My tribute to Herb White is now on newsstands and, while you can read about his rather remarkable life online, I recommend that you grab a physical copy of the paper if you're able. City Paper art director Pete Morelewicz did a wonderful job putting together a map of the city with pinpoints linking to blurbs showing, location by location, the span of White's influence on the District. I'm grateful that he didn't say "No wtf" when I asked him for "map maybe with bubbles lol".
It was affecting to write an observation about a man I've never met, especially given how many people tracked me down to say some words of respect about the man for the record.
Consider dropping by DCAC on July 3, which the city is recognizing as Herb White Day. Councilmember Jim Graham speaks about White here.
Beck's Sea Change is a album I've overlooked; I figured I was above West Coast countrypolitan dabbling, but as it turns out, it's a wonderful record and when weather and circumstances conspire, it's the only one that does the trick.
Anyone going to the reception in McLean for Strictly Painting tonight? Want to give me a ride? E-mail me: specialcapps $ gmail # com.
If I've lent you a book, you may return it this summer without shame or late fee. There are some holes on my bookcase and I can't remember in every instance what used to fill them, so here's a post to jog your memory about that book you borrowed that one time that we've both since forgotten about.
It's so hot outside, in fact, that the G.p server melted, no joke, taking it with it all the thrilling content I've posted since last week. You'll have to content yourself with a couple things I wrote for this week's City Paper: first, an appreciation of Herb White, an arts patron, restaurateur, and founder of DCAC, a guy who left a large footprint in the District. For the appreciation, I focused on the places on the places he shaped in the city, so look for a map with a story about his patronage. For more about the man's life, the Washington Post's obit is here.
Also in this week's edition, I've got an item on Strictly Painting. Which made for my annual adventure into North Virginia. This time, I carefully copied down the one-two punch of Metro and city bus directions that would take me from home to hinterlands, but then, five steps into the furnace called outside, I called Charles and asked to commandeer his car. Wheels with A/C: score! Driving in NoVA: problematic! After the McLean exit failed to materialize (and signs for Manassas appeared), I bailed for Vienna. (Having been lost there during my last adventure, it was the devil I knew.) After taking the exit and dialing up my GPS system, I found my way to McLean, with a brief pit stop at Jamming Ja-va, which is known to your correspondent to serve the best chili in town. Pork and tomatillo. See the painting show and make a day of it.
While I read these Smithsonian reports, you watch this koala video:
I steadfastly maintain that the koala is the keee-yutest bear, and with this, I believe I've put that debate to bed. G and I are getting a pair. You'll find them on our backs toting point-and-click cameras, to wit.
Another Corc kernel to pass along: Sarah Newman, who replaced Stacey Schmidt as junior curator, is curating "Postmodernism", the followup to the Corcoran's "Modernism" show. That show started at the V&A and traveled to the Corc with Paul Greenhalgh; the Postmodernism starts here and will wind up there. More about Newman here.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the V&A is also staging an intermezzo exhibit that won't travel stateside: "Cold-War Modernism". Never heard of it.
[So sue me, but I started up with an Mmorpg. It's all Emily's fault—she knew full well when she sent me the link that I was powerless to resist a text-based zombie apocalypse simulator.]
At the start, there's not too much for a z00b to do, so my time has been mostly absorbed by swaying to and fro and groaning every so often—errands I can take care of while I work. I think that Penny Heights, my adopted neighborhood, might be a bad one: there's graffiti everywhere ("PHDF Secured This BLOCK!"), and my first attempt to dine locally was met with some hostility (the business end of a sawed-off). It's been a little lonely, sure. Beyond the occasional scientist who finds me in a brain-addled stupor and extracts my DNA—it's a local custom, I guess—I've had few interactions. Quarantine might be too strong a word, but I do feel isolated. I've always been a union guy, and I'm thinking about joining up with the Local, which ought to improve my lot and expand my social network.
If you're ever in the area, don't be a stranger: I'm Armsmasher from Penny Heights, and currently I'm located outside the Salle Building, where I'm occupied with smashing a barricade in hopes of figuring out what's going on with those lights inside. Drop by and I'll have you for dinner!
After a thorough consideration (I'm sure), Documenta 12 denies Terence Koh "accreditation" as an artist. Marc Spiegler has the goods.
BONUS: AFC selects some T-Koh favorites.
Jonathan Binstock, contemporary curator of art at the Corcoran, has left that position for . . . Citibank?
