Semantic Dictionary

from Knatz.com

Teaching / Scholarship / Glossary

1999 02 08

Semantic Dictionary
Definitions, Daffynitions, Ironies, Wisecracks ...

High seriousness mixes here with comedy.

ArgumentIt has long been my habit to use the word argument in its scholarly sense: thesis, or general point being made. That usage does not make me elsewhere avoid using the same "word" to mean "combat over an issue." But I worry about readers who won't make the distinction. (Why should I? Who but a sophisticated reader would be here?)
What's really nutty to the normal speaker of the natural language is to try to guess what computer programmers mean by the word: their use is conspicuously "artificial."

Some people—always other people—twist the meanings of words,
especially during the course of an argument.
SI Hayakawa

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Artistone who is willing to undress in publicOnce you start undressing in public, as Thomas Wolf observed, You can't go home again.Good artistone who undresses the public as well as himselfPop artistone who dresses himself and the audience the way they want to be dressedselling as well as buying their vanitiesGreat artistone who undresses the public and is somehow praised for itSupreme artistone who makes the public strip without even being aware of itOf course opinion as to which artists are great, which supreme, changes from generation to generation, fashion to fashion.

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The above couple of jeux remind me of the observation I once heard that a minister is one we pay to be virtuous for us: at least to dress and comport himself virtuously.

I've made hay with that in my variations on jazz artists:the jazz artist is one who dresses (and behaves) the way the public longs to dress but doesn't dareOf course my beloved jazz has been co-opted by that egregious rockIt wasn't so bad when it was just R&B: R&B was part of jazzNote: speaking of our paying jazz musicians to be drunks and junkies and to get syphilis in our stead, don't forget that jazz was originally whore house music. (Above all don't forget that whores was about all that Blacks were allowed to be.) In fact, the etymology of jazz traces it to the West African crios of the age of expansion for fuck.

Thus, jazz music was the music the white patrons of New Orleans whore houses fucked by.

I didn't know till Ken Burns' wonderful documentary that pianists like Jellyroll Morton had a peep hole into the whores' rooms so they could know when to crescendo, when to pianoroll.

You realize further of course that Jellyroll's very name means pussy.

Man alive, how that cat used minor VI / diminished VI progressions! Minor IIs too.

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AuthorityThere is no authority. Only evidence: evidence processed by theory, the theory tested by falsification.

Substituting the expert for the expertise seems to be an indelible characteristic of kleptocracy. A society which would chose reason as a survival tool must demote all human authority to "opinion: probably politically motivated."

Notice: and remember: Human authority has a poor record with regard to truth.

That includes human scientific authority. Science is our best chance. Therefore it's essential that scientists remember the ideal humility of their art. Science priests are the last thing we need.

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Kleptocratic authority is incapable of understanding what is said to it, incapable even of imagining that it ought to understand. No: such "authority" is the teacher. Authority has no need to learn.

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Dozens coming

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Theology: the kind of cosmology, older than science, where the imagination plays with unnatural causesCosmology:what happens to theology after science buds and orthodoxy slips a bit

The Picasso of 1985

paralleling Knatz.com

Personal / Stories / Theme / Business

2009 10 31

The Picasso of 1985
Short version: Early 1975: I was making an art presentation to the Brewster Gallery in Greenwich Village. I'd been chatting with Jerry Brewster while turning the graphics in my portfolio, telling stories about the artists, detailing sales results so far, both my sales, and my clients' resales, when another art salesman barged in. The newcomer didn't know Jerry, had no appointment: he just ignored my prior position and blurted, "I've got the Picasso of 1985!"
Jerry let a smile flicker, and answered, "Good. Bring him to me in 1984."
Then he turned his attention back to me as the oaf realized that he had been dismissed, his greatest artist in the world unseen.

Details: In 1970 I founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., following Ivan Illich's saintly genius in trying to offer the public a cheap low-tech internet by which that public could sidestep regulation into freedom: any community with a cybernetic bulletin board of human and inanimate resources, together with both interest matching services and feedback on quality, on behavioral irregularies, could recreate the ancient marketplace into a new Phoenix of liberty, upgrading interfering regulatory government into direct cybernetic democracy at the same time: Congress was designed for representatives to renew information from their constituency annually; with networked cybernetics opinions can be updated at the speed of light. In 1973 my wife stopped paying the bills and kidnapped our son: a handy way of not having to discuss his education with the deschooler. I had to produce income myself, and, having sworn off teaching in the university system, and with no time to find a position even were I willing to break my vow, I took a shit job in a graphics gallery which palmed reproductions as technically "original." In a month I was director of the company's Madison Avenue gallery, and by 1974 artists were clamoring for me to represent them directly. Thus, late 1974 saw me cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back as I embodied PK Fine Arts, Ltd., and early 1975 found me back in the 'Apple, schlepping my portfolio into the Brewster Gallery in Greenwich Village.

