If you need another reason to read James Huckenpahler's art blog: he's into The Apes!
Or at least links to them!
You may have noticed that my giant face has disappeared from the top of your monitor. Do not adjust, and don't panic!, but that's permanent. It's a distressing surprise that this comes as a relief—I was planning to change it up, anyway. Do I not enjoy staring at my head? That can't be right.
Anyway, I don't have Photoshop (or Photoshop skillz) but if one of you has the time to throw together a simple banner, will you e-mail me? In the meantime, I'm going to try to jigger something up with this B-grade paint program, but outlook: not so good on that.
UPDATE: Thanks for the generous response! I'm a little busy right now to sort through these great offers, but you'll hear from me soon.
James W. Bailey is always berating me for being an iPod-toting art fag. Now it's actually true! Yesterday I trekked up to FedEx to pick up a package�one spanking new iPod, courtesy of the g-friend. That's just what I got her for her birthday (though my generation is nicer). Yes, we are happy yuppie couple scum, destined for an adult-contemporary hell coordinated by Sharper Image and Williams-Sonoma.
If you have any particular ownership insights, have at. How often am I supposed to walk it? Am I doting on it too much? This one takes video as well as music, and it's probably time I tackled the world of podcasts.
Quarter centuries of my life, that is. It's my birthday! (I'm still in my 20s. I'm still in my 20s.) Probably won't hear too much from me today, since I'm running around and then, then, bowling, like the vibrant still-a-20-something that I am.
I knew the news was bad before I'd even heard the news. It started with a pair of voice messages from Susan, which were unexpected, since she knew that I'd be far from the phone in honor of next-to-last football Sunday. I'm not an invested fan but I'm observant, and that means beer and chips & salsa and lots of guys delivering the People's Elbow at one another. She wouldn't want to interrupt that, but in an irritable voice her second message asked whether I was, like, still watching football, god, which was also the gist of the first message she left minutes earlier.
So I dial her up. She doesn't waste a breath: "What's the news from Georgia?" That salutation usually runs vice versa, so I'm assuming that I exited the maelstrom of masculinity playing out in the living room with a concussion. When I obediently load up the news, I realize that there were three disasters on Sunday:
As it turns out, that's what Georgian President Saakashvili is saying, too. No Russian terrorist group has any real beef with Georgia; it's not obvious why a Georgian proto-separatist group would want to cut off Russian gas, which both heats Georgia and also furnishes electricty. (Or at least such a group wouldn't cut off the power and not claim it.) Saakashvili went so far as to call the explosions Russian policy—a muscular form of oilpolitik.
The Kremlin's been throwing its weight around lately—pressuring Georgia to sell its oil pipeline network; cutting gas exports to nations like Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine and demanding fourfold price increases to restore the juice. The sudden cutoff is poorly (or sharply) timed: Georgia is looking at a cold snap of its own, and since it depends almost wholly on Russia for its energy, it will be days before Georgia can establish a link to another country (Azerbaijan or Iran).
The Russians have called Saakashvili's remarks "hysteria and bacchanalia." While his comments were hyperbolic and even arch, the circumstantial evidence against Russia is telling. But nevermind all that—it's obviously Azerbaijan carving out its own market.
Anyway, that's my short synopsis. What it means for Susan, bizarrely, is that she got to take a blistering hot shower—she came home to find her notably unreliable furnace blazing. Hope that situation holds. And if she finds electricity tomorrow, she may be able to upload some pictures she's shot with her new camera, which just recently arrived. (Hooray!) In a different vein, nothing can redeem today's sorry excuses for football contests.
Read about the northern bottle-nosed whale that's swum up the Thames into London? Londoners are calling him "Big Ben." Great story. Well, it will have been a great story if the city is able to return the guy to the ocean. The reaction of the man who purportedly spotted the whale first was something right out of Master and Margarita—he refused to believe his eyes.
Not to fire a shoot across the bow here, but really, a whale is a much better metropolitan mascot than a panda.
UPDATE: Sad.
The Russian cold snap. The temperature in Moscow as of this writing (it's night there) is a frigid -10º F, but apparently it feels like an apocalyptically bitter -30º F. Unbelievably, it's predicted to get colder before the February thaw. And yet Epiphany frost is such a pleasant phrase.
I just got two press releases from local art galleries, and I wouldn't have noticed anything special about them had they not arrived one after another—but come on, people! It's Friday, 4:30 p.m., and no one has done anything more productive than reading the 24 forum. Don't junk the news 'cause you're trying to get everything off your desk before happy hour.
