Edward G. Nilges, “Peter’s Crazy Aunt Dances on the Strand to the Music of Bach, and the Sweet Zy-Deco Sounds of Clifton Chenier, the King of the Bayou”, acrylic on canvas, 20 * 60 cm, January 29 2012 AMDG

Note: if the painting is truncated, click above on “Spinoza’s Blog” to see the post with other posts. I haven’t mastered how WordPress treats pix, nor how Apple handles them on a Powerbook.

I have decided to declare victory: this painting is done, and, as the Scots say, “this and better may do, this and worse will ne’er do”. The figure is colorful and this rather large (60 * 80 cm) canvas lights up the room with the way she leaps as an hart.

The numerous deficiencies cannot obscure the life in this thing nor its evocation of the bell-like tones of Poussin. Particularly noble is the twisting motion of the abdomen.

I am not bullshitting here. I like this painting and would pay big money for it if I were a collector. This artist, dammit, has thought about the play of light even if he manages to preserve every single mistake he makes, and he makes a lot, by means of translucent paint and cartoon transfer.

Besides, making art makes me feel good. Pity I didn’t put my foot down and do what I had to do years ago but there’s no point in crying over the past. Peter’s Crazy Aunt certainly doesn’t.

Zey vill laff at me at zee Zalon undt der Royal Academy but I shall show zem!

My next project is “Mama Kanumba del Cucamonga takes the Children to Power Station Beach” because I want to see the profile I drew realized in paint. I need to do more plein aire work on Lamma to get a better feel for our wonderful if abused natural environment, which is something I could only imagine when I was a kid in the Midwest, sketching maps of places, anywhere but around Lake Michigan, carved, unlike Lake Michigan, into all sorts of hidden coves and mysterious mountains.

Basically, the geologic youth of the Great Lakes isn’t their fault. They are big melting ice cubes from the recent past, whereas Lamma Island is the forbidden and mysterious peak of a great Mountain that used to oversee a Plain.

I like Peter’s Crazy Aunt’s expression, it isn’t crabby like the expression on my nude which I won’t post online…it is similar to PCA but naked, same overall colors, crabby expression. That’s because I was working full time when I painted on Dance of Victory.

I went dancing last night to an annual festival put on by a fellow Chicagoan. It was hard at first to foot it featly here and there like Ariel in the Tempest because I was on a wooden plank which moved slightly, it was cool (about 17 centigrade) and my feet were seizing up.

But o the power of music to move Helen, as William Kennedy wrote of Helen, in Ironweed, when she gets enough money for a hotel room and can play the Ninth symphony.

There was quite a large crowd of people and a bunch of Lamma kids who also danced. After the dance, three strangers congratulated my “performance” which surprised me because it wasn’t intended to be such, but, I was close to the band (Black Mariah). It gave them felicity which is the whole purpose of art. That was cool.

As I left I was cold and stiff. I started to walk down the steps like an old man but a far older man needed assistance. This always happens to me. On the MTR, a little girl gave me her seat last year but as soon as I, a weary Old Lo-Shih Teacher, took it, the Three Immortals, three really old Chinese guys, got on the train.

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

WB Yeats

I got a hair up my ass about saving Western Civilization from the Paganorum thirty-five years ago, so I ruined the poor girl’s life.

This Republican primary is what it must be like for some female to have to listen to her drunken husband’s bullshit on the phone at three o’clock in the morning, or to be forced to read my collected Works (gesammelte Schriften) on the Trans-Siberian Express, as opposed to dipping into them at Starbucks’s for the amusing or naughty bits, and the pix of hot girls.

Edward G. Nilges, “Detail of State of ‘Peter’s Crazy Aunt Dances on the Strand to the Music of Bach, and the Sweet Zy-deco Sounds of Clifton Chenier, the King (le Roi) of the Bayou’ as of Jan 20 2012″, acrylic on canvas, 60*80 cm

This tax return makes me sick.

When I cleaned up my father’s house after he moved to assisted care, I found all his returns, neatly and compulsively filed, going back to 1946. Each one was painfully honest. He paid rates as high as 70% as a physician.

