The first surprise is that the card is large, 7 inches high, much bigger than today's standard tarot size. It needs to be, of course, being hand-painted. The second surprise is its surface: textured paint and etched gilding that catches the light. What I’d always assumed to be a flat image turns out to be a luxury object.

At the Morgan Library, the earliest tarot cards — lavish decks commissioned by the Duke of Milan — are on display.

One room focuses on the aristocratic Renaissance culture of these early parlor games, entirely distinct from the occult context we associate with tarot today.

Inspired by Petrarch's “Triumph” sonnets, Italians devised a card game with a new suit of “trump” cards.

These Visconti cards were crafted in the art workshop run by the Bembo brothers, Andrea and Bonifacio. One deck was a wedding gift from the Duke to his daughter.

Each custom deck cost about 1,500 ducats (ten years’ salary for a court official).

You can almost see the artist's brush moving through the wet paint of the figure's robe. Six hundred years from now, I'll be dead, and perhaps someone else will stand before this card and wonder about the hand that painted it.

Across the hallway is the other half of the exhibit, titled “Modern Visions,” which focuses on the occult Anglo-American decks of the past century.

The 78-card structure remains, but the entire context of their meaning has changed.

A gulf separates the two rooms, and reminds me of another metamorphosis. The indohyus was a small deer-like creature that lived eons ago. Seeking food or safety, it spent more time in shallow water. Over generations its descendants eventually became ocean-dwellers. We know them as whales.

Tarot made a similar migration, from the “shallow water” of a Renaissance parlor game to the ocean depths of modern occultism.

A critical twist came in 18th Century France when a pair of occultists claimed tarot originated in Ancient Egypt, that its images represented hieroglyphs from a magickal “Book of Thoth.” Images were re-drawn to reference alchemy, Qabbalah, and the wizard's kitchen sink. A card game morphed into an esoteric toolkit.

The Papesse has become the High Priestess.

The shameful Traitor is now the self-sacrificing Hanged Man.

The once-lowly and wretched Fool is now the primary seeker; the whole suit of trumps is now called The Fool's Journey.

First printed in 1909, Pamela Colman Smith's theatrical scenes for the pip cards became iconic.

I look at her “Nine of Swords” and feel a pang for that afflicted figure.

The images have always held a magnetic fascination for me—modern tarot offers a kind of DIY cosmology.

I was thrilled to find some of the original Frieda Harris watercolors made for the Crowley deck.

The cards have survived not because they foretell the future, but because they keep revising the present — teaching each generation how to pause and look.

The Morgan commissioned Chris Ofili to create new tarot-inspired paintings for this exhibit, re-imagining the cards through Trinidad's carnival tradition.

Bianca Visconti used her father's gift to play tarocchi with her friends on rainy afternoons in Milan.

Six hundred years later, Rachel Pollack used tarot for divination, which she called “a two-way conversation with the divine.”

I have no such theosophy. But I adore the images and find something mysterious about a constellation of cards laid out before me. My rational bias is confounded, while my child-self lights up: “Wow, what might this mean?” A waking-dream that invites interpretation.

The images point to what, in us, has not yet become articulate to ourselves.

The cards don’t speak at all. They simply hold the silence long enough for me to hear what I’ve been avoiding.

Tarot's utility lies not in the supernatural but in its capacity to focus attention. Laying the cards suspends conventional thinking patterns, and demands acute observation: What the heck am I looking at here?

Seeing the cards in glass frames prevents their visceral use: the pleasurable ritual of shuffling, dealing – one, two, three cards on the table. Turning the cards face up, one by one. A private altar, rising out of the vast dark ocean, meant only for you.

‐—-----------

NOTES

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” is on view at The Morgan Library through Oct 4th 2026:

https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/tarot

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The mythic David Bowie arrived when I was 15 during the premiere of “Ashes to Ashes” on BBC TV’s Top of the Pops.

This jaded “pissed-off Pierrot” of 1980 became my version of Bowie.

The cigarette-smoking Pierrot was detached even from the artifice of his costume.

For my schoolboy self, his song “Teenage Wildlife” seemed to be a private message:

Are you one of the New Wave boys?

You’ll take me aside and say

‘Well, David, what shall I do? They wait for me in the hallway’

I’ll say ‘--Don’t ask me, I don’t know any hallways--’

Scream out aloud as they shoot you down:

No no, I’m not a piece of teenage wildlife…

His refusal of the mentor role was the sign that he was trustworthy.

A year later came “Under Pressure” and when Bowie sang

It’s the terror of knowing

What this world is about…

…it was the most profound recognition for this 16-year-old: the shock of adulthood.

I saw him in concert once, at the Slane Castle festival in 1987. My height let me navigate the pressing crowd as it crushed in waves; I lost the shirt tied around my waist and my return bus ticket. I hitched a ride back to the city, and was exhausted – the pilgrimage complete.

In his songs consciousness itself was always under question, mirroring my own shifting identity.

Seeing this world through an alien’s eyes made perfect sense to me. I was newly arrived in New York and stripping away all past associations.

As I got older I reached into his back-catalog for the incarnations I needed: the grandiose glam cultist, or the sober experimenter of the Berlin era.

The strange Low album captures an exile nesting in an apartment, going through detox. Listening to it was immensely soothing: fragile and alone in my own room, futon and books on the floor.

Even failures were instructive: his fierce commitment to the horrendous Tin Machine project was weirdly compelling. I could likewise recover from career disaster.

Finding meaning in his songs was the listener’s creative task. I was less interested in following interviews with Bowie since he fabricated his answers for entertainment value. And since many of his lyrics were randomly assembled by the cut-up technique, I suspected they carried meanings beyond his intentions.

Often in the songs, even when the publicity-photo persona was camp, his baritone voice was strong and emotionally true. That’s what I kept returning to, singing along in my headphones on Broadway.

In the Nineties his record sales cratered; he was a disgraced knight. Yet his new work, uncommercial, remained solid and quietly experimental. I was looking at his middle-age, and possibly my own future: pursuing an expressive private hobby. Such as writing essays.

After his 2004 onstage heart attack, he entered a new Hermit persona, occasionally releasing albums without any public appearances. I listened to these when they came out, as if they were cryptic testaments that could still transform my life.

We both lived in Manhattan now, but he still inhabited a separate dimension. I sat down to a vegan lunch at Wild Ginger restaurant in SoHo, knowing he could be walking past – right then.

Until: Blackstar. The last album, and a marvel. The myth swelled, just as the mortal body of David Jones disintegrated.

And I now had a life suddenly out of orbit. Since my teens I had never lived on an Earth without Bowie.

I was compelled to re-watch his “Blackstar” and “Lazarus” videos.

These feature the unsettling Button-Eyes figure, but also a final, rawer persona: the Artist in the striped catsuit.

As Button-Eyes lies on his deathbed, The Artist dances, or sits at a desk writing frantically (one last song!) before the end approaches. I am undone by these scenes. And exhilarated – he was pointing a way forward.

In 2018 the Brooklyn Museum hosted ‘David Bowie Is…’ and I explored it as a vast memory-palace.

Each avatar – Ziggy, the Thin White Duke, film roles – triggered a flashback to one of my own prior selves. (I bought *that* album on cassette in the long-gone Crazy Eddie store on Fordham Road…)

Myth is always now; a self is always then.

David Jones died a decade ago; the mythic Bowie continues to mutate.

Visual artist David De Angelis designed two of Bowie’s album covers; in 2018 he created the Starman Tarot deck. I shuffle, and pull three random cards, invoking his avatars. After all, he had first arrived as the Pierrot Fool.

And my headphones are still tuned in to that enduring unearthly baritone.