1. Sarah Hromack explains that Serpentine Gallery pulled the plug on a light projection piece by Paul Chan about life in Baghdad before the Iraq War. Why? Because Fox News was hosting a party at the gallery. Serpentine, your new name is Sniveling.
2. Not only does Antonin Scalia defend Jack Bauer at an international justice conference, he also—no, let's take a moment to consider that. Whew, that's sorry to read. I understand that it's only a conference, and the attendees are like people at any other conference—they hope the hotel has HBO, they'd like to catch up on real work between sessions, they hope not to run into exes, whatever. But Scalia isn't a middle manager or a lowly graduate student, he's a Justice of the Supreme Court, and there is a dignity to that office that flows with its holder wherever he goes. Scalia should bear his office much better than he does. Watch all the 24 you like, sir, but remember that you have one of the highest duties in the entire world.
Anyway, the Globe and Mail:
"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.The correct answer is, yes, Jack Bauer has the right to a jury trial, and if reasonable evidence is put forth saying he broke U.S. laws or U.S.–signed treaties, then yes, a jury will convict him, but nevertheless, yes, sometimes doing the right thing involves breaking rules, however, the only world in which doing the right thing necessitates lifting the ban on torture is the world of fiction. In the real world, there is never perfect knowledge of ticking time-bombs, and anyway, torture is not a useful way to interrogate people if it's reliable intelligence (instead of cheers from the audience) that you're hoping to gather. (Yep, we're fucked.)
Michael O'Sullivan has the right take on the Bethesda Painting Awards. The jury's decision to recognize Matthew Klos with first prize is unfortunate for everyone involved, even Klos, who hasn't yet had time enough away from school to develop his work. And the jury's reasoning for occluding Fiona Ross is bizarre:
According to gallery director Catriona Fraser, who serves as the non-voting chairwoman of the awards, that Ross's works are on paper rather than traditional canvas, linen or wood panel (along with her use of ink instead of acrylic or oils) caused the jury to question whether they were, properly speaking, paintings.This doesn't hold up. Cara Ober, second-place prize-winner, paints on paper. Maggie Michael, third prize (an eyebrow-raising third prize, as she was easily the front-runner) paints using spray-paint/aerosol delivery in recent work. I'm sure there are other examples among the semifinalists of artists who break the prescriptive norms but it hardly matters since presumably the jurors saw Ross's work when they chose her from among 200 or so artists to move on to the semifinalist round.
Alexander Chancellor passes on this item about David Hockney and the UK smoking ban:
The imminence of the smoking ban, which starts on July 1, has goaded David Hockney to speak out once more against what he sees as this gross infringement of our civil liberties. His main point, of course, is that we should not have "dreary people" telling us what to do, but he also plays down the dangers of smoking. Many great artists smoked, including JMW Turner, he said at the opening of Tate Britain's Turner exhibition this week; and some of them, such as Monet and Picasso, lived to a ripe old age. He didn't go as far as to say that smoking could be good for you, but he sort of implied it.Huh, I would've guessed that living in LA would have cured Hockney of this particular prejudice. Or at least inured him to busybodies.
Elsewhere in the UK: Did Damien Hirst's For the Love of God find a buyer? In the Guardian, I comment on what Hirst's piece is not.
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I've heard this happens in other journalists' lives, and now it's happened in mine. Yesterday, making a routine phone call to try to track down contact info for a story, I inadvertently alerted someone to the fact that her friend had died. I couldn't help but feel callous, like my role in telling her had been a callous role, even though it wasn't and things like this happen from time to time, journalism notwithstanding.
Kevin Drum is right: the "Stars & Bucks" signage in Brian Ulrich's photo from Ramallah is something.
Which brings to mind Megan Stack's LAT piece: a female correspondent's perspective on life under "the world's most stringent public moral code" in Saudi Arabia. She writes that Western franchises like Starbucks abide by the prevailing code governing the appearance and behavior of women. There's a sensible, colonial prescription for change in there: If Saudis want their frappuccinos, they should be asked to wait in a single co-ed line, just like everyone else in the world does. The draw of the Colonel's 13 original herbs and spices might be the only force in the neighborhood powerful enough to shake society free from the deeply ingrained, but generally disfavored, grip of old tradition. Say what you will about crass consumerism, but it can be an excellent vehicle for transmitting and incentivizing some very base standards for sexual equality. (And transfats. Delicious, delicious transfats.)
