counterlight's peculiars jack the dripper

7/29/2019 Counterlight's Peculiars Jack the Dripper

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Counterlight's Peculiars: Jack the Dripper

Counterlight's Peculiars"Art is a lie that tells the truth" -- Pablo Picasso

Monday, August 2, 2010Jack the DripperAfter all these years, I finally saw that Ed Harris movie about Jackson Pollockon the teevee last night. I was impressed.

It was a bleak and unromantic look at a very romantic man undone by his owngalloping insecurities and destroyed by the alcoholism that afflicted him mostof his life. The long sequence where he falls off the wagon for the last timeafter 2 years of sobriety (and his most important work) is really painful towatch. Its also probably close to the truth. The movie paints a verysympathetic portrait of Lee Krasner, his wife, who eagerly follows his risingfame, and who also suffers the brunt of his cruelty, self-absorption, hisinfidelities, and his alcoholic rages. She finally leaves him for a long trip to

Europe to protect herself and her sanity. Lee Krasner took a lot of abuse at thetime of Pollocks death, and for many years after, with many people blaming her(very unjustly) for his untimely death. The movie makes us wonder that she putup with so much from Pollock for as long as she did. The movie very candidlyshows Pollocks very complicated relations with his own large family, hissometimes dissolute and feckless father, and his competitive and resentful fourbrothers.The movie also shows Pollocks difficult relationship with the art world of thattime, a tangled mix of high-minded ambition and show biz. He was the verycomplicated star of an art world dominated by reductivist criticism and thinking

(as personified by Clement Greenberg in the movie).

Jackson Pollock loomed very large in the imaginations of art students back in myday, especially among young men. I dont know if that is still true today (in anage of star video game designers and graphic novelists selling movie rights, Idoubt it).

Jackson Pollock himself in his studio in Springs, Long Island in 1950

He was the sad bad James Dean of art; not as pretty as Dean, but more brilliant,

more macho, and more troubled. We loved all the old stories about Pollockgetting into fist-fights at the Cedar Tavern on 8th street, and pissing in PeggyGuggenheims fire place during a party. The movie puts a very different spin onthose antics, less the defiant acts of a hero than the acting out of a reallybad drunk. Pollock was a troubled brawler all his life. He was expelled fromschool twice for fighting. He probably began drinking in his early teens, andwas already a serious alcoholic under treatment in his twenties. His death in acar crash sealed his lost hero James Dean credentials. Deans death was acatastrophic accident at the beginning of a brilliant career. The movie implies,


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as have many others, that Pollocks fatal crash (with 2 other women in the car,one, Judith Metzger, died; his mistress, Ruth Kligman, survived) was a murdersuicide.Booze and madness do only one thing for an artist's career, they end it. Pollockhad already stopped painting in 1955, the year before his death at age 44.

The Abstract Expressionists were probably the last great romantic painters. Theywere all misfits and alcoholics. Two of them died by suicide (Arshile Gorky andMark Rothko). Most of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants(deKooning was an illegal immigrant, jumping ship into the USA when he was inhis teens). In 1950s America, not fitting in came at a very high price ofunofficial alienation and poverty, and official suspicion and legal sanction.The Powers That Be were eager to dampen the expectations for socialtransformation awakened by the Second World War. Those expectations would stiranyway and finally destroy the thin anxious crust that was the legacy ofVictorian America. In that anxious and xenophobic age, the largely Jewish andforeign sounding names of these artists aroused a lot of suspicion. Pollock wasnot Jewish or foreign with a name that sounded like a hero from a teeveewestern. What is more, he really was born and raised in the West, from Cody,Wyoming. Instead of the son of Belorussian Jewish tailors (Rothko) or Armenianrefugees (Gorky), he was the son of cowboys (actually his father held a variety

of odd jobs, including surveying). Pollock himself carefully cultivated thatimage of the cowboy from out West riding into New York to show them all how itsdone.

