The District is reeling from last night's Arcade Fire show—it really lived up to the hype. Easily the best show I've seen in years and more than enough to dispel the mounting anti-hype from my mind. I was sold. "Une Annee Sans Lumiere," "Laika," and "Power Out" all owned pretty hard.
Also good was the opener, Final Fantasy, the Google-proof nom de guerre of the too-fey-by-half Owen Pallett. The guy gets on stage with a violin and a necktie for a belt, professes that he's homesick for Canada ("snuggling" was cited as something he's been missing in the States), and tells uber-blue DC that paying higher taxes makes for better sex. I'm not sure whether he in fact stole every last heart in the audience, but the music was novel—he loops tracks with a foot pedal (a la math rockers Don Caballero) and thereby builds a whole violin section sound, then sings about Canada and AD&D and universal healthcare and what have you over the top. Here's a cover of Joanna Newsome's "Peach, Plum, Pear"—which is funny in itself, all these indie kids from orchestra going at it—and there's some songs online from his other band, Les Mouches, if'n you care to hear.
Since I live a block or so from the venue, I invited some folks over to pregame and christen my new charcoal smoker. Eight pounds of brisket, eight pounds of ribs: I started the fire at about 8:00 a.m. and smoked the meat until 5:00 p.m. Despite fighting with the cold to keep the fire at a solid 200 degrees (and fighting with Susan because I was losing the fight with the cold), the barbecue turned out mighty fine. I'll link to some pictures if the shutterbugs who were over last night post them.
So—if the Arcade Fire comes through your neighborhood, go see them. Try to show up early and wander around until someone offers you brisket. Watch out for Owen, who will steal your girlfriend. And be forewarned that all this Canadian fun is going to have you asking yourself why you still bother with the States
[More on the show: Matthew can't figure out how much he paid for his ticket; Susan is pleased; DCist has photo evidence.]
I promise I'm not spending Friday night on the Internet, but I had to note the Hirst Chapel story:
The Italian, US-based collector Carlo Bilotti is in discussions with Rome City Council to convert a former chapel in the north of the city into a centre for contemporary art which will display works by Damien Hirst and other artists from his collection.It's not so surprising that Hirst would want to be involved, but it's not going to be a Rothko chapel. Like Rothko, Hirst works with the sublime. Unlike Rothko, Hirst has never sourced the sublime experientially—he insists on an exegetic remove between his work and the spiritual themes he references. A series called "The Four Evangelists", the works for the proposed chapel space, will debut at the Gagosian in London early next month, but unless they're a real departure from Hirst's body of work, I wouldn't count on couples lining up outside to get married.[. . .]
Mr Bilotti says he aims to create a “modern meditative environment” in the chapel which will be modelled on the Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas.
The real shocker comes in Bilotti's larger plans in Italy. The mayor of Rome has agreed to a scheme to open a Bilotti museum on the grounds of the Villa Borghese. What the fuck, is Rome that bad off? Can't they sell naming rights to the Forum or something? I could live with Il FedEx Colosseo.
UPDATE: I can't remember if I mentioned it or not, but this guy is on his way to the MoMA.
Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991.
The word is that the shark's in pretty bad shape these days; it'd be interesting to know whether Hirst considers the piece to be this or any preserved shark. Anyway—it's too bad for Sir Nick and the Tate, who just can't afford Hirst. Though Saatchi has been more or less garage-saling all Hirst's work, Saatchi says that Hirst's art will survive over time, and I think that's right. (But I wouldn't be hurt if they kept his stuff in across the pond.) Sounds as if nothing short of charity will get the shark or Armageddon or anything but those Pharmacy trinkets into the Tate. How did the Tate blow all its money?
In the most important Style-section report ever, Robin Givhan blasts Dick Cheney for underdressing for the "inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity" of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Far from the subject of the ceremony or the most substantive criticism one could summon for Dick Cheney, but the point remains—I've seen better-dressed Iggles fans. It's within the realm of possibility that one day America will have leaders who won't bring the spirit of Vet Stadium to state affairs.
Tucked in Givhan's snark-laden missive, however, is this exceedingly ill-advised sentence:
Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp.Editors, First Vice Ladies—could someone get on this?
Artcritical has made available in MP3 format a worthwhile National Academy panel featuring David Cohen, Arthur Danto, Mario Naves, and Katy Siegel discussing exhibitions by Christo, Barbara Kruger, Tom Otterness, and Carroll Dunham.
. . . okay, so the discussions are from November. I missed this the first time through. But the Dunham conversation touches on Philip Guston's troublesome legacy, how cartoon art inevitably reduces to Guston nowadays—even Dunham's flip dickhead paintings. Worth a listen (unless you have a very strong and sensitive affinity for Dunham's work).
Carroll Dunham, installation view at Barbara Gladstone, 2004.
To give Roger Kimball some fair due, I am also appalled at Ward Churchill's analogy of victims of 9/11 to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi technical bureaucrat who abetted the Holocaust. There's not an ounce of scalable criticism to that analogy—it's unworkable and repugnant. I'm less appalled by the invitation that Hamilton College extended to Churchill to speak on a panel, because it's important to be exposed to and understand arguments with which you disagree. But very stunning was Hamilton's invitation to Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, to be a professor. Speaking, okay, but teaching? What the fuck? Kimball's right: The trustees ought to be raising some serious hell over this.
However—I'm not giving an inch on the meta point that Kimball hopes to make with every breath: roughly, that the university installed a right-minded Western civic education once before these effin' kids got to it with their mothereffin' multi-culti crap. I like these effin' kids! But really, Hamilton, you're not making it easy over here.
Yesterday Matt Yglesias scolded Roger Kimball for boldly mischaracterizing the trajectory of contemporary philosophy vis-à-vis the epistemology of truth. The nut of Yglesias's complaint is that Kimball snips from conjectures to fuel large, body-of-work judgments on theories; rhetorically conflates arguments; and cherrypicks theorists as it suits him.
Yesterday Kimball similarly annoyed me with a post on the perils of sexual liberation. His argument runs like a criticism of the Democratic Party that starts with Eugene Debs and ends at Lyndon LaRouche.
