September 11, 2025 : Issue #98

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

This: Needlepoint Vermeer. That: The trouble with AI cartoons. And the Other: running the numbers after six Israeli civilians get killed in a bus stop attack.

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THIS

A few months ago, I was giving the latest version of my “Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing” slide talk at The Church cultural space out in Sag Harbor. (Longtime veterans of the Cabinet may recall how that talk starts out with Szymborska-flecked close-readings of Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” and “Lacemaker,” see Issue #49 here.) Anyway, after the talk, a local resident came up to me and introduced himself as Mark Wilson, “an artist/painter, late of Tony Shafrazi’s stable, and sometime curator, dealer, collector and all-around hunter-gatherer” (all of which I subsequently confirmed at his website here.) He went on to say that one of his recent passions had been collecting amateur needlepoint knock-offs of Vermeer paintings. It turns out there’s an entire industry given over to needlepoint templates, where, for example, a customer can purchase (for around thirty dollars, not including the yarn) a stiff canvas approximation of the painting in question and then take to overlaying their own threaded version—and that there is quite a thriving market in the resultant confections over on eBay.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid, Needlepoint template, sample resultant confection.

Wilson proceeded to show me several examples on his smart phone, such as the one to the right above, but then he went on to say that what had really caught his fancy in recent years was what the confections looked like from behind, see the first two Milkmaids below (and I must say, I too was really taken with that second one). As images, they were understandably reversed, so, he explained, he sometimes photographed the back-sides and flipped that resultant image, as in the far-right Milkmaid below.

He went on to show me a needlepoint version of Vermeer’s celebrated “Wine Glass,” which alas was hardly great shakes,

though the backside was definitely something:

(Remember how David Letterman used to have an ongoing routine in which he would invite everyday amateur variety acts on stage—the more absurd the better—and then invite the audience to judge, by way of their countervailing applauses, Was that Something or was it Nothing? Well, that’s what I mean when I say the backside of that “Wine Glass” was Definitely Something.)

Wilson then went on to show me a suite of Girls with a Pearl Earring, the frontsides of which, alas, were little short of terrifying: veritable landslides into the Uncanny Valley.

Though, in fairness, with that painting, it would be hard for anyone, even a master painter, to capture the transcendent freshness of the original. On the other hand, the backside of the one on the left (shown below both in its actual reverse and in that reverse photographically flipped) is truly haunting.

“In my early days as a painter,” Wilson recalled for me, “I was always surprised by and paid equal attention to the marks that occurred at the edges of my creativity. For example, I sometimes incorporated my disposable paper palettes into my own work.” He showed me an example.

“The unpredictable unconscious marks,” he went on, “have a poetry of their own, similar to what you see in the backs of those needlepoints.”

Across the ensuing months, Wilson continued sending me examples of recent finds, and many of them were quite striking, whether head-on or flipped, full-on or in detail. As for example these two:

Flipped backside of a “Little Street”

Likewise with a detail from a “View of Delft”

I was charmed and not entirely surprised to hear that one of the most commonly broached needlepoints was that of one of my own favorite paintings, or anyway what used to be one of my favorites, Dresden’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.”

The confected results evinced, shall we say, varying degrees of success (see one flipped below, the other head on):

There was another one, though, that was somehow powerfully affecting:

Indeed in some ways even more so than what is left of the actual “Girl Reading” in Dresden, ever since, in what some have been referring to as The Art Crime of the Century, that museum’s restorers got finished with their radical “cleaning” of the original.

(A word on that disaster: it had long been known that Vermeer had originally painted something behind the reading girl—and indeed for many years, after the painting itself was X-rayed, it was known that what it was was a jumbo version of another painter’s Cupid from Vermeer’s own collection that surfaces in the background of several of his other paintings. Such an inclusion would have gone along with the archly moralizing tendency of many of his contemporaries and served as a tut-tutting commentary on the ridiculously delusional expectations of the girl in the foreground: a sort of feint much prized by their contemporary collectors. But in what several historians, including Ben Binstock, surmise was arguably one of the pivotal moments of his career, Vermeer himself had grown disgusted by such arch imputations, and himself painted out the Cupid, replacing it with the first of his tidal washes of light spreading ever so subtly across a bare wall—the result being nothing short of a kind of Annunciation. This being the first of the series of women alone caught in an extended moment stilled absorption, arguably the pinnacle, or towering mountain range of such pinnacles, of his career. The Dresden restorers, for their part, were not convinced if they were even aware of that interpretation and proceeded to scrape out the white wall so as to reveal the leering Cupid behind, going to great lengths, thereafter, to crow over their epochal discovery. Aye, like I say, now I almost prefer the backside of that needlepoint confection.)

