Georgia's English language daily scores a major exclusive with the GF. Read it, it's great! Featuring words like "Akhalkalaki" (a place!) and also a clear, cogent overview of ethnic integration issues in GE. If you know her, it will make you proud.
Not innocent after all, says Upton Sinclair (by way of the LAT):
The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.America's first muckraker: still at it! But he held his tongue in Boston, citing among other worries a concern about the precedent the S&V case would set and the many legitimately unfair aspects of the trial—but also fear of retribution from his readership:Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.
Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. ". . . He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.Can't help but think of the Hitch, who revels in thorny ethical grey areas like a pig in mud, to the point at which his love for the counterintuitive stake clouds his judgment. But he really has risked his readership, and while I think history will judge him harshly for going down with the U.S.S. Ahmed Chalabi, it's better to be wrong than to be low."My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.
"Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."
He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.
Either here or in Texas between now and January 9. Posting will be absolutely out of control! Go on, get out of here, go place with your little cousins or something.
Just days ago, the United States Postal Service was listing the same physical address for God and Santa. Roommates? Perhaps a single supernatural construct, who happens to take on seasonal employment? I know the distinction was lost on me when I was little—I used to pray to Jesus before praying to Santa, and only later realized that the theologically sound approach is to pray to Jesus to intercede on your behalf with Santa.
Putting aside the larger metaphysical mystery, as of this writing the Postal Service only lists an address for Santa—no Big Guy.
Fortunately, this bear's LiveJournal archives the original USPS page ("How do I address a letter to Santa Claus or God?"). The FAQ entry explains the protocol for sending letters to Santa. (Use either "Local City, State, ZIP Code" or "North Pole, AK"—which is so stupid, the North Pole isn't in Alaska and all children know that—plus a return address.) Formerly the page added that "[l]etters to God can be addressed in the same way replacing 'Santa Claus' with 'God.'" Just pick your reason for the season and don't forget the stamp, right?
So why is the Postal Service whitewashing the baby Jesus's address from frequently asked questions about holiday mail service, one of His most important outreach programs? Consider also the feds' disinformation campaign against Santa:
Santa enjoys candy canes and cookies, and his reindeer enjoy fresh hay.Bull. Only if you intend to give Santa's reindeer stomachaches are you going to leave them fresh hey. New Hampshire Public Radio speaks truth to power:
Reindeer Lichen, sometimes incorrectly called Reindeer Moss, grow abundantly throughout the reindeer's natural habitat—the arctic tundra and northern woodlands. You can even find them locally in open mountain forests and along roadsides. There are several common species, but all look like mounded gray or greenish miniature shrubs and can grow in dense, extensive mat-forming colonies.That's news you can use. Also notable: New Hampshire is one weird fucking place:Reindeer lichens are highly adapted to their harsh arctic environment and are a major winter food source for reindeer. The reindeer use their hooves to paw through the snow and ice to reach the lichen, and may even fight over particularly good patches. Lichens provide important carbohydrate energy, particularly when little else is available. These complex carbohydrates are broken down by special enzymes produced in the stomach of reindeer or caribou but in few other animals.
Humans can't digest reindeer lichen very well, and eating uncooked lichen can even make us sick. However, partially digested lichen from the stomachs of freshly killed reindeer can be eaten, and it is even considered a delicacy in some arctic cultures [do NPR personalities have to live in northern climes to be considered "arctic"? —ed.]. In this form it has much greater nutritional value. It is said to taste pretty good—something like fresh green salad. But don't worry—we're pretty sure that Santa prefers gingerbread cookies.No worries, little children, Santa's not so big on greens, so it's unlikely that he'll butterfly Rudolph before Christmas Day. Unlikely.
As you see, I'm on this. You just try to have a merry Christmas. I'm going to find out how far down this rabbit hole goes.
I was nothing. It didn't matter to me.
Ah, there were tags all over my sleeve.