**************

NOTES:

The haunting “Lazarus” video is here:

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A blood-red tree erupts from a bedframe. I circle the sculpture, gazing from the roots to the branches.

In tandem with a new opera about Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera coming to New York, the Museum of Modern Art is hosting an exhibit of the duo’s paintings.

Set designer Jon Bausor places a replica of Kahlo’s bed at the heart of both the opera and the exhibit – the axis of her mythic realm.

Polio and spinal injuries often confined Frida to her bed; she installed a mirror in the overhead canopy so that she could paint her self-portraits. The mirror opened an inner landscape where she could imagine other versions of her self.

I’ve been reading interviews with the poet Li-Young Lee. His work engages what he calls the “universal mind,” and a “vertical” exploration of the psyche.

This contrasts with much of our cultural discourse, which, he says, operates at a shallow “horizontal” level. TV and magazines only provide social chatter, while Lee wants to explore the depths of our Presence vertically.

Kahlo’s surreal self-portraits are “vertical” while Rivera’s political murals are “horizontal.” He looked outward at society; she painted variant aspects of her inner being.

This presence is the red tree that rises from Frida’s dream-bed, her altar. Her body was constrained; her imagination was not. The mirror above her did not merely reflect a face; it opened a chamber of possible selves.

My own constraints are not physical – old mental patterns keep me in a rut. It’s so easy to slump on the couch, turn on the tv, and watch yet another detective show.

For Lee, the finished artwork is not itself the prize; instead, “the total presence is the grail.” The transformation of the psyche is the true project.

This screen-page is my mirror – a site where the self can appear in its many layers. I want to speak as the essential version of myself.

The summoning of focus is the true work; the essay is merely its trace. The page is the altar where attention is practiced.

To inhabit this vertical awareness each day – let the red tree grow from my spine.

NOTES:

Paintings are copyright the estates of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Link to MoMA exhibit info: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5882

Info about Li-Young Lee: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/li-young-lee

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A hybrid human/serpent glides through the submerged ruins of a Cold War naval base. She moves through rusted girders and pylons encrusted with algae.

The artist Emilija Skarnulytė performs in her films as a Siren, a mutated aquatic “archaeologist from the future.” She swims open waters with a silicone mermaid tail.

I watch hypnotized – her eerie films follow this Siren swimming through the relics of our civilization: an old NATO submarine base, an endangered river, and an obsolete Soviet nuclear station.

I love Gary Snyder’s poetry, the way he stakes his blunt words to the gritty reality of his life in the woods. In the 1960s he raised the alarm about environmental destruction. He preached a “return-to-the-Garden” approach, a simpler lifestyle modeled on that of our ancestors.

Snyder, a student of Asian culture, used the metaphor of “Indra’s Net of Jewels” to describe an environment in which every element is interdependent, an infinite lattice where each gem reflects all the others.

He translated a 7th‑century Chinese hermit whose poems praise a life in the remote wilderness:

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease–

No more tangled, hung-up mind.

I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,

Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.

For many years Snyder taught at the University of California; when he retired in 2002, his job went to Timothy Morton, another ecology writer with a starker perspective.

Morton dismisses Snyder’s “back-to-Nature” slogan as a naive Romantic fantasy. The environmental catastrophe triggered by our fossil fuel civilization has swelled for two centuries and cannot be escaped. We are already in the midst of ongoing global warming and a mass extinction event.

Scientific studies have detected microplastics in the blood and organs of humans and other animals.

Morton also refers to Indra’s Net, but renames it The Mesh, a vast barbed tangle in which we are, yes, enmeshed. We are all cyborgs now, children born with pollutants in our blood. The uncanny Siren swims through the Mesh as her native habitat.

David Cronenberg’s film “Crimes of the Future” pushes further. Set in our future, the film opens with a boy eating a plastic wastebasket; humans are evolving to digest the plastic saturating the environment.

This is the Mesh Morton and Emilija Skarnulyte describe, where humans and every other species are inevitably altered by toxins and climate distortions.

Morton has a famous quote:

‘Nature’ is a word for a world that no longer exists.

Like Gary Snyder, I wish we could all return to the Garden. But like Morton, I suspect that option is forever gone.

Refuse false hope — but I still insist on lucid presence while facing a toxic landscape. This starts with acknowledging the true state of the world we’ve shaped.

We must act with integrity, the only way to keep our humanity, even as we mutate.

The Siren archaeologist swims through the wreckage of our technology and may be a genetic adaptation to our altered future.

She is a witness to what we have made, and what we might still make, of our turbulent world. We swim in darker waters now.

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NOTES

All Siren images are copyright the artist Emilija Skarnulyte. More details here:

https://www.sieshoeke.com/artworks/emilija-%C5%A1karnulyt%C4%97-sirenomelia-2018

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The acid-green bathroom could be in a cheap motel. I’ve been in a bathroom like that, after a rough night’s sleep, under buzzing fluorescent light. You have too. You don’t feel great, but you know you have to get through the day.

A new MoMA photo exhibit features the work of Tania Franco Klein (TFK). She’s created a large series of staged photographs called “Subject Studies: Chapter 1.”

Some of these are posed in a bathroom, a private space, where one does not have to “perform” for others.

Yet these individuals are all aware that they are being photographed, as they “perform” a private hygiene ritual.

When am I performing? Always. Even in the bathroom, the mirror is a stage for self-judgment. We are our own most demanding audience.

TFK says that her photos are “psychological landscapes “ and considers her practice to be “emotional archeology.“

The artist cites the book “The Burnout Society,” and its claim that each of us is chronically exhausted from “hustle culture” and being caught on a never-ending treadmill. In our state of hyperactive capitalism, inconvenient emotions are seen as obstructions to optimal productivity.

Looking with empathy at the photos, one feels weary and depressed. (Note the prescription meds above the faucet.)

TFK’s photos are often soaked in a toxic nostalgia. They could be cinematic stills from an ‘80s Brian de Palma thriller. We sense that something bad is going to happen.

Tania Franco Klein stages this tension in hostile rooms. Her photos are faux-documentaries. My essays are a similar fiction: an “intimate and casual” voice, the paragraphs carefully edited and placed.

We are always performing our own authenticity – even intimacy is stage-managed.

The bathroom promises privacy, but offers only another surface: mirror, self-consciousness where exhaustion has nowhere to hide.

But noticing the staging loosens something: the mirror’s grip, the demand for perfect authenticity.

The bathroom remains a horrible sick-green space. The fluorescent light still on. Yet I love these photos, and the whole artistic project – the rawness.

Perhaps the audacity lies not in hiding exhaustion, but in embracing its unglamorous truth.

In a culture that turns even privacy into performance, exhaustion becomes the most honest form of resistance.

None of us looks good in our undershirt. When we stop hiding the fatigue, the performance itself cracks, and for a moment, we are simply there: human, messy, and bare under the harsh light.

An honest presence.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

NOTES

All photos are copyright the artist Tania Franco Klein.

More info about the artist:

https://www.taniafrancoklein.com/subject-studies

Book, The Burnout Society :

https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society

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I just saw “Antigone,” the ancient Greek tragedy, in a modern‑dress production starring Juliette Binoche and directed by Ivo van Hove. (see YouTube link at end of essay below)

After 2,500 years, the story still enthralls. I follow its red thread into the labyrinth.

Kreon, king of Thebes, has the body of the traitor Polynikes thrown outside the city walls, to be left unburied, as meat for vermin.

Polynikes’ sister Antigone insists on performing a ceremonial burial for him, and she is arrested by Kreon’s soldiers. The drama is the ongoing clash between Antigone and Kreon.

Kreon: You dared to disobey the law.

Antigone: Well, if you call that “law.”

Kreon: I do.

Antigone: Zeus does not. Justice does not. Death needs to have Death’s laws obeyed.

