As Jesse Taylor puts it, these recently released Mexican stamps definitely look like some "racist-ass stamps." However—at the risk of sounding annoyingly counterintuitive—read in context, I don't quite see how these stamps could be anywhere near .
Now I think these stamps are tasteless, but that's because I am an American, and Americans have every reason to regret blackface comedy for what it represents, and so on. Memin Penguin, the character featured in the stamp, is unambiguously a "pickaninny" caricature, and buying this stamp would be a slap in the face of any African American. Blackface today operates as a cultural signifier for the entire Jim Crow era, and an inappropriate citation of blackface—say, when white fraternities throw blackface parties—is inexcusably offensive.
But it doesn't necessarily follow that Mexico should share this collective shame related to blackface comedy. When complex cultural symbols are imported from one society to another their component antecedents are often lost in translation. (Think of, say, the Christmas tree.) I don't know when blackface comedy arrived in Mexico or how the symbol operates there, honestly, but I imagine it has been stripped it of its original context, which wouldn't have had much meaning for a nation that has a very marginal and localized population of people of African descent and never experienced the tragedies of African American history.
Is there some more basic level at which blackface, with its crude stereotypical lampoon, offends? Again, clearly—to me there is. Mexican humor, however, is far more forgiving of stereotypes. From an article filed after Vincente Fox generated a public outcry with his comments on race in America:
While Mexico has a few, isolated black communities, the population is dominated by descendants of the country’s Spanish colonizers and its native Indians. Comments that would generally be considered openly racist in the United States generate little attention here.While I'm no more comfortable with those examples than I am with the stamps, they demonstrate, at least to me, that . . . well, that I clearly don't appreciate Mexico's sensibilities about race. I would certainly be curious to know how it is that Memin Penguin came to be so beloved, but I'm not convinced that it's because the nation of Mexico hates black people, and I also don't see the rationale that says that Mexico ought to know better.One afternoon television program regularly features a comedian in blackface chasing actresses in skimpy outfits, while an advertisement for a small, chocolate pastry called the negrito — the little black man — shows a white boy sprouting an afro as he eats the sweet. Many people hand out nicknames based on skin color.
I admit, my gut reaction to Nike's, shall-we-say, "citation" of the iconic Minor Threat album cover was negative—Minor Threat inspiring nostalgia in me in a way that Nike does not, memories of dedication to Dischord Records's trademark abstinence regarding image-based commodity (t-shirts, etc.). Yet I read the apology issued by Nike—make that "Nike SB," which I take means "Nike Skateboarding," the division created to take this hit—and of course it's entirely reasonable. It's corporate wisdom and an eye toward the demographic that has the mega multinational pleading for mercy from mom and pop, but the letter is smart; I might entertain a Rove-ian interpretation of the homage-cum-scandal as a clever way to force the brand into a pretty insular niche market.
On another note, as Christopher Lynn observes, the no-doubt supremely offended reaction among any number of punk ethos/DIY adherents is a bit much: A robust appreciation for intellectual property rights has never exactly been a central feature of the punk platform. Frankly I think it would be inspired if every company whose logo has been molested by a rock band were to feature their music in an ad—unattributed, even! Teach you damn punks a lesson! Get outta my flowerbeds! You kids are on thin ice with me, thin, thin ice!
I used to have a t-shirt for a band called Seaweed—I think it was a play on a Motel 6 ad? This post is making me feel so old.
I've joined a reading group featuring the writers and readers at Unfogged, and we're going to work our way through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. I'm unreasonably excited about this—it's probably not a book I would make time for otherwise, but a little paternalism (deadlines, assignments) goes a long way with me.
I believe there are some philo professionals in the group; Ogged (the guy who kickstarted the book club) has created a number of guidelines intended intended to steer the discussion toward accessibility (that's good for a layman such as myself). If you're interested, feel free to read along—the comments will be open, and I think I'll put up a link in the sidebar.
I'm not sure whether Ogged thinks of it in these terms, but I imagine that when it's finished, the blog could last as something of a Wiki-annotation of the book. Which isn't to say that this small group of readers is going to take Heidegger in new directions or anything, but there's really no telling who might end up reading it down the line and adding her thoughts. Most book clubs go about it the wrong way, I think, by meeting in person.
