It's up! Eye Level, a blog I'm writing for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Click-click.
UPDATE: Wow, busy day. I'm post-Turkey Day thankful for links from Tom, JL, The Governess, Roxanne, and Tyler. Sorry if I missed any others.
(I can't help it—I simply have to point out my preferred nomenclature for the punny one-liner: "the eyes of ____ are upon you.")
Thanks for all the advice and opinions you sent when I mentioned that I'd be heading down to Miami as a stringer, but I had to call the trip off. I'm dealing with a work-related crisis that I won't be able to diffuse before next week and there's just no way around it. Frustrating. I'm being reimbursed for my ticket, which is good, but over the weekend I'll be reading The Next Few Hours and feeling envious.
. . . even if it wasn't pretty. All I could think while I was watching the game was how extraordinarily comforting I found it to know that USC does not run the option. That's the play that allowed Aggie redshirt backup Stephen McGee—playing his first touch in his college career—to throw off Texas and put first-quadrant numbers against the Texas defense. The option! What Rodrique Wright was doing before he swatted the ball from McGee in the fourth quarter to force the turnover, I can't say, but he should have been closing down that option and making Mr. McGee take to the air. Because there's simply no way that a redshirt freshman can pick apart Michael Huff and the Texas secondary.
Say that we didn't show up to this game, but in fact we showed up too thoroughly—I think Texas was looking at an A&M team and seeing a W, not a hungry team with nothing left to lose, looking at lights out, led by a squeaky quarterback with nothing-but-nothing to prove. If McGee can make not one but two attempts sneaking on the corner for the TD in the third quarter, then Texas didn't fully appreciate the fact even that late in the game. The Longhorns' bad hands early on strike me as exactly what you might expect of an extremely overeager team.
It's fine, ultimately—an ugly victory still goes in the win column, and perhaps Vince Young will play with a little more hunger now that the Heisman isn't on the table but an even bigger question mark looms over the Rose Bowl. And that game is most definitely still up to question, naysayers be damned: Texas has played extraordinarily since last year's Rose Bowl triumph over Michigan and weathered a steady promenade of gloom and doom from the commentariat, from the upset over OSU through talk of the inevitability of Vick's Va Tech squad. Acknowledging that Reggie Bush is a very special player—no question—I'll say nevertheless that 1) Texas's juggernaut committee of runningbacks is an unquestionable threat, 2) Texas's secondary is stingy enough to squash any aerial threat in college football (holla, Huff), and 3) Vince Young is the most valuable quarterback in college football. That'll be more than enough to see us through the big dance.
Speaking of naysayers (sort of). The Washington Post article calls this season the greatest in college football history, highlighting USC as "the best team ever assembled"; proclaiming Reggie Bush as "the most exciting player in the modern era"—whenever that means; and noting a renaissance among historic programs Alabama, Notre Dame, and Penn State.
The last point is inarguable. But was it so recently as 2003 that Oklahoma was crowned Teh Best Squad Evar? And how did that turn out? Maybe it's less than wise to take one team as your data point (in the Post's case, USC), draw a hasty conclusion about the fate of the season, and stamp it for posterity. Texas ought to at least figure in for a mention, if this is indeed the best season of all time. That brings up the real question at hand: how does the paper get away with having Tommy the Trojan write its sports opinions?
Hope it's a good one for you. I'll be in Baltimore getting crazy on tryptophan with this guy. More stuff on the page (promise!) this weekend, and some interesting developments next week.
Any readers from or familiar with the Miami area? I need to change my flight pronto, and I'm trying to figure out if it's reasonably doable to fly into Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International airport and mad dash it to Miami. Is there any sort of shuttle running between the two, or would I need to rent a car?
While I'm ostensibly flying down for this thing, it's currently 35 degrees outside in the District, and my cold-blooded reptilian nature demands a warmer climate.
UPDATE: Mos def, if you have tips about what's to be seen at Basel, send 'em. I have a rough outline of the booths I'll be seeking out, no idea when I'll be where, and vague apprehensions about my lack of accommodations. And I plan to try out the new drink sensation called "the mojito"!
Ben Wolfson posted a reading of Larkin's "This Be The Verse," and it is recommended.
I don't know too much about 20th century British poetry, but I would venture that Larkin's poem on biology and heritability also considers traits inherited over the history of poetry, hence the thumping iambic tetrameter. (Rhythm was not avoided in his work, to be sure.)
Larkin's title brings to mind an antecedent poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem":
UNDER the wide and starry skyRelevant for the incidental or coincidental line but also for the address to his heirs.
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Nothing to jolt the blogger to post like stepping off a Metro elevator in suburban Maryland at 9 a.m. to find yourself face to face with a portly man dressed as Spider-Man. I was the only person going up, he the only one going down—so no, I can't say for sure that I wasn't simply still asleep.
. . . or under the influence of the dread Mysterio!?