There was water outside the windows
and children in the streets [ ] rats with tags.
Ain't got a passport.
Ain't got my real name.
Ain't got a chance, sport, at fortune and fame.
And I walk these endless streets, won't you give me a lift.
A lift. A lift. On your citizen ship.
They were rioting in Chicago, movement in L.A.
Sixty-eight it broke up the yardbirds.
We were broke as well.
Took it underground, M.C. borderline, up against the wall.
The wall. The wall.
Show your papers, boy.
Citizen ship we got mem'ries.
Stateless, they got shame.
Cast adrift from the citizen ship,
lifeline denied, exiled this castaway.
Blind alley in New York City, in a foreign embrace.
If you're hungry you're not too particular about what you'll taste.
Men in uniform gave me vinegar, spoon of misery.
But what the hell, I fell, I fell.
It doesn't matter to me.
Citizen ship we got mem'ries
Citizen ship, we got pain.
Cast adrift from the citizen ship,
lifeline denied, exiled this castaway.
I was caught like a moth with its wings outta sync.
Cut the chord. Overboard. Just a refugee.
Lady liberty, lend a hand to me, I've been cast adrift.
Adrift. Adrift. Adrift. Adrift. Adrift. Adrift.
On the citizen ship we got mem'ries
Citizen ship, we got pain.
Lose your grip on the citizen ship,
you're cast, you're cast away.
On the citizen ship you got mem'ry.
Citizen ship you got pain.
Citizen ship you got identity.
A name. A name. A name. . .
What's your name, son?
What's your name? . . .
What's your name?
[ ]
Nothing. I got nothing.
[ ] Jersey.
Give me your tired, your poor
Give me your huddled masses
your wartorn [ ]
Give me your wartorn and your [ ]
Lift up your [ ] unto me.
Ah, mythology.
—Patti Smith, 1979
Labeled as "credible threats" of terrorism by the Pentagon: gay student groups who have demonstrated against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In order to stop al Qaeda, the government spied on and infiltrated a protest (classified as "potentially violent") held by NYU Law's gay advocacy group and also a kiss-in held at the University of California-Santa Cruz. But don't ask the brass about what went down, cuz they're not tellin'!
That's nearly hilarious. Also, I'm weeping. Courtesy of Blah, Blah, Black Sheep in comments.
From the NYT:
One internal F.B.I. message, sent in October 2003, criticized the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Justice Department, which reviews and approves terrorist warrants, as regularly blocking requests from the F.B.I. to use a section of the antiterrorism law that gave the bureau broader authority to demand records from institutions like banks, Internet providers and libraries.Radical militant librarians!!! In our communities, OMG!!! Well, frankly, if the FBI can't take them, I'm not sure OIPR is going to have any better luck. Sounds like the RML have already won. († Joy Garnett)"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools given to us," read the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. "This should be an OIPR priority!!!" [emphasis added]
And from yesterday's WaPo:
FBI counterterrorism investigators are monitoring domestic U.S. advocacy groups engaged in antiwar, environmental, civil rights and other causes, the American Civil Liberties Union charged yesterday as it released new FBI records that it said detail the extent of the activity.The FBI now knows the precise location of every patchouli vendor on campus—and hardly coincidentally, there have been zero terrorist attacks since 9/11. The consequences for the nation's civil rights and grilled-cheese sandwich consumption may be grave indeed, but Americans must make sacrifices for the global war on terror—especially dirty lefties and "readers."[. . .]
The papers offer no proof of PETA's involvement in illegal activity. But more than 100 pages of heavily censored FBI files show the agency used secret informants and tracked the group's events for years, including an animal rights conference in Washington in July 2000, a community meeting at an Indiana college in spring 2003 and a planned August 2004 protest of a celebrity fur endorser.
[. . .]
John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, told a Senate panel in May that environmental and animal rights militants posed the biggest terrorist threats in the United States, citing more than 150 pending investigations.