A very brief work by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, from Borges's A Universal History of Infamy:
"On Rigor in Science"A fiction and a forgery* but also a prediction. Behold! Google Earth, the dimensionful version update of and successor to Google Maps. A devastatingly neat little desktop application and a quick and painless end to that productive day that's been pestering you. (Thanks to Eszter for passing it along.). . . In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
—J. A. Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
. . . you know, the site is all well and good, but I would greatly appreciate it if the architects at Google HQ were to develop a Google Earth handheld. Nothing that calls your mom and coordinates your photo albums or anything, just a slim, digital map and compass. I suffer from an absolutely debilitating lack, no, void of a sense of direction, and so long as I'm going to be lost all the time, I could get a lot of use out of a device that at the very least directed me toward the nearest coffee shop.
UPDATE: A screenshot with callouts:
* If you aren't familiar with the story, now you are: That quotation is the whole shebang, first published by the authors under a psuedonym (B. Lynch Davis, sez Google (always flexing its muscle)). I'm not sure how Cesares got nudged out of the picture, but I always see that story attributed to Borges (e.g., in Foucault's The Order of Things). Apparently the idea preceded Borges, appearing in a Lewis Carroll story called Sylvie and Bruno in which Carroll describes a map featuring "the scale of a mile to the mile."
You say simulacrum, I say simulacrum, let's call the whole thing off.
J.T. Kirkland's description of the works he presented in his recent showing, "Studies in Organic Minimalism," is misleading in an important way: The pieces do not comprise "wood" and "holes," I think, but instead "small holes" and "boards." Were the works simply variations on these two factors—wood and holes—they would lend themselves too well to the reductivist works with which artists like Frank Stella launched Minimalism. To go with that example: We can be certain that Stella's compelling consideration for his early Minimalist works (e.g., Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959) involved the manipulation of two "rules," an x axis and a y: the shape of the canvas and the width of the black stripe. No such legend goes with Kirkland's work.
J.T. Kirkland, Horseshoe, 2005.
These distinctions are key to sussing out Kirkland's Minimalist bona fides: I say "small holes" because the holes are small, none of his drill bits larger than a half an inch or so in diameter, and "boards" because "wood" implies a set that could contain elements other than the boards Kirkland uses. And more tellingly, I didn't find the regularized patterns the Minimalist citation led me to expect—in several works, the holes fell militarily along a precise grid, whereas in others the pattern was less obedient. By any number of other vectors—hole size, wood grain, polish, orientation, and surface qualities inherent to the type of wood (maple and mahogany appear to be infinitely more forgiving of the penetration than aromatic cedar and poplar)—Kirkland introduces variations that lead the viewer to suspect that there are fewer determinations and more happenstance at work.
J.T. Kirkland, All at Sea, 2004.
A viewer may than reach for "Organic" as a key, but I wasn't able to coax much from that angle. "Studies," I think, is more instructive. Kirkland's works don't read as discrete objects, and that's why it's easier to talk about them as a show; taken as a whole there's an obvious something going on, a progression over a number of variables and processes. That's nothing new to readers of his searching art blog. His probing approach plays out in a simple sense at the individual level: by leaving the woodworks untreated (that is, by refusing them treatment), he's set a course for them replete with fissures and warping, ostensibly frustrating the viewer (and buyer?) who perhaps appreciates the work as craft with a comely design influence. Taken together, the works easily fall into a linear order, as if the holes were discovering elements of the wood—so that, for example, Shadow must necessarily follow after Horseshoe, whose arch of holes operating contra the grain of the wood leads evolutionarily to the more advanced mimicry in the former piece.
J.T. Kirkland, Shadow, 2005.
To be sure there's too much of the studio in the show; the tension between Kirkland's imposed geometry and the natural choas of the wood grain isn't interesting enough to sustain the viewer's attention over some of the more rudimentary developments he's exploring. I would have been more satisfied with fewer and more decisive pieces. (The space was also a travesty—let it be said and let it just be left at that.) When he's able to put together a deceptively simple juxtaposition—such as Undulate, with its static repetition of pattern pulling at the planks' striations—there's potential for a perfect storm of severe process and natural form.
Augusto di Stefano, Untitled, 2002.
Appealing stuff by Augusto di Stefano, who was selected for the Dallas Museum of Art's 2003 "Come Forward" emerging-artist review and is currently showing (with DC's favorite son Dan Steinhilber and Ess Eff's Rosana Castrillo Díaz) in Tyler Green's exhibition for DCKT Contemporary, "In My Empire Life Is Sweet." In early 2006 di Stefano will do a stint at the artpace gallery artist-in-residence program in San Antonio, which has been know to pick the winner in the past. Curiously: no mention of di Stefano on Glasstire.
Apologies for the link overkill—and yet (outside this spare Artforum mention) none of them is really about Augusto di Stefano. He doesn't show often outside Texas and Texas isn't talking him up. Both of those counts really ought to change.