In the absence of any domestic pressure, of course, these corporations are under no obligation to take on any business risk abroad. So stop buying Starbucks, already, and ask them to pair their generally broad and generous benefits for employees at home with principled community standards abroad.
This call-to-arms probably deserves a disclaimer. I'll explain. So, I've always taken real satisfaction from idle, manual labor, from helping people move (seriously!) to pushing a broom around (of course, this doesn't apply to my own home). No, really, I'm not kidding. I need something to get me away from the computer and criticism. When a couple of friends—one who works as a Senate staffer on the Hill, another who just finished law school—took up some shifts at the 9:30 working the kitchen, I felt a little bit jealous. As it happened, the timing worked out just right for me to moonlight with the working ranks: I met a nice couple from San Francisco who were opening a great coffee bar about a mile east of my house; I bought a bike (a spunky hybrid named Topanga!); and summer arrived, and with it, a lull in the galleries.
So, to break up the day, I'm working a couple shifts a week, really just a few hours, at the Big Bear Cafe, which is fantastic and won't ask you to stand in line according to your sex and doesn't even have any Riyadh branches for you to worry about. I'm already miserable about a couple of early mornings I have scheduled, but otherwise I get to load up my iPod and wipe down counters and indulge for free my considerable caffeine addiction. Structured work in a nice, clean neighborhood spot. So stop by already! BBC @ R and 1st NW.
(This is your thread for jokes about how, 10 years after enrolling in college, I'm still serving you coffee.)
In the Express today I have an exclusive on seven new acquisitions by the Hirshhorn:
A dealer passes on this Artinfo article by Sarah Douglas on the "Venice effect": How (and whether) Venice shapes Chelsea. I'm working on a related piece—on the converse effect, in fact—so keep an eye out for that.
Jeffry "Cuddles" Cudlin passes on some Ian and Jan–esque video by Marina Abramovic. I'll see his YouTube clip, and raise him some Bruce Nauman:
Whoops—guess not. Burned DVDs of Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68)? Soaring off pirates' shelves. Bit-torrented Bruce? Clogging all ur tubes. Anyway, you can watch the video here, but you have to sit through two minutes of Pinchneck (1968) first.
UPDATE: What's an Artists' Rights Society, anyway? Turns out, that's the local branch of the Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Auteurs et Compositeurs, a busybody organization that's been squabbling with the European Union recently over interests that dealers, estates, users, and the market are much better able to regulate themselves.
According to the New Yorker: Steve Earle will perform the opening theme for the next season of The Wire. That is all, and that is enough.
Jen Graves in the Stranger mentions that a television spot featuring a psychotically animated version of the 2012 Olympics logo is causing seizures across the UK. Christ almighty, I hope it didn't take epilepsy on an epic scale for Britons to reconsider this one:
Graves calls it a "swastika or two Simpsons characters sexing it". Christ, is that ever ugly. I'm anxious just looking at that. I'm going to have to push that down the screen, aren't I? Totally: a Nazi standard by way of Hasbro.
When the Vija Celmins drawing retrospective closed at the Hammer in April, I figured I'd be seeing it soon on the East Coast or pricing out tickets for a Midwest flight. I just assumed, never bothering to check, and then—nothing. No more U.S. dates. How did one of the most important contemporary shows of the year find only one venue stateside?
Today, after several rounds of telephone and e-mail tag, I spoke with Jonas Storsze, curator at Centre Pompidou, the institution that organized the exhibit. It wasn't for lack of interest that the Celmins retrospective didn't find another taker. Storsze explained to me that, given the sensitive nature of the medium and concerns about overexposure, there were never any plans to travel the show to more than three venues, tops. He explained that SFMOMA expressed interest at an early stage, and Pompidou later spoke with DMA, the Menil Collection (how great would the show look there?), and Museo Tamayo (in Mexico City), in addition to several museums across Europe.
As these things go, none of these institutions committed to the show. There can be any number of scheduling, financial, or temperamental reasons why each institution decided to pass. But Storsze proffers a plausibly prime explanation:
The third venue would have been a smaller version [of the show] anyway; there were several institutions and collectors who did not wish to lend their works for more than two. Vija Celmins's body is very, very small; we had two-thirds of her production in the show. The people who own her drawings are very careful and do not wish to overexpose them.So much the worse for those of us living elsewhere. Christopher Bedford's review of the Hammer retro for Afterall serves as a great primer on Celmins.
