"When it comes to mating rituals, young women have rewritten them, leaving some men pining for the clarity of the old days." If by "some men", the writer means "Laura Sessions Stepp". She writes that androgyny among young men today is a direct response to, and another casualty of, Captain Jack Sparrow. See, Sparrow's "swish and swagger" model of masculinity owes to new freedoms expressed by young women. Stepp laments that women are no longer passive agents to be picked up, treated, petted, and returned home before midnight. Today, women might pay for dates, and might skip the movie altogether to get to the sex.
The offer of pay and play has deeply confused young men—so much so that they are dressing out their apprehensions. This is why you see so many fey pirates walking around. But just what exactly are these buccaneers wearing?
They bend the gender role freely, especially if their buds are doing the same.Hey, I'm wearing at this very minute a pair of Rainbows. Like the rest of these clothes Stepp lists, these sandals turn out to be designed and marketed for men and yet have a brightly colored element. Transgressive, somewhat disturbing, and perhaps too high a price to pay for women's entree into professional and academic spheres.A preppy guy in high school might pair a lime-green Polo Ralph Lauren shirt with light yellow J. Crew pants, a Lily Pulitzer belt and Rainbow flip-flops.
I'm on the Outer Banks with some confederates until Saturday, but nevertheless, work returns in full this week. But before we get back to the sober stuff:
Holy hell! That's Mastodon!
Washington Watchman Mike Licht passes on an item in the Examiner on the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The article reports that the Commission botched a deal to put art—craft, sculpture, site-specific yadda yadda—in the new baseball stadium. Here's the long and short of it: The Commission couldn't fit $850,000 under the stadium construction cap, so the item for the 2008 city budget was billed to general obligation bonds—the idea being that the Commission would then own the art and lend it to the Nationals at no cost. Councilor Kwame Brown, who has "oversight of the arts commission as chairman of the economic development committee", oversaw right through this clever ruse. Now, the stadium has no art and the Commission is out $850,000. Whoops!
Licht is quoted in the article as saying that the Commission's play was an "absurd attempt to get around the spending cap." Or, in site-specific terms, an error. In brighter news, the 2007 Nationals may not turn out to be "historically bad" in the final analysis. I'm sure Charles is thrilled.
Ian and Jan in the City Paper. For those of you who aren't leaving the District for a week at the beach, I recommend you check it out.
Delicious meals awaiting me today: lunch at Taqueria Nacionale and a celebratory dinner at Comet Ping Pong. By the end of those posts, you will be salivating. Promise.
Ernie Kovacs, Aesop Broadcasting Company, 1950s?
I'm new to the work of Ernie Kovacs, the Philadelphia comedian and television pioneer who seemingly invented all the television comedy troupes that persist today (all the funny ones, anyway). In that clip alone Kovacs satirizes the medium, breaks down the fourth wall, and employs an impressive range of textual puns—this, at a time when most television comedians were still doing vaudeville. Even the man's opening and closing credits were radical.
It's distressing to know that there ain't much of his work to see.
Most of Kovacs' early shows, such as the local morning show he hosted in Philadelphia from 1950–52, do not survive as they were done live. Only a few short film clips of these shows still exist. Some, though not all of his later 1950s shows exist in the form of kinescopes. Videotapes of his 1960s ABC specials were preserved, but other videotaped shows such as his quirky game show "Take a Good Look" exist only in piecemeal fashion. After Kovacs' death, his widow Edie was horrified to find that the networks were starting to systematically erase and reuse the tapes of Ernie's shows. At great expense and effort, she managed to buy up the rights to the surviving footage and ensure that future generations would not forget her husband's work.His Nairobi Trio gag, when the banana flies out of the peel? Conducting with a banana! Worth a full season of 30 Rock.
Henry Farrell writes today at Crooked Timber:
I'm one of those people who find the new New York Times 'helpful' feature of pulling up a dictionary when you click on a random word, really annoying
Emphasis his, and I share his frustration. I bet you do too, you, reader, who has seen through my HTML ruse; I bet some of you were clickring before you had begun to read and never noticed the blanked-out text at all. For you, clickrer, clickring facilitates reading, and that's why you find the Times's purportedly populist property preposterous.
What's to be done? The Times has ignored the cries of the very readership it intends to enlighten with its barrage of pop-ups; also, all my telephone calls and e-mails. Many of you noted technological workarounds, but I refuse to add unnecessary tools to block unwanted features. Rather I ask the New York Times to come to its senses and return usability to the user. So I can only hope that you like-minded readers will raise ever higher the banner and echo ever louder the refrain: Bring Back Free Clicking! We won't be cowed by ad clutter!