Jackson Pollock in southern California, circa 1927

The small nascent modern art world in New York greeted his arrival with relief.Modernism could finally establish all-American creds, and dispel some of thexenophobia and anti-Semitism that surrounded it since the Armory Show in 1913.Pollocks work, just like the work of the rest of the artists in that group,came out of the sometimes friendly encounters, and sometimes hostile clashes,between American artists and the large community of European artists driven out

of Europe by Hitler. They came together in Greenwich Village. The ideas of theold and new worlds met and clashed in that neighborhood, and out of thoseconflicts and collaborations would come the American culture that dominated theworld until the 1990s. The artists met in each others studios, and together inlocal bars like the now famous Cedar Tavern, the dive where Pollock made himselfpersona non grata.

Artists in the Cedar Tavern in 1953

Pollock was not the first artist in the history of the world to fling paint. Max

Ernst and Andre Masson dribbled and flung paint while Pollock was gettingexpelled from school in Wyoming. Artists in China and Japan spattered paint forcenturies. And yet, Pollock seemed to live out Ruskins accusation leveled atWhistler, that he flung a pot of paint into the face of the public. The publicwas predictably outraged and fascinated.Pollock didnt begin splattering paint until late in his career, not until 1947.By then, he had been painting for almost 20 years. His work already had a kindof cult following long before he dripped his first drip.

It took me a long time to warm to Pollocks drip paintings, but I felt no such


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reservations about his earlier work from the 1940s.

Pollock, The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943

Pollock, The She Wolf, 1943

Pollock, Mural, 1943, one of Pollock's first essays in centerless over-allcomposition

Almost every modern painter in New York (not a large group) was doing a form oflate surrealism heavily informed by the writings of Jung, especially his ideasof a shared unconscious. The whole point of surrealism was to tap the creativepower of the unconscious, of the primordial id. The American version of that wasless Freudian and more Jungian, less interested in sex and more interested inmyth. At the end of World War II, there was a desire to begin history again,similar to the desire that drove the modern movements that came out of the First

World War. Only now, the driving emotion was more sorrow than anger. The exiledEuropean Surrealists in New York, and the American artists, wanted to somehow goback to the primordial beginnings of all creativity and begin again.Pollock, like all the artists in these groups, made paintings based on acombination of automatism (putting ones conscious mind in neutral and lettingthe unconscious take over as one drew, a much more serious form of doodling) andJungian ideas of collective symbolism. All of these artists were influenced bythe work of Picasso and Miro. Pollock added the sense of scale and the dramaticgrandeur of the great Mexican muralists that he admired. He turned his owndoubts and frustrations as a painter into virtues, making his struggle to

realize the image part of its drama. The result is the busy, crowded, and verygrand paintings he made around the end of the War. To my eye, these are muchmore aggressive paintings than his later drip canvases, with their sharp formsand constantly edited out, and edited back in passages of painting.Pollock, like a lot of artists since Kandinsky on the eve of the First WorldWar, wanted to make painting itself carry all the expressive and narrativeweight of art. He wanted painting to be its own tragic story, to make it speakdirectly to the emotions the way music does without narrative and withoutimagery. This played right into the expectations of modernist critics likeClement Greenberg who championed a Hegelian idea of reductivism, that allpainting was destined by History to be refined down to its most basic essences,and ultimately to become pure expression unhindered by the social constraints of

imagery and story telling. Im not quite sure thats quite what Pollock wanted.DeKooning insisted (rightfully I think) that all painting tells a story, whetherits about the Fall of Troy or about Green and Red. He said that all painting isultimately an image, no matter how abstract, and that all imagery is ultimatelyan abstraction no matter how realistic. Like deKooning, Ive always thought thatthe old abstract vs. realist conflict was a red herring. I suspect that Pollockmay have felt the same way. His desire to create an art of pure expression waspossibly not about getting rid of imagery and story telling so much as takingthem to another level, about re-inventing them.


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I think its that search for a way to re-invent painting that led Pollock to thedrip in 1949.

Pollock, Shimmering Substance (Sounds in the Grass), 1946, an all-over field ofnuances applied with the brush. I've always been fond of this painting.

