I bought the final Tin Tin book "Tin Tin and Alph-Art," in which Herge explores chicanery in the modern art world. The drawings are simple sketches, quite compelling--although they are not the finished colored images one is used to nor is the story complete. However there are some fascinating notes made by Herge suggesting its possible directions.

Intriguingly out of character is the suggested plotline in which Capt. Haddock turns "artsy" and makes Marlinspike a hangout for his eccentric new friends, takes up the guitar, exhibits modern art...

18th Avenue, Booklyn, NYC, late October, 2010

What is a "fine art" photograph (as opposed to a "vernacular" photograph)?

The distinction is based upon context of presentation more than aesthetics.

While a professional photographer has greater technical ability than an amateur, there's a more level technical playing field than is the case with painting, for example.

A tourist snapshot can be more interesting than a professional photograph of a similar scene, provided the snapshot contains an interesting image.

Admittedly, these thoughts are neither original or profound. Just jotting them down!

I have followed the unfolding story about the discovery by one Rick Norsigian of the supposed Ansel Adams glass plates--and watched his claims steadily dissolve.

Now there is news about the discovery of a long lost Michelangelo pieta painting.

Unlike the Norsigian plates, there does seem to be reasonable hope for it. Actually I was struck by the painting.

The problem with these breathless media-fed art discovery stories: the focus is primarily on the putative money involved.

About a week or so ago I borrowed a book of Hemingway's complete short stories from the library. By coincidence around the same time I pulled off our shelf our old copy of The Stranger by Camus.

As I began reading both at once it struck me that the elegiac tone of both writers seemed quite similar.

I recently recalled an incident involving Jerry Rosen. This was back not much after my first meeting him in the early 70s.

Jerry told me to watch an interview with him to be broadcast on local television.

Watching it I remember being stunned because he was simply speaking the heartfelt and whole truth--which differed diametrically from normal television speak. Normal television speak is a skein of fabrications, more or less. Normal television speak doesn't inolve giving voice to the reality of American life.

It is the first and perhaps last time I've ever witnessed someone being truthful on television.

I may have spoken too soon when (earlier post) I noted how limited is our diet.

Actually, we've recently added a new dish to our repertoire: tacos.

Each taco consists of 1 Mexican corn tortilla, red kidney beans (made from the dry beans, not canned), avocado pieces, hacked white meat chicken, salsa and yogurt.

The salsa is probabaly the magic ingredient. It's Bonnie's own recipe mixing tomato, onion, spices, cucumber...

These tacos are incredibly good. Eating them is perfect for either forgetting one's woes or celebrating something positive.

The other night I watched a movie called "Cadillac Records." It's the story of Chess Records, the famous independent label that introduced Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Etta James, etc.

One of the early scenes depicts Alan Lomax appearing in the fields to record Muddy Waters, then a Mississippi sharecropper.

It was kind of disconcerting to me because the actor playing Lomax didn't look much like him and hadn't his presence. Alan was a big man, with a vestigial Texas drawl. This actor looked and talked like, I don't know, maybe a less than brilliant New Jersey car salesman.

Of course it's not a flaw in the movie, unless you happened to have known Alan.

I had just recovered from that when there was a scene with, of all people, Eric Bogosian playing Alan Freed the disc jockey!

Is the world such a small place that I can't even be left in peace to watch a movie anymore?

Yesterday I began re-reading Jerry's magnum opus autobiography: Cold Eye, Warm heart.

I was grateful that Jerry could see it through to publication before he died. I think this may be the book he most wanted and needed to write.

To read it is to have him here again speaking in his familiar voice.

I wish I could drop him an e-mail to tell him how much I appreciate it.

On Sunday I received a note from his wife, Marijke. that my old friend Jerry Rosen had died on Friday, August 13.

He succumbed following a long battle with leukemia and had been in seclusion for a while now.

I will miss Jerry. Life without him will feel measurably more hollow.