And speaking of 24, as we ever so coincidentally were, make sure to check in with Mr. Drezner before you leave the office. On the Department of Justice 's demands of information from Google:
The DOJ wants to show that online searches lead to inadvertent stumbles into porn. It is true that the best way to show this would be to retrieve a sample of searches. However, almost as good would be for the DOJ to commission some social scientist to do the research for them. It would not be hard for a researcher to run an experiment to gather this kind of data, and the results would be just as useful to the Department of Justice.Did door number two send shivers down your spine? Mine, too. I think it was one of the Crooked Timberites who said that he intentionally diversifies his media providers—e-mail by Google, search by Yahoo!, that sort of thing—so as not to become too beholden to any single company's liability or dominance.There's something else that disturbs me about this request. If Yahoo! and other search engines have already complied, then the DOJ doesn't really need Google's data. . . . So why continue to press Google?
I see one of two possibilities:
1) The data they have doesn't support the administration's supposition, and they're hoping Google will bail them out;
2) They don't care about the data for this case as much as they do about establishing a legal precedent and/or intimidating Google into compliance.
Usually, with these kind of things, I try to remind myself: why assign malignance when incompetence will do, and is in such abundance? After all, the man who previously sat in Alberto Gonzales's chair used the office to conduct the War Against Statue Boobs. Not exactly Dr. No we're talking about.
But if that was an aesthetic departure from the normal day-to-day over at the Dee Oh Jay, then this is curiously legislative one. These data—if the DOJ in fact played nice and did not use them to ID millions of users—would tip the Department off on all sorts of ways that people might find illegal pornography in the future. Based on my watching The Wire (three seasons, multiple viewings), I don't quite see the criminal threat that warrants the use of the federal subpoena for a massive cache of privately owned data, one which they've already been given more or less by another company. But I don't really know what I'm talking about here, and I'm sure I'm out of touch anyway—I can nearly hear the defenders of the Unitary Executive, Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito: "I'll allow it!"
Back to speaking of 24: I haven't watched much of the series, but judging from the first two episodes of this season, it's clear that it's a proven predictor of U.S. political trends. Last season? Torture. Everyone, for any reason, you looking at me?, time bomb's a-tickin'—just willy nilly. Season 5: data mining. Data mine that phone call, damnit. I couldn't data mine this morning's Sudoku. Marion Berry, caught data mining the rock again! Don't know whether "data mine" is different from "look into" or "read" in any sense whatsoever, but it looks like it might be hard to remember how things ever got done before.
I know when it's time to strap on the tinfoil before tuning into TiVo, so I'm keeping my eyes peeled. If I see Jack look something up on Baidu, I'm going to call that a spoiler for 2006–7.
Oh man, I didn't mention the Pay It Forward Forward Blog before, but it's imperative that you see it now. It's brought to you by me and the Governess and more or less all our relatives.
Both [District Mayor Anthony] Williams and the library board want to replace Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with a facility that would anchor the redevelopment of the old Washington Convention Center site. The task force estimated the cost at $280 million. [emphasis added]Elected officials in this city aren't seriously contemplating destroying the Van der Rohe, are they? That just can't be the case. They must mean to replace the library facility with another facility, located somewhere else, and in no way on the same site where stands one of the District's modern architectural gems.
I'm comfortable with moving the library (they won't let me borrow anyway, damn fines). The Van der Rohe is not being put to the best of its potential uses. It's not a space I'd prefer to be in to read, which is a library function that's taking greater precedence in design today—the library as a Starbucksian communal space—even if bureaucrats only ever talk about it in terms of the Internets. On the other hand, clearly, the building is the city's leading candidate for a dedicated contemporary arts center. As for all those books, isn't there an empty building up the road?
As someone who for several years dealt with epilepsy and the medication (and side effects) attendant to that condition, I'm appalled to read that coverage under the new Medicare prescription drug dispensation restricts and excludes whole classes of antiepileptic drugs. Barbiturates, for example, are not covered at all, for seemingly arbitrary reasons—though I agree with one TPM reader that there's surely a Republican shibboleth at the root of that objection.
Perhaps some congressmen vaguely recalled "barbiturates" from the Just Say No! educational pamphlets that his children probably accepted as to-do lists for the weekend. Maybe, just as with the ink and the pork and the coveting the neighbor's ass, benzodiazepenes are namechecked in the Book of Leviticus; where there's legislation authored by the Republican leadership, there's fire—and brimstone. Or more insidiously, as the above-linked reader puts it, "maybe the competing drug classes are much more profitable for someone's campaign contributors (as both benzodiazepines and barbiturates are cheap and produced as generics, unlike their likely treatment alternatives)."
Whatever the reasoning and whatever your philosophical inclinations toward state health care, it must be acknowledged that there simply is no second-best alternative to some of these drugs. My experience was instructive. I experienced seizures belonging to a variety called tonic clonic, which sounds like a long-last Pavement album. After my first seizures, many of the antiepileptics I tried caused extremely severe side effects: in the worst cases, seizures, but also profuse nosebleeds and profound visual chromatic defects (dramatic "red-shifting" in everything I saw, as it were). Tonic-clonic seizures: not as fun as they sound. Tonic-clonic side effects: nearly as disappointing as the seizures.