Pollock, Cathedral, 1947, one of Pollock's earliest drip paintings

The movie makes his drip paintings look like a serendipitous discovery. Isuspect that it was not. Its not hard (in retrospect) to draw a straight linefrom Surrealist automatic drawing to flinging paint.

Pollock long had a fascination with Navajo sand painting.

Navajo Sand Painting

A shaman or medicine man would dribble out colored sand while chanting anincantation, making an elaborate design on the ground. He would then place the

patient on top of the painting, inevitably destroying it. The healing power ofthe image comes in the act of making it. Its power can only be released when theimage is destroyed. I think this gave Pollock his idea for his drip paintings.The act of painting became as important as the finished work.He always painted on the floor of his studio, but now he took off thestretchers. He unrolled a bolt of canvas and began walking around it withbuckets of fluid paint (usually cheap house paints that have given conservatorsnightmares ever since) using his brushes as sticks to fling the paint. Sometimeshe poured it out or splashed it out of smaller cans.

Pollock at work in his studio at Springs, Long Island, 1950

These paintings made Pollock immediately famous, and got him a feature articlein Life magazine in the August 8, 1949 issue. The press dubbed him "Jack theDripper."

The Life magazine spread on Pollock in the August 8, 1949 issue.

This changed his life. He started out as a very marginal figure with a cultfollowing borrowing money for rent, groceries, and booze. Now, he was off thebooze, taking interviews, and thinking about purchasing land out in eastern Long

Island.

The public reaction to his work is best summed up in Norman Rockwells gentlesatire originally titled Abstract and Concrete, but today mostly known as TheConnoisseur.

Norman Rockwell, Abstract and Concrete (The Connoisseur), 1962


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Rockwell does his own version of a Pollock painting. Rockwell sees Pollockswork as a chaos of colors and a flurry of uncontrolled paint.

Pollock insisted that there were no accidents in his work, that his methods werevery controlled and precise. When we compare the painting within Rockwellspainting to an actual Pollock painting, we can see what he meant. Pollockscolors were not random. Pollock chose his colors carefully, emphasizing somewhile letting others play a secondary role. Blacks and grays dominate Luciferlivened up by ropes of green and spots of orange and red.

Pollock, Lucifer, 1947

Pollock, Lucifer, detail

Black, white, and tan dominate Autumn Rhythm, set off with small spots ofturquoise blue. The more we study a Pollock drip painting, the less random it

looks.

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, detail

Something else appears in the Rockwell that we never see in Pollocks work,

runs. Arshile Gorky and Willem deKooning loved runs and let their paint run allthe time. Pollock hated runs because they brought an unwanted reference togravity into what were supposed to be centerless directionless fields of whatseem to be electric sparks.Pollocks drip paintings, like Monets huge water-lily paintings, are vastuncentered fields of nuance. Pollocks nuances are charged and electric, busyand anxious, compared to Monets consoling calm strokes of color. Unlike Monet,Pollocks nuances have nothing to do with light or with any observed experience.They are their own thing, their own separate world, a new creation; somethingLeonardo 5 centuries earlier said that every painting should be.

The public was outraged, but the reaction from other artists was morecomplicated. Pollocks old teacher, the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton always

supported Pollock even as he bashed New York modernism. I sometimes wonder ifBentons anti-modernism really came out of conviction (he began as a Cubistpainter in Paris), or out of his own bitterness and anti-Semitism. The artistRobert Beverly Hale, now best known as the author of a number of books ondrawing technique and anatomy for artists, was a champion of Classicalfigurative art in the very powerful position of curator of American painting atthe Metropolitan Museum. And yet, it was Hale who made the case for purchasingPollocks Autumn Rhythm to a very hostile Metropolitan Museum board ofdirectors. I think the textbooks once again oversimplify things when talkingabout the controversies of this era.


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Autumn Rhythm today in the Metropolitan Museum in New York

Here is Hans Namuth's 1950 film of Pollock at work.

Lee Krasner was much more than Pollocks long-suffering widow. She was quite anartist in her own right. Pollock, to his credit, always encouraged her work. Ifanything, her work is a lot tougher and more aggressive than his with itsjarring colors and sharp forms. I've always loved her work.