I've read in a couple places today that the big story behind the Bush administration's authorization of the use of NSA wiretaps to monitor the international communications of American citizens is that the New York Times has been sitting on the story for a year. That begs for an explanation . . . but the big story behind the secret authorization really is that the Bush administration has put aside the rule of law.
Also not the big story but really quite significant is the fact that, given a year to put together so much as a press release, the Bush administration did not have a pat answer ready in the wake of this story. Now, Bush's answer ("There is a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring") comes close to a reading of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that says that Bush didn't order subordinates to break the law. (Close, if you grant President Bush a command over the English language language that he notably lacks. The distinction between "detecting to prevent" and "monitoring" amounts to different flavors of administration Kool-Aid. But in form, at least, the President is saying that the law concerns a but he's doing b.)
Jacob Sollum links to an NRO piece that provides exactly the sort of explanation I would have expected: that FISA grants an exception to the prohibition against eavesdropping on Americans' phone calls if some bad shit is going down. Also senseless—is the NSA going to put out a wiretap when bad shit is obviously not going down?—but still an argument that the war on terror falls in line with other longtime American favorites like the separation of powers and U.S. Constitution.
[UPDATE: "[I]s the NSA going to put out a wiretap when bad shit is obviously not going down?" I asked; the FBI answers.]
But that's simply not what other Bush administration officials are saying, Kevin Drum outlines. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's answer really does amount to: We wanted to change the law to keep this domestic espionage program in the mix, but we got the impression that the assembled representatives of the United States' citizenry wouldn't go for it . . . so we usurped that power from the legislative and judicial branches.
Like so many things about the war on terror, it's not unreasonable for the government to want to listen in on conversations between citizens at home and potential agents abroad, and the laws should reflect those new powers enough American citizens are willing to grant them. But when the Bush administration forthrightly admits that they're not doing the following-the-laws song and dance any longer, but then lacks the courtesy to lie outrageously about their secret espionage programs, I wind up feeling like I must be wearing a stovepipe hat's worth of tinfoil. And worse still—sympathizing with proponents of small government!
But it's nice to have that Harriet Miers mystery sewn up, anyway. That call makes perfect sense now.
So some friends back in Austin are meeting some fair success with their band—preposterous, given the number of people on this Earth with friends back in Austin trying to meet success with their bands. But these guys are good! I'm pretty sure that over the years I've heard every incarnation of this/their group, and it only gets better. I'm still nodding my head. Visitors (songs here). "Back on Track" and "Need a Little" are both very listenable.
Sure, I'll gush about the blogger party that Yglesias and I hosted the other night. Who's too proud? Not me: What with the great Unfogged meatup and the local blogger revue at Tomcat and Charles's, my social life can be pretty quickly summarized through hyperlinks. With regard to this party, in my dual role as host and total fly on the wall, I'm more than happy—obligated, even!—to dish.
On Saturday we feted Kevin Drum, who was in town for the sole purpose of going to parties. 'S a tough life there, K-Drum. So we invited a few people from the East Coast Internets whom he wanted to meet, meaning that we got to meet some of them for the first time, too.
Which also meant that we were obligated to throw an adult party. Now, in the past MY and I have always relied on the fruit of the smoker and the Champagne of Beers for our entertaining puropses, and that always went over well enough. This time around we braved the notorious traffic of north Virginia for two-buck chuck and appetizers from Trader Joe's. Worse still, the Zipcar we rented was a Prius, meaning that—do I have to say it?—we drove a hybrid to buy cheese and wine for a blogger soirée. No no, don't kick my ass—I'll do it myself, thanks. Anyway, despite the fact that our household is manned by persons whose maturity levels effectively taper off somewhere at the post-toddler level, I don't think our spread was half bad. Especially given Sommer's tasty spinach-artichoke dip, mm.
