More to feed the fireplace fire

One of the articles I collected on the attempted establishment of an objective system when valuing art: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/01/arts/ruling-prevents-removal-of-warehouse-sculpture.html?scp=1&sq=judge%20prevents%20removal%20of%20warehouse%20sculpture&st=cse
Also January 27: Jane Alexander testifying for a "legitimate Federal role in the Arts".
From May 21, 1996
GAY RIGHTS LAWS CAN'T BE BANNED, HIGH COURT RULES
In a significant victory for gay rights, the Supreme Court today struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that not only nullified existing civil rights protections for homosexuals in the state but also barred the passage of new anti-discrimination laws.

"A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in a forceful opinion for a 6-to-3 majority. He said the Colorado provision, known as Amendment 2, had placed the state's homosexuals "in a solitary class," singling them out in violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee for a legal disability so sweeping as to be inexplicable on any basis other than "animus."

It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort," Justice Kennedy said in an opinion joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. [Excerpts, page A20.]

Justice Antonin Scalia filed an equally forceful dissent, accusing the majority of taking sides in "the culture wars" through "an act not of judicial judgment but of political will." The process by which Colorado's voters adopted Amendment 2, by 53 percent to 47 percent in 1992, was the "most democratic of procedures," Justice Scalia said.

September 4, 2005

Reviews of bios on Edmund Wilson, Henry Ford, Matisse

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04TOIBIN.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=american%20critic%20colm%20toibin&st=cse

and:

"Spurling reached the end of Volume 1 with a transcendent insight: his ''paintings of light and color . . . seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries. . . . He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a 20th-century art that would draw its vitality essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04HOWARDL.html?scp=1&sq=matisse%20the%20master%20richard%20howard&st=cse

Reducing the fire hazard further

Mostly from the NYT:
On Bingo:

BINGO goes back to 1530, descended from an Italian game called Lo Givoco del Lotto D’Italia. A pitchman encountered a version in Germany and sensed its possibilities, bringing it to America in the 1920s as a carnival game. It was called Beano, since players marked their cards with beans. Winners shouted, “Beano!”

A struggling toy salesman from New York named Edwin S. Lowe saw the game at a carnival near Atlanta in 1929. Back home, he tested it on friends, and one winner mistakenly called out, “Bingo!” rather than “Beano!” He liked what he heard.

It was a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who recognized the game’s power to help his ailing church. Trouble was, there were just 24 unique cards at the time, so too many people were winning. The priest pressed upon Mr. Lowe the need for vaster possibilities of losing. Mr. Lowe enlisted a Columbia math professor named Carl Leffler, who configured more than 6,000 different bingo cards.

All those combinations took a mighty toll. He is said to have gone mad.

On Martin Amis:

A.S. Byatt accused Amis of "folie de grandeur" for demanding $794,000 for "The Information", firing his agent and switching publishers. "I always earn out my advances and I don't see why I should subsidize his greed simply because he has a divorce to pay for and just had all his teeth redone"

On judicial reasonable doubt:

"Jon O. Newman, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a November article wrote that a curious feature of a judge's instructions about reasonable doubt is that trial courts are reluctant to explain it to juries.
"I find it unsettling that we are using a formulation that we believe will become less clear the more we explain it."

On the favorite film villain, the Government:
"There have been so many movies with such a consistent theme that I'm afraid they're also shaping the views of society," Mr. Thompson said. "That's not to say that government shouldn't be fair game along with everything else. But can you think of a movie in the last 10 years that has shown the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in a positive light?"

RONALD BROWNSTEIN, AUTHOR of the 1991 book "The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection," is critical of that scene, on the grounds that it unduly simplifies the problems of governing. "It symbolizes what's wrong with all of these movies and so much of our politics as well," he said. "They perpetuate the idea that the problem in the country is self-centered or careerist leadership rather than the structural disparity between what we want and what we are willing to sacrifice for what we want."

Such plots, which pit a well-meaning outsider against a vastly corrupt political system, have another effect. They let audiences cheer for the hero while realizing the fleetingness of the victory: if people are told that the root of government is rotten, then even a good branch can't survive for long.

On Tony Alamo:

Born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin mo.; married Susan Lipowitz in 1966 (his 3rd of 6 wives). The cult designed and manufactured jeweled jackets. Susan died in 1982. Alamo stated she would be resurrected and for six months he had her body on display "while their followers prayed". After 16 years, her body was given to her family.

On July 28, 2009, shortly after his conviction, Tony Alamo again made headlines by calling himself "just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the gospel." On October 22, 2008, Alamo's former followers testified in court during a preliminary hearing that Alamo had practiced polygamy and had taken an eight-year-old girl as a wife. He was sentenced to 175 years in prison on November 13, 2009.

