Juan Gris, “Guitare sur une table,” from 1916, at Helly Nahmad. Credit via Helly Nahmad Gallery.
The Poet sat in a dive on 52nd Street “uncertain and afraid.” I sit in a shed on 3rd Street where I, too, watch “the clever dreams expire of a low, dishonest decade.” The manic hubbub of tear-it-downers and bust-it-uppers and look-at-miners washes over the world like a toxic red tide.
For respite from anomie I resort to the guitar fretboard. It supports a lifetime of soothing obsession. Full disclosure: I haven’t read Maimonides. I know him only by name and reputation. My version of his title reflects a conviction that the best guide for the perplexed is the perplexed.
And here we go:
Guitar strings are numbered 1 through 6, tuned E-B-G-D-A-E unless you learned them 6 through 1 in E-A-D-G-B-E order, as I did. For a mnemonic phrase, use “Easter Bunnies Get Drunk At Easter” or vice versa according to the situation.
With string nomenclature and tuning mastered, it’s time for Octave-of-Following (OOF) state, coming next.
(c) 2019 JMN
EthicalDative 
“Islands of Daring”
Any drawings that are “like letters of a foreign language” would get my attention. This is so with the drawings of Susan Hefuna.
“Untitled, 1994” by Susan Hefuna — ink drawings inspired by the wooden screens of Cairo. Credit Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.
And the notion of repainting famous portraits of women while eerily disguising their faces, is cheeky and provoking in a thoughtful way. The painting by Ewa Juszkiewicz shows that the scariest masks don’t have horny ears and dripping teeth. They’re much closer to what we expect to see, then don’t. They creep up on us by distorting the familiar, cobbling a fiendish false face for it.
“Untitled (after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun)” by Ewa Juszkiewicz, 2019: one of the artist’s altered representations of classic portraits of women. Credit Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times.
(Martha Schewendener, Will Heinrich et al., “At Frieze New York, Islands of Daring,” NYTimes, 5-2-19)
(c) 2019 JMN