Here's another beauty:

Wilson informed me that he had begun experimenting with posterlike photographic blow-ups of the resultant images, along the following lines:

And, indeed, I wasn’t at all surprised, though I was pleased, to hear that another of the most popular of the needlepoints online proved to be Vermeer’s own final masterpiece, “The Lacemaker,” as in these backside captures:

For those particular needlepoints uncannily recapitulated the very theme Vermeer himself had been probing there at what proved to be the very end of his life, that of “the darling little being with its tiny heart beating inside” (in Szymborska’s casting), utterly absorbed in the task before it, be it the lacemaker herself focused on the V of the stretched thread couched in the M of her surrounding hands,

the only thing truly in focus in the entire painting, which is to say VerMeer himself, similarly intent, breath stilled, before the focus of his own attention, or we ourselves as we visit the resultant painting in question at the museum, or now the needlepoint artists themselves laboring over their traced matrices, or Wilson and then us, gazing upon their completed confections.

A veritable Russian doll procession, one inside the next, of intent and awestruck presence.

Which in turn reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s recent observation regarding the controversy as to whether publishing is an art, a science, or merely a business. “It’s none of those things,” Garrison concludes, “It’s a hobby—like needlepoint.” With all of which, alas, I myself can only concur. Sigh and amen.

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THAT

One of my problems with AI cartoons

So my dear friend Gil Kofman, the playwright behind the Leni Riefenstahl play we were spotlighting here in the Cabinet several months back, has taken to sending me AI versions of ideas he has for cartoons, such as this one here,

and I think I can honestly say that much as I love Gil, and I do, I hate these synthetically extruded AI diversions of his. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

In this particular instance, there’s the uncanny-valley ickiness, say, of the shaking knife (shades of the six-finger problem), the lameness of the Hitchcock approximation (not nearly grotesque enough), the nonsequitur of what the Janet Leigh figure is doing inside the shower, the inanity of the shower curtain being up against the wall instead of where it is supposed to be—all of which could be improved upon, I suppose, through further prompts and sharpenings. But beyond all that there is the rote, flabby, uninspired facility of the whole thing, the lack, for lack of a better word, of a soul behind the drawing. (I can just hear my other friend Blaise huffing away.)

But here, take a look at this recent New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens by way of contrast:

So incredibly spare and economical, and yet so supple and so accomplished. The directness with which both the wide expanse of desert and the rising hillside get evinced by pair of single sweeping lines. The way the difference between land and sky, materiality and atmosphere, gets suggested by way of a spattering of tiny dots, or the lack thereof, to either side of the division. The subtle shadows. The masterful way that the throbbing heat of the sun is signaled by those pulsing swirls (inside their own paradoxical shadow). The disbelieving expressiveness of the poor fellow’s single eye, and the gulp emanating from his nonexistent mouth. And then the centrality of the punchline, right there in the middle (with the undertone that it could only have been placed there by some sort of taunting deity).

That’s what I mean by soul, the expression of one embodied individual, directed in a sort of I-Thou fashion, to each fresh individual receiver.

And that’s just what I want to believe (in my admittedly Luddite manner) that a large language model (or whatever they’re calling the visual approximation of same) cannot replicate. It can copy it, feast on the copy and add it to its pablum horde and average out the teeming plenum, but it can’t create, and it can’t be inspired.

I truly believe that. Prove me wrong.

Terry Gilliam’s stomping foot.

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& THE OTHER

The “other,” as it happens, being the very subject of today’s final entry.

Jerusalem, September 8, 2025. (Photo: Anwar Arad, Reuters)

For earlier this week, six Israeli civilians were killed and eighteen wounded (and their two Palestinian West Bank assailants likewise slain) during a morning rush hour incident at a crowded bus stop in a north Jerusalem neighborhood (internationally recognized, since the end of 1967’s Six Day War, as being on the very edge of occupied territory) frequented by settlers waiting to board transport to or arriving from their West Bank homesteads.

