The Cloisters: A Good Place to Start

(Originally Published on January 3, 2011)

Several years ago, I was living with my wife and one-year-old son in a three-bedroom apartment we were renting in Queens. I used the third bedroom for a studio, which was actually more difficult than it may sound seeing as the entire apartment had been painted bright orange with green trim. It was not an ideal color scheme for a painting studio, but I made do as best I could. Every day I commuted to midtown, where I worked an entry-level job at an investment firm in the Chrysler Building.

It was early March 2008, when I met a friend, and painter, for a drink after work at a bar beneath Grand Central. He had just come from the Whitney Biennial, which had recently opened. The experience had left him drained and a bit cynical. I hadn't seen the show, but I knew the feeling.

There are shows that leave you so invigorated that all you want is to be back in the studio, feeling as though you could work through the night without tiring. Then there are the shows that leave you empty, pondering the foolish choices and childish ideals that led you to choose the life of an artist. And you leave these shows knowing you're supposed to want to go back to work. But who can work when there's so much drinking to be done?

So we talked for a while over some beers about the things two painters talk about when they feel the world is backwards and that nobody makes art for the right reasons. And somewhere in there, we realized that though we'd both lived as painters in the city for the better part of a decade, neither of us had ever been to The Cloisters. Finally, a problem that could be solved!

And so it happened that the following morning my friend and I met at Columbus Circle, and headed north seeking some form of creative purification or rejuvenation at a medieval monastery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

If you've never been to The Cloisters, it's really quite remarkable. The subway lets you off outside the gates of Fort Tryon Park, which is a gorgeous patch of hilly green overlooking the Hudson just to the north of the George Washington Bridge. From there it's a bit of a hike through the park's gardens and wooded passes, and by the time you finally reach the abbey you're so taken out of your surroundings that it's almost a surprise to realize that you haven't even left the city. It's a feeling you rarely get in any of the other major NYC parks, and for this place, it's an appropriate sort of artifice. For it's there, hidden away at the northern tip of Manhattan, that you can find a museum that houses what is probably the greatest medieval art collection in the New World; including, most famously, the Unicorn Tapestries.

The building is a sort of amalgam comprising architectural elements taken from various medieval European abbeys and transported to New York, in the 1930s, by John D. Rockefeller Jr., for redesign by Charles Collens. The interior is stone, and a bit cold. In the heart of the building, there's a 12th century arcade (hence: Cloisters) surrounding an open-air garden, which is closed off during the colder months, as it was then. At opposing ends of the garden, there are two chapels, built centuries apart, lit by a cool expanse of ambient natural light. The tapestries hang in more dimly lit rooms adjacent to the arcade, but the bulk of the collection on display, e.g., illuminated manuscripts, ivory carvings, early Flemish masterpieces, can be found on the lower floors.

We walked through this space with thoughts of the Biennial and of the emptiness of its brand of celebrity still fresh in our minds. I stopped before an elongated glass case that held a small ivory relief. There were two panels with hinges in the center allowing it to open and close like a book. Opened, the piece displayed four miniature scenes carved into the ivory. On the left was the Coronation of the Virgin. On the right: The Last Judgment. In the lower third of both panels, souls were being lined up, the lucky being welcomed to Paradise, the rest were being banished to damnation. It had been carved by an anonymous Frenchman in the mid-13th century.

I've seen a lot of medieval art and artifact in my life, and I have little doubt that I've walked past similarly crafted works before without taking notice. And shame on me for that. But not on this day. I remember being struck by the scale of the thing. In a world where we can become so accustomed to the over-sized, to the pretension of the monumental, here was this thing, this tiny object that I could hold in my hand, smaller than a paperback, but carrying more weight than anything I'd seen in I-don't-know-how-long. And what was this weight? Whatever it was, it seemed to flow through those halls like lava: dense and slow, but hotter than you can imagine. And it filled those spaces with a power to preserve the old as new, and leave the new cowering in shame and in awe.

The diptych was but one object of many that made us stop and just look. But it's only one of literally dozens of ivory carvings and miniatures, each sharing many of the same attributes. It was the same with the Gothic sculptures adorning the walls of a crypt from which they looked down on a variety of gorgeously rendered sarcophagi. And it was the same with the paintings. Shit. The paintings!