Mom would complain that “the air turns blue when your father does his taxes” since my Dad would curse and swear. Yet he paid his taxes at far higher rates than Romney. In cases of doubt he would deliberately err on the side of the government, perhaps because he was ethnically German-American.

That’s what his WWII generation did. His brother laughed at propaganda on the troopship to Europe in 1943, and my Dad voted Republican in hopes of tax relief, but he and his brother were natural Kantians: for them “duty” is precisely that which we do not want to do.

Romney gets a refund of almost two million dollars. His total W-2 withholding is 112.00. He directs the refund to go to paying the next year’s tax not, I would imagine, out of a desire to make the government a loan, but because his preparers find this the optimal strategy from his point of view…and a cool million or two is chump change in a year when you’ve made 22 million.

You don’t need the money to get the clutch replaced or to avoid fraudclosure. You don’t need it for a hospital bill.

While the Fed reduces interest rates to zero but no ordinary person can’t get credit, we have a mediaeval situation; for just as in the Middle Ages, capital was frozen specie, today banks and rich men hoard it…while condemning us for buying a laptop in a world where employers expect you to have one.

If Romney wants to be President he needs to follow the lead of Soros and Buffet.

Don’t give it to charity. For one thing, so many charities are so woman-friendly (usually for a good reason) that they will not support destitute single males. Increasingly they predefine desert.

Instead, call for the capital gains tax to end: call for higher taxes on the 1%. Stop the barbaric practice of taxing us expatriates on money earned overseas, one that is not followed by other developed countries.

The French revolution, like our own, started over unfairness of taxation. Necker could not balance Louis XVI’s books because the First and Second Estates (the nobility and clergy) refused to pay taxes. The Terror was the result.

Stop using coded racism. We’re all black folk today. A white man with no credit and no car is under almost the same suspicion when he walks in the rain to Motel 6. Racist talk died down a bit in the 1930s when people realized this.

The whole system works because people show up for work. But in today’s America, you can be fired “for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all”. Your worth is defined in ridiculous performance reviews where what you thought was good performance (finding a way to bill conference calls, connecting with students by marshaling their anger against Asian schools) can always be renarrated, at will, as not what’s needed.

But the desert of a Romney of capital gains and a 13.9% rate is never in play.

I used to live in a semi-well-sealed bubble. I got company laptops, I could expense hotel rooms, my Silicon Valley firm provided us with a hot tub. But in return I worked 16 hours a day and got paid for eight. And then the company wanted to hire junior college graduates to blindly make changes to parameters, not real programmers.

Job performance can always be questioned. Almost as soon as you’re too “inexperienced”, right around 30, in my former field, you’re over the hill. But capital gains and bonds, ah, they survive everything: wars, depressions, you name it. In fact, young men will go to war to preserve your gains: as Sean Penn says in the Thin Red Line, “this war is about property”. Like TS Eliot, I would like to be in heaven, and, with Mustapha Mond, lie “wrapt in a six percent Exchequer Bond”.

Perhaps we seriously need a President a guy like Harry Truman, who was seriously broke when selected by Missouri boss Tom Prendergast to be FDR’s Vice in 1944, and replace Henry Wallace…who troubled the Mustapha Monds of his day by being a socialist. Truman was broke because he was honest.

Or Lincoln, who passed the Bar through self-study.

There is no political democracy, writes John Rawls, unless there be a rough equality in the fair market value of a vote. But when bondholders and capital gainers vote and call their Congressman, they have real clout. I can write Senator Durbin of Illinois and get a form letter.

Romney’s tax return is obscene. And it IS a set-up. I destroyed my marriage, in part, by working absurd hours; but in consulting, your worth is defined by the worst things that are said about you when you lack “social skills” and would rather code great software … for companies like Standard Oil that didn’t deserve it. I was in the arena, my Dad was, and, in terms of the filthy bastards now running for the Republican nomination, even Richard Nixon was in the arena.

These guys own the goddamn arena so they don’t have to fight.

A movie from back in the old days when Americans were grownups.