My antiepileptic wasn't a barbiturate, but I was prescribed many before I found a medication with a profile of side effects I could live with. (I eventually weaned myself off antiepileptics and have lived fun and fancy free for two or three years now—although another seizure would mean that I'd have to return to the pills for good.)
But my profile did change over time, and it's conceivable that at some point I might have had to (and may still yet) need to explore other options or even take a cocktail of medications. Given that under the new dispensation, anticonvulsants old (mysoline) and new (lyrica)—along with whole categories of drugs (benzodiazepines, barbiturates)—are not covered by Medicare, appropriate prescriptions will only be an affordable option for those not well off if dual eligibility (state and federal aid) allows for the right intersection of drug coverages. Which is to say nothing about the process for determining the right intersection of drug coverages.
State Medicaid, federal Medicare, and temporary emergency relief, that is—of the likes declared by several states already in the wake of institutional confusion and exceptional incompetence seen in the rollout. The Citizen reports on just one of the many cases of the new January blues, in which an epileptic was greeted by the pharmacist with hundreds of dollars in copayments, no clear avenue for redressing her situation, and limited time to resolve the problem.
Again, the tragedy with specific respect to epilepsy is that there is no second-best alternative for many of the available drugs—but these are predictable problems that probably apply to a range of chronic conditions. I haven't followed the prescription drug benefit fallout as closely as your Ezra or your Lindsay; the most insightful thing I could say about the issue is that it's one helluva sedative. Feel free to take me to task for the angles I haven't appreciated here—I'm sure I'm just repeating the basic orthodox liberal points on the subject. But the complaints raised by the Epilepsy Foundation strike me as very obvious, the sort of broad, foundational considerations raised by the very prospect of revising state health care standards. How was Congress able to so deliberately fail to address these concerns?
It happens that I'm young, educated, not dependent on state aid, not infirm or unaware of events, and probably not even likely to have a seizure any time in the near future. But, of course, you don't write Medicare legislation with people like me in mind. Congress deliberately ignored and excluded those for whom the legislation matters most.
UPDATE: I forgot the scariest detail, which is what everyone wants to hear about, right? Skipping epilepsy medication not only exposes one to potential seizures, it can provoke a condition called status epilepticus: prolonged, clustered seizures that are not interrupted by periods of consciousness. High mortality rate and ominous as all hell. It's not untreatable, but one of the primary treatments is a procedure called rectal diazepam, which, if possible, involves an administration even less appealing than the name suggests. Status epilepticus, brrr.
Did anyone take a final casualty count after the conclusion of the "Sculpture Unbound" opening on Friday? By the time I left, wild children had wrecked two works: a white cube made from flour by David Meyer and a dirt installation on the floor by Jessie Lehson. Have to watch those small, hyper people.
You know what was awesome? The Rose Bowl!
Hoisted by/falling on Brendan after Vince Young's game-winning touchdown in the fourth.
Reid needs you to throw them horns up.
Fourth quarter wasn't easy, no doubt.
A look at the teeming masses that took to the streets.
Some shots courtesy of Matty, who would no doubt want me to caveat that he hasn't edited his pics, blah blah blah whatever hook 'em!!1!
Okay, time for weekend. Sorry I've been such a bad blogger this week, but I'm still shaking off vacation. I'm catching up on a lot of art this weekend and you'll hear about it here.
From McSweeney's:
MATTHEW BARNEY: (On phone.) Matthew. Barney. Sure. It’s called the Flärke. F-L-A-R-K-E. It’s a bookshelf.I know people who would agree. Post yoinked from Paul Schmelzer.BJÖRK: (In background.) Ask if they have an aluminum igloo.
MATTHEW BARNEY: (Muffled.) I’m on hold. I’ll check when he gets back on.
BJÖRK: (Giggling.) Imagine if clouds were made of licorice!
MATTHEW BARNEY: Flärke. With an umlaut over the a. Also, my wife was curious if you sold aluminum . . . Yes, I can hold again.
BJÖRK: The winter makes me feel particularly blinkered.
MATTHEW BARNEY: The Flärke is in stock? Great. Another quick question. My wife is Scandinavian and she was wondering if you had any aluminum . . . All right, I can hold.
BJÖRK: Icelanders complete the echo with feel.
MATTHEW BARNEY: You’re kidding me. If you can’t deliver it, why do you have the option to order by phone?
BJÖRK: Pandas are sexy.