After a bumpy start in which he compares the widely accepted and observably successful sexual revolution of the 1960s to the excesses of mystical Anabaptists of yester millenia, Kimball identifies as bedrock and gospel to the sexual revolution the Herbert Marcuse text, Eros and Civilization (written in 1955, as it were). To the extent that one Marxist-Freudian-aesthetic analysis of sexual utopianism seeded the sexual revolution is somewhat irrelevant to Kimball's point—it can't be said that the Marxist-Freudian-aesthetic camp continued to win advents during the 1960–70s, Marcuse's personal cache with leftist students notwithstanding. Tracing a legacy between Marcuse's work and the intellectual tradition today is a considerable task given the large number of works that remain untranslated for lack of interest, but it's not unfeasible that there is a tradition today whose roots lie in Marcuse's work.
Getting from that narrow ledge back to a substantive observation on the dubious sexual liberation policies of today (the intolerable terms of which Kimball assumes the reader already knows) would require some gymnastics. Kimball might have made a leap from Marcuse's Marxist-Freudian aesthetics to someone working today in, say, the psychoanalytic tradition (Jane Flax?). Better yet would be to outline first the parameters of the complaint at which he wants to arrive. There's nothing Marcusian about it, but Kimball suggests:
By the mid-Seventies, though, the prophets were grumbling. The sexual utopia they had envisioned was--as the etymology of the word suggests--no place. Nature itself was part of the problem. A battery of new sexually transmitted ailments, from herpes to AIDS, arrived in quick succession to make casual sex a dangerous, potentially a deadly affair. But disease was not the whole story. For one thing, most people found the pursuit of sexual gratification for its own sake ultimately ungratifying. They were looking for sex without strings. It turned out that "the strings"--the emotional and spiritual nourishment that longstanding relationships offer--were essential: sever them and the pleasure chills.To ignore in his diagnosis that over this period women entered the workforce is an astounding error of omission and analysis. Caitlin Flanagan's interesting brand of feminism has a great deal to say on the subject, and in comparison Kimball is inobservant if not retrograde.So much was a salutary corrective to the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies. But true to form, the demand for sexual liberation has also spawned a counter-movement, an ideologically motivated demand for sexual orthodoxy. This shows itself above all in what we might call the sexual-harassment industry: the fantastical reinterpretation of everyday life such that every human exchange is potentially open to the charge of sexual malfeasance.
Wild stuff! But the thing is that MacKinnon and Kimball agree about the sexual revolution. It is certainly the weirdest spot in feminist criticism, the one at which both Catherine MacKinnon and Roger Kimball stand together to say that the sexual revolution ought never have gone as far as it did. Far left, far right, far out?
It should be obvious enough that MacKinnon represents no point of consensus in contemporary criticism. I'd call it a stretch to say that she's even played her marginal role relevantly since the early 1990s. Where's Adrienne Rich? Judith Butler? bell hooks? Portentous though the threat of a MacKinnon-led "feminist tyranny" may be, it would probably be more useful to address the performative and economic models that substantive critics are advancing today.
Philip Johnson, 98, has died. I think I was probably in about 10th grade when I saw the short film tour PBS made of his New Canaan, Connecticut, estate, and I distinctly remember it being an early lesson for me about form. Who else could be said to have been so dedicated to form throughout his career while also adapting and changing styles so dramatically?
Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949.
I was looking over the ArtsJournal's new book blog, Beatrix, written by Ron Hogan of (naturally enough) beatrice.com, and I noticed that Hogan doesn't link to the usual bookstore suspects. All his generic book links run through Powell's Books. The good people at Bookslut don't seem to mind Amazon, if they've put any thought toward it.
An admittedly mundane observation that struck me because I picked up some interesting bookstore trivia recently: After Ayatollah Khomeni pronounced fatwa on Salman Rushdie following the publication of Satanic Verses, Canada's Coles Books and the U.S.'s B. Dalton Booksellers (Barnes & Noble) and the Borders Group (Borders, Waldenbooks), among others, pulled Verses from the shelves. Say what you will about decentralized bookstores, but short of a DNS attack, I don't see how the Islamofascists can get to them. Amazon's political involvements, however, leave much to be desired for liberals (and libertarians, for that matter).
Powell's sounds like the way to go for booklinking, and I'll adjust my recs in the sidebar. But for my money you can't beat Kramerbooks in the District, which resists the militant fundementalist threat whether it comes in the form of Islamist dictum or independent counsel overreach. And they serve Shiner.
UPDATE: Doubleday has announced that it will publish the Al Qaeda Reader, a collection of translated writings by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. And you thought the right got angry when people didn't say Merry Christmas enough. . . .
Tyler Green asks art bloggers to consider and respond to Jerry Saltz's MoMA divinations. After some words on pure historical linearity and its worth to an institution like MoMA (we'll get back to that), Saltz teasingly writes in headline font, "Nine Ideas for a Better MoMA"—then fails to give me concrete, bulleted proposals. To facilitate the conversation, I'll oblige. The following are Saltz's points, distilled (desalinated?):
That said, I like all Saltz's points—except the project space suggestion. Ditto on the annual exhibition (however fun that sounds). Frankly, MoMA ought to get out of the young contemporary gallery business altogether and act like the disinterested statesman that it is. I understand that that's a severe turn on Barr's vision, but the turn of the century irrevocably transformed the context and purpose of the museum. As it stands MoMA has precious little space to act qua historical archive; other spaces serve as galleries without MoMA aping that function. I'm even hesitant to endorse the new acquisitions space. It seems to me the way that MoMA can remain topical in the discussion is by aggressively incorporating new acquisitions in curatorial considerations. Dan Steinhilber, for example, is a natural fit for several historical discussions, so when MoMA buys his work, it ought to be shown in the context of these larger conversations. And that's what MoMA can do that galleries can't.