Hanoi Jane ripped up the set here. This movie was a vision of wonderfulness: color, sex, New York in a grey time when I was sweating the draft and my first girlfriend’s Mom sent her to Israel where Leah decided that Pope Paul VI sucked because he condemned the Six Day War of Israeli Aggression and that because I was a nice Catholic boy, I was not for her.

Barefoot was a sort of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for intelligent heterosexual guys: a vision, a promise of a City that would like Don Draper in Mad Men tell you that you were OK. Leave the boring suburbs, and the girls already fat in the senior prom with the Tricia Nixon hairdo…at a dead run. Leave their talk of their older sister in Hoffman’s Estates and their brushing your hand off their chunky thighs. Have a smoke, have a drink, meet a girl in black tights. O City, city…the gold horn robes of Jazz…

Jane was the promise of something else and that why many of the guys who went to Vietnam still hate her, resenting everything the movie represented for fifty years: New York, Freudianism, sex without power-guilt.

In 1967, the movie seemed curiously already dated, and unserious about what was “going down”, pre Buffalo Springfield and in color, unlike a demonstration against the war in the Chicago spring rain.

Back then, you wondered about each young guy you saw in the movie. What, you wondered, was the specific relationship of the actor, and the character he played, both Redford and “Paul Bratter”, to the draft? I have always had a tendency, as did my father, to visibly carry burdens (my father loved the Mission, the de Niro film about a Spanish soldier who expiates great guilt, probably because de Niro humps his armor through the rain forest in a penance).

In 1967 it was the draft, so to me “Paul Bratter” seem unburdened. He didn’t seem to be sweating his student deferment or lottery number.

“Power” is the term in today’s discourse about sex that “guilt” occupied in 1967. Back then, we weren’t supposed to be guilty because we actually believed that since we had the Pill nobody could get hurt. Yeah, right. Today, the “sex-positive” feminists, my favorite feminists, are trying to remove “power”.

They define any sex without the “enthusiastic consent” of both parties as a rape and I totally agree. I had a lot of fun designing a poster for the Hong Kong Slutwalk based on this idea, which I represented as the flying leap she takes when in love when in my own words inna poem I wrote, “she ran to you like rain”, and leaped, hanging on with her thighs. Ah yes…dry your whiskers…no man deserves a Flying Leap, most of us deserve one clear shot at us at dawn as in the code duello.

This movie unabashedly Freudian: “Paul Bratter” (Robert Redford) won’t let go of his very Fifties Mom, who can’t climb stairs, is a Lady who Lunches, and hates it when Cory talks about sex. My Mom, when we watched Barefoot on TV, laughed when she saw Cory’s Mom, for my Mom wanted to be like her: the sophisticated Lady Who Lunches at the Plaza.

But Cory doesn’t win: Paul goes too far and she has to rein him in because she cares about him.

Redford is merely witty and has timing. Jane, on the other hand, is a force of nature especially when she dances her Cambodian Mystery Sex Dance.

I got scared of the unboundedness of a later girl’s sexuality, that of the lucky lady who became my ex-wife, so like Paul Bratter, I used the Important Job in the City to rule lines around it as he does. Moral: don’t do that.

You’ll get loads of time to do that later on after she pops off a couple of kids, your Male Pattern Baldness and Love Handles take hold, and she can’t stand the sight of you most of the time . Then you can stay late at the office and code software up the ass. Just don’t get any funny ideas about that lovely unmarried fellow coder in the next cube.

Make sure Saturdays are free because it’s actually loads of laughs to have to assume responsibility for the kids. You can do all sorts of random things, the more random the better: art museum visits with solemn inspections of Cezanne, playing with the dog being walked by a female obstetrician at Northwest Memorial while she takes a break from delivering a healthy baby, and watching concrete being poured. Until they’re about ten they will love things like that. And you will never forget them.

Remember, also, that if you fart in the car you can always blame them. They will claim it’s yours because of its sonorous tone, its length, its deep, intense bouquet and body, and its high specific gravity which causes it to sort of hang in the air for a long while.

(You may have realized by now that I had boys.)

