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Did a 15 year old boy on a family farm invent TV, or did a nasty old big corporation?Okay, so Philo Farnsworth was older than 15 when he came up with the first functioning electrical television broadcasting system, but he started when 15.Earlier, actually. He shared it with his high school science teacher at 15. According to the patents, he’s the one who did it.Philo T. Farns…

A less forbidding Egon Schiele painting:Four Trees by Egon Schiele, early 20th CenturyHis wife died during the Spanish Flu epidemic, while six months pregnant. He died of the flu three months later. It would be nice to have another 60 or 70 years worth of work from him.The man himself:Egon Schiele

Tree in the Autumn-Wind, Egon Schiele, early 20th century?, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the major seed companies has left okra out of its print catalog. In the table of contents, it says to go online if you want okra.Will Big Okra sue the seed company?abused okraWill the United Okra Breeders Association of North Carolina sue to get its lifeblood back into print and on equal footing with those glamour queens, the tomatoes and melons?Will the Okra Front barr…

We live in a mass, administered society. The cultural industries produce assemblyline entertainment that is triage for wage slaves. Half of your brothers and sisters have below average IQ’s. School is a medium-security prison run by, as my father said many times, “the stupid kids.”a blank canvasIt’s time to get rough with this reality.A blank canvas or an empty page is for you…

Our internal and external environments affect how we think. They can be inspirational. They can create epiphanies. If we’re lucky, they can create our life paths.Vesuvius ejaculatingIn “NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory” (Yale/Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2024), author Martin Mittelmeier, with wonderful help from translator Shelley Frisch…

Here is abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb’s most iconic painting:Cadmium Red Above Black, Adolph Gottlieb, 1959, via WikipediaThis is what his work looked like in 1936, when he worked for the Federal Art Project, which subsidized fine artists during the Great Depression. It’s called “Sun Deck”:Sun Deck, Adolph Gottlieb, 1936Quite a freeing of the spirit over 20 years!Cad…

I know it seems hard to believe, but there was a time when classical music was as available and as free as country or pop.That time was in the early days of radio. In the 1920’s until 1950, broadcast networks such as CBS or NBC provided classical music, as did local stations. And there were a bunch of reasons why they did.When radio was a novelty, there was a civilized war, but…

by James Ensor, 1888The Haunted Furniture by James Ensor, 1888