Kreon: Enemy is always enemy, alive or dead. Go down below and lavish your love on the dead.

Each sees the other in monstrous terms. Kreon despises Antigone as a hysterical anarchist; she scorns him as a petty tyrant ignoring divine law.

Neither will relent, and stakes are raised. By the finale there is catastrophe and (of course) more dead bodies.

I want to believe that I’m wiser than both Antigone and Kreon, that I can transcend their conflict.

But this may be wishful self-delusion.

When I was younger, I behaved like Antigone. And later, a corporate manager, I behaved like Kreon.

I was Antigone when I quit my job and self-righteously faxed my resignation letter as a public protest to every departmental office.

I was Kreon when, as a manager, I required staff to follow obtuse protocols imposed by our VP.

What do I gain by believing I’m better than Antigone or Kreon?

My “calm witness” stance is a luxury of those who think they don’t have a body to bury. My serene awareness is not a higher ethical position but a refined avoidance strategy.

What unburied corpse am I ignoring in my own life? What do I do with this blood and dirt on my hands?

I am afraid to step onto the stage of action. I’m a spectator of others’ tragedies, but unwilling to risk my own ass.

There is an interesting note to this production. The director wanted to depict an intimate scene between Antigone and her fiance Haemon, though none appears in the original Greek texts. He asked the translator Anne Carson to write dialog for it.

Carson refused on principle: Sophokles had not written this conversation, and she demanded fidelity to his text.

So instead the director crafted a silent scene onstage between Antigone and Haemon. This dramatic solution was acceptable to Carson, since she was not inventing dialogue.

Director and translator found their compromise in silence.

A silence that did not ignore but engaged the noise and paradox of conflict.

We come out of the dark, says Antigone in the first line of the play.

And we return to the dark. I go to bed and sleep, with the unburied still within my chest.

NOTES:

The BBC made an excellent recording of the Barbican production, which is available, for now anyway, on YouTube.

This link works as of 2025:

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Time-stream Z78:

• It is 1930 in the city of Zagreb, within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. You are born to a middle-class Jewish family in a Croatian neighborhood, and your name is Darko Slesinger.

  

• It is 1937 in Zagreb, and fascism and antisemitism are on the rise. Your father, a doctor, decides it would be prudent to change the family surname. So you are now Darko Suvin.

• It is 1941, the German army has invaded, and King Peter II flees the country. Zagreb is now within the newly-created Fascist Independent State of Croatia. Your paternal grandparents and two uncles are murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators.

  

  As you walk home from school a bomb explodes right in front of you – its blast hurls you backwards to the ground. You are bruised and bloody, but alive.

The mental shock lingers – nine feet closer and you would be dead. You imagine a fork in the river of reality, a different time-stream where Darko has died and the world goes forward without him.

You become haunted by the potential of alternate timelines. Is there also a better world in which there is no Hitler and you are still Darko Slesinger?

• It is 1943 and your family is taken to an internment camp on an Adriatic island, guarded by Mussolini’s troops. You are a 13-year-old boy with only a handful of books to read, including “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift, and “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells.

  

  Gulliver’s capture by the idiot Lilliputians mirrors your imprisonment by fascist soldiers; you realize that imaginary literature illuminates the real world.

On a contraband radio you listen to BBC news reports of victories by General Tito, the heroic leader of the antifascist Yugoslav partisans.

• It is 1945, and the Nazis are defeated. Upon returning to liberated Zagreb you join the Young Communist League. You idolize General Tito, now prime minister. Zagreb is within the new People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, a member of the Soviet alliance.

  

• It is 1948. You are a student at the University of Zagreb, and an avid reader of the latest pulp “science fiction” magazines. Tito breaks from Comrade Stalin, and announces that Yugoslavia will go its own way, independent of both the Capitalist West and the Soviet bloc. Zagreb is now in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

  

  You develop your English so that you can read the latest works by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, all of which you critique through a Marxist lens.

You are especially fascinated by Thomas More’s 1516 fable “Utopia” and its continuing influence through centuries of literary and political imagination.

Tito is still your hero. You are exhilarated by his vision, knowing that you are on the ideal time-stream to a utopian socialist Yugoslavia.

• It is 1959 and you begin teaching at the University of Zagreb. You publish studies of East European SF writers: Ivan Yefremov, Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky brothers.

• It is 1965. Revolutionary progress in Yugoslavia has stalled: there is high unemployment, and bureaucratic gridlock. You still have faith in Marshal Tito, but think he is being ill-served by mediocre Party members.

  

You write an article in a weekly newspaper calling for Orwell’s banned novel “1984” to be published in Yugoslavia.

• It is 1969. At the University of Zagreb there are intra-Party squabbles, and a rival Lilliput faction gets you dismissed from your teaching post.

McGill University in Montreal is setting up a brand-new “Science Fiction Studies” department, and invites you to be director. Reluctantly, you leave Zagreb to start a new life in Canada at forty years of age – a Marxist now exiled to the Capitalist West.

Canada is a strange new world; you seem to have shifted to a time-stream you never anticipated.

• It is 1979 and your career flourishes in the West. You publish a successful book “Metamorphoses of Science Fiction” that becomes a landmark in literary studies.

Your book argues that science fiction is not defined by starships, time travel, or alien creatures, but rather by “cognitive estrangement” – the vertigo effect on the reader as they are catapulted into mental freefall by an altered reality.

You adopt the term “novum” to describe how this estrangement is achieved within a sci-fi story. The novum forces the reader to face the implication that their present culture, their own mundane existence, could be radically different. The reader is altered by this paradigm shift: the novum opens the possibility for transformation.

The bomb that almost killed you as a child was the novum event that changed you forever.

You win academic awards and get to meet Asimov and other sci-fi writers who shaped your youth.

• It is 1980, and Marshal Tito dies. Yugoslavia is now led by a series of ineffective politicians, and goes into decline. This worsens when the Soviet Bloc collapses in 1989 and everyone in the world (except you) agrees that the dream of a socialist utopia is extinct.

  

• It is 1991 and a long brutal civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia. Ethnic conflicts become savage, and result in massacres of civilians. NATO launches airstrikes on Yugoslavia to punish the warlords. Once again, children in your homeland live in fear of bombs. You are in despair, realizing that you are on the worst timeline in the multiverse.

  

• It is 2025 and your beloved Yugoslavia no longer exists on this timeline, having splintered into seven rival nations. You are 95 years old, retired, but still writing and posting on the internet. You warn that there is now a global ruling-class system that you have dubbed “The AntiUtopia.” The worst Lilliputians run the most powerful governments and corporations. History did not follow the path you expected.

Yet your novum endures as a liberating concept – a creative tool to conceive and forge better timestreams.

The “AntiUtopia” relies on the slumber of the crowd, but it cannot conquer the lucidity of a mind that refuses the imposed reality. The ultimate sci-fi novum is not the spaceship or time machine — it is human consciousness itself, the strangest event in the universe.

As long as we can see the world as otherwise, better futures remain possible. This is your legacy: not a finished utopia, but the will to imagine one.

_____________________________

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A Californian man visited Disneyland every day for 8 years. After his hospital shift ended at 3pm he’d go straight to the park. His run of 2,995 consecutive visits only ended when the pandemic shut the gates.

I’d be tempted to mock this fellow except that most winter days I visit my Disneyland equivalent: the Museum of Modern Art.

MoMA is on West 53rd Street, and I live over on East 34th. I could take the subway but prefer the 2-mile walk through midtown; the city’s caffeine-chaos is energizing.

I keep my visits unique by choosing different galleries on each occasion. Since they rotate the exhibits on a seasonal basis, there’s always something new to see.

Most of the galleries in the museum are quite expansive, but Gallery 201 is a small room with just three paintings on display.

