Yglesias and I didn't take seriously the Halloween admonition to stock up on candy—we sort of thought we'd buy a pizza crust and use some toppings from the garden instead to make dinner. That's us: at home on Halloween with lights on and Monday Night Football playing and no candy—the biggest assholes on U Street.
As we enter into the tricks stage of the evening, we know we deserve what we get. So far it's been mostly middle fingers; I just hope that the flaming objects that will be tossed at our house throughout the night are still primarily dogshit based. I don't expect any mercy.
Over at the deli, I saw that G. Gordon Liddy is providing color commentary on FOX News. G. Gordon Liddy! As if to signal that Scooter's taken his first steps toward his own comic book series.
So we're supposed to hear about ongoing criminal investigations at 2 p.m.? That's different. Time to run and grab a sandwich so I can actually savor the moment.
More problems for the Guggenheim:
NEW YORK—Art collector Walter P. Vaifale announced Monday that he will no longer loan artwork to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Too often, he says, the museum returns his priceless works of art scratched, broken, or stained, if they remember to return them at all.Read the shocking exposé here. I bet this guy will find a sympathetic ear in Peter Lewis.Vaifale, the holder of one of the world's most extensive private collections of modern and contemporary Western art, characterized the Kool-Aid stain on Peter Halley's White Cell With Conduit as "the last straw."
"Initially, the Guggenheim staff would make minor mistakes, such as returning my works in the wrong frame," Vaifale said. "Sometimes, when I'd visit, I'd notice a painting hung upside-down. I allowed the staff to brush my complaints aside for several years, but I'm sorry, getting peanut butter on Van Gogh's The Red Vineyard is unacceptable."
Since there's obviously no Halloween without Halloween carols (and since I have three more days before this FTP client starts asking me for money), it's time for spooky sounds on G.p.
Including all or part of the Arcade Fire, Beck, R.E.M., Rilo Kiley, David Cross, Devendra Banhart, Elvira (!), Sonic Youth, Sparks, Les Savy Fav, Peaches, That Dog, Postal Service, Karen O, Wolf Parade, and a mess of others, the North American Halloween Prevention Initiative is a supergroup who are standing up and saying no! to razor blades in candy apples, no! to LCD candy wrappers, no! to childhood obesity (I'm inferring), and no! to Sugar Daddies. (On principle. Those things are disgusting.) NAHPI has a treat for you, and it's a message of hope:
North American Halloween Prevention Initiative, "Do They Know It's Halloween?"Hat tip to Tom. That's pretty clever, but I'm not sure it's, you know, sufficiently accursed to speak to the spirit of Halloween.
That distinction goes to "I Put a Spell on You," but whose version? Nick Cave and his haunted harmonica? Howlin' Wolf, whose name is already pretty Halloween? CCR? I'm going to have to go with
Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You"I really ought to warn you that what you hear next might shock you. We're plumbing depths so satanic, so abominable—the meek and noncostumed should turn back now.
Cradle of Filth, "Castlevania"Do you know where you are, Bartolome? You are about to enter hell.
Full disclosure to Congress in 2004 about WMD intelligence? Bah, humbug!
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.What the hell is going on? Who's writing this stuff, Democratic Underground?
Almost—but definitely not quite—over the cute little "Fitzmas" angle. Also: It should be noted that Murray Waas bears a passing resemblance to the Dude.
A little doohickey that uses Technorati inputs to determine the value of your blog. Courtesy of (undervalued!) Adrienne Aldredge.
OK, yeah, I'm phoning it in this week. Substantive posts to resume any day now.
Bunny Smedley's survey of Rachel Whiteread's new Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation, Embankment, is worth the read (despite Smedley's profoundly incorrect assessment of Bruce Nauman).
Of many points that Smedley touches upon in the article, the one that registers most strongly is that Whiteread should never have been lumped in with the YBA crowd. Clearly the best trend to emerge from Saatchi's moment was the explosive growth in contemporary galleries, which in turn bolstered the "second wave" of young British artists: Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, and so on. The second wave benefited from a base of support that amounted to more than one collector's mania. Of that preliminary class of artists, Whiteread not only stands head and shoulders above the rest, she ranks as an artist whose work is consistently compelling even as she reiterates one modus operandi. For more on that score, see Dr. Smedley. (Link courtesy of Smedley's U.S. attaché, Modern Kicks).
Is it all likely that we could appropriate Whitread for the United States without straining too much international relations with our strongest ally? Whiteread's a much closer fit to postminimalists (like Nauman) than to her YBA contemporaries Hirst, the Chapmans, or the rest. It wouldn't take much more than a small wetworks team to extricate her, right?