Anyway—imagine the fellow below, but in costume not paint, and 2x along the horizontal axis,
That's right! pr0n! I hope all of you are reading this at 9 a.m.
and less nude. No explanation was forthcoming as we traded places, and really, at 9 a.m., I'm not sure whether it would have been courteous or abusive for him to offer one.
I'm really quite busy right now, and probably won't have an opportunity to post all the awesome content I'd planned to this week. I'm in a real spin, but my situation isn't so frantic as Drunken Bee's:
That was maybe the most crazy scene in which I've ever found myself. Bitches were grabbing and yelling, and some photographer kept flashing in my face, capturing my lovely expression, which I'm sure was a mixture of grasping greed and total fear. Some dude flexed on a mannequin and it went crashing to the ground. Near the front window, a group of ladies decided to forego trying to negotiate the racks and opted to start clawing the clothing off the mannequins. Store employees rushed over to pry their fingers from the cheap silk, the mannequins now standing disheveled, plastic nippel-less breasts exposed for all Michigan Avenue to see. The situation around the center table (upon which all the skinny-fit jeans had been piled) was not unlike Heysel stadium, where we enacted some bizarro game of Pit, all wild hand gestures and cracking "I got a Small, who's got an Extra Small? I need an Extra Small, I'll trade you? What do you have? Oh a medium? WHO HAS AN EXTRA SMALL?!?!" Most remarkably, over all the din was the booming voice of a friendly employee pleading "Ladies? Ladies? WHOSE CHILDREN ARE THESE?" in reference to a double-stroller that had been ditched in a corner, containing two little motherless and sobbing toddlers.That's funny to me, not just because it's hilarious, but because I just read Valerie talking about the same clothing line. And obviously quite a few more than these two contributed to the Summerslam scene at H&M. Valerie even wrote, "i've decided against partaking in the h&m/stella mccartney opening day madness," knowing full well what was going to happen.
I've been shopping probably, oh, three times since I started college in nineteen ninety-harumph-hrumm, so I know I'm not the person to ask. But how do hardcore shoppers even come by this information? Does H&M have an RSS feed?
UPDATE: Three's a trend, of course, and I shoul have waited until I'd heard Fey Accompli's "Stella!" before I ran with it. You ladies, you're something else.
Tonight American University is hosting a festival of short films by Bruce Conner, the artist/director who made A Movie, Vivian, Mongoloid, America Is Waiting, and Valse Triste. Experimental film, Ess Eff style. The Walker Art Center put together an impressive-sounding film festival of Conner's full-length works a few years ago—take a look at the WAC|BC site to read more about Conner's work.
The AU film festival is being held in conjunction with "After Bruce Conner: Anonymous, Anonymouse, and Emily Feather," a show of Conner's inkblot drawings and those made by the panel of anonymous artists who have taken up the Conner's work since the artist retired in 1999. The hoops they make graduate students jump through these days. . . .
In the ongoing case of People v. Blake Gopnik, sure, I've historically sided with the critic. Not merely because I also think Art-O-Matic is a worthless fair, but because the arguments cited by his prosecutors are really just about shutting him up. There's clearly a big crowd in town in favor of going forward with Art-O-Matic—but it's far from criminal if others think it's simply not worth the time (or tax dollars). There's room in this town for a contrary opinion, even one that runs counter to the notion that nine hundred artists crammed willy-nilly into a cavern makes for a good art exhibition.
Nevertheless—one line from Gopnik's latest is pretty poor:
There are also unknowns: Kathryn Cornelius, a barely emerging local artist, presents a series of stills from a video in which she's shown vacuuming a beach—a housewife become Sisyphus.If there's a substantive point undergirding that comment, it's not one that can be made in the context of a 150-word review. Barely emerging? "Barely emering" hints at (and demands) more editorial comment than Gopnik is willing to give. I say this as an admirer of Cornelius's work but also as a proponent of criticism: make the case, if you're willing to put it out there.
I have a brief article in DC Style about last weekend's Transformer Gallery benefit art auction. Click click.
More Americans will tell you that they have personally seen a ghost (22%) than will tell you that they approve of Vice President Dick Cheney (19%). Take from this information what you will.
"And I would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn Senators!"
WAMU's "Metro Connection" is about to run an item on "Found Sound," which closes tomorrow. If you attend the Dupont openings tonight and 14th Street openings tomorrow, you're sure to run into a few of the cans. All the listings can be found here.
Finally saw Options 2005 for a second time, and I'll post my review on Monday. (Reviews should never go with the Friday dump.) But I wanted to note one gaffe in curator Libby Lumpkin's essay/catalog that caught my attention:
[George] Tkabladze, who began his rigorously classical studies in art at age nine, and who left the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to settle in the Washington, D.C. area in 2003, is not your typical thirty-something M.F.A., 3-D artist. [emphasis added]Even before the Rose Revolution in November 2003, Georgia was not a Soviet Socialist Republic, of course. Georgia SSR was renamed the Republica of Georgia when it staged its first democratic, parliamentary elections in 1990; the country formally broke from the USSR, oh, around when the USSR dissolved in 1991. In 1995, the Republic of Georgia dropped the formalities and became Georgia. Of course, Georgians call their nation Sakartvelo, so it's a little hard to know for sure.
