Thomas Fuller, the real Thomas Fuller

My colleague Thomas Fuller recently captured the mood in the Bay Area, a region engulfed in fire and choked by smoky haze four years in a row. “First there was the coronavirus, then the threat of fires and power outages, and now the smoke,” he wrote (“The New York Times” on-line edition, California Today, September 1, 2020, Maria Tae McDermott).

Everything’s quite disturbing. Not even Thomas Fuller is immune.

I, for one, check-in every morning from The Far Left, but to the right of Antifa, while going through a rough patch of hyper-sensitivity, a white man who’s afraid of being shot in the back after giving a beggar alms.

Reading today’s newspaper, including, but not limited to, snippets about The Justice Department, the director of national intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, I conclude that the Mueller Report as written by Rod Rosenstein (former US Deputy Attorney General) was not a witch hunt but was, instead, a protection racket.

Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes has new meaning, at least to me: not the time allotted for one’s fame, but the time allotted to looking at any one painting, whether it be a painting by Clyfford Still or Thomas Fuller, and/or the maximum time allotted for the playing of one hole of golf.

In Belarus, the newly elected president Lukashenko, the same president Lukashenko since 1994, ignored protestors who gathered in front of his residence, the Independence Palace, chanting, “Go Away”, while pleading with the president to come out and accept their congratulations. Lukashenko did not come out, but his press secretary released a photograph of him in a white T-shirt and black bulletproof vest in front of the palace, clutching a rifle.

In Germany, a re-emergence of far-right nationalism. In Israel, the chartered El Al airline that flies non-stop to the U.A.E., skippered by Jared Kushner and Bibi. A 24% decline in the economy of India. Factory orders in China exceed expectations, much of it fueled by the consumer desire in the USA for luxury products such as in-home spas. The virus re-surges in Europe; Macron of France says, “Our country needs to learn to live with the virus.”

Other hot spots?

Too many to mention here. Not even The New York Times can contain them.

My new painting, Impedimentia, painted using the pseudonym Brooks Roddan, reaches a standstill: no matter what I do to it, what I do to it is wrong. It had such promise at the beginning, such life, joy; I don’t know what happened? The last move I made on it—yesterday—dipping my right thumb in a pool of light blue paint and affixing my thumbprint in several strategic places on the canvas, seemed gratuitous, like a move an exhibitionist painter might make, Schnable for example, or Yves Klein. Hannah Arendt’s comment about Walter Benjamin also serves to distort my vision: how wrapped up Benjamin was, ‘in the negative criticism of existing conditions.’

My new painting, now lost beyond any reasonable possibility of rescue, sits there on the wall. If it’s worth saving, someone other than me must save it.