Reflection On the Death of Tom Wolfe

88 years after 1930 changed the random associations of drunken flappers to the structural shoulders of another World conflict and the subsequent drug-showering of American Youth's brain synapses, Tom Wolfe exits with little applause...his fashionability having lost its runway footing as pants legs again narrowed, revealing some big feet, now on the ground.......Tom showed us that Dürer,   on acid, was Picasso, after all......The Merry Pranksters were On The Road, but Wolfe was not on the bus....he was writing the Story of the Bus Trip, and taking us into a brief orbit, before crashing into the Big Sea......

I'm eager to watch Benedict Cumberbatch's latest undertaking, PATRICK MELROSE......Each of the Five-part installments adapts a single St. Aubyn novel.....in the ongoing tradition of simplifying complex material into less than anti-Tolstoyian or anti-Dickensonian abbreviatorialness...following the cocaine and heroine trail conceit of the novels, unravelling the word-fabric of the protagonist's tale of compulsive addictions, by depicting ....in 'days'....the "new, out of order, style" that permeates television series, manufactured for the shorter attention spans of the ADD Generation.....Stylistically, this 'technique' is also being employed in the "Genius: Picasso" series....Piece it all together for a succinctly artistic adaptation of largely overlooked writing ...with the brilliant Benedict!......."Bad News" may be "Good News" for Serial Showtime....

"KILLING THE EYE"

At 6, i became aware of the variations in individual's interpretations of sensory information and how these variations from the mean create eccentrics like myself. A few years later i discovered that my eyes did not focus very acutely upon objects more than a yard away, although my close range focus was extraordinary. i was amazed, when my vision had been "corrected" by the intricacies of Nature at greater than arm's length. now that the world was "in focus" I continued to avoid interactions with other children whom i considered boisterous and undisciplined...and therefore.....unthinkingly dangerous and volatile creatures. it seemed that the surfaces of things were extreme and the depths unfathomable. of course, i did not..at that time....either have the vocabulary to shape my thoughts in such a way that i could play back my interpretations or the confidence to believe that my take on what seemed to be happening around me could be any more "true" than the preconceptions of others that formed the context of my education in Life. I did not know about the sub-species called artists or those labeled intellectuals or those who lived lives as instinctual as those of birds. I was wary of the impulses that were genetically driven and that seemed to bypass ethical or moral considerations and wanted only to cast aside the predestinations of learned patterns of both perception and thought......But then....I was only 7 by then, and had only a few clues to go by.....