The Merode Altarpiece by Robert Campin may be the greatest painting I've ever seen. Humbly displayed in a quiet room the color of limestone, it sits on a perch and whispers, "Come closer." I obeyed, and I found a picture I'd seen a thousand times before in reproduction, but as is so often the case, I had yet to really see it. Three panels: the Annunciation of the Holy Motherhood by the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin in the center, flanked on either side by devout onlookers to the left and Joseph the Carpenter in his workshop to the right. A technical marvel, it's masterfully rendered in oil from a time when the medium was still in its infancy. I have yet to find a reproduction that will do it justice, but the picture is revelation, both literally and figuratively.

I've heard stories of people breaking down before a Mark Rothko. Now, I like Rothko as much the next guy, but give me a break! You want a reason to weep, go stand in front of the Campin Annunciation for twenty minutes and really look. Afterwards, try to remember why you ever thought Mark Rothko was a painter of note. Maybe you can do it. Maybe a lot of people can. I sure as hell can't. I couldn't that day, and I can't now.

I don't mean to say that the Campin has no equal, or that the Rothko lacks the power to move. I've stood in the middle of a room full of Rothko pictures and bathed in the depths of his blues and oranges; I have stood there, closed my eyes, filled my lungs with air, and felt myself falling into those fields of color, and I have been moved. But on this day, as I stood before that gloriously crafted and unassuming triptych, I stared into its turbulent world of spatial anomaly, of allegory and riddle, of symbolism and iconography, and of blind humility in the presence of the extraordinary, and I was pulled in, and my eyes were opened. I've since found that I do some of my best looking when my eyes are open.

There's a terrace with a well-manicured garden upon which museum visitors can walk out and sit while enjoying panoramic views across the Hudson and into New Jersey. It was on the terrace, while looking at a peculiar shrub whose branches had been manipulated over the years to grow like the arms of a candelabrum, that my friend and I began to piece together what we'd been seeing. And why it was all so profoundly different from what we'd become accustomed to seeing.

Had either of us been religious, then we might have been tempted to look at all of these distinctly Christian masterpieces and attribute their power or pathos to some form of divine inspiration. We are not so disposed. Nor are we of the type to be persuaded that the Old Masters were endowed with mystical secrets or otherworldly abilities. They could not, as an eloquent professor of mine once put it, shit marble. They were not, in any objective sense, special. They were just people; people with an admirable level of skill, which was innate, and a brilliant technique, which had to be learned. But they had something more.

When I mentioned to my friend that I would be writing about this, he reminded me that the word-of-the-day had been "Devotion." We decided on the terrace that afternoon that, more than skill, technique, or inspiration, the current that reverberated through the halls of that abbey and those of so many of the great museums of the world, yet so few of the places where new art is still being made and shown is nothing if not the lingering vibration of the profound and unshakeable devotion of the makers. Not to God, but to the work itself.

Think of the nameless Frenchman who, with large hands and diminutive tools, more than seven hundred years ago peered through a primitive magnifying glass to deftly carve tiny Bible stories into a fresh block of ivory that had been harvested from a slaughtered elephant somewhere across the known world. He could have had no ambitions for museum exhibition. There was no such thing. The object he toiled over was not even meant for display. It had utility. It was small for a reason. It was meant to be held, to spend most of its time clasped shut, and to be opened privately by its owner who could then contemplate its lessons in solitude. That was its purpose.

It had a purpose! It wasn't even art in the modern sense of the word. Certainly no more so than a chair or a desk. But it breathes with life even today. Through a pane of glass it was never meant to be behind, it speaks. Christ! It has the power to speak to nonbelievers about life, about meaning and faith, and about devotion. It's nothing short of magical. That it is art is undeniable. But more than that, I've come to believe that it is what art, what all art, should be. What all great art has ever been. Not what it should look like or be about, but what it should strive for, and sadly what so much of art today fails to even consider. That it was made by, probably, a man with no ambition or even concept of fame only serves to underscore how far our expectations have fallen.