Krasner, Sun Woman II

Krasner, Gothic Landscape, 1961

Krasner, Left Bird, RightPosted by Counterlight at Monday, August 02, 2010 5 comments:

Grandmre Mimi said...Counterlight, I can't believe that you, an artist, are just now seeing thePollock movie for the first time. It's powerful, and was, for me, difficult to

watch. Growing up with an alcoholic father, I'm not inclined to cut drunksmuch slack for their outrageous behavior while under the influence. I knowalcoholics are wounded human beings, and they have their reasons, but

still....

Ed Harris is one terrific actor in nearly every role he plays.

With you, I admire Pollock's pre-drip painting more than the later work.However, once I saw the drip style in the flesh, I liked the paintings more.

It's amazing how art comes to life when not seen through the filter of acamera lens - some artists' work more than others.

Lee Krasner's paintings are extraordinarily good. I love them. I don't knowwhy she put up with Pollock's behavior for so long, but my mother did the

same.

Thanks again for the excellent art history lesson.August 3, 2010 10:59 AMCounterlight said...


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Grandmere,

I've heard about the movie for 10 years and just never got around to watchingit.

As I get older, I like Pollock's work more and I like him less. It was theother way around in my art student days.

You're always welcome.August 3, 2010 11:25 AMLeonardo Ricardo said...

I studied Fine Art (Watercolor emphasis) starting in the Fall of1961)...Pollock was a inspiration to me, one of the freedom givers, whoallowed me to breakout of my own fear of being mediocre (a joy I stillnurture)...I too was very active as a alcoholic but got to the falling offplace at 35...later, after a career in retail and wholesale/productdevelopment, I started painting again (for money), interestingly, at least tome, I paint wildly vivid action painting as underpainting and then dopointillism on top...the action undershapes are so alive to me...theyliterally take me where I think I need to go...Im lost in the shapes, thedepth the textures on textures...the building process that sometimes includesspraying too.

Thank you for my revist to Pollock...I know drunks, I am one and he and them

make sense to me (even dry, I identify and can follow the insanity of it all).

Mil gracias,LenAugust 3, 2010 5:23 PMGran Koch-Swahne said...

A bit beyond me, but thanks!

I think the Krasners are fascinating as are Pollok's earlier pieces.

And I did think of Leonardo ;=)August 4, 2010 12:35 PMphilip king said...

Thank you for this thoughtful appraisal... I too am an artist who recentlywatched the Pollock film after putting off watching it for many years assumingthat it would have a certain sentimentality.. I was wrong and came awayimpressed... His murderous self-destruction is vividly and objectivelycaptured in the film.the reductionism you so rightly decry has been so limiting, and I wasinterested in your take on the more traditional artists and curators whosupported Pollock. I personally feel Pollock's sense of himself as aninternational artist with shared transatlantic concerns is not generallystressed enough, Dubuffet, for example is key...

Thank You.

Phil King Oakland CADecember 5, 2010 4:11 AM

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My Art On FacebookClick on the picture to go to Facebook Albums of my work.Who Am I?My name is Doug Blanchard. I'm an artist in New York. I keep a studio in theLower East Side (one of the few artists left in Manhattan). I paint figurativelyin oils. I think of myself as a kind of history painter and aspiring classicist.I teach art and art history at a CUNY community college (no PhD, so I'm adiscount professor). I live with my partner Michael and 2 cats, Willy and Betty,in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.I was born and raised in Dallas, and lived in the Midwest for a number of years;first in Kansas City, MO, and then in St. Louis.This blog is about whatever pops into my head at the moment.