Your correspondent very nearly got logged out for good today. I'm crossing this intersection in Bethesda on my way to the Metro when a driver races through the red light, taking a wild left turn onto the street just where I'm walking. He doesn't see me, and this intersection has bad visibility, and none of this really matters in the two seconds it takes me to suck in my breath in order to prepare to begin freaking right the fuck out, because driver swerves, slams on his breaks, hydroplanes but then kind of fishtails, and crashes his Cherokee against the curb. Swoosh, his bumper nearly grazes my bag. The whole exchange: two, maybe three lousy, excruciatingly drawn-out seconds.
Now the guy who walking to my left has it worse—he actually hops out of the Jeep's path when it careens by me. It wasn't expertly athletic or anything, but it was still so fast. Both of us hustle across the street, cursing earnestly while Cherokee drives away. Both of us clearly stunned, we commiserate for only a moment and then walk off.
A few minutes later, he steps onto the elevator to the Metro just as the doors close. It's just us in the car, and when the elevator moves we turn to one another with the same look on our faces—a grimace, primed for volcanic blasts of profanities and shared indignations. And of course all that pent-up consternation, carefully considered and mentally rewound and replayed, has hilarious effects on the human face: scrunched-up, puffy red features, ears steaming and brow furrowed and mouth drawn up in a muscular, tight-lipped frown. We get as far as Can you believe—? and That guy—! before this face that we're mirroring registers, and it all folds and we just laugh.
Now, I bet laughter's just the automatic, visceral response to a scary experience. But in my limited experience with this kind of adrenaline spike, the mind records everything in crystal clarity and it feel as if you have minutes to process seconds—and I really did get a good, long study of this guy's facial features just as he opened up his mouth to cuss the air, and the look on his mug was hysterical, just too much to take. He must've seen the same angry baboon staring back.
Fusebox, one of the District's top-shelf galleries is closing. I'll post the press release:
After a remarkable and rewarding five years, co-owners Sarah Finlay and Patrick Murcia regretfully announce the closing of Fusebox effective February 11, 2006.So, this opening will be the gallery's last, which I'll miss as I'll be in Dallas. Speaking of, my brother just showed up to take me to Big D, so I don't have time to comment, but best of luck to Sarah and Patrick going forward.As many of you know, Patrick Murcia, my husband and co-director of Fusebox, has for the past 5 years diligently balanced his demanding full-time position in the nonprofit housing world with his substantial responsibilities here at Fusebox. He now has an opportunity with his organization in San Francisco, and we, as a family, have made the difficult decision to close the gallery and relocate.
We can never fully express our gratitude to this community for its overwhelming support. We believe more than ever in the viability of Washington as home to a vibrant, internationally relevant contemporary art scene. We hope above all that our success has helped to affirm that potential. We are indebted to the other galleries and nonprofits on 14th for their collegiality, professionalism, and commitment to excellence; and for taking the risk to come here and create a critical mass of exceptional art spaces on the 14th Street corridor.
Of course, no commercial gallery can survive without avid collectors, and we have been so fortunate to work with an amazing community of intelligent, passionate people. These individuals deserve so much credit for substantially raising the bar in Washington--for zealously participating, for educating themselves, and for enthusiastically supporting excellent artists both within and outside this community.
Most important, we want to publicly express our deepest gratitude to the 18 artists who have been such an integral part of our lives for the past 5 years. Beyond providing us with a first class program, they have generously shared their time, their ideas, and their friendship. They have made it incredibly easy for us to realize our mission of furthering their careers. Every one of them has made huge strides professionally during our tenure representing them. We have every confidence that all of these extraordinary artists will continue to do great things.
Special thanks also go to our Assistant Director, Kevin Hull, for his uncompromising commitment, and to the many talented and ambitious young interns who have enriched our lives and helped in every aspect of the gallery’s operation--without them we could not have succeeded.
In closing, we want to reiterate that this art community has so much to offer and so much potential for continued growth and significance. We hope that any void we might be leaving will be quickly filled by another promising new gallery, and that this rich community of critics, curators, academics, gallerists, artists, students, and collectors will give them the same generous support and encouragement they gave us. Thank you one and all.
Must say, I prefer Kieran Healy's edited version of Billy Collins's poem to the original.
Your Saturday night plans ought to include a stop by Fusebox to see the opening of Vesna Pavlović's "Collection/Kolekcija" in the primary space and Ian Whitmore's "Little Lies" in the project space. This show is not to be missed, for a number of reasons—not least of which the work by these artists.
Vesna Pavlović, Kasina Hotel, Majdanpek, 2001. C-print.
I'll still be in Texas, juuust catching the Anselm Kiefer show at the Modern before it closes. So say hi to everyone for me.
Hey, can we laught at Leinart for saying that USC is the better team? If only the football teams had agreed to settle the question by some way other than playing football. Seriously, I'm laughing at that jerk.
Bayes is all wrong about Robin Givhan's column on Abramoff's gangsta style. I really like the archetype of a self-serious beat writer who can't help but transform the news through her individual lens. Also, Abramoff did show up to trial in a floor-length trench coat and coal-black fedora. The fashion analysis makes clear that Abramoff is simply dressing true to form.