It is some comfort that I can reread his books if I wish to hear his voice again. I will always be guided by him, the thought of how he would have reacted to the various things that happen in life. But no more pleasure in telling him about these eventualities in person!

A great friend.

In writing my post on our eating habits I completely forgot to mention that on Sunday we take a break from our weekday routine and have an omelet for breakfast--which I make in our non-stick silicon-coated frying pan.

We're having a serious heat wave here in NYC. I'm sitting in my office (I should say our office) staying cool, restoring a drawing and eating occasional chunks of watermelon.

Bonnie's in the other room preparing our set lunch: steamed fish, steamed broccoli and steamed fresh corn.

We are definitely creatures of habit when it comes to eating, totally unadventurous. Except on Saturday when we may go totally wild. The last couple of Saturdays I've been panbroiling a salmon steak. It's still fish! And Bonnie has been really pushing her boat out by pan broiling a small piece of steak.

We only have two or three other set meals. Oatmeal and banana for breakfast. Larger tossed salad with chicken pieces for dinner. Or noodles with peanut sauce and chicken pieces + small tossed salad. We generally avoid eating red meat.

We've made creating these few meals a fine art. I think Bonnie deserves the lion's share of the credit. She has an impeccable sense of proportion in mixing ingredients. Her dressings for both chicken and salad, based upon Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, mustard, honey are something worth eating. One feels satisfied without being heavy--and spiritually uplifted.

We rarely alter our diet because these meals taste so good. And we have candlelight and music every night.

I am fully dependent and can no longer imagine an evening without some of this Bonnie-made food.

It's strange that we do so little experimenting because we're actually quite interested in dining. Bonnie gets cookbooks out of the library. We read and discuss the recipes. For what larger purpose I can't say.

I just finished re-reading "Main Street" this July 4 weekend. I had first read it as a high school student.

But in the intervening years I was fortunate to meet and become friends with Rex and Carole Wiederanders, whose life together bore some resemblance to that of Will and Carol Kennicott.

Rex was one of the main physicians in Williston, North Dakota; Will occupied the same position in fictional Gopher Prairie.

I once visited them in Williston for an extended stay and had the opportunity meet their friends and absorb the town's atmosphere. It was a genuine "Gopher Prairie" experience. I had dinner at the Kiwanis Club, went duck hunting, got a full dose of midwestern theology from the local clergy. Rex even allowed me to observe when he performed a hip replacement on an obese middle-aged farmer's wife. I'll never forget him slicing through the thick layer of fat and peeling it back so he could work.

Rex and Carole were conservative politically and, while not Bible pounders, made clear where their religious sympathies lay. They disliked long haired folk and rock music. Not to mention Indians (whom they thought shiftless). Possibly they hated Swedes as well. They were quite adamantly opposed to anyone who transgressed against their sense of the proprieties. Rex more so than Carole. Like many people who hold starched traditional views, they were generous in tolerating in their personal friends considerable freedom of action and thought.

They greatly admired art and artists--and here we found much common ground.

Carole developed cancer and required a mastectomy. Rex performed it.

Rex's young son, Carole's stepson, was murdered while away at college.

Carole died before Rex. Rex was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and retired to Arizona where he died around 2005.

Rex wrote some books, which will live after him in a manner of speaking until they disappear from the market place. Although, given the internet, that could take a good long while!

"Main Street" has forever changed for me--due to having known Rex and Carole.

I had no idea that Ronald Neame was still living, so when I read about his death last week I was doubly startled. He died at 99. He was known for directing many British film classics. For me the greatest will always be "The Horse's Mouth." But that's personal. Others are more widely viewed as greater.

Identified a sculpture for someone the other day. It was a Cycladic figure playing a double flute, dating to around 2500 BCE.

I have admired Cycladic figures for many years. I was first taken with them as a teenager when I saw one at the Met. They have some of the mystery of the Easter Island monoliths, but a greater delicacy of design. They seem to "stand-in" for humanity in a very potent way.

