20th century Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren (d. 1947)  painted Vermeers and others so convincingly, he duped buyers, including Netherlands officials, an estimated $30 mil (adjusted for today) dollars; most notable of his doings was selling one to Hermann Göring, for which he was arrested by the Dutch government under charges of “collaboration” with the Nazi party, and taken to trial. Ironically, his defense to charges against selling Dutch cultural property (i.e. Vermeer) to the Nazis was that Göring’s recent acquisition had been a forgery, hence not cultural property. Two wrongs, it seems, does make a right. Fortunately, Göring was at Nuremberg at the time and had bigger worries. At the last day of the ruling, even though charges had been dropped, the painter had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital, at which he had another fatal one three days later. This may have been ringing around in William Gaddis’ mind when he wrote The Recognitions (1955), in which one Wyatt Gwyon realizes he can make more money forging Dutch masters than making originals. Gaddis’ indictment of what would be postmodernism worried itself in a classical context. Under this Faustian pact (the novel, a much shorter version, was initially conceived as a parody of Goethe’s Faust), he slowly loses his identity and completely disappears in the middle of the novel. Gaddis — smart, bitter, both repulsed and smitten by his society, obsessed with documenting its minutiæ — may have found a descendent in Larry David, whose relatively conceptually vigorous and poplulace-friendly shows Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm seem to me the funnier and perhaps existentially more dire version of a Sartrean “No Exit,” the former collaborators endlessly shouting at one another inside a room, free to simply leave, but never doing so (same goes for The Real Housewives series) — enter empowered and feminist-y Elaine Benes, loosely based off Richard Yates’ daughter Monica, who, in a twist which writes itself, Larry David once dated. When fiction is authenticated by real life, people are appeased, as if what we really wanted all along was the truth. Per the 65th episode in which Elaine brags about never having an orgasm with Jerry, we can only wonder who that inspiration was. A morose pessimist jackhammers his way to ecstasy in under two minutes, and a woman accompanies it with a forgery. Two wrongs, again it seems, does make a right.

The Fall of Man’s vector is of course down, a direction consistent with our tiered notion of heaven and hell, the latter’s visceral intuition made more compelling by natural physical laws, that is, the acceleration of gravity precluded by the surface on which its falling object lands. Though we never hear Mario land some 60 ft. below, breaking all his bones and liquifying his internal organs, his final breaths squeaking through paralysis. He simply dies — or rather, his death is commemorated by his very reincarnation — before he actually dies, before we hear his cries. One could offer, however, that the pit never ends, towards the core of the earth it falls until upward again and out the other side. Camus’ last novel (a) The Fall, claimed by Sartre to be “perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood” of his books, amounts to a long-winded dramatic confession that one Clamence tells to a stranger,  presumably at a bar or cafe. READ MORE >

In Manhattan (1979), for about one minute, the characters played by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit in front of the Queensboro bridge at dawn after an all night date — both strenuous and romantic it seems, as I’ve never been, though I can imagine the slow light creeping onto someone’s lovely face as bakers and newspaper boys wake up, and cats return to porches with heads. Keaton concludes the scene by saying she has lunch with a friend. In a lesser first attempt, in front of the Brooklyn bridge in Annie Hall (1977), Woody tells Diane in response to if he loves her, “Love is too weak a word. I lurv you, I loave you, I luff you,” the middle sentiment which I always hear as “loathe” because I’m a Nietzsche kind of bro; I appreciate more “The most beautiful words in the English language are not I love you, but It’s benign,” which he says in Deconstructing Harry regarding a tumor. Much of Manhattan is drawn in silhouette, black shapes eclipsing grey backdrops as moons before a muted sun. Artists are always going to a city for the low and high rent and culture, respectively, until that get’s flipped, and they move. Never say “gentrification” at a dinner party, it’s dumb. Paris may in the past, but their bakers’ butter still wafts in the air. In Les Misérables (1862), Jean once passes an “l’invalide du pont” (the invalid of the bridge, here Pont d’Austerlitz), a disabled war veteran given a job collecting toll. Georges Seurat’s, L’invalide (Conté crayon on paper, c. 1881) does not have such a task, but merely gazes across the waters. Most known for his laborious pointillist paintings, I’ve always preferred his studies for them, the brief encounter with form from a meandering hand, as if only loosely attached to the eye. It’s so sad how both the artist and his subject’s aloneless are contingencies for their very collision. I will take anyone who jumps off a bridge seriously. I bet Diane has a salad with a French word in it. I bet Woody had some pills, imagining them as almonds for her salad. If only time could yellow a .jpeg the way it does a drawing. This post should be $2.50, but I’ll let you pass.