UPDATE: Douglas Gordon is Scottish, not British per se, reminds one correspondent via e-mail. The sun never sets on the pickiness of you lot of readers.
On the first day of Fitzmas, my Preznit said to me
I withdraw my Supreme Court nominee.
The White House is restoring Davis-Bacon labor protections for Gulf Coast reconstruction projects. If anything ought to spur redevelopment in the area, it's putting money in the pockets of local workers enough to feed their families and restore their homes. Representative George Miller (D-CA) writes about how Congress made it happen in this TPMCafe post.
Representatives talking to constituents, laborers getting paid fair wages for dangerous and difficult work . . . it brings a tear to my eye.
Roxanne tagged me with the newest meme. What the hey, I'll bite.
1. Of all the books that you have eventually finished after many starts & stops, which one took you the longest and how long did it eventually take?
I don't think I finished The Silmarillion until my junior year in college, and I probably started that book in junior high. Lots of fits and starts. Same thing with Gravity's Rainbow, which I picked at for over a year until I killed it during a study-abroad program in Italy. If you're looking for a book to sort of not read for long periods of time and eventually put down, I recommend Pynchon—the Tolkien myth is actually good, so long as you're willing to slog through the Molgorth-begat-Orgnaught stuff.
2. What great band (or album or song) have you heard so often, you wouldn't mind never hearing again even though you still think the band (or album or song) is great?
Probably Radiohead.
3. Which cliché or often cited quote needs to be placed in quarantine for a few decades?
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" is what people say when they mean, "I have never voted, and in fact hold no opinions about politics whatsoever." Fenceriders, bah!
4. During the 1990s "Compassion Fatigue" received a lot of press, now the media is giddy with "Donation Fatigue". What will be the next trendy fatigue?
Indictment fatigue! We'll be hearing those aches and moans as early as tomorrow from the folks at National Review
5. What percentage of respondents will answer "meme fatigue" to question #4?
I like little time wasters, but man—this one meme a while back was truly terrible. (Nothing meant by linking to The Heretik as an example.) The first question was, "You are stuck in Fahrenheit 451. What book would you be?" or some variation. Doesn't that reference signal that the book is about to be burned? I was ready for these things to disappear at that point.
Okay, kicking off to Jeff G., Jeff N., and Charles.
The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.The New York Times:This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.
[. . .]
Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, nor for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.
I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.Laura Rozen:Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.We know that the Vice President's office was so deeply opposed to the CIA that it practically set up its own intelligence agency to sell the Iraq war to the people. It was not Joe Wilson's statement (in a New York Times op-ed) that Iraq did not acquire nuclear materiel from Niger that caused the Office of the VP to flip out; it was Nick Kristoff and Walter Pincus's reports that Wilson confided anonymously he had told the CIA that the Niger docs were forgeries that really irked the administration. It turns out that Kristoff and Pincus were wrong, likely because Wilson misrepresented his involvement with exposing the forgeries, but that's immaterial to the question of the administration's retaliation.Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.
Now, previously we might have understood the retaliation against Plame/Wilson to be a sign of the Veep's bizarre perspective about American intelligence: that Wilson would be discredited for the fact alone of his being linked to the CIA. But now we understand that the Niger dossier was known by the State Department to be fake before the President cited its findings in the 2003 SOTU Address. And what we're finding out from the Italian press is the degree to which the Pentagon, in 2002—just 1 year after the September 11 attacks, almost to the day—collaborated with Italian intelligence (SISMI) to push bogus Niger documents after the CIA wouldn't bite. The reason the administration pounced on Wilson in the first place? Something about those secret meetings in Rome would have been devastating to the White House Iraq Group, had that revelation become public knowledge in 2003.
One of those Pentagon officials who met with SISMI leaders in secret Rome meetings is Larry Franklin, who has been arrested and charged with acting as an Israeli spy. Stephen Hadley, another Pentagon figure present for the meetings, is currently the National Security Advisor. Stateside figures Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby are likely looking at perjury and obstruction of justice charges; Vice President Cheney may or may not be indicted. He may be labelled an unindicted co-conspirator, based on what reports are saying today.
Steve Clemons reports that indictment letters were received today, will be filed officially tomorrow, and will be acknowledged publicly on Thursday.
Mars, bitches.
. . . and weren't afraid to ask. That Leon Kass essay? The first of three parts? Recycled. You can read the whole (insufferable) thing here. No big deal, really, but where's the disclosure?
