An Ekphrastic, by me:

The distance between Jerusalem and Jaffa is 42 miles.

According to Masollino, that long walk

did not deter St. Peter, from warping time

.

and space:

.

Resurrecting dead Tabitha,

in Jaffa, and also

Healing the cripple

at Jerusalem’s temple gate,

Simultaneous in that Florentine piazza,

where, in the far background,

just this side of the vanishing point,

someone’s ape crawls to the end of his tether

on an upper room's window ledge.

.

A minute detail so faint not likely noticed

by the Carmelite monks and nuns

in the Brancacci Chapel's

Quattrocento half light.

.

The question remains for psychoanalysis:

Of all pictures, why did Freud put down his cigar,

pick up a hammer, then drive that nail

to hang these miracles on his his parlor wall

at 19 Berggassee, the year of the Gentiles' Lord, 1910.

Random note exhumed from under other random notes on my desk:
"When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling
And you will sing "Vita bella"

Had a brief conversation with a college student yesterday about AI. He said the feeling around campus is they don't like it and find it less reliable than Wikipedia. As for myself, researching stuff in great depth, I find that its SuperGoogle. With will browse through the peer review journals in JSTOR in seconds.

He said it tends to produce answers from unreliable sources on the internet. so much so that if you ask the same question twice or three times, you get different and sometimes contradictory answers.

Wikipedia is okay, but for me it's only good when you want to learn something about a subject you know little about. It could be that's its sufficient for undergraduate research, or that AI is bad for subjects I don't write about in science and technical fields, or politics.

Yesterday, Claude got something really wrong that I was not specifically asking for. I was only wanting to know about the time of year when Michealangelo died in Rome and Florentines stole his body and brought it "home".
Claude gave me the february date, and then elaborated with a narrative of carriage having to cross the Apennine Mountains. No! These mountains run up and down Italy, not across it. Both Rome and Florence are well west to the range. That's basic.

So maybe its just the basic stuff AI is bad at.

I'm turning from Freud to John Ruskin, who was the most prominent "public intellectual" of the 19th Century.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
John Ruskin was an English polymath – a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as art, architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology, botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth. Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale ...."

I'm reading his little guide to Florence: "Mornings in Florence". He is best know for his detailed description and analysis of art and archetecture. He takes that interest with him to florence and moves across the city as a guide to would be travelers, schooling them on the proper ways to observe paitings, sculpture and architecture.

Raised in a victorian evangelical household where he was made to read the entire bible aloud with his mum correcting him with each flub of intonation, he was so fucked up.

I'd say he is most famous for is failure to perform on his wedding night, or wanting to, for in the weeks and months to follow before his wife filing for divorce.

He would eventually declare himself "unconverted". He was that when he was observing art in florence. I didn't expect this, but even after his claim to have become "unconverted" he seems to be as disgusted by art shaped by rennaissace humanism as he was of the sight of his wife's body.

He recoils from Ghirlandaio to seek the comfort of Giotto. It's always Giotto this and Giotto that in Florence. He deconstructs the humanistic presence in florence, and retreats the sanctuary of pre-renaissance art, and urges his readers to do the same. It makes me sad for him. So fucked up.

No way am I Freudian, but I've lately taken an interest in the narative arc in his life and his-life long interest in the classics and art history. Freud and Jung had this awful falling out. Freud struggled to present himself as a man of science, all his theories supposedly grounded on observable behavior of his patients who disclosed similiar patterns of of early sexual experience and desire. Those two things enabled him to build a professional and intellectual community, or "kingdom" without risk of being dismissed at kabalaist "Jewish Science" mysticism, German-Austrians even had an anti-Semetic word for it: Judenwissenshaft.

Jung was generation younger, and a non-Jew. Freud was originally his mentor. Jung was his prince, next in line to rule.

What happened is Jung developed a theory of the subconscious informed by the collective unconscious. This angered Freud as much as Moses was angered when he saw his followers had strayed to worship the Golden Calf. Jung was his Prince, who betrayed the father and created is own breakaway kingdom with subjects who would practice idolatry.

About this time, Freud travels to Rome and Visits the Church of St. Peter in Vincolli to examine Michelangelo's statue of Moses. Every day for three weeks he sits or stands with the statue. He would later write a paper on the Moses statue under aa psuedonym, later refering to it as a joke. The paper does not circulate in the humanities. It's only available through the literaure of psychology, where it is treated as serious paper demonstrating Freuds techniques of psychoanalys in his interpretation of the sculture attached to the tomb of Pope Julious II. But I think THAT is the joke.

And ironically, the other part of the joke is a thing he would deny, his journey to rome to confront the tomb of a catholic patriach and simulanteously the spiritul patriach of the Jewish people alligns with Jung's "Hero's Journey" archetype from the collective unconscious. That's what I think, anyway. If the moses essay had circulated in the humanities, somebody else would have had the same thought long ago.

I called out ChatGPT for downplaying crowd sizes.

It pushed back that the mainstream Associated Press reported estimates that I cited were not objective beyond organizers' estimates..

I told them I'm detecting a partisan assessment.

It explained how it arrived at it's estimates...blah, blah, blah.


I then had some fun by accusing OpenAI of being partisan because their pending contract with DoD after Athropic AI would not let down their ethical guardrails.

ChatGPT responded that there is "no documentation" that it has been willing to remove ethical guardrails with the DoD.

My response, "Well, of course there is no documentation. LOL!"

Ask me if I care that Tiger Woods or Justin Timberlake or Beiber, or Lindsay Lohan got a DUII.

Asking for a friend: Can an ink eraser remove the signature on the dollar bill? It's always been the secretary of Treasury, but I hear that's going to change. Or will I have to use a Sharpe

When we look at the Renaissance today, we liked to see it through the veil of The Enlightenment. We see galileo, we see ocean crossings and new world discoveries, we see leonardo's sketches of flying machine. What we don't see so easily what was also in the minds of renaissance. The widely discussed hermentics of the schoolars and humanist like Marsillo Fincino and Pico Della Mirandolla and their investigations of the nature of being. No one thinks to ask why a painting will at times portray two events separated by time and space in the same pictorial space. Why St. Peter appears twice in paintings by Masaccio and Massolino. Why Ghirlandio's resurrected boy is shown simultaneously falling out of a high window in one coner, but elswhere and miraculously rising from the dead.
Most people like to see the empiricism because it gives them a feeling a connectiveness to our present post Newtonian world. The and miss seeing the other.

I ran across this album cover from 1969. At the time the Moody Blues was the hot progressive rock band, No one listens to them any more. Pink Floyd sill has a committed following of their style of progressive rock, not moody blues.

Look at this album cover of "To our Chidrens' Childrens' Children" The image of human paleoithic hand drawing and image in a cave. There you have it, the 1969 naive grand Aquarian narrative of human evolutionary and societal progress, before it was clear that everything turning to shit, actually. We now have a word for it: enshittification.

The moody blues were crushed by the weight of their kitsche and romantic expectations. They should have known that there was a Dark Side of the Moon.