Then, Teen Coolness arrives and you find that in terms of being not cool, you are the very thing itself, a Cynosure, the “man of wax” as Juliet’s Nurse puts it. But they still rely on you for transportation and cash until they’re 17, so you can use *baksheesh* and *guan xi* to keep their respect for a while. But be mindful of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in this regard.

Then: they are 18. As Garrison Keillor said, the police stop cruising up and down your street. If you’re divorced as I was your bachelor “pad” no longer has their crap in it. It will be a distinct honor if they introduce girlfriends to you but you must be on your best behavior.

You get a grand total of ONE story which you may tell the girlfriend about how cute they were, so choose wisely. “Boy, lemme tellya, when Peter was a little kid, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I useta have to change him several times…”: ok, that’s it, Dad.

Since they will take after you in their choice of females, don’t be surprised, if you’re a guy like me, if she’s a psycho art major who chain smokes Camel lights and can beat you at poker and arm wrestling.

So there it is, as the Emperor said in Amadeus. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Keith Haring, Radiant Child

Unfashionable…

Tries too hard…

I find this article nauseating.

“CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s and many other magazines, and is currently working on a book, ‘The United States Must End,’ which advocates the dissolution of the US.”

This from someone whose income is made from national magazines and who uses that income to live apart from a wife who’s apparently French and junket with his alienated daughter in Utah…without getting fucking stuck in fucking Utah with no fucking money, and sending emails and Facebook messages out in despair because the motel phone won’t make long distance calls.

Who argues that the United States must be dissolved. Gee, does this asshole know what happened when the federation of Yugoslavia dissolved?

Who uses Facebook and the net to preserve his income, who submits articles electronically and promotes himself on the Internet. Has this guy any shame? Has he ever read Plato and pondered Plato’s hypocrisy concerning writing?

Who uses, irresponsibly and at second hand, Heidegger’s Jargon of Authenticity to laugh at us poor deluded and systematically isolated fools, with our unfashionable age, race, gender and bank balances, who use Facebook to relieve isolation, to connect, and bring down governments and their apologists of the chattering class.

Clearly, Facebook needs to be limited to the elite just as teaching slaves to read and write was a capital offense in de old Souf. How dare that Motel 6 long term resident have a Blackberry? Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? Clearly there needs to be a First Clawss access for which we shall pay, and a Colored Person access for everyone else.

The new game in town is to shame the black and the brown
How dare they use Facebook or a cellphone so as not to be alone?
They strut their stuff so shamelessly on Facebook
Creating a homeless man’s home a shantytown nook
Wherein they can say to the uncaring Other
Yo dig it I am a man and a brother.

Technology is so inauthentic, these people are not real
And from the Gods they steal the fire!
Time to throw your cellphone on the pyre
And to follow the authentic thug
And stop tracking up our rug.

The Tudors, like their enemy Phillip II of Spain, were thugs who dispossessed the peasantry through dissolution of the monasteries in preparation for 17th century enclosures of the common lands. But focusing on their efforts to discredit the Yorkists who descended from Edward III through the male line, rather than through the female line and marriage as had the Tudors, is an excellent way of not talking about posh behavior in Britain which continues today, and which has “enclosed” London, and made it a preserve for superrich Russian gangstas.

Sir James Tyrell confessed to the murder under Henry VII and Richard Gloucester benefited most directly. Gloucester as a mediaeval war-lord thought nothing of killing people in a vortex of slaughter that had broken out when his baby brother was slain by Clifford. The story is in Shakespeare, but it’s also in Holinshed and, for the most part, in modern histories because it was documented at the time.

It is nonsense, because in fact the Shakespeare narrative makes the most sense in terms of emotion and human nature, and this argues strongly for its truth.

The homophobic murder of Richard II, of which a precedent was the homophobic slaughter a century before of Edward II, was a refusal to accept the consequences of primogeniture and legitimacy itself which had enabled England to struggle out of the Dark Ages and clashing systems of legitimacy. Basically, as Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard II insist, and as Marlowe’s Edward II insists, if you believe in primogeniture and the Lord’s anointed, you have to accept a gay or weakling king…as an alternative to the Roman struggle to display who’s the best man, which interferes with trade and the Peace of God.

