Winslow Homer, "Morning Bell"

"After the Civil War, economic necessity forced many women to work in factories. In this painting, which depicts the start of a workday, a fashionably dressed young woman, lunch pail in hand, walks up a makeshift ramp and rickety bridge leading to a dark mill. On the right, three chatting women in homespun dresses evoke a sense of rural community in contrast to the solitary figure who probably came from the city. Isolated at the crossroads of the painting, she remains symbolically poised between an agrarian past and the increasingly depersonalized, industrial present."

                                                                                                Yale University Art Gallery 

https://artgallery.yale.edu/

 

 

"Homer’s talent for creating ambiguity and tension in seemingly sunny narratives is on display here. This is one among many 1870s images by the artist that explore transformational social change in the post-Civil War era—in this case, the expanding role of White working-class women in the wage economy. At its fulcrum is a sunlit figure, lunch pail in hand, ascending a makeshift structure that leads to a mill, as a bell atop the roof sounds to signal the beginning of the workday. She may be new to economic necessity; her finer dress and pronounced separation from the other women in homespun evokes a tension between urban and rural communities in a rapidly industrializing nation."

                                                                                               The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/839024 

 

https://youtu.be/kEqGdGAgAjw?si=fI5DyhlMLwuXV2fl

                                UNKLE - Rabbit In Your Headlights (Feat Thom Yorke)

 

 

                                             

Strange Relationship

 

 

 

Say Goodbye to America

 https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/turkish-student-detained-tufts-university-masked-federal-agents/507-e8a60d3c-2e2f-482e-83ad-880677192b82

No one is safe when everyone is suspect. The Great Dream is ending. God help us all.   

 

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Poem by Mary Oliver

The Scream 2025

This Generative AI design is meant to represent an army of silent billionaires. I tried to get as close to Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” as possible. Well, I’m still tweaking it. Most of Chaplin’s films were silent and heavily body-centered, absurdist, and patho-visual. I wanted the tux-wearing army to represent the ruling class. The billionaires running/ruining the world, the planet, the working classes, the voices of minorities and diverse groups of marginalized people. The child, deliberately androgynous and ethnically ambiguous, is screaming to be heard, to stop the privatization of healthcare, education, incarceration, big-pharma, big-agra, big oil, big billionaires buying elections and completely undermining privacy and originality via (the irony is not lost) the very tools I used to create this image: AI. Replacing artists, writers, actors, and journalists who strive to report real information that is fact-based, first person, and primary-sourced. 

The child is screaming because Earth is being provoked to the point that the pollution of big oil energy will destroy humanity and cause incalculable suffering, displacement, and death to all forms of life. The billionaire’s have their compounds, their bunkers, safe rooms, mega-yachts, and each other. They are brazenly and openly disdainful of democratic values. And they don’t give a flying fuck about the common man. They’re snickering at the people who voted Trump in. Trump is their puppet and apparently almost a 3rd of the electorate voted for Trump, so they are puppets to these billionaires as well. It’s a super-feeder benefiting the top 1%. 

This child stands for all of us, whether we know it or not. Elon Musk wasn’t always a gregarious monster with a mohawk. Jeff Bezos wasn’t always a corrupt Washington Post owner not thinking twice about manipulating politics, and bleeding ethical & moral journalists. He wasn’t always ego-driven, and a brazen destroyer of the proletariat. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t always a Zionist, suppressing or oppressing the viewpoints of Palestinians working for him at META, and Palestinian/pro-Palestinian users. He is among a group supporting the “conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” https://novaramedia.com/2024/07/09/meta-extends-ban-on-the-term-zionist/  .

These men weren’t always elitist, aloof billionaires undoing all the safeguards for truth, transparency, and justice on the biggest, most famous social platforms and presses in the world. You know the saying…power corrupts. Well, it’s about to get a lot more wild out there. 

 

As an Earthling trying to survive climate change, pollution, and man-made environmental disasters; as a citizen of the country - and the world, we should all be screaming. 

We are such a young, formerly promising, Democratic experiment of what "could be" in a just world where equality was valued, and the quality of life for all being’s was primary. I am sad. I am screaming sad.    

PS: and for all the hate-filled trolls trying to friend me on Facebook— my maternal grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew whose family fled during the Revolution. My daughter’s paternal great grandmother was 100% Jewish, and my husband has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. No Hate. Peace.

Contentions

 

Multitude by Lia Chechelashvili

A Sparrow girdled within 

a winter garden I stop. 

An enmeshment of baby bats. 

Angles twine in the scene where 

a calico eye’s found bounty. 

I didn’t realize how many 

times I needed to wash my hands. 

In life, I am failing at hygiene. 

A plastic toothpick does more 

harm than good, second person

glaring up at me. Why you 

glaring up at me? 

I’m a ripe egg, feathered,

vulnerable as a blind mouse. So shoot, 

burn, throw your throwing knives. I am 

stronger than, at least, calving glaciers,

I am rising from a deep 

rich brown ground. A darkness falls away. 

Diane Seuss’s “Pentralium” from Modern Poetry

PENETRALIUM 

I wish I could tell you how deep 

the suck goes,

how dark it is and holy, 

it's tragedies siloed. They dot 

the landscape, with oxen, mud hooved, 

and crows. 

Shakespearean but boiled-down, 

a thick gravy, oversalted, 

served on white bread, day-old, 

sold cheap at the bakery outlet. 

It broods on the windland edge,

morbidly forested and bottle green, 

fermented in swamp, dung, skunk, 

and bridled by sorcery, potions, 

bible school puppetry, ogres, faries, 

poorly tendered papier-mache 

good and bad Samaritans. 

Kept awake by good, honest terrors, 

eviction dreams, half-conscious 

fantasies of terrible mothers wielding 

hatchets, but oddly 

free, like a free lunch is free, 

or a vacant lot, or a stinkweed 

bouquet. Just sit with it as you'd sit 

with a legless drunk

 

who wont shut up about the bygone. 

Don't bring your sobriety narratives 

to this bedside, Diane.

Be drunk...it's the only way, raved 

Baudelaire, corkscrewed
through and through with syphilis. 

How artless, this source 

of art, this shit show where 

the greenest 

watercress grows.

Soap Bubbles by Jean Siméon Chardin

We had all the woe on tap.

Aspirin

Aspirin, and the, my God, eszopiclone. Just give it up. Astro poet. Astro farce, designating the constellations? As if you give a fuck? Come, meet me in the closet at Barrymore and Vine. Jungle busts and cheap, sweet wine. Go on, you fakery faker. Let’s both succumb, sourdough, worshipper. I’ll take a bite out of you; do you know the film? Brewster, Packard, Duesenberg, blue? Don’t you know the truth? Skinny owl-eyed dooped de doo? Let’s get it on! Let’s call the cosmos what they are: telescopic assumptions patterned medieval screeches, all the other prehistorica, familia. Ganglia. I want to fuck you, too. For KEK. BOO

Keep Quiet by Hot Chip

Fooling around after a class I took in generative AI