Jerry Saltz wrote a review of Sam Durant's Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C., which provoked a response and comments over at Edward Winkleman's. Here's the gist of Durant's show (provided by Saltz):
The idea for Sam Durant's "Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C." has the virtue of being simple enough to fit on the front of a T-shirt. In the handy pamphlet accompanying the show, Durant says he wants to "move monuments commemorating lives lost during the Indian Wars to the National Mall in Washington, D.C."Not having been at the show like Winkleman, I can't actually riposte to his reading. Talking about just the idea behind even such a conceptual piece is a little like reading sheet music. Winkleman's heard the thing played live.[. . .]
Twenty-five replicas of actual monuments from all over the country -- each painted gray, made of a nondescript-looking material -- are placed like an eerie oversize chess set in Cooper's grand main gallery. None have commemorative plaques or markings, although the checklist abounds with evocative names like "Birch Coulee Monument to Faithful Indians," "Monument to Heroes of Wounded Knee," and "Okoboji Indian Massacre Monument." By presenting these monuments as uniform and nameless, Durant renders them mute, separates them from time and place, creating an uncanny forest of implacable signs.
Doesn't sound as if he was doing the stadium clap-clap-stomp while he was at the show, though. He calls it "condescending and inappropriate, as if designed to alleviate White guilt via sanitized WASPish sentiments that do nothing to even hint at the cultures lost or reveal anything about the reality of the slaughters."
Sam Durant, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C.,
2005. Installation view.
By proposing to situate these obelisks on the National Mall—lining the Reflecting Pond—Durant's real focus is the national obelisk. And it's true, it all sounds very WASPish, an installation about atrocities committed against Native Americans featuring a bunch of shuffled forms that never had any bearing on Native American art. But that can't really be helped, can it? It wasn't Durant's decision to make these monuments obelisks; he's only testifying to the fact. I take it that's the point.
You know the difference between a champion and a runnerup? Seven ten-thousandths points of computer love. First in the nation! Have I ever metioned how much I admire the pure logic of BCS rankings?
It is seriously beginning to look like a lot like Christmas from where I'm standing.
Speaking of payola punditry, four newspapers—one in California, two in North Carolina, and one in Colorado—each published an identical paragaph in their respective papers' unsigned editorials in praise of stripping Davis-Bacon Act labor protections for Gulf Coast reconstruction projects. Same paragraph, four editorial columns. Have fun explaining that, eds.
UPDATE: As noted in comments, there's less than meets the eye to this story. It turns out that a shadowy megacorporation simply owns a number of small-market newspapers throughout the country, which they use to distribute pro-administration opinion.
If it weren't for the fact that the New York Times company owns not only the Boston Globe but also the Boston Red Sox* I think there would be cause for outrage. But, nah, just more crazy fishwrap fun.
* something like that
Truly the only thing I can add to Kieran Healy's shelling of Leon Kass is a link. Just click through already.
But a couple words about Maggie Gallagher's mortifying guest stint at Volokh. (Scroll about from that link.) First and foremost: Doesn't anyone remember the payola pundit mess from a while back?
More importantly, what are these arguments she's bringing? She was crucified in comments for arguing that homosexuality led to the fall of the Roman Empire—I kid you not—and has rebounded with the tried-and-true slippery slope to polygamy. All this without explaining by what mechanism gay marriage actually threatens heterosexual marriage (or civilization), despite a chorus of commenters asking her to do just that. The "SSM" moniker, with all the monolithic threat implied therein, is her cleverest contribution to the debate.
In comments to this post by Edward Winkleman about political art (which I hope to also write about), James Leonard mentioned a piece that he made, Greetings From America. It's a snarky, pithy piece, and the back of the postcard really seals it.
(By the way, that stereo image? Now we know it's not a hologram—it's called a lenticular image.)
I'm doing my best impression of Charles and Modern Kicks and posting a few MP3s—just tempting fate for no good reason.
A while ago Susan sent me a song by Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris, and she said that there's a part near the end in which Waylon steps in to lend a harmony that will melt your heart. Dangerous, by prescription only:
Guy Clark, "Anyhow, I Love You"As long as I've got this thing open I'll toss up another song, one by Warren Zevon that I probably listen to four times a day or so. It's been covered by around a dozen artists, and Zevon plays a few different versions of the song—I've got a live cut he did with Jackson Browne in which he's added a verse and a half about a Samoan guy.
Warren Zevon, "Carmelita"Like that, but wish it were just a little more border and a lot more honky tonk? There's Dwight Yoakum's version with Flaco Jiminez (on accordian):
Dwight Yoakum and Flaco Jiminez, "Carmelita"Any takers?