The mediaeval idea was remarkably sophisticated (CS Lewis shows us how to see wisdom we have lost). It reasons from a perception, centuries before Thomas Hobbes and centuries after Plato, that power maddens men and creates the war of all against all in which there is no legitimacy. Legitimacy through victory in war and the elimination of rivals is fleeting.

Therefore the convenient fiction, which ancient and mediaeval man could see was a fiction, that the eldest boy inherited the ability to reign along with a genetic keek about the brow, was developed to legitimize the king in a semi-lottery. But ambitious magnates such as Mortimer in Edward II’s time, or Bolingbroke in Richard II’s time, upon whom in the feudal economy the king depended for provender and soldiers, were always tempted to call the king “weak” if he did not with enthusiasm kill people such as the ever-hapless French or while on holiday in the Holy Land.

Of course, mediaeval deep homophobia played a part for the elimination of what may have been a berdache or feminized male along with paganism made Edward II’s 13th century proclivities, and to a greater extent Richard II’s, completely unmentionable…although in the 16th century play, there is a cautious discussion of Roman precedents for enduring a fruitcake King.

But comes now, Josephine Tey. What’s needed is an explanation of her zany ideas.

The key is found in the “seduction scene” which has a supernatural force, wherein Richard seduces the Lady Anne, who’s dragging Henry VI (her father in law) through the streets, Gloucester (Richard in the play until he’s crowned) having killed not only Henry but also Anne of Warwick’s husband Edward.

Tey was seduced by Shakespeare’s Richard through an almost (but not quite) occult power of the language of the scene.

And even today, Western women, and women in other patriarchal societies, eroticize patriarchy in order that they may endure it. Women today fall for liars, lager louts and villains and many who’ve never studied Shakespeare immediately connect to the Lady Anne scene.

(One popular scam in the USA being a military or CIA record you don’t have. Gets the pussy, or so I’ve heard.)

Tey was seduced by a common form of denial, another manifestation of which is the strikingly common way in which men who are victims have their victimization renarrated as a product of a defective character. She wants, against all the historical evidence, such as it is, Richard to be the Father found just.

But this is nonsense. The homophobic deposition and assassination of Richard II had, like the anti-Catholic assassination of President Kennedy, and the soft coup d’etat of Richard Nixon, not for his real crimes, destroyed the reality of legitimacy, and the ability of Yorkist magnates to serve their newly legitimate king.

Shakespeare gets their psychological conflicts perfectly right: the Duke of York, after having the attaint of his blood removed by a well-meaning Henry, doesn’t want to make trouble but allows his sons to persuade him and later there’s an attempt at conciliation in York’s allowing Henry to reign but not pass the crown to his son.

Legitimacy closes the gap between a perfect but cloud Cuckoo land of direct democracy and the real world. It plays a part in the interpretation of the American constitution: folk thinkers like to claim it has one “original” meaning, ignore the diversity of interpretations, and wind up yapping on a Web page and prophesying to the wind, because the legitimate American constitution is its black letter text plus all court cases.

But that which makes legitimacy, well, legitimate, is the superego’s check on the ego, which makes men willing to obey an election or a king, and these days the superego’s been replaced by advertisements (cf Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment). It stands to reason that in the 15th century, the superego had decayed as a result of Bolingbroke’s stunt and the natural result? Pure ego, in the form of an Italianate condottiere, Dickie Crookback.

And as one scarred by feminine atavism, I say that I’m tired of women making excuses for falling for liars and thugs and alienating my children based on mythical thinking. O thus, quoth Forrest, lay the gentle babes.

It stands to reason that Richard killed the princes in the absence of archeological evidence which today is impossible to come by. The motive was there and Richard’s behavior during the Wars of the Roses made it clear he was a thug.

But basically, American and British society is in the process of sacrificing the next generation in the destruction of public education, so in denying that Richard killed the Princes, we are in a twisted way getting ourselves off.