The art world, whatever else it is, is an insulated place. I spent the Thanksgiving prior at the home of a friend of mine who owns a gallery. Towards the end of the night, a conversation between the host and a guest I didn't know turned to an argument over who was more relevant: Jeff Koons or Matthew Barney. Koons, the host argued, was more relevant, and this was evidenced by his having had a float in that morning's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I don't really remember the argument in favor of Barney, but it probably had something to do with the Guggenheim. "Relevant to whom?" I recall asking nobody in particular. After all, while it's true that, short of being the subject of a major motion picture, Koons and Barney are probably as famous as any two living artists can get, I couldn't help but feel as though I was watching two adults heatedly argue over the relevance of two people to a world that had never heard of them, had never seen their work, and could, consequently, never be expected remember either. Relevant indeed.

Artists today are, in a way, like the 13th century ivory carver. That is to say, we don't—or shouldn't—have any illusions about being remembered by history. But unlike the ivory carver, we live in the 21st century and have therefore been endowed with a very keen sense of celebrity, which, when historical relevance is out of the question, will do in a pinch. And this brings me back to The Whitney Biennial.

It should be said that there's nothing extraordinary about hating the Biennial. Indeed, almost everybody always does. The idea, if you don't know, is a large multi-floor group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in which the curators take their best stab at defining that moment in the world of art-making and, theoretically, distinguishing it from the moments two, four, and ten years prior. The result is almost always a cacophony of the fashionably novel, a noisy mess of the superficially new.

But somehow nothing ever feels new. It's always the same things being said in slightly different ways. A grand creative dialogue, which began in earnest at some point in our distant past, has devolved into an exercise in which everybody sits quietly, waiting patiently for their turn to chime up in agreement, to take their brief solo in the endless chorus of "Me toos!" A periodical exposition of shabby cover tunes, a loud and over-hyped episode of American Idol every couple of years is all that remains of what used to be called the avant garde.

Devotion, in art as in other arenas, is a virtue to be cherished. And even if we assume at the outset that it's always been a rare commodity, it's hard to walk the halls of The Cloisters, filled as they are with centuries old masterpieces produced by human beings of whom history has little or no memory, and then find even trace amounts of that kind of devotion in the shallow pitch of "Me too." It's as though we as artists have forgotten what we are capable of doing. Or as though so many of us have simply stopped caring. But so often it seems to be that devotion—more than talent, craft, inspiration, or even time—is what separates them from us.

The work mattered to them in a way that it doesn't matter to us. Their work was precious, and their work had meaning. They had no concern for being remembered, yet their devotion moved them to create things that have bridged the centuries and can move us still today. For our part, we seem to have responded to the news that we will almost certainly be forgotten with the conviction to stop caring altogether. After all, if we can be reasonably certain that the day will come when our names will be uttered for the last time, where are we to find the motivation even to try to make something actually worth remembering?

For those who still have the energy to look, I offer The Cloisters as a good place to start.

BreakerBaker 1-9

(Originally Published on January 3, 2011)

First things first. I am of course obliged to thank our generous host. I am genuinely flattered by his invitation to spend the week up top, as it were. Like many here, I've spent the last couple of years finding my way to Ta-Nehisi's space most days, multiple times a day, and I deeply appreciate the vote of confidence I think he's given me.

Now, based on a handful of comments and suggestions I've made down below over the life of this blog, TNC's asked me to talk a bit about visual art. I spent a while turning it over in my head trying to figure out what that means, or what it should mean in the context of this space, and what I've decided makes the most sense for this blog and this readership is a sort of illustrated meditation on art, the act of creation, and the experience of looking.

There will be an unavoidably autobiographical element in this, and while I feel like I know a lot of you already, I think I should provide a bit of background on me. I have good amount of art history, but I come at this from the perspective of a maker as opposed to a scholar. I studied drawing and painting, first at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, then at the New York Academy of Art. I lived and worked in New York off and on for seven years, and I continue to paint today from my home outside of Atlanta, which is more or less where I grew up. Everything I say here is from my perspective, and it's not really meant to challenge your feelings, as much as it is to express mine. I hope I am able to keep your interest, and you'll forgive me when I go a bit long.

Also, I already have the week more or less mapped out, but I am open to suggestions.

The Atlantic

I had the opportunity last week to act as guest blogger at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog on The Atlantic website. It was pretty cool, although after the second or third day I began to wish I had been allowed a bit more time to prepare. It was the first week after the holidays, after all. I was originally offered this week, but within hours TNC asked if I could take the week of the third instead.