I knew Jerry Brewster after a fashion: we'd mutually seen each other in the Whitehorse Tavern, way west on Hudson and 11^th, not far from his place on 7^th just below 14^th. So, I'd stopped by let him know that I was in the business, had some good new artists. When I phoned and said now would be a good time for me, he summoned me in. Fancy art galleries may have back rooms with space adequate for an artist (or rep) to make a presentation, but I can testify that there aren't any in the level of the business I'd entered. But Jerry's no-space was luxurious compared to the no-space in most low-to-middle-end galleries and frame shops. I was hawking stuff from two to three figures with only a token item or two in the lowest four figures: Jerry had art at two and three figures but also had some items in four to five figures. (Jerry would soon open a Madison Avenue branch intended to specialize around five figures: Miro, for example: lithographs for $18,000 to $24,000: early 1975 remember.) (Jerry told me, "It's just as had to sell some 7x9 chatchka for $89.95 as it is to sell a Picasso for $30,000. I'd rather sell the Picasso." Understand: at those prices, again early 1975, we were talking about multiples only: lithographs, etchings ...

Jerry half-recognized me, realized that I had some sense of what I was saying. I'm confident further that Jerry recognized that I was tilling ground for an ongoing business relation; not trying to squeeze a quick sale so I could have lunch. The above story occurred. Now you see it in its setting. I can now add additional reflections:

Jerry bought nothing from me that day. Much better he explained to me that his sister did all his buying: and she had the checkbook: once she made a decision, she'd write the check, then and there. I returned many times over the years. Gertrude would buy, and sometimes reorder within days. One new lithograph I sold her was framed and put in the window that evening, and was sold to a customer waiting for her to open in the morning.

I saw little of Jerry after that. He spent his time up on Madison Avenue, super busy, super important: and probably frantic to pay the rent: you have to sell a lot of Miro to meet that nut. But one day he happened to be back down in the Village. I reminded him of our first meeting in his gallery, and quoted him to himself: "Good. Bring [this Picasso] to me in 1984." Jerry looked pleased. "Gosh. I didn't know I was that smart," he joked.

I love this story because it illustrates that there is no intrinsic value in business. A Picasso has no value because it's a Picasso, because it's beautiful, historically important, because it's challenging, excellently rendered, inconceivably conceived, because it makes your mind all withershins ... No, it's valuable only if you can resell it at a profit: regularly enough to pay the rent, and move uptown, and then to Mt. Vernon, and then to Scarsdale ...

I here repeat something I said to great artist Will Barnet in 1973, the year before this story. I told this at K., but K. got purged, so here it is again: I said that art had three values.

1. the value to the artist in making it
2. the value to the observer in looking at it
3. the market value

and that the three had no necessary relation to each other. Will said, "Amen."

PS: I don't think Jerry Brewster actually used the Yiddish term "chatchka." I have though sold to WASPS in the business who did use that term: and so do I.

pk: Censored

All along my writing hasn't been published. Where the writing is incompetent, that's a form of aesthetic cultural hygiene; where the writing is original in expression as well as ideas, that's a form of censorship: cultural sterility: a society subtracting itself from a yearing for survival, for quality. Majorities routinely stick cultures in the mud: evolution routinely sends mutants, independents, god, saints, geniuses ... to get stomped on. But sometimes a little of the god gets though: though only improbably, panting uphill, where the Nazis, the hawks, the morons ... the conventional are in control.

But as of February 2007 I am also officially censored, by federal court order. Getting arrested by a tag team of the county sheriff and the FBI on 2006 October 13 stopped me from writing and posting to the web. But that's small potatoes compared to the kind of censorship I'd been enduring all my life: since childhood, before puberty: probably well before puberty, but I just don't remember my childhood at quite the resolution that I remember my adulthood.

My family accomplished the equivalent of censorship by never understanding what my words or actions had hoped to convey. Neither did my church, my school, my friends.

As a kid my messages were not unique: I was just trying to be on the side of various abstractions: Jesus, Christ ... equality, democracy ... Sound conventional? Hell, I thought so. But no; it proved radical: in all cases. Or, it proved incommunicable: past age six, or eight. As a child my boyhood friends also wanted to be "good": to stand up for "right." But then, no. It proved that they just wanted more money, better grades, a new car ... the other guy's girl ... I too wanted more money, and the other guy's girl: but not as much as I wanted to sacrifice my life, my security ... for my fellow man.

(Note: now I wouldn't buy human redemption for a penny; but I'll still sacrifice all for the biosphere, for DNA ... for evolution.)