Kevin Drum showed up in a USC sweatshirt, and after I threw him out, the party kicked off in earnest. I have to say, if Topps ever made a trading cards series based on the blogosphere, the people in attendance that evening would make up the limited-edition foil-stamped holograms. Without further ado, my (breathless) party notes:
I've been picking through Ben Wolfson's old college radio playlists for new music. Those featured Scott Walker, Captain Beefheart, and Camera Obscura in heavy rotation and tons of stuff I've never heard before.
Playlists are meant to be listened to the whole way though, right? Now that Wolfson's kindly returned to school, you may, from 9:00 to midnight EST tonight—click. Playlist will be loaded here. Probably not the soundtrack for TomCat's xmas party, unf.
Typepad's down today, which prevents me from posting to Eye Level, so I thought I'd throw a mention up here that EL is Yahoo!'s Pick of the Day. It's a generous writeup and will probably be making an appearance back in Texas on Mama Capps's refrigerator within the day.
Meanwhile, dusting the cobwebs off the G.p entry screen got me reminiscing about the good ol' days, like last week, when I wrote stuff here. Those were feel-good times. This week it's all about end-of-the-year project madness and holiday party stop and chats and, ought'n I be boojy and start my xmas shopping at some point? But I'm going to break my taboo on weekend blogging to get some stuff on the page—I miss this joint.
Today I had the great good pleasure of gathering with the local Unfogged affiliates for a special site visit from Ogged himself. Townhouse Tavern was filled with cheer as Yglesias, Tom, Ezra, and I met up with Apostropher, Matt F, (hyperlinkless) Michael, and Ogged. Scholars and gentlemen. (A special nod to Apostropher, not only for having the best blog name of anyone, anywhere, but for driving all the way up from Durham for breakfast tacos and beers.)
Internet meetups are supposed to be so awkward until you realize that these guys you're meeting aren't like all the online creeps you hear about, and instead resemble the blog personas you read and cherish. As it turns out, people just do resemble how they write, so friendships made online translate to real life pretty well. The genre of encounters has an undeserved bad name. Meanwhile, in the meatosphere everywhere you go you're always running into strange people who aren't like you and probably don't share your values and may not even have URLs. Meeting strangers, in the human flesh, without a digital trial period? By how—talking at them, for no good reason? No thanks, Morpheus, I'll take the blue pill.
Ogged has a deeper voice than I would have guessed. (If all this is Greek to you . . . read Unfogged daily for 9 months or so.)
I've been reading Boundless, this webzine by Focus on the Family, and it's pretty fantastic. The editorial formula: Take a rote, sexist stereotype, dress it up with the personal voice and namedrop brand things and places (to connect to "you" and "your life") and punch it.
Now, I'm not such a humorless literalist that I don't think the differences between the sexes aren't ample ground for humor. Women's complete inability to grapple with even simple arithmetic, for example: hilarious! But when an organization publishes—with a straight face, apparently—a guide called, "Husbands and Wives: How a Husband Should Handle His Wife's Submission," well, that organization will be sleeping on the couch tonight. There's no good humor to back up this jokey column about how men are too goofy, too labrador retriever-y to shop for groceries and succeed and so women should do the shopping. Under any circumstances I'd avoid ending a piece like that with the line "women should do the shopping," but it's especially suspect coming from the folks who believe that "women should do the everything men tell them to."
The tired lines follow the predictable ones (the Hunter-Gatherer emerges!), but along comes this:
John is a kid in a candy store when he steps through Safeway's automatic doors. He pounces on the very items most female shoppers avoid: dried fish, mint chutney, coconut ginger rice and banana-strawberry kefir.Really? That's what guys eat when their women aren't nagging them? Coming from a place where people really buy into this stuff, Focus on the Family has always struck me as being awfully similar to Focusing on a Bag of Pork Rinds, at least as far as culinary ambitions go. Chutney, coconut ginger, kefir? That's not Family Focused—John's shopping at Whole Foods!