My assumption is that Michael Chabon (who's one of the guest bloggers for this week) was too nervous about having to share the space with me. It's understandable. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm a pretty intimidating guy. It's a shame, though, because I'm confident that we could have coexisted for the week and thus avoided this collision course he and I now find ourselves on. But I'm not going to focus on that now.

Right now, I am going to focus on reposting the stuff I did last week here. That way, when I begin to try to write more new content for this space, it will feel as though I've already started.

Two guys. Seven Square Inches. One night. (Give or take)

A friend told me that I should blog about an art show coming up. This was funny seeing as at the time I hadn't so much as looked at this space since last summer, but he's a good friend, and he's organizing the event, so here goes: Single Fare.

I’ll sum up: JP…err..Jean-Pierre Roy and Michael Kagan, studio mates and, like me, NYAA alums are organizing a very special exhibition in their space, and they've asked artists far and wide to participate. The only requirement for participation is that all works must have been produced on a MetroCard, the 2.125” x 3.25” plastic key to the NYC public transportation system. All works are being accepted. All works will be shown. And all works will be up for sale at what is truly a bargain price: $50 each.

I don’t know what to say. I am generally skeptical of gimmicks, but I’ve lived with the idea of the show for a few weeks and can say that I’ve genuinely been won over. I actually think it’s a really good idea—borderline great—and, failed terrorist bombings aside, it’s the first thing in months to make me feel a little down about not living in the city any longer. I guess I should thank Kagan and JP for this dull ache in the pit of my stomach the next time I see them.

At any rate, I found myself so taken by the spirit of the show, that I pushed up the conversion of my new garage into a workshop/studio space by a couple weeks, and made a couple tiny paintings for the show myself. Yesterday I entrusted the United States Postal Service with the care and transport of my two pictures from Roswell, GA to Brooklyn, NY, and they happily accepted for the reasonable fee of $0.44. If they do not arrive on time, or at all, I want JP and Michael to print out the below pics at 300 dpi and glue them to the back of a MetroCard. I still want my shot at a $100 payday, minus the 10 percent surcharge (Fucking blood-sucking independent dealers. I guess I should consider myself lucky they’re not asking for 10 percent each.).

The deadline for entry is tomorrow, so it suffices to say that if you're only hearing of the show now, then it's very nearly too late for you to participate. Then again, if you’re reading this, it’s very unlikely that this will be the first you’ve heard of it. You’re probably one of the organizers. Regardless. At the last I heard, over 200 pieces had been dropped off as of yesterday morning. I’m expecting that number to as much as double before the Saturday reception. There’s going to be a ton of art. Knowing many of the people who are likely to participate, I assure you that a lot of it will be quite nice. It will be eclectic, but I would not be at all surprised if the quality of the work (as a whole) compared favorably to any other group show that will be up in the city this year. I do not exaggerate. At least, I don’t think I do. If you’re going to be in the city on Saturday night, I implore you to consider making the trek out to Brooklyn to have a look. It will not be a waste of time. And if you’ve got it, consider bringing a fifty in tow. You will see something you want. Come early. Stay late. It should be a blast.

Such is life

I will do my best to avoid speaking at length about having not blogged in such a long while. Let it simply suffice to say that I haven't. The move we were contemplating when I last blogged didn't go through. Sarah did go to New York. Received an offer, but one that was lower than we needed. We are still in Georgia, but now we're in Roswell. Sarah and I are homeowners. Our first mortgage payment is due this month.

Look Away Before You Leap.

I heard reported on NPR a couple of weeks ago that only seven percent of Georgia employers will be hiring over the fourth quarter. And the seven percent is mainly comprised of construction companies and contractors who’ve received stimulus money. This is a problem for Sarah and me because today, nearly ten months since the birth of little Maggers, we’re still a one income household. And my income isn’t what it should be, either. So we’re both looking for something right now. Actually, she’s doing most of the looking for the both of us.

Sarah’s had a couple leads in Atlanta that never really panned out, but for the most part, the job market around here has more or less dried up. Whereas a couple of months ago, Sarah may find 15 or more promising local listings in a single day, lately she would be lucky to see those kinds of numbers over the course of a week or two. So for a while we’ve been widening the net a bit. The first thought was to North Carolina. It’s where we were born and went to college, and we know some people there still. It’s also not that far from here, so the logistics of interviewing, and moving and everything else didn’t seem terribly daunting. It was a few months ago that Sarah started looking in North Carolina, and we’ve yet to land a concrete lead. So within the last couple of weeks we’ve covertly begun to cast an even wider net. And so it happens that at the beginning of next week, Sarah has an interview for a job in TriBeCa about two blocks from where I went to grad school.

