Rothko & Ken

So, now what do you see? Be specific- no, be exact. Be exact, but sensitive, you understand? Be kind. Be a human being, that's all I can say. Be a human being for once in your life. These pictures deserve compassion and they live or die in the eye of a sensitive viewer. They quicken only if the empathetic viewer would let them. That's what they cry out for; that is why they were created. That is what they deserve. Now, what do you see?

Red.
But do you like it?
Yeah.
Speak up.
Yes.

Yes, yes of course you like it. How can you not like it? Everybody likes everything nowadays. They like the television or the photograph, the soda pop, the shampoo and the cracker jack. Everything becomes everything else and it's so nice and pretty and like-able. Everything is fun in the sun, hm? Where's the discernment? Where's the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect? What I deem worthy? What has, listen to me, significance? 


Red, john logan

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory of the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind

william wordsworth

Memory Gardens

Well while I'm here I'll
            do the work-
and what's the Work?
            To ease the pain of living
Everything else, a drunken
            dumbshow.

allen ginsberg

Benny & Joon

Because you know, it seems to me, well beside being a little mentally ill, she's pretty normal.