oleander in bloom, amplified in an unlit room

Coffee and cigarettes and slack-jawed fatigue, minus the formal dress. Is this painting sad? Is this an age where it makes sense to ask if a painting is sad?
I still haven't heard anyone discuss, with necessary seriousness, what this age
is. Is it just the first decade of a new century/millennium? if so, how is it
"just" that? is it, phonetically, the ots (rhymes with tots or - wait for it -
robots)?

I think this painting is sad, not because of the people in it, but because of the
perspective implied: someone is looking in on the scene, presumably from a slight
distance. And that someone is not you the viewer, nor is it Hopper the painter.
Not a nobody, but a no one, occupies that perspective. If that makes sense.

This doesn't reach the second question - whether it even makes sense to posit that
a given painting is sad - which must be tabled out of sheer inaccessibility to the
scope of the question.


Andy was right. Panda Bear is infectious. But you have to (get to?) sift through
some noise that separates one hook from the next. The metaphorical cachet of this
process boggles.