OF COURSE: Gov. Rick Perry's Texport will probably blow up first.
I feel personally antagonized whenever worthwhile art events are situated in Virginia. Case in point: It's bad enough that I'm required to venture into the hinterland, where the Metro dare not run, for "Strictly Painting 5." Though I've been looking forward to the show for a while, the last time I (borrowed a car and) drove out to wylde NoVa for a show, I was hit with a ticket for $0.50—honest to god—at some toll road of whose existence I was neither aware nor warned. It's one thing that Virginia still situates its economy on small bits of copper and nickel and expects the rest of us to retrogress while passing through, but quite another—you just won't believe it—to schedule the opening reception contra game 7 of the NBA Finals. The Finals, game 7! It's an act of red state aggression. (And by the by, watching Tony Parker time and time again try to penetrate Detroit from the top of the key brought me back to the toll booth: "No pass." Though things worked out fine without him, obv.)
Tonight: nothing but alternating patches of urban blight and fresh gentrification along my walk to Adams Morgan for "Traveling With Gulliver by KIOSKdc. Not only have they kindly provided a map I can follow with reasonable assurance that I won't get lost—as opposed to, say, hypothetically, driving experiences in the cities of Reston, McLean, and Clarendon—I'm almost certain not to accrue any traffic violations along the way. Take notes, NoVa!
UPDATE: However, if you simply must leave the WMATA-servicable confines of civilization—final warning: don't expect an embassy!—you should see J.T. Kirkland's work before the show is over. Tomorrow is its last day, and it's not so far from McLean Project for the Arts (though you'll need $0.50). Laptop meltdowns, work, and the NBA have severely cramped my schedule but I plan to post over the next day or so some notes on Kirkland's show, the Northern Virginia Community College/George Mason University student show, and Tim Tate's "Compelled by Content" (scroll down).
My intrepid laptop Jonas has returned! Receptionist, who handles deliveries: "How come you're always getting these boxes?" I'm not holding my breath that I won't be sending it out again before the G5 comes along . . . because I would be dead.
On a different note: trackbacks. I probably exterminate at min 300 trackback spam a day, and because I'm running this blog on the cheap, the MT Blacklist tool I use invariably times out as soon as it begins�meaning that 1) the process takes a lot longer than it should and 2) the posts don't rebuild, so the spam remains in some purgatorial state until I rebuild (thereby shuttling them all to hell). Which takes more time and also invariably times out before the entire site is rebuilt.
I managed to more or less eliminate comment spam by changing the name of the comment directory (by "I managed," of course, I mean, "I managed to pester my roommate's visiting guest with so many questions that he eventually did it for me, all the while muttering something about 'what kind of man can't use secure shells' or something"). Would that do the trick for trackback spam, and if so, can I ask you a few questions? Or: Is there a plugin that will close the trackback functionality on posts after a few days? I would eliminate the trackback function altogether, but if I'm going to get under the hood of the blog, might as well see if there's a way to fix it.
Tyler Green's mention of Ess Eff's new de Young Museum, designed by Herzog and de Mueron, reminds me that my fair alma mater squandered a Herzog and de Mueron design toward the end of my college career, a story I'll record here for posterity. "Reminds" is the wrong word, implying some period of healing and forgetfulness between then and now. The wound is raw as ever.
The Board of Regents commissioned the architects for the new Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which would house the campus's permanent collection and serve as a much-needed, premier university gallery and classroom space. In a move that shocked and insulted many, the Board never consulted with UT's premier architecture faculty,* taking it upon themselves to reject H & dM's first design stage in 1999 for noncompliance with Paul Philippe Cret's 1933 "Master Plan" for the university's architecture. Chagrinned or not, H & dM submitted a second phase that implemented aspects of Cret's Southwest/Beaux Arts style; this second proposal was apparently greeted with a professional insult. Rita Clements, Regent and chair of the Facilities Planning and Construction Committee, apparently asked a local architect she had hired to add a wing to her home for a quick sketch that she could take to H & dM to show them what the Regents were looking for. Can't y'all add some golden arches?
Didn't go over so well, obv. Now, I've heard that H & dM immediately returned a third design—a windowless, doorless box. Apocrypha notwithstanding, H & dM quit, and Larry Speck, the dean of architecture, resigned in protest. The outrage was palpable. Three schemes comprising 14 models, down the drain; the Board of Regents boorishly announced that it would limit its next search to American firms.