Suggestions number 1 and 9 will be greeted as they always are—with praise from the Guerrilla Girls and contempt from the New Critters. This ties into a larger discussion, like you see in the academy in the wake of postmodernism, whether the role of a museum (as an educational institution) is to promote a common civic understanding of art—i.e., Cézanne to Picasso to Matisse—or encourage contemporary evaluations of our history—i.e., here are the women artists you never saw. It's not a knot that MoMA will untie, but it's a discussion worth having now that we know what the modernity museum of note will be for some time.
The panels and paperbacks sound especially good to me. If MoMA doesn't make the panel available online, some blogger will, so we can't lose.
MoMA reform aside, Saltz makes the case for an entirely historically linear hanging of MoMA's collection—it would be a revealing show, but I doubt it would be as beneficial as Saltz believes. Worth the read. I'll have to chew on it. . . .
I love, love, love that the White House is taking journalists to task for using the term "Social Security privatization" to refer to the issue of Social Security privatization, which the White House not only designed but introduced as such. Now it appears that "private accounts," another verbiage the President invented, is also forbidden. I'm guessing that now we're being directed to discuss the Freedom Accounts component of President Bush's Social Freedom Liberation (Freedom Liberty) plan.
Personally, the feature of life under the USSR I most admired was the Hymn to the Soviet Union, and were I cutting whole cloth from Red history I'd pick that before the fundamental opposition to transparency and revisionist wordplay. But I guess those were fun, too.
As everyone else has noted, GawkerForum and the Los Angeles Times both produced more detailed accounts of the Burden resignation/UCLA classroom handgun incident, and, shocking no one, the cry of "domestic terrorism" was incorporated in the latter story. Terrorism has officially been reduced to a meaningless term.
Neither story entirely clarifies what happened, including whether the artist wielded an authentic weapon or how precisely UCLA responded (or failed therein). It has been revealed that the artist enacted a round of Russian roulette for the piece (apparently getting lucky) and then left the room and discharged the weapon, which makes UCLA's non-response all the more appalling. And also furnishes a more direct allusion to Pearl Jam's Jeremy than to Burden's Shoot. Anyone out there still think that Burden bears some responsibility for the student's actions?
Todd Gibson suspects that the imperial hubris on the part of Thomas Krens behind Peter Lewis's decision to resign from the Guggenheim's board is only the beginning; Deyan Sudjic makes the authoritative case against sanguinity in the Guardian. This detail was new to me: Apparently, back when Krens lent Jackson Pollock's priceless Number 18 (among other works) to a private gallery, he didn't tell any of the museum's trustees until someone showed up to pick it up. Have to wonder what the other board members think they're getting for supporting Krens over Lewis.
Sartogo and Grenon, Chancery to the Italian Embassy, 1993.
Sue and I drive by the chancery to the Italian Embassy frequently and agree that it's the nicest contemporary building on Embassy Row. I only recently discovered that it was designed by Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon. It's maybe too sexy, okay, bearing too much resemblance to something like Philip Johnson's Gatehouse for some tastes, and I imagine that Sartogo's design would be a nightmare were it asked to correspond with any other building—that is, were it placed anywhere other than along Massachusetts Avenue. But Embassy Row is curious that way: Once a row of Beaux Arts–period homes built for the area's extremely wealthy, it's now a hodge-podge of Beaux Arts homes that serve as embassies for the world's poorest nations, while across the street, the world's wealthiest nations host a real-time exhibition on modern and contemporary architecture in the form of large residences and chanceries. It's a pleasant city feature, an embassy district. Area and extranational growth (and, you know, regime change) shuffle embassies around every so often, so you never know when an I. M. Pei building will pop up. And a chancery lends itself to formal experiment better than any other building—its purpose is being to make your nation look more awesome than other nations on the block (right?), show off motherland architectural talent, and host visitors and passing dignitaries.
One building that is expressly not suited for explorations in form is a library, which, in my authoritarian world, would all be the Boboli Gardens with stacks. It's hard to determine whether Mies van der Rohe or the District of Columbia government deserves more blame for the dreadful thing that is the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which the Washington City Paper names as one of the District's most awful public spaces. It's not a Rem-Koolhaas-no one-can-find-the-bathroom difficult library; it's a library that invites you in but then forces you out as quickly as possible with its yellow lighting and threateningly low ceilings. I'm sure the building is a fine space so long as you're not books you're looking for, and I can't believe that there's a District reader or art viewer who wouldn't prefer the space as a contemporary art museum, which the District needs far more than an unused and unusable library. And though it's probably unwise urban planning to centrifuge a city's cultural resources along its economic clusters, I'm afraid that MCI Center–area real estate is much too hot to host a block-sized space that, while benefitting the community, brings zero economic incentive to the neighborhood. A contemporary art center would do both.
Besides, a van der Rohe contemporary art center? The building is the argument in itself. You can't sweeten that deal.
Mies van der Rohe, the MLK Memorial Library, 1968.
UPDATE: I'm hardly the first to suggest the van der Rohe DC|CAC, by the by. Dawns on everyone over time.
UPDATE II: I knew someone had mentioned the MLK proposal recently, but couldn't remember who. It was Tyler Green, of course. If I recall correctly, he's championed this cause for a long time (hell, he probably came up with it). I used to spend a lot of time volunteering at a gallery near the MLK library, and my co-volunteers and I would try to come up with the best sculpture for the empty space in front of the library (which is mentioned in the WCP article).
And courtesy of DCist I see that Washington Post Metro section columnist Marc Fisher once suggested that the DC library system could make up its budget shortfall by selling the MLK building and moving into a smaller shop on the site of the old convention center.
So I was under the mistaken impression along with such benefits as reduced car insurance and being able to rent cars in America, turning 25 meant that you were no longer eligible for the draft. Turns out that I was wrong—I could still wind up in Tehran or where-have-you. Whatever—birthdays aren't about war! Today is about football and the ridiculously great charcoal smoker that Susan got me.
Thanks to those of you who braved the aftermath of yesterday's absurd snowstorm last night to come by for the party. Stop by next weekend for smoked ribs! And be sure to ask Catherine about her new partisan bathroom policy—it's going to change everything.
