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light and darkness
good and evil
matter and God
truth and falsehood

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Iris Murdoch ----from The Jackson Dilemma

...An awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment--remorse.

Surveying myself in the mirror, there was little light, the mirror old, I always wondered what I looked like. --This connects with who am I, what I am...I wonder why everyone does not feel like this, or is it a gift, free from my gods, an understanding of the only reality which is in truth that we are nothing. The mirror now shows me mostly my father, my brows thickening, perhaps...

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Hares may pull the beards of dead lions.

"Postmodernism is about the reappropiation of the past, the making real of false consciousness, the revaluation of values. Until now we have been living in a false culture, surrounded by mass-produced kitsch....We borrow from the past, we have no history so we write it where it doesn't exist." Igor, Between East & West

imaginary realism-- imaginary truth.

ROBOTIC AYN RAND

Need advice about your latest megalomaniacal scheme? If only you could ask history's greatest megalomaniac, "novelist" and "philosopher" Ayn Rand. Too bad she's dead. But wait! In 1963, a secret cabal of Objectivists intent on taking over the Student Union at MIT built the first robotic Ayn Rand, and now you can own a Randroid® based on their original design. Comes with stock phrases such as "Morality ends where the gun begins," "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent," and "Nathaniel! Bring me another gin and tonic!"

Price: US$50,000 includes software*
*software tends to be rather buggy. For instance, your Randroid may oppose immigration, yet be an immigrant herself. She may oppose infidelity, yet cheat on her husband. She may espouse individuality, yet believe that only those who follow her are individuals. She may oppose the control of individuals by organizations, yet laud corporate power. These bugs can not be repaired.


Item Available at VillainSupply.com

The few who have everything-- the many who need something. Which side are you on? The few who are unwilling to give up anything? Or the deserving many? Know which side you are on. It is amazing, however, that many of the many take the side of the few. Have I said that the masses are asses?

Last night the little woman and I went to see the International Sport Latin Ballroom Dancing Competition at the Diplomat Hotel. This is not dancing as we knew it in the Catskills. The two Titos would be very surprized, shocked (!) to see this highly stylized, ritualistic, robotic dancing.

The "sport" in the title of the competition refers to the furious movements that partners make on the floor. The Tango's ritual seem to be carried over to every dance, Rhumba, Tango, Cha Cha, Cha. These partners really sweat during their performance and when they violently turn their heads the sweat sprays a circle around their bodies. Did I see a rainbow in the rain of persperation? Maybe. There was some agreeable grace in the slides of the Quick Step and perhaps in the Paso-Doble.

Fred Astaire? Neither present in body nor in spirit.

Saw Matchstick Men last night at Cinema Paradiso. Nicolas Cage is good as a phobia-addled con artist . His life goes awry when Cage's teenage daughter (Alison Lohman) shows up. Alison Lohman is very good as a 14 year old. B+


Look, I want a movie that's free of anecdote and cheap sentiment. This wasn't it. Most films today just can't take me over the wall and into the world of real emotions or beauty or honesty.

I can't breathe anymore. The sterile atmosphere around me has become irrespirable. I need beauty, art, emotion. That's my oxygen. And no one around me understands. People around here equate going to restuarants with living. They fail to know that they are engaged in a desperate search for life. But restuarants and TV aren't life. And talking about restaurants and food coupons isn't conversation either.

Gad.

PPPoE what is it? Why does it hate me? What did I do to make it disappear? How can I get it back? I always lose the one that I need the most. Come back PPPoE what ever you are.

Dick Robinson's American Standards by the Sea

Okay, back in Florida. Joined a gym. I don't know why--the building I live in has its own gym, and of course we have the pool, and the ocean as well, and that's swell.

But maybe I want to get away, meet some people, and the whirlpool at this gym is very hot--hotter than I am used to, and finally I feel satisfied by the heat in the whirlpool and the suana. No steamroom here though. My fellow gymnaughts seem very blue collar which is to be expected here, as the price is very very low. But the gym is spotless, the pool is big enough and there are more machines here than in the Ford Motor plant in Dearbourne.

Maria and I have to go through all the mail that was kept by the post office here. This is the kind of project that proves my need to procrastinate, so I guess it will be a few days (weeks?) before I complete the project.

Le Divorce : American girl lives in Paris with French artist husband who walks out her. Sister comes to help her through her misery, but instead becomes the mistress of an important French businessman-politician. B-

Soulmate Aug 2003


On a walk through Central Park, on a rainy afternoon, I had asked my closest friend whether he felt that the woman that he had been married to for the past twenty years was his soul mate.

At six-thirty the next morning I received a phone call. I picked up the receiver and listened to the plaintive voice of his wife. She was sixty and had gone off the hormones that had kept her flush free for the past seven years. …


……………..

I looked at her, soundly sleeping, hair plastered against her sweated forehead; even in sleep drops of perspiration could be seen on her cheek. She was sixty and had gone off the hormones that had kept her flush free for the past seven years.



He was his own weather system, now in storm cycle, and no, it wasn’t that romantic distant thunder that brings lovers together, but rather it was the startling, fearsome crack right overhead, the flash of it simultaneous with its sound, evidence of its dangerous closeness, and blinding, a cleansing smell of ozone wafting through the brilliantly lit trees, eidetic, drenched and gleaming, then disappearing back to black in the threatening darkness.



He beat her mercilessly, with the alcohol fueled fury of a man too short and too fat, and too slow for his lean and hungry ambition. She loved him anyway, craved him for it, as most women love the men who beat them.


“Uncertainty,” Robert Musil said, “is sometimes nothing more than mistrust of the usual certainties.”