Jessica Dawson is right: Joshua Shannon does get the best line in "Ian and Jan". I did like Tyler Green's dry suggestion that video performances by Ian and Jan had to be depixelated lest they overwhelm the tubes themselves.
The show, by the by, is a great show, a deadpan spoof that lampoons local prejudices and industry cliches. (I have a short item about it in this tomorrow's City Paper.) After I'd taken a tour, I brought a friend along who doesn't follow the art world so closely—someone on whom all the in jokes would be lost. She loved it. So the show passes a crucial test.
One question I have, though: "Ian" of Ian and Jan is pronounced "Yan". Is that a local thing? I haven't met enough honest-to-god Washingtonians to get a good sense of the accent. And I'm told that around Baltimore "Ian" is pronounced "Ann" by the local yokels.
Mary Coble performs Aversion tonight at Conner Contemporary. Through video installation and performance, she will stage (and submit to) an electroconvulsive aversion therapy session. In a typical session, positive sexual stimuli (photographs) are coupled with negative stimuli (electrical shocks) in order to shock gay people in hopes of making them straight people. The practice was finally, fully disavowed by the psychiatric establishment as a recognized, endorsed treatment within the last decade. That was long after the end of the psychiatric ex-gay movement, which collapsed in 1973, when the best minds in minds declared that homosexuality is not actually a mental disorder. The religious ex-gay movement, of course, persists today—as does aversion therapy, albeit not in any professional medical setting.
(Writing this brief just now led me to look up American witch trials, and you know what? The last trial was held in Salem in 1878, some 250 years after the first one. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise.)
Read more about Coble and Aversion in my City Paper piece this week—then see the performance at Conner Contemporary tonight.
New Yorkers can catch her work in the "Global Feminisms" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. And anyone with a modem can see her discuss her work in that show, Binding Ritual, Daily Routine.
UPDATE: At 7:30 p.m. tonight, you can watch the performance via. Note, though, that the piece also includes three videos—not sure how much of that you viewers at home will be privy to.
Jason Gubbiotti, Is This What Happiness Looks Like?, 2006–2007.
Tyler Green: "Jason Gubbiotti has finally arrived." Click and scroll down for my thoughts.
"Formalism and Its Discontents." "Aestheticism Lite." "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics." New Republic art critic Jed Perl has always tapped the marketplace for the clever coinage in his art criticism. But the market doesn't lend itself to the conclusions Perl draws, and yesterday's contemporary art-market record high at Sotheby's is reason enough to revisit a few of Perl's balder claims.
Perl is a prickly critic; dislike is his default state. He isn't pleased with whatever's clever. That much he's made clear in frequent and often blistering tirades published by The New Republic, from whose ramparts Perl has blasted a broad range of artists who share one feature in common: They enjoy popularity or notoriety. A handful of postwar artists—so-called Silver Age AbEx painters, such as Joan Mitchell—qualify for his grace in New Art City, his (quite decent) reconsidered art history of "the Byzantine city within the Byzantine city" (i.e., present-day Chelsea). But Perl himself can tell you best how he feels about the progress of art: "[C]ertain artists were perhaps not so much acting in history as they were responding to popular demand, to what [Dwight] MacDonald, quoting Kierkegaard, called 'a phantom, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public.'"
In his latest piece, the critic is pitted against the titted: "Laissez-Faire Aesthetics", an essay he penned earlier this year, is a double-fisted denunciation of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage and that phantom menace, the public, who tolerates them. But Perl gets in another bête noir in this piece, too: the art market. He writes:
Amid the gold-rush atmosphere of recent months, however, something very strange has emerged, something more pertinent to art than to money--a new attitude, now pervasive in the upper echelons of the art world, about the meaning and experience and value of art itself. A great shift has occurred. This has deep and complex origins; but when you come right down to it, the attitude is almost astonishingly easy to grasp. We have entered the age of laissez-faire aesthetics.How to square that downcast view of the market with the record-smashing Rothko sale? Originally valued at $40 M, White Center (Yellow, Pink, and Lavender on Rose) cleared $72 M. If financial valuation has forked off of aesthetic valuation, what to say about Rothko, an artist whose work, if not unassailable, probably isn't the standard flown by this new financial-existential threat?The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now--think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes--believe that any experience that anyone can have with a work of art is equal to any other.
