The Washington Post reports on a guerilla-ish Beirut ad blitz that skewer sectarianism. It's a series of billboards with newsprint text advertisements or offers blatantly tailored to certain groups ("Parking for Maronites Only") alongside more earnest appeals ("Citizenship Is Not Sectarianism") designed pro bono by H&C Leo Burnett, Beirut. It's been distributed pro bono, too, via rapid-fire txt msg and word-of-mouth buzz.
The WaPo calls it "part provocation, part appeal, with a dose of farse that doesn't feel all that farcical." Hm. A nascent Dada?
At least a couple of us are thankful for Charles for hosting Thanksgiving again for the area Tex-pats. The Cowboys lost the game this year, so Chaz will be serving some gloat, but also generous helpings of turkey, casseroles, fixins, and booze. Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.
DCist picks up the story here. As Sommer notes, the library has 99 problems. And now there's this gaping hole in the OCC footprint to think about. But it's easy to bury the lede in this story: Mayor Williams hoped to slip under the radar an ambitious restructuring of the DCPL. From the beginning his plan has resisted scrutiny, and the press has mostly not bothered. The Mayor released his Blue Ribbon Task Force report on the future of District libraries, a 370-page monster, the day before the Council's scheduled markup session on the legislation. And all this happens the week of Thanksgiving. I mean, come on.
Today Kojo Nnamdi—oh, go ahead, treat yourself, trill his name! You know you can't resist lolling those mellifluous tones over your tongue—will talk with new library chief Ginnie Cooper. Given that NPR just mentioned the tabled library bill in its hourly news roundup, I'm betting the question will come up. (NPR's angle, for what it's worth, was that the caucus found that the OCC site was too profitable to be given over to a public library. That's definitely Carol Schwartz's reasoning for opposing the Mayor's plan, but not Gray's position, that is, not his position before the vote. Now, it's harder to say. Barry's position is, as ever, mysterious. You know, I think I might have even said something like this to NPR's cub reporter.) Just a few more minutes of listening to poor Art Buchwald slowly dying on air on the Diane Rehm show, and then I'll be updating.
Here's the Mayor's response:
It's disappointing that the Education Committee did not approve our library plan but it's a good sign that the members tabled it rather than voting no. That suggests to me that they see the value of a new, clean, high-tech, child-friendly modern central library that is worthy of our great city and want to revisit this issue again soon. I will be redoubling my efforts over the next few weeks to work with Councilmembers to respond to any unanswered questions they have about the project.I understand that yesterday Mayor Williams called Marion Barry three times before the committee vote, so phones will be ringing off the hook—now, he has to convince nine members to introduce the library bill as emergency legislation, if he has any hope of establishing the library transformation as part of his legacy.
Tomorrow, the City Paper's Jessica Gould will run an item on the Hirshhorn's loading dock renovation woes. Woes? Woes.
And cheers & bon voyage to folks departing and joining the paper.
MLK Memorial Library. Picture by Rob GoodspeedSCOOP: Are the Mayor's plans to create a new library on the grounds of the Old Convention Center DOA? That's the story, after the D.C. City Council just voted to table the legislation in committee by a 3–2 vote. Councilmembers Marion Barry, Carol Schwartz, and Vincent Gray caucused before the meeting began, delaying quorum for nearly 20 minutes. After chair Kathy Patterson finally called the session to discuss Bill 16-734 (The Library Transformation Act of 2006), Schwartz immediately motioned to table the legislation. Patterson called for a roll-call vote, and the motion carried: Barry and Grey voted with Schwartz.
So, with the legislative session winding down, any other attempt to pass the legislation during Mayor Williams's tenure will involve introducing emergency legislation. That requires nine votes. Whether he has that many votes in the Council or not, and it's not clear that he does, it probably won't happen: Vincent Gray is the chair next term, and members are likely to defer to his vote on legislation that immediately impacts the next session. And really, for all its woes, the library is hardly the stuff of emergency legislation—unless you're preparing your legacy, that is.
