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Dispatches From Dystopia

~ "What man by worrying can add one cubit to his span of years?"

Dispatches From Dystopia

Category Archives: Aesthetics

Sunday Night Musings

21 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by David in Aesthetics, Modernism, New York

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#Art Deco

I was going to go up early. J is still feeling badly, but believes a doctor visit at this point would be of little value. She is trying to sleep while she has a DVD of I Love Lucy episodes playing in the background. Not wishing to hear the ossified jokes and agonize through the banal situations, staying down here where I can listen to the music (the best part of ILL) is the smart choice. I can put a DVD of old cigarette commercials in the downstairs machine and pretend I’m 8 years old again.

I will always associate these Lucy episodes with my recovery from back surgery. We played them almost every night, along with The Andy Griffith Show. Reading or other stuff was reserved for the day time. We did not have FIOS then. I can’t remember exactly what I was reading then, four years ago. Stefan Zweig, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein., most likely.

I considered myself something of a sophisticate four years ago. Any modernist idea received a full and rather uncritical consideration and acceptance. So I would lap up a PBS presentation on modern art as if Picasso were the equivalent of Raphael or Giotto. It’s all art, right? And people pay good money for all of it. The modern world, I am afraid, is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and wondering what happened to the truth. But that was how I thought then.

There will be one more passenger train passing through Ashland. #97 Southbound Silver Meteor, headed to Miami. One Winter’s night we will make the full journey. We will stay in an Art Deco hotel in South Beach and pretend 85 years of history never happened. No Hitler, no Bomb, no Castro. If only.

Right now, we have the yellow orange sodium lights reflecting off wet pavement and wet slate roof shingles. It is a static moment anticipating the dynamic conjoined chrome steel cars of the passenger train. The horn sounds. It won’t be long now. Less than a minute of speed, and a rush of sound, then stillness til morning and Northbound Silver Meteor #98 will work its way toward Manhattan, Penn Station, Times Square, The Empire State Building, Radio City, the Northetn artifacts of that hopeful time, now perhaps as anachronistic as the biplane, the Zeppelin, these very trains for which we wait.

Favorites

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by David in Aesthetics, Uncategorized

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When I can swim, cook, read, write, sing, and fuck, it is an even more wonderful world than it already is. That kind of defines being human for me. Yeah, I should mention being in loving relationships, acknowledging the cosmic dimension of Christian Love, and treating all people with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree with them. But if I go into great lengths on that other stuff, I would be morphing this into some syllabus on being Mr. Perfect, which I don’t want to do.

Here is what I have done in life fairly consistently, I find the things that I enjoy doing, are beneficial for me to do, and nurture my soul at the deepest level. Then, once found, I avoid doing them, finding “more important” things to do. Finally when doing the “other stuff” to the neglect of the “important stuff” has wrought maximum unhappiness for my loved ones and me, I declare it is time to get back on track.

The “other stuff” leaves a debris field of dust, clutter, mess. As I clean, I see myself in the new clean, neat Dave Universe, functioning flawlessly. Cleaning accesses my fantasy world. The truth is imagining my self doing the things I enjoy is the first step in doing them.

Go figure.

Peach Excursion

25 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by David in Aesthetics, American History, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

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#Charlottesville_Virginia

We did go buy peaches in the mountains. We found the nearest convenient mountain with a peach orchard, Carter’s Mountain Orchard.

It is on the East side of Charlottesville,very close to where famous slaveholding, political philosopher, architect, and Dead White Man Thomas Jefferson built his residence, the architectural gem, Monticello. I took a picture of Charlottesville and, if you know what to look for and where to look, you can see the dome of the Rotunda, another Jeffersonian desugn.

The peaches are great. We bought some corn, squash and cucumbers too. This orchard offers a “pick your own” option that we did not exercise. Had we three or four children to wear out, we would have picked our own, actually had them do the picking.

On the other hand, Charlottesville is a gigantic blob of sprawl spread across Rte 29 for about 20 miles. Yuck.

Aesthetics (Revision #1)

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by David in Aesthetics, Classical Music

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#Beauty

I don’t know how much I am going to write about this right now. So come back for future editions. The previous post, wherein Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca perform the Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera Lakme, has me thinking about beauty and art.

Art is a convergence of emotion and intellect. With exceptions, the art of Jackson Pollack, (perhaps?), art (literature and music included under that term) expresses itself in a discernable structure that touches a common understanding with humanity.

We can see beauty in Michelangelo’s David and an African mask. This David seems somewhat remote from Bible stories, just as the masks evoke a spirit world that we Westerners don’t fully understand, if at all.

But the construction of both are ordered and get points across. David represents a human at a full potential, as a child of God. The masks confront us with the depth of the universe, that there is always more than just what we see.

What I’m leading to are the questions, can there be an aesthetic of chaos, disorder, ugliness and brutality?

This is not to say that art cannot depict ugly or disturbing images. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement from the Sistine Chapel immediately comes to mind. Robert Capa’s iconic photograph of a Spanish Republican soldier at he moment he is killed is another example. No image captures the brutality of war better than that photograph.

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