The large galleries have dark-suited museum guards on watch; I feel sorry for the staff, as these sentinels are not permitted to sit during their shifts.

But this tiny space is unguarded. It feels less like a gallery and more like a chapel: a room with three windows into other worlds.

Some anonymous curator selected these particular paintings with no obvious theme. But years of fooling around with tarot cards have trained me to see any random images as a meaningful tarot spread.

The first painting is by Carlos Almaraz: “Solo Crash.” Almaraz made a series of these “crash” paintings set on LA’s elevated highways. Each is violent and yet spectacularly beautiful.

There’s a cartoonish aspect to this image: the car must have been traveling at incredible velocity to ricochet and then hurl so dramatically. It leaves a blurry motion-trail of red and yellow.

The next painting is “Chronic Hollow” by Ida Applebroog. It’s a multi-panel piece, a jigsaw puzzle. The artist notes in a separate caption that the inspiration for the painting was the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but nothing in the image directly indicates this.

Rather, the assembled work seems deliberately mysterious. What’s the significance of the girl in the grotesque mask? Or of the acrobats?

Unlike with the other two images, which were new to me, I don’t have an innocent eye for the final painting, since I’ve seen a couple of solo exhibitions of Matthew Wong’s work. He loved the work of Vincent van Gogh, which is clear in his vibrant expressionist style.

Wong died by suicide a few weeks after painting this in 2019. He titled it “Unknown Pleasures,” a reference to the gloom-rock album by Joy Division. The band’s singer Ian Curtis was a suicide, so Wong may already have been signaling his own distress.

Reading the three paintings as a single tarot spread, I see them as a call to take nothing in life for granted: to be prepared for the worst, and to stay strong.

Wong’s far-off mountain still symbolizes hope to me, even if he was unable to find any. That pure white summit beckons.

Fuck Disneyland. Tomorrow I will be back at the museum, to explore a different gallery. I will wake up expectant, with the hope of seeing some rare and strange new thing.

____________________

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Late October – the days in New York are getting cold and gray. And I am at an impasse. Drained of any creative ideas.

I consult the I Ching oracle; the coin toss reveals Hexagram #29, Kan – “Dark Waters.”

Also called “The Watery Abyss,” or “The Unfathomable.” Alfred Huang suggests phrase-titles: “plunging into darkness,” or “sinking-but-not-drowned.”

So I dive into the black ocean, and for long moments I am immersed in the cold deep. At last I break the surface. The night air is welcome, but the sky has no moon. The constellations above are strange: I let instinct decide a direction, and start to swim.

One must keep moving, without light, trusting only sinew and breath. Propel forward, or surrender to oblivion.

The ritual of swimming takes over, a meditation of survival. My breathing is clean and regular, and for now my limbs are strong.

Fear is present. Though I cannot see their shapes, I sense ancient serpents – leviathans stirring in the depths below. Perilous, but life is always such. All I can do is commit to action. To stop is to drown; to trust in effort is to live.

The rhythmic motion silences the mind, and there is only the hush of the dark sea. Swish, swish, swish.

But eventually fatigue sets in, my legs grow heavy. I feel the darkness dragging me down.

There is only the dark abyss.

I wake up sprawled on a pale beach, sore and exhausted, tongue gritty, but grateful for the dawn’s soft light.

I stand up. There is a wild cosmos uncoiled within. Dismantled by the ocean black, I assemble myself anew – ready to face the granite city.

_____________________

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Photo Credits

All from Unsplash website:

1. Lukas Robertson

2. Tom Gainor

3. Patrick Connor Klopf

4. Patrick Fore

5. Siddharth Verma

6. Adrian Lopez

7. Klara Kulikova

I recently watched ‘Will,’ an obscure 2017 series about Shakespeare’s early days in London.

Flawed and melodramatic, it never touches Shakespeare’s genius, and was swiftly cancelled. Still, I enjoyed it.

The concept grafts a 1970s punk vibe onto the Elizabethan era. When young Shakespeare says goodbye to his family in Stratford and sets off for the big city, the soundtrack brazenly plays The Clash song London Calling.

The visuals are carnivalesque; many episodes were directed by Bollywood legend Shekhar Kapur, who helmed the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth movies.

The show rightly portrays Tudor England as a police state, where the Crown relentlessly hunted enemies, foreign and domestic.

Informers were everywhere; torture and public executions were routine. Skulls hung on the city walls as grisly warnings.

The Privy Council’s chief investigator was Richard Topcliffe, who built a private torture chamber in his own house.

All playscripts had to be cleared by government censors. Shakespeare’s play “Sir Thomas More” was banned and never staged. He had written a speech pleading for tolerance toward immigrants, and empathy for exiled “strangers, their babies at their backs and their poor luggage…”

The script condemned the “mountainish inhumanity” of xenophobes. But the Crown was passing new laws to deport the Romani and Africans, and Shakespeare’s work was clearly unacceptable.

His younger colleague Ben Jonson also ran afoul of the censors. After a single performance of the satirical Isle of Dogs, Jonson was arrested by Topcliffe, and all copies of his playscript destroyed.

Worse was the fate of Shakespeare’s friend, playwright Thomas Kyd. Heretical writings were found in his home, and Kyd was arrested, tortured, and died soon after.

Shakespeare could not publicly stand up and proclaim that Queen Elizabeth or her successor King James were tyrants. But he certainly could depict vivid examples of other tyrants for the stage.

In “Tyrant,” Stephen Greenblatt captures power-hungry Richard III’s worldview. Richard divides people into two categories: winners or losers. And winners will always bully losers. Law and the truth are irrelevant and can be manipulated (or simply ignored) by winners. Greenblatt notes:

“Richard’s villainy is readily apparent to almost everyone. There is no deep secret about his cynicism, cruelty, and treacherousness, no glimpse of anything redeemable in him, and no reason to believe that he could ever govern the country effectively.”

Yet despite this, Shakespeare demonstrates how Richard finds willing collaborators, henchmen, and mobs that elevate him to power.

The TV show imagines a young Shakespeare who risks his life to rescue Catholic friends from persecution. But there is no evidence that the real poet ever dared any concrete dissent.

He never led street protests when his playwright friends were arrested (which would have been suicidal anyway).

He kept his head down. He kept his head, period. Shakespeare chose survival over rebellion.

Instead he wrote flattering letters to wealthy aristocrats seeking patronage, and performed his plays regularly at the royal court. He had a wife and children to support.

Facing oppression, Shakespeare chose to be a bystander rather than a rebel.

I fear that I am making the same choice. I’m not out protesting loudly on the street today either.

Like him, I’m choosing safety over courage.

A kinder view is that Shakespeare was by nature & talent an empathetic witness, and not an activist. Survival is not the same as surrender.

Honesty, in a time of lies, is its own form of rebellion.

To witness is not neutrality. It’s to refuse amnesia. The tyrant’s most important project is to make people doubt the truth, and forget history. The witness who refuses to be hypnotized by propaganda is a resistance fighter.

A tyrant thrives in the fog. He loves confusion, noise, and chaos. But true witnessing is a clean, bright signal.

Shakespeare’s stage showed that tyranny devours itself: Caesar, Macbeth, Claudius, Richard – all meet bloody ends.

By writing down essential truths, by giving them specific form, Shakespeare forged an anchor for future audiences. The tyrant builds on sand; Shakespeare sculpts in marble.

Even in a police state, the lucid gaze that refuses delusion is the beginning of freedom. And then putting the truth into words on the page.

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My art history textbooks are scavenged from a thrift-store. Each morning I commit a tiny sacrilege: ripping out a single page to study at a cafe.

This week I was fascinated by “The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul.”

