The Demise of Bobby Short and Joe

I pronounced the guilt upon Aracely, which had earlier lain on me, for transforming acts of mercy into selfishness.

Why?

No political dimension.

Clive James complains "in April '41, with a rampant Hitler already on the point of turning east, Thomas Mann's idea of a pertinent note in his diary was pudel gesund (the poodle is healthy).

Bob Marley could never only sing.

What, then, can we make of the New Yorker ad featuring Keith Richards pouting alongside a Louis Vuitton case?

Could it be, as the Baltimore (non-Gatesian) Creative Capitalism art collective, proposes, 'whereby things fall apart only to reemerge in new forms embolded by the failure of their ancestors, resurrecting discarded work that is unlikely to be appreciated in the culture industries of the academy?'

Frank Kermode conveys, a century later, how Loie Fuller could "penetrate the spectator's mind and awaken his imagination, revolutionizing a brand of aesthetics - the fire dance - her long dress spouting flame and rolling burning spirals twisting in a torrent of incandescent lava - her twirl buries the figure."

The altered state, and its implications, to achieve the same effect, seventy years on, is absent in the former, though forty years beyond even that, Cirque du Soleil recaptures the wistful Gallic mystique in Kooza.

Stephane Mallarme pronounces pure work requires the poet vanish from the utterance.

Joe died this week. I, of all people, the avatar of casuality, pointed out, he never left his desk sans sports coat. Bobby Short, the Porter crooner, the Admiral's caviar, ends his 36-year run, this year, at the elegant Cafe Carlyle.

Claiming history begins with us, we unintentionally killed Bobby Short, and Joe, rallying, instead, around Crosby's paean that we owed it to someone else.

Isadora Duncan reveals 'before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne.'

Toni confided, Martha Graham, no longer able to walk, demanded she be carried in and out, unseen, before and after board meetings.

If they'd never danced at all, this is sufficient definition.

Al Alvarez wrote Elie Wiesel's works are beyond criticism.' Wiesel himself is determined to 'establish a principle that every manuscript should be published' regardless of readability.

A Baltimore City Paper letter this week, from an 'Afrocentric pro-choice Catholic progressive liberal to my bones,' concludes, everyone must have an input in saving humanity. If not a cosmic war will destroy all humans as the next great starry explosion from the heavens - the next great flood.

Not that there's anything wrong with that but better if she'd stopped after bones.