The final resting place for Rose Mallinger, one of 11 killed in the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Credit Jeff Swensen/Getty Images.
… Jewish prayer is not primarily personal or spontaneous. It is communal reading. Public recitations of ancient words, scripts compiled centuries ago and nearly identical in every synagogue in the world. A lot of those words are about exactly this.
(Dara Horn, “American Jews Know How This Story Goes,” NYTimes, 11-2-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
If rocks are firearms, words are sticks and stones. (c) 2018 JMN.
Tom Jamieson for The New York Times.
I’m not a supporter of Boris Johnson. I have no interest in him or his political ambitions. [But] I do defend people who make jokes about religion. I was part of a campaign to oppose a Parliamentary bill [the Racial and Religious Hatred Act] in 2006 because I draw a distinction between race and religion, and I think religious practices and beliefs can and should be lampooned. It’s been quite a British tradition for many hundreds of years.
But it sort of bleeds through into the challenges of free speech in the modern era, and this new definition of free speech — which is free speech is fine as long as it doesn’t offend anybody. And free speech to me is completely meaningless if you can’t offend.
(Rowan Atkinson)
(Katharine Shattuck, “For Rowan Atkinson, Comedy Isn’t Always a Laughing Matter,” NYTimes, 11-3-18)
(Cc)2018 JMN.
Lady Ottoline Morrell: recognisable in at least a dozen novels, by authors from Huxley to Lawrence. Photograph: Getty [from The Guardian, 10-10-06].
“He is obviously very ignorant of England and imagines that it is essential to be highly polite and conventional and decorous and meticulous.”
(Quoted by Louis Menand, “Practical Cat, How T.S. Eliot became T.S. Eliot,” (The New Yorker, September 19, 2011)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Doesn’t one write for oneself primordially? That alone will keep me powering out the posts ‘til kingdom come. If any one of them catches another eye, its ice cream on the frosting.
I often bend double laughing at my own nonsense. In a recent exchange with Eric Wayne I asked rhetorically, “How far does one go to out-tut-tut the tut-tutters?” I was referring to strident rhetoric used by irate cognoscenti to excoriate cynical poseurs in the art world. After recovering from gales of mirth at my inventiveness, I determined that I must create a blog post justifying use of the phrase for a title. Mission accomplished.
(c) 2018 JMN.
Kakistocracy.
Kleptocratic kakistocracy.
Kleptocratic kakistocracy of pettifoggers.
Kleptocratic kakistocracy of pettifoggIng snollygosters.
(c) 2018 JMN.
Horacio Cardo in 2009 at his studio in Pinamar, a resort city on the eastern coast of Buenos Aires Province. “In Cardo’s work,” an art critic wrote, “nothing is naïve.” Credit Juan Carlos Casas.
Some of Mr. Cardo’s earlier works were painted in oils, to which he added fabric, lace and plaster of Paris to create various textures. Later on, he created dramatic illustrations with ink and acrylic paint that he altered with digital tools like Photoshop.
“Photoshop has allowed me to get closer to what I consider reality: the permanent transit (mutation, imbrication) of the images within the psyche,” he said in an interview with Artefacto magazine in 2010. “I would like to capture that permanently changing reality in my work, where past and present are interconnected.”
(Richard Sandomir, “Horacio Cardo, Illustrator With a Political Edge, Is Dead at 74,” NYTimes, 10-31- 18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Katz at work in his studio. Photograph: Ali Smith.
“I was in the abstract art world, socially – they all thought I was really stupid. The poets all liked my work – I had some of the smartest people on the planet buying my work. I knew I was OK…
Rather than his fellow artists, Katz looked to poets for inspiration: Frank O’Hara (whose portrait he painted in 1959) and Gertrude Stein… “The language is beautiful. And the ideas are kind of impressive too. The thing with the present tense is the thing that I bought.” This has long been Katz’s ambition – to capture the fleeting moment, although not in what he considers the navel-gazing style of the French philosophers… “Camus – he’s depressed and can’t figure out what to do on a Sunday? I was like, ‘Oh,
come on’…”[Katz’s] portraits are concerned primarily with surface energy, which he finds as meaningful as works that claim to unearth a “deeper” meaning. “When the dominant characteristic of a painting is called sincerity, that’s a bad sign. Sincere painting means it relies on things outside of the painting. ‘Sincere art’ – as if painting pretty people isn’t. Well, it depends who does it.”
(Emma Brockes, “Alex Katz: ‘The smartest people bought my work,'” The Guardian, 10-29-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Since My Baby Left Me
Rock and roll musician Elvis Presley performing on the Elvis comeback TV special on June 27, 1968. NBC/Getty [From Rolling Stone, August 16, 2017].
Elvis sang those words and I can understand them. They’re etched in my head. Julie London: “Cry Me a River”; Tony Bennett: “I Left My Heart In San Francisco”; Frank Sinatra: “Fly Me To the Moon”; Bobby Darin: “Mack the Knife”; Peggy Lee: “Fever”; Bobbie Gentry: “Ode to Billie Joe”; Simon and Garfunkel: “Bridge Over Troubled Water”; (Name any artist): “Stardust,” “Summertime,” “Night and Day,” “My Buddy,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” etc. The words come across in the recordings I’ve heard. My mother, a superb alto, taught my sister and me a lot of these old songs from our toddlerhood. The music predated us. We harmonized as a trio.
I’m not troubled or indignant over how the lyrics in many modern songs get swamped by the wall of sound or stranded in the singer’s pharynx, in contrast to earlier styles. I’m simply bemused in a good way at how a certain evolution has occurred in popular music from Tin Pan Alley times to modern times. Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Vincent Youmans, Ira Gershwin and their sort wrote lyrics that received musical accompaniment. In the music of many modern performers and bands, lyrics seem to recede from the
foreground and be absorbed into, not to say overcome by, the instrumentation. It coincides with advances in studio production technology, I surmise, and with the increasingly robust amplification machinery that’s available for large audience venues. Loud is good and louder’s better, it goes. Bring it.
The music’s the thing. It’s about melodies and intervals and chords and rhythms. I’m led to wonder in certain instances: Why bother with lyrics at all? Given that the voice is functioning as another instrument in such cases, why not just sing sonorous nonsense syllables instead of words. Or something along the lines of the solfege warmups of a cappella Sacred Harp choirs. For most American audiences the lyrics of many classic operas are nonsense; it’s the singing and spectacle that captivate aficionados. Then again, though, why bother not to bother? If the lyrics of certain songs are incomprehensible, they’re already functioning as nonsense syllables! Might as well belt out “ripped up like a douche and did a no no in the night” or whatever. I’ve cornered myself into a speculative irrelevancy of botheringsomeness. I salute you if you’ve persisted to the end of it.
(c) 2018 JMN.