Naturally enough, not more than a semester later Herzog and de Meuron went on to win the Pritzker Prize, adding a layer of frosting to our cake of shame, which has now been topped with two big scoops of Walker Art Center and de Young Museum. A worse marker still—a black candle casting a light as dark and impenetrable as this metaphor—came in the form of the eventual successful design. Judge for yourself:
Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, Bad Blanton, 2001. There are the arches!
Herzog and de Meuron, Good Blanton, 2000. Note how the design fails to match the, uh, simplicity of the Jester dormitory complex, which towers over the horizon.
I'm not able to find better images than those, unf. Click here for a larger shot of the Good and here for a bigger popup of the Bad.
And then there's the Ugly: Tony Sanchez, a Board Regent (a position he purchased acquired despite his lack of experience in education (much less architecture)) and one of H & dM's most vocal opponents, who ran a (quite brutal) campaign for governor on the Democratic ticket against current governor Rick Perry. Even by the November 2002 election, the sting of his role in the Blanton disaster was too fresh; considering also his otherwise rebarbative candidacy, I did something I haven't admitted to anyone since—I voted in protest for the Green Party candidate. Don't even recall his name.
I know. Green Party. Yeah, more than partly motivated by the Blanton deal. Yeah, I know, I know.
* Reading over the student daily archives, the professor quoted most frequently about the matter is Austin Gleeson, a physics professor. I took a course with him later on and needled him on the subject, since he was a member of the facilities steering committee. Never wanted to talk to me about it, though. Perhaps he was tipped off by the specks of blood that would form in the spittle on my lip whenever I brought up the subject? Could have been anything I suppose.
You'll want to read Julian Sanchez's clever taxonomy of smoking ban supporters: the "High-Banners" (antismoking fundamentalists), the Grassroots (those who assertively prefer nonsmoking establishments), and the Friends of the Worker (among whom I suppose I'm forced to classify myself). But among the bon mots, Sanchez buries this dud:
It's not obvious why choosing to accept whatever risk is entailed in being around second-hand smoke is inherently different from accepting any other unattractive feature of a job—late hours, frequent travel, the physical risks of working in jobs like construction, emotional and mental stress, or even simple tedium.Sanchez takes up the task of hunting out the canards among the smoking ban supporters' argument but can't resist employing one himself. Sure, if the drycleaning bills are the worst inconvenience to a job that exposes you to a lot of secondhand smoke, the Friends of the Worker come off looking very stupid indeed. Stink is a reasonably sufferable occupational hazard, especially when offset by the perks of entertainment employment. But we know better: worse than leaving work in smelly clothes is the full shift spent working in the presence of a carcinogenic environmental constant.
Now, I'll admit: Nonsmoking bartenders haven't exactly been beating down a path to my door asking me to pledge solidarity to their cause. But neither are they hypothetical, and I'm sympathetic to that minority of nonsmoking workers, few though they may be, who complain that their jobs require them to endure exposure to an entirely preventable environmental carcinogen. Smoking ban supporters do better by arguing that the market provides sufficiently for this minority. The ban opponents lose points (with me, for whatever that's worth) by acting dodgy with the science. (Speaking of specious, Smokefree DC, an organization that supports the smoking ban, claims (oddly enough) that there are hundreds of smokefree bars and restaurants in the area—which would seem to strongly contradict their argument that entertainment staff aren't able to choose smokefree employers. Yet they provide a list that contains extremely few actual bars, nearly a dozen bakeries, and, audaciously, Max's Best—an adorable ice cream parlor.)
Nevertheless, Sanchez's exercise looks like fun and begs for reciprocation. My not off-the-cuff whatsoever empirical research of the ways of smoking ban opponents has uncovered three phyla:
(I single out Sanchez here but I wouldn't necessarily call him an Ostrich. I admire all the Ban the Ban bloggers, and though I think they're cavalier with the science at times, others who have argued the case in town have pretty brutally misrepresented the facts.)
Monday, June 13
I think I can safely say that my laptop's going to fine. Browsed a Mac support forum and symptoms point to a logic board failure. Bad news is that my 3-year insurance plan expired last month. Good news (under the circumstances) is that my laptop falls within a range of iBooks for which Apple issued a recall. Telephoned Apple; turns out that the recall also has an expiration (3 years from date of purchase). Made the cut with only 1 day to spare.
So that's a relief. Still a little freaked by the way my laptop was behaving, tho. Sort of expected the problem to be something . . . worse.
Tuesday, June 14
Can't get the hang of this "right-click." Probably could be worse. Actually, I think that staring at this monitor is giving me a headache, so maybe it can. Nothing that happy hour can't fix I think.
Happy birthday, Jonas! (That's my laptop, and according to all these warranties, today's his birthday.) Come back so I can post some reviews.