It’s a “frame tale,” a sequential story within a single canvas. Anthony’s journey (departure, centaur, climax) unfolds in one picture.

I was unfamiliar with this legend of the hermit St. Anthony: apparently he had a divine dream telling him to go further into the wilderness in search of another hermit, St. Paul. Lost in the forest, Anthony met a centaur (!!!) who pointed him in the right direction.

Despite 12 years of Catholic schooling, I’d never heard of saints chatting with centaurs before. It must be true, since many medieval artists recorded the encounter. (Had the nuns mentioned these hybrid creatures I might have paid more attention in Catechism.)

The Dance of Salome (and the subsequent execution of John the Baptist) has also inspired various frame tale paintings.

Other common examples are set in the Garden of Eden, and compress the Book of Genesis into a single canvas.

Such images depict a deterministic cosmos; a divine blueprint where Creation, Temptation, and Fall occur as a fixed chain.

Frame Tale pictures disturb me: they imply predestination. The tragic Expulsion of Adam & Eve is shown only inches away from their Creation sketch.

John’s severed head is already on the platter while Salome is still twirling.

These frame paintings unsettle me: they steal my hope. The Eden painting is a diagram of damnation.

Gazing at the image evokes dread, looking into a cage of inevitability.

In contrast, every time I watch a live stage performance of “Hamlet“ I still find myself hoping that this time the young prince will prevail, and survive the final duel.

In theatre, the “what if?” suspense remains; every performance is another chance. As long as Hamlet’s sword is swinging, a new ending is still possible.

On a canvas, hope resides in the still-wet paint in the artist’s studio, just before the next brushstroke.

I must step out of the painting and seize the brush (or in my case, the ballpoint pen).

I am not the spectator of my life’s story. The present moment is pure possibility, not fated karma.

The unframed story is not pre-destined. It is being drafted fresh, this very day.

And still, I want to meet a centaur.

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I’ve wandered into someone else’s dreamworld, blissfully disoriented. A room full of strange new art leaves me in awe.

Plus a question: “What the hell am I looking at?”

This vertigo came from walking into the new Austin Martin White exhibit at Petzel Gallery.

The largest room is dominated by ruins that seem to be from a Martian landscape: canvases in a red both ancient and radioactive.

After the chaos of raw sensation on that initial visit I was compelled to research the artist and his methods. I wanted insight, that internal “click” that would unlock the artwork.

When I returned to the gallery on Thursday, I had more context: White’s “Composite Ruins” series is his modern riff on 18th Century engravings of Roman ruins by Piranesi.

White’s images are deliberately disturbing due to the neon color choices and an uncanny texture to the paintings.

The paintings are not created by brushstrokes: White draws and cuts stencils on vinyl, then pushes rubbery latex paint through mesh screens. The extruded paint forms the final image, resembling an embroidered tapestry.

White also references art history with a haunting version of Bob Thompson’s 1965 ‘Massacre of Children of Bethel,’ itself inspired by Laurent de la Hyre’s 17th-century work.

Born in Detroit, 1984, over his career White has explored colonialism and caste systems, exposing their unjust assumptions.

Now I can place these new paintings within a grander map: historical layers, the tragic echoes and resonance of the past.

Only by fusing wonder with understanding does art reach its deepest effect. It destabilizes us, and then orients us anew.

Writing about this gallery experience is a crucible for alchemy, blending research with reverie, technical insight with existential vertigo. The final elixir is self-transformation.

The greatest art doesn’t just hang on a wall — it rewires your nervous system.

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NOTES

The Composite Ruin and other paintings shown are all copyright the artist, Austin Martin White.

The Austin Martin White exhibit is open at Petzel Gallery through Oct 18 2025:

https://www.petzel.com/exhibitions/austin-martin-white3

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We each sculpt our world – by default or, if we are fortunate, by design.

Albert Camus began to craft his vision of the world at the site of the Roman ruins at Tipasa in Algeria. His essay, Nuptials at Tipasa, was written as a young man in 1936.

“In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea…”

“I love this life with abandon and wish to speak it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition.”

In contrast, the new world I forged began at age 17 when Simple Minds released their breakthrough album New Gold Dream.

On a tedious bus commute to Dublin each morning I’d listen to the cassette on my Walkman’s dinky foam headphones. From the first wave of hazy guitar and synthesizer chords, euphoria surged through me, and the dull rainy streets were now shining.

The city conjured by their songs is wondrous, a radiant Shambhala. The opening song is Someone Somewhere in the Summertime:

“See me burning slow

Brilliant days

Wake up on brilliant days

Shadows of brilliant ways will

Change all the time

Memories

Burning gold memories

Gold of day memories

Change me in these times”

Where Camus found meaning in the ruins of the Roman past, Simple Minds was looking to the future. The album was a pivotal shift from their darker post-punk origins, and exults in the joy of discovery: “a beautiful morning after a storm,” as singer Jim Kerr described it.

The music creates a vast sonic landscape shaped by crystalline synthesizers, melodic basslines, and textured guitar riffs.

I saw the band in concert for the first time in ‘83 at Phoenix Park, alongside U2. My awkward teenaged self longed for a future, a whole world, soundtracked by this shimmering music.

I learned to frame my life as a negotiation between stark Reality and conscious Awareness - and in that space lies creativity.

“New gold dream

Sun is set in front of me, worldwide on the widest screen

New gold dream

Burning bridge and ecstasy, crashing beats and fantasy.”

In these ordinary moments, on a rainy day, I can decide whether to see gray drizzle or shining liquid silver; whether to move through the world as a passive drone or as an alchemist of wonder. I've always found that music is the perfect catalyst.

I remember my classmate “K” who took her own life, and wish that she'd been able to envision and live in a better world. One where Jim Kerr sings:

“Life throws a cure, everything is possible…”

Camus wrote Return to Tipasa fifteen years after his initial essay, now a weathered rebel who had lived through the Nazi Occupation. He had lost friends executed by the Gestapo.

Before the bus trip to the site, he sat in an Algerian cafe and looked around at fellow diners.

“All I knew was that these men had been young when I was, and that now they were young no longer.”

But once he was at Tipasa again, his spirits lifted:

“In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away.”

“In the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky had never left me. It was this that in the end had saved me from despair.”

In 2022, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the album, Simple Minds performed a UNICEF benefit concert of New Gold Dream in its entirety. All funds went to help children in Ukraine; the band's music still pushing back against the darkness.

Instead of my wonky old cassette, today I can stream a high-def recording of their recent concert. The songs are ever fresh; like the sun on Tipasa, the music offers a world born again in a light always new, forged from brilliant, burning gold.

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Be careful of what you read. As William Burroughs said: “Language is a virus.”

Perhaps you should not read this, because you may be infected by the coded words, which quietly reprogram your brain circuitry.

Do not read this. Especially because I don’t want to let you know how sad I am since my cat died last week. If you stop reading now, then my grief can stay private.

Beware of the language virus, and especially this lyric text. It is a hybrid essay. A monster. It works in fragments, with dream-logic. A viral code that slips past your defenses, and alters your consciousness.

Burroughs used the “cut-up” technique to generate texts that could not be civilized.

My apartment was “home” when it was the place my cats lived. Now that I am alone, the apartment is just a transitional space, an impersonal hotel suite. My old life has been cut-up.

Home was the purring vibrations of the sleeping cat in my lap. Home was a furred weight on my chest in the middle of the night. Now, the apartment is just a void space.

[Insert photo of cat's empty food bowl]

I have no home. I am a ghost haunting the empty apartment. Do not read this. Do not witness my haunting.