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The Seven Sacraments of Nicholas Poussin

AIDS Disappeared

"You May Say That I Ain't Free, But It Don't Worry Me." Robert Altman's"Nashville"

Eisenstein's Red October

Tang Dynasty Imperial Tombs

The Ming Tombs

Sinan, The Unknown Architect

San Francisco City Hall

Christianity is a Rotten Family Values Religion

The Once and Future WTC


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Jack the Dripper

Caravaggio

Norman Rockwell

The First Sci Fi Epic Returns

Limousine LiberalMayor LindsayEaster Noise (A Lot of It): Easter in Florence

Florence: Some Commentary and Sources

Florence: Building the Cathedral

Florence: The Ciompi Revolt

Florence: Catastrophe

Florence: From Craft to Art, Part 5Giotto's LegacyFlorence: From Craft to Art, Part 4GiottoFlorence: From Craft to Art, Part 3

Cimabue and DuccioFlorence: From Craft to Art, Part 2Italo-Byzantine Painting to CimabueFlorence: From Craft to Art, Part 1PulpitsFlorence: The Preachers

Florence: The Rise of the Commune, Part 2

Florence: The Rise of the Commune Part 1Andrea Pisano, The Art of WeavingFlorence: Up From AnarchyTowers of San GimignanoFlorence, The First Modern City: PrologueDuomo from San Miniato


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Wojnarowicz and Bacon

David WojnarowiczDown and Out in 1980s New YorkFrancis Bacon"I am an optimist about nothing."Jesus Kicks Ass!

Equality (Part I)*Prologue *The Equality of ChristiansEquality (Part II)*"All Men Are Created Equal" *"Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"Equality (Part III)*"The Images Ye Have Made of Me" *The Power of the EarthEquality (Part IV)*The Radiant City * "The Grid of Two Hundred Million" *Postlude

Saint Peter's: Peter's Prodigy

Ancient Saint Peter's

Renaissance St. Peter's: The Decision to Rebuild the Church

Renaissance St. Peter's: Michelangelo

Counter-Reformation Saint Peter's

Baroque Saint Peter's

Reflections on Saint Peter's

1. The Creation of Christian Art: Before Christianity

2. The Creation of Christian Art: The First Christian Art

3. The Creation of Christian Art: The Image of Christ

4. The Creation of Christian Art: Constantine and the Basilican Church

5. The Creation of Christian Art: The Origins of Byzanitne Form, Part 1, LateRoman Imperial Art


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6.The Creation of Christian Art: The Origins of Byzantine Form Part 2, Orthodoxvs Arian at Ravenna

7. The Creation of Christian Art: Islam

8. The Creation of Christian Art: The Iconoclastic Controversy

9. The Creation of Christian Art: The West, Atlantic Meets Mediterranean

10. The Creation of Christian Art: The Scandal of the Cross

Futurism at 100

Futurism and Fascism

Russian Avant-Garde, Part 1Malevich and SuprematismRussian Avant-Garde Part 2ConstructivismMy Favorite ArtistsIn no particular order:

GoyaWilliam BlakePoussin

Piero della FrancescaMasaccioDonatelloWatteauPicassoMax BeckmannLeon GolubDelacroixLeonardoRembrandtVelazquezFriedrichEakins

KleeGorkydeKooningErnstRothkoBruegelTitianGiovanni BelliniTatlinLissitzky


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RodchenkoGiottoCimabueMa LinMa YuanKuo HsiHsia KueiShen ChouJan Van EyckRogier Van Der WeydenHokusaiUnkeiKaikeiPhidiasPolykleitosPraxitelesDegasSeuratDurerTurnerDavid WojnarowiczFrancis BaconMondrianGericault

ChardinOrozcoVermeerRubensPhilip GustonBig Mike (Michelangelo)R CrumbRichard DiebenkornCaravaggioAnnibale Carracci

Sorta goes all over the damn map, don't it?

I can't help it. I love all this stuff.

Words of WisdomHere being built by the Sidonian queenWas a great temple planned in Junos honor,Rich in offerings and the godhead there,Steps led up to a sill of bronze, with brazenLintel, and bronze doors on groaning pins.