Wednesday, June 15
God this headache is getting worse. Killing my appetite, nothing sounds good. Weirdly steak tartar sounds fantastic but that's not exaclty chicken-noodle soup.
I really hope they send Jonas back before the weekend. It's too quiet without iTunes, and there's something unnatural about Windows.
Thursday
Rash, head going to explode. Fever. Scratch, scratch. I looked in the mirror, I don't look so good. Vvvvery hungry, don't want bad food. Want tasty food. No right-click. Want . . . brains.
But that's not right! But it feels right. . . .
Friuuuhhhr
uhhh . . . Jooo-naaas. . . .
Bit Sue before work, sorry, bit again, sorry. tasty-tasty. uhhhr, maybe she has Jooo-nnass. She won't tell me but she not sayin much now! Joonaasss . . . guess I'll eat some brains all weekend
An image of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ I posted a while back has been linked by a few bloggers who put Serrano's artwork in the same ballpark as recent revelations about U.S. military abuse of the Qu'ran. The left, the argument goes, is hypocritical for expressing outrage that American troops would urinate on the Qu'ran but not over Serrano's 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. Glenn Reynolds, who was never quite so motivated about the photodocumentation of torture at the Abu Ghraib facility, is spearheading the charge, naturally enough. (Inspired, I suppose, by the Monolithic Left's recent nationwide Serrano appreciation marches.)
So Jim Henley steps up for art's defense by arguing that Piss Christ should not, in fact, be read as blasphemous, therefore there's no case. That's a weak counter to the argument at hand, though. Henley's take acknowledges equal footing between two blasphemy cases but then acquits Serrano on the charge—yet whether the piece expresses some beef with Christianity misses the point. The fact that, ultimately, Piss Christ is subject to interpretation—that it has a virtual significance qua photograph distinct from the significance of the depicted action—distinguishes it from unmediated acts of violation committed against the Qu'ran. Aesthetically, we're talking about apples and oranges . . . but that's very much beside the point.
Another angle offers that, according to some orthodox, urinating on a crucifix is a lesser offense than urinating an a Qu'ran. Huh. Well, I think we could possibly stray further afield by analyzing the chemical urine content of the respective incidents, but the comparative theology misses the much more relevant elementary American principle: my right to desecrate a religious artifact is protected alongside my right to adore it; my right to desecrate your religious artifact and force you to participate in its desecration is not. Terrorizing and humiliating prisoners of war by violating their religious sensibilities is not exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. (But precisely what the framers of the Geneva Conventions anticipated.) And these violations the military perpetrates in all our names. It's entirely inappropriate to put Serrano and Guantanamo on the same page.
That revelations of these crimes are being answered by a pervasive, spittle-fueled meme about a photograph taken nearly 20 years ago—one which exemplifies the breadth and depth of American freedoms as much as the detainee violations epitomize the inverse—is perhaps typical misdirection from Bush administration apologists. But it's still stunning: the gall, and so casual.
I don't have a clue what language Kunstkritikk is written in, but I wish it were mine so I would have access to sweet words like "populærkultur." It's plain that the site is a topical online arts journal, but I couldn't figure out how it had linked to this one until I stumbled upon its feature on arts blogs, which generously provided me a listing:
Kriston Capps på skriver om samtidskunst og kultur. Han er 25 og bor i District of Colombia. Skriver også for den politiske orienterte gruppebloggen Begging To Differ. Capps har tatt pause fram til mai, I mellomtiden skriver JL fra bloggen Modern Kicks og Dan fra Iconoduel på sidene.I still get a juvenile thrill from seeing the familiar in the context of an alien script. Unless they're saying bad things, obv.
I've been retained by the Smithsonian Institution for a blog project about which you'll be hearing more in the near future. For now the details are nearly that scant, so this isn't so much an announcement as an announcement that the announcement is forthcoming. It's going to be neat, and I'll tell you more soon.
MORE: Or less, rather—it's going to take some time for the project to come to fruition. I'm sure I jumped the gun by mentioning it at all; a lot of people from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (the branch developing the project) are and have been working on it, and there will be some inhouse work before anything goes live.
I'm sorry to report that, yet again, my laptop's petered out on me. Cross your fingers with me that the June expiration of my insurance plan can be interpreted as the end of June. I should create an Effing Computer category for as often as I have to post a miserable note that the blogging will be slow until my computer is repaired.