New York City. Again. Maybe.

As luck would have it, Sarah received the call for an interview when she would be most readily able to do it. She took the kids to visit her parents in Greensboro last weekend, and got the call on the day she was planning to return. As luck would have it, the weather was terrible yesterday, and the rain was delaying their drive home. Now it’s been delayed for the better part of another week. Sarah, the kids, and her parents will be driving to her aunt’s home in Manassas on Saturday. They’ll spend Sunday, Sarah’s birthday, visiting, and then Sarah will take Amtrak up to Penn Station on Monday morning for the afternoon interview, then back to Manassas that night.

Looking in New York again was my idea. It was an emotional decision. There were lots of reasons, really. The state of the search here was a definite catalyst, but the simple truth is that, given the choice, we want to be there and not here. And not in Raleigh. Or Charlotte. Or DC. Or anyplace else. New York is where we have spent our adult lives. It’s where we started our family. It was where we always planned to raise our children. Oddly enough, over the last seven years, it became our home. It’s where we want to be.

Of course, you can’t always get what you want, and Sarah and I had spent so much of the last year saying that it wasn’t going to happen. That it couldn’t happen. It was stricken from the realm of possibility. Then we officially crossed the one year mark. A few weeks before everybody started celebrating the anniversary of Lehman imploding, we had our own series of anniversaries. Over the Fourth of July weekend, we realized it had been a year since Indymac went caput, and Sarah was laid off. Then, August 11, Nate’s third birthday, marked a full year since Sarah and he left New York with my parents. I had my own anniversary a little over a week later.

I guess it’s only natural that anniversaries are going to make you a bit nostalgic. This one did. And it was that special brand of nostalgia that was tempered with a bit of shame and regret. So I began thinking: why not? I’m not sure I was taking the question as seriously as maybe I should have been. I mean, I had spent the better part of a year thinking precisely about why it couldn’t happen. But suddenly I was in a different state of mind entirely. My mantra was “Well, we’re going to be struggling wherever we are. Why not struggle in a place where actually want to live?” Today I’m a little unsure about how sound that logic is. But here we are. The first lead we’ve had in a month and it’s in Lower Manhattan. Precisely where we want to be. And all I can think about is, “What the fuck are we getting ourselves into?”

I mean, we think we have the money for the move. We’ll have to sell our car, and probably take the hit of a couple grand on that. But we do think we have the money to make the move. And maybe live for a month or two on a strict budget while I look for a job. We think we can do that. We think we can. We do not know. Yet here we are. It’s Friday. Sarah has an interview on Monday. In New York. I am writing this at work. In Atlanta. It’s by no means a given that Sarah will get this job, but it’s clearly plausible. And if that happens, then everything is going to change, very quickly. Things go from being theoretical to being real. Very real. Decisions will need to be made, and they’re the kind of decisions that shape the kind of person you are and are going to be. We’ve done this before. We’ve made the leap. It worked. More or less. But things were different. We had one more job and one fewer kid. It worked in the short term, but things fell apart around us. Indymac crumbled. Sarah was pregnant. We were stuck. There wasn’t going to be another job for months and months.

But those months have passed. And an opportunity may be presenting itself. An opportunity to do what? is the question. And what happens next? And do you know anybody who may want to hire me? That last one may be the most important question of all. Pay attention to that one.

The Kobayashi Maru

I was recently at work listening to old episodes of Radiolab on my iPod, and I was feeling kind of sad as I don’t think the show will ever be as good as it was in the beginning. I don’t know if there’s been a genuine drop in the quality of the show. Maybe it would be better to say that the show will never be as good to me as it was when I first heard it. The fifth season of the show is over, and while the sixth must be coming soon, the long periods of hiatus between the short, five episode bundles have stopped filling me with the feeling of heavy anticipation. Now? Eh. I could sort of take the series of leave it. I almost think it would be better if there were no sixth season. The fifth season, but for a couple episodes (I liked “Sperm” a lot…teehee), was pretty ho hum. The show doesn’t feel fresh anymore. It’s still impeccably constructed and produced, but I feel like it’s lost a little something that made it special. (Although if you’ve never heard the show, do yourself a favor and check it out. There’s a free semi-weekly podcast, and I’m sure you can find any number of archived episodes streaming at WNYC.org or elsewhere on the web.)

