Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 7

Rectified and Readymade

The idea that “anything can be art” is a
destructive notion that devalues art:
equating pop-cult’s levelling Cuisinart
with masterpieces like that Mona Lizza:
I stood in line to see her once, La Giaconda;
room 711, cheek-to-jowl, nose-to-fart,
but her behind her glass, a world apart,
petite, obscure, untroubled by wokisma,
modernism, deconstruction, Yale
and Harvard, Palestine, Marcel Duchamp,
bugbearless belle who proves my thesis that
beauty is truth, and truth is always pale—
life in images d’Épinal my psychopomp
and heaven as suburban habitat.

Or, the Wail

To the American people: Our future starts around
kitchen tables just like this. With moms
and dads just like you. Although, it says in Psalms
that ma and pa will leave you, lost and clowned-
on by your enemies: a modern Jonah drowned
by mankind’s monstrous mechanized pogroms
against Behemoths and Leviathans:
no mouth to gulp us; El Elohim unfound
and missing from his tabernacle since
we lost his interest, being more concerned
with what our neighbors say on Nextdoor, what
will leave the incremental vote convinced:
Their own? Deserved—What others get? Unearned.
The world won’t bang its end. And you? Shut up.

Pastime Paradise

You must go back in time: would you prefer
to live the life of a slave owner, or the life
of a slave? Or to be the wife and/or ex-wife
of one or two cohabitating monsieurs
in Brooklyn, February dusk’s longuer
filtering through the glass: an ontology rife
with bad questions as a mad toddler with a knife:
you must answer; you cannot demur:
the chair turned backwards, jeanèd legs astride,
class enraptured—look, I’m gonna rap
at y’all: you would choose, if pressed, to own
derision in your life and in your Twitter mentions
if paid for your inflammatory crap,
cool to date your ex, too bored to bone
though, and only in it for attention.

Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus

US names campaign to target Houthis
in Yemen “Operation Poseidon Archer”—
failed opening-weekend Aquaman mise
en abyme—abyssal god’s too-late departure
from depth and form to dumbass Artemis
who hurls more heedless missiles, baking sand
to glass for a domestic audience
that can’t tell Bab al-Mandab from dry land.
They asked: tell Philly Ahab, cut it out;
stop bombing hospitals, and we’ll permit
your ships to pass; in Florida, a gout-
y two-star reads the note and files it
do not reply, and cracks a beer, desires
good consulting gigs when he retires.

Endymion

“DeSantis drops out of Presidential race
and endorses Trump.” No less surprise has ever
flowed from failed ambition; it was never
gonna happen, yet God’s good grace
brought us, witnesses, to this time and place
to see this runted, rutting, not-so-clever
Archimedes: world to move, no lever
though—and spot to stand? Yes: third place.
A scorned son will make an idol of the dad
who lured him to the sport he couldn’t play
and coached the team to make him ride the pine:
loving to hate himself and going mad
to please the man who calls him short, and gay,
and weak: loss is a howl, but defeat? A whine.

Key? Mo’ Therapy.

We have to deal with the cancer that is mental
health. Good thoughts are gumming up the works,
and happiness immiserates both saints and jerks
who each require more than incidental
misery: a boo-boo healed, a gentle
word from mother, love, a job with perks—
they rob from noble nature; they’re the Turks
at our Vienna: foreign, oriental,
bearing a better-ordered civilization
with running water, daily baths, and prayer
and poetry: what worth are we if all
that we expect from life in this great nation
is to be clothed and fed without a fair
good chance of dying in a shooting in a mall?

Meine kleine Kampfmusik

“I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins…Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.“

–Jeff Bezos

If we had a trillion humans, we would have
at any given time a thousand Mozarts
and a thousand Einsteins—but a thousand Hitlers too:
from each ocean-edging glacier calves
ship-sinking icebergs; mankind is crime and art,
both Model T and Ford who hates the Jew;
our solar system would be full of life,
Europa choked with algae; Mars on fire
like Pittsburgh riverfronts in ’53;
a zillion virgins for each fed-up AI wife
whose godlike energy demands require
the output of the sun itself, and we
last earth-born, dying-earthbound humans forced
to this end by rich men’s pattern baldness, and divorce.

d/dx(Q)

I’ve told this story before, but in 2008
I applied to be a scooper at an ice cream stand
with a BA from a top-25 school in hand,
a CV on paper of excellent gloss and weight,
a skill for conflating absolute change and rate
that the shift manager did not seem to understand—
his media diet and his clearly poor command
of slope curve derivations. . .—well, as fate
would have it I was one of maybe 50
applicants, sweating from the coolers’ hot
exhaust: a normal joe, a working slob,
although I wore a tie, unlike these shifty
untucked teens—it was an interview, not
some joke, my god. I didn’t get the job.

Kind of Blew

How sad that perceptions so quickly tri-
umph over truth in our decadent culture. This
most woeful outcome breeds small minds that miss
the hives’ swarmed thought for each buzzed bee, the fly
for the ointment: asks not cui bono, only why?—
but it was good for me, side eye, chef’s kiss,
a modern man’s best bet at benefice,
small favor from great fortunes’ wont to buy
their best bets before the betting line
is set—and then, mere parlay, placed across
polls’ standard deviations, law’s whereas
and wherefores, interest rates, and chance, divine
disfavor, foreign intervention, Jews, Hamas,
life’s rhythms, Adolph’s watercolors, jazz.

Angelus Not Us

The blast killing hundreds at a hospital
in Gaza is deeply wrong. I grieve for each
non-actor whose non-action I impeach;
blown up and blasted down, a miracle
of sorts, that it’s occurred without a little
human help at all—no thought nor speech
preceded it; mere happenstance in breach
of all intent or cause: what noncommittal
form of fraught effect could bring into
this universe of action something no
human being has witnessed yet: kaboom!
without a bomb preceding it, and blew
that backwards angel outta here, although
an aide could swear it cried: “Please, read the room!”