Dying to plant your nicotine-stained fingernails into somebody's face? Wish you could tell smoking ban opponents that it's no use blowing smoke up your ass? Hooray, interminable debate! Stop by the Lincoln Theater tonight for a townhall meeting on the proposed District smoking ban; I'm planning on taking notes. I'm curious to hear more about Council member Carol Schwartz's proposed compromise bill:
The Schwartz bill would offer bars and restaurants that go smoke-free a two-year tax break equal to 25 percent of the sales tax they generate while increasing license fees and ventilation requirements on those that don't.Though if I recall correctly Council member Kathy Patterson's out-and-out smoking ban stands a fair chance at passing, since its path to passage bypasses Schwartz's Public Works committee, whose members comprise the largest bloc of ban opponents on the Council, in favor of David Catania's Health Committee, whose chair (Catania) cosponsored the smoking ban. Regardless, I'm taking notes tonight, and I'll post them tomorrow (more quickly if there are curse words)."It's truly a carrot-and-stick approach," Schwartz said. "It does not mandate it, it does not coerce it, rather it gives businesses in this city freedom of choice while we maintain our freedom of choice of which establishments we patronize."
For the record I'm sympathetic to the argument that identifies secondhand smoke as an absolutely heinous toxin that ought to be banned in bar, entertainment, and restaurant workplaces so long as there are not viable alternatives for staff who do not smoke or relish constant exposure to secondhand smoke and its gazillion carcinogens. I also am of the opinion that bar and restaurant staff have less job mobility than some other professions and can't simply work some place else if they don't prefer a smoking environment. On the other hand, I love to smoke when I drink and think that an important aspect of the American character would be lost if bars were sterilized, so I'm open to proposals to bolster market incentives for nonsmoking bars—I'm just not convinced that they'll strike an effective balance.
I'm hostile to two positions in the debate: 1) It's hogwash that smoking bans hurt local business, and 2) groups like Smokefree DC, with whom I nearly agree on the issue, except for their insistence that a right to smaller dry-cleaning bills is somehow relevant and that whole part of the charter that says its members must be drawn from the most uptight, sanctimonious members of the community.
UPDATE: So I didn't end up going to the townhall meeting—some good news that required celebration. Nevertheless I did see Brooke Oberwetter from Ban the Ban walking down the street afterward, talking very heatedly into her cell phone.
UPDATE II: Ms. Oberwetter may have been angry because Council member Jim Graham, who was an undecided on the smoking ban as recently as yesterday, through his support behind a comprehensive smoking ban.
Not here, or not yet anyway—I have a number of reviews in the draft queue that need just a bit more polish, and I hope to get them up soon. Blogging is very good for being freeform, but I like for the reviews to be formal. Over the weekend, definitely, if not before then.
An item about the new Gagosian Gallery opening in Palazzo Borghese (with an Ed Ruscha exhibition) reminded me of some handwringing a while back over Carlo Bilotti's intentions to build a museum in the Villa Borghese. You may remember that Bilotti wants to build a Rothko Chapel–style permanent meditation station for works by Damien Hirst.
I thought I'd look around for some fret-worthy updates, but the only news I found (from the St. Petersburg Times) confused me. The site he's building at the Villa Borghese will be called the Museo Carlo Bilotti. So Bilotti's taking equal footing to good Scipione and the Italian government is paying for it.
But the report also specifically states that Bilottie-on-the-Borghese will house his collection of works by de Chirico (only de Chirico?) and that the house of Hirst will be located elsewhere in Rome. Call this one developing.
Yesterday evening some friends and I caught a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Shakespeare Theatre. Top notch—the production value was high (and dark), the humor was appropriately bawdy and physical, and the performances were all more or less spot on. And even though it was 147º in the shade, a sultry sunset concluding the first hot day of a muggy summer seemed like an appropriate setting for the show. A pic-a-nic basket's worth of beer helps with the heat, anyway.
But every director knows that there's one absolutely indispensable element to success in the theatre: electricty. And I don't mean jazz-hands enthusiasm, but honest-to-goodness AC/DC—a District black-out in the fourth act brought the house down, literally. Know what? The show does not, in fact, go on once it's in Pepco's hands.
So we had to pack up and make our way through the dark before the final curtain, but I thought I'd post some observations in the hopes of drawing out a genuine Bardophile.
One: Unseen acts notwithstanding, Bottom easily stole the show. Now, I have it in my head that Puck is far and away the meatiest role in the play, but now I'm not sure—Puck's performance was okay, maybe too sissy, but moreover the role itself looked less substantial than I had thought. Did we get a bum Puck, or is there a little more room for Bottom at the top?
