Ahoy!

An Uncomfortable Art The hypnotic music from my DC days — my 20s / the ‘80s — drew me across the expanse of galleries at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA): Bronski Beat’s “Small Town Boy” — a melancholic anthem for a generation of young gay men seeking love amid the loneliness of AIDS in that dark ruin of a Reaganesque era.  I walked closer until a red curtain warning of “graphic content” stopped me from instant entry. Once behind the curtain, a wizard of MoCA’s permanent collection confronted me: the 42-minute-long photo-with-music montage that is Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1983 - 2008). I stayed for every minute — for every often disturbingly yet always intimate image. I kept wondering — how did she get these images, these brutally honest, often ugly but somehow hypnotically beautiful snapshots of gritty humanity? The soundtrack rolled on and I was left strangely moved. In another gallery, an even more unsettling  display: “Chromatic ...

“We must flee, as we are now in the clutches of a wolf,” said then Cardinal Giovanni di Medici in 1492 upon the election of the notorious Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI. As this was a period during which papal enemies often took unexpectedly ultimate swims in the Tiber (including Borgia’s own son some years later) flee Medici did, eventually to return and become a rather wolfish pope himself, Leo X. Since November 9, 2016,  I have often recalled that quote: obvious to me — and I believe, to most thinking, humanist people — that Trump was a singularly dangerous wolf. Like a feral canine, he lives only to eat, kill, mate and survive. And like a lupine predator, DJT leads a pack of lesser, subservient wolves. Unfortunately for the United States — and the world — many voters (for and against) saw in Trump an aging dog in sheep-killer clothing: all bark and no bite.   Alas, after almost a year-and-a-half since 11/9, Trump has proven (as if anyone who had followed his...