Denied Deeper Meaning

It is sort of freaking me out, but my good mood and happiness quotient are still quite high.  This is fairly surreal given everything going on around me.  My life's conditions haven't changed for the better.  Nothing has actually improved.  Probably quite the opposite, actually.  There is still much to be done, more work than I care to do, and my finances are heading in the wrong direction.  My romantic life. . . well, pretty much non-existent.  My sex life is still very active, but I have no partner. . . .  I have no studio nor anyone to photograph and my photo skills are degenerating.  My body is broken and I grow old.  The world is at undeclared war and now Trump 2.0.  I could and should, probably, be miserable.  

For some reason, however. . . I am not.  

I can't even show the photos I am so loving right now.  

I've manipulated this one here to make it less explicit.  I think the goddamn thing exudes a lovely decadence and deserves to be printed in platinum.  I know how to do the platinum and palladium prints. . . if only I had a studio.  I know how to do photogravure, too.  Travis has one of my photogravure prints in his home,  Every time I see it, I am shocked and pleased.  This photo would look lovely printed in photogravure, too.  For that, I would need a studio as well.  

But the question, as always, is who would show it?  Who would hang it?  People might have it if it were in a book and could be closed and put away on a shelf.  

I watched a video on the Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur last night.  She has a studio.  She makes a living from taking photographs.  She is fascinated with people's bodies, she says.  She especially loves hands.  The photograph she talked about most was of the hands of an older woman.  Aged elegance and grace.  Something like that.  Maybe I should do feet, but I know many people who are repulsed by people's feet.  Feet are disgusting, they say.  It seems impossible to win.  

The painted nude is O.K.  The photographed nude is not.  Anyone would hang a painted nude and nobody would batt an eye.  Well. . . unless it was Balthus.  Those must still be kept behind guarded doors.  I've loved Balthus since the first moment I became aware of him.  He is one of the few painters who can get in trouble for painting.  

I read a critique of the Tamara de Lempicka show at the deYoung museum in San Francisco.  The author, Sebastian Smee (hard to believe, I know), is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his art criticism, so I shouldn't weigh in on his observations.  

But I did.  I wrote a comment on his piece for The Washington Post.  Smee (for real) faults the paintings for placing style over content.  Lempicka "lost track of the 'deeper meaning,'" he says, whatever that is.  I assumed he meant something more ideological.  He wrote a book on Lucien Freud, and I should probably read that before I critique the critic, but I felt confronted by the conclusion to his article.

But honestly, I feel I can live without these pictures. Their immaculate aesthetic feels dated. They pander to the fantasies of the suddenly wealthy. Instead of a return to order, what they leave me craving is a return to reality.

"Deeper meaning" and "reality" were the "trigger" words for me.  And so I felt inspired to send a comment.  I feel a little bit like Hemingway about critics, though I was trained to be one.  Maybe Smee (not lying) will follow the crumbs and come to a devastating conclusion about my blog.  He could relieve me of my current happiness quotient and drive me to a desperate place.  

I heard a report about an execution of a prisoner in Indiana yesterday.  So many executions are bungled, you know.  Some observers have said the executioned suffered terribly and didn't die for an agonizingly long time.  The executioners, in those instances, were using a cocktail of drugs injected one after the other.  But Indiana didn't do that as some of the drugs were no longer available.  Rather they used one.  It is the one my vet uses to put animals down.  It is the one doctors recommend.  Pentobarbital.  Medical doctors can no longer get it, of course.  Only vets.  It is the close cousin of phenobarbital that was the sleeping pill used by many stars in the way back.  Marilyn Monroe, etc.  It is the one I so desperately wish to own.  

Observers of the Indiana execution say the prisoner went out quickly with no signs of misery.  I've had my hands on two of my own animals, a cat and a dog, that my vet has put down using pentobarbital.  They were there one moment and gone the next.  You can truly feel the instant when life has left the body.  It is instantaneous. 

My vet told me long ago that this was the most painless and effective way to go.  

I look out my window at the breaking day.  Fog.  It is somehow lovely.  A truck engine at the house construction site across the street ruins the quiet loveliness of the morning.  Such is the reality of things.  

Oh. . . I'd recommend "Bad Monkey" to you.  It is good.  My buddy is the narrator but is not present in most of the show.  Vince Vaughn, however, is up to his old tricks.  He is good and fun in this bizarre series.  The whole thing captures the Carl Hiaasen aesthetic perfectly, I think.  

But, if I may echo Smee (obviously made up), I'm not sure that the show captured any "deeper meaning."  

And isn't that what we all are seeking?

Not me.  I'm chasing rainbows and fairy tales.