When I became interested in writing essays a few years ago, I picked up Brian Dillon’s book “Essayism.” I wanted his tips on literary style in the genre, but was caught off-guard in the middle of the book by this section:

“I was now deep in a depression such as I had not known for almost twenty years. Each day I sat at my desk in an office at the end of the garden and cried and tried to write – tried to write this book – and each day finally gave myself up to fantasies of suicide. …walk up the garden… and pick up a length of electrical extension lead from the shed on my way, with which to hang myself upstairs, through an open hatch to the loft.”

Dillon is “patient zero” for the virus: he mentions suicide in his confessional text, which I read a few years afterwards and became unexpectedly infected, and right now the word suicide is planted like a black flower in your mind too. [This is why you should have stopped reading two minutes ago.]

The noose of language tightens around us before we realize it; words penetrate like tattoo needles, a viral calligraphy under the skin.

In Dillon's case the transmission of the word-virus was unintentional. The comics author Grant Morrison has explored the dangers of weaponized language, its use as a Trojan Horse.

In Morrison’s sci-fi epic “The Invisibles” words are deliberately used by shadowy combatants to hijack people’s perception of reality.

Much of the plot concerns “Key 23,” a viral tool that allows language to directly modify someone else’s consciousness.

In other stories Morrison has directly referenced mourning their own beloved cat.

I will not share my cat’s name or photo – they are private memories. But I’ll show drawings of Morrison’s cat.

Zen says the virus is linguistic thinking itself, and therefore emphasizes meditation, sometimes with koans:

“When I look in the mirror I see my face. Where is the true self?”

A zen koan is a linguistic grenade, sabotage designed to trigger discontinuity in your inner monologue. The text evaporates like mist.

Maybe silence is the first step to quarantine the language virus. Let’s both stop reading a moment…

...

…

…

When my cat lived here the apartment was quiet, but the silence is different now, a vacuum.

And one cannot stay in quarantine forever. Language is inevitable for our species.

The ancient Greeks had a single word, “pharmakon,” that had two opposite meanings: both “poison” and “remedy.”

Plato wrote that the invention of writing was itself a double-edged pharmakon.

So perhaps the language virus can be isolated, and modified into a vaccine.

The careful ritual of writing this essay could serve as my inoculation, where the proper dosage is medicinal. It will be a counter-spell to break up the propaganda language polluting the airwaves.

I sit in a café, take a breath, and write a single sane sentence, and then another.

My cat remains in memory, in the silence of my chest. Home is not the walled structure of the apartment, but instead my daily meditation and writing practice.

[…Read this text as a benediction.]

I spoke to my cat every day. He didn't need words – he just gazed back at me.

My buddy.

* * * * * * * * *

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The 1940s saw the rise of film noir, an era of gritty crime dramas, where a troubled man in a fedora traded quips with the femme fatale just before gunshots rang out.

As a schoolboy I loved those old black-and-white classics starring Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum whenever they aired on TV.

By the time I was old enough to go to R-rated movies in the ‘80s, there was a wave of “neo-noir” films such as Body Heat and Blood Simple. Unlike the ‘40s flicks, modern neo-noir amplified everything – vivid colors, sex, music, violence – into a potent pulp cocktail.

A subset of this genre especially fascinated me: a new type of “nerd noir,” about naive boys drawn into a dark world.

They were updated versions of the Parsifal myth in which the young fool longs to be a Grail Knight and rescue the damsel, but is quite unprepared for the corrupt wasteland he enters.

The prime example was David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.

Nice boy Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) fancies himself an amateur sleuth, and recklessly dives into the unknown. For the first time, I saw someone like myself, a nerdy college student, in a contemporary noir.

The earnest Jeffrey starts as a curious voyeur, and then tumbles into a terrifying netherworld. The unhinged depravity of Dennis Hopper’s character pushed beyond the limits of my innocent imagination.

I remember walking out of the cinema, devastated, utterly disturbed. Like a duckling forever imprinted by its first caretaker, the extraordinary Lynch film shaped me at the moment of peak receptivity.

In Less Than Zero a freshman (Andrew McCarthy) comes home to a neon-and-toxin Los Angeles. While he had escaped to college on the East Coast, his old friends had descended into hedonistic misery.

The noir premise is that his buddy (Robert Downey Jr) is in debt to a drug dealer. The film's visuals and music are steeped in a sensuous ennui, the backdrop for Downey's riveting portrayal of a doomed comrade.

Look – it’s autumn 1987, and this particular young graduate has flown from Dublin and arrived in New York. He doesn’t know anything.

(I still don’t know anything.)

On the subway A-train, crack users fell asleep on the seat next to me, and in the West Village young men walked the streets slowly, hollowed-out from the virus ravaging their organs.

In Bad Influence meek accountant James Spader finds an alpha mentor in Rob Lowe. The amoral Lowe guides nerdy Spader to explore his repressed impulses, until (of course) it all goes too far. The movie is a slick, lurid melodrama, and I watched it many, many times.

The one time I witnessed an armed robbery, it was not at all noir. Rather it was a sunny spring afternoon in busy midtown Manhattan. I was at a large Blimpie’s sandwich restaurant, crowded with office-workers like me on lunch break. Not yet vegan, I was eating my usual tuna-salad on whole wheat, with a bag of potato chips.

Two men approached the front counter, no masks or theatrics, and one slowly produced an automatic pistol and waved it calmly, just to announce what was happening. His partner handed the cashier a brown paper bag and asked for all the cash. The armed man scanned all the seated diners, and our glances briefly met. I felt more puzzlement than fear – this all seemed too casual to be scary.

The gunmen were there-and-gone in under three minutes, as if picking up a takeout order. After they left, I finished eating my sandwich, and went back to the office (where I was a dweeb drafting voltage specs onto blueprints for new franchise restaurants like Taco Bell and Blimpie’s).

I walked the Hell's Kitchen streets where State of Grace was being filmed. Sean Penn is the undercover cop intertwined with the gangland tribe of his old neighborhood.

He tries to save his childhood friend (Gary Oldman) from a spiraling fate. [ln these Parsifal tales, women are reduced to accessory roles, either pure goodness or evil. See the Note at end of essay for alternatives.]

Modern Manhattan was also the setting for a neo-noir Hamlet, where the prince was portrayed by Ethan Hawke as a “slacker detective.” Like myself, he spends hours wandering the aisles of the video-rental store, reciting soliloquies under his breath.

By the time Hamlet was filmed in 1999, Kyle MacLachlan was no longer the fresh young hero – instead he played the scheming uncle, Claudius. This Parsifal had become a corrupt king, a warning to me.

The astonishing power of cinema is that I was far more traumatized by Blue Velvet than I was by facing an armed man during an actual robbery.

The young man who obsessively watched those films seems a different species now. Back then he mistook the aesthetics of darkness for philosophical depth.

Those neo-noir movies were fever dreams, rites of passage, as he charted his own ragged course across the wasteland of early adulthood. Not to find the Grail, but to learn the vastness of his own ignorance.

I was learning to see in the dark.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

NOTE:

Hollywood studios are primarily run by straight white men, so most movies produced reflect their particular anxieties, especially noir. However in the '80s and '90s there were a handful of neo-noir films from other perspectives, that are definitely worth viewing.

Kathryn Bigelow made Blue Steel starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Lili Fini Zanuck made Rush starring Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Black directors Bill Duke and Carl Franklin made great films in this era. Deep Cover stars Laurence Fishburne, and Denzel Washington starred in Devil in a Blue Dress.

And then there is Bound, by The Watchowskis, starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, which I guess is in a category of its own.

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There’s a part of me that is still a 12-year-old boy who wants to live in a Star Trek universe. And so this month I’ve been reading a big stack of books about AI, preparing for the new world ahead.

They fall roughly into three clusters:

1. Narratives about the early days of AI research, the origins of companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind, and the obsessive personalities driving those teams.