The New York Times reported how “The Israeli government identified the victims as Rabbi Yisrael Matzner; Yaakov Pinto, a recently married immigrant from Spain; Rabbi Yosef David; Sarah Mendelson; Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Pash; and Rabbi Mordechai Steintzag, who owned a well-known bakery.” (Israeli media of course dove into exhaustive and incessant detail on the exemplary lives of the victims in question and the understandably consuming grief of their families and neighbors.) The two shooters, who were themselves shot by a passing soldier and an armed civilian, were identified by the Washington Post as Muthna Amro, 20, and Muhammed Taha, 21, both from villages in the occupied West Bank.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad both denied responsibility for the attack while praising the attackers for what they described as “their natural response” to ongoing Israeli actions in the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The Palestinian Authority for its part condemned the attack outright as it condemned “any targeting of Palestinian or Israeli civilians.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the act of “terror,” as he put it, and promised swift retribution. And sure enough, within hours IDF forces arrived at and sealed off the villages from which the two shooters had come, arresting male relatives and promising further action. For his part, according to the Washington Post, Netanyahu’s Finance Minister, the extremist firebrand Bezalel Smotrich, demanded that notwithstanding its statement, the Palestinian Authority had to be disbanded forthwith, and not just the homes from which the suspects had hailed but their entire villages razed to the ground.

We will see how all that plays out. It goes without saying that the assassination of the six Israeli citizens is to be deplored and needs to be condemned. That last is a rhetorical statement. It also goes without saying that nowhere near the same sort of focused and individually personalized coverage has been lavished on the other sixty-six Gazan and West Bank Palestinians murdered the same day (or the 81 the day before, or the 68 the day before that, or the 70 the day before that day before)—and, far from a merely rhetorical statement, that last seems to be both Israeli and international media policy: it does go without saying.

And while I myself stand by the Sanhedrin doctrine that the extinction of any child from the family of man constitutes the extinction of an entire universe and needs to be condemned as such, absolutely, I also can’t help but note that if, in the coming weeks, desperate and despairing young Palestinians shoot up ten times as many Israelis, that will still be a thousand times fewer than the Israelis have killed of their Palestinian brethren (and mothers and wives and sisters and children) across their own “terror” campaigns of the past few years. And if in the weeks after that, such Palestinian desperados kill a hundred times as many as were killed the other day, which is to say 600 Israelis (and here we are entering the territory of the 800 Israeli civilians killed on October 7 and the grand total of 1083 killed during the entire five years of the Second Intifada from 2000 through 2005), that would still be one hundred times fewer than the number of Palestinians killed in the still less than two full years of Israel’s war of retribution. And think about that number. Start counting it aloud in your head: one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi. No: seriously, keep going…. How long can you keep at it, and what does it start to feel like?

Only a few months ago, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Aharon Halevy, who happened to have been the head of military intelligence on October 7, 2023, though he stepped down from that position in April 2024, could be heard (in recordings broadcast over Israel’s Channel 12) declaring that “fifty Palestinians must die for every person killed that day and it does not matter if they are children” because such a number would be necessary as “a message to future generations of Palestinians” who “need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price.”

Leaving aside the fact that we are well past the fifty for every one of the total 1200 Israelis (four hundred soldiers and the rest civilians) killed on that day in October 2023, does Halevy understand that by that logic and that calculus, some of the ravaged children of those decimated Palestinians will grow into the right and duty someday to kill well over 3 million Israelis in their turn, at which point no Israeli would have any right to cavil or complain.

It would never end. And of course this entire discourse of counter-tolling numbers is obscene and reprehensible, even as a rhetorical exercise.

Because in fact it all does have to end, and to do so right now. Israel has to cease offensive operations and withdraw its forces from the Gaza strip, all of Hamas’s Israeli hostages have to be released as do all of Israel’s Palestinian hostages, Hamas has to be removed from governance just as Netanyahu and his regime have to be, Gaza needs to be flooded with humanitarian relief administered by non-Israeli entities, and further erection of Jewish settlements on the West Bank need to be suspended once and for all. At which point serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians on a just and stable future dispensation need to resume, probably buttressed by the presence of international players.

Otherwise . . . well, let’s not return to that dread-saturated rhetorical exercise. Suffice it to say that only Trump can pressure Netanyahu out of Gaza and out of power and only their fellow Arabs can pressure Hamas out of governance, and should either side fail to do so now, the onus of history (and perhaps international law) will be on them.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL

Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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Coming attractions: Ren in Texas this week

Ren will be traveling through Texas—aye, Texas—this coming week, with two public events planned, to wit:

On Tuesday September 16, 1 pm, at the University of Houston’s Fine Arts Building Rm. 110 (just off the Blaffer Art Museum), Ren will be reprising his “Recent Kerfuffles in Vermeer Studies” slide lecture

& then

On Saturday, September 20, at 11 am, in Marfa’s Old Auction House, out at 43360 Ranch Road 1112, Ren will be joining our old friends, life and four-hand-piano partners Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in conversation on the last morning of their extraordinary 3-day 5-concert residency at Marfa’s Ballroom (for more on which, including details on ticketing, see here).

& therefore

Owing to those engagements, we will be taking a break next week, but back thereafter.

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