A hot, quiet Saturday morning. We're going to the 26th Street fleamarket today, leaving in a few minutes. Just thought I'd check in. Depending upon the mood I'm in the fleamarket can either seem to me a wonderland of discoveries or repellant piles of junk.

There's a new memoir out by Patti Smith called "Just Kids." The primary theme is her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, from their meeting in the late 1960s until his death in 1989.

Bonnie brought it home and I've been kind of reading it "over her shoulder" as it were.

From what I've read, the writing seems to me a bit stilted. It deals in good part with the inner feelings of Patti Smith in response to people and events. Some of her feelings, as she recounts them in retrospect, appear overly romanticized. She views herself, and wishes to be understood, as the child of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Perhaps someting of a "bright teenager" wish? Anyway, that's the book she chose to write. Who am I to naysay?

But I noticed one passage where she recounts a visit she and Mapplethorpe had paid to one of Charles Henri Ford's literary soirees at his Dakota apartment. In reviewing it she comments that Charles seemed better suited to the old days in Paris. He had been a member of the Gertrude Stein set and knew many key artistic and literary folk of the era.

That was funny because Bonnie and I were invited to tea by Charles, some 20 years later. The tea and cake was graciously served by his Nepalese butler Indra. After leaving we discussed how Charles seemed better suited to the old days in Paris. An almost word-for-word repetition of Patti Smith's comment.

I suppose it was fairly obvious and many people may have commented on it before and after us or Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe!

I made a discovery while researching some art on the internet. I suppose it's of little or no significance, just petty gossip and way past it's sell-by date, but here goes.

Bonnie and I were good friends with the filmmaker Emile De Antonio in the 1980s. "De" [pronounced DEE, as his friends called him] died in 1989. De had made a number of important documentaries [including "Point of Order"] and was very knowledgeable in contemporary art. He had been instrumental in advising Warhol, among others.

A just recalled aside: De wrote a treatment for a film, basing the main characters on Bonnie and me. Martin Sheen had shown an interest in playing me. Like so many film projects, it came to naught.

A man of rare wit, education and insight, it was always a pleasure to talk with De. Our conversations about art were among the most valuable I have had. De had produced a classic film called "Painters Painting," using direct cinema techniques to document some of the major figures of the New York School.

De and his wife Nancy lived on East 6th Street, in a house I presume he owned. We visited it often and had dinner with them. Their downstairs tenant was the well-known painter/filmmaker Alfred Leslie.

Anyway, it turns out that shortly after De died Nancy took up with Alfred Leslie and is still his live-in companion today. So something must have been brewing for a while.

We never picked up on it. Although I can imagine that De might have been a bit of a handful. I well recall his bottle of Aqua Vitae on ice and loaded rifle at the ready!

We had completely lost touch with Nancy, as our relationship was almost exclusively with De.

As I said, this couldn't mean much to anyone other than ourselves.

Mother's Day passed quietly today. Neither of our mothers are still living so we remembered them each in our own way. Bonnie burned incense. I overcooked a pot roast.

Great Neck, Long Island, where I grew up in the 60s, was haunted by the ghost of Nazi Germany. It was a mostly affluent Jewish enclave. The middle-aged residents believed they were secure. But there was an undercurrent of uneasiness. If Nazi Germany, or something like it, should rise again all bets were off. I think there was a small voice whispering to them that one could never be certain.

Nazi Germany was kind of an all-purpose bete noire. It symbolized the worst circumstances one could imagine. Therefore invoking its spectre could provide some comfort, because nothing happening to you in Great Neck could ever be so bad as the same thing happening to you in Nazi Germany.

Stubbing your toe in Nazi Germany was worse than having a stroke in Great Neck, Long Island.

"My bursitis is playing up again...but at least I'm not living in Nazi Germany."

"My wife ran off with her podiatrist and my business is bankrupt...but at least it's not happening in Nazi Germany."

Nazi Germany gave people some hope that maybe life's crises could be resolved.