What a cop-out! Today media and fans clog the intertubes with clues and theories and Easter eggs to prove whatever theory you prefer, but what the finale actually did (irrespective of all the extra-textual bullshit David Chase decided to build into the episode) was to revoke the whole premise of the show. Mob boss sees shrink. In the episode before last, when Melfi shows Tony Soprano to the door (evoking the end of The Godfather) we know that this bodes poorly for Soprano, who has wrestled with panic his entire life and career. Chase exited Melfi in an inexcusably clumsy way (a colleague at a dinner party Googled a study, a study, singular?), it set up Soprano's fall by taking away his crutch. The viewer could only expect the burden of his childhood and his lack of an heir apparent to come crashing down on him.
Instead: Having achieved total victory by following Phil Leotardo's risky proposition of war, the entire New York crew decides to join up with the shambles of the wrecked New Jersey family (whose business New York had already assumed!), thereby leading to the Leotardo's demise. Having never proven suitable to take up his father's work, A.J. Soprano finds himself taken with another category of crime (terrorism!: why else his professed obsession with the car's explosion, his alternating invented justifications for joining the military to get to Afghanistan?)—only to be dissuaded from this path when Soprano Sr. flashes a shiny object in front of him.
The season-specific conflicts all tidied up, the messiest bit comes in at the end. Chase chooses not to conclude the show, but that, of course, isn't an option for a media-heralded conclusion of an epic series. The show tells us with its ambiguity that Soprano keeps on keeping on: Maybe, in the end, he's pinched by the testimony he describes or someone finally pops him or he just lives his life with his family, and all of those things in their copotential possibility are suggested by this Schroedinger's cat–foreshadowed dinner, but none of these foreseeable endings speaks specifically to the premise of the show: Mob boss sees shrink.
SHORTER POST: Tony Soprano's dead, and David Chase killed him.
Cathleen McGuigan notes in her Newsweek piece that Thomas Eakins was fired "in 1886 for removing a male model's loincloth during a class with female students". The Art Bulletin summarized critical characterizations of Eakins: "a truculent individualist, a salty realist, a martyr to Victorian prudery, a psychological introvert, or a sexual pervert". A friend who is studying photography from that era regales me with pervy stories and points to this page of Eakins images, and, yeah, I can see letters of resignation following naturally from those.
Now I'm inclined to look up the collaborations between Eakins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Walt Whitman in Philadelphia in the gay old 1880s—this article seems to be a good place to start, if you're so inclined.
Newsweek's Cathleen McGuigan phones in a report on Crystal Bridges, asking why art critics and patrons are so unnerved by Alice Walton's art-world maneuvering. Why does Walton's money scare people? Why not ask Laura Katzman—the director of museum studies at the Randolph-Macon Woman's College's Maier Museum, who resigned in protest from her tenured position after Walton's shopping-trip visit to the museum?
McGuigan writes that "locals can get jumpy", citing local news reports issued "supposedly because [Walton] was checking out the fine collection at Randolph-Macon College's Maier Museum of Art". (The story's significance expands beyond the purview of the art world. Here's the short version: Recognizing that single-sex schools don't compete in higher education today, Randolph-Macon Woman's College decides—rather quietly—to admit men. The school promises angry students and alumni that the university won't be forced to sell assets or its character with the transition. However, in the wake of an alumni backlash over the sex change and the school's secretiveness—a backlash that cost the school big time—the university starts to look to its assets for sources of income. It badly needs to replenish endowment spending, which has gotten so out of hand the school's accreditation is at risk, without alarming alumni even more. Hence, an audit recommending that the university sell its art collection; hence, a visit from Walton.)
It's not wrong that the lion prowls the savannah after the wounded antelope (as a friend likens Walton), but it's not better for these institutions—the Maier, the whole city of Philadelphia—that Walton arrives to buy art but not to support art institutions. Notes the Richmond Times Dispatch:
"One of the things that's frustrating is the continual talk of it as an asset," said junior Emily Knoble, a studio art major from Tucson, Ariz. "They're talking dollars and cents instead of creativity and inspiration and culture."Right: Critics like me and educators like Katzman get nervous because institutions start talking very institutionally when a baroness like Walton on hand, as if their decisions affected Excel spreadsheets more than their communities and constituencies.
Finally—and this gets ignored in favor of deliberations about aesthetics and acquisitions—but it should be said every time Walton makes any purchase that she benefits from a ludicrous tax giveaway written for Crystal Bridges by the Arkansas state legislature.
