Just landed after a red-eye from Dallas. Some things to share later, but I have to tell you first: I had been reading Elie Wiesel's Night on the plane, a gift from my brother's new girlfriend (along with a Star Wars pop-up book—oh, she's good). I set it down so that I could take a nap. I dreamed that I picked up the book, turned it over, and read the author's bio/blurb. Where it ought to have listed his amazing accomplishments or enumerated his many published works, the text simply read: Elie Wiesel: "I'm kind of a big deal."
But he is! Don't look at me like that!
I'm stealing this post whole cloth from Sadly, No!, if only to introduce it to an ever-so-slightly larger audience. It's the video for the Silver Apples' "Oscillations," from 1968's pure piece of pwnage, Silver Apples:
My year-end galleries column for the City Paper, concerning art parties I don't really enjoy and the final nail in Dupont Circle's coffin. Click click. Jeffry Cudlin has written the report on museums—read that one, too.
Far be it from me to defend the death penalty as it's practiced today, but I'm frustrated by today's New York Times article on capital punishment in the state of Texas. The Times reports:
This year's death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.In fact nothing has changed about the rate or the application of the death penalty in Texas, except that they slowed somewhat. So what's the development? Nor is it honest or edifying to hang the whole article on that 60 percent figure—which is jarring, even blindly horrifying, but not meaningful without controlling for state population and murder statistics.
There are vastly many more people in Texas than in any of its peer states that assign capital punishment. There are vastly many more murders in Texas than in any of its peer states that assign capital punishment. Comparing the number of executions in Texas with the number in South Dakota dramatically understates the fact. Death penalty rates are better for comparison's sake.
A study performed by Cornell University in 2004 found that Texas assigns the death penalty at a rate lower than the national average (2 percent versus 2.5 percent). The most death penalty-prone states were not Texas or Florida, but rather Oklahoma (6 percent) and Nevada (5.1 percent). In part this rate disparity owes to Texas's sentencing standards. In order for the death penalty to be assigned, a crime must meet certain objective criteria (scroll down). For example, when a police officer or firefighter is murdered, when a child under age 6 is murdered, or in the case of multiple murders. Subjective criteria—the "heinousness" of a crime, for example—are not considered. Texas's sentencing standards are those that tend to find sympathy among even moderate opponents of the death penalty.
The speed with which the state carries out capital punishment, however, finds no quarter among sensible observers. Both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the Texas Fifth Circuit are prosecutorially oriented; a state prosecutor explained to me today that there are no is only one defense lawyer serving on the Court of Criminal Appeals. The speed of the system is aggressive, as critics point out, and is certainly out of step with the current national mood. (Indicators of which include the so-called national moratorium—although it is no such thing. The Supreme Court has merely stayed every execution by way of lethal injection that has come across its desk. A formal SCOTUS moratorium would have delayed the hasty execution of Michael Richard; the "de facto" moratorium did not.)
The Times: "The death penalty developments that have dominated the news in recent months are unlikely to have anything like the enduring consequences of Texas' vigorous commitment to capital punishment." True for the convicts put to death, of course; true for the families of their victims, I would imagine. In other respects, this is a dramatic statement. The state's execution of executions is impressive and awful, the product of a pervasive political problem that inflects the justice system. Its devotion to the death penalty, however, is truly average.
Ezra Klein on the sharp uptick in cloture votes under this Congress:
When minority Democrats sought to slow the Republican agenda by asserting filibuster power far more infrequently, Republicans convinced the media to tar them as "obstructionists" unwilling to permit "yes-or-no votes." Conversely, the Democrats, facing a much greater display of intransigence, have been deemed ineffectual by the media, and the situation has been represented as if they are inexplicably failing to pass their agenda, rather than watching the Republicans act to block it.Why on earth don't majority Democrats hand minority Republicans telephone books and tell them to start actually filibustering? It is only a gentleman's agreement that invests the threat of a filibuster with the full weight of an actual filibuster. So long as Republicans choose to turn every vote into a 60-vote cloture issue, Democrats might as well require them to own up to the mechanism that makes this obstructionism possible. At zero cost the Republicans can currently threaten filibuster on any legislation that comes down the pike; at the cost of reading from the encyclopedia all night long, some of these threats will surely be proven to be bluffs. Better yet, an intractable press will have to take notice when Republicans are forced to make a circus display of torpedoing popular legislation. Also, what the Democrats are doing now isn't working: Popular legislation is not passing and Democrats are being tagged "ineffective."
Jonah Goldberg: still a prat. Given my housemates' occupations I'd expected to see that book on the coffee table by now. What good are these guys?
