The Freudian Eye
While the practice of psychoanalysis is all but embalmed and placed in its coffin, this year has been nothing if not Freudian. Lucian Freud died last July, at the age of 88, on a two-week respite from painting the unfinished Portrait of the Hound. Freud knew his body — hawk-like and sinuously muscular up until and into his crepuscular years — was falling away, beginning to look like the people he painted. He left the legs of the dog unpainted, focusing on the faces of the two creatures. He died, in that hoary old cliché, doing what he loved. He was animated and maintained, up until the end — “the work is everything.”
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While the practice of psychoanalysis is all but embalmed and placed in its coffin, this year has been nothing if not Freudian. Lucian Freud died last July, at the age of 88, on a two-week respite from painting the unfinished Portrait of the Hound. Freud knew his body — hawk-like and sinuously muscular up until and into his crepuscular years — was falling away, beginning to look like the people he painted. He left the legs of the dog unpainted, focusing on the faces of the two creatures. He died, in that hoary old cliché, doing what he loved. He was animated and maintained, up until the end — “the work is everything.”
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More Subtle, More Right? — The Passion of Bradley Manning
Daniel Ellsberg may not have been the American beau idéal, but he came pretty close. Ellsberg served as an infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with real battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a held gig as a defense analyst for the Cold War giant, RAND. In short, Ellsberg was a poster-child of our cherished meritocracy, righteously flung far into the empyrean of the military industrial complex.
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Daniel Ellsberg may not have been the American beau idéal, but he came pretty close. Ellsberg served as an infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with real battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a held gig as a defense analyst for the Cold War giant, RAND. In short, Ellsberg was a poster-child of our cherished meritocracy, righteously flung far into the empyrean of the military industrial complex.
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Learning to Love the Bomb: On Aviation, Futurism and Fascism
The potential for humans to take to the skies, before it became a stable and accepted means of travel, had connotations of blasphemy. There are reasons the sky is above: it is a reminder to humans that they should keep their humility tethered close by, if nothing else than to retain their place as man in God’s Kingdom. Lest we forget that God, in Genesis, after all, gave Man dominion over the earth and all its multitudes (not the heavens) and in any case, Daedalus’ loss… a punishment that could be wished upon no-one. As Hilaire Belloc, his divine cudgel never far from hand, warned...
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The potential for humans to take to the skies, before it became a stable and accepted means of travel, had connotations of blasphemy. There are reasons the sky is above: it is a reminder to humans that they should keep their humility tethered close by, if nothing else than to retain their place as man in God’s Kingdom. Lest we forget that God, in Genesis, after all, gave Man dominion over the earth and all its multitudes (not the heavens) and in any case, Daedalus’ loss… a punishment that could be wished upon no-one. As Hilaire Belloc, his divine cudgel never far from hand, warned...
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American Wilderness - Gary Winogrand Retrospective Review
As I rushed through Gary Winogrand’s byzantine retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the second time, I wondered if my current way of viewing was not actually the best way of engaging the show. The first time, I went slow, I was deliberate and studious: noting and cataloguing as many of (what I believed to be) the details, patterns, and rhythms of the show as I could, as if they were portents to some future understanding, only accessibly after a latter period monkish and solitary reflection...
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As I rushed through Gary Winogrand’s byzantine retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the second time, I wondered if my current way of viewing was not actually the best way of engaging the show. The first time, I went slow, I was deliberate and studious: noting and cataloguing as many of (what I believed to be) the details, patterns, and rhythms of the show as I could, as if they were portents to some future understanding, only accessibly after a latter period monkish and solitary reflection...
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