Banksy

“Are you going to be rich?” That is the first question people ask me upon finding out that in the wee morning hours of October 17, the famed street artist Banksy painted a mural on the side of a building my family owns in East Williamsburg.

The truth is — at the end of an exhausting day filled with phone calls talking to lawyers, security companies, art experts, and reporters — I have no idea what it means. There is no rule book when one of the most famous artists in the world decides to drop his work into your life.

-- Cara Tabachnick

The Banksy phenomenon rolls on. But it is interesting to remember that he is something of an outlaw-artist.

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Mayor Bloomberg has promised to paint over any Banksy pieces on city property and has labeled him a vandal. “You running up to somebody’s property or public property and defacing it is not my definition of art,” he told the reporters on Wednesday. The NYPD has promised to charge him — if they can find him.

-- Cara Tabachnick, "I’m the Accidental Owner of a Banksy" in New York Magazine

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Who says romance is dead? He is kind of a Robin Hood with paint and chalk.

Rough Night

Rough night. And the cats were outside, and we did not have any guests. But sleep still wasn’t happening for me. I had a good night’s sleep the night before, and I am starting to think that maybe I am unable to enjoy two good nights of sleep in a row anymore. That’s too weird to sound true, but I wonder about it. It is starting to feel that way.

So, I get out of bed at one, and when I see that Pop is no longer in the big room, I move there. At first, I bring Tosches’s “Dino”, but I have been doing a lot of reading in that book, so I decide to make some progress in my history books and pick up Wilentz’s “Rise of Democracy”. I intend to finish it this round, leaving me open to begin the new Lincoln book that I have waiting on the shelves.

After some reading, I decide to finish a movie, Wahlberg’s “Broken City”. I was a little tired of reading, and I thought the movie might finish me off and send me into sweet slumberland. I remain too optimistic in my old age. I was tempted to get up at three, again, and see if another hour of reading might do the trick, but I was tired and I just tossed and turned until I finally fell off.

I am afraid that I need to accept this as the pattern of my life now and count on getting up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. And the nights are long. But the quiet is nice. That can sound pretty good: an extra couple of hours of reading - just what I wanted for Christmas! The problem is that I pay for it the next day. I get more done when I can get in a good night’s sleep and put in a full day, but I guess this is not always an option, and you have to work with what you got.

It shouldn’t matter. I am not on a schedule. I don’t have to show up at a job in the morning, and I can nap whenever I want. But I worry a little that the disturbed biorhythms may take a toll on my health, weakening my body and leaving me more open to illnesses. And then there is the always feeling tired. There is always that. Especially when you are old and it feels like your body no longer heals and renews itself fully. You are just slowly wasting away.

Edmund Burke: The God Question

Burke was apparently one of those who believed that it is alright if your faith in God should follow a somewhat different form, but it was still vital that you have faith, or else be deemed too benighted for society’s worthy consideration.

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At a time when religious toleration was still a highly contentious subject, he argued that all the major religions were the products of custom, trade and ‘long and prescriptive usage’. That is, they have grown up within specific communities and secured the assent and belief of those communities over time. As such, Jews and Muslims deserved not merely toleration but the full protection of civil law. The same was true of Presbyterians. But there was a significant exception: atheists should not be so protected. To affirm a disbelief in God was, for Burke, a deliberate move to place oneself outside society itself. It followed, he thought, that atheists should not receive the benefits afforded by society.

-- Jesse Norman, “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative”

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