I really haven't been keeping up with the rock at all. The last two or three times I've gone to the record store, I've walked out out with a Slint album. I still have no songs by Teh New Pr0nographers or Neko Case, an infraction that's punishable by a fine.
You really don't want to miss Ezra Klein's post (which he should expande into an article!) about Big Pharma's literary aspirations:
Big Pharma, furious that so many Americans are taking advantage of Canada's cheaper drug costs to undercut the industry's price-gouging, decided to commission a book that'd vault up the bestseller list, scare the daylights out of American consumers, and shut down the cross-border trade. The plot? A band of Croatian terrorists wreaks havoc on unsuspecting Americans by constructing a website that claims to offer cheap drugs from Canada but in fact ships out poison pills.That is fantastically creepy. And maybe a harbinger of art to come. Andy Warhol offered a pretty thorough critique of material culture, but I don't think his art anticipated a state in which even novels are a form of spam.
Tom writes more here. Now for a nonsequitor that's probably of very little interest to most of you. Last night Tom and I went round and round again in our continuing debate about marketing and determination. Here's what we're arguing over:
We've been going round and round over this stuff (see comments to Tom's post for more)—we're practically not even friends anymore. So as an olive branch, Tommy, I offer to you Libelous Claims About Large Corporations.
In my last year at Texas I took a fantastic course from Aleksandra Shatskikh, a visiting Malevich scholar. She has an editorial in ARTnews about the sorry state of Konstantin Melnikov's home in central Moscow.
If I can find a scanner, I'll load some pictures I took in Moscow a few years back (back when cameras operated on something called "film"). It's a great building, it's in very apparent disrepair, and it needs to find its way into the hands of an organization (the Schusev Architecture Museum?) that will make its preservation a first priority. Come on—tell me you'd choose Disneyworld over the Melnikov Museum of Constructivist Architecture.
Fortunately, the Melnikov's problems are either cosmetic or correctable; I think it was chosen for World Monuments Fund's 100 Most Endangered Monuments primarily because its fate is likely to be determined by a Russian court. Really, the state has a compelling reason to preserve the site: Melnikov's place was the only Soviet single-family home built for a private individual. (Yeah, just one.)
Melnikev's home. 1927–29.
Russophiles in the audience might be interested in Shatskikh's forthcoming book on Vitebsk, the Belarussian city where Chagall, Lissitzky, and Malevich developed their work. It was the Paris of the Baltics! And say what you will about ARTnews, but they cover important Russian art topics that virtually every other publication ignores.
I wouldn't be surprised if the artists participating in "Found Sound" were extremely annoyed with Mark Jenkins for appropriating their exhibits with his tape sculptures—these, in the form of feces. He's punning off the Port-O-Lets in which the exhibits are installed, which is smirkworthy—but is Joseph Grigely happy that Jenkins wrote "hot poop" on his exhibit? The Numark Gallery associate or volunteer who's probably going to have to clean it off? What about the not-exactly-subtle negative comment about the project? (Link courtesy of DC Art News.)
The kids these days. No respect for private property public art. Click away for more about "Found Sound" (PDF).
UPDATE: Here's a non-PDF link to the "Found Sound" site, which features a sample of Brandon Morse's installation.
UPDATE II: Jenkins has removed the images at the link and issued an apology to the "Found Sound" folk. It's not my place to say, but I think it's big of him to apologize.
See, all this buzz? Now you really want to check out the installations, right?
Your first stop for Gettygate news ought to be Modern Art Notes. (Any chance we can get a single round-up post of all the Getty stuff, Tyler?) But if you've cycled through all the artblogs and still crave new sources of Schadenfreude, pick up Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. I can't find the copy I stole from Yglesias (sorry, Yggy), but the introduction is a lengthy feature about Marion True and co. getting snowed over this forged kouros.
I didn't plan to write such a snipey post about it until I saw the Getty's text about the statue. Gladwell's account doesn't leave much doubt about the authenticity of the work, and even discusses the fact that the Getty antiques crew decided that they just didn't care whether everyone in the know thought it was a forgery. Appealing to future wisdom in the face of so many expert conclusions is a slap in the face of the scholarship, viewers, and puppies. Okay, JL is right in comments: never say never. There is an enormous amount of literature on the Getty acquisition, a gloss of which shows a strong consensus that the statue is a forgery. Technologies that currently do not exist could vindicate the piece, which seems to be the grounds for the agnostic camp. But as it stands, it's no cointoss, and I think the Getty misrepresents the debate as such in the text about the piece.