Here in this grove new things that met his eyesCalmed Aeneas fear for the first time,Here for the first time he took heart to hopeFor safety, and to trust his destiny moreEven in affliction. It was while he walkedFrom one to another wall of the great templeAnd waited for the queen, staring amazedAt Carthaginian promise, at the handiworkOf artificers and the toil they spent upon it;He found before his eyes the Trojan battles


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In the Old War now known throughout the world--The great Atridae, Priam, and Achilles,Fierce in his rage at both sidesHere AeneasHalted and tears came, What spot on the earth,He said, What region of the earth, Achates,Is not full of the story of our sorrow?Look, here is Priam. Even so far awayGreat Valor has due honor; they weep hereFor how the world goes, and our life that passesTouches their hearts. This fameInsures some kind of refuge.--Virgil, from the Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

Great masters who have shown mankindAn order it has yet to find,What if all pedants say of youAs personalities be true?All the more honor to you thenIf, weaker than some other men,You had the courage that survivesSoiled, shabby, egotistic lives,If poverty or ugliness,Ill-health or social unsuccess

Hunted you out of life to playAt living in another way;Yet the live quarry all the sameWere changed to huntsmen in the game,And the wild furies of the past,Tracked to their origins at last,Trapped in a mediums artifice,To charity, delight, increase.Now large magnificent and calm,Your changeless presences disarmThe sullen generations, stillThe fright and fidget of the will,And to the growing and the weak

Your final transformations speak,Saying to dreaming I am deed.To striving Courage. I succeedTo mourning I remain, Forgive.And to becoming I am. Live.--WH Auden, from New Year's Letter, 1939

Art still has truth, take refuge there.--Matthew Arnold from Memorial Verses

We have art in order that we might not perish from truth.--Friedrich Nietzche

Those masterful images because completeGrew in pure mind, but out of what began?A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slutWho keeps the till. Now that my ladders goneI must lie down where all ladders start,In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.--W.B. Yeats


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The camera cannot compete with a brush and canvas, as long as it cant be usedin heaven and hell.--Edvard Munch

Invention, it must be admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void,but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded: it can giveform to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substanceitself.--Mary Shelly, Introduction to Frankenstein

The artist is a dreamer who consents to dream of the real world.--George Santayana

To see is to understand.--Leonardo da Vinci

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is avery absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put someorder into ourselves.--Willem de Kooning

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It is

the lord of astronomy and the maker of cosmography; it counsels and corrects allthe arts of humanity; it moves men to the different parts of the world; it isthe prince of mathematics, its sciences are certain; it has measured the heightsand sizes of the stars, it has found the elements in their locations... hasgenerated architecture, perspective, and the divine art of painting. Oh mostexcellent thing above all others created, what peoples, what tongues shall bethose that can fully describe your true operation? This is the window of thehuman body, through which it mirrors its way and brings to fruition the beautyof the world, by which the soul is content to stay in its human prison.--Leonardo da Vinci

The artist begins to communicate before he is understood.--TS Eliot

But what, after all, was humanism if not a love of humankind, and by token alsoof political activity, rebellion against all that tended to defile or degradeour conception of humanity? He had been accused of exaggerating the importanceof form. But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced humandignity--Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain

...what would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earthlook like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects

and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of treesand living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees andall the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the nakedlight?--Mikhail Bulgakov from The Master and Margarita

The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no flowers,


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no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting patches of ruddy brick.By an odd chance -- unless we believe in a presiding genius of place -- thestatues that relieve its severity suggest, not the innocence of childhood northe glorious bewilderment of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity.Perseus and Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or sufferedsomething, and, though they are immortal, immortality has come to them afterexperience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might a heromeet a goddess, or a heroine a god.--E.M. Forster, from A Room With A View

To be an Error and to be Cast Out is Part of God's Design.--William Blake

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.--William Blake

Faith our outward sense befriending, makes out inward vision clear.--Thomas Aquinas

Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me.--Yiddish proverb

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves

it.--Mark Twain

Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.--Mark Twain

Humanity is a parade of fools, and not only am I in that parade, I'm carrying abanner.--Mark Twain

In a world full of caterpillars, it takes balls to be a butterfly.-Anonymous Tranny.

Peace is more than the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.--Martin Luther King Jr.