On Leo Strauss:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/weekinreview/the-nation-a-very-unlikely-villain-or-hero.html

From the November 13, 1994 Book Review, letters on the Bell Curve controversy and a terrific article on Voltaire by Professor Larry Wolff:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/13/books/if-were-younger-would-make-myself-russian-voltaire-s-encounter-with-czars.html

Pope JP2's 1995 letter against ethical relativism which hints at moral ambiguities inherent in Democracy

James Atlas' article on the conservative movement:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-counter-counterculture.html?scp=3&sq=the%20counter%20counterculture&st=cse

February 19, 1995's reviews of a book on teaching and race:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/are-white-schools-bad-for-black-children.html?scp=1&sq=kwanzaa%20and%20me&st=cse

and a review of Gert Himmelfarb's book on Morals:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/why-can-t-we-behave.html?scp=1&sq=the%20de-moralization%20of%20society%20himmelfarb&st=cse

And a review of the Joseph Frank Dostoevsky bio, The Miraculous Years.

and Clinton's 1995 State of the Union Address

Lambert Orme nee Firbank

From Harold Nicolson:

His sitting room was exquisitely decorated.

When I think of that room, I am again convinced there

was something cabotin about Lambert Orme:

people at the age of twenty should not have rooms like that.

He had painted it shiny black....

I did not see him again for some five years. He

went round the world, and sent me a postcard from

Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the

beauty of American cities, and it was from them that

he first learnt to see life as a system of

correlated planes. It was several years, however, be-

fore his very real and original talent for association

was finally able to cast the slough of symbolism.

When I next met him he was still intensively con-

cerned with the relation between things and himself:

it was only in his final period that he became

predominantly interested in the relation of things

towards each other. His talent, which though singu-

larly receptive was not very muscular, had failed to

attract any interesting synthesis from the confront-

ation of the universe with his own twitching heart:

He had tried, and failed, to interpret con-

scions cognition by a single simple emotion. But,

in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying

original analysis, implicit rather than expressed of the

diversity and interrelation of external phe-

nomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subcon

cious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities.

The conception of life as a repetition of self-con-

lined and finite entities can be integrated only

by the pressure of a compelling imagination: Lambert's

imagination though mobile was not compelling- I

suspect indeed that less power is required to disinte-

grate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms for-

tuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a

tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of

our convention. His later poetry succeeded because

of its influence to this unapparent reality, I am now

assured that some of his later poems were very re-

spectable.

Kenneth Clark on William Blake

Personal revelation also has an insidious effect on illustration. Clark on the appalling visions of William Blake.

"Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a

visionary. It is a vague term. Artists, even the most realistic, start

from some kind of vision – that is what leads them to select what they

need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

But with Blake the word vision has a more precise meaning. He did not draw from

nature because, as he said repeatedly, his visions were clearer and

more vivid than his optical perception of the world around him. He

saw these visions as a child; saw God put his head in at the window,

saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree at Peckham Rye. There is

nothing extraordinary in this; many imaginative children have

similar experiences. What is exceptional is that Blake kept these

intense powers of visualisation after the age of puberty. Exceptional,

but not incredible, because this can be paralleled in other forms of

mental activity. Some people have the gift of total recall and others

can renumber accurately whole pages of figures; physiologically

these endowments seem to me quite as hard to explain as the accurate

visualisation of images.

“What was the nature of Blake's visions? His accounts of them sug-

gest that, although obviously closely related, they were of several

different kinds. The first was simply his poetic faculty that led him

to see a natural event as something supernatural. 'It will be ques-

taoned', he says in his Descriptive Catalogue, 'when the sun rises do

you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea – Oh no, no,

1 see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy?

holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty”. The seventeenth-century

poets, Traherne or Vaughan, might have said the same. The second

was when an analogy became so strong in his mind that an ordinary

experience was transformed: 'With my inward eye 'tis an old man

grey. To my outward a thistle across the way.' These lines show

that Blake was capable of switching from one kind of vision to another

out of course Blake's pictures in the fire' are far more precise than

ours.

This leads us to visions of rather a different order which seem to

have involved an element of hallucination. They are described in

detail by Varley and Linell, in whose presence Blake drew a number

of what are known as 'visionary heads' One must remember

that Varley was an early spiritualist and he encouraged Blake to

draw these heads in the middle of the night and in an atmosphere

rather like that of a mediumistic séance. He was requested to draw

the likeness of William Wallace, says Linell, 'the eyes of Blake

sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace,” he exclaimed,

“I see him now, there, there, how noble he looks – reach me my

things.”Having drawn for some time with the same ease of hand

and steadiness of eye as if a living sitter had been before him, Blake

said: 'I cannot finish him, Edward the First has stepped in between

him and me.'

There was an element of clairvoyance in his work, but the

visions that make his best work unforgettable were somewhere

between the poetic analogy of the rising sun and the literal reality of

the heads.