Also, as I mentioned, I have the Asian bird flu. Not much time left; better spend it mean.
Yes, Pinter. We know better than to hold an artist's work hostage to his political views—what's the controversy here? There's a substantive difference between the interplay of work and worldview for Pinter (factually incorrect, more-or-less peacenik) and, say, Céline (anti-Semitic, even eliminationist), and and the case can still be made for Céline's literary achievements. (But not by me—I'm not a fan.)
To be sure, Pinter's work measures up to the award. The Birthday Party remains the most underrated modernist play, in my opinion. To poach a comment I left on another thread (about football, of all things): If you hate Beckett, you won't like Pinter. If you just dislike Beckett, he may be your man. But you probably want to tuck the play in your bag if you're travelling through the Balkans.
UPDATE: Roger Kimball provides the must-read case against Pinter. To wit, Kimball says that Pinter's views on terrorism are too far beyond the pale for his theater to merit recognition. Indeed, I doubt the Swedes even stopped to consider whether Pinter votes Labour or Tory, walks his dog everyday, tips well, or suffices in any other sense as a playwright.
UPDATE II: Those clever Crooked Timberists.
I had reason to write the word "snowglobes" earlier today, and caught myself writing "snowblogs." An ominous sign, but not nearly as bad as the Asian bird flu that I have contracted.
I'm link poaching from the inestimable Bayes Project, but this item deserves another run:
bloc-notes, n.m.The other items on the vocabulaire de l'internet are pretty pedestrian, but Christ if bloc-notes isn't better than "blogs."Forme abrégée: bloc, n.m.
Domaine: Informatique/Internet.
Définition: Site sur la toile, souvent personnel, présentant en ordre chronologique de courts articles ou notes, généralement accompagnés de liens vers d’autres sites.
Note: La publication de ces notes est généralement facilitée par l’emploi d’un logiciel spécialisé qui met en forme le texte et les illustrations, construit des archives, offre des moyens de recherche et accueille les commentaires d’autres internautes.
Équivalent étranger: blog, web log, weblog.
Anna Conti has pictures of the long weekend lines to see the new de Young Museum, designed by Herzog and de Mueron. All fall I meant to make the trip out to see the Richard Tuttle survey at SFMOMA. Never got to it; now I think I'll wait and go when the de Young crowd has died down a bit. (And see Tuttle at the Whitney.)
I want to make it my goal next year to travel out to the West Coast at least once in the spring and again in the fall, and ideally twice each season so I can see both LA and SF. But I'm already dedicated to (and very excited about!) at least one trip to the Black Sea Coast. So that's a lot of Coasts, especially when you consider the one I occassionally snake my up to see New York. I'm not sure how feasible it is to plan to spend my entire salary on airfare.
So, readers: Any ace travel tips in your deck? I almost never do the comparison shopping characteristic of good travelers, so assume I don't know anything. Barring that angle, know how I can approximately double my salary?
(And no, I can't not mention that Austin nearly got a Herzog and de Mueron building. Working through the pain, but a long way from healed.)
Nearly every other day, it seems, Tommy does something to make the internets work just a little bit better. Today, it's in a way that I actually understand! Check out DCist Maps, the new and ridiculously useful Google Maps application he's written for the District—the app charts Metro paths and stations over Google Maps searches. Then pester him to build one for your town!
Becks gets back to us on her tour of the MoMA conservation studio (previously mentioned here):
Considering how you always hear about how light can damage works of art, I really expected that they would want to protect the works they were restoring from sunlight. On the contrary, the lab was designed to let in as much Northern light as possible so that the conservators could assess pigments and materials using natural light.Funny, I also expected something off a CSI set, with lots of bones piled up in the corners. Even in art conservation, bones are industry standard—any work that involves tiny little tools calls for lots of human skulls.
Anyway, as I understand the light concern, pigments that absorb light mostly convert absorbed light into heat—so, no sweat, if you will. But even the fairly energy-resistant molecules that make up the inorganic pigmentation used today in the plastic arts undergo the occassional chemical change, usually in the form of oxidation.
Now, I understand why conservators would need light for their work. But why would full-spectrum white light be less cause for concern than a more rarefied light? For the record, I've never heard of photons. Recalling even this much chemistry has brought me dangerously close to the edge of systems failure.
The rest of the conservation studio? Total bat-cave. The space is lined with lead and features special paints on the filing cabinets that do not emit gases. Unlike the rude thing near your desk.
