Ulalume
This Thing Has No Heart
Statue of Lady Diana, Kensington Palace, England, unveiled 1 July, 2021 Move over, Robert Jacobsen: the title of Worst Sculptor in the World now passes to Ian Rank-Broadley, whose repulsive statue of Diana Spencer is scaring people. Stiff, awkward, vapid, completely lustreless, uncomfortably masculine and soapy in texture, the hulking, virtually generic Princess stands, surrounded by three kiddies, one lurking behind her recalling the artful dodger. She is wearing something from a discount couturière and has the casual indifference of smooth bronze. It is kitsch enough to be by Jeff Koons. Great sculpture entails inserting heart into stone or metal:…
Continue Reading →The Covid-19 Hall of Shame
911 deaths in Australia from (with?) Covid, in 18 months. 169,301 registered and received deaths in Australia in 2019 (pre-Covid). Are we missing something here? Like a sense of proportion? Pardon our manners, but here we must quote ourselves : “In this plague year…we saw Australians banned from returning to their own country; banned from leaving it; banned from crossing state lines, in apparent/arguable breach of section 92 of the Constitution; locked in their homes unless adjudged by a bureaucrat as ‘essential workers’; arrested on beaches, golf courses, parks (and in the case of one pregnant woman in Victoria, handcuffed…
Continue Reading →Four
In our material universe, science finds four categories of sex in Homo Sapiens: Old Traditional # 1 Who produce ovum (“Woman”) Old Traditional # 2 Who produce sperm (“Man”) Small Sliver (# 3) With gender dysphoria or intersex anatomy (who deserve love, compassion, understanding, and perhaps, especially if given high office in the Biden Administration, treatment) Burgeoning New Category (# 4) “Fraudsters” If I can’t win a medal in my shotput division, I may do better turning out on the track in a skirt. Not bright enough to gain admission to Law School? If I reimagine myself as a disabled…
Continue Reading →What
(with apologies to Rudyard Kipling) What can you keep when everyone around you Is hysterical and blaming all on you, “What the dickens,” is the way they sound you Out, and stipulate the new taboo; What the devil is the endless queuing, The waiting by the door we see, surprised, What went down when everyone was booing, When emerged one, no longer disguised: — What you dream you are is often vaster; Than the actual world…
Continue Reading →American Unease
September 2020: With a Presidential election a mere 2 months away, we have thought about the unrest in that country, an admixture of BLM protest, concerted (possibly organized) opposition to Donald Trump, and a spontaneous reaction against the prevailing authority, a left-wing version of the alt/general-right correction of 2016. The disruption and disorder is a weird echo of 1968, where in a different and more difficult period, voters chose order over chaos. In the wake of Martin Luther King‘s assassination in that year, Robert Kennedy’s plea for calm seems apposite now (see below). We fear this November, or next January, might…
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