POST-MODERN ENGLISH USAGE

At the Watermark Quorum they call it "stepping on vapors." That's when the edifice of one's "fictional self" serves as a guiding principle for a misdirected life.

 Or what my Cobble Hill neighbor Carmine might call "horseshit."

The streets of Brooklyn are no longer awash in Saddlebreds and Mustangs but Carmine still has an unerring ear for all manner of dissimulating feculence. I wonder what he'd make of the Watermark Quorum.

I've been taking courses at The Quorum for about a year now, ever since my beautiful and exotic girlfriend Noga assumed the distinguished position of girlfriend emeritus. She told me to "show some character," "grow up," that she was not my "mommy" and that I had - and this was the unkindest cut of all - "the aesthetic discernment of a postman." (I suppose in her native Israel, mailmen aren't known for their erudition or sophistication).

My friend Serge told me about the Quorum and how it changed his life so with half an open mind I decided to give it a go.

The whole thing is set up so that you are practically shamed into facing your vulnerabilities. You meet in small groups led by "team leaders" who "coach" you into small epiphanies that they encouragingly call "breakthroughs."

For example, when I admitted to my group that despite the admonitions of my dental hygienist I neglected to floss my teeth, they looked at me so sympathetically that I welled up with tears. When I came back the following week I joyfully announced that after facing all of my inhibiting fears I had successfully (though perhaps not thoroughly) flossed 5 of the previous 7 days.

The event was greeted as a dramatic success and indeed I felt flush with a sense of palpable accomplishment! 

The most useful lesson I learned from the Quorum was to avoid what they call "feckless phrasings." (Alliteration is to self-help what photosynthesis is to plants). A feckless phrase is any idiomatic construction that contains irony, lyrical ambiguity, rhetorical flourish, double entendre, ornamental description, metrical cadences, extraneous adjectives or anything else that is not plainly transactional or utilitarian. The only possible exceptions would be cozy, homespun aphorisms and a limited number of uncomplicated similes, a list of which can be found on the Quorum's sensibly designed website.

I can't tell you how much this has helped my critical essays which are now featured semi-regularly in the Quorum's quarterly newsletter Extraordinary News for an Exceptional Life. 

 I sure hope Noga is reading this.

DRAWING ... AGAIN

THE DIMMER DOPPELGANGER

Domingo Sabatinos

I often wonder what it must be like to see the world through the eyes of Domingo Sabatinos.

Here is a writer like no other.

At home in exile, dissolute yet devout, Sabatinos has charmed close readers of experimental fiction for years. Heir to Borges and Cortázar, he resembles them only in his ferocious originality and his deep commitment to Turgenev.

He often writes about love but never from the point of view of advocacy. To Sabatinos, love is an unfortunate affliction, something of a handicap like a stutter or a limp. He's won nearly every conceivable literary prize save for the Nobel, though he's been a front running candidate for years.

I met him in Cannes where a film adaptation of his short story Berel the Clown was screened. He was accompanied by an impressive bevy of young Eastern European starlets including Anca Papanasi and Maldina Amandine. 

There's something suspicious about his demeanor. Whenever he's approached by a journalist or a fan he reaches for his coat pocket with a nervous, jolting gesture as if he were a bouncer or a poorly trained policeman. It's said that he carries a 247 Beretta though I know of no one who has actually seen it. This uncertainty only adds to the mystique but I hear that militant gun advocates are quickly losing patience with what they see as a childish hoax. 
 
He's never been married though he's been linked to several young American poets. The fact that he allows himself to be photographed while in the company of beautiful actresses but is never seen in public with a woman of letters is supposed to somehow attest to his seriousness.

I'd love to get to know him better but with his uncanny resemblance to the Los Angeles artist David Schoffman, I feel that there's almost no need to. 

Strong physical resemblances between unrelated people are an occult reflection in an unsettling physiognomic lottery. At this point, to pursue a relationship with the real Sabatinos might seem like an unnecessary defection. 

I suppose I'm stuck with the dimmer doppelgänger. 

PROGRESS (OR PERISH)

While sincerity is the highest form of intellectual treachery, when it comes the ragtag denizens of the unregulated art world the unleveling impact of legitimate insight rarely goes unpunished. The sanctions inflicted upon the thoughtful and the discerning can be draconian or worse. 

 

Nobody likes a smartypants.

 

Aloïs Gerstedes had outlived his critics. As a young refugee fleeing the Nazis, Gerstedes arrived in the United States during an American golden age of ideas. At Columbia University his professors included Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro and Doris Killhany.

 

As an outspoken progressive he was called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) where he steadfastly refused to cooperate. As a consequence Gerstedes found it nearly impossible to pursue his academic work and ended up teaching art history in a public high school in Queens. (Yes, they used to teach art history in public high schools!)

 

Mr. Gerstedes was my teacher. 

 

Having survived both Hitler and Senator Joseph McCarthy the New York State Department of Education's 1983 Pedagogy and Advanced Training Standards (PATS) were not about to defeat the brilliant and stubborn Gerstedes.