Here's what I want to say about him:

He beat her mercilessly, with the alcohol fueled fury of a man too short for his ambition. She loved him anyway, craved him for it, as most women love the men who beat them.

From Hal:

Spencer Tracy said it best; when asked what advice he could give to aspiring movie actors to make them good actors, he answered " show up on time....hit your mark...look into the lens....and tell the truth ! " I think something like this, could restore our ability to communicate......Hal


From Basil:

I am going to be sixty five in January. I've reached the stage in life
where I know it is all downhill from here. I look in the mirror and
don't like what I see. I try to do my exercising and I don't like how I
feel. I used to run four miles just to warm up. I now can barely jog
four miles. My doctor says I am in great shape for my age but that does
not help how I feel. I am getting old and I don't want to. I don't want
to deteriorate to the point where I can't stand looking at myself. I
think it is mostly a question of vanity but the thought of my muscles
becoming any more flaccid and my skin becoming more wrinkled is not
something I am looking forward to no matter how healthy I am. If I don't
die it will happen. I don't want to die but I think I would prefer dying
to growing much older. I am afraid of dying but I would be even more
afraid of living forever. Intellectually I know once I'm dead it's all
over so death is definitely more preferable.

On the other hand I don't worry about dioxins or watch what I eat and I
do not exercise obsessively. I smoke my cigars and eat fats and
sweets.......... What a relief Basil

From Gross:

I just finished Barzun's History of the West. He wrote this sweeping vision of civilization when he was 91; and he had stopped jogging years before. When we are no longer sufficiently fueled by our muscles, we need to look for a new energy source. gross

Basil's moaning results from the assumption that life is limited by physical capacity. The defect in that presumption is apparent from it's making. There is much evidence that our consciousness is capable of expanding indefinitely. Thinking carries us beyond our biology. Witness Stephen Hawking. The mind's eye clears with age. Look beyond the length of a jog, (which is also dependent upon time). Exercise ideas. Pessimism is poison. gross

Every man has seen women's bared breasts. Most have seen them hundreds, if not thousands of times under varied circumstances.

Why then, do we still hope for a glimpse of still another bare breast or nipple? Tonight Cameron Diaz was a guest on Jay Leno's night show. She wore a particularly revealing dress, one that looked as though her breast might fall out, or perhaps a nipple might appear. What kept me waiting, watching, hoping for a look?

Yesterday, the day of the big blackout, I went to the Whitney with MG, hoping to visit Tim Baum at the same time as his gallery is only a block way. Well, we never heard from Tim, so Mike and I did the Whitney, after passing through a blockade of very aggressive fund raisers. I t was lucky that Mike and I had the benfit of fighting for Coach Quinn on our old HS football team, Mike as a first string tackle and me as a benchwarming guard. Anyway, we cross blocked the little old lady and soon found our selves on the admission line.

Following our Whitney experience we went for a walk through Central Park, stopping for sandwiches at the Boathouse. We talked about soulmates and decided, basically, that they were very hard to come by. Comprimise seems to be the order of the day, especially at this age.

I was to have dinner in Great Neck with a neighbor from the old days on Willow Lane, and so I left Michael and took the "C" train from 79th and CPW to Penn Station where I made the last train that made it all the way home before the blackout. I arrived at Great Neck at 3:59 PM and went to 5 Continents to pick up some cheese for cocktails with Vesta and Maria. At 4:10 PM as the cheeseman began to weigh the cheese on an electronic scale he lights went out. The Cheeseman paniced and ran out of his store, leaving me alone with the cheese. Resisting the natural impluse to steal all the cheese in sight I waited for him to come back in. But now the electronic scale couldn't weigh anything--not even Mr. Cheeseman's thumb. He was reluctant to sell me anything, even though he had already cut my cheese. So I convinced him to estimate the weight--and finaly just stuffed some cash in his hand and took the cheese.

Last night we saw the Smuin Ballet dance Dancin' with Gershwin.at the Joyce. The Joyce is a small theater which was re-built especially for dancing and I dare say that there isn't a single bad seat in the house. But the Dancin': like eating at a restuarant named Moms or playing cards with a guy named Doc, one should not attend events when the producer thinks it's a good idea to drop the "g" at the end of a word ending in "ing." You can write that down. And shoould one be a dancer one should know that it is not a good idea to try to tap dance in a tuxedo to a recording of Fred Astaire singing Fascinating Rhythm. Mark this: when the audience hears Astaire's voice it cannot help seeing Him dance. I felt sorry for Shannon Hurlburt and Roberto Cisneros as they tried to climb the Astaire Mountain. Can't be done. It's like trying to outplay Art Tatum at the piano. Astaire and Tatum are in a class by themselves. You can be great but you can't be Astaire.


However, the rest of the night was light and fun. the light funtastic comes to mind.

Too often social reform is conflated with socialism. Liberalism is not socialism. Progress is not revolution.

I checked your link, and spent some time looking at the pictures that the Italian futurists made--the graphics, lettering, etc. I have a friend, a schoolmate, named Tim Baum, who is an expert on Man Ray, and a major dealer of his work. He befriended Man Ray during the last ten years of Man Ray's life.

Tim has a gallery in an apartment on Madison Avenue, and I will be calling him tomorrow because I discovered a coincidence. Inspired by looking at the Futurists I went to the library today and took out several Man Ray books--photos, biographies, etc.

It seems that Emmanuel Radnitsky and his family lived on the block where my grandfather had a drug store. I imagine that they were his customers and probably often used the telephone in his store or were called to it when people would call the Radnitsky family.

Seabiscuit: Come prepared. Bring a handkerchief.