This is just a draft: and I have to get offline. So for now I'll just quick detail the fed and my family's role in my official censorship:

In the summer of 2006 I launched a new domain: AgainstHierarchy.org. I intended to move all of my deschooling files (materials from my Free Learning Exchange, Inc., my analyses of civilization as kleptocracy ...) to AH.org. Once a few basic introductory files were up, I concentrated on linking my stories of my own compulsory education, and built those links to include my stories of my university education, and my university teaching, up to and including my offering of a low-tech low-cost internet in 1970. I analyzed my experience with universities on both sides of the lectern as fraud. I gave my graduate school a particular my indictments. The I wrote a black satire, the most vicious yet of my life, warning my graduate English Department, that I didn't intend to die broke and anonnymous. They should see the sands of wasted time as running out for them. Either address my indictments, or get a bloody nose. (Note: I've never bloodied anyone's nose that I can think of. I am the last person in the world to go around bloodying noses. Cops, feds ... priests, nuns ... teachers, journalists bloody noses all the time. In short for the sake of my ironies, I pretended to intend to become One Of Them!

The descendants of the morons who didn't know how to read my graduate papers complained to the FBI: and I got handcuffed, interrogated by a team of morons even stupider and more deaf than my teachers, stripped and refrigerated in the jail, then tortured the worst when the public defender made it clear to me that though he personally understood what I was saying (he really did seem to, the most intelligent lawyer I've ever encountered), that he would do nothing to help me communicate any of my explanations to a jury. He's stand to the side while I had anything but a fair trial, the jury made rabid by fear of terrorists (other than themselves and their bomb dropping government).

I was told that the court would demand that I remove the couple of files at AgainstHierargy.org/NYU/ that talked of bloody noses. I wasn't ready to cooperate in any such thing; but I would do Anything to get back home and report my new experienes online. That's how they got me: with threats of continued silencing.

But: After they got from me the degree of cooperation they sought, the just outright censored the whole of AgainstHierargy.org/NYU/: dozens of files, only two specified as offending.

Once in jail I asked my son to close my bank account, then to also have my utilities disconnected. He did. He got the bank to transfer my remaining two cents to him: after which his wife, Nathalie, paid my bills: where the bill came in the forwarded mail; she did not pay bills that came by email. My email, though the location and password were made known to my son, was not checked.

Thus: a court order hit APlus.net, my host for my five domains: PKImaging.com, Knatz.com, InfoAll.org, Macroinformation.org, and AgainstHierary.org to disable AgainstHierargy.org/NYU/.

Exactly what happened then I can only speculate. Communication with APlus.net is as bad as communication with the Motor Vehicle Bureau. Communication with my son and his wife is slightly better, but only slightly. Thank goodness I'd asked bk to back up my data at APlus.net to a CD. He had. The FBI stole my computers (and who know how much else of my records: I'd need a staff and a budget to check for all that might be missing). After my trial, after the censorship order, I asked my son to see what data had been tampered with. I had nearly 2,500 text files, hundred of graphic files, and, counting art at PKImaging.com, thousands of art images online. bk reported that all of it was gone. APlus.net had destroyed everything!

APlus.net isn't even an American company! I think they're located in Canada. I speculate that APlus.net, sent me a bill, for $6.95, or for $12.95, renewing this or that domain name, this or that service, when to my bank account to help themselves, and found the account closed. I'd been their good client for over a decade. I bet they sent a few emails before they pulled the plug on me. I also bet that the total I was overdue was less than $50. Did they check on my health? Did they know I was being tortured and railroaded as well as censored? I don't know.

I know this. Once my domains were down, bk didn't put them back up!!!!

bk publishes my adopted daughter's website. bk in the past has sponsored my K. domains: I only moved them in with PKImaging.com after bk lost control of the machine had had all of our data on. Why didn't bk republish my persecuted files? the ones not censored: the all but a dozen?

I don't know. My communication with my son have never been much better than my communications with my wife, or my sister, or my mother: and I say so. Knatz.com materials were not flattering to my family. So they kept their hands in their pockets while I got persecuted.

Hey, it's not everybody who can claim to have something so vivid in common with Judas! and with St. Peter ...

Miscellaneous pk Stories

from Knatz.com

Personal / Stories

2000 09 20

Miscellaneous pk StoriesFirst: 1961 or so:
"Paul, you're an interesting person," says my fellow worker. "I don't think I can stand it."I'm out of college, in limbo, waiting to be drafted. My venture in one business with my college partner was a disappointment: I'm treading water with what started as a part time job at full time pay with my partner's brother at New York Trust Bank. Trust merges with Chemical and the situation degenerates. The Trust team did the work in four hours and went home. Under Chemical domination we had to put in the eight hours: so why be efficient? But the army took me from an increasingly hellish limbo and put me straight into hell.1955 or so
"Paul, you're the only one in the whole bunch I can have a real conversation with."The point is: that was the only serious conversation Dick and I ever had. I guess one was enough for him.1979"Paul," says a girl friend, "You make other people look shabby."
I'd been well dressed when she first saw me, but by the time she said it, I don't think she meant just my appearance. Whatever she meant, I approve the line intellectually and spiritually. This latter story got expanded into an independent Knatz.com module. K. got censored, tag teamed by the fed (and my family), my fans standing by, silent. I'll remount K. when and if I can: my parole thug has warned me not to.
The nature of my getting censored, with mention of my family's involvement, needs its own post: coming up next.