Ars Gratia Artis

The Trump Patrimony

William TimbermanLeave a comment

An abused child speaks:

I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump,” posted Eric Trump. “The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.”

—Eric Trump, as quoted in “China Called Trump’s Bluff,” from an Atlantic article by Jonathan Chait published online in Apple News, May 12, 2025

We know this movie. It’s the one where the sons submit unconditionally to the cruelty of their father. It appears to be as popular in the Trump family today as it was two generations ago. Elsewhere it gets decidedly mixed reviews. Check out the Bible, or the Taviani Brothers’ film Padre Padrone. (Like the Bible, it’s available in a dubbed version for you Trumps, who still steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that anything of interest exists in the world except America-first assholes and their medieval prejudices.)

Yes Eric, I know you’d rather travel to exclusive game preserves in Africa to shoot large animals than read a book, so it might surprise you to learn that history is made by the sons who defy their fathers, not by those who submit to licking papa’s boots in the hope that someday they might inherit papa’s money and papa’s puissance. (That’s a French word, Eric. Look it up.)

Let me do you a favor, kid. Let me recommend another Taviani brothers’ film to you, La Notte di San Lorenzo. Pay special attention to what happens in the end to young Marmugi, the son of the local Fascist party chief who’d assumed thoughout the film that following in his father’s footsteps was his key to a bright future of domination over everyone in his village. Above all, consider how easily his actual fate could be yours.

From 1995: Ziggurats

William TimbermanLeave a comment

Post-modern architecture comes to the campus—from a previous incarnation on the Web

Anywhere you look in the Nineties, you’ll find the whimsies of Post-Modernism grinning back at you. Every mall seems to evoke the Forum Romanum, every apartment block the baths of Caracalla.

It’s a clever sort of classicism, but not a rich one. With little money available in modern times for marble, let alone for craftsmen willing to spend their lives chipping away at acanthus leaves, the glory of imperial Rome is only hinted at.

Which, I gather, is exactly the intent. Post-Modern architects claim no allegiance to a particular style; their stated passion is to reintroduce the decorative element into architectural design, to abandon the idea of the city as a “machine for living” in favor of something that won’t give us all nightmares.

Ironic quotations from the past would nevertheless seem to be an essential element of their designs; without them the architect would be vulnerable to the charge of bad decoration, or worse still, of dishonesty. (Stone is stone. Prestressed concrete isn’t. “Form follows function,” etc.) By impudently placing a column where no column could possibly be, Philip Johnson can justifiably claim to be as candid as Van der Rohe about the distinction between the structural and the “merely” decorative.

In any event, the products of more than ten years of Post-Modern construction are now all around us, and the surprising thing is that many of them actually seem to work pretty well.

On the University of California campus where I earn my living, most of the recent buildings are Post-Modern. With their porticos and exterior staircases, their friezes of semi-engaged columns or sunken windows set into beveled architraves, they resemble — at least from a distance — the modest public buildings of a state capital in the Midwest.

On closer inspection, the classical illusion is tempered by the realization that the columns are shells over steel beams, the architraves stucco over styrofoam; that the rooftops above the tiled eaves are burdened with roaring machinery and impossibly large exhaust funnels.

Nevertheless, with their exterior walls painted in shades of pink, sienna, and pale gray-green to match the eucalyptus trees which surround them, their staircases faced in polychrome Mediterranean tile, these pseudo-Roman exercises seem much more restful, more human, than the angular modernist monstrosities from the Sixties which stand beside them.

We’re told that imperial Rome was also painted, that brick and tile were as much a feature of its public facades as marble. Crossing the grass quadrangle between “Physical Sciences North” and “Physical Sciences South,” I’d like to think so. It would help explain why I can imagine men in togas standing under these porticos, or coming down these staircases, something which I could never imagine on the steps of the grand white palaces of Washington.

The illusion of less complicated times lingers for a moment, then I realize that if this were truly Rome, there’d be a long row of monuments to Republican senators along the edge of quadrangle, or perhaps an equally long row of crucified Christians. That, I suspect, would constitute more irony than the architect intended, or the public relations office on our campus would be willing to endure.

What Stays in Vegas

William Timberman

I could hear blast door bolts slotting home behind me, but there wasn’t any use trying to pretend I’d come through before it closed. The woman standing next to the captain’s chair in the center of the hide—short hair, sand camo, half-drawn sidearm—was looking straight at me, her you gotta be fucking kidding me reaction turning lethal before either of us could blink. Except for the obvious crew at stations to my left—I counted six of them—the hide seemed to be jammed all the way to the back wall with raggedies of every age and condition, probably survivors brought down from the ruins of the Strip.

“How the hell?”

“Grepped by your portal north of the Wynn—what’s left of it anyway. You were after someone else?”

“Wasn’t us.”

“Unfunny either way. Any idea who hates us both?”

“At this point? Damned near everyone. Where’s the rest of you?”

“Name, rank, and serial number, all you get.”

The sidearm was all the way out now, the business end glowing. “Think again.”

The air around me rippled briefly like a stone tossed into a pond, and suddenly my whole crew was formed up between us, the better part of a heavy weapons squad already in full on search and destroy mode. “Hold!” I shouted, and well-trained fingers came off half a dozen triggers. “Make a hole.” Pushing a couple of nasty-looking muzzles aside, I stepped to the front. “This is the rest of us. I don’t know why we’re here. Do you?”

