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Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Ceiling, Lunette - Aminadab

Michelangelo’s Jews

May 12, 2016 by William Eaton

The Treatment of Jews in Renaissance Rome and on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling By Chantal Sulkow Introduction After the earliest stage of the cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes in the early 1980s, the lunettes depicting Christ’s ancestors were the first to emerge from beneath centuries’ worth of darkened layers of dirt. (Fig. 1) Michelangelo’s brilliant use of color was not the only revelation; previously obscured details also came to light. One of these was an element of […]

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Look Rich or Go Bankrupt Trying

May 8, 2016 by fritztucker

I’m not the only person who finds 50 Cent a fascinating figure. His landmark album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, is one of the top ten best selling albums in rap history, and is perhaps the only rap album ever to have a feature film made of it. While living in Belize during the summer of 2005, I stumbled upon a middle-schooler’s yearbook in a house I was doing construction on. Nearly every child’s yearbook quote was either a line from Get Rich or Die […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: art, capitalism, politics

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Chutzpah, Self-abnegation, Creation

April 24, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I s creation, in the arts, or elsewhere, a matter of chutzpah or daring — perhaps of overweening pride? It often is. And sometime it’s a matter of humility, stepping aside, letting another speak through one. Thus the Odyssey begins, Sing in me muse, Sing of the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course This makes the poet almost incidental to the creation. Can we generalize here? No doubt some poets are models of humility […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: books, literature, philosophy, writing

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CIA, Obstruction of Justice, 9/11

April 17, 2016 by Ed Mooney

The only good thing that came out of 9/11 was that the building fell on him. –Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA anti-bin Laden task force, testifying before a congressional committee, applauding the death of John O’Neill, former head of the FBI’s NYC anti-terrorist task force. The New Yorker has begun to produce short documentaries to view on line. The topics are as varied as the contents of any recent print issue, and the stories might […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: death, ethics, New York City

In Favor of Fantasy

April 12, 2016 by Ana Maria Caballero

Fantasy has it rough. It bears a reputation of being trivial, flashy, adolescent, and entertainment-driven. Indeed, some fantasy is. But, such a judgment is unfair to good fantasy, which is none of the above. Because fantasy is so blatantly allegorical, when it is good, it reveals a forthright understanding of how reality functions. And, when it is great, it resembles myth, with its godlike way of adding meaning to life. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) raised many literary eyebrows when it came out because it dared […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: book, fantasy, Kazuo Ishiguro, reading, writing

Imagination, Rowling, Happiness, Carnival

April 10, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Memorable lines from William Blake: Twofold, twofold always May God us keep From single vision And Newton’s sleep Imagination lets us see the world as other than a Newtonian assembly of spinning atoms (updated to Quarks), or as a Darwinian stage for Fitter-gene transmissions, or as a Brainy locus for neurological pathways. Blake was worried about a physics take-over of claims to reality. The situation is more complex today, with a variety of sciences vieing for top […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: death, literature, poetry, reading

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Consumers, Apprentices, Failed Universities

April 3, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I have no complaints about living in Maine. I find good music, good restaurants, good friends in the small city of Portland. I’ve taught inland and upstate in Bangor – just this side of Old Town, home of the classic canvas canoes I grew up with and rigged for sailing in a tidal river that opens on Buzzards Bay. That inlet-laced coast reminds me of the Maine Coast. There’s an older, slower, pace to life here. All this nostalgia […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, Uncategorized, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, education, literature, reading, technology, writing

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Berlinde De Bruyckere, No Life Lost II, Installation view, Hauser & Wirth, 2016, photo by Mirjam Devriendt

De Bruyckere, Ibsen, Gatsby, Graceland

March 31, 2016 by William Eaton

Or, Dying, “What does it feel like?” First approach Torvald Helmer: Oh, you think and talk like a heedless child. Nora, his wife: Maybe. But you neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over—and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you—when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Adorno, aporia, art, Belgium, Berlinde De Bruyckere, death, dying, Gatsby, Ibsen, Jean-François Lyotard, juxtaposition, Paul Simon, popular music, reverie, sculpture

Power to Intrude, Illustration by Ben Jennings, Prospect Magazine, February 2016

Privacy and Power

March 28, 2016 by fritztucker

Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to call for surveillance of oppressors, or imagine ways that surveillance could be used to create a world devoid of oppression. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about our current obsession with privacy. In The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, criminals, ethics, literature, New York City, philosophy, politics, reading, social justice, technology, women, writing

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