Two: Not a question, but the actress who played Hermia (Noel True) was fantastic. A little like Maya Rudolph doing Diana Ross on SNL, if you can imagine that in iambic pentameter. (Side note: We're the first hit for "Damn, Tanina," which makes me think that I'm the only one who thought that skit was funny.)
Three: Again, the art direction was top shelf, especially the costume and concept for the edgy faeries, which were a cross between the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz and the music video for Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away," so no complaint there. Except. The faeries weren't very sexy. Everyone is supposed to be crazy from the heat and the faeries are supposed to really drive that home, and though they did a lot of slinking, it wasn't hott.
And if anyone reading ever has a performance cut short by a blackout, take a bow! In the absence of that closure the audience actually resorted to The Wave. I kid you not. Had a police official not taken the stage to tell us that the show was over, I think the actors could've rightly been held responsible for the carnage and cannibalism that would have inevitably ensued.
The Hirshhorn Museum announced on Tuesday the finalized plan for Janet Cardiff's "Directions" show—an audio walk on the National Mall:
Visitors will individually start out from the Hirshhorn’s lobby with an Apple iPod shuffle that delivers audio directions instructing the visitor where to walk. Directed by the voice of the artist—which is interspersed among enhanced recordings of ambient sounds, a cappella music, excerpts from historic speeches and snippets of interviews with individuals who recount their Mall experience—participants will pass through the Hirshhorn plaza and Sculpture Garden, along the National Mall and through other Smithsonian museums. Cardiff’s voice-over also includes instructions and references to specific artworks, buildings and vistas as visitors approach them on the predetermined route. The work is designed to be an individual experience and will be administered in a way that prevents participants from overlapping at any point along the route of the walk.There was talk about Cardiff creating an open sound installation for the Mall, which brought to mind Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials for the Tate's Turbine Hall, but the rumor had it that that project got canned—something like that.
Regardless, I want to be first in line for this. The playful take on "directions" is smooth, and I loved Cardiff and George Bures Miller's The Paradise Institute, a cinema installation for the Canadian Pavillion at the 2001 Venice Biennale and a work I've had a chance to see a few times since then. (It's a real crowd-pleaser wherever it goes.) Probably we'll hear more talk about how Apple is horning in on the museum, once the show goes live.
Incidentally: Has anyone seen/heard Cardiff and Miller's Pandemonium sound installation at Eastern State Penitentiary near Philly? I'm going to make my way up to see it in the near future—obviously I need to time this trip to coincide with the opening of George Romero's Land of the Dead, since any creepy sound installation set in a prison ultimately describes a zombie escape.
Courtesy of Clutch Pearls, it appears that the Internets will go through with a plan to extend a top-level domain to the porn industry: dot-xxx. ICM Registry—the part of the Internets, apparently, that sprouts new domains—lists the benefits to the .xxx registry. Dot-xxx is voluntary but is leveraged by incentives: By agreeing to the best practices guidelines (mandatory for the use of the registry), adult content producers become more appealing to major credit card companies, who sometimes refuse to enable transactions for online pornographers due to shady practices. Porndogs benefit from .xxx, which ensures minimum confidentiality and identity-protection standards. And an online red light district is a major victory for parents, who may soon be free from the fear that Precious Tot will visit whitehouse.com while writing a report on Sox the Cat and find, instead, Soxxx the Stripper. Here's hoping that everyone involved—family groups, pornographers, and porn aficionados—realizes this and plays ball.
WORD TO THE WISE: Add it to your MT Blacklist now!
Last week Tyler noted a piece by Christopher Knight in the LAT about Edward Burtynsky, the Canadian industry-landscape photographer; Todd at Gallery Hopper, among others, picked up the conversation with commentary about the environmental activist reading of Burtynsky's work.
Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 31. Sudbury, Ontario, 1996.
There are ways his photographs work and there are ways that his taking of his photographs have worked on him, I imagine. He's not secretive about his advocacy of sustainability and his identification with environmental concerns. Seeing his photographs definitely provokes horror. It's hard to accept that his landscapes—some of which are absolutely lunar , some Martian— are shot on the same planet that brought us tulips, after all. But the sublime to be found between the abstract expanse of his work and his miticulous, tiny detail mitigates the pure impact of ruin. Shock comes in second: There's no loss of wonder in his work for the horror in his subjects.
When I saw Burtynsky's photographs in person a few years back, they reminded me of Charles Sheeler's painting. See Sheeler soar above the city in Church Street El (1920) or hover, seemingly, over a harbor wall in American Landscape (1930), and you find the same subtle application of unsettling aerial perspective that Burtynsky uses—particularly in his "Breaking Ground" series.
Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930.