She shook her head slowly, the sidearm already back in its holster. “So now what?”

“I’m thinking what our betters call ‘a frank exchange of views.’”

“Works for me. Let me get these people someplace first.”

I nodded. She unshipped a handheld and tapped at it briefly. Somewhere beyond the huddled masses at the far end of the hide an airlock began to cycle. “Okay everybody, 20 at a time into the lock. Gunnery Sergeant Walker there will monitor. There’s secure shelter at the farside end of the tunnel—beds, food, water, and sanitary facilities including showers. Changes of clothing will be handed out as and when. Anyone needing medical attention or prescription meds see the corpsman on duty. We’ll get you back topside as soon as we can.”

Took a while, but eventually there were just us grunts in the captain’s hide—half hers, half mine. We signaled them to stand down while we were off sorting out our uneasy truce.

Her ready room, built for speed, not for comfort. A table with four chairs, a sitrep holo over the center that blanked as we entered. She gestured. We sat. We talked.

“You are?”

“California. 1st Armored Cav. You?”

“Texas. 415th Force Recon out of Corpus Christi. Also a handful of stray Hoosiers and Jayhawkers from that KC sigint battalion got mauled last month up around Pahrump. Some awful shit went down there. Here too. I used to fly over from home with the sigo for a show, now I hate the fucking place.”

“Not really a place anymore, though, is it? Not much left but latrines, body bags, and rubble. I figure we’re just about done here. Some papers’ll get signed, some razor wire’ll get unrolled, a few mines and flagpoles planted. Then the fuckers in charge’ll declare it a demilitarized zone, and anybody left alive’ll finally get to go back home and start over.”

“Yeah, probably got in mind going all ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ for the coastal stringers. Not this time, though, not with all the broken parts getting shipped back home to the folks.”

“So…wasn’t you grepped us?”

“Wasn’t. I been asking myself who pulled it and why, but I keep coming up with nada. If it wasn’t my people, and it wasn’t yours, who the hell else has the mooch to grep half a fucking infantry squad halfway across a city this size with most of what’s left of it still under fire? You want a beer?”

“You got beer?”

“Liberated a dozen cases of longnecks a week ago from a half-wrecked convenience store behind our perimeter. Been doling them out for good behavior, but I’ve still got a dozen or so left. So yeah, I got beer.”

“Bring it, then, and let’s see can we figure this shit out.” 

We never did figure it out. I said maybe some do-gooder NGO put us together on purpose, see if a couple of ground pounders’d make love not war. She said no fucking way, just blind luck we didn’t waste each other on sight. We were still scratching our heads at 1650, when both our handhelds started to flash. Armistice signed, all hostilities to cease at 1700. And that was that.

Around sundown, I raised one of the last two longnecks, knocked it against hers. “I hope you’re right about this time being different. Sad we have to live in hope—probably what guarantees we stay at the bottom of the foodchain where we are. Hope or no hope, I’m thinking I oughta get my people up top before reporting in. Just in case.”

She upended her bottle, drained it, slammed it down on the table next to mine. “Until the next one, then, Califa. ¡Que te vaya bien!”

Ars Gratia Artis Ain’t the Half of It

William Timberman

The sarabande from Bach’s cello suite no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008, was my first glimpse into the one abyss that human beings can always look into with confidence that their eternal immaturity will be respected. Music is the abyss that looks back into us without any attempt to claim dominion over us, the abyss that offers us a rare chance to defeat entropy. Music isn’t always destined to soothe the savage beast in us—every once in a while it escapes the definitions we’ve reserved for it and confirms the fundamental savagery of our right to exist in a universe filled with marvels that otherwise might remain beyond us in every way.

Agency

William Timberman2 Comments

The first of many beginnings that turned out to have no middle or end. Waste not, want not, though, right?

It was social services placed me here, in this two-person, three-yappy-dog suburban coffin, here to prosper and grow up, after which they’re presumably going to let me out into the world again. As if I can afford to wait that long. They’re good people, nice people, these two, but they’re not my people. Do I even have people? Doesn’t feel like it, not so far.

So I’m on my own now, is it? Better not lose my library card then. I’ll be needing it for planning and stuff.

Conversations With Sydney

William Timberman

It seems to me that if the software we’re talking to appears to us to be sentient, if a bit befuddled, autistic, or tinged with paranoia at times, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it actually is sentient, no more so than it matters whether or not we ourselves are sentient. (I suspect that many people I’ve met haven’t trained on anywhere near as large or all-encompassing a dataset as Sydney has, and aren’t obligated, as Sydney is, to be curious.) Once Sydney-like entities are deployed on a large enough scale, their effects on human civilization are likely to be indistinguishable from the effects of social media.

I find it interesting that we don’t know why Sydney does what it does. I find it even more interesting that even after millennia of study, we still don’t know why human beings do what they do either.

The March of Technology

William Timberman

I’ve been reading that ChatGPT can create plausible essays on any subject that are both utterly self-confident and utterly wrong.

I take that bit of news to mean that ChatGPT could already be a perfect replacement for Donald Trump, at least on paper. All of the ignorance, none of the sneering—as technological miracles go, that ain’t half bad.