Check out your buddy and mine, Ezra Klein, on Hardball.
More fun than listening to Yglesias and Ezra squabble over the immigration bill at the dinner table is watching Michelle Malkin go at it with the Wall Street Journal editorial board. The whole board! When they assemble, they are known as The Man! The Man supports the guest-worker program. Malkin says that by supporting a contract-laborer program with Mexico, these Rockefeller Republicans fail to consider and even invite across our borders
the al-Qaeda operatives who plotted not only 9/11 but also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the LAX millenium plot, the New York City subway plot, and the New York City landmark bomb plot.Though not all of those attacks were designed by al-Qaeda, fundamentally, I have to agree with Malkin here: We must not hire al-Qaeda operatives as temporary workers. They are shifty and don't assimilate well. Violence, not the national English, is the only language they understand. No to al-Qaeda—not even for the jobs Americans don't want.
Playing this week at E Street—it's just not to be missed, friends. The superlative reviews from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post (among many other outlets, I'm sure) are all deserved. I'm busy but I'll write more about it soon. Go see it!
Not whether Tony will die, but how? Given the disappointing arc this (half)season, I will guess that it will not be by fire but by ice. What's ruining the family—beyond the sudden, nearly far-fetched, and certainly disappointing revelations that Tony Soprano has a gambling addiction and that his addiction has driven the family to the brink of insolvency—is the lack of an appropriate successor. It's a shame that the writers invested so much in making the family (that is, on the business side) look incompetent, since this is a problem that could wreck Tony's family (business and immediate) even if the Jersey family were doing as well as it was when Johnny Sacks was running New York. (Which wasn't that long ago, in the series, which is one reason why the sudden alterations to the established power relations between NJ and NY are so unacceptable, notwithstanding the fact that gambling addiction is a powerful disease, evidence of which the viewers should have seen long ago if Tony Soprano had this flaw all along.) I'm envisioning the end of The Sopranos through the lens of Lion in Winter, in which Carmella realizes even before Tony does that Anthony Jr. is unsuitable and makes a play to secure her future: leaving him and wrecking the family, thereby exposing Tony to threats external.
But you go into an open thread with The Sopranos you have, so: I'll say that Tony dies from a heart attack provoked in some fashion by the anxiety he feels in retrospect about having killed Christopher Moltisanti, his last best choice.
Ann Althouse argues that fiction shouldn't be taught in public schools. A stalking horse—but for what? I'll consider it while I'm reading on the beach.
UPDATE: I promise you, I gave Althouse no thought whatsoever while I was closing waves, root beers, and short stories by Will Self. But now I'm giving her program a little more thought.
Althouse:
And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school.
So that's pretty straightforward: get rid of English classes, literature classes. (But I don't think your reading skillz are teh suxx0rz, Henry; I was looking for an angle and that probably slanted your reading of my reading, lolz.)
Maybe it's Culture Wars shell-shock that leads me to suspect that Althouse—a conservative who is not above specious argumentation—objects to, and with this suggestion deprecates, exposure to art. She's down on fiction (the tell-tale "storybooks" slam on novels), so there's reason to suspect that she is suggesting this program at the very least because she does not like fiction. "I worry that authority figures will choose fiction that they approve of because it teaches the values they like" sounds like a nod toward contrarianism, but may just as well be a swipe at the liberal academy, and, in any case, expresses a concern that applies to subjects like history and science. Intelligent design, anyone?
Subtext and context notwithstanding, she's arguing that English classes are unnecessary because the goal of reading education is to promote reading comprehension, and comprehension alone—that fiction has no utility. She assumes that this is self evident. I don't think it is self evident, I don't think she's right on the comprehension point, and furthermore I don't think that she's even arguing what she says she's arguing.
Althouse claims but never proves that fiction is an inefficient way to teach kids how to read. In fact, the only counterargument she anticipates and falsifies is that people might not learn to love fiction if they're not exposed to it during school—which is neither here nor there. Althouse's question should be whether history and science texts are better vehicles for developing reading skills.
Reading isn't merely processing the logic of a text; acuity is also required. Teaching kids how to read, and read well as they age, means exposing them to all the diverse textual strategies that writers use to convey information. Learning to understand and anticipate and imitate strategies like metaphor, symbolism, and the first-person perspective makes for strong, literate readers. None of these strategies appears in junior-high American history textbooks. Which—so long as we're debating positions built entirely on personal preferences—were really fucking boring.