My roommate and I were talking about the free tickets that Joss Whedon bloggers up with to see Serenity. Wouldn't all the bloggers have seen this movie anyway? And wouldn't they have then blogged about it—just as with Sin City, Batman Begins, Kill Bill, Star Wars II–III, and any other film to which the term "space opera" or a suspect libertarian reading could be applied? I doubt the studio lost much on the ticket giveaway, but I doubt they made much on it either.
But Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know—I bet a blogger outreach would have had a bigger impact for that movie. I saw the movie after Dan and Todd spoke so favorably about it. It was a ducky, charming film, and I mentioned it to three friends, all of whom enjoyed it. Maybe some other people then saw it upon Yglesias's recommendation.
A person who came to the film at that point might not be aware of July's art or necessarily see every Cannes awardwinner—that viewer, I imagine, is a total bonus, being completely outside the likely audience demographic. For a creator with a niche movie she really believes in (I mean really believes, since (to go with our example) a negative review from a Dan or a Todd might be the sort of thing to keep me a given like me at home), kicking out some tickets to some citizen journalists along with the traditional press couldn't hurt.
How's my day? I walked through the rain to the Townhouse Tavern, my favorite District hole in the wall, only to find that ABC isn't broadcasting the Texas–OU game. That's right—they're showing Virginia vs. Boston College instead of the Red River Shootout, which is only one of the most storied rivalries in college football today. And furthermore features the #2 ranked team in all college football.
So when I get home (I have the complete college gameday package, you see. I'm not playing around.) I'm treated to this snuff piece by the WaPo. No recognition of the fact that Texas is ranked number two, whereas Oklahoma is ranked not at all. No doubt the fishwrap is perfectly comfortable running an abject hagiography for Virginia Tech, who are good! but ultimately ranked below the Longhorns.
And I'm treated to this commercial every break about the glory of college football that features . . . Oklahoma, Ohio State, and USC. Texas A&M ought to feel burned for not being invited to the Longhorn hate fest.
Fine by me. We have a double-digit lead over the Sooners, and that score's only going to go higher. Today I'll be perfectly comfortable with Mack Brown running up the score—I hope, even, that there's time to put in the second string. Just so Bob Stoops knows where he stands under the new dispensation.
Hook 'em!
You may recall an item we discussed some time ago regarding the plight of Duffy's Irish Pub. Andy Duffy only ever wanted to open a classy bar, an honest working man's kind of place for people like you and me. But a local group of puritanical killjoys has so far prevented the pub from receiving a vote of support from the Cardoza-Shaw Neighborhood Association (CSNA). That show of support is crucial in order for Duffy's to get the go-ahead from the dread Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) and Alcohol Beverage Control Board (ABC).
Now is the time to stand together with your U Street neighbors and say aye! I'll have a pint at Duffy's. To make that happen, you'll need to attend the CSNA meeting next Thursday at the True Reformer Building on U Street at 7 p.m. and vote in support of the bar.
Before you stand and have your voice be counted, though, you'll need to join CSNA. You can click on this map to see whether you live within the boundaries of ANC 1B. (I'm almost positive those are the same boundaries for CSNA.)
You'll also need to pay an annual membership fee of $15. (Think of it as the cover charge for the grand opening celebration of Duffy's Irish Pub.)
If this sounds good to you, e-mail me over the weekend, and I'll get the form to you.
In the meantime, take a couple seconds to write to the following people to tell them individually that you want to see Duffy's beautiful dream become a reality:
I'm running out the door to make my way to the Options 05 reception, so I haven't checked to see what the science wonks are saying about the news, but if the news is true that a genetically engineered vaccine prevents the two HPV strains associated most highly with cervical cancer—and does that trick with 97-percent efficacy—then that's one of the great sexual health developments of our lifetime. Pretty sweet news. I'm even looking forward to the cartoon marketing campaign!
(Courtesy of Sommer.)
Don't forget that tonight NYT art critic Roberta Smith will be giving a lecture, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Art Criticism, Art Theory and the Art Market," at GWU's Lisner Auditorium as part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art. Better set Lost to record!
Jury duty today! I do believe I detect a "guilty" conviction on the early October morning air, with autumnal undertones of corporal punishment. I assume they explain out alll the buying-off details when you arrive at the courthouse—nevertheless, I'm looking forward to hanging 'em high while waxing The Firm for millions of crooked bucks. All that and a $7 lunch stipend? Quite a little country we've got on our hands.
UPDATE: I kid, I kid. Obviously I'm going to do whatever the trial lawyer lobby asks me to. Let me tell you, jury duty doesn't disappoint. Ken Burns's Jazz is playing and I've got WiFi. I only get $4, though, which means that I'm subtracting $3 worth of mercy.