I'd like to say that I will pick up de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, but the truth is that I'll probably depend on Miguel Sánchez and his readers to gloss the important details. Biographies only rarely find their way into my rotation, and I have yet to get around to reading the last bio that occupied the art world (Art Lover, if you ask me), but mostly it's just that my to-read stack is at capacity.
No reason that I shouldn't soon be seeing de Koonings, though, what with the Hirshhorn Museum's ongoing "Gyroscope" rotation of its permanent collection. Just days after a new book was published on Joseph Cornell, the Hirshhorn had installed a Cornell room. It's awfully kind of the Smithsonian to ensure that those of us who don't get out of the District very often are at least topical on all the important conversations.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1949–50. Enamel on paper.
On my last tour of the Hirshhorn I saw an early untitled work (not the one shown), but given the amount of de Kooning's work that the Hirshhorn owns, next time I expect to see more. And it'd be nice to see not only the urban abstrations but a few of the more fiercely heterosexual examples from his "woman" series.
(While we're talking about books: I emphatically recommend skipping over Mary Ann Caws's Robert Motherwell: With Pen and Brush. I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me that someone could make me dislike Motherwell even temporarily, but, yeah, this book did the trick.)
Inspired by Sean Carroll's posting of Charles Simic's "The Death of Heraclitus," I thought I'd pass along Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy of Fortinbras":
Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to manAs translated by Czeslaw Milosz.
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippersYou will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start
to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bitAnyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breatheNow you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dialAdieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedyIt is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince
Lenny asks whether anyone will second the description of the DC Warming discussion provided to Lenny and published anonymously. Frankly, I think Lenny is missing a crucial point—he published a review that stinks of both dubious charges and an overt agenda, so it seems to me that the burden of proof is on him. When you give an anonymous voice access to your forum, you're not quoting, you're corroborating.
Regardless, the description Lenny published ranges from uncharitable to outrageous. For example, as I recall, one question in particular was phrased and moreover intended quite differently than Anonymous put it. Ms. Porran asked how Tyler's blog relates to his criticism, why he links to other writers, and how that supplements his criticism. Tyler said that he hoped to give other writers exposure and that Internet-based or blog criticism in particular represented a link between the cube and "kitchen table" discussions of art. Tyler very definitely provided an answer, and Anonymous, who doesn't bother to disguise his dislike for Tyler, absolutely mischaracterized the event by saying that he was "unable to answer." That is not just uncharitable but completely false, and, moreover, a characterization that could potentially damage a critic's reputation—if Anonymous's summary weren't so obviously the work of a hack.
So there, it's my word against Anonymous's, but I'm signing my name to mine.
. . . you know, this is the stupidest scandal ever. You know—from reading Joseph Barbaccia's version of events, I can tell that he and I came away from the evening with distinctly opposite impressions. But that's fine, that's what's supposed to happen. Done, good for Joe, good for me. Yet that isn't ever the end of the story, because the District plays host to an overly loud negative chorus—a histrionic column, an aureate estate—who are waiting—eager!—for Blake Gopnik or Tyler Green or whoever to say something, anything, that isn't dogmatically grassroots or populist or I'm-not-sure-what-but-something. I even received an e-mail on Tuesday afternoon from someone associated with the DC Warming event who noted worriedly that every DC art blogosphere discussion gets mired in this sort of dramatic, flame-prone bullshit.
I swear, DC, I can't take you anywhere!
On Tuesday I attended the "DC Warming" panel lecture organized by the District outpost of Art Table, a national organization for professional women working in the arts. The event was initially intended for Art Table members only, but since it was held at DCAC, the invitation was extended to that organization's listserve, from which it eventually trickled down to the Internet and its unruly masses (and moi). Faith Flanagan (whom I recognized as a former contributer to Cultureflux, if you remember that old site) helped organize the event—three cheers for her. Courtesy of HTML bullets, the panel members:
Pollan opened up by establishing a rule that would greatly behoove every DC arts conversation: No mention of any local newspapers whose names start with Washi and end with ngton Post. I came in expecting to gag over denunciations of Art-O-Matic and medieval cries for Blake Gopnik's head. It didn't happen. We're all better off if it never does again.
On the general state of the arts in the District, Tyler sized up our place pretty neatly:
"They're putting up Anish Kapoors in Chicago with public money, and we're putting up panda bears."If there was a dominant narrative thread of the evening, that captured it. It's not so much that the District has conservative tastes per se but that its progressive arts community has been on the defensive for some time. I think there was some consensus among the group that this is changing—nationally visible artists and the emerging 14th Street corridor (maybe we should start saying emerged?) being the hallmarks of the sea change. There's something to be said for the way that the federal museums abet this growth: Since the Hirshhorn and Corcoran and NGA are national points of interest, a prominent gallery culture stands to capture some share of that attention. Especially for those who can take some share of credit for this progress—these panelists all can—a guarded optimism is certainly warranted.
A few turns in the discussion struck me as exceedingly interesting. The first was pretty much everything Allison Cohen had to say. She's an IP lawyer who has transitioned into entrepreneurial arts consultancy (she operates Sightline). Which means that she helps people who lack specialized knowledge of art with their decisions about purchasing and investing. Cohen noted the predominant attitude among cautious, first-time buyers: "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." Which she says is as much an intentional barrier, an insecurity, as it is a revelation. Cohen is certainly right that people ought to have as little compunction about seeking out guidance with decisions regarding art as they do when they seek a lawyer to answer questions about the law—not only is that practical advice, it's a hell of an elevator pitch. I would certainly like to be able to discuss her business in greater detail—I'm sure that I'm making her sound like an art world madame, guiding tender novices in their search for beauty. But as she said herself, she respects art for its ideas and not its potential to supplement home decour, and she wants to help people make sound decisions. I hope to find out more about what she's doing—broader Internet visibility wouldn't hurt.
Pollan, McClellan, and Reis had a few commentworthy observations about the psychology of the gallery. That the bright white of a contemporary gallery seems to suit contemporary art better than other setting options is a given, but that such a space is hostile to most people sometimes escapes me. Different communities have addressed this paradox with different strategies: As Tyler explained, it was years ago (so the story goes) when Mary Boone commanded her gallerists to be unfriendly, a strategy intended to make the white space the least intimidating aspect of a gallery visit. Here in DC, the galleries are "personable." I think the alcohol helps, personally. No word about how they cut the tension in LA . . . I'm inclined to say Qaaludes, but that's probably ungenerous.