And why say anything about Currin and Yuskavage at all? They aren't the high-tide markers of the market; if anything, these artists benefit from the buoyancy that established master lend. Artnet published an end-of-the-year report in 2006 discussing fall auction results. Of 2,800 auction records, these are the top 10:
Moving down the list of the top 400 record sales, you'll find no mention of Currin or Yuskavage. Which doesn't say much—they might not have come up at auction in the fall; if they did but didn't set records they nevertheless sold high, to be certain. In any case, 2006 was not the year for either of them. Why did Perl feel the need to highlight these artists as the exemplars of excess?
Or [collectors] may enjoy their Currin as a financial trophy pure and simple, proof of their buying power. Or they may regard it as an object of delectation, in much the way that they have been instructed by some art-historian-turned-art-consultant to enjoy a Bonnard.In fact, collectors are enjoying Bonnard just fine:
Here's the article I think Perl could write: "Fickle-Down Economics". A treatise about how the boisterous art market promotes speculation on the work of untested artists at the margin. This would be, of course, nothing new about art or about markets, but it would give Perl license to hunt his bugaboos. Playing amanuensis to the marketplace doesn't play to his strengths if at the end of the day that's what he's interested in doing.
One of the New York Times's keenest online features is the sidebar window that allows you to toggle between the most frequently e-mailed and most frequently blogged articles. Select a cherished preconceived notion about navel-gazing Internerds/the great unwashed masses and find up to 20 bullet points to confirm your suspicions!
Check out the peculiar data from the arts section:
versus
And the last time I checked, there were only two or three top-blogged stories. As it happens, I just ran down my visual art RSS feeds, and of about 40 bloggers, only one had posted a link today to an article in the Times. Which only confirms my dearly held suspicions about the MSM. Arts bloggers are too busy writing original content to bridge the gaps in the dailies' coverage to write much about what the dailies think. For example, Lee Rosenbaum has written a lot on last night's recordbreaking Sotheby's contemporary art auction without mentioning this article once.
Jim Crace's latest novel is poorly written. Generic and meager as that criticism sounds, especially when it regards a novelist who comes so highly praised as Crace, it's true—it's by design. The Pesthouse is something of a science-fiction novel (quoting myself here):
Disturbed by the long national nightmare of the Bush administration, the English novelist turns on the American dream itself: Following an apocalyptic collapse staged generations into the future—in which the United States has descended into a pre-modern dark age—emigrants flee the West by mule and wagon in a journey across the Mississippi to the East. There, they line up for a ticket to the land of opportunity: Europe. Crace's reverse Oregon Trail is marked by a spoiled breadbasket, ruthless lawlessness, and worse still, a terrible plague (the "flux") that ravages the last populated bastions of the City Upon a Hill.To tell this story, Crace adopts a mimetic strategy. He writes in strictly tempered tones, dressing the medium itself to match the thing he's representing in the narrative. The story's premised on a pre-industrial, superstitious, traditionalist, anarchist society—so, accordingly, Crace's prose is nasty, brutish, and short.
The writing in The Pesthouse is in fact folksy, characterized by simple sentences and elementary diction. But it's not ironical or tart, the way you might expect a stylized future apocalypse tale to be. Instead, the narrator comes across as naive—in fact, as naive as his lead characters, Franklin and Margaret, whom the reader meets on their punishing trek east. (No worry, no spoilers here.) Throughout the story, the value of his protagonists is strictly symbolic. Like characters in a parable, they are levers, simple machines used to accomplish the elements of the story. The narrator's relation to the story, however, is tangled.
Good science fiction stories are legends; and a reader expects the narrator of a legend to be a tribesman, a fellow, someone who is sympathetic to the text or, at the very least, shares the epistemic situation of the readers. (As opposed to being in the same condition as the hero, for example.) Folk literature is diagetic (in that the narrator tells the story rather than reveals it). Crace's narrator, however, doesn't tell it straight. An example from early in the story, just after Franklin meets Margaret (she is sick, he is carrying her):
Were they in love? Well, no, not yet. He was too young and inexperienced; she was too old an inexperienced. They were, though, getting there with every step. And they were as intimate as lovers. How could they not be, with her legs pushed open, wrapped around his back, her breath and lips against his nape, her arms embracing him, clasped across his breastbone, so that, she thought illogically, she could help him bear her own weight and share the weight of worrying?Crace's stilted, superficial delivery continues apace, mirroring the blank characters in the story. It's a textually mimetic device: The narration is built to resemble a mythic journey, an epic text. Crace's post-history is practically pre-novel.[ . . . ]
. . . [Franklin] was determined not to show any weakness or tiredness. Here was his chance to prove to her how useful he might be and how mature. What luck had put this woman on his back? His damaged knee had proved to be an unexpected blessing.