I promise—no more flighty posts about Cai Guo-Qiang (after this one). But I had to point out the more substantive link between the artist's work and terrorism. Cai:
Ever since September 11th, the idea of terrorism is always on our minds. It’s ever so present. And while car explosions have been around for a long time, they have a heightened sense of reality in our minds. ‘Inopportune’ obviously has a direct reference to these conditions that we live in now. But making an installation that is so beautiful and mesmerizing that also borrows the image of the car bomb already has inappropriateness in it. . . . So maybe in this way it’s kind of unfashionable or inappropriate, or ‘inopportune.’
On view at Mass|MOCA until October 30.
Courtesy of in revolt: It turns out that Cai Guo-Qiang's Tornado did make the pages of the WaPo. Sort of. Read Phillip's comment to this post if you'd like to read about the work itself; the "Metro"-section article details the emergency calls prompted by Cai's piece, the extraordinary noise of which convinced some residents that terrorists were attacking. The bombs bursting in air, as it were.
If you check out the new coupled WaPo–Technorati tracking feature for this article, it's true—quite a few NoVA bloggers were pretty seriously wetting their beds!
Hey, no one can blame them: Cai's "explosion events" are loud. And they don't sound too much like fireworks. I haven't seen his works in person, but the artist provides a few video feeds on his site: Turn your volume up and click on the clips of the Black Rainbow: Explosion Project events in Edinburgh and Valencia.
Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Valencia, 2005.
Holy hell, it's a cool public art project in the District. Here's the juicy bits from the press e-mail:
OCTOBER 14–NOVEMBER 5, 2005Funny—Edward Underscore wrote today about the last great public art project to hit the District: Jenny Holzer's "Xenon Projection," which visited here nearly a year ago.WASHINGTON, DC—In collaboration with leading art galleries of Washington, DC, FOUND SOUND, a public art project, will present works of prominent artists in sound booths placed in public locations throughout Washington, from October 14 through November 5, 2005. The project will also present sound works at on-site locations.
The sound booths—each a reconfigured Port-a-Potty—will be outfitted with high-tech sound equipment and will feature sound art and other work from internationally known and local artists. Participating artists include Richard Chartier, Joseph Grigely, Alberto Gaitán, Jennie C. Jones, Helmut Kopetzky, Brandon Morse, Robin Rose, and Alex Van Oss. Actor/satirist Harry Shearer—of The Simpsons, Spinal Tap, and A Mighty Wind—is contributing a piece on Hurricane Katrina. The sound booths will be placed on sidewalks outside art galleries and arts institutions and be open to the public during gallery hours. Participating galleries and institutions include Fusebox Gallery, Numark Gallery, Conner Contemporary Art, Curator's Office, Adamson Gallery, Hemphill Fine Art, G Fine Art, the Goethe Institute, and DCAC. [So, basically, 14th Street near P, with stops on 7th downtown and 18th in Adams Morgan. —ed.]
"By placing the sound booths on the sidewalk, the project will make this innovative art accessible to a large number of people," says Welmoed Laanstra, the exhibit's curator. "The aim is to create a public experience focused on the developing field of sound art." The project will provide a map so visitors can go from site to site.
In an essay for the project, Nora Halpern, a vice president of Americans for the Arts, observes, " Most traditional exhibitions inhabit contiguous spaces, but FOUND SOUND entices the listener to crisscross a city to experience fully this collection of work. As one leaves a destination for another—whether by foot, car, bus, or Metro—the heightened audio awareness encouraged by each piece should continue, like a musical riff, through all the spaces in between." Writer/humorist Calvin Trillin contributed a poem to the project.
FOUND SOUND is being curated by Welmoed Laanstra, an independent curator. In recent years, she has brought engaging and well-received exhibits to Washington, including "Civic Endurance" (Jacqueline Tarry and Bradley McCallum), which featured photographs and video of homeless youths in Seattle, and "Face Time" (Harry Shearer), which presented video of television talking heads sitting in silence.
I mentioned that I saw Janet Cardiff speak at the Hirshhorn last week. She gave a great lecture, about which I'll definitely post more, but I wanted to get straight to the business that Blake Gopnik wrote about for WaPo and Tyler Green pursued here and here. When I first read that the Hirshhorn would only be allowing ID card–carrying students, invited guests, and supporters (who have donated $100 or more) to hear the artist, I was as confused as the next guy: A lecture by an internationally renowned artist surely falls under the purview of the Hirshhorn's educational mission. There's nothing wrong—at all—with providing programming and other incentives that express appreciation for support. But an informational artist talk simply doesn't belong under that classification.