Sheeler's Precisionist painting looked to photography whereas Burtynsky's work nearly does the opposite. And I can't resist pairing Sheeler's Steam Turbine (1939) with Burtynsky's Oil Refineries (1999).
Charles Sheeler, Steam Turbine, 1939.
Charles Burtynsky, Oil Refineries No. 6. Oakville, Ontario, 1999.
One looking forward from the birth of industrialism; the other looking out from its manifest destiny. Nothing but, well, several decades of American energy policy between them, I suppose.
I hesitated from the start when I heard that the newly launched TPMCafe would be built using Scoop, the collaborative media engine behind Daily Kos. Not a site I frequent for a variety of reasons, the format not the least of which—it's dizzying. TPMCafe, on the other hand, looks great, and even the reader diaries seem reasonably well integrated, though I'm not sure I know the difference between those and the reader blogs yet—anyway, there's a books section that looks promising.
If I were planning to launch a blog that would probably find a large audience pretty quickly but wanted to maintain a cool, moderated comment section, I'd probably give Scoop a close look. . . .
I'm drowning in e-mail asking, "God, I'm sick of happy hours. Isn't anyone having an Annual Patchwork Event tonight?" Well! It so happens that tonight starting at 6:00 p.m. Art Enables is hosting Patchwork 2005, its second annual. AE is an enterprise that supports artists with developmental or mental disabilities. From the boilerplate:
Participants in Art Enables are selected for their interest in drawing, painting and color. They come to the studio on scheduled days to work under the guidance of professional artist-instructors creating and marketing their own outsider and folk art. Their artwork is exhibited and sold in shows at the studio, via retailers around the city and at galleries, markets and special events throughout the region.An excellent benefit to the artists and a unique local resource for those with an eye for outsider art. I personally appreciate the work of Charles Meissner and hope to see some new (and not sold) work by him.
Charles Meissner, CSNY, 2004?
Anyway, the fine print:
Art Enables Patchwork
June 2 at 6:00p
St. Mark's Episcopal Church
3rd and A St, SE
Metro: Capitol South
Free admission
Featuring a most affordable raffle and the year's noisiest silent auction.
It's AE's best event of the year, so I hope some readers will make an effort to come out even given my late notice. Shoot me a line if you plan to drop by.
Gregg Chadwick rounds up art blogs from various destinations around the world—Georgia, Finland, Portugal, Tasmania, and (Ess Eff by way of) Norway. Since I'll have reason to visit Georgia soon enough, so I think I'll keep an eye on Hans Heiner Buhr. Thanks, Gregg.
Over the long weekend Sarah Boxer chimed in with a piece about PostSecret and clued into the most interesting observation about the site: the increasingly streamlined style of the entries. If you've checked in on the site before (or if you scroll from the bottom forward) you'll note the sine qua non to the appeals, an "I give you x—in defiance of y social expectation!" no less requisite than the "Forgive me Father" preface to the more traditional testimonial.
The visual vocabulary of PostSecret, a whisper-postcard project by Frank Warren (Boxer doesn't note the site owner and artist's identity), is pure Barbara Kruger; the rhetorical quality a cross between Jenny Holzer's letters-to-the-universe aphorisms and Cindy Sherman's context-deprived but wholly narrative film snips. Some postcards are more visually sophisticated than others—the visual sometimes helps to set 'em up or knock 'em down (here or here)—but mostly they aim for the same target, and it's somewhat more specific than just airing the dirty laundry.
So how does some motivated portion of the site's 2.5 million visitors come to collectively recognize a distinct way to realize a secret? There are of course limitations to what may be done within the confines of a postcard (at least one that stands a chance of being mailed, anyway); syntactically speaking, secrets have a structural quality that fits the mold. And probably it's easier to tell everyone the details about the skanky skeletons in your closet when there's a codified tradition to it, especially if it costs less than a full-price stamp to get involved, and more so if there's a certain way of doing it that onlookers find mutually rewarding.
I suspect that we see Warren's hand at work, too—his preferences bring some postcards to light but probably direct many more to large bins shoved under the bed or wherever. If that's the case, Warren is asking for something more specific than the site's modest instructions might lead you to believe, either by dint of his voyeuristic tendencies or perhaps inadvertent curatorial guidance in what the community of confessors has to say.
Or he may post everything he gets, or he may intend to eventually post everything he receives (barring, I imagine, Blake Boyd-types trying to use the space as a forum)—regardless of the degree to which Warren guides the page, there's a strong organizing principle at work. Beyond the level of pure pathos, it's the accretion of visual and narrative intuition that activates the site.
