Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Watches used to be very common items. In a gathering of 10 people, it was quite likely that 5 or more of them would be wearing one. I never got consistently into the habit, but I have owned a few. But, when I moved to Prague, after a couple of days of walking around the city, I thought ‘there is absolutely no need to own a watch here. Everywhere you go, you are within sight of a clock. On a tower of a major building, at a tram stop or major intersection, visible from quite long distances and most of them working, and accurate.’
This evening, on my way to a poetry reading and suspecting I might be a little late, and being too lazy to fish my phone out of my bag, I cast my eye about me (I was coming out the back of Quadrio, by the moving metallic statue of Kafka) for a clock, and did not see one. This struck me as curious. After a few blocks it struck me as a revelation. We have come full circle. Now, everybody has a phone with them at all times and there is no need for clocks or wristwatches (I was looking around at the poetry reading – of approximately 30 people there, I only saw two wearing watches, and I suspect it was more a fashion accessory than a necessary tool) I did eventually see a clock, in Charles Square, between the trees, and one or two more as the night wore on, but it’s not like before. When the need is gone, the means tends to disappear.
This has probably been true for some time, but I just noticed it tonight.

I got my second vaccination today, it all went very smoothly, no apparent side effects (touching wood), and then on the way home I got on the tram and didn’t even notice until I was about to get off that I’d totally forgotten to mask up. I coughed a bit, and noticed a couple of people give me nasty looks, and realized that my face was butt naked. I think as this thing eases up a bit, that will cause it to ease up a bit more.
I’ve got a poetry reading tomorrow, and have very little written and ready to go. I’ve got a long one percolating in my head and thought it would be ready for tomorrow, but it won’t, unless I get a suddeen and dramatic burst of inspiration between now and then. The reading will be outdoors, which maybe they’re doing because of Covid but in the summertime it’s nicer anyway. Poetry goes very well together with being able to look up at the stars, and feel the breeze, and breathe the fresh air.
I doubt very much if anybody will be wearing masks, but I’m not too worried about that now. I’ve had my second shot.

I don’t think enough is being made of Joe Biden’s speech at the G7 conference, where he said Libya when he meant Syria, because Syria is an issue now and nobody’s even talking about Libya, and he repeated the mistake 3 times. It reminded me of the time George Stephanopoulos was interviewing someone, I believe it was during the Bush administration (the retarded one), and the guy kept saying Tibet when he was pointing to Nepal on a map and he did it more than once and George, well, he never called the guy on it and I will never be sure if he was so uninformed as a journalist that he didn’t know the difference either, or if he was just covering for the incompetent Bush appointee.
Also during that speech, Joe was speaking extremely slowly, and slurring his words. He is exactly as we (Bernie supporters) told you (Biden supporters) he would be.
But, it doesn’t matter any more. If Dan Quayle were to misspell potato today, everyone would just say “Well, Democrats misspell words, too” and others would say “Who cares about spelling?,” because they are of that segment of the population that apparently doesn’t.
Our standards have become too low. And, any time Biden is criticized, you get “But Trump was worse!” Well, not by that much. Not by enough.
I am certain that the other G7 leaders (with the possible exception of Boris Johnson) were listening to Biden’s speech, and I’m sure they noticed the gaffe, and the slow, slurred, Abe Simpsonesqueness of the speech, being as they are not deaf, or stupid. They probably won’t say anything publicly, that wouldn’t be polite. But they noticed it, and will take that into consideration at all future talks.

I have a lot of artists among my Facebook friends, in my cybercommunity so to speak, and so of course they often post paintings, drawings, photographs, etc…, sometimes their own and sometimes somebody else’s, so it was nothing out of the ordinary when someone posted a lovely ‘Van Gogh’ this morning, which inspired many thoughts, but maybe not the ones intended, because that’s not how the inspiration of thoughts always, or even usually, works.
It is a lovely painting, and very typical of Van Gogh’s work, called “The Red Tree House”, it evokes a scene at the edge of a village, a row of neat houses with gardens behind the wall, and one tree which was casting its shadow on the wall of a house, making it a temporary work of art in itself.
But, as one person in the comments section pointed out, it is not a Van Gogh. The Red Tree House was painted in 1890 by an artist named Leo Marie Gausson. Checking his dates, he was a contemporary of Van Gogh, but lived to the ripe and happy age of 88, i.e. into the 1940s so, despite the great disparity in their levels of fame, he was much more successful in the game of life than Van Gogh. And he was probably every bit as much the brilliant painter, but, due to the limited storage space within the human cranium, we only have room to remember a few famous people from every field, from every era, and it’s real hard to know who will make that final cut.
We can all name several current movie stars we like, and popular musicians, but take it back a few decades and the number is smaller, take it back a century or so and the number is smaller still. It’s as if we have a zip drive in our heads.
I’m not trying to diminish Van Gogh’s greatness, his brilliance, his talent and his vision, but he was apparently not the only one painting that kind of thing in that kind of way at that time. At least part of his current fame is due to his sad life story. He sold very little during his own lifetime, and what he did was mostly bought, very discreetly, by Theo Van Gogh, who felt bad for his weird and socially unacceptable brother.
So, in death, he has become the patron saint of artists who will never be famous in life. We can all believe, rightly or delusionally, that people of future generations will see our paintings, sculptures, books or whatever, and recognize us as the geniuses we know, deep in our hearts, that we are. Van Gogh’s death absolves us of our mediocrity.

Well, it’s late and I’m uninspired so I’ll just write down a couple of lines here about one of my pet peeves with Facebook. I’m sure everybody has a list of things they would do better if they were Mark Zuckerberg, but this is just one teeny, tiny little thing, which would probably cost them next to nothing and would make my life much easier, and those of similarly short attention-spanned readers as well.
Sometimes, when I want to refresh the page, or just leave Facebook and do something else for a while, I get a message that says “You have not completed your comment,” and there are two boxes below that, marked ‘stay on page’ and ‘leave page.’ Would it fucking kill the guy with a hundred billion dollars to add a 3rd box, which says something like ‘view comment’ or ‘return to comment’? Without that, how am I supposed to make an educated guess as to whether it’s worth it even to scroll back and finish the comment, or just allow it to dry up and disappear, on an afternoon desert wind? But, I can’t do that.
So, I scroll back, and back, and back. Sometimes I find that it really was a zinger of a comment, appropriately scathing, and I end it and send it and that’s it, and sometimes I find it was just a slip of the finger, and I’ll find a letter or two in a comment box, and so I delete it so I can move on with a clear conscience, and sometimes I can’t find the offending unfinished comment at all, and so I search again.
Just that one little extra box would save thousands of people minutes a day. Do the world a favor, Mr. Zuckerberg.