What's the current over/under on congressmen implicated in the scandal, 20? Republicans 18, Democrats 2 sound like the right spread?
CNN has love for the District's arts. The article mentions the upcoming Capital Fringe Festival, the first in the area. This editor is friendly with one of CapFringe's directors, and I'm pleased to see her hard work pay off in official acknowledgment.
I'm not excited about leaving Texas, but I'm happy to come home to the spring art season. No tasty enchiladas, the arts, but they'll do.
To the draft, or not to the draft? One thing my friend Brendan and I were talking about last night with regard to Young's throwing motion and its potential to impede his success in the NFL that I think I think is right: Vince Young is 6'5" and some change. That makes him taller than plenty of quarterbacks—not all, but many—so I'd like to see what his motion actually amounts to in terms of height and arc at release. It certainly looks worrisome, but Young's passing style has not amounted to cringeworthy performances this year. The scouts may be wrong about his NFL prospects, but it's hard to say without taking his height into consideration.
No doubt his passing accuracy still needs development, even if his style is acceptable, but that's something he's going to get through an NFL team whether he takes another college year or not. The same is true for Matt Leinart and every other quarterback who makes the pro-ball transition.
So, draft? I'm completely happy to see Vince Young stick around and rack up trophies for my alma mater, but he ought to go in, especially if he thinks that Houston is now reconsidering their options. And Houston should reconsider their options. They have a great prospect in Reggie Bush, but they have a great prospect and homegrown hero in Vince Young. Houston must not only develop its loser team but also could use to invest in its relationship with its fans. The day after the Rose Bowl, calls poured into local sports radio affiliates from Houston fans voicing their support for a Young-helmed offense. It's a win-win decision with the first pick, sure, but Young brings intangibles to the team that Bush doesn't offer.
Woke up this morning to find that it's still true: Texas. Won. The Rose Bowl. Also not a dream: the mysterious gash on my thumb, which I think is a burn that I self-inflicted (?) some time very early Thursday. Neither was the cell-phone madness a duplicitous collaboration between my imagination and call log (sorry about that, guys). I shed blood and cell-phone minutes, but elsewhere my friend Hardigree actually took a punch to the stomach from one extremely poor-humored Trojan fan.
Much improved between yesterday and today is the gyroscopic motion of the universe. On Wednesday I lost physical orientation at some point halfway through the fourth quarter, around the same time I was arm over shoulder with a dude wearing ass-long hair and a Neurosis tee who'd been bragging annoyingly from the table next to ours about how he'd never watched a Texas game all the way through. (Why in the world was he at the Tavern?) Strange bedfellows, as they say.
This site is now a blog about the Rose Bowl, if that isn't perfectly obvious. Note the poorly placed apostrophe in "GIG 'EM HORNS."
Oh man, those last six minutes . . . intense. Three quarters of the way into thousands of dollars in drink tabs is not the time to induce a collective, bar-wide panic. When the Texas D made the big stop that returned the ball to Vince Young—a stop by strong safety Michael Huff, who called his own audible, adding himself to the six guys designated to blitz inside at LenDale White—the entire bar jumped to their feet, and no one sat down again. Funny how inadvisable amounts of alcohol emphasizes and encuorages the worst nervous ticks—nail-biters gnawing at their knuckles, people who nervously drum their legs running in place.
Sure, it certainly looked like a fait accompli after that stop. And it's hard to say why Pete Carroll thought it was reasonable to keep a tight deep-pass defense when Young hadn't hit up Sneed or anyone else for more than 20 yards all night. No QB spy? I understand what Pats fans were complaining about. But I'm not sure that anything could have stopped Vince Young on that 4th and 5.
When we won, when Young proved his mettle and put a stop to the Troy-fecta, of course Austin dissolved into complete madness; we marched to the campus and did like you'd expect, singing, climbing on things, honking horns, smashing our heads against one another's, hugging total strangers. It's all very cliche on television but no! the gods, they demand it, and it's infinitely more fun and necessary when it's Texas that's won the game.
So I'm dying to know whether the Once and Future Quarterback sticks around for another year—I think it would be fantastic but maybe pointless, since he's never really going to develop to NFL-appropriate status with his sidearm. I'm dedicated to following whatever team picks up Michael Huff. God, what an amazing game, season, and team. I am now ready to join the proud ranks of crotchety old men, because you don't know shit for football, young man, so let me tell you about them ought-five 'Horns. . . .
Holy shit, the over/under for the Rose Bowl is 69 1/2. I'm going to throw up, this game is going to be so amazing. I still think that's a high number but I'll be more than pleased to see a 38–21 or 45–21 Texas victory. Now, Reggie Bush is very good, and Kevin Drum's a nice guy—no one's tempting fate over here—but we're going to kick their asses. Now, time for Shiner.