Listless men return from shopping trips energized by their ingenuity. Noodles are replaced by artichoke hearts, milk exchanged for broccolini, the sought-after turkey traded for a single hairy coconut.Grocery shopping on the DL.
Fantastic. Though they missed one of my favorite b-sides: "Hat-tip: So and so."
Improbably. . . impossibly!—G.p is the number-one Google return for "anti Texas Longhorn". I really don't want to talk about it.
And you! You bastards looking for Trojan agitprop! FUSC!
Scientists say that one of the major obstacles to a manned mission to Mars is psychological: Astronauts—trapped like sardines in a tin for a voyage of 9 months or more—would be stressed to their breaking points by the confinement and tight proximity to one another. A degree of stress that could potentially lead to madness.
Nathan Manuel and D. Billy's collaboration for DCAC, "Point of Departure," might serve as a glimpse of that sidelong descent into curiosity and depravity. Local artist Trish Tillman assembled the men for the mission: Billy and Manuel, young local artists with somewhat similar styles. Neither had met the other previously, but for more than 9 months the artists collaborated on mixed media drawings, collages, and paintings.
D. Billy and Nathan Manuel, Title Bout, 2005. Mixed media.
The works are the product of rules, games, and other externalities. For a half-dozen pieces, the artists lifted inspiration from an ancient board game: One player selects from a stack of prompt cards ("Without looking, what necktie are you wearing? If lady, describe your ring.") while the other drew puzzle cards ("What goes up a chimney down, but can’t go down a chimney up?Answer: Umbrella"). That's the combination Manuel and Billy drew for Title Bout.
The 50s/60s vibe is reinforced by the artists' signature pulp motifs, including Billy's reliance on comic-book onomoatopoeia (BLORRRR) and Manuel's repeated text balloons. The Ballot Box Bippo is a "happening" of a piece: for a month the artists collected ballots asking DCAC visitors what they'd most like to see, and the artists complied with a 36" x 180" mixed-media panel. (I have my concerns about DCAC visitors.)
D. Billy and Nathan Manuel, Special Cut, 2005. Mixed media.
The show has hiccups. Like a Beck album: loose, cut-and-paste play with genre and subject makes for a lot of fun but leads to some incoherent compositions.The small works show a lot of compositional give-and-take; a few of them (Giants From the Unknown) show no seams from being composed by two artists. And it's the brightest show in a month where dour, wintry painting dominates.
Here's a fan who, uh, gets it. Ahem. (NSFW)
Whoa. Check out Leafblower's pictures—Annie is fine. Mm-mmm. Sorry I missed her.
James Panero of New Criterion skewers the Whitney for the political art content in its upcoming biennial. A few things.
First, OK, he's right. Politically oriented art—the political art I've seen over the last few years, almost without exception—has been snide, sneering, didactic, transparent, self congratulatory, self satisfied, at times bathetic, more often punny, almost always formulaic. Political art has never really shaken the design roots of its cast and bears, if not a similar appearance to propaganda, at least the same byte-sized message format. Consider.*
But consider also how Panero is right. The substance of his complaint isn't with the impoverishment of political art but, naturally, with the politics itself. His complaint that the left does not make creative work like the right does—referring specifically to a 1986 Dartmouth University incident, sometimes called the "Shanty Wars," in which writers of the conservative Dartmouth Review vandalized a student "shanty" demonstration for divestment in South African companies. Panero doesn't contend that, say, sculptors or postmodernists are not as adept as the "guerilla theatre" artists (his term for the apartheiders, or anti-anti-apartheiders) at making insightful work, but that the left-slash-artworld, as if sitting en banc, is ruling against conservative artists.
So Panero calls out the art world's signature smugness but hoists himself by his own petard, I think, by playing the martyr. The whininess of the right about the representation of liberal values in the culture misses the point of why political art is bad.
