How like a star you rose upon my life, Shedding fair radiance o’er my darkened hour! At your uprise swift fled the turbid strife Of grief and fear,—so mighty was your power! And I must weed that you now disappear, Casting eclipse upon my cheerless night— My heaven deserting for another sphere, Shedding elsewhere your aye-regretted light. An Hesperus no more to gild my eve, You glad the morning of another heart; And my fond soul must mutely learn to grieve, While thus from every joy it swells apart. Yet I may worship still those gentle beams, Though not on me they shed their silver rain; And thought of you may linger in my dreams, And Memory pour balm upon my pain.
Stanzas [How like a star you rose upon my life,], Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
with its flotilla of votive candles in the window close enough to set our coats on fire and cupcakes at Billy’s afterwards, […] I love going back. I think, in a way, going back is the subway to love. Easy, noisy, and very close.
Small flowers bloom in the waving grass And birds are singing in the pine Where once between tall columns rose The Zeus whom Phidias made divine. The thunderbolt was in his hand, Men dared not look upon his face, The fluted earth was but his throne, The bright sky was his dwelling-place.
Now his proud temple strews the ground, His altars are but broken stones, His gold-and-ivory flesh is dust Mixed with his violators’ bones. Brief is the hour of gods and men– Their carved fame falls that was so fair, While wilful beauty blooms in flowers And floats in song upon the air.
“I don’t know why I thought we were an exception. Maybe because sometimes we were. Artforum, for many years, was about as leftist as an elite publication could get. We really did play a role in holding weapons manufacturers and the engineers of the opioid crisis to account. We really did give jobs and bylines to some singular and brilliant people. We really were a brainy refuge of weird glamour married to principle, and sometimes I wonder if mine is the last generation to grow up thinking of the art world as a place for ungovernable outsiders and talented eccentrics, which doesn’t hear the word ‘art’ and think immediately of commerce.
[…]
For years we had been signing petitions for all kinds of social causes, calls for liberation – feminism, queer rights, climate justice, abolition – that were often taken up by the institutions that housed us. Until 2025, nearly every museum had a gay pride celebration. When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, a parade of museums frantically marshalled committees of sacrificial minorities, staged unctuous exhibitions and asserted their commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.
Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives.
[…]
The writing can’t keep pace. Every minute there’s another atrocity tidily packaged as a sedate number in a headline. At least 70,000 Palestinians have been murdered, but these are the underreported official counts. Around 30 percent of these have been children, with an estimated average of 28 children killed each day since October 2023. More than 98 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged or made inaccessible, or both. It’s increasingly hard to hold in mind the scale of devastation.”
Upon a second viewing, Tenet is interesting mostly in its narrative sequences and choreography of bodies, moving and running, for the camera.
“Above all, there is Barbara’s instruction, as she ushers the Protagonist into the wonders of temporal inversion. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” she says to him. The echo is clear: “Do not try to understand. Just believe.” That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles his film with reverse-motion images, but each one of them gives off a lyrical shimmer, and when a dead woman, lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her body springs to the perpendicular as if reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch and lift in response.” Antony Lane, New Yorker, 2020.