It's a strange twilight here in Austin, Texas. Late into last night our expedition group could be found in the bowels of the University of Texas Life Sciences Library—the library directly under the UT Tower—looking for treasure. The ultimate treasure. The National Treasure of Texas: the Rose Bowl. The site of Texas's ascendancy. Or, for our purposes, the best place to watch it live.
"It's no use!" cried Matty, brushing aside a stack of old scrolls and blueprints. The team's television surface-area logistics expert was sweating in sheets. "We'll never find a site with enough screens!"
"Silence!" Danny's voice boomed throughout the cavern-like space of LSL. "Patience will reveal the path." His eyes flashed wildly; Danny, a member of the Ilonghornati, ran his hands through his hair, flashing for a brief moment the seal of the Longhorn tattooed across his brow. He was sooo drunk that night he got that thing. As a member of the ancient spirit sect, Danny has awaited the return of the Longhorns since, well, they won in '69, I guess, which wasn't so long ago, but whatever, hook 'em.
Brendan, the group's getaway driver, stood smoking in a corner. That was Brendan—silent but deadly.
"Look," I say, my telegenic jawline revealing a level of stubble suitable for facing imminent danger, "we need a site—"
"Dude, did you just characterize me as a fart—?" interrupted Brendan.
"—never mind that now! We have no time! We have to find the bar that matches all the clues. We need to maximize the total inches of TV width and highest concentration of cute waitresses while minimizing beer prices and distance to campus. From the bar we'll take a bus toward campusthe school, get off, and tip it over ourselves—the national championship calls for blood. Yes, gentlemen . . . we go to . . . [torch flickers; Brendan mumbling] . . . the Tavern."
* * * * *
Here's my prediction: Texas, 31; University of Spoiled Children, 21. On SUC's side that's three touchdowns by Reggie Bush—that many and no more. Holding him to three may not mean stopping him, but that is containing him. For Texas I'm calling one running TD (by Jamaal Charles, I bet, now that he's healthy, but it could be anyone from Texas's running committee), one TD either by special teams or defense, and two by Vince Young. Southern Cal looks weak on the corners and Texas is going to exploit that all night long.
On the peripherals, I bet Leinart throws an INT and so does Young. I think it's crucial that the Youngs (Vince and Selvin) get through this game without putting the the ball on the ground—for one thing, because USC will exploit the fumble, and for another, because USC isn't strong enough defensively to force the fumble, meaning that those turnovers are all on Texas's nerves. So: no fumbles for Texas (and no fumbles for USC, either). And just for icing on the cake, at least one sack by UT's #7, Michael Huff. Huff's going to rattle Leinart's cage from the secondary.
Most importantly: Mack Brown is playing to win. No conservative playcalling, no reading his mind, no playing to get through or get over or get out.
You know what to do, folks—hook 'em horns!
Howdy! Feels as if I should be saying "Aloha!" since I've been wearing sandals and short-sleeves since I arrived in the sunny ATX. Or maybe "Holy-shit-fantastic!" since I can hardly describe how great it is to be home again. Like the man said, it feels so good, feelin' good again.
And it feels so good to be back in Austin. It's not just college nostalgia that draws me to this town. That's a powerful magnet, a force tempered by the fact that when I get together with my old buddies, we quickly revert to college freshmen—guzzling down Shiner by the gallon and giving one another purple nurples (a shock-and-awe twist attack targeted at the nipple) at every unsuspecting moment. And siren song that the purple nurple may be for every young professional male struggling with business cards and blazers, it's not devastating nipple violence that draws me back.
Take New Year's Day. We ambled over to the Chili Parlor for a hangover treatment (cheese enchiladas, smothered high with jalapenos and XXX-level chili), where my friend Red John tells us about a hobby he's picked up from his college-aged sister. It's called letterboxing, and it's a scavenger hunt in which you follow clues to find hidden boxes containing specialized ink stamps. You collect these stamps but also leave your own behind in the letterbox's journal, so there's a treasure-collecting dimension to the game. Imagine Indiana Jones, were he a notary public by trade. So we're climbing all over Chili Parlor to solve a puzzle, decoding old country lyrics and dusting signs for prints and the like, since there was a letterbox nearby (this game is played everywhere, apparently).
Left there for Barton Springs, where we played Tarrou by the water. Tarrou's a card game played on something like a regular deck combined with a tarot deck. OK, the city's gotten a little froggier since I left it, but I'm a real sucker for cardgames and had a blast. From there: hair of the dog and some dancing downtown, where we saw our waitress from the Chili Parlor getting down to a Television/Cure 80s set. (Later, we flicked on the TV to be greeted by her on A&E's excellent new series about the Austin Rollergirls; Chili Parlor was none other than Venis Envy, one of the documentary's stars. Lunch = hotter in hindsight.)