(And is simply tough to stomach. Take for example the working title of New Critters Panero and Stefan Beck's upcoming publication: The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper. Groan. Only a title in jest—um, I think—but the whine seems heartfelt. (But in all honesty, congrats to the two of them on the project.))
So why does political art fall short of the times? Edward Winkleman says it's because artists don't consider opposing viewpoints—in effect, that they lack a nuanced view of the political reality. Sure, I bet that's true for the most egregious examples—the awful flag straightjacket Winkleman posts certianly confirms his point—but there are plenty-thoughtful artists for whom this explanation shouldn't apply.
The trouble is the times. Take the right's lysenkoism vis-à-vis evolution: a "debate" grips the nation despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of scientists operate on one side of it and one tiny flat-earth society makes up nearly the whole oppostion. Yet, somehow, it's the totality of factual support for evolution works against evolution. (Why, I don't know, but it has something to do with what building have you been in that didn't have a designer? Etc.)
Maybe you want to call it "postmodern corruption", or as Chris Cagle puts it, a "politics of second order" ("'the people' instead of the people, 'history' instead of history, 'protest' instead of protest"), but whatever it is that has recently thwarted social liberalism has also stymyied political art. There's an exasperation that comes from facts with no authority. The political art that I see doesn't seem to encapsulate the new political reality, but is instead about how right the art is. Democrats will tell you: That mentality's a handy way to lose elections.
If anything, the substance of political art has sharply declined. I was really feeling Panero while reading about Hans Haacke's exhibit at Paula Cooper. When I was in college and first discovered Haacke's information art, especially his push-polling exercises, something clicked for me. But a one-person gallery show is a retreat from the interventional role he staked out for the artist. High-fives and clinked wine glasses, in these sorry times?
* Hans Haacke, Star Gazing, 2004
UPDATE: Samantha Wolov responds.
If I were in New York today, I'd definitely see Maud Newton, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Terry Teachout speak at this panel. But why don't they broadcast it online so I can see it? It's about online criticism, after all; I'm sure the Internet is involved with that in some way.
The first Texas game I ever watched, I watched in relative luxury: By happenstance I'd come into two skybox tickets (courtesy of the dean of the liberal arts college) for the season opener my freshman year. College football is great, if comparatively sloppy! I thought, and then a hostess brought me a complimentary Shiner. Revelation. It was like a burnt-orange blood transfusion.
That's not a process that's complete until you've met and thoroughly reviled the Aggies at the rivalry game, and, in those days at least, daytripped to Dallas to watch the Sooners beat up on the 'Horns. Exciting, exciting games, but I don't think I've ever been so excited about a sports game as I am about the Rose Bowl. Texas is going to the big dance and we are not playing around.
So if anyone wants to buy me a ticket, I'm totally buying drinks. But in the event that no one wants to pony up $1,500 to entertain me, I'll be buying drinks here. Where are we going, people?
NOTE: This is the text of an article I wrote for a publication. It got bumped—unfortunately, these things happen. Sometimes freelance contracts specify kill fees and grace periods and nondisclosure yadda yadda, etc., so I wasn't able to put it up on the blog until now. The shows reviewed here ran through October, so this is by definition old news. Nevertheless, I submit for your approval.
It’s not a Sunday brunch in the District until representatives from all three branches of the federal government make an appearance at the table—at least, in conversation. Maybe it’s everyday overindulgence in politics that explains why the District has so rarely seen politically oriented art over the last few years. As if a number of people came to the realization at once, several galleries buck the trend with season openers that bring the political to the fore. Improbably, these shows feature heavy political themes without any mention of Washington.