Hearing Philip Barlow speak was the first time I'd ever heard a collector address how one gets into the business of being an art collector. As one might suspect, it involves acquiring large sums of money. So that's a scratch. He did say that he does not (yet) consider his collection to be a document of the 90s/00s District progressive arts, and he does not buy work from good artists whom he does not care for. He also says that the work he collects fills his home and offices, which made me wonder—if Barlow buys a Steinhilber, does he just end up with scores of plastic junk everywhere?
[As Philip notes in comments: "What I said on the panel was that I started buying art when my income started growing faster than my rent. Admittedly this was 15 years ago, but I started saving $100/month expressly to by art and only spent what I saved. That was hardly acquiring large sums of money." I didn't mean to disparage the man's hard work or thriftiness. Philip struck me as a funny guy, so I was having some undue fun at his expense. All apologies. —Ed.]
Some odds and ends:
If my lack of posts hasn't made it obvious, I'm quite busy with work. Plus President Bush is waging a Tet offensive of an inauguration on the District, and it's putting me in a bad mood. The Metro is clogged, there are weirdos everywhere, there are military helicopters everywhere, and—worst of all—it's snowy. I don't know how he pulled that off, but I imagine that somehow the District was forced to foot the bill.
But check in tomorrow—good stuff is coming.
So, remember when I said that I had mono? Some of you might remember—some of you even expressed heartfelt get-wells. Well, see, now, ha ha! this is really amusing, but I got the official test results* back from my doctor, and while I have had mono in the past, I don't have it currently, or at least did not at the time of the test. Doc was unable to identify significant stocks of viruses of mono disease. Still, you have to recognize that in the post-Susan's mono era, you can't wait untilthe VMD are identified—in the form of a global epidemic—to take pre-emptive action. After all, we know that I've had mono in the past, and all the doctor can say with certainty is that he couldn't find VMD. Regardless, I feel liberated now, so we're closing the investigation with resolute-ness and credibility intact—but most importantly, a newfound respect for freedom.
* Urgency of said test results somewhat mitigated by the fact that I partied all weekend.
See PZ Myers and Bitch Ph.D. on Harvard administrator Lawrence Summers's dumb observations on women (i.e., "Math is hard!"). I'm surprised whenever a 21st century American surfaces who believes that because women don't do science and math, they can't, and denies any structural barriers preventing those women who can from doing math and science professionally. Then again, it sounds as if Lawrence Summers is himself one of those structural barriers, so I shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't recognize, uh, himself. Whatever, just click those links.
That's the name of DC ArtTable's panel lecture: DC Warming. So tonight at 6:30 p.m. you can participate in your own self-ridicule by venturing out into the absolute freezing cold—it's a well-known fact that the District is the currently the coldest place in North America—to go to a lecture about how hott DC is. The art scene, anyhow. And they'll only ask $20 in admission for your efforts! Like a trip to the MoMA!
Okay, I kid, though twenty bucks is on the steep end of the bills I'm carrying in my wallet. Tyler Green, Maggie Michael, Philip Barlow, and several other local laudables will be in the house, so if you find the District art scene as interesting as I do, you'll pony up the scrylla to chat with the people who make it interesting. Great people though these may be, however, it's still miserably fucking cold out, and there are some things art can't change.
UPDATE: Not every panelist was aware of the admission price before agreeing to the lecture. That's important to note since there is something distinctly Marie Antoinette about taking $20 from people and telling them that DC is warm when the District is, in fact, so cold that it can't even be metaphorically warm. So I say we hold DC ArtTable to the fire for this one.
. . . if you're looking for charming but can't invest the time in Don Quixote, you can't go wrong with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
Prompted by hearty endorsements from Henry, John Q., and Kieran of Crooked Timber (and my boss, of, uh, my workplace), I picked up Strange and licked it in short time. For a heavily footnoted book that is more academic tedium and scholarship than sorcery, it's a quick, gripping read. Now that Will Baude is reading it I've been meaning to help him spread the word.
(And Will is right—for such a Jacob Marley of a character, Mr. Norrell is shockingly more sympathetic than the heroic Jonathan Strange.)
I nearly forgot that today is Don Quixote's 400th birthday. It's worth noting, as any introduction to the novel will, that there is hardly a literary theory or construct that Cervantes did not prefigure in Don Quixote. (Modernist and postmodernist strategies not excluded, given the enduring theme of inescapable madness and the book's unreliable, polylingual narrators, metacritical narrative, and self-reflexive structure.) A fact made all the more signficant by Cervantes's indisputable contribution to the canon as its first member, his book being the first novel. I've heard that both Faulker and Tolstoy read it once a year.
Of course you don't reach for Don Quixote for all that, you read it because it's enchanting, hilarious, terrifying, everything you want from a novel, and any person whose nose doesn't scrunch up a little whenever Quixote describes his love for Dulcinea lacks soul.
Any time DQ comes up, it's noted how few people get around to reading it—even among good readers. There hasn't been a more appropriate year to resolve to read it in the last century. I recommend Burton Raffel's edition, not only because it's the version I've read, but because it has a strong supporting cast, including: other writings by Cervantes (including "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man"), source material (selections from de Montalvo's Amadis of Gaul and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso), apocrypha (the Prologue to de Avellaneda's "false" Quijote), and scholarship, both good (Foucault and Borges, María Antonia Garceés's timely essay on Andalusia and the veil) and bad (Harold Bloom).
Don Quixote, ed. and tr. Burton Raffel
But I won't be mad atcha if you want to go with Edith Grossman's economical, sexy new translation (though, with it you only get a Bloom intro).
Don Quixote, tr. Edith Grossman
If we're all parts Quixote and Sancho, bloggers are surely a bit more of the former: "[Don Quixote] had no desire to postpone his plan for even a moment longer, propelled by the thought of how badly the world might suffer if he delayed, for he intended to undo endless wrongs, set right endless injustices, correct endless errors, fix endless abuses, and atone for endless sins."