Spending two-thirds of the day in the sun, either driving around town or sitting on a beer-garden porch or swimming (in January), you really see it in Austin—the pinks, limes, teals, golds, torquoises, and burnt orange that make up the color scheme of every enchilada emporium; the Christmas lights strung at the drop of a hat over any freestanding structure; the tacquerias, the cacti; the old Texas typefaces on the saloon signs. And Austin at sunset! You can't beat this place.
Real quick: DCist kindly offered to host my top ten list of the year's best District gallery shows. Completely forgot to make mention here of the list before I bounded out the door for vacation (owing primarily to the mad-dash that was getting out of town—I had only just hopped into a cab for the airport 45 minutes before takeoff).
Now, I responded to DCist's call with about 26,000 more words than is appropriate for their site; arts editor Sommer waded into the fray and edited it for their readership, bless her heart. But here at G.p I have no compunctions about straining your eyes, so below you'll find the listings with a bit more detail.
You know, really, the DCist-lengthed listings probably make for better reading. There's something middle school–awkward about the under 250–word capsule. Not quite a blurb; not yet a review. But enough with the meta caveats—I'm in Austin, Texas right now, where margaritas demand my attention, and that, citizens, is a call that I do not answer lightly!
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Let’s be forward about it—top ten lists don’t really make a lot of sense. Especially for a field as diverse as contemporary art. Really, how much better is the sculpture of the giant Cheetoh than the digitally manipulated photograph? A true accounting for the decision-making process behind a hierarchical ranking of art shows would make the BCS computerized college bowlgame system look like a coin toss. It all comes down to hunches, biases, instinct, and pure visual stimulation. So let it be said that all these shows were remarkable—and the list of shows vying for the eleventh spot is much longer than this one—but caveats aside, here were the strongest District gallery shows of 2005.
10. Jason Zimmerman, Fair Game—Zimmerman’s video installation, a series of segments clipped from more than 100 episodes of the Fox proto-reality series, COPS, showed only the foot chases, free of context. The jostle of stocky backsides as one Joe Friday after another bounds into the darkness left viewers in stitches—gasping for air, not unlike most cops after brief spurts of exercise.
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, don’t provide for a defense testimony. The footage of the pursued, predictably, constitutes fleeting glances at mostly minority individuals from bleak neighborhoods. 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. Zimmerman’s darkly comic observation: Now that’s entertainment. (Transformer Gallery)
9. Molly Springfield, anything we have not had to decipher on own own does not belong to us.—Springfield’s ambitious solo at Jet Artworks showed her tipping her hat to one of the looming literary giants: the title of her exhibition of trompe l’oeil–based drawings and paintings was lifted from a passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Similarly, Springfield’s work explores memory (without all the to-do over the cookie), creating precise drawings of pages from her own life. Specifically, Springfield draws her notes: the sort you used to pass around in grade school, the ones that documented the great tragicomedy that is your life.
Accurate graphite recreations of old, folded, scrawled slips of paper showed Springfield wading into well-worn, text-art territory: words, how they mean other things, what they mean as objects. Here Springfield takes her clues from the text—and the history of text, working anthropological writing constructs like palimpsests into her smart art. (JET Artworks)
8. Julee Holcombe, Homo Bulla (man is a bubble)—Julee Holcombe puts the plastic into the plastic arts—by adding laminate to the development process, she creates prints that could be walked on. (So the artist assures. That shouldn’t be tested without permission.) The distinctive plastic glaze complements her photos, which take a maximalist approach to digital manipulation. In a word, these photos are fakes.
Homo Bulla (man is a bubble) was heavy with the art historical nods; the hourglass, bubbles, and extinguished candles in the title piece are all icons that recall the French vanitas portraiture tradition, in particular Jean-Siméon Chardin’s 1739 The Soap Bubble. Other pieces revealed Holcombe’s Romantic streak. Self as Narcissus showed the artist crouching over a reflective pane, holding a computer mouse; the nude, 16-bit reflection, too digitized to be recognizable. She pooh-poohs the Internet’s role in contemporary life, a telling gesture for an artist who lives by Photoshop. (Conner Contemporary)
7. Kelly Towles, Underdog—The line between street art and fine art may be razor thin, but so is the margin for innovation in a genre crowded by wannabes. Towles sets himself apart with an aderol-fueled animation style that might be fairly described as either loose or psychotropic. The cast of the epic power struggle at play in Towles’s prints and paintings includes boxers, amputees, fugitives, Dobermans, lunatics, dunces, soldiers, and a score of squatty birds.