I'm leaving tomorrow for Texas, where I'll celebrate Christmas by trekking to San Angelo and then to San Antone to visit with relatives. When I'm not on the road, I'll be with my family in sleepy Post Oak Bend (population: 432). Don't know whether I'm looking at radio silence over the duration (hope not), but I expect that communication will be spotty. Even the mail is slow in POB. Email away, though, and I'll get back to you.
Back in a week! Happy holidays.
Photo by rodeomilano.
In The American Spectator, Charles Paul Freund takes up the cause of the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, writing that preservationists are pressing too far for the Brutalist church:
Whether an appeal to expertise in Brutalism trumps philistinism, along with property rights, spirituality, and the church's own sense of its religious mission (and thus the First Amendment) remains open both to debate and to legal action.By the sound of it, the Historic Preservation Review Board violated every enumeration of the Bill of Rights except the Third Amendment—which only means that they haven't made the Christian Scientists quarter troops yet.
The Spectator deems blood and treasure central to the defense of the church. Freund writes:
Federal law protects churches from local preservationist enthusiasms. Many congregations are cash poor, and are often housed in old buildings that may be appealing and arguably historic, but which they cannot afford to maintain. Forcing such congregations into a preservationist box may, as one lawyer told the Post, inhibit the congregation's religious expression.Is this the case at the Third Church of Christ, Scientist? Is Christian Science strapped for cash? The article doesn't say. Or rather, the report won't commit to the implied suggestion that the church's small draw (its congregation numbers 40–60 members) owes to a repugnant temple. (Is fifty so surprisingly small a number for a Christian Science congregation? One reader suggested that the Brutalist design is most fitting, given the extraordinary violence that Christian Scientists commit against their members (primarily, in the form of child abuse and neglect).)
But that's all beside the point, insofar as preservation is concerned. From the Washington Post's report:
Tersh Boasberg, preservation board's chair, said during the hearing that the board would not address First Amendment issues in its assessment of the church's architecture.Rightly so. Were the Historic Preservation Review Board to consider the "property rights, spirituality, and the church's own sense of its religious mission"—in this case or in any other case—the sensible conclusion would be that an organization's situation would almost certainly change at some point, and therefore, preservation would never be warranted. It is hardly palatable, especially from a libertarian perspective, for a public group to go about telling organizations that they can't cast off their architectural albatrosses, all in the name of "local preservationist enthusiasms". Nevertheless, the price of architectural continuity is some degree of rigidity that must inevitably be borne by the people who inhabit the buildings.Instead, he said, the board would base its ruling on whether the church's architecture is historically significant.
Given that groups like the Becket Fund exist to protect the flexibility of religious organizations, it is fitting—it is balancing—that the Historic Preservation Review Board considers architecture and architecture alone in making its decisions. Its judgment is not always right—but the suggestion that its conclusions are ill motivated does not hold up in this case.
UPDATE: According to a reader with ties to the church, the national Christian Science organization is in fact in dire financial straits.
How much would you pay to see the Beatles play live?
All alive and in full vigor of youth, of course. Playing at a mid-sized venue (say, the 9:30 Club, whose upcoming shows include Editors, Blonde Redhead, Lupe Fiasco, for size reference).
. . . the City Paper, if it has not run its critics' lists yet, and to The Field, whose From Here We Go Sublime was worth brushing off the nonmandatory and totally arbitrary cap of ten selections—my top ten favorite albums from 2007 drum roll ba-dum-ching:
Battles, MirroredIt only goes to show how mercurial this process of assigning best-ofs is: For the list I submitted to CP I ranked the submissions, and looking at that ranking just now, I clearly didn't know what the hell I was talking about last week. So today they're in alphabetical order. And I haven't given that Panda Bear album a listen, but I think that maybe I don't like it. Look in the City Paper on Thursday for a year-end essay on District art galleries and so on.
Caribou, Andorra
Dan Deacon, Spiderman of the Rings
Deerhunter, Cryptograms
Dirty Projectors, Rise Above
Feist, The Reminder
Liars, Liars
Radiohead, In Rainbows
UGK, Underground Kingz
White Williams, Smoke
As for the Best Show in 2007 That I Barely Remember Attending, that has to be Raccoo-oo-oon, a band I like okay but loved that night. I'm pretty sure I bought one of every piece of merchandise they had to offer.
Sadly, No! had better not be foolin' with these screenshots from Jonah Goldberg's oft re-titled book, Liberal Fascism, which apparently includes this line in the book jacket, authored in all sincerity, I kid you not: "The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore." (Via the entire Internet, just now.)