Note the common thread in conspiracy theories: the Princes were not killed or their murder can be offloaded onto Henry VII making it less meaningful and blackening the name of a relatively good king: Kennedy was not essentially the victim of a meaningless street crime: the puffs of smoke we saw on TV as the towers went down were planted explosions and not the souls and bodies of men and women: an honest man (Shakespeare) was really a liar.

And oh yes, the Jews died of cholera.

The mechanism of conspiracy theory relieves psychological pressure. The conspiracy theorist is Cain who says in response to his brother’s blood, am I my brother’s keeper? It’s a game people play to locate evil elsewhere than in their hearts.

Edward G. Nilges, “State of ‘Peter’s Crazy Aunt Dances on the Strand to the Music of Bach, and to the Sweet Zy-Deco Sounds of Clifton Chenier (the KING of the Bayou)’ as of 22 January 2012″, acrylic on canvas, 60 * 80 cm

Before I got my eye put out,
I liked as well to see
As other creatures that have eyes,
And know no other way.

Emily Dickinson

Come on, come on, you bastards: Vorwart! This ain’t no pork chop, this is Chloris, this is Pandora, this is Artemis, this is Chang-Er, Goddess of the Moon, and I’se Jade Rabbit.

Over and over again. Painting on the floor, me dancing around like Jackson Frigging Pollock…love his work, could never accomplish something like that…but no wonder he smoked…I pound Nicorette.

If you’re glazing (dark and transparent over light) or scumbling (light and translucent over dark) you have to be an Action Painter at this phase despite the realism of the work, for there are patches of light in darkness and darkness in light. You need not be afraid of the way the Light shoots (zuschammen) into the darkness and the way the darkness climbs towards the light as in Milton:

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn,
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

Constant glazing and scumbling. NO GOUACHE, as Daniel V Thompson, author of The Practice of Tempera Painting said, “we are not here to paint with poster paints, dammit.”

In The Lady’s Not For Burning the Lady says why was I born why did I give my mother pain. Why did you buy the pure white gesso canvas?

My painting series as displayed on wordpress are what Henry V would call “another Fall of Man” in th’old play when the King arraigns Cambridge, Scroop and Grey:

I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.

I mean, generally speaking the earlier versions are better, and I care not, because it is Man’s Fate to Outsmart Himself. This painting has suffered less of a decline than my painting of the Holy Terror of Chattanooga, dancer, artist, activist Lana Sutton. That started out great and went to hell you ask me. I was lucky to preserve its grisaille.

And the intersecting glazes and scumbles are slowly fusing the thing. There is a single column of highlight that starts at the top of her head and goes all the way down, it’s her Soul, it’s her pillar of fire: but matching it is a single Shadow and a deep vermilion middle tone (that Vermilion I got in place of Cadmium Red, which sucks, is working out well).

Sir Joshua Reynolds would simply darken the background with tinted varnishes made of ground bones of Egyptian Mummies. Sir Joshua was an idiot and Benjamin West, the first real American painter, was way better.

Sfumato, the smokiness of tone that strangely makes form more and not less distinct. Leonardo strove for this in La Joconde but succeeded in Virgin on the Rocks.

Modern materials make his effects easy. The question is where the sfumato goes.

I’m thinking once in Italy of continuing to do the Grisaille in acrylic but the svelatura in oil. I’m up against the limitations of a petroleum byproduct. But I need to be more familiar with different oils and drying agents.

We admire a van Eyck because it has the appearance of a manufactured product: this is of a piece with the fact that, in Adorno’s reading of Odysseus and the Sirens, the old myths were a proto-science, a way of controlling reality. But the difference between what’s sitting in my flat and what you see is that in the actual art object there’s a piece of me, a secondary Soul in the Buddhist sense. A sort of Buddhist, I believe that living things have souls, and that first-order handicrafts have a secondary soul. Whereas, as I discovered to my dismay as a software engineer, technology is always such a collective venture as to be a sarcophagus, the trace of dead souls.

A new way of authenticating artworks has been found: the artist’s fingerprints as verified from a known attribution where all of most of the fingerprints are known to be his. Perhaps also fragments of sweat, blood and tears, that is, DNA.