At any rate, I was listening to “Morality,” which is a show from season two (2006). It’s not the first time I’ve heard the episode. I used to listen to the podcasts over and over again in the studio and at work, so I’ve heard this particular show a dozen times or more. It’s got chimps in it, which is always a plus. It also spends quite a bit of time centered around a couple basic morality dilemmas that I can’t recall having heard prior to listening to the podcast the first time, but which sound a lot like the sort of basic thought experiments you might expect a philosophy or ethics professor to use as a conversation starter in 100-level university classes.

It goes something like this:

Scenario One: You’re standing near some railroad tracks. Far out of ear shot, you can see five men working on the tracks. Behind them, you see an approaching train. You see the train. They do not. Nor do they hear it. They also don’t see you, so (theoretically) there’s no way for you to alert them to their impending doom. Beside you is a lever. You can pull the lever and divert the train to another set of tracks where only one man sits working, also out of earshot. Your dilemma, if it’s not yet clear is whether to pull the lever or not. You can choose not to pull the lever, in which case five people will die, or you can choose to pull the lever, in which case you save the lives of those five people, but put another man into harm’s way and effectively kill (murder?) somebody who would have been in absolutely no danger had you decided not to act at all.

Scenario Two: Similar to scenario one, you’ve got the tracks, the train, the five guys completely oblivious to the fact that they’re about to be squashed. Only this time, you’re not on the tracks; you’re standing on a pedestrian bridge that crosses above the tracks somewhere between the train and five guys. There’s no lever. No way to redirect the train. The only hope the five guys have is that the train stops before reaching them. Beside you on the bridge is a sort of hefty man, and as the two of you look down on the situation unfolding on the tracks it occurs to you that if you were to push the man off of the bridge and onto the tracks, the train would hit him and (for reasons not altogether clear to me) that would cause the train to stop. So again, your choice is to do nothing and allow five people to die, OR choose to act, this time by making physical contact with the man and pushing him to his death, and save the five guys. What do you do?

Have your answer? Anyway, as is explained to Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich by various neurologists, when people are presented with these two (virtually identical) scenarios, something like 90 percent of respondents say that they would pull the lever, but far fewer people said that they would push the fat man to his death. The show went on to try to figure out why this was the case or, more specifically, to try to figure out what the physiological nature of the thought process was. Neurologists used an fMRI to figure out what was going on in the brain at the moment where people were making the decision, and it came down, essentially to a sort of frontal lobe battle between emotion and logic. It was all very interesting in the context of the show, but personally, I couldn’t get over the original findings. Nine out of ten people are going to pull the lever? I have to hope that’s bullshit.

It’s not that I don’t accept that this was people’s honest response to the scenario. It’s just that I don’t accept that their honest response is their true response. I hope it’s not anyway. From where I stand, they either don’t understand the question or they’re saying what they want to believe they would do. In this case, for some reason, they choose to believe that the heroic thing to do is to kill the one guy to save the five. Of course, the truth is that choosing to pull the lever isn’t the least bit heroic. It’s murder. And I don’t know what it says about the world if only 10 percent of respondents understand that to be true without even thinking about it.

After the train analogy, they gave another scenario which the guys admitted having taken from the final episode of M.A.S.H. Here it is:

It’s war time, and your entire village is huddled into a basement or hut (do huts have basements?) as the enemy troops search the town. Everybody has to be very quiet to avoid being found out. It’s a given that anybody who is found will be murdered. So you’re hiding out with every man, woman and child of your village with each and every one of you making as little noise as possible. In your arms, is your baby. Your baby has a cold. Your baby could cough at any minute. If the soldiers searching the town hear your baby cough, everybody’s dead. Your option in this case is either smothering your baby or do nothing risk everybody’s life on the hope that your baby will not cough. Why those are your only two choices is beyond me. Anyway, 50 percent of respondents say they’d smother their baby, a statistic to which Jad Abumrad, the younger host, says admiringly “That’s not bad.” Oh yeah? Really? It seems pretty bad to me.