I. M. Pei, Third Church of Christ Scientist, 1971.
The same Washington Post editorial I slammed below clues me in to the fact that parishioners at the Third Church of Christ Scientist want to raze their I. M. Pei–designed building:
A few blocks west, at 16th and I Streets NW, stands the exposed concrete of the octagonal Christian Science church. Also erected in the early 1970s, it was designed by I.M. Pei & Partners at a time when Pei's firm also was designing several other complexes for the church. The abstractly sculpted mass at the corner of the block adjoins a high, featureless concrete wall extending north to an eight-story office building. The concrete sanctuary, wall and office building constitute an ensemble framing a plaza facing 16th Street.How's this béton brut beauty supposed to function as a civic space? It's a temple for a small congregation built near an adjoining Christian Science office building. That they'd like to sell the plot to developers, I 'll believe. What exactly would that do to "bring life" to 16th and Eye?The D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board is considering historic landmark designation for the church, contrary to the wishes of many church members, who, according to press reports, dislike the building and its architectural brutality. It's too big for the shrinking congregation, which would like to demolish the building to make way for a smaller sanctuary and to redevelop this prime site, especially because the lifeless plaza has never succeeded as a civic space.
If possible, Lewis's suggestion for Pei's piece is worse than his idea about the Mies. There's nothing to the building if you can't see its shape, of course.
The Washington Examiner reports that the Fenty administration is talking to the Bloomingdale's corporation about potentially locating a new store in the Mies Van der Rohe–designed Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library. If the Examiner's report is true, it suggests that the Fenty administration is no more serious about the fate of the library than the Williams administration. Less so, even.
Mayor Williams, at the very least, had identified a site for the library to be re-placed. Even if the Williams plan for the Old Convention Center (to be developed by Hines International and Archstone-Smith, and approved at one time by the City Council) only allocated 110,000 square feet for "civic use"—roughly one quarter of the area of the 400,000-square-foot Mies-designed library—it was, to be sure, a space.
Given that the proposed new library was intended to be a token aspect of an essentially commercial development at the Old Convention Center site, I find it far more credible that talks between Bloomingale's and the Fenty administration have focused on and will continue to focus on the prospect of the Old Convention Center site itself. Why would Bloomingdale's want to court negative press associated with replacing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library—whose eviction from the Mies building has not (to date) drawn sufficient support from the community, despite aggressive promotion by Mayor Williams and significant developer interest? Why would Bloomingdale's want to take on the cost of renovation for the Mies facility when it could build a new store in a commercial center a few blocks away? Why also would Mayor Fenty choose to stake out a plan to draw a new Bloomingdale's into the city rather than to build a new library for the city (or whatever he perceives to be the solution to whatever he perceives to be the problem with the old library)? And if the whole problem is that the Mies building is so offensively ugly and unmanageable, what's Bloomingdale's see in it?
Complicating matters further, the MLK Library was granted Landmark status by the Historic Preservation Review Board this year. The Historic Landmark and Historic District Preservation Act of 1978 safeguards landmark sites against alterations, including any "change in any interior space which has been specifically designated as an historic landmark". Landmark status protects modern designs from terrible "solutions" intended for changing tastes—like, for example, University of Maryland architecture professor Roger Lewis's proposal in the Washington Post last month. (Building something on top (!) of the Mies is supposed to accomplish what, now?) Makeup counters along the long, uninterrupted planes of Mies's lobby might not technically count as "alterations"—but proposed changes to the building have typically involved keeping the "shell" and gutting the insides.
That's not an option, now. Does Bloomingdale's realize this? I see every incentive for everyone involved to leave the Mies be and look toward the Old Convention Center site.
In the Washington Post story on the astounding and inevitable news that scientists have created entirely artificial DNA, staff writer Rick Weiss asks:
What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make?Whenever a story overblows the historical significance or marvelous might of al Qaeda et al., I'm reminded of the Barbary pirates. I have a vision of shipwrights and patentmasters wringing their hands throughout the 1780s, losing sleep over the steam engine and the frightening applications such technology might be put to by Tripoli. If the Ottoman corsairs get their hands on one—! It's not a totally random association of mine: Tripoli told the first Continental Congress that the pirates attacked American ships because they were charged to by the Qur'an, and that every Muslim lost while battling or pressing Westerners into service would see paradise. Furthermore, no one remember the Barbary pirates—just as no one will remember al Qaeda from an era that saw the birth of the artificial organism.