But without the benefit of an emulsifying agent (like irony), Crace's stylistic ingredients don't take. Dialog is rare in The Pesthouse and instrumental at best; the reader is granted selective insight into the protagonists' minds, but they are blank as slate. And even that fails to say something compelling or biting about America.
Had the story been told from a strictly objective lens, Crace might have pulled off his faux-naif tale. Certainly, the novel would have benefited from the kind of affection that sci-fi authors typically devote to description. The narrator has no better knowledge of science, medicine, etc., than the characters, leaving the reader with dull explanations for catastrophes—the land is toxic, full stop, and no opportunity is afforded to investigate this state in a way that might give the reader some clue as to why or how.
Such an extravagant and ultimately fruitless approach to a story that ought to have been delicious. Where were the everyday artifacts, the everyday things lost on the characters but token to us? Or frightening cave bears? Not even a Statue of Liberty, half sunk, visage shattered, where nothing beside remains. The pure pleasure elements are missing in The Pesthouse because Crace didn't take pleasure in writing it.
Le Monde reports that Sarközy is readying to eliminate or roll up several Ministries—potentially including the Ministry of Culture—in a quick-strike effort to shrink government. Mssr. Reagan? Oui, il l'aime.
In which Townhall columnist Mary Grabar quotes from a 1966 Thomas Pynchon essay after the Watts race riots:
Thomas Pynchon . . . observed "white culture," a "creepy world of precardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order." We white people are so darn repressed . . . so unlike those authentic black folks who are much closer to nature and their primal, savage selves.What Pynchon in fact observes about Whitey in his original essay: "[A]mong so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence." A slightly more nuanced reflection than had he slurred black people as savages in a defense of savagery, or, wait, what is it that Grabar's going on about?
Her essay is standard Townhall fare: racial misdirection, quotes lifted from context, singularly personal anecdotes, metaphorical strawmen. (Observe when she compares Pynchon to a lazy grad student, then realizes that grad student by inhabiting the role with an anecdote, then extends the range of her target from one writer to include the entire liberal elite, past and present. Standard—but balletic.) And the pretext of Grabar's column is surely mandatory: the latest perfidy published on the New York Times editorial page. But the context of the essay—a spirited defense of French president Nikolas Sarközy? "Sarközy and Me"‽ It's just embarrassing. A conservative movement that boasts about drinking French wine has lost its True North. What would Mssr. Reagan say?
The New York Times calls them "trapeze dresses" and says that they're designed to show off a woman's clavicles, of all things. But come on. A lot of these potato-sack dresses don't reveal the collarbone. In fact, the best of them don't and aren't even designed with that in mind. Sure, there are counterexamples—hot!—but these dresses, as a family, don't highlight the neck any more than others.
Also, it's not as if the women modeling these dresses got skinnier for this season. Rail thin may be in, but then rail thin always has been, right? so you can't draw decent conclusions about what women are doing with their bodies from the runways. Highlighting the clavicle, I dunno. But in any case, it's gratifying to know that the fashionista at the Times agrees with me, contra my commenters.
Did you know that Walter De Maria was the original drummer for the Velvet Underground? No joke. Courtesy of the invaluable U B U W E B, two De Maria percussion tracks:
A letter to the editor with regard to an item I wrote; my response follows the letter. See also.
You know it's bad news that Alice Walton is visiting your museum when officials refuse to confirm or deny her visit. Smaller museums don't typically shuttle major collectors in through the back door under cloak of night.
After a Maier Museum of Art insider tipped her off to the trip, diligent reporter Christa Desrets checked flight records at the private-jet terminal at Lynchburg's airport. A twenty million–dollar jet flying from and later returning to Mineral Wells, Texas (Walton's home)? The Crystal Bridges logo (pictured above) couldn't make it any clearer.
What's so wrong with Walton dropping in? Nothing, per se—it's the museum who's treating her like she's poison. Perhaps they know as well as I do that it's bad museum policy to start thinking about deaccession only after a deep-pocketed baron expresses interest in something in the collection. That would be something to be ashamed about, though it's far from clear that anything of the sort is going on.
