Psalm 146

 

Hallelujah! Praise the LORD, O my soul! * 

I will praise the LORD as long as I live; 

I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. 

Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, * 

for there is no help in them. 

When they breathe their last, they return to earth, * 

and in that day their thoughts perish. 

Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help!* 

whose hope is in the LORD their God; 

Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; * 

who keeps his promise for ever; 

Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, * 

and food to those who hunger. 

The LORD sets the prisoners free; 

the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; * 

the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; 

The LORD loves the righteous; the LORD cares for the stranger; * 

he sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked. 

The LORD shall reign for ever, * 

your God, O Zion, throughout all generations. 

Hallelujah!

Pietro Cavallini, surviving fragment of The Last Judgement in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome, 

13th century

James Ensor

James Ensor, The Skeleton Artist in His Studio, 1896

 

R. Cumb

 

Polychrome Sunday

 

Colorado Wildflowers

Brush Fire in New York.

 We've been in a drought for a couple of months, and now we're having a brush fire in Prospect Park. 
It started last night is now officially contained.  The whole city is now full of smoke.

Photo from the FDNY of the fire

My photos of the smoke in the city.

The Frankfurt Synagogue

 

Max Beckmann, The Frankfurt Synagogue at Night, 1919

my photo from 2016

The Börneplatz Synagogue in Frankfurt shortly after it was completed.

Destruction of the Börneplatz Synagogue, November 1938, Kristallnacht.

Reruns

 Ethno-nationalism, social Darwinism, and even a return of antisemitism, the 21st Century so far looks a lot like a remake of the 19th Century.  The only real difference is a lot of technologically empowered bad faith and fakery in the service of the same old bigotry and superstition.

Violet Saturday

Purple Pansies.
 

Goya, The Sleeping Colossus

 

Updates and Some Big Changes About to Happen.

My soon to be empty studio on October 2.

It's been about 2 years since I posted much on this blog.  A lot has happened and a lot is about to happen.

I am retiring from Bronx Community College next year.  I will go on partial leave next semester.  I will teach a single online course.  By August of 2025, I will be officially retired.  I will likely do some part time adult teaching to supplement retirement income, but basically my academic career will be over.  I will be on full Social Security and Medicare plus my pension by September 2025.  I should be in a much better position to meet the inevitable health issues that are bound to come up in coming years than I would be if I continued working full time.

Michael and I will be leaving New York.  We are both broke and can no longer afford to live here.  I can't afford the studio anymore and we both can't afford our apartment.  So, Michael's parents have offered to house us for the duration in Aurora, Colorado next door to Denver.  It's a big suburban house where we can have a large basement room that's almost as big as our apartment in New York.  We will be leaving sometime in the middle of February.  I've started closing my studio.  I plan to take some of my paintings and painting equipment with me and leave the rest in storage in New York.  We will not be taking any furniture with us to Colorado.  I plan to sell my library before we leave, so only a minimal amount of books will go with us.

We are both devastated.  Michael hasn't made any money in more than a year.   Since 2019, Michael worked in real estate in New York.  Before the Pandemic he was doing quite well with rentals in our immediate neighborhood in Brooklyn.  Then everything changed profoundly with covid. The real estate market for anything below top of the line luxury housing in New York is mostly dead, and little is being built fast enough for down market sales and rentals.  My income is too small to support us both here in the city.  We both feel like we are being evicted.  Michael feels it even more deeply since he is a New York native. Michael has continuing health issues that are only getting worse.  My health isn't ideal, but I can still walk and talk and function pretty well.
We are continuing to make plans with his parents and with friends for this long distance move.  It looks like Michael will wrangle the cats on a plane and I will later join him in Colorado with a friend driving a moving van.

Times for us right now are very dark and our prospects are not rosy.  However, there are far worse places to land than Colorado.  Michael has been through the state by train a couple of times, but has never spent any time in it.  I'm a Texas native, and like so many Texans we spent Texas summers in Colorado.  I'm quite familiar with the state, but I haven't spent time there myself in about 50 years.  I expect that it has changed drastically since then.  Still, I'm glad to be going there to make a new start.  I hope Michael will be happy there too.  I think we are also fortunate to be taken in by people who know us and love us.  

I hope we can turn this disaster into a new start and a whole new life for the both of us.

 

Social Darwinists.

 People who think they've won the survival lottery, that they are absolved from misfortune and sudden death.  It's other people and their children who have to do all the dying.

Friday Blue

 

Fringed Gentian

Bitter?

 

R. Crumb

 

Dear Fellow Americans,

 You sold your birthright for a mess of pottage, and you sold mine too.

Thanks for nothing.

Thursday Green

A Luna Moth.

 

Carl Gustav Carus

Studio in Moonlight, 1826

 

Light.

 Time to part the coming dark no matter how tiny the light.

Scapegoating

 Scapegoating people, blaming a group of people for all your problems and beating them up is so much easier and more emotionally satisfying than taking responsibility and doing the difficult work of repair and reform.  I expect that I will see a lot of that over the coming years, and perhaps to find myself among the scapegoated.  Gays are almost as popular a target with bigoted paranoids as Jews and Blacks.  
There will likely be those who voted for and support the new regime who will find themselves singled out and targeted.  Dictators can change their minds over who their friends are.  Just ask Joe Stalin.

U.S.A. R.I.P.

 As far as I'm concerned the United States of America is dead, or it will be dead at high noon on January 20, 2025.  That 248 year long project that began with the bold declaration that all people are created equal and have certain unalienable rights as a birthright, that ended slavery in bloodshed, that expanded the franchise to labor, to women, to African Americans, and to other minorities, that expanded rights for citizens is now over.  A new country will begin in its place next year, an unfamiliar country that we've never lived in before, a country where people are always careful what they say in public and in print, where people report and betray neighbors, friends, and family.  We will have a new country with new and novel laws prohibiting "slander of the state," "insulting the army," and such like that.  People will be arrested and tried for blasphemy and maybe even apostasy in this new state.

A new country ruled by temperamental thin-skinned tyrant surrounded by sycophants, a new country ruled by racists, fanatics, cynical opportunists, and grifters.

I doubt I will live to see the resumption of that original project of expanding democracy.  Perhaps a future generation will take it up again.

Time to Bring Back this Blog.

A Klan rally in a church in Oregon in the 1920s.

 The future is dead and the present will be unbearable.  The United States voted to end itself today.  It looks like Facebook will no longer be a safe or reliable place to share thoughts, so it's back to Blogger.  Away from the conditional mercies of Zuckerberg and into the uncertain hands of Google.  I feel a little safer here because few people read Blogger anymore.  

And so, here we go into the abyss.