We cleanse our world of aura, the human stain, and wonder why we’re so discontented. Mediaeval man on the other hand prized the skin and bones of saints as holy relics. Perhaps even piss and shit, we don’t know.

Keeping everything transparent & translucent has preserved the nobility of the line drawing. That’s all one can do. Richard Strauss risked his life protecting his Jewish grandchildren during the War and went on to write Four Last Songs. I can draw a line in the sand and preserve it, highlight it, glorify it. Unum necessarium.

When I stop painting and photograph the painting for upload here I usually do a Hitler Video, fuming with rage. This is because anything to do with technology fills me with anger. All programmers seem like incompetent little lower-middle class dweebs, probably because I wasted so much time programming. That little “rainbow spinner” on the Mac really, really sets me off. I gotta cool it since my landlord doesn’t like it when he hears me raging.

I knew it long ago. I might not have talent but I gots duende, the magic fire, up the ass: unlike some art students I have something to “say”, a “vision thing”. Dang, one leg is still bigger than the other (needs to be adjusted in the old style, glazing and scumbling, like Wellington at Waterloo): but every time I look at the damn thing that gal LEAPS out. It expresses for me the fact that I’ve been leaping as an hart ever since I left my kids thirty years ago, as if my ex wife cursed and blessed me at one and the same time: he will run and not stop running hee hee until he wises up. Which he won’t.

Go straight for the feeling, the jugular, the bone. Learn tricks of the trade but don’t worry about them too much. Every time we know we feel every time we feel we know: this is University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s point in Upheavals of Thought: a physical feeling is identical to a physical fact but an emotional feeling is based on what we believe to be true. “I have a headache” is different from “I am sad that my father has died” because if in fact your father has not died, your sadness would go away…whereas the fact of the headache is ONE fact.

Therefore in any image or text there’s a sort of grisaille backstory, the emotional trace. Shakespeare’s life story isn’t known in detail but we get a good feeling from it, because he left his wife and kids and succeeded as an entrepreneur whilst ripping Early Modern English a new asshole. Of course, jagoffs like Emmerich, being jagoffs, like to destroy this trace in that new movie Anonymous. They confuse knowledge with lack of feeling.

The ancients knew this. It wasn’t history if it didn’t either edify or instruct through pity and terror. The modern, scientific (or pseudo-scientific) distinction between emotion and cognition was to them unknown.

Therefore I think I’ve communicate a feeling. And without being “painterly” or overtly clumsy in the modern way. I love Matisse and Leroy Nieman, the guy who paints the Super Bowl, ain’t all bad, but never wanted to paint like them.

Which probably means I should. Sometimes I do. We have to turn ourselves inside out.

Listen!

Jimbo Wales with false modesty is pretending again to be some sort of benefactor of humanity with his stupid and dangerous 19 January stunt: bringing wikipedia down, thereby endangering in an unknown and unpredictable fashion any automated system, anywhere in the world, that includes shells or scripts that assume it’s available, and access a dataset in text form that’s stored on wikipedia.

And from behind computer screens, world wide, the Techie Troglodytes cheer him on with an audible rattling of real chains.

Consider that the unemployed software engineer needs to get off his ass, and sit neither at home nor in Starbucks, and instead haul ass to interviews and live conferences to get a new job. That’s how I got a new job in 2000: I hauled ass to the VSLive conference and the Microsoft Author’s Conference. I worked as an unpaid volunteer at VSLive and took the bus to and from Seattle, to and from Chicago, to get to the Author’s conference.

In a remarkably similar way, #Occupy taught us that we the 99% will only get the attention of the people whom we called the pigs in the 1960s and are referred to today as the 1% by putting the human body on the line.

But, of course, a necessary part of the techie subconscious is a deep shame about and hatred of the human body. To the extent that before 1981, as I slowly became fatter and fatter, I was accounted a great tech: as soon as I started running, despite the fact that running improves learning and concentration, my reputation as a tech suffered.

While Facebook has been a part (but only a part) of true revolutions beginning with Tunisia, note that Facebook is about our ability as bodies to communicate in a capitalist system that in countless ways needs to keep us separate. All other tech ventures have net out to a decline in our ability to meaningfully control our lives.