I've been in New York for a few days and failed to note here that Artkrush mentioned G.p in its issue about the art blogosphere. Reading over it makes me feel first appreciation, and then guilt for drafting a post about the long offseason that awaits the Dallas Mavericks. Well, if Mark Cuban can get away with writing nothing about his team's humiliating defeat on his blog, I can too.
As the risk of relentless self-promotion, here is a link to the online version of my City Paper ColorField.remix feature. And there's more! Click away, God help you, to hear me talk about the works highlighted in the article in this slideshow podcast.
It is bad practice to use one's blog to expound ex ante defenses of one's potentially pain-inducing forays into new new media, so I won't. Much as I love to hear myself talk, I find it painful to listen to the sound of my own voice, so I haven't heard past the part where I say "drop E" when I mean "drop D." Apologies to any doom-metal guitarists out there.
UPDATE: Link fixed.
Item! My City Paper feature on the ColorField.remix festival hits newsstands today. Pick up a paper and you'll find:
Quite fortunate that the City Paper got color before this article. The B&W-printed mockup came with a funny comment, a note scrawled over a foggy, halftone image reproduction : "Is this a painting?"
If you're Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas and you've just suffered (or at least observed) as your season ended with a whimper, where do you go to shake it off? You go to Buboys and Poets, right?, because the NBA is just your deskjob, and you are, in your own words, more than an athlete.
In fact, you slouch at 24/7, a U Street joint that we Flophouse writers sometimes hit up for shawarma. Better luck next year, Thomas.
Kevin Drum wtfs the National Review for publishing this line by Thomas Sowell:
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.I kid you not, in just a few hundred words he's skipped on to the sorry state of pitching in baseball. (Johnny Wholestaff, my ass! When I am king, Ron Guidry will be first against the wall.)
If you ask me, this line, a gem Sowell passes on from a nephew of a reader—oh, the red-American "reader", that font of five-and-dime wisdom, who probably considered this phrase, rolled it over his tongue and perceived its truth from every angle, while he sat, squinting against the setting summer sun, watching the rivalry game at the local Little League field, where boys play ball and somehow, along the way, through the spit and the grit and the long extra innings, and not without a little tough love, grow into the men that built this nation and make it strong, and that "This Is Our Country" song from the Chevy commercial is always playing, everywhere, no one even thinks to ask how that's just playing all the time, and readers are good but nephews of readers, every writer wishes for a nephew of a reader, for they are one in a generation, although sometimes more: young and brash, hawks, revolutionaries you see, bright-eyed and laser-focused, with true vision and singular commitment to identifying and then analogizing the enemy—redeems it all:
Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented worker' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist.'That works for me.
Hey, I've got a scoop: the semifinalists for the $25,000 Sondheim Prize. Artists who are still in the running to become Baltimore's next top emerging artist are listed below. (Artists who work or live primarily in the District are listed in bold.)
Seth Adelsberger, Chul-Hyun Ahn, Lillian Bayley, Heather Boaz, Mark Cameron Boyd, Edward Brown, Lynn Cazabon, Richard Cleaver, Mary Coble, Kathryn Cornelius, Frank Hallam Day, Eric Dyer, Neil Feather, Shaun Flynn, Steven Frost, Dawn Gavin, Geoff Grace, Susannah Gust, Maren Hassinger, Sam Christian Holmes, Jason Horowitz, Courtney Jordan, Brian Kain, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Magnolia Laurie, Joey P. Manlapaz, Gabriel Martinez, Jeanette May, Lisa Moren, Brandon Morse, Jeremy Rountree, Erik Sandberg, Tony Shore, Molly Springfield, Deirtra Thompson, Ren Trevio, Karen Yasinsky, Jason ZimmermanRead more about the prize and the artists here; place bets in comments.
Another Wemple item: He reports that the Washington Post beat on-the-ground news teams on the Virginia Tech slayings story by making phone calls. Wemple writes:
So bag all the advice you got from your editor or journalism prof. Those are the folks who've established the wisdom that good reporting involves burning calories. Get out of the office. Hit the streets. Just think of the acronym that has long inspired reporters at the Los Angeles Times: GOYA/KOD—Get Off Your Ass/Knock On Doors."But the acronym already exists: "Pick Up the Damn Phone"!In light of the Post's reportorial romp of last week, a new acronym is in order: SD/HSC—"Sit Down, Have Some Coffee."
The real lesson I took away—and probably everyone who went to J-school knows this—is that the only way to search out college students for a pressing story is over MySpace and Facebook and IM. Obvious, in hindsight.