Vince Angelo died this week. Angelo's "The Angels" was one of the early doo-wop groups. Born in Hoboken in 1938 he made his first record in 1956. The A-side was "I Can't Wait (Can You?)." The B-side song was a marriage proposal to his 16 year old girlfriend Theresa Ciccolini. It became a huge teen hit. The chorus: "It'll be so fine/under stars above/when I make you mine/to treasure our love."

It created a stir when fans later learned that "The Angels," supposedly a quartet, was actually Angelo alone, who overdubbed the other parts.

Vince and Theresa married and the marriage lasted until his death. But his music career didn't and he opened a roofing company in New Jersey, from which he retired in 1999.

The couple had two children: Johnny and Lana, named after Johnny Stompanato and Lana Turner. Stompanato had been stabbed to death by Turner's daughter just a week before Vince and Theresa's wedding. The couple considered it a good omen.

Here is a fragment from a newly discovered 1888 letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. It was written during the period Vincent and Paul Gauguin shared lodgings at Arles:

"....I've had enough tsouris from that meshuggeneh Gauguin to last me a lifetime. I need this? He's always going on about moving to Tahiti. Tahiti, shmahiti. So move already! But last night I told him not to leave me in the lurch on the rent we owe for the house. What does he think? I can sublet midseason? Anyway we had words and Gauguin stormed out. Probably went to drink absinthe with some nafka. Came home early this morning.

Tonight I'm going to serve a nice gedempte fleisch and try to smooth things over..."

Some scholars now suggest this proves once and for all Van Gogh was Jewish, something that has been in dispute for many years.

From Mel Brooks:

"You're standing in front of two movie theaters. One is showing a movie called The Typhoon and the other has It's Drizzling. Which are you going to pay to see?"

I can't think of anything to blog about today, except the fact that I can't think of anything to blog about.

Bonita's interest in his work led me in the 90s to read Michel Foucault and about him. I got a sense of where he was going generally but, to be candid, I never could muster the patience to follow his work all the way home. Although what I did manage to work though at the very least provided some cogent reinforcment of my natural suspicion of all institutions.

But there was one Foucault anecdote that has remained with me. In the early 1960s Foucault was teaching at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. The Communist philosopher Roger Garaudy also came to teach there--and he and Foucault ended up at serious loggerheads. I believe they even had physical altercations.

Finally in frustration Garaudy demanded to know the reason for Foucault's animosity. Was it personal?

Foucault replied: "I have nothing against you personally, just against stupidity!"

I just thought of perfect names for two Icelandic brothers: "Gad" and "Egad."

From pretentious overpriced restaurants to loathsome Broadway musicals to books by academic divorcees on voyages of self-discovery in Italy, the New York Times breathlessly champions everything I think meretricious in our culture.

I'm coming to believe that the editors of the Times know my taste and deliberately try to insult it!

It seems to me that the majority of literary folk who form opinions about Sinclair Lewis acknowledge that he was a writer of considerable accomplishment. But their praise is often qualified by an enumeration of his personal flaws and literary shortcomings.

H.L. Mencken first met Lewis at a New York party, which the Smart Set editor had attended with George Jean Nathan. Mencken's initial reaction to Lewis was less than kind. Lewis bragged loudly about his new novel [Main Street] and his behavior was generally boorish. But back at the Smart Set offices Mencken pulled out an advance copy of Main Street that was lying around. Mencken had only gotten part way though it before telegramming Nathan: "That idiot has written a masterpiece!"

There's little question that most of his novels don't measure up to the standards of his great 1920's works. One can argue the merits of Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth. And one may take or leave his stories written for the magazines.

Still, I've long held that an immigrant need read only three classics to understand what makes America tick: Democracy in America by Tocqueville, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Veblen and Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.

Many years ago, when I was young, reckless and hanging around in all the wrong sort of company a junkie I met gave me some street survival advice: if you're about to be mugged, act as if you're crazy in the head. It will put the muggers entirely off their game. Too much uncertainty as to how you'll respond to risk it.