However, the insiders at Apple, Google and the other ventures seek to enrich only themselves and in this venture, they have found it convenient since 1980 to tell a story of personal liberation through technology that’s completely at odds with the facts.

Stunts like “bringing wikipedia down” merely endanger thousands of systems world wide that include shells and scripts that link to wikipedia, and similar stunts like “bring Google down” magnify this danger.

The tech 1% including Wales are trying to delude the tech 99% by persuading them that by sitting on their fucking ass, eating junk food, and making trouble online will change a god damned thing. This is because conforming to SOPA and PIPA would actually be easy; these laws, which are job creators, apply to foreign sites and would be trumped in the USA by the First Amendment in an obvious way. Under the Constitution, a Chinese pirate has no First Amendment protection.

But despite the fact that such conformance would be easy, tech CEOs hate doing anything not directly related to the bottom line, such as designing a system to discover the origin of content which appears to match a copyrighted document…such a system can rely on IP addresses.

So they marshal marching morons.

Edward G. Nilges, “Self Portrait as Old Orpheus”, photograph 20 Jan 2011

I do not use photographs or the model for drawing the figure, instead I draw upon my own sports and dance practice to feel the figure from within.

Peter Blume, The Rock, 1944

With false modesty after 19 January’s Wikipedia stunt (which I believe was a serious risk to world computing, and set a precedent for further such stunts), Jimmy Wales is breaking his arm patting himself on his back.

I’ve posted this comment at Jimmy Wales’ blog. It’s under moderation and may never appear.

Comment:

Actually, Jimbo, I am making a post to comp.risks (Association for Computing Machinery, Forum on Risks to the Public) concerning your stunt.

By bringing down a facility that is widely used, not only by human beings but also by automated tools, you endangered the Internet.

It might not be good practice for a shell or script procedure to contact wikipedia to update a data base from the numerous tables of information provided by “your” site (which as you’ll be the first to admit, is really “ours”, the 99% who, working as virtual slave labor, built it and were bullied by the editors you seem to have retained commencing in 2006).

But given my own thirty years of experience in software, this happens all the time, and many incompetent programmers fail to check status or availability. Their shells and scripts would not turn Javascript off and would go unexpectedly to the special black screen, causing a failure.

Since in all probability thousands of such shells and scripts exist, this raises the possibility of a cascade of failures every time you turn Wikipedia off to make your point.

It is a point which I only somewhat support. Microsoft did after all create real jobs by being aggressive about intellectual property so as to pay its employees, whereas the hacker culture has in fact deprived good developers and academics (such as Andrew Tanenbaum, probably the real inventor of Linux) of both credit and payment, as Bill Gates pointed out in 1976. It’s replaced family-wage software jobs with a Maoist “cultural revolution”, accurately characterized as such by Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not a Gadget, featuring, in place of family or fair wages, mob action and bullying, such as I have been subjected to, most recently in your serious violation of my privacy, when, as I have observed to you elsewhere, you published the IP addresses I use.

You may be inflating the seriousness of SOPA and PIPA simply because you don’t want to pay staff to automate search for copyright violation. Nothing in your Randroid based philosophy or personal behavior can convince me you are a revolutionary, working for the good of humanity. It is likely that most bloggers will be unaffected by SOPA and PIPA by way of the maxim, de minimis non curat lex: the law does not concern itself with trivia.

But not only did you create a risk of a cascading network failure as did our friends the bankers in 2008 with their toxic securities, monkeying around in an unexpected fashion with feature so widely used as to be an expected resource, you also created a precedent for Google, YouTube, Facebook, WordPress, and other widely used tools, which may be used by automated shells and scripts, to also pull this stunt.

Recall if you will that the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986 was caused by technicians making changes to and “testing” a system they did not fully understand.

I cannot help but remember the female and humanistic supervisor to whom I reported when at Princeton who strongly discouraged her programmers to make cute or dramatic changes to software facilities because even within the Princeton community there was no way of knowing whether distributed computers would use centralized computer resources and in what way.

As opposed to this dreary male culture of ersatz political protest, I should say.

Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111)