If we could simply recognize the place as Sakartvelo, I wouldn't have to do a kabuki dance to explain where Susan's studying: not-Hotlanta Georgia; Georgia the Republic of; post-Soviet Georgia; Georgia by the Black Sea. (As if any of us could find the Black Sea on a map.)
An update for Susan-watchers: She's somewhere in Azerbaijan monitoring elections, her last known coordinates placing her in the capital, Baku. Azerbaijan is an immensely wealthy oil country sandwiched between Russia and Iran, a melting pot or proving ground for the unique cultural attributes of both. The nation's oil-rich designation grants it a certain degree of lenity from the U.S. government, despite the highly repressive regime currently holed up in Baku. The Azeri campaign season has seen its share of fingers broken by police during interrogations, shakedowns of demonstrators, government harassment of opponents and their sympathizers, arrests of opposition leaders and parliamentary candidates, and even one assassination—of a leading investigative journalist. (For sure, I don't love that Sue's there, but no one's tougher or smarter.) Freedom might have a better chance of reigning and marching and what-not if the world's leading democracy exporters—e.g., the United States, known for its Rose-sympathetic boutonnieres and purple finger–stained congressmen—would say a kind word for the teeming Azeri opposition; but, mmm . . . oil.
In other news, I'm sorry to report that Susan may have lost her wonderful camera. Nicked or neglected, she doesn't know, but it's not in her possession. I suspect she'll have another one soon, but it was a rough way to start what may not be the best vacation evar.
J.K. Rowling refused to allow Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway—the musicians who play the Weird Sisters in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—to release an album qua the Weird Sisters. I don't know that J.K. Rowling actually had anything to do with the decision, but the small batallion of agents meant by the designation "J.K. Rowling" wouldn't move the paperwork, saying that a product not authorized and distributed by Rowling would "confuse children." I think I get this. Clarity means buying the movie soundtrack!
But you don't care, because you prefer Harry and the Potters anyway, right?
Voldemort can't stop the rock.
And I don't care if I'm three weeks too late on this band.
Raphael, Pope Leo X With Two Cardinals, 1518. Oil on wood.
(times)
From left: Ursa, General Zod, Non
(equals)
From left: Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Harry Reid (D-NV), Dick Durbin (D-IL). [Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is not pictured.]
(Doff of the mitre to Pandagon for the image.)
Nothing surpising about grassroots bigotry in Texas, I'm sorry to say—not even this particularly egregious Prop 2 flyer that Pam Spaulding found and posted.
Typical homophobic invective (and typically poorly formatted—what's the deal with bigots and unruly formatting palettes?) about which nothing need be said that a slow, sorry shake of the head doesn't capture. But one detail will not stand:
I went to the recent Texas/Texas Tech game. 80,000 people were in the stands. Heterosexuals, with God's blessing, made every single person there!!The author's astounding logic notwithstanding, she or he is barking up the wrong tree in Austin. If there's any place more tolerant in Texas than an Austinite-packed Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium on game day, I haven't been there. Austinites are surely lining up in droves to vote against Prop 2. Take this schtick to, I don't know, Lubbock*—Austinites know that Virginia Tech is the only true threat to our families today.
* I'm not saying that Matt Weiner necessarily wrote and distributed this flyer
Much too busy to comment on anything, but Will Baude's post on Sam Alito is an intriguing look at the post-Roe landscape:
Anti-abortion states will have several possible legal tools. First, they could criminalize travelling across state lines with the purpose of aborting one's fetus. Second, they could exercise state long-arm jurisdiction to make it a crime under, say, Kansas law to abort a fetus conceived in Kansas, or belonging to a Kansas citizen, etc., no matter what state one is in.But in a civil state with anything short of digital passports, it's difficult to imagine how even the most crimson red states could enforce a ban on abortion demand. Minutemen on every state border?Both of these tactics face some constitutional challenges, but not necessarily insurmountable ones. State long-arm jurisdiction is restricted by the due process clause, and there appears to be some sort of federal constitutional right to travel, but nobody is quite sure what it means. Federal law makes it a crime to transport certain people across state lines for immoral purposes, and a state would be forbidden from enacting similar legislation only if it violates commerce-clause or related principles (since the right to travel presumably extends against the federal government just as much as the state).
Won't the more likely endgame involve abortion supply? Criminalizing, for once and for all, this dangerous, divisive, back-alley procedure being practiced by rogue doctors [so they will say]? Though I'm not sure what avenues overturning Roe will open legally in this regard that aren't being pursued now—I assume that some state laws will go back into effect and change the whole atmosphere surrounding women's health and privacy.
Not a pleasant to think about, our new Court.