After first glance I assumed that the response to the lecture was so overwhelming that the directors were forced to cap the demand to keep with the supply. Wednesday night proved that false: The lecture hall was roughly three-quarters filled—not bustling, and definitely not exploding out into the hallways, as you might expect if the seating situation were so dire that it called for an intervention. I imagine that the Hirshhorn event planners are competent people. I really doubt that they so wildly overestimated the number of attendees that they thought the fire marshall would be stopping by.
The event directors called a late audible, announcing that plebians who arrived would be given remaining seats beginning 10 minutes before the start of the lecture on a first-come, first-serve basis. (Tyler witnessed.) This policy is even more restrictive—are people who don't live close in or on a Metro line really expected to make the evening trip in the hopes that fewer contributors showed up than anticipated? Sure, we take risks on our evening plans—going to the concert without tickets, going to the restaurant sans reservation—but not often on events that we already subsidize with our tax dollars.
To be sure, the Hirshhorn deserves wild applause for its new emphasis on artist-driven programming; Cardiff's words drawn on water is an enormous feather for the District's cap, and every "Directions" show has been exciting. While I'm sure that public funding alone isn't enough to float all the Hirshhorn's projects, the museum's educational mission strikes me as more an obligation than a priority, and should be administered by a different hand than manages the general ledger.
Did anybody see Cai Guo-Qiang's performance on Saturday? Care to report (anyone)? Kills me that I wasn't home to see it, but more so that this project isn't the talk of the town.
A-HA: Thanks, Flickr! So there's pictures, anyway.
Semilocal prolific commenter Becks has started her own blog (made it public, that is)—have a look. She passes on the tip that the MoMA conservation studio is participating in Open House New York this weekend; studio architect Sam Anderson and chief conservator Jim Coddington will be providing tours on Saturday. Act now!, spaces are limited!, and all that.
MoMA conservation studio.
Quite a few more pictures from the studio here, if you can't make it out. The District really ought to think about adopting a program like OHNY. . . .
G.p-fave The Dust Congress recently commissioned an Ess Eff poet whom he features regularly to compose a piece about Jack Abramoff. I submit for your approval.
THE MEN THE MACHINEClap your hands, say yeah.Without DeLay
Jack Abramoff
pled guilty
to persuasion
to lobbying
his way into
the earshot of
politicos for
sale inside
the Beltway
on the Hill.Five
counts of wire
fraud one
county of
conspiracy
these he did
deny with-
out DeLay
by his side.
-skyboxes
-heroin
-a chain of sandwich shops
-a “gang style hit”
-a Dial-a-Mattress franchise
all were
in the mix
oh
and
hundreds of
millions of
dollars.Tom DeLay
(R - Sugar Land)
a k a
The Hammer
The Exterminator
The ReDistrictinator
Hot Tub Tom
(who asked “Is-
n’t this kind of fun?”
of Katrina’s refugees)
soon had a felony
indictment of his
own to deny.DeLay
Abramoff Abramoff
DeLay vaudeville
or a law firm
or a debt we
all will pay
the interest on
for years and
years to come?—klipschutz
I'm not sure I understand the logic behind the decision by JET Artworks to go with a curated group show ("Go Figure") for its season opener—it doesn't feel quite right to see so much secondary market stuff in September. Nevertheless I was pleased to see two older photographic-sculptural works by Alessandra Torres. She works with sculptural forms that serve as surrogates for the body but also stand as icons in their own respect—the dress in the Shadow Drawing series, for example. The iconic motif (and obviously the dress in particular) recalls sculpture by Beverly Semmes; the performative aspects of Torres's work brings to mind the tradition of postminimal sculptors like Bruce Nauman. (And the Out of Body series smacks of Neuman's deadpan sense of humor.)
Torres's work is charged with fairly grave to deadly sincere imagery. My first reaction to Torres's work was lukewarm, in part, because at times I have a low tolerance for the earnestness in which Torres trades. That her surrogate works embody not just physical forms but also emotional presence gives her work a less universal, more personal drive. But the collage presentation for one of her works in "Go Figure" provides a formal balance to the metaphorical content of the series, providing the work with different handholds for viewers who don't choose to relate to Torres's narrative. That's really neither here nor there—it's the unique signature Torres carries across diverse media that really appeals.
Alessandra Torres, Body Language II, 2003. Photographic collage.
. . . with my eye that Molly Springfield is now showing with Moti Hasson in NYC. Good for Springfield, good for NYC.
