now working on

1. the extra Circus Philosophicus myth, commissioned for an art catalog

2. the Laruelle review

And I owe one other thing to someone. Will try to get this all done before hitting the road again in late June.

I keep meaning to say no to projects more often, but it feels like a foretaste of death to do that. You’d be cutting yourself off from a potentially transformative experience. Eventually you won’t be able to say yes to anything anymore, so why stop early?

the continued degeneration of Lenny Dykstra

The former baseball star is IN TROUBLE YET AGAIN. Reports have been rife in recent years of Dykstra defrauding various people in business deals (including his own mother, if memory serves). This won’t be the last time we see him in trouble, either. Dykstra’s compass is spinning.

The last case in sports I can recall that had quite the same repetitive magnitude was that of American football player and compulsive gambler/con artist Art Schlichter (pronounced “Shleester”). Schlichter’s activities were, if anything, even more bizarre than Dykstra’s so far.

But there’s one element about Dykstra’s case that’s slightly more bizarre. Schlichter would always do things secretively, but then when captured and punished would make courtroom speeches admitting what a rotten person he was. Dykstra is exactly the opposite. He’s always willing to talk about the most recent charges against him, but he never admits to having done anything wrong at all. It’s always everyone else’s fault. My sense is that Dykstra isn’t just trying to snow us all. I think he actually has less introspective insight than Schlichter, who is able to grasp the darkness within, whereas Dykstra seems to have convinced even himself that it isn’t there.

Strange. I think most of us remember Dykstra as a very electrifying and very tough young player (such as continuing to play after cancer treatment that had especially terrible side effects).

Lenny Dykstra:

Art Schlichter:

what makes a favorite city

Since I just mentioned Istanbul, which was easily my favorite city in around 2006, I have a few thoughts about what makes a city qualify as a favorite.

First of all, there are some places that just have so much to offer, like Paris. A few people might not like Paris, but most love it, and for me it will remain a perennial candidate for my favorite city whenever the question comes to mind.

However, I’ve now spent approximately five months of my life in Paris, if I add up all the trips. And that means it’s somewhat domesticated now. Always great to be there, but the adrenaline rush is vanishing. Compare that with, say, Berlin, where I’ve only spent about 7 days total in my life. I don’t think I like Berlin as much as Paris in objective terms, but in some ways it’s more exciting, simply because I’m less familiar with it, and that gives it an undercurrent of infinite adventure. In Paris I have a fairly good idea of what good and bad things may or may not happen, because I’ve been there enough to see the range of possibilities. But drop me in Berlin, and the possibilities would be murkier and thus more exciting, at least for a few weeks.

Prague was my favorite city for awhile too, but by now I’ve spent maybe 4 weeks there, and there too the range of possibilities is now fairly clear, and that takes away the adrenaline rush and makes it just very interesting and very pleasant.

New York, now there’s another place where I’ve only spent about 7 days total, I’m sorry to say. So the possibilities still feel somewhat infinite, and I’m sure it’s going to be a great time there in September for precisely that reason.

But here’s what I’m driving at with this post… Venice is the one place in the world where I may never lose the adrenaline rush, and thus it might always remain among my top three favorite cities at any given time in the future. It’s so easy to get lost here, and also one’s memory doesn’t always store up every place one has seen in Venice. You can pass across the same little Venice bridge 10 or 12 times without quite realizing that it’s the same bridge, thereby further increasing the illusion of infinity.

Other cities that easily rank as favorites are good ones where I haven’t been for an especially long time, since memory can augment them and make them seem even better than they actually are. Florence is one such place for me: I haven’t been there since 1990, and that gives it a certain exotic patina, since it’s now blended with a long-gone time that can never be retrieved. Even Hamburg, where I haven’t been in just about that long either; maybe ’91.

exhaustion

As many of you may have noticed, one of the most exhausting things to do is to walk around an art museum for several hours. And also among the most exhausting things are late-night parties.

So, take three or four consecutive eight-hour days on your feet, looking at hundreds of artworks over a fairly sprawling geographical area, and then add late-night parties at the end of each of those days, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of why the Venice Biennale is so exhausting.

Calling it a night here. Tough day coming up tomorrow in dreary, boring Istanbul (joke).

Picasso’s work habits

Though I finished Gilot’s memoir some days ago, I did find one other passage worth quoting here. It’s about the intensity of Picasso’s work habits and his views about them.

“One of the qualities I… admired about [Picasso] was his intense power of self-concentration to unite and direct his creative energies. He attached no importance to the façade of living. Any roof would have suited him, so long as he could work under it. He spent no time on ‘entertainment’: we almost never went to the theater or the movies. Even our friends were kept within well-defined limits. His great strength had always been that in proportion to his expenditure for his creative work, he wasted little of himself on the assorted routines of day-to-day living. That was one of his guiding principles.

He had told me once, ‘Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my painting, and everything is sacrificed to it– you and everyone else, myself included.'”

trains shut down for awhile

Didn’t seem like that big a rainstorm, but apparently it was enough to delay all the trains for awhile. No escape from Venice. I can think of worse places to be trapped.

Intrade’s assessment

Intrade, whose Irish CEO John Delaney recently died on the North Face of Mt. Everest, is always the best place to look for this sort of coming news question: who will be the Republican nominee?