G Fine Arts
“Blasts,” a group show at G Fine Arts curated by New York-based curator Paul Brewer, explores the explosion as both a notion and phenomenon. Working in a wide variety of media, the show’s artists work under an expansive understanding of the term. Louis Cameron takes a topical route with Warfare Riddim, a video loop featuring an animated digitized Atari graphic (lifted from a DJ Spooky album cover). Cameron’s pixilated burst reduces violence to a sample, a kilobyte-sized, media-ready message. Christoph Draeger’s The Last News picks up the media sensationalism angle with a video installation featuring artist Guy Richards Smith, who delivers satirical newscasts against a video loop showing the successive destruction of the world’s capitals.
Maggie Michael lends a new work, Explosion #8, which demonstrates a formal approach to the theme. The 21-foot-long mixed media drawing incorporates more motion than the biomorphic, dripped acrylic paintings that have characterized her previous efforts. The human body can still be detected in the piece, but splattered ghastly throughout in the form of curvy, evocative marks that hint at human devastation.
Also working from a formal direction, Rosemarie Fiore’s Firework Drawing takes the explosion meme quite literally. The New York artist detonates fireworks in tubes in order to blaze the trace imprint onto paper. The collages she makes from these annular imprints marry the violent imagery and automatic process that characterize much of her work. Like a bomb, Firework Drawing is an act of calculated chaos.
But in a show that for the most part makes the explosion seem like an altogether polite affair, it’s Joy Garnett’s contribution, Jog, that hits hardest. Garnett’s painting is modeled after a photograph taken during the first Gulf War; brilliant Kuwaiti oil fires roar in the distance as a jogger, gas mask equipped, runs in the dusk. Plumes of flame are mirrored in the oily road surface. The fact that the man pictured is jogging, not fleeing, serves as a perfect reminder that these devastating events change people in such unpredictable ways.
Transformer Gallery
Around the corner at Transformer Gallery, Jason Zimmerman’s first solo exhibition is made of smarmier stuff. The show features Fair Game, a video projection of segments clipped from more than 100 episodes of the Fox proto-reality series, COPS. Zimmerman shows only the foot chases, without providing any context. The jostle of stocky backsides as one Joe Friday after another bounds into the dark leaves the viewer gasping in laughter—a bit like the television cops after brief spurts of exercise.
In the blur of motion, one clip is only distinguishable from the next by the dozens of ubiquitous station identification logos that cycle at the bottom of the screen. What’s missing from nearly all these clips is the perp—Zimmerman never shows the tackle to the ground. These images, literally controlled and narrated by the police, do not provide for any defense testimony. Officers jump fences and burn around corners in mostly poor neighborhoods; footage of the pursued, predictably, constitutes fleeting glances at mostly minority individuals.
Appropriate, given the debate about race, poverty, and privilege that broke wide open in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Zimmerman thin-slices a pop TV show and discovers a microcosm of the media phenomenon in New Orleans that saw greater immediate emphasis placed on looters than on refugees.
Numark Gallery
It’s old hat to acknowledge that political, corporate, and media messages permeate our world like ether. The ways in which we internalize that omnipresence is the focus in “Empire of Sighs,” a group show at Numark Gallery curated by local independent curator Andrea Pollan. The works in the show explore the political in the personal. Kyung Jeon’s gouache, graphite, watercolor, and ink drawings on rice paper show what the Eden story might have been like if someone like Marcel Dzama had written the Bible. Jeon works in lots of impulses that skirt the line between fetish and traditional, but the drawings just aren’t very fresh. In Chamber, an adolescent Asian girl, as much object as protagonist, is locked inside nominal spaces that both constrain and sexualize her—a pretty typical cover of the “not quite a girl, not yet a woman” refrain.
Laura Carton digitally detracts from her images—specifically, she removes porn stars from porn site screenshots. The set that remains in www.sweetcameltoe. com is a skanky, suburban vista; the backdrop of www.dirtydomains. com could be the dining room of upper middle-class homes everywhere. (A reminder that Big Porn, for all it is demonized, is a juggernaut that eclipses any other entertainment industry.)