2. Cultish “sci-fi” scenarios of possible Advanced AI futures, both good and bad.

3. Skeptical critiques of the current AI giants, questioning their scientific claims, and pointing out the real present-day harms being done by them (environmental damages, labor exploitation, biased data).

1. How We Got Here

For decades AI research had been an academic dead zone, its incremental progress serving to keep it perpetually deprived of funding and top scientists. But in 2010 three young researchers (Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman, and Shane Legg) founded DeepMind in London, with no money – just the audacious goal of creating a human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Hassabis’ utopian motto was “Solve intelligence, and use it to solve everything else.”

They made progress using a “neural network” approach, creating a basic AI that taught itself how to win at Atari videogames through reinforcement learning. The game demo impressed Google management, which bought DeepMind in 2014 and supplied the team with far more resources.

This step alarmed Google’s rivals in Silicon Valley, and in 2015 a paranoid Elon Musk agreed to fund Sam Altman’s alternative project, OpenAI, thus triggering an AI arms race. Soon Microsoft and the other tech giants started allocating vast resources to a handful of competing teams, and major technical breakthroughs began to cascade.

Most notably, LLMs (Large Language Models) made dramatic advances in predicting the appropriate context for conversational text, and the AI then generating surprisingly useful responses. OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public in November 2022, which became an immediate sensation. Suddenly humans could talk to an alien mind (or had the illusion of doing so).

2. THE SCI-FI CULT

Reading about all the personalities involved in these research teams, one is struck by their similarities: cohorts of obsessed young men convinced that they could build an ASI (Artificial SuperIntelligence) that would either transform human civilization into a technological paradise, or drive our species to extinction.

These AI pioneers are not the typical business entrepreneurs just marketing a shiny new vacuum-cleaner. Instead they often sound like religious zealots with messianic visions, espousing cultish sci-fi philosophies about the spread of humanity throughout the galaxy.

For example, here are a range of typical quotes from Sam Altman:

"Most of the world's problems... could be solved by really advanced AGI. We could solve climate change, we could cure all disease, we could have infinite energy.”

"In a decade, the amount of intelligence we have on Earth will increase by a factor of a million.”

"My worst fears are that we cause significant — or even extinction-level — harm to the world. And if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”

"I expect AGI to be the most powerful technology humanity has yet invented. I expect it to create a world of abundance, where everyone has access to whatever they need, and the existential risks posed by resource scarcity, including those leading to climate change, are largely mitigated.”

Altman is not a rare outlier – many of the other prime players in the AI field have made similarly bold sci-fi claims, insisting that our species is on the verge of cataclysmic change (for good or ill).

These bizarre perspectives help to explain how we got here: the priests who founded DeepMind & OpenAI needed faith in a transcendent vision if they were going to pursue what seemed quite impossible back in 2010. They were dreaming of an AI God.

3. SKEPTICAL CRITIQUES

Finally, I read books by folks who challenge many of the scientific and social assumptions of the AI priesthood.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell points out that despite recent advances, current AI models are quite brittle, easily confused, and only excel in very narrow domains. She believes we are very far from creating an Artificial General Intelligence that will be competent across a broad spectrum of real-world functions.

Karen Hao’s book, Empire of AI, looks at OpenAI and its rivals through the lens of colonialism. Rather than “saving humanity” as Altman claims, she says that they are just profit-driven corporations exploiting cheap labor, embedding biases in their data, and causing terrible environmental damage.

In order for “deep learning” to occur, AI models have to be trained on vast databases, primarily of text and images scraped from the internet. Much of this trawled material contains the worst of human content: racist, violent, and sexist. As a result, AI firms do make some attempts to filter the data. Hao has interviewed low-paid workers in Kenya employed by OpenAI to read through this vile material (child abuse scenarios etc) for hours each day, causing them emotional stress and insomnia.

Hao notes other hidden costs, such as the environmental impact of the gargantuan data centers required:

“AI computing globally could use more energy than all of India.”

These data centers, often located in poor communities, require vast amounts of water to keep the systems cooled, harming the local ecosystems.

When asked about these grim climate damages, Altman and Hassabis both make the same claim: after they’ve built a SuperIntelligent AI, it will solve the climate crisis for us. We should simply trust the priests, and have faith in the New God they are summoning.

4. THE COMING STORM

Any prediction that I make today (May 31 2025) is certain to be wrong. I don’t have the technical expertise to say whether we’ll have an Artificial SuperIntelligence within the next decade, or this century, or ever.

I’ll admit that the 12-year-old boy in me would still love to see a luminous Caretaker AI & its angelic robots guiding humanity into global abundance. But my 60-year-old self has a more jaded perspective, and lower expectations.

Multiple specialty-AI agents will become embedded in every system we use daily. Rivalries between corporations and nations (USA, China) will likely ensure rapid deployment to achieve tribal dominance, at the expense of safety measures or ethical concerns.

Whatever their benevolent public marketing claims, AI systems will ultimately reflect the needs of their powerful creators. (For example, Elon Musk eventually feuded with Sam Altman, and is now developing the Grok AI that aligns with his own distinct interests.)

There’s a storm coming, a longterm messy conflict between powerful, wealthy forces (corporate and political), leaving us to navigate the turbulent weather. There are no external saviors. We’ll each have to find an internal anchor, paying attention to the rapid changes, and highlight the hidden costs, to meet the best and worst of what's to come with equanimity and civic responsibility.

(And okay, getting Star Trek's holographic AI doctor would be pretty cool.)

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In December 2023, artist LuYang's dynamic images took over all 92 video billboards in New York’s Times Square.

The kaleidoscopic spectacle was their exploration of the tension between the meditative self and the hyperreal fantasia of consumer modernity.

LuYang (born Shanghai 1984) has made a series of artworks using gaming technology, starring their androgynous digital avatar “Doku,” modeled on a 3D-scanned copy of the artist’s own face.

I always want to be surprised by art, jolted out of my conventional worldview. I was immediately intrigued by LuYang's 2022 video DOKU the Self, a 36-minute 3D animation that I first saw on a big-screen at the Rubin Museum, where it attracted a large audience, including many fascinated children.

The video is inspired by a personal experience LuYang had on a turbulent flight during a lightning storm that nearly resulted in a crash.

This near-death event acts as a catalyst for their avatar Doku's mythic journey: just as Dante travelled through the realms of the Christian Otherworld, LuYang’s clone moves through the various Buddhist realms of heaven and hell.

The work features six dazzling reincarnations of Doku, each dancing in one of the realms of samsara — the karmic cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Each domain is made vivid by LuYang’s CGI landscapes.

The god-version of Doku in the celestial dimension may be relatively happier than the damned incarnation in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, but is still attached to an ego-self, caught in the Wheel of Existence.

In the climax, Doku is savaged by vultures, ascends into the stratosphere, and finally disintegrates into crystalline particles. The character’s voiceover asks: what remains of the self?

But of course, there's irony here. Doku the avatar is just a set of pixels on a screen – it has no true presence or sentient awareness. What we witness on-screen is not a fellow Being but a glamorous shell – intricately fabricated, but devoid of heart. Doku has no essential depth; it is just a mesmerizing 3D puppet.

Yet I am moved by Doku’s death. LuYang has essentially dramatized their own extinction.

This tension sets up the work’s paradox: techno artifice vs. deep stillness. The dazzling video is a glittering empty spectacle, but it still evokes a tender response in me, a lucid meditative witness.

Watching the travails of Doku, where is my own awareness, as this mammalian body ages each day and slowly deteriorates?

Standing in Times Square, immersed within an open cathedral of flashing lights & noise, there is an inner hush – the calm center of the ever-spinning Wheel.