Courtesy of Fresh Paint, (I am in your debt for this one, Cynthia), comes the Rapture Index, one of the more wonderful things the Internet has produced. Part of a comprehensive Rapture-preparedness resource center, the RI is a system that aggregates weekly data related to signs suggesting whether that Sweet Chariot is, in fact, coming forth to carry us home. The system behind the RI is, well, a couple of guys named Todd & Terry. The Lord did say that man shall not know the hour of His coming, but Todd & Terry sure as hell intend to have the over/under.
The Rapture Index, a "Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity," a "prophetic speedometer," is your source for methodology in eschatology. Let's take a look a few significant indicators:
| Index | Value |
|---|---|
| False Christs | 2 |
| Occult | 4 |
| Leadership | 5 |
| Unemployment | 2 |
| Inflation | 3 |
| Gog (Russia) | 4 |
| Beast government | 4 |
| Oil supply/price | 3-1 |
| Anti-Christian | 4 |
| Liberalism | 1 |
New blog game: The idea is to shuffle your iTunes music library and write down the first 10 songs that come up, and entertainment ensues. Just in time for payola the iShuffle!
Everything you need to know about 24, freepers, and "Mooselimbs," tidily explained by The Poor Man. The Internet is a vastly entertaining place.
Dana Priest for the Washington Post:
In a major new study, the CIA's National Intelligence Council says Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, officials at the CIA director's intelligence think-tank said today.A miserable failure. What kind of fool would want to do this all over again, knowing that no WMD would be found? Will the war finally be seen in error once the destabilization of Iraq following this war turns out something worse than the destabilization of Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviets?Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."
Low's comments came during a rare public briefing by the NIC on its report of significant global trends looking out as far as 2020. But within the 119-page report is a startling frank evaluation of Iraq's place as a breeding ground for the new generation of Islamic terrorists, an evaluation that represents a consensus among terrorist experts throughout the world.
The al Qaeda membership "that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.
Iraq today: far worse than it was under Saddam. A dictator in his august ruling a police state that had, sadly, already committed its worst crimes, versus a civil war in which all sides blame America.
Overread, anyway—I found this comment on a discussion about painting. No link so as not to embarrass, but this strikes me as hilarious:
Pardon my romantic comment, I just turned 23.Indeed.
Until I give you the go-ahead, anyway. Looks like I caught the mononucleosis from Typhoid Sue. (I have to come clean—we've been known to kiss from time to time.) If I am ever able to move from this spot on my bed again, I will go to the doctor. If.
It's hard to describe that overwhelming loss of energy that comes with mono. I always thought that was a useful fiction mono sufferers worked up to sucker people into giving them spongebaths and what have you. As if your bones have been swapped out for Fruit-Rollups, or your shoulders were tasked with holding up the atmosphere. Not sleepy, but pretty fucking tired.) Don't know if this means I'll be doing more or less blogging . . . the provisional plan is to use this space to throw an altogether unprecedented pity party. And to get Susan to bring me comic books.
Last week a rumor shot through the California art world. Artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins (his wife) had resigned their positions as teachers in UCLA's art department after an art student loaded a gun and fired it during an art performance in class. Apparently, Burden wanted the student to be reprimanded, but the university administration demurred, leading to the resignations. Both the artists and the school are mum on the matter. Burden, of course, is known for a 1971 performance piece, Shoot, in which he had himself shot in the arm with a .22 rifle.I'm on the run, so go see Sarah Hromack.
UPDATE: With all due respect to local lights Lenny and James W. Bailey, I'm afraid I've invited a misreading of my post. I won't deny it, it's funny to me that the artist-teacher who once had himself shot meets the student whose medium is also ammunition. Far more piquant, though, is the fact that UCLA felt that, without argument, some student artist's submission overrides the school's obligation to provide an educational environment in which students don't fire weapons at will. (What the hell was UCLA thinking?) But take the long view and the story's a funny one, funny enough to lead even a concerned blogger to mislabel his post on the subject.
Chris Burden's Shoot is an entirely admirable work. The idea of an artist repeating or advancing it, though, strikes me as similar to the recent Andrea Fraser kerfuffle—provocative, but not transressive, and thereby not successful. To me some aspect of the question involves whether Burden's copycat is producing good art, not whether this kind of performance is art. So long as the discharge wasn't attempted homicide, I'm willing to grant that the guy had art in mind, however bad. But art doesn't give you a license to do whatever you want.
One way to convince people that you're a douchebag while simultaneously politicizing a global tragedy is to call your political enemies stingy in the face of devastation. Two examples are so awful that I think they ought to be put up to a contest. Can you pick the more tasteless of the two?
Courtesy of TyGr: Christo's long-awaited Gates are being raised, and some NYC bloggers are documenting the process. Not everyone's excited, though:
[Christo and Jeanne-Claude's] wrapped projects (Pont Neuf, Reichstag) were powerful because they took an iconic structure and forced people to look at it in a new way. Running Fence was interesting (rather than powerful) for the way it sectioned the landscape. . . .Todd's the New Yorker, so he knows better than I do how the city will react. I will say that with Running Fence, the social reading resonates much more with me than the formal reading—it's hard for me to not return to the fact that each rancher whose land the work crossed was a bureaucracy of one whom Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to deal with, and how for some of these ranchers Running Fence must have actually felt like the democratization of conceptual art that Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work was always described as bringing about. It was chicken soup for the young leftist college student's soul!Fans of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, realizing that the finished installations can be lackluster, often default to the rather specious claim that the work isn’t really about aesthetics. It’s about how these two manage to work existing political and economic systems to their own ends. The art, they claim, lies in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ability to manipulate governments and capitalism to realize their projects.
That’s a great claim for art that’s purely conceptual, but Christo and Jeanne-Claude view themselves as formal artists. The object they will be giving the city with The Gates, I’m afraid to say, looks like it just won’t be terribly compelling once its initial impression wears off.