rj3 of Thrown for a Loop:
[I]t burns up a lot of carbon when world leaders travel to climate conferences like the one in Bali that just concluded. However, if by burning some jet fuel now they can reduce carbon emissions in the future, their greenhouse gas profligacy is worthwhile. If a person living in a big house can't comment on changing incentive systems, the only people who are left to do so will be dreadlocked college burnouts who you see trolling the streets for Greenpeace donations.Is that fair?[ . . . ]
Environmentalism is a classic collective action problem in which the actions of one have negligible impact, but the benefits of everyone acting the same way reap huge rewards for everyone. Acting green on your own may make you feel better, but you do nothing in the scheme of things. Policy solutions like a gas tax or increased CAFE standards, cap and trade emissions limits, the end of farm subsidies (including, counterintuitively ethanol subsidies) and perhaps more nuclear power generation will get things moving in the right direction. Best to take the money you spend on carbon offsets and send it to whomever is running against Sen. James Inhofe (R-1950).
rj3 describes recycling and other DIY environmental initiatives as politically counterproductive. But recycling is an example of one collective action that benefits everyone. When large urban centers adopt citywide recycling programs the benefits for the environment are appreciable; when suburban and less dense areas adopt those programs that benefit margin expands. Misguided or not, civic and environmental doers good had more hand in bringing these programs to bear than the collective action of the scientific policy establishment.
The dirty hippies complaining about delegates' jet fuel consumption on the way to Bali sure sound like strawmen to me, but maybe they are out there, outraging on their livejournals. Nevertheless rj3 has hit the nail on the head when he describes the dismissive Republican attitude toward green policy—an individual or ethical program that (liberals) can choose to opt into or not. Moralizing about consumption sticks in my craw, too—this NYT article on Etsy provides some frustrating examples—but it should not be oversold as a majority belief possessed among Americans or across the world.
In fact, the conference in Bali demonstrated that it isn't. Overcoming U.S. objections and deciding on a program that establishes that the whole world (!) will begin working now on a framework that the United States can then join in 2009—under new leadership—suggests a couple of truths about the planet's position on global warming. One, that the consensus on global warming among United States citizens is much closer to the world opinion than that of the obstructionist Bush administration; the world believes this to be the case, anyway (and it is), and the world believes that this truth will out come election time. Two, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the agreement in Bali shows that this truth really does have to out come election time. If Republicans win in 2008, the world has to kick the ball down the road until 2013. And who knows by then whether you still find India or China on board or, indeed, whether the science on global climate proffers the same solutions. Read John Quiggin on Bali, too.
To be sure, rj3's frustration with individual solutions like carbon offsets dovetails perfectly with the global position on the matter. Every dollar that you might spend saving the world over the next year should be funneled directly into Democratic coffers, because that's how we're gong to save the world.
Just about all my photos from Miami are up, and they're available here. Some didn't turn out, and I didn't take my camera out every day, so there's plenty I can't show you: Red Dot, Aqua Wynwood, and of course the things that for whatever reason just did not catch my eye.
In other online image news, the Wpa has at long last put its art registry online. They'll still publish the physical catalog, though.
In the Washington Post, Jessica Dawson all but savaged Jayme McLellan in the lede to her piece on why dealers from the District were participating in Art Basel Miami. It seems like Dawson chose to pick on the n00b—this year was McLellan/Civilian Art Projects's first trip to the fairs—but in fact, nothing about the hierarchy that close observers might identify among galleries in the District extends to the fairs. This year, success had to do with placement, not pecking order. Every dealer I spoke to at Aqua Wynwood was strained by the lack of traffic and sales. Dealers at the Aqua hotel fair, on the other hand, seemed to do much better business. None of this has anything to do with these galleries' relative stature. So I don't see how helpful it is to compare the interests of established galleries and those of younger galleries; once they arrive in Miami, they're almost all in the same boat.
I do believe dealers mean it when they say that they go to the fairs in hopes of gaining a wider exposure for their programs and their artists. Fairs do this. Which fairs end up doing this, though, is difficult to say; with 33 fairs over the course of 4 days, some of them just won't get any traffic.
Washington Post Style fashion critic Robin Givhan can't help but beat on Hillary Clinton. Not because she's poorly dressed, but because she's a woman, and women's clothing dominates the fashion world. I like that Givhan's column exists, but if she's going to divide her attention between the male and female candidates in a way that reflects the proportionate interests of the industry, she's going to be writing about Clinton often. Recognizing also that this is the first time the United States has seen such a high-profile woman candidate, and she could be writing about Clinton twice weekly. And that's all fine—no amount of hand wringing will change the fact that Clinton's fashion sense is newsworthy.