For his premier solo showing, Towles tagged the gallery with floor-to-ceiling clowns that framed his works, a series of prints (from drawings on street-signature U.S. Postal Service mailing envelopes) and paintings on wood medallions. Judging by the number of those gravy red dots during the show’s run, errbody in the gallery got tipsy off Towles’s grubby goons and deranged pigeons. (Adamson Gallery)
6. Jiha Moon, symbioland—Art watchers greeted Moon with feverish attention after the artist took home the $10,000 Trawick Prize for young, local artists. Her subsequent show at Curator’s Office of smaller ink and acrylic drawings confirmed the buzz (and bluzz): In these works, overarching atmospheres, weather patterns, and ribbons of energy played host to the small eukaryotic forms that distinguish Moon’s marking system. Moon’s delicate ecosystems make for a satisfying balance between Southeast Asian compositional conventions and the very contemporary all-over style of painting. (Curator’s Office)
5. Linn Meyers, Current—Linn Meyers’s drawings are a manifestation of her body. The artist draws long lines in ink and colored-pencil on Mylar according to predetermined parameters. These rules are sometimes exhaustive for Meyers—to the benefit of the viewer, who watches the evidence showing the wear and tear of time and effort on the artist’s forearms, in the form of spasmodic, scragglier lines. Like the rings of a tree’s cross-section, the fluctuations in her drawings serve as a kind of biodata meter.
For Current, the artist presented works dotted with punctuation formed by starts and stops (as dictated by her preset rules). By doubling up the Mylar in several works—background drawing layers visible through the fore—Meyers achieved a highly textured, fabric-like Op Art effect. And it didn’t hurt that the works were simply stunning pieces to look at. (G Fine Art)
4. Dan Steinhilber, [untitled show]—Suave-brand shampoo bottles arranged on shower grab bars, artificial sweetener packets coiled in tightly swirling wall medallions, plastic cutlery molded in the shape of a caterpillar—who does Steinhilber think he’s fooling? Nobody at all: Steinhibler’s brand of homemade post-Pop sculpture reveals meticulous attention to composition and an authoritative eye for recombinant creations. A real junkyard dog, Steinhilber took mass-produced, banal, commercial materials and reserviced them as new, distinct forms for this show. Those shampoo bottles, for example, are filled with fixed chemical concoctions; taken together, they made up an assemblage of paint tubes, a sort of virtual palette. (Numark Gallery)
3. Ian Whitmore, Mirror, Mirror—Matching dense literary, art, and historical references with a temperamental balance between representative painting and gestural abstraction, Whitmore’s Mirror, Mirror was a satisfying look take on common myths and fantasies. For such a meaty show—each of the works alluded to one other art historical work, at least—Whitmore offered a lot of access points. The myths were readable without an advanced degree; his attractive palette sublimated the violence at play in his canvases. But therein lay the strongest level at which this show worked: Every canvas showed a struggle between the literal painted representation of a subject and the abstraction that figuratively suggests the meaning of that subject—a conflict most appropriate for driving at the meaning of myth and magic. (Fusebox)
2. Kendall Buster, Model City—Buster’s installation, on first glance, was a great iridescent swoosh of blue nylon cutting across the gallery in an arc. The undulating plane of fabric intersected the white cube space of Fusebox gallery, slicing from just above the door to a point waist high before rising roughly to eye level. After walking, kneeling, and finally crawling under this draped ceiling to the far end of the room—the work didn’t quite reach the end of the gallery—it became apparent that the swatch of nylon, in fact, comprised the joined bottom edges of 52 pup tents. (Not Nike, but close enough: IKEA.)
Buster’s scientific training shined in Model City. Standing under the installation felt like being enclosed by a breathing membrane; from the far end of the gallery, one could see the basic architectural structures that, in context, resembled hard, chitinous, protective scales. Attending the crowded opening was like walking into a cross-section 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. This was as ambitious an installation as you’re likely to find in the District. (Fusebox)
1. Mary Early, Sculpture—The big pineapple. It was a mesmerizing vision that greeted viewers walking into the project space at the back of Hemphill Fine Arts: a balsa-wood and beeswax sculpture in the shape of a tasty slice o’ pineapple, a work that looked as if it were gluey and unstable but just as easily might be substantive and firm. Early’s work invited touching, exactly as it should; her rough-shod geometry—the result of a repetitive, naturalistic process of laying down trapezoidal balsa pieces and beeswax in a radial direction—mimes the inexplicably simple ways that nature has given us her most exotic forms. (Again, no touching—not even when the piece invites the touching—without permission.)
Early’s other work in the show (also an Untitled) was less luminous and more imposing. The cramped closet space in which the work was placed seemed to prohibit any close inspection of the star-shaped obelisk, but in fact, the work reveals itself to the viewer exactly as it did to the artist when she sculpted it: only, and exactly, half of the piece can be seen from any vantage point. Viewers should take in the works as best as they can—eventually, given exposure to light, the sculptures’ imperial gold color will turn a balmy white; nature gives, and nature takes. (Hemphill Fine Arts)