But there's not much left (no pun intended) in that reading of their work, is there? It's hard to see how The Gates will live up to the Pont Neuf or Reichstag wrappings, and if the project falters, I hope it's not the final one they have in mind for New York.
UPDATE: Dan at Iconoduel outlines another important frame for understanding C&JC's art.
Just wait until the folks at the Jackson-George Regional Library System of Mississippi hear about this:
["Nip/Tuck"]'s creator, Ryan Murphy, has declared that it is his goal in life to remove every barrier to depiction of explicit sex on over-the-air TV. He was quoted earlier this year saying, "It's tough to get that sexual point of view across on television. Hopefully I have made it possible for somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three years. Maybe that will be my legacy."Who are we to stand between a man and his dreams?
America: banned in America. It's really quite funny that the Jackson-George Regional Library System of Mississippi have joined Wal-Mart in its decision to ban the book by Jon Stewart and his Daily Show cohorts. Yes, precisely because it features small, fictitious nude illustrations of the Supreme Court justices, which certain individuals have deemed it to be adult material. The decision begs the question as to the state of aphrodisia in the province of Jackson-George Regional, MS. Then again, I don't even need to hazard a Google search to feel confident that somewhere in that great wide Web, a SCOTUS fetish site is happy to accept your credit card number.
I'm reading Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, and one historical aspect of these sorts of decisions that she emphasizes is how difficult it is to ascribe prurient "intent" to photography. Not just art, but photography in particular: with its thorough formal correspondence with reality—by dint of its accurate pictorial representational ability and its fundamental place in our lives—photography has rendered the question of obscenity in literature entirely void and rendered the question of obscenity in painting obsolete. (When was the last time Lady Chatterly's Lover came up for parole?) The finer free speech question that photographic material and art poses is sufficiently difficult that our censors simply no longer care about literary or other visual erotica (or art). Satire, though, is still as challenging as ever.
Over at Begging To Differ, we're trying something new—to go with the total site redesign, we've added a forum. I'm not terribly familiar with these things, but already this one is my favorite forum because I am a 5-star admin. That may be the most authority I've ever been granted. So head over and start a thread—over the few hours it's been open, two dozen members have already joined, so I don't think it will be wanting for conversation. But remember: at any moment, I could delete your thoughts. My fingertips tremble with the awesome power.
Since everybody's talking about them, let's all take the lead from Sasha Frere-Jones and correctly refer to "mashups" as such. You don't want to be embarrassed in a few months that you used to hyphenate "mash-up" as if it were "down-load" or "on-line"—and you don't have to be.
And as far as I'm concerned, Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke of Genius" squeezes the Gospel truth out of Xtina and The Strokes.
UPDATE: My roommate was just noting that though the New Yorker adheres to Fowler's antihyphen instruction better than any out there, they like to throw the odd German diacritical at household words like "cooperative." True. They also refer to the MoMA as "The Modern." So let me be clear that I'm with S F/J on mashups, but not all the kinky stuff the New Yorker favors.
Well, fuck me. Remember when I said I was going to write up something on I Am Charlotte Simmons? I really wanted to at least get a smirk out of someone to purchase the time I wasted reading the goddamn thing. But Unf has gone and written what you need to know about the book:
As for Wolfe's latest, its not so good. The wierd verbal tics (someone may wish to inform Mr. Wolfe that no one in the English speaking world uses the phrase "loamy loins") are a lot more difficult to get over when you're reading a novel about an 18 year old female college student written by a 70 year old foppish reactionary. Which is to say, this novel suffers from a lack of realism that makes it pretty difficult to get through without chuckling off and on at how tin Wolfe's ear has become.I'd have said more, but that's about what you need to know. To illustrate just how embarrassing it is to read this book, at one point Wolfe tries incorporat the word "torpor" in the lyrics of a "crunk rap" song playing in the background. Worse still—at multiple points—Wolfe uses the onomatopoeia, "rutrutrut," to describe sex. (G.p pleads with its readers: Once your sweet lovemaking goes "rutrutrut," it's time to refrain from the sweet lovemaking. Even the thinking about the sweet lovemaking.) Wolfe deserves a congressional medal of honor, though, for his identification and etiology of "fuck patois" (e.g., "Fuckin what the fuck?").
Fafnir is sharing his review, which you should read . . . if you are of the opinion that Fafnir and Unf are different people.
Over the week I'll be posting a few reviews: Kelly Towles's "Underdog" at Adamson, Ian Whitmore's "Mirror Mirror" at Fusebox, and Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. I met up with both of two of the three at Whitmore's opening last night, which followed a dance dance revolution at Chez Zunta and preceeded even more dancing at the Bluestate party at the Black Cat.
I can hyperlink my entire weekend, but the hangovers—those are special. Those are for me alone.
I failed to mention the whole Pac-Mondrian thing when it swept the blogosphere a couple weeks ago and even got some e-mail asking whether I'd seen it. So now it's mentioned, but I don't have anything to add to what Sarah Hromack wrote. I also can't believe that people are taking this so seriously. The Prize Budget for Boys' Web site assures potential buyers that each work is bon à tirer by Tamarind standards. But then you play it, and it's just this Java applet that also comes in a painted cabinet—and as a bunch of other unrelated merch. (A Pac-Mondrian vacuum?) Was the NYT really scratching their heads over whether this is ersatz Pop Art? A "blip," says Sarah—that strikes me as exactly right.
Prize Budget for Boys, Pac-Mondrian [screenshot], 2002.
I still want to buy it, of course.
. . . death squads are sure to follow:
What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.Courtesy of The Poor Man. When we last discussed Negroponte back in April, when it was announced that he would serve as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq—whatever that title means—my concern wasn't so much that Negroponte would again organize death squads and march them through the Sunni triangle, but that the Bush administration was actively seeking the most inappropriate political jackanape for the job. Especially when the individual in question doesn't speak a language that applies within 1,000 miles in any direction. But I was wrong! My skepticism was misplaced—they are going with the death squads. So in some sense he's the only man for the job.Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)
It's important to remember that these people—Gonzales, Negroponte —weren't pulled out of a vacuum, but were vetted and chosen as the least objectionable candidate in the eyes of President Bush. Yet there are any number of people whom Bush could have nominated for the job. Surely a few of them aren't preceded by monickers like "Torture Memo" and "Death Squad"?