If you’re not familiar with the website, its predictions are based simply on who is willing to buy “shares” in certain events occurring. It’s a stock market for news events, basically. If you paid $14 per share to say that bin Laden would be killed before December 31 of this year, you’d now have $100 for each of those shares, and if bin Laden had survived the year you would have lost all your money.

Anyway, here’s what they say about the Republican nominee in 2012 (I’m killing time waiting for the rain to stop in Venice).

It’s too early for this to be very accurate, but the Intrade clientele is more knowledgeable than the average poll respondent, so it’s worth keeping an eye on these.

Romney, 29.8
Pawlenty, 19.2
Huntsman, 15.0
Palin, 7.4
Rick Perry, 5.5
Bachmann, 5.5
Cain, 4.8
Chris Christie, 3.1
Giuliani, 2.0
Ron Paul, 2.0
Gingrich, 1.8

Everyone else is below 1.0.

Big loser here: Gingrich. Though Bobby Jindal at 0.3 is perhaps in an even more humiliating position with these prices.

I don’t think Romney can beat Obama, but at least Romney wouldn’t utterly embarrass the Republican Party, unlike some of the other names on this list. (However, a Romney nomination could well lead to a third-party run by a Pat Buchanan-style caveman, perhaps Rick Santorum himself.)

Incidentally, Barack Obama as the winner of the 2012 election is at 61.3. I’d put it at more like 85.0. If I were a betting man, I’d buy some Obama shares on Intrade. I just can’t picture him losing at this point.

The grimmest price is surely Joe Biden winning the 2012 election at 0.8, which is essentially the same thing as betting on an assassination. Then again, I suppose 0.8% probably *is* roughly the chance of a Presidential assassination, viewed in historical terms. In fact, it may even be slightly higher than that…

We’ve had Presidents since George Washington in 1789, or 222 years. During those 222 years, we’ve had 4 Presidents assassinated: Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), McKinley (1901), Kennedy (1963), or one assassination every 55.5 years. Worked out over the 17 months to the election, it’s around a 2.5% chance, historically. There’s also the chance of natural death (W.H. Harrison, Taylor, Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt). But Obama is young and healthy. Or resignation (Nixon), but Obama doesn’t seem to be in the Nixonian category of rampant criminal/paranoid behavior.

Is this a more dangerous period for the safety of U.S. Presidents (U.S. especially hated by certain groups right now)? Or less dangerous (unprecedented levels of security)?

In either case, it would make me sick to buy shares in Biden winning the election. Shame on those investors.

this many candidates already?

I’ve been so out of touch with U.S. political news lately that I didn’t realize any of these people were already declared.

“In fact, his viability may be one of Mr. Santorum’s biggest challenges as he joins a field of five declared candidates — Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Tim Pawlenty and Mr. Romney.”

No reason for Obama to lose any sleep over this list, or over Palin or Michelle Bachmann. I was sorry to learn that Bachmann originally comes from Iowa. We deserve better.

Of the somewhat serious people on that list, Pawlenty is a bore, Romney is only a replicant or some sort of simulated human, and Gingrich is smart but compulsively self-destructive. I can’t forget how Gingrich singlehandedly revived Bill Clinton’s career and ruined his own by blurting out: “This may sound petty, but I shut down the government because Clinton made me sit in the back of the plane on the way back from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral.” (Saturday Night Live then did a hilarious skit in which the back of the plane had piles of hay, with chickens flying around.)

If you were going to make a list of the greatest American political gaffes in my lifetime, that may actually be the worst, because its consequences were so extreme for Gingrich and his movement. This guy was the most powerful person in American politics from November 1994 through early January 1996, and he threw it away on one idiotic remark. And he’s already making further idiotic remarks in this campaign. Too bad, because he may be the smartest candidate the Republicans have. It would take something pretty grim domestically or internationally, in my view, for anything but another Obama landslide to occur 17 months from now.

here comes the rain

It’s now extremely dark and pouring rain in Venice. A good natural ending point to my stay in Venice, assuming I can get out of here soon in these conditions.

Reportedly it was also raining hard for two hours yesterday evening, but we were having such an excellent dinner for several hours in a dark restaurant that we didn’t even notice.

Marclay’s film

I watched 1 hour and 10 minutes of his well-known 24-film “The Clock.” It was interesting enough that I could have watched 4 or 5 hours of it under different circumstances.

For those who haven’t heard of it, he had a large staff scour through what must have been thousands of films and television episodes, looking for scenes showing clocks and watches. They managed to find all or virtually all possible times on the clock, and then wove all the neighboring scenes together into a unified film. This works better than it sounds, partly because Marclay often did a good job of weaving scenes together that have at least some visual relation (even when there are abrupt jumps between color and black & white footage) and also because the sound from the preceding scene is generally carried over a bit into the new scene to help create additional continuity.

During the hour and ten minutes that I was watching (from 11:20-12:30) there were some familiar things (Laurel & Hardy, “Easy Rider,” Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, “The Breakfast Club”), some unfamiliar things, and some downright bad scenes from television episodes.

Overall, I agree with Francis who said last night that the film was not just technically stunning, but also interesting in its own right, and moreover that you start to feel emotionally invested in certain characters and their dilemmas after only 30 seconds or so, only to see them vanish right away into some completely unrelated scene.

And yes, whenever a character says something like: “It’s 11:23!,” you can look at your watch and it’s exactly 11:23 (I found myself checking every time a character said the time, and quite often when a clock or watch was merely shown). This phenomenon obviously brings the viewer directly into the work as well.