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Hey, I'd be glad to take responsibility for this. Mark At 10:24 PM 3/1/2005, you wrote: >SEVEN MEDITATIONS ON AESTHETICS >(apologies to Mark Weiss, whose fault this isn't) > >1. Gene Smith, seeking tears from his viewers via the perfect image, >feeds mercury-laden fish to the children of Minamata, a village the >proverbial stone's throw from the more famous city of Nagasaki. His >strategy works: in 1985, at a retrospective of his work at the >Philadelphia Museum of Art, visitors look at the great Pieta, "Tomoko >in her bath," and weep unashamedly. But this does Smith no good, >since he had, in addition to his quest for the Great Picture, the >worst thing an artist can have, a conscience, and Chissu Chemical >Company goons beat him into blindness. > >2. Greyhounds are the most aesthetically pleasing dogs on earth, and >are its second fastest animal, able to attain 45 miles per hour in >three strides. However, racing for money is not their idea since they >don't get any of it. Their handlers beat and starve them. They >collide with one another and break bones during races. At the end of >their racing careers--normally at 3 years of age--they are shot >because a bullet is cost-effective, costing only 36 cents; gassing >them en masse would be more expensive. They do not always die at once >and are buried alive. Remarkably, greyhounds are moral creatures with >the forgiveness of St. Maria Goretti: the survivors who live to be >adopted as housepets do not carry resentments and give love >unconditionally to their new humans. > >3. Hitler greatly admired the German heldentenor Max Lorenz. He was >dismayed to learn that Lorenz, who had fled to England, was both a >homosexual and a Jew. Lauritz Melchior, another giant of the age, >wasn't a Jew, but could have starred in Priscilla Queen of the Desert. > >4. As long as we're talking about Frederick Law Olmstead, who has a >street named for him in the Bronx, not in Manhattan, what were the >working conditions for the men who landscaped, tree-planted, laid >marble and paving blocks in Central Park? For that matter, what was >the original Central Park Zoo like? That's rhetorical: I know the >answer to that question because I am old enough to remember it. Vide >supra notes on greyhounds but read "Siberian Tiger." The only Gates >there were iron bars. > >5. Stalin perfectly melded art and politics, for he fancied himself an >music and literary critic. "Fancied," nothing. When you can make >Shostakovitch and Prokofiev shit their pants, when you can dispatch >Mandelstam to some Christ-awful gulag, you are not fancied, you have >become God. > >6. Eliot Weinberger writes of Cambodia that its full horror has a >name: Kampuchea, and that the name itself, Kampuchea, sums up all one >needs to know. A land conceived by Pol Pot as a work of agrarian >socialist art, a world without art, a land in which the price of art, >literacy, science, medicine, and breathing is starvation, torture, and >death. > >7. Lucky Seven. All the rest is trivia. > >KTW/3-1-05 > >-- >--------------- >Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com > If you want patience, go to medical school.