Tag Archives: #Beauty

Watching The East River, Thinking

20 Saturday Jun 2020

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You can find most anything on YouTube. The other day I found a live cam that looks across the East River, from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The visual centerpiece is the Brooklyn Bridge in all its magnificence.

A bridge is something we take for granted in 2020. We cross rivers, lakes and bays without a second thought. Rarely are we touched by the beauty. But the beauty of a bridge derives from its functionality.

This post is more about the thinking than the East River or The Brooklyn Bridge. Tomorrow is Fathers Day. My son is coming over to assemble the gas grill he sent me that is my Fathers Day gift. Truth is, for me,the gift is just him being here. We will talk, joke, commiserate.We think alike. We’re father and son after all.

That was the first tier of my thoughts tonight. A little further down comes the “should haves” and “could haves” around why my life turned the way that it did. The images of ex-wives stream by in my mind, as if they were floats in a parade. I think about the sex I once had that I’m not having now, the thoughts I don’t share with J, because her life is about comparing herself to others and to some idealized version of “wife”. It is best to keep quiet.

A little deeper are the observations that I am looking for some sublime experience and then when I have it, want to immediately have it again.It is found most frequently in The Search For The Perfect Cup Of Coffee. I have a cup of coffee that is just hot enough, strong enough, flavorful enough. Once finished, I want to have it again, that same perfect cup of coffee. But it hardly ever comes back again, at least, not right away.

I went through two marriages looking for The Sublime Sexual Experience. You know the one where we both have world-shattering orgasms and promise to love each other forever, but end up divorced anyway, the rubble of our failures comparable to Berlin in 1945. .

I was dreaming a new dream earlier, with J, the laughter, the sweaty sex, the orgasm, the Eternal Pledge of Fidelity and Trust. And I was ready to risk it all.

Again. Why not?

Aesthetics (Revision #1)

14 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in Aesthetics, Classical Music

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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.