Nobody's as yet tried to mug me, but I've always believed this to be an example of pure folk wisdom and have secretly hoped for an opportunity to measure its effect.

Although, come to think of it, why should I listen to advice from a junkie?

I think he had read my blog entry regarding the Candlelight Restaurant...anyway, an older friend wrote to me about eating at the Automat in the Bronx in the 1950s. We also ate at the Automat, the Fresh Meadows, Long Island branch. The Automat was operated by Horn & Hardart, which also operated retail shops ["Less Work for Mother!"] purveying their Automat-style food. We regularly had food at home purchased from the Great Neck branch of the shop. Wonderful gooey, middle-of-the-road food. Of all the dishes my mother brought home I most distinctly recall the macaroni and cheese. Don't ask me why.

This made me think of another Great Neck restaurant playing a significant role in my childhood: "Hamburger Express." This was a counter style burger spot. It's gimmick was a model railway built into the counter. Your hamburger would arrive via Lionel railway! It was rather a dazzling sales gimmick. No child could resist the sheer romance ot it! The rattle of the train, the steam whistle blowing, the crackle of sparks...the hamburger on its own flatcar gliding to rest right before you!

I grew up in Great Neck, Long Island in the 1960s. At that time our family dining spot of choice, for special occasions, was Patricia Murphy's Candlelight Restaurant in Manhasset. They were famous for their popover rolls, distributed from baskets by gingham clad waitresses. I notice these popovers are still mentioned enthusiastically on the internet. For good reason.

The other day I was recalling to my wife, Bonita, a typical Candlight menu--at least what I think I remember of one. I'd start out with a "heart of iceberg lettuce" and Russian Dressing. My entree was chopped steak and gravy with potatoes au gratin and string beans. Dessert: a strawberry parfait.

My father had a preference for starting out with the tomato juice cocktail, moving on to broiled scallops, then lemon meringue pie for dessert.

It was unashamedly comfort food. Very American. Very good, in fact.

It seems like it was only later that the average run of upper middle class American diners developed a penchant for self-consciously European bistro or trattoria food accompanied by amusing little wines.

During World War II the artist Jean Arp had an exhibition in London. When he arrived in London for the opening he was delighted by seemingly how well his dealer had promoted him. All over London there were posters announcing his show. He was disappointed when he learned that the posters actually signified A.R.P. [Air Raid Precaution] .

In his 1922 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" T.S. Eliot wrote: "...the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates...."

I first encountered this phrase about 25 years ago. Since then I have come to more fully appreciate its applicability to the lives of many artists.

Most recently, a few days ago, it came back to me when, at loose ends, I pulled Stefan Zweig's biography of Balzac off our bookshelf and leafed through it.

How well Eliot's separation principle applies to Balzac. A writer of almost supernatural acuity was in his non-authorial life prone to fatal miscalculations, a first-class stumblebum!

Chuang Tzu and a disciple were crossing a foot bridge. Chuang Tzu notice the fish swimming past below and commented: "Being in their natural element and behaving as is natural for them, unencumbered by conflict, the fish feel truly happy." The disciple challenged Chuang Tzu: "How do you know how fish feel? You are not a fish!" To which Master Chuang replied: "You are not me. How do you know I don't know how fish feel?"

I was born on Morton Street in Greenwich Village, New York. At that time, within close proximity dwelt a disproportionate concentration of the world's prominent artists, writers and assorted intelligentsia.

My parents recognized that this was an unsuitable environment in which to raise a child. When I was a year old, they moved us to the suburbs.

They were thus able to shield me from geniuses for more than seventeen years. I am grateful. Who knows what might have resulted had I, an impressionable youth, chanced to encounter e.e. cummings or Marcel Duchamp on the way to the grocery store.

Well, I've reluctantly had to concede (to myself) that I'll never be famous or even notable in a minor way, never rich or even modestly well-off. So what else to do but create a blog!