To illustrate the different perspectives (and to my mind, illustrate just how bad it is), they ask the question to a number of New Yorkers on the street. Some saying yes they would kill their baby, some saying no. Everybody who says no says it for the obvious reason: i.e. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I’m paraphrasing. Those who say they’d do it go through a series of obvious rationalizations about the greater good. The needs of the many are really heavy, and all that Vulcan bullshit (Can we all take a moment to thank Eric Bana for knocking those green-blooded, logic-obsessed, pointy-eared bastards onto the endangered species list?). Anyway, almost to typify how absurdly indefensible this position is, they bring out a girl who sounds to be no more than 19 or 20, and she proceeds to stumble through a painfully meandering rationalization that essentially uses the language of “Pro-Choice” advocacy to explain why she believes she has the right to “terminate the life of [her] baby.” A sort of post, post, post factum form of birth control, I guess.

Anyway, the people who choose to kill their baby, or so the argument goes, are the logical ones; just like the ones who pull the lever or push the man. And here I’d always thought of myself as a sort of logical guy. Not that I was necessarily a Vulcan, but maybe a half Vulcan, half human hybrid (Can they do that?*). But as it turns out, I’d always been hiding from the obvious truth. I’m not Spock at all. I’m James T. Kirk. You want to know what my answers to those scenarios are? Fuck you. That’s my answer. Fuck you and fuck all no-win situations.

The Wrath of Khan is all about the no-win situation. The movie opens with Kirstie Alley as the Vulcan Saavik who is seemingly in command of a starship responding to a distress signal sent out by The Kobayashi Maru, a ship which is under Klingon attack. A battle ensues, the bridge from which Saavik is commanding is tossed and everybody goes flying all over the place in true Star Trek fashion. The battle takes only moments. The Kobayashi Maru is destroyed, and everybody on Saavik’s bridge is killed. Or so it seems. A door opens and a silhouetted Admiral James Kirk steps onto the bridge. The lights come up and all of the dead officers rise in good spirits. As it turns out, the whole thing was just a training exercise named for the ship sending the distress beacon, which is designed as a no-win situation to help officers in training learn to deal with circumstances for which no positive outcome exists. It is later revealed that the only cadet to ever beat The Kobayashi Maru was, you guessed it, James T. Kirk.

Later still, it is revealed that Kirk didn’t beat the scenario as it was, he rewrote it so that it could be won. He cheated. Not because he wanted to win, but because he wanted the chance to win. He rejected the premise of the test and any lessons it had to teach him. Saavik is offended when she learns of the stubborn and childish lengths Kirk had gone to avoid the shame of losing. Stupid Vulcan Scientologist.

At the end of Wrath of Khan, the Enterprise is marooned in space as Reliant, a hijacked Federation starship that carries the Genesis device(if you have to ask, then maybe you should’ve stopped reading a long time ago), is about to explode nearby. The blast from both Reliant and Genesis would surely destroy the Enterprise and everyone on it. But the Enterprise has no warp drive, and there’s no way she could clear the blast area on impulse power alone. Without giving too much away, Spock goes down to engineering, repairs the drive allowing Enterprise to jump to warp speed ahead of the shock wave of the blast, but in doing so, Spock exposes himself to the radiation of the warp core and, in one of the most touching sequences in American film history, he speaks to his friend Jim for the last time (theoretically) through a pane of protective glass. This, as Spock explains, was his response to The Kobayashi Maru. The ship is saved. Spock dies. Before he dies, he explains why his decision was the logical one: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. The very justification used to pull the lever, push the man, and smother the baby. But Spock, it’s important to note, doesn’t do any of that stuff. He doesn’t pull the lever and he doesn’t push the man off the bridge. He jumps off the bridge himself.

What Spock understands, and what all of these respondents so eager to pull the lever or push the fat guy don’t seem to get, is that the many includes the fat man. Your baby is one of the many, too. The one? That’s you. And if you’re standing on a bridge trying to stop the train, and the only thing you can think to do is push the guy next to you onto the tracks, you’re not thinking hard enough. Not by a long shot. Mind you, I’m not saying I would jump. I’d probably hope the guy next to me would jump, and then spend the next movie trying to figure out how to bring him back to life. Although, not if it meant listening to those damned Klingon bastards kill my son. That, I think, is a bridge too far.

*That’s a joke, son.