 

Imagine, after years of soaring lectures on Huzinga, Burckhardt, Berenson and Warbug, field trips to downtown Manhattan to visit the studios of some his artist friends (yes! I met Donald Judd!) and bringing into the classroom distinguished guest speakers like Clement Greenberg and Denny Albatos, Mr. Gerstedes was asked to adjust his curriculum in order to accommodate the (since discredited) "Pleager and Roth Cognitive and Analytical Skill Building Rubric." 

 

Suddenly Mr. Gerstedes was no longer allowed to refer to "The Waning of the Middle Ages" because it was deemed "overly assertive, biased and complex." Professionals visiting his classrooms had to be properly vetted and were only allowed to speak if they received PATS certified training. Art studios were no longer deemed as "appropriate" field trips since the educational value of contemporary art was considered questionable.

 

Mr. Gerstedes quit - or was fired, depending on the telling - and moved to his beloved Tuscany to retire among the tinted hills and scented vines. While he spent his final years writing and painting lovely scenic watercolors New York State rescinded PATS and replaced it with the national standards of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and now The Common Core. The public schools have gutted most of its arts programs and those that remain are mired in the bureaucratic jargon of the Industrial/Educational Complex.

 

But that's okay. Museum attendance is at record levels, especially among school children who are now encouraged to look at all manner of works of art and to talk thoughtfully about their feelings.  

 

 

THE RANCOROUS POLITICS OF MEDIOCRITY

Harps of Heaven editor in chief Dahlia Danton

Like hysteria and influenza, disgruntlement among scribes is contagious. When the stakes are truly inconsequential tempers tend to flare like bottle rockets. As a fair weather contributor to The Harps of Heaven, that petulant west coast arts and culture journal that reads more like an elevated Page Six than a serious intellectual document, I have been long witness to the slow boil of insurrection disrupting the ion ratio of their editorial office.   

Maybe it was inspired by the implosion of The New Republic or merely the consequence of too many hot toddies at the Christmas party, suffice it to say, there's big trouble beneath the palms.

Rivals Schoffman and Macfadyen in a rare moment of détente

The long standing enmity between Los Angeles painter David Schoffman and Maine's literary majordomo Nim Macfadyen is well known. A minor dispute that has distilled over the years into a fine fermented hatred has turned editor Dahlia Danton into the Ban Ki-moon of the art world. Few seem to understand the genesis of their mutual aversion but I've heard from one insider that it has something to do with furniture.

And as if that's not bad enough, at a recent meeting with their board of directors (which includes such luminaries from the techie world like Arvinda Mataba of SmartSocks, Kim Takiwati from MilkMilk.com and PlantIt's CFO Stephanie Shorenburg), it was decided to shift the focus of the journal away from hard arts journalism and more toward a dinner-theater potpourri of idle gossip, celebrity parenting advice and self-help book reviews. 

If the rumors turn out to be true Harps stalwarts like Sophia Lagrimar, Clement Digby, Orestia Shestov and Currado Malaspina have all resigned in protest. Macfadyen, whose unhealthy fascination with his divinely demanding editor is legend has decided, against all logic, to remain loyal. 

Also clinging to the hull of this sinking junk
is the flailing David Schoffman. 

Why?

Who knows ...

  

THE PEN IS MEEKER THAN THE SWORD AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE

Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson famously issued the naive injunction stating that "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" but that was in an age before Gawker.

Today it is no great distinction to be hacked, exposed, appropriated, impersonated, outed, eavesdropped, photobombed, tagged or retweeted. The most egregious sin of the 21st century is to be deemed so inconsequential as to be ignored.

We trade these days in "clicks' and without a lot of them you might as well retreat to your rotary phone and your typewriter.

Or even worse, your pen.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable subject of my embarrassing ignorance.

Am I the last art critic to have written about the recently published Letters of Currado Malaspina Volume I 1970 - 1985? Damn! I didn't know that the guy even wrote letters! Who the hell writes letters anyway?!

Well, while I'm working on writing my review (the book is 900 hefty pages with footnotes) I'll have to leave you with this classic video (though I hadn't seen it myself until yesterday!)

WHAT A TURKEY!

My cousin Tanya has about 2000 followers on Twitter.

 

 

I know that's not terribly impressive but to me it seems incredible. You see, when we were kids, my parents used to bribe me in order to get me to play with her. She always had this wonderful talent for alienating people.

It's not that she was ugly (though she was far from pretty - I think the proper term of art back then was that she was 'plain'). And she wasn't especially mean or at least she wasn't any meaner than the rest of us. I think she just gave off this invisible disagreeable indiscernible aura that was nonetheless unmistakably palpably and annoyingly bad.

 

Now that she's in her twenty's and is over-educated and under-employed and since she never fully outgrew her ability to repel the people around her she has embraced social media with grateful and ravenous dedication. 

Though (or because) her observations, pensées and
aperçus are dull and predictable and are rarely about anything even remotely approaching consequence she manages to attract loyal devotées who eagerly await her every quip.

She started working out recently (did I mention that she was always somewhat dumpy) and I have to say that after shedding 30 extraneous pounds she does look a lot more fetching, at least from behind.

 

With her new body has come a new wardrobe and her double-jointed dexterity with her cell phone has enabled her to approach the tricky art of the postable selfie with mastery and ingenuity.

 

 

But honestly -

 

My parents still have to bribe me to join her and her family for Thanksgiving.