Broadcasting & Cable offers an analysis of changes at the news desk six weeks into Katie Couric's tenure at CBS Evening News. It's fascinating:
[S]ince Couric's arrival, women have received 40% fewer assignments than they did under her predecessor, Bob Schieffer. Men, meanwhile, have seen no cutback in their workload. The paucity of female correspondents is one result of an array of changes to the content, form and presentation of the newscast instituted under Couric. Those changes amount to two main differences in the new Evening News.I'd read that Couric was shortchanging hard news, but this seemed natural enough to me, who has a dim view of broadcast TV news: People go to the Internet for the hard news, and Katie Couric for the smile and the latest on [cleverly abbreviated couple]. But that's not a totally founded view, I think. There's a sizeable proportion of people who still depend on the nightly news for information, and those people are increasingly turning to the Internet for . . . pr0n. I poked around on the Congressional Internet Caucus site and, well, didn't find the report I looked at a while ago, which suggested that the increase in news-net use is a mere fraction of the increase in YouTube and other entertainment-net uses. The anchors are still gatekeepers.First, some hard, breaking news has been supplanted by features/interviews/commentary. The "Story of the Day" averages 18% less time than it did under Schieffer, who used to run one soft (human-interest, celebrity) feature for every three on a hard topic. Under Couric, the ratio is one to two. Moreover, the new nightly feature, freeSpeech, devotes 90 seconds to guest commentary.
Whatever else her tenure means, Couric seems to be keeping her sisters at CBS down:
Second, the role of the anchor has been emphasized; the role of the correspondent downplayed. That change is evident right at the top of the newscast when the day's major stories are teased.Maybe the changes explain why Couric's show has taken a drubbing in the ratings. Already the show is cutting its nightly opinion segment, but the report doesn't say anything about what the new mix will look like, or whether it will include more roles for women broadcasters.Whereas Schieffer had his correspondents introduce their own stories, Couric does all the teasing herself. She also has 20% more voiceover time than he did. Couric cedes time for the freeSpeech segment to a CBS News colleague only once a week, when Schieffer himself offers a regular commentary on Wednesday; on the other four days, we hear a guest.
The upshot of all these changes is that stories filed by correspondents account for just 69% of Couric's news hole, compared with 85% under Schieffer. And the brunt of that cutback has been borne almost entirely by CBS' female correspondents.
Philadelphia: Where beastliness is next to godlinessWhile I was in Philly visiting Emily, I found a meat counter at the Italian market that sold game. Whole geese, elk steaks, alligator fillets, buffalo beef, bones of all varieties for stocks, and sausage galore—anything you could ask for from the wider animal kingdom. The Dallas Cowboys partisan in me hesitates to say that it was enough to convert me to full-fledged Phillophilia—Eagles fans harassed Santa, for chrissakes—but I'm sure I've never seen any meat counter like it.
Before we left, K. and I personally ensured that every employee received a healthy holiday bonus. She'd been talking for a while about cooking a goose, but we couldn't buy one that day; the butcher only kills the goose on order (so you're in fact taking out a hit). Instead, we bought plenty of this, that, and the other. Last night, we made dinner with our spoils: figs wrapped in boar prosciutto, grilled, and treated with drizzled honey; rabbit sausage in bangers and mash; acorn squash with butter and brown sugar; a venison leg roast, marinated in buttermilk and herbs and then larded with frozen bacon nails before being roasted in Warsteiner with leeks, carrots, onions, and celery; and a delicious chestnut chocolate tort. (Firing up the grill in November is very much called for.) Some photos if you're so inclined, but fair warning—my point-and-click and I don't claim any food-photography chops. Check in with Matt Harvey for that.
So! This has been a fun post—I had a good meal and you didn't. But there's a story. Needing wax paper and milk, I stepped over to the nearby R/te A/d, never for a moment deviating mentally from the tasks back at the house: the grill, the gourds, the guests—and these leaves I'm supposed to be picking to use as molds for the chocolate garnish. I was deep in thought when I walked in, and focusing totally when I walked out with goods in hand, having not paid for them. The funny thing is, when you're walking home with loose groceries, even just a few, people will stop to ask you why you're not carrying them in a bag. It's a genuine curiosity. The answer is, "Because I shoplifted these," unless you don't realize what you've done—how's that for scatterbrained? When I did finally realize, I was terrified to turn around, for fear of looking too suspicious, carrying red handed my $5 in stolen groceries. Later, I felt like an ice-cold hardass.
So Bonnie and Clyde join Punk Rock Kitchen. Save room for transgression!
Okay, this is cool.
via.
Tacita Dean wins the 2006 Hugo Boss Prize. I was plugging for the Puerto Rican pair of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, whereas Global Warming Your Cold Heart was rooting for Tino Sehgal.