But how newsworthy? A-section newsworthy? Feminist-commentary newsworthy? Steve Benen says no, and I agree. The problem with Givhan is that she can't decide whether she wants to lead or follow the conversation. "Voters are being asked to envision something this country has never had," writes Givhan, "a female commander in chief." That is one take that voters are being asked to swallow—namely by Clinton's critics, or at least, with a mind to the language put forth by the right.
"Voters are being asked to envision something this country has never had: a female leader." Put another way, Givhan's question doesn't sound so ominous, and the pressing connection to the pant suit falls away, too. Close reading of clothing is not necessarily a bad thing but at the end of the day there were probably more newsworthy items to run in the front of one of the nation's largest newspapers that day.
(Courtesy of Tyler Green)
At my Flickr page you'll find photos from Miami. Right now I'm uploading photos from the main fair, with some quick thoughts wherever I dashed them. Caveat emptor: I was point-and-shooting in a hurry and am no great hand with a camera, and I won't be taking the time to make them presentable. For this page, though, I'll upload a few better images of some specific works worth the mention.
First, though, I wanted to introduce you to a new friend of mine, Art Astronaut:
In Chicago's Millenium Park, near Cloud Gate
At the Art Basel fair in Miami Beach
Art Basel wouldn't be complete without a Big Toy installation (e.g., 2006). Meet Arcangelo Sassolino.
Terrence Koh and Kirstine Roepstorff at Art Basel.
Today I walked the perimeter and latitudinal aisles of Art Basel, then scurried up the beach for a few of the satellite fairs. Some broad observations about Basel: Male n00dz are in, the abstraction is staid, and photography is surprisingly absent. One exception is the Koh and Roepstorff installation at Peres Projects, but it's work that everyone has seen by Koh, if not in this exact configuration. (Which is to say, butt seks.) Quite a lot of the photography I saw at the fair was more of the same or hardly recent.
Someone in the media lounge just suggested that the beach is blanketed by free WiFi, so the city doesn't bother wiring the convention center. You are spared a screed.
UPDATE: That doesn't really make much sense, does it? Why would that WiFi signal not penetrate the walls of the building? Where are the power outlets outside? You're still spared the full screed. Photos coming up.
For close to two decades, Art Miami has shown in January; this year, the fair finally answered the siren call of ABMB week in December. I am told that the transition did not happen without a hitch. Yesterday, the structure that houses the fair—along NW 2nd Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets—was plagued by power outages. Though there were rumors of power outages persisting today, a representative of Art Miami said that everything was running smoothly as of this morning; she suggested that the problem owed to the fact that the temporary structure was built from the ground up to house the fair. Another report suggested that installation continued yesterday, the first day of the fair, with trucks running the aisles. Ilana Vardy, director of Art Miami, is also the director of artDC.
Loughborough University classifies Miami as a gamma world city, but come the first week in December, it's the alpha and omega, at least as far as the art world is concerned. If that weren't reason enough to visit, it's supposed to snow in the District, starting tomorrow. So I'm skipping town early in the morning; check in this week for updates from Art Basel Miami and lots of gloating pictures in porn shorts and other beach attire.
Stuck in the District? Assuming you're not snowed in, you should attend Robert Storr's lecture at the Phillips Collection on Thursday. Price of admission gets you a seat in the auditorium.
Today I filed my list of top 10 albums from 2007 for the City Paper and UGK's Underground Kingz definitely made the cut. Sad news, then, that Pimp C was found dead in L.A.. Spencer and I listened to UGK's album (and Computer World for what that's worth) for a while today, so the news seemed especially incredible.
Last year I spent an unreasonable amount of money in Miami on cabs, often only to idle in Miami traffic, which is worse that I'd ever been lead to believe. The fairs advertise shuttles between South Beach and the Wynwood District, but I found that they never arrived. So this year i'm thinking about renting a bicycle, or, if that's not an easy option, buying some beater from a pawn shop or secondhand store, just for the week. Miami's flat, so getting around by bike should be easy—thing is, I don't remember seeing anyone actually riding a bike while I was there, so I'm wondering if a bike isn't a good prospect for some reason. Too much sand and not enough road? Too many little friends to say hello to? Anyone know?
This is a reasonable depiction of what I'm hoping to accomplish (soundtrack included).
Seeing as how fascination with Russia seems to be on the rise in the wake of the latest election and Putin's other maneuvers to maintain power, I thought I'd recommend Andrew Jack's Inside Putin's Russia as a primer on the man and his ways. I'm eager to read also Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia, though that was published in 2004, a year before Jack's book, so for something more current you might want to look elsewhere.