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels aminority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is differencemade legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels aminority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself.--Martin Luther King Jr.

Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon growinsolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned byimportance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at

large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, andwhen they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfitof any throughout the dominions.-- Thomas Paine

Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence ofcemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is thegenerous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism.Peace is generosity. It is right and it is a duty.-- Oscar Romero, January 7, 1978


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Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit oflabor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor issuperior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.~~Abraham Lincoln

Live as though you will die tomorrow. Learn as though you will live forever.--Mohandas Gandhi

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.--Dag Hammarskjld

Some say that God did spank the townFor being over-frisky.So why did He burn the churches down,and save McCarthy's Whisky?--Anonymous ditty in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

There has never been a kingdom so given to so many civil wars as that of Christ.--Montesquieu

When they try to become angels, men become beasts.--Montaigne

Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.--Montaigne

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.--Immanuel Kant

The God of Love will never withdraw our right to grief and infamy--WH Auden

Politics is the art of the possible.

--Otto Von Bismarck

... the politics of the holy is the art of the impossible. It makes long-runcompromise untenable.--Avishai Margalit

The best live by legends. The average live by ideology. And the worst live byconspiracy theories.--Hannah Arendt

Laws, like the spiders webs, catch the small flies and let the large ones go

free.-Balzac

If you had enough courage, you wouldn't need a reputation.--Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.--attributed to Philo of Alexandria


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The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleepunder bridges.--Anatole France

The sound of the Gion Shja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; thecolor of the sla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mightyfall at last, they are as dust before the wind.--opening of the Heike Monogatari, 13th century Japan

The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.--Pascal

There's a Christ for a whore and a Christ for a punk,There's a Christ for a pickpocket and a drunk,There's a Christ for every sinner, but there's one thing there ain't,There ain't no Christ for any cut-price saint.--James Fenton, from "Cutthroat Christ"

Men never do evil so willingly and so happily as when they do it for the sake of

conscience.--Pascal

Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one ofthose who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of thoseplague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage doneto them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time ofpestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be of one finalvictory. It could only record of what had had to be done. and assuredly wouldhave to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and itsrelentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while

unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive to theirutmost to be healers.And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieuxremembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowdsdid not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus neverdies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years infurniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks,and bookshelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane andenlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to diein a happy city.

--Albert Camus, conclusion of The Plague

Faith is never identical with piety.--Karl Barth

Oh God, If I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell; and if I worshipThee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee forThine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting beauty!--Rabiah al Basri


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Live this life and do what ever is done in a spirit of thanksgiving. Abandonattempts to achieve security, they are futile. Give up the search for wealth, itis demeaning. Quit the search for salvation, it is selfish. And come tocomfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life withan attitude of thanksgiving will receive its full promise.

-- St. Benedict of Nursia (480-543 C.E)

IF I were but mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lordshand made me of this dust, and the Lords hand shall re-collect these ashes; theLords hand was the wheel upon which this vessel of clay was framed, and theLords hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dustand the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious?But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.--John Donne

Christ has no body now but yoursNo hands, no feet on earth but yoursYours are the eyes through which He lookscompassion on this worldChrist has no body now on earth but yours.--Teresa of Avila

Again I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle tothe strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor tothe men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.-Ecclesiates 9:11-12

What shall I bring when I approach the Lord? How shall I stoop before God onhigh? Am I to approach him ith whole offerings or yearling calves? Will the Lordaccept thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my eldestson for my own wrongdoing, my children for my own sin?God has told you what is good, and what is it that the Lord asks of you?Only to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

-Micah 6:6-8

Divine folly is wiser than the wisdom of man, and divine weakness stronger thanman's strength. My brothers, think what sort of people you are, whom God hascalled. Few of you are men of wisdom, by any human standard; few are powerful orhighly born. Yet, to shame the wise, God has chosen what the world counts folly,and to shame the strong, God has chosen what the world counts weakness. he haschosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existingorder. And so there is no place for human pride in the presence of God. You arein Christ Jesus by God's own act, for God has made him our wisdom; he is ourrighteousness; in him we are consecrated and set free.