A reductive sculpture made with magnets, string, and primary colors by Julianne Swartz seems far off topic in context, but a series of snowglobes by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz and a sculpture by Roxy Paine reinforce the fetish theme. The snowglobes introduce the viewer as voyeur to dioramas of desperation; Paine’s realistic, oversized hallucinogenic ‘shroom under glass puts fantasy tantalizingly out of reach. And a show highlight comes in the form of Michele Kong’s ethereal installation, a transformation of industrial products into an old world, silk-like object—globalization in reverse, perhaps.
Curator’s Office
Pollan is also showing Jiha Moon at Curator’s Office (Pollan’s own gallery). Moon is getting good airtime after recently snagging the $10,000 Trawick Prize for young artists in the area. The artist brings formal training from the United States and her native South Korea to bear in her all-over ink and acrylic drawings.
Like Julie Mehretu—to whom Moon bears a passing resemblance in both biography and style, and whose name inevitably appears alongside “globalization”—Moon’s marking system involves variations on a number of signature motifs: overarching atmospheres, weather patterns, and ribbons of energy play host to eukaryotic forms (Blubber Blobber) and small iconic stamps (Forecast). Moon’s organic ecosystems allude to the world of flora, fauna, and phenomena; her drawings—most clearly in J-Walk—combine diverse global strategies for representing nature.
Fusebox
Moon’s drawings are big gestures on small canvases; the big gesture in a big space is Kendall Buster’s installation at Fusebox. Model City is Buster’s second solo show at the gallery (her first was in 2002).
On first glance, Buster’s installation is a grand iridescent swoosh of blue nylon cutting across the gallery in an arc. The fabric forms an undulating plane that intersects the white cube, slicing from just above the door to a point waist high, before rising again to roughly eye level. After walking, kneeling, and finally crawling under this draped ceiling to the far end of the room—the work almost but doesn’t reach the end of the gallery—viewers realize that the swatch of nylon, in fact, comprises the joined bottom edges of 52 pup tents.
Model City makes tactile Buster’s training as a scientist. While under the installation, the viewer feels that she is enclosed by a breathing membrane; from the perspective at the far end of the space, the viewer looks out over the other side of this skin and sees that it is pockmarked by simple architectural structures that, in context, resemble hard, chitinous, protective scales. Attending the crowded opening was like walking into a cross-sectional model of an organism, with viewers (crawling around the floor, stooping while mingling, “camping out” in corners) playing the part of a culture under the microscope.
The tents come from Ikea’s basic outdoor line—the gold standard in uniform, global design and consumption—putting Buster’s commentary in mind with a conversation that seems to be pressing Washingtonians at the moment.
I'm just returning from a meeting with the Board of Directors for G.p (NYSE: GPDN), and company trends both distressing and positive from the third quarter were the subject for review. From the debits column: It's been so slow lately in part because other projects have required a lot of time. But for the credits: One of those projects seems to be moving right along and even got a mention on MSNBC (scroll a bit). This graph and this chart should provide a comprehensive view of all the third-quarter data for the company; the Directors tell me that early analysis indicates more local reviews coming soon, though one or two might be late, and for that, the Directors very regretfully removed their tophats and begged your pardon. But they're drying their eyes, affixing their monacles, filling their chests with big resolute breaths, and getting back to business, harumph-harumph.
Speaking of the third quarter, it's inarguable that the KissCam is the pinnacle of time-out entertainment. Sure, you'll tell me, people said the same thing about digitally animated concession-stand food products racing around in formula-one cars—who will top that? I didn't think it could be done either, but at last night's Wizards game pals Ian and Valerie popped up on the jumbotron and it became clear to me how awesome it is to join a stadiumful of people in evaluating a couple's kissyface. They did well! On the other hand, the Wizards really need to learn how to pull down the boards.
UPDATE: Did Jamison really double-double with 15 rebounds last night? From the floor it didn't look like there were 15 rebounds among the whole bench.
