New Moon Observer

October 21, 2025

Tetragrammaton New Moon Observer is best experienced in broadsheet format. Click here to read the full PDF.

Rivering in the Museum of Suspense

Ale Nodarse, October 2025

A white orb glistens. A sky swells forth. Daubs of orange-pink glow incandescent before falling into a warm blue — falling further again into a muted violet. And the sky folds on itself, so that the rivershore appears as an isthmus,
a dark ground set between the sky and the sky’s double. The painting, Charles François Daubigny’s River Landscape with Moon (c. 1856–66,
Leopold Museum), is a lesson in reflection.

The artwork is a study, among many, which Daubigny produced of the River Oise during the 1850s and 60s. As with most studies, it implies speed. The brush moves quickly, oil paint crossing atop the wooden panel as the horsehair bristles make themselves seen. Paint structures its own topography. In this case, the first ground layer of cream-colored oil remains visible beneath the secondary, darker tones. The effect (which a screen fails to capture) proves luminous. The light of the moon suffuses the landscape. It emerges as if from below, flickering through and under everything...

How to Speak Poetry

Leonard Cohen, 1978

This is an interior landscape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. Be good whores. The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties...

The Power of a Heavy Sigh

Vestal Malone, October 2025

The perfectly divine design machine of the human body may appear symmetrical but its balance is asymmetrical: our liver, gallbladder, the “good side” of our face for the family portrait, right or left handed, goofy foot or regular, all contribute to a lack of balance within ourselves. Even those that appear symmetrical – the kidneys, lungs, eyes, legs, ovaries, and arms – have subtle differences. And the gray matter, balanced atop the spine, encased by the skull, with the duties that control every aspect of our existence – the sacred left brain, the mundane right brain – separate yet united, floating and dancing with the breath. The simple wisdom of this twin organism can create a breath and relax the body without the mind’s conscious choice getting in the way. The heavy sigh...

Tetragrammaton on Jan de Bain

Two Dutch brothers were lynched by an angry mob in the 1600s and sketches composed by onlookers were reproduced in newspapers across the country. Jan de Baen used these to construct his own, accurate version of events. Yet he still painted with his own astute eye, and the work is aesthetically beautiful not simply by accident. The murder of the DeWitt Brothers is remembered entirely through de Baen’s painting, and the truth of what happened on that day no longer matters – art has trumped truth to define the past...

‘Dont Look Back’ and the Self Made Myth

Ana Roberts, September 2025

D.A. Pennebaker followed Dylan in 1965, touring England, at the very start of his electric revolution, still playing live shows with his acoustic and harmonica. He is seen hanging with Joan Baez, Donovan, and a group of managers, journalists, and fans, with Allen Ginsberg appearing in the background of the now iconic opening sequence set to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a proto-music video before the term existed. It is a remarkably candid film and stands as a pinnacle of 1960s-era cinéma vérité. Pennebaker does not interact with him; he serves as a fly on the wall and tries to, through the powers of sheer observation, understand the truth of his subject. The Dylan that the public sees in this film largely aligns with his established persona—a mercurial, elusive genius—yet the consistency of this behavior reveals a soft inauthenticity. The more we watch him interact with journalists and play the role of the aloof prophet, the more his predictability begins to erode the myth. Instead of reinforcing his mystique, it undermines it. We see not a spontaneous artist but an actor fully conscious of his role. At once relentlessly confrontational and perpetually elusive, his time on tour is punctuated by petulant encounters with journalists, lazy days, and frustrated evenings spent in hotel rooms, trading songs with Baez while he sits at his typewriter, and the occasional flash of anger. Where the consistency of Dylan begins to undermine his façade, it is the latter of these, the moments of anger, which one can guess are to blame for Dylan’s refusal to ever be filmed by him. Even in these moments, as he tries to recover from the broken façade he inadvertently revealed, we can see shivers of regret in the young Dylan’s eyes—fear that his image of a “cool cat,” unfazed by the world around him, has slipped in front of an audience and, worse, a camera...