Kenneth Baker reviews "Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth" at SFMOMA. He says that the Kiefer show, with a nudge from Richard Serra's Gutter Corner Splash: Late Shift—a permanent installation the museum usually tucks away but decided to bring out for company—rises to level of "museum event of the year." I won't argue with that. If Melancholia is any indication, though, Baker's seeing a lesser show than the exhibit viewers were treated to in Fort Worth and the District.
Baker's opening caught my attention:
In 1988, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art paid more than $350,000 for a giant painting—Isis and Osiris (1985–87)—by Anselm Kiefer. At the time, many observers, including me, voiced skepticism about this move on the part of a museum whose collection provided scant context for Kiefer's art and that did not even have its own building. [Link added]Neither Baker nor anybody else is going to call that a mistake in hindsight, but that's hardly the point. This sale was a capital moment in the American market for Kiefer. The story also serves as the lede for Richard Polsky's Artnet 2005 market report. In it, Polsky rates the artist a "Buy." (In the next sentence he calls Kiefer a "living European art god," which in technical terms promotes the artist to "Recommended Buy" status.) Polsky writes:
Given the immense size of Kiefer's works, their non-archival materials and steep prices, it's a wonder that anyone other than institutions manage to buy them. A few more accessible exceptions come to mind, such as his giant books. These sculptural objects are "bound" with pages of malleable lead, covered with stained black-and-white photographs. Kiefer's books, which need their own sturdy table for display, can still be had for approximately $200,000—but rarely appear at auction.Kiefer has painted smaller works, too—notably the watercolors that appeared that appear in the show, works I for one was glad to see. These smaller pieces ground Kiefer—even if only by association within the trade. They resemble in scale and scope the bread-and-butter works of many ambitious artists whom the market does not recommend so favorably.*
"Small scale" isn't something you say about Kiefer. Take a gander at Peter Schjeldahl's account of the artist's notorious 1993 exhibition at Marian Goodman, 20 Jahre Einsamkeit (20 Years of Solitude)—featuring finished canvases (worth millions) stacked high in a junk heap interspersed with sunflowers, in addition to a collection of semen-soaked blank journals that documented the artists sexual activity from 1971 to 1991. (There's a priceless bit about a celebratory dinner in which guests were served pancreas and other B-side organs.)
Alec Soth reads the Vanity Fair art issue and snips another Kiefer/market mention from some industry hobnob. Jeffrey Deitch questions Kiefer's market presence:
Great things get lost through the cycles of the art market. Take Anselm Keifer, who in the late 80's was probably the most desired artist of that generation in the art market. Nowadays, one is even cautious about putting up a major Kiefer at auction because you don't know if there will be enough people there to buy it. So a major, major Kiefer might be well sold at a million dollars, whereas Lisa Yuskavage [a 44-year-old painter whose provocative works toy with soft-core porn] might get the same price.To start, Deitch is talking about the violent indigestion that struck the market after it gorged on the oversized neo-expressionist canvases of the 80s by the likes of Julian Schnabel. And works by Kiefer, too—though he's more guilty by association than for producing a glut of faddish works. Gordon Burn glosses the history in a Guardian review:
If Julian Schnabel hadn't come along when he did in the early 1980s, the market, ever ready to buy into the cult of the driven and angst-ridden artist, would have had to invent him. Wall Street was in full flood; the bull market had started its five-year run, which lasted from 1982–87; and art, in addition to the varieties of glamorous lifestyle feedback it offered, had become the smart place for futures traders and hedge-fund managers to put their money. Schnabel's paintings on horsehide and broken plates, which were priced at $2,000 apiece in his first show, had jumped to $40,000 apiece by his third. At the head of the queue was the bright young collector from England, the newly rich advertising executive Charles Saatchi.
Saatchi promoted Kiefer, too. So while Kiefer's works have held up infinitely better than Schnabel's, everyone took a hit quality notwithstanding, and it's taken the market some time to regain its appetite for large works that present major archival obstacles right out of the box. It would be surprising that the market for these works was ever so strong in the first place, and continues to grow, if we weren't talking about a living European art god.