*** All artwork shown is copyright the artist LuYang ***

NOTES:

Video of the artist viewing the Times Square billboard display: Lu Yang on December 2023 Midnight Moment: "DOKU: Digital Reincarnation"

Link to the full 36-minute Doku video: http://luyang.asia/2023/05/20/doku-the-self/

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As a seven-year-old boy the highlight of Sunday evening was a new episode of Columbo.

Every case began with the Perfect Murder, presented to us in detail on-screen. The killer would carefully prepare the phony ransom note, arrange a fake phone call, or secretly edit the CCTV footage.

Who would ever guess that they had driven to the victim’s house in a borrowed ice-cream vendor truck?

They were Important People who always had the Perfect Alibi (with many witnesses).

Murder was their entitlement. The killer was always oh-so-clever, and confident of their victory.

And then Lieutenant Columbo would shamble onto the scene. He had a stinky cigar, a sad basset hound called “Dog,” and a rumpled raincoat.

Columbo would have to apologize to the suspect for walking on their nice carpet with his muddy shoes. They were Very Important People, and he was sorry to interrupt – he just had to politely ask them a few Inconvenient Questions.

What happened to the pink carnation that was in the lapel of the conductor’s tuxedo earlier in the evening?

The Very Important Person would smile, and give polished answers to Columbo. They were successful Big Shots and he was just a funny little man asking irrelevant questions.

What were those strange scratches notched into the whiskey bottle found near the victim’s body?

Like Columbo, I knew that adults were lying to me, even though I had no proof yet.

In school the nuns said we had to obey the Ten Commandments, and so I asked about the Seventh: Thou shalt not commit adultery. What was that? Sister Muriel waved me away and told me not to be concerned, that it was a sin only adults could commit. But Lt. Columbo would not have accepted an evasive answer.

Why didn’t the voice message on the answering machine also record the noon chimes of the grandfather clock?

Mrs. Carroll was the gray-haired widow who lived in one of the downstairs apartments. She sat on the park bench most days, in her gravy-stained dress, and asked everyone passing by “Have you seen Tommy?” My friend Shawn’s mother said we should avoid Mrs. Carroll because she was “senile,” and it might be contagious. But I think Columbo would want to know Mrs. Carroll’s story and help her find Tommy.

The victim was a Texas oil baron who only listened to country music – so why was his car radio tuned to the classical-music station?

When reading the story of Hansel & Gretel, it wasn’t the witch that scared me – my nagging question was: why had the children been abandoned in a dark forest in the first place?

Unlike other police, Columbo didn’t carry a gun, just a small notebook and a pencil. Like me, his only tool in this strange world of Big Important People was observation.

At last, the critical scene would come when Columbo would confront the suspect. He’d ask “How do you explain this?” and from his pocket pull the cracked wristwatch, or the stolen key, or the forgotten postage stamp on the envelope.

Faced with the pesky evidence, the murderer would bow their head, smile sadly in defeat, and confess… adding that they should not have underestimated the rumpled detective.

I could sleep well that Sunday night, safe and comforted, knowing that if you keep asking Inconvenient Questions, the world could be put right.

Unless that one question kept me awake: who had abandoned Hansel & Gretel in the deep woods?

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I visited MoMA this week to see the major Jack Whitten retrospective. The exhibit takes up the whole top floor, in a series of galleries laid out in chronological eras from the 1960s till his death in 2018.

Walking the galleries is like traveling through Whitten’s lovingly-crafted dream realm over the decades.

Whitten was born a coal miner’s son in Alabama in 1939, and grew up in what he called the brutal “American apartheid” of the Jim Crow South. Until he came to Manhattan at age 21 his only formal education was in racially segregated classrooms.

Although he was initially part of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York, he decided early on that he needed to go beyond the white European/American art tradition, and forge a new path of his own.

This led him to constantly experiment with new materials, where he could work outside Western classical guidelines. His love of hard-bop jazz music provided one source of inspiration.

His 60s works may be abstract, but the turmoil of the Civil Rights struggle is still evident. He said that abstraction was a distillation process that allowed him to get to the essence of an experience. “Abstraction allows for a multiplicity of readings. It doesn't shut you down, it opens you up.”

He had seen a museum exhibit of African nkisi nkondi ritual figures, which have nails driven into them to endow them with powerful spirits. Whitten adopted this concept in many of his own sculptures.

Whitten had a lifelong interest in science, and by the ‘70s had started referring to his studio as his “laboratory” for performing experiments with new materials.

He used the new acrylic paints that were now available, experimenting with combs, squeegees, and large rakes on his canvases. He was also invited by Xerox to try out their latest equipment.

Whitten carefully noted comments on his “experiments” in daily journals. As an engineer and science geek myself, I love the dedicated methodology shown in these logs. He was exploring the unknown as a curious researcher.

In the 80s he began his Monolith series — large works in homage to Black cultural figures. He would cut dried paint slabs into small tiles – his "tesserae." He meticulously arranged these into large intricate mosaics.

The tesserae were described by him as pixels, or as DNA – systems for encoding vast amounts of information within a complex structure.

The later gallery rooms with these large mosaics have a dense mythic energy.

Photos don't do justice to the way that light reflects from the tiles on these Monolith works.

In his final years, he still kept his interest in new technology: inspired by the design of the iPhone screen, he created an amusing Apps for Obama piece.

For me, sitting down in the last gallery looking at his final work, there is the sense of having completed a profound journey through a rich imaginative life. Jack Whitten resolutely followed his own North Star for decades, an example I’d love to follow.

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. . NOTE: all artworks shown are copyright the Estate of Jack Whitten

Yesterday I created a hybrid East/West oracle: a random I Ching hexagram, paired with a random Tarot card. The question I posed was “What now?”

The hexagram thrown up was #17, Sui, usually translated as “Following.” The tarot card was The Chariot, taken from the Mary-El Tarot deck.

I looked in my reference books for commentary on the #17 hexagram. From Hilary Barnett: Energy flows strongly into life's landscapes, bringing a great creative drive, from the source through towards fulfillment. Following it means a willingness to honor the flow and align actions with it.

Stephen Karcher’s interpretation is: Follow the stream – insert yourself into the flow, and let it move you. The hexagram also reminds me of the Joseph Campbell motto: “follow your bliss.”

But there could be darker meanings to Following. The magnificent opening song on the debut U2 album is “I Will Follow.”

Over the years Bono has offered various interpretations of the song, including that “the song is a suicide note,” about a teenager yearning to follow a loved one to the grave:

If you walk away, walk away

I walk away, walk away, I will follow

If you walk away, walk away

I walk away, walk away, I will follow

And during yoga this morning, the radio played Bob Dylan:

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

So the oracle could be advising me to join a magnetic cult leader shaking his rattle.

The original image of The Chariot card is taken from a Roman victory parade. By tradition, the card is taken to symbolize the calmly rational Self controlling its powerful passions so as to drive forward.

In this deck however, the artist Mary White was inspired by Nordic myths of the wolfpack. There are no reins here – this woman is happy to follow her pack. In this case, all elements of the psyche (Passion, Reason, the Will, and the True Self) travel in natural alignment. (The image also reminds me of the La Loba folktale, popularized as “women who run with the wolves.”)

So anyway, returning to my original query: “What now?”

Looking at The Chariot from the lens of the #17 hexagram, the term flow comes to mind again, and this alternate version of a surfing charioteer:

In Buddhism there is a key meditative stage known as “stream-entry,” where the seeker has reached an irreversible momentum that will ultimately lead to liberation. By deepening their awareness and practicing virtuous habits, the seeker is carried along by the flowing river to maturity.

So a possible answer from this East/West combination oracle could be: “Align with the Flow to move Forward.”

That sounds like pretty good life advice, I guess.

Though I could use some of that wild wolf fierceness too.

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