Art with edge is the beautiful whim or grim, a Mona Lisa smile, a urinal by R, Mutt, Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus, and an Edward Hopper, who catches the grit of New York City in a painting of an overpass to a railway line or a woman alone in an automat. It is confrontation with the inexplicable, and a sense of being thrown into a reality never seen, or always seen but never appreciated. It is an energy expressed and a thought condensed, or never felt. Edge is hard to attain and difficult to keep. Like anything sharp, it dulls with repetition. In the ‘50s New York, art had edge.

Dyslexia is made more difficult in the digital world. I find that my tolerance level for the problems I incur daily in the world full of passwords, authorization codes, and resetting of websites has become less troublesome with each passing year.

… These opening lines of Auden’s great poem are invoked by a museum guide at the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Bruegel Room in the film “Museum Hours,” 2012, by Jem Cohen.

Many saw the action thriller “Captain Phillips,” about the Somali pirates, who attempted to take control of the container ship, the Maersk Alabama. Tom Hanks gave a great performance. What I would like you all to do is think about this story not as a great nail-biting, gut-wrenching tension-packed tale of resistance to outlaws, but as a metaphor about globalization, about what happens when the paths of the very poor and the very rich intersect in the crossfire of world economics.

Cairo, (pronounced Kay-ro), Illinois, lies at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This town was murdered. White right-wing racism killed it. The ruin is testament to the negative forces of American history. What I saw, quite by accident, reminds me of our situation in 2016 with the candidacy of the demagogue Republican Donald Trump.