Lisa Yuskavage, the painter to whom Deitch compares Kiefer, doesn't come close. That's not to say that she isn't good—she is. The brick-house blondes in her "motherfucker" portraits merit her strong sales. Deitch is drawing the wrong conclusions: Yuskavage's painting may be tricky, but it's not radically problematic to buy or own. Kiefer's just that much harder. Deith concludes:
Sex sells. People want sexy images. This goes back to the old masters, to French 19th-century academic painting. You know, Cabanel, or 18th-century painters like Fragonard, Boucher. They're sort of excuses for people to have high-class pornography in their homes. This is nothing new. Go back to the Italian Renaissance with the nude male and female figures. They're religious subjects but have lots of prurient interest, too—for people who are in circles where they cannot have Playboy calendars pinned up to their walls.That's a bit much, but JL of Modern Kicks made a kind-of similar observation that was much closer to the mark—"who can stand such ponderousness?"—in his response to my notes on Kiefer. Is it really the sex that's selling so much more? Or is the market balancing massive, fussy, gloomy, backward-looking masterpieces alongside relevant, academic, accommodating, fetching portraits? Eros and thanos? More like apples and oranges.
* Now, I'm pretty sure those watercolors never served that purpose for Kiefer, and it's anyway been a long, long time since he's had to think about something so mundane as selling his work. I doubt he's even used the bathroom since the early 70s. If he has made less imposing works specifically suited to a lower market rung, those works have been photographs.
When your angle, your take, your thing is killing your ex-wife and her boyfriend, you need to constantly remind the public about your double-murdering tendencies, lest it be that you did the deed in vain. But you can't just kill a new ex-wife and boyfriend—either getting away with murder is more often beginner's luck than practiced talent; or it's too much bother to search out that special person who will later seem a lot less special and, ultimately, deserving of a ghastly death; or you're afraid you can't carry it off with the same pluck now that you're older. Yet the problem remains: How to cement your legacy? You—because you know that society reviles a biscuit conditional as totally as it does the evidence of its own failures—you give them both. I think it's safe to say that the people will never mistake your talent.
Oh! Oh! I know this one. It's called affirming the consequent, right? What little I know about propositional logic, I learned over the Internet, so there's no excuse for The Insta-Pundit.* †
* unless the Iranian death unicorns OWN UR TUBES
† I accept responsibility for all 12 logic errors in this claim
Raymond Uhlir, Verdant Valley Hara-Kiri, 2006.
Raymond Uhlir opens his second solo show, "Fore Fathers," at Deborah Colton in Houston tonight. Glass Tire recommends you check him out, and so do I.
Notes on his first show/ Game Cube Nintendo/ Five percent tint so you can't see up in his window.
Banks Violette, SunnO))) / (Repeater) Decay / Coma Mirror, 2006.SUNN O))) & Boris brought their collaboration, Altar, to the Walker in Minnie last May. For a June exhibition at Maureen Paley in London, sculptor Banks Violette cast in salt every piece of equipment that SUNN O))) uses—guitars, heads, pedals, synthesizers, enough stacks to bring down the walls of Jericho. As part of the installation, the band performed, but viewers were only permitted to watch the facsimile instruments. (Scene & Herd was there to see and hear; Joe Beres has pictures of the casting process.)
To my readers at the Hirshhorn: I would like to get in on some of this action.
In fact I think it would take special-event programming at the museum to get either of these bands here. SUNN O))) and/or Boris only ever come as close to the District as Baltimore (which is, not coincidentally, the nearest city with personality). It's not for lack of venues. The Warehouse doesn't seem to book noise acts, but I don't see why it couldn't. And though the All Souls Church doesn't seem to adhere to the traditional Unitarian practice of hosting non-mainstream musical performances, it's in the right location and brags about its large in-house music program. Unitarians, they're pushovers, of course they won't mind hosting your doom concert, they'd be thrilled.
Neither of the bands are touring now, so the point's moot, so I'll keep listening to Altar. It's a satisfying November soundtrack, especially before the gloomy weather lifted: Bill Herzog's bowed bass for the early evenings, Atsuo's cymbal rolls and scattered drums for the rain. (Kim Thayil—that Kim Thayil—plays on the record. So that explains this week's freaky spot of sunshine.)
I've been tempted to abandon showers and shaving and go for a monosludge look to match the sound, but this plan has been greeted by considerable consternation from my nearest and dearest. Possibly because I was two days into the operation when I mentioned it.
* The title shouldn't make any sense, unless, like me, you mentally pronounce "SUNN O)))" as "sun ought" (with just a little bit of reverb at the end—though when you're speaking about the band you say "sun-oh-parenthesis-parenthesis-parenthesis," because you honor the band's titling convention, even if more often than not you're interrupted before you say "parenthesis" a second time because your listener knows the band, or doesn't want to hear about it), in which case you arrive at "The Sun Ought So Rises"—and, I don't know, that's clever? Ben, Ian, someone want to help me out?