Lillian Davies makes the case in Glasstire against Turner Prize–winner Jeremy Deller:
Another much-discussed manifestation of Texas in London was this December’s Turner Prize for the best contemporary exhibition by a UK-based artist, which was awarded to yet another ArtPace alum, Jeremy Deller. Deller beat out Kutlug Ataman, Langlands & Bell, and Yinka Shonibare for the big award with his piece Memory Bucket, a work involving found objects and a film, which he put together during his residency last year in San Antonio. Deller’s hackneyed presentation of the Texas ethos was greeted locally with tepid praise and even derision, but it was obviously a big hit elsewhere, where the Texas stereotype still has some life left in it. One bright spot in his film involves sublime footage of a colony of bats leaving a Central Texas cave at sunset (indeed, anyone who’s watched this majestic phenomenon from one of the bridges over Austin’s Town Lake can but hardly be moved by it).I was under the impression that the latter image was more characteristic of Memory Bucket, but I'm pretty sure that the clips I saw online weren't the complete work. Regardless, I have to sympathize with Deller—there's probably no place on Earth in which an honest attempt at bricolage can lead to a more seamless portrait of a stereotype. To wit: My parents recently moved from suburban Dallas to a place a ways outside the exurbs. My first drive around town (I use the term loosely), I saw a classic movie theater that had been converted into a church (completed by the reformatting of the attendant marquis); a Christian bookstore (slash Internet cafe!) with a story-high sign featuring a cartoon penitent pilgrim; and a structure that I could only describe as a bunker, which was in fact a diner—inside which hung a POW-MIA flag, a self-styled Don't Tread on Me flag, and a neon decorative thingee juxtaposing the outline of the USA and a cross. The diner, obviously enough, offered several variations on the chili-cheeseburger.
I'm as fascinated as those voyeur Brits by this stuff, but because I lived in Texas for years, I know that an accurate pictorial presentation would involve a lot of pictures of Staples, Chile's, Walmarts and what have you, suburban housing subdivisions, cacti and mesquite. Pretty dull. For the kind of quasi-photojournalistic art Deller practices, the urge to take exciting photographs of interesting stuff competes with a certain obligation to accurately describe what is primarily homogenous and boring. (I think so, anyway, though let me admit that I'm not well versed on the ethics of photography.)
In so many words Davies accuses Deller of either a Stockholm syndrome enchantment with or brute condescension toward our great state. But it's hard to see how it could turn out otherwise, because definitionally a photographic survey promotes favored images to the exclusion of equally viable alternatives. Discrimination is the process and the point; it should speak about Deller, not Texas.
UPDATE: Other good Glasstire material to check out: Heather Mathews on Laurence Miller's arts-related program activities in Austin; Christopher French on the Beuys retrospective at the Menil. (Did anybody out there see that show? Sounded fun.)
A speaker on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR just made a point that hasn't been aired much in the recent debate on Social Security. To the extent that you believe that Social Security is in crisis, you are forced to acknowledge some fiscal mismanagement at some point along the way. On the sunset of the Clinton administration, the U.S. Treasury was swollen with trillions in surplus, and in the debate about how this money ought to be spent (or not), Gore advocated that we squirrel it away to bolster Social Security, whereas Bush said that it ought to be disbursed to Americans. Bush won and disburse he did, and most Americans received a share of that surplus in the form of DVD player–valued tax cut paychecks (with far more going to the far more wealthy, but details be damned).
The responsibility for today's deficit is multivariate, for certain: September 11, the digital bust, and a receding global economy all contributed to the cobwebs in the U.S. purse. But Bush's taxcuts are without question the guiltiest party. Would not Americans have benefited, then, from Gore's lockbox? (I have my doubts about the doom facing Social Security, so I'm serving as something of a devil's advocate.) If there is a Social Security crisis on the horizon, and President Bush is dedicated to preventing it, he could have done so by being Al Gore. If other benefits purchased Bush's expansive tax cuts—how's that DVD player working out?—they're don't balance the enormous deficit and enormously expensive war we're waging.
So how about that lockbox now?
Tyler Green discusses specialization vis-à-vis Slate's decision to give Lee Siegel yet another hat (improbably, Lee Siegel is The New Republic's television critic, The Nation's book critic, and now Slate's art critic). I don't think Slate is showing inexcusable judgment, given the medium that it is. They publish cocktail party–criticism. A generalist can write this well because he doesn't mind (or perhaps exceeds in) identifying trends, glossing the right details, and ignoring the nagging Jiminy Cricket–impulse critics feel to know the literature and know it thoroughly.
Be wary of the generalist who dismisses any concern about overstretch. "Everything’s the same," says Siegel, "I can write about anything," which makes Siegel sound like a cockatiel proud of his plume. (To be fair, it's far from the best interview that's ever been written.) So I wouldn't go to Siegel for anything instructional about the art world. Then again, I wouldn't go to Slate for that in the first place.
The WaPo's Dana Milbank:
Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.When the Supreme Court decided that the U.S. government had to grant "detainees" under their care access to the courts, the government (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House) was forced to endgame one inchoate aspect of the war on terror. The detainees—née Afghans, Saudi, Yemeni and others, Taliban and al Qaeda agents and sympathizers or innocents—were to either be prosecuted or released.The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.
[. . .]
One proposal under review is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons would be operated by those countries, but the State Department, where this idea originated, would ask them to abide by recognized human rights standards and would monitor compliance, the senior administration official said.
At the same time, data suggest that those who have been released from Gitmo have (re)turned to Iraq to fight the United States military, meaning either that releasing detainees encourages recidivism—or that being imprisoned in harsh conditions without legal representation or being charged with a crime is a surefire way to embitter a captive against his captor.
But the United States is poised to realize a loophole that grants the solution it seeks. Key to the Supreme Court either/or decision on detainee rights was the fact that Guantanamo Bay, while stationed in Cuba, is legally on U.S. soil. The "long-term" prison will not be:
As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense o