-1 Corinthians: 25-30

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me toannounce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recoveryof sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the yearof the Lord's favor.--Luke 4:18-19

Because I live, so shall you live also--John 14:19-20


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A Prayer Attributed to Saint FrancisLord, make us instruments of your peace.Where there ishatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon;wherethere is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith;wherethere is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light;wherethere is sadness, joy.Grant that we may not so much seek tobe consoled as to console;to be understood as to understand;to be loved as to love.For it is in giving that we receive;it isin pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that weare born to eternal life.

Amen.Metta Karuna PrayerOneness of Life and Light,Entrusting in your Great Compassion,May you shed the foolishness in myself,Transforming me into a conduit of Love.May I be a medicine for the sick and weary,Nursing their afflictions until they are cured;May I become food and drink,

During time of famine,May I protect the helpless and the poor,May I be a lamp,

For those who need your Light,May I be a bed for those who need rest,and guide all seekers to the Other Shore.May all find happiness through my actions,and let no one suffer because of me.Whether they love or hate me,Whether they hurt or wrong me,May they all realize true entrusting,Through Other Power,The Prayer of Eleanor RooseveltOur Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers

after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what wemake of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keepus at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to thee for strength. Deliverus from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see andof the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around usand our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try tounderstand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world madenew.


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Blog Archive 2011 (120)

May (10)Osama Bin Laden is DeadThe HitThe Morning After.Rejoicing in the Death of SinnersCongratulations President Obama!I'm Glad He's GoneMy Inner "Conservative"Beatifications"All The World Cries Out For Peace, Freedom, and a...Robert Grant

April (29)BootstrapsApocalyptic AssholesBritney Spears Never Looked So GoodNice KidsAlabamaSchadenfreudeIt Ain't Easy Being Queer and ChristianAmerica Now

Open StudiosAnd For All of You Who Are Already Sick of the Roy...EasterThe Seven Sacraments of Nicholas PoussinWhat The Frothing Rage of the Right Is All AboutTrofim Lysenko Lives!Florence: Some Commentary and SourcesPower versus AuthorityRevolutionaryMusic For John GaltThat Mysterious Man in the White House ...America, No We Can't!150 Years Ago Today

The First Person Ever in SpaceFluffy BunniesJesus So LowlySpeaking of Fun House Morality ..."Am I My Brother's Keeper?"The Mystery of the Mona Lisa Solved ... MaybeThe Last of the Magic RealistsNormal! Normal! Happy! Happy!

March (30)American ChristianityCold SpringFlorence: Building the CathedralThe Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 100 Years Ago Today

"For This, For Everything, We Are Out of Tune"The End of Religion?A Bloody March in New YorkBeethovenJapan Needs HelpJapanScience!

February (29) January (22)

2010 (409)


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December (28) November (39) October (50) September (35) August (27)Just Color Me Mauve"Survival of the Fittest"Katrina, 5 Years Ago TodayMy Dream These Days ...The Real One, 47 Years Ago TodayThe Fake OneSpam Spam SpamKen Mehlman Finally Comes Out ...A Christian Victory MonumentI Love Wikipedia"Charles, People Will Think..." "What I Tell Them...Human NatureMy Last Word on the "Ground Zero Mosque" Non-Issue...Mies Van Der Rohe, German ClassicistA Letter from an East Coast Elitist to a Group of ...Ground Zero MosqueSan Francisco City HallChristianity is a Rotten Family Values ReligionMore Music For New York

Music for New YorkPatricia Neal 1926 - 2010Tony Judt 1948 - 2010Class and FatWe've Come So Very FarProp H8 is No More (For the Time Being)Jack the Dripper"The First Amendment Issue of Our Time" -- Net Neu...

July (43) June (40) May (56) April (28) March (1)

February (21) January (41) 2009 (598)

December (68) November (47) October (62) September (53) August (57) July (48) June (48) May (55) April (56) March (37)

February (40) January (27)

2008 (309) December (51) November (44) October (33) September (44) August (61) July (63) June (13)


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