Rainer Maria calls it quits. It strikes me as more than sad that the band announced the news via Pitchfork—Yglesias and I have long maintained that that site's hegemonic sway over the market is just plain bad for music, and a genuine Internet curiosity. Show after distressingly empty show, I the declining attendance on the silly and solipsistic pans that Pitchfork's Rob Mitchum gave their latest albums Catastrophy Keeps Us Together and Long Knives Drawn. I don't think I'm knocking the guy for not sharing my tastes when I say that. These albums aren't perfect or anything—the Village Voice noted some reasonable flaws, flaws I'm willing to overlook for affection's sake. But Pitchfork treated the band to vacuous, bad-faith reviews. Pitchfork called Rainer Maria lame, and Rilo Kiley fans stayed away.
I don't take it as much comfort that even the writer who posted the news praises R|M and complains about her site's manhandling the band. It's unfair and partisan of me to assume that poor sales drove them to break up, and I'm sure a less bitter person will tell you that they outlasted the faddish genre they came up in, even if they could never quite shake the derogatory tag—that's an accomplishment beyond just surviving as creative collaborators and succeeding as musicians over several years and albums. "Atlantic" stands up as a meandering and perfectly toe-tappable pop song; "Tinfoil" is a sentimental favorite; "Artificial Light" irritated me until I decided to love it; "The Contents of Lincoln's Pockets" is a narcotic singalong. Catastrophe Keeps Us Together is the band's best album, and they have a hits album, too. But (getting into the spirit of the band, now) I'll miss them in great part—not the new music they won't make, I mean there's that, but also just knowing in the back of my mind that they're out there and playing—because a lot of their songs remind me of good times, and some sorry ones also, and these associations feel interrupted, and maybe less brilliant, for watching the band close on a down note.
Do me a favor? Leave a comment to test the all-new, terribly annoying, Turing test–enabled, comment spam–blocking plugin, will you? Here, let's do a poll. The focus of the new Democratic legislative majority should be:
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954.
It's Morning in AmeriKKKa!
Here's a Senate update: According to MSNBC (as of noon), the vote margin in Montana isn't close enough to trigger a recount (the contest has to be within a quarter of 1 percent, which is something like 4 Montanans). It looks as if Jon Tester will take that race.
In Virginia the vote is close enough for Allen to request a recount, but the recount process in Virginia isn't a complete recount. Allen can't challenge every vote, and it's unlikely that he can make up the 8,000 or so votes he would need to beat Webb through the challenge process. He's not expected to concede—but he's not expected to win.
Comments are off for now. I'm under a huge spam attack, and I can't tweak Movable Type's trojan horse intuitive spam-lookup system to both prevent this spammer's comments and permit mine and yours. (You see, the spam comment that wasn't blocked then becomes "trusted," and the lookup system gives me no way to ban e-mail addresses, usernames, or links or otherwise reconsider its decision to trust this 'bot.) I've given Movable Type a lot of money in the past in hopes of getting immediate and personalized support and fixing these problems—other people using Movable Type 3.2 don't seem to have them—and while they showed me how to clean out the tens of thousands of lines in the database, this is only a bandaid and it's super annoying. What I'm saying here is: Don't give Movable Type your money. Use Typepad or Wordpress instead.
It's not like I even get that many comments, but still, every one is a precious little gift to me. E-mail me for now; I'll probably install one of those annoying Turing tests or search for some other solution.
Back on after a week of technical difficulties. See, even though spam doesn't show up in the comments, it still shows appears in my database tables, hogging disc space. When I go over my limit, my host grounds me, but deleting the lines from the database (tens of thousands of them) wasn't doing the trick this time around. Many thanks to Becks for encouraging to stand up to my host and demand my SQL insert rights! It's an Election Day miracle.
Speaking of, and I don't know anything about anything, I'm on the books for a pickup of 23 House seats, 5 Senate seats, and 7 governors. (Chris Bell, I'm afraid, won't be one of them.) If we do win back the Senate today, I think it's important for the Democratic Party to honor appeals to not bog down the legislature in investigations & prosecutions and, instead, skip straight to the executions. The NRCC ought to be the first against the walls. To the polls, and the gallows beyond!
