Chris Cilizza gets the big scoop that Arlen Specter, well, (R D-PA). Specter's statement is here. The initial response from progressive corners seems to be a frustrated optimism: Speculation about the Democratic primary contender strong enough to take down Specter is already afoot, while others bemoan that even a Specter switch is a net loss for progressives, as he has said that he won't change his position on the Employee Free Choice Act. (Even though he's already switched sides once.)
I would go further than Scott Lemieux and say that not only should we expect a lot of wrangling to make the filibuster-proof Senate majority operate like a filibuster-proof Senate majority, it will be more difficult to arrive at 60 votes now that the Democrats ostensibly have them. The threat to take a vote away from an agenda is more palpable than the threat to refuse to support a piece of legislation. At 60 votes, the agenda is at hand. That means that Ben Nelson (D-CO) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) become less reliable votes, insofar as they can wrest more from the leadership for their compliance. And in the Democratic Senate, discipline seems to work bottom up, not top down.
But some votes are different than others. We have 60, let's pack some courts.
UPDATE: The Corner is mandatory reading today. Ramesh Ponnuru: "My initial reaction on hearing the news was that after generating a bunch of Democratic House seats, the Club for Growth has now produced its first Democratic senator." Mark Hemingway: "I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he's still a Democrat."
I reviewed the new Wilco concert film for the DCist. Take a look and, sure, I'll just go ahead and say, think about picking this up: You won't be disappointed.
One thing that struck me during the Q&A afterward is that Brendan Canty made a point of saying that the people who worked on this film are largely or all from the District. As if he were making a point about labor law or stimulus funding. I love that artists here care so much about this city; it's easy to forget but in my experience it's really unique.
Bob Boilen was sitting right behind me in the theater! Here is what he twittered afterward: "Is Wilco the best band in America? after seeing Ashes of American Flags, I'm sure of it. watch a clip and decide." Indeed, click click.
I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot!
So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.
For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
Robert Irwin, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?, 2007–8.
The line belongs to Lawrence Weschler, writing in The Believer about an improbable debate between Robert Irwin and David Hockney that has taken place entirely through his writing. (Improbable, but not unbelievable: Weschler has just published two books totaling 30 years of interviews with the former artist and 25 years of interviews with the latter.)
A nice line, anyway! I believe we are now at "to determining who is permitted to do the seeing."
If not in handcuffs, at least place him in context.
Because I have missed you, and because this is context worth having (and information worth sharing), I am painstakingly retyping a section of the book for you here. (And painstaking it is! I spilled miso soup on my keyboard a couple weeks back. I now enjoy the luxury of the
" ' P - 0 p : ) ; [arrow]keys through the laborious combination of keyboard remapping and perpetual cut-and-pasting.)
Anyhow, this excerpt is long but worth the read. It comes from a passage on issues facing the returning New Orleans diaspora:
Although government officials insist that the dirt in residents' yards is safe, Churchill Downs, Inc., the owners of New Orleans Fair Grounds, felt it was not safe for its million-dollar thoroughbred horses to race on. The Fair Grounds is the nations third oldest track. Only Saratoga and Pimlico have been racing longer. The owners hauled off soil tainted by Katrina's floodwaters and rebuilt a grandstand roof ripped off by the storm's wind (Martell 2006). The Fair Grounds opened on Thanksgiving Day 2006. If tainted soil is not safe for horses, surely it is not safe for people--especially children who play and dig in the dirt.You have to feel sorry even for Governor Bobby Jindal, who faces the horrifying prospect of the government counting disaster aid against the state as income for the federal Medicaid calculator. But not that sorry, since by all accounts Jindal would cut assistance no matter what.Families who chose to return to rebuild their communities shouldn't have to worry about their children playing in yards, parks, and schoolyards contaminated with cancer causing chemicals left by Katrina floodwaters. In March 2006, seven months after the storm slammed ashore, organizers of A Safe Way Back Home initiative, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University (DSCEJ), and the United Steelworkers (USW) undertook a proactive pilot neighborhood clean-up project--the first of its kind in New Orleans (Deep South Center for Environmental Justice 2006). The clean-up project, located in the 8100 block of Aberdeen Road in New Orleans East, removed several inches of tainted soil from the front and back yards, replacing the soil with new sod, and safely disposed of the contaminated dirt.
But residents who choose to remove the topsoil from their yards--which contains sediments left by flooding--find themselves in a Catch-22 situation with the Louisiana Department of Economic Quality and EPA insisting that the soil in their yards is not contaminated and the local landfill operators refusing to dispose of the soil because they suspect it is contaminated. This bottleneck of what to do with the topsoil remains unresolved more than three years after the flood.
The Safe Way Back Home demonstration project serves as a catalyst for a series of activities that will attempt to reclaim New Orleans East after Katrina. It is the governments responsibility to provide the resources required to address areas of environmental concern and to ensure that the workforce is protected. However, residents are not waiting for the government to ride in on a white horse to rescue them and clean up their neighborhoods.
The DSCEJ/USW coalition received dozens of requests and inquiries from New Orleans East homeowners associations to help clean up their neighborhoods block by block. State and federal officials called these voluntary cleanup efforts "scaremongering " (Simmons 2006). EPA and LDEQ officials said that they tested soil samples from the neighborhood in December 2006 and that there was no immediate cause for concern.
According to Tom Harris, administrator of LDEQ's environmental technology division and the state toxicologist, the government originally sampled 800 locations in New Orleans and found cause for concern in only 46 samples. Generally, the soil in New Orleans is consistent with "what we saw before Katrina, " says Harris. He called the Safe Way Back Home program "completely unnecessary" (Williams 2006). A week after the voluntary cleanup project began, an LDEQ staffer ate a spoonful of dirt scraped from the Aberdeen Road pilot project. The dirt eating publicity stunt was clearly an attempt to disparage the proactive neighborhood cleanup initiative. LDEQ officials later apologized.
[ . . . ]
Although many government scientists insisted that the soil is safe, an April 2006 multiagency task force press release distributed by EPA raised some questions (U.S. EPA 2006). Though it claimed that the levels of lead and other contaminants in New Orleans soil were "similar " to soil contaminant levels in other cities, it also cautioned residents to "keep children from playing in bare dirt. Cover bare dirt with grass, bushes, or 4 to 6 inches of lead-free wood chips, mulch, soil, or sand."
[ . . . ]
Now, instead of cleaning up the mess that existed before the storm, government officials are allowing dirty neighborhoods to stay dirty forever. Just because lead and other heavy metals existed in some New Orleans neighborhoods before Katrina doesn't mean that there isn't a moral or legal obligation to remediate any contamination uncovered. Government scientists have assured New Orleanians, including gardeners, that they do not need to worry about soil salinity and heavy metal content. They also say residents need not worry about digging or planting in the soil. But given the uncertainties built into quantitative risk assessments, how certain are these government officials that all of New Orleans neighborhoods are safe?
In August 2006, nearly a year after Katrina struck, the EPA gave New Orleans and surrounding communities a clean bill of health, while pledging to monitor a handful of toxic hot spots (Brown 2006). EPA and LDEQ officials concluded that Katrina did not cause any appreciable contamination that was not already there. Although EPA tests confirmed widespread lead in the soil--a pre-storm problem in 40 percent of New Orleans--EPA dismissed residents calls to address this problem as outside the agency's mission.
And in June 2007, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report, Hurricane Katrina EPA's Current and Future Environmental protection Efforts Could Be Enhanced by Addressing Issues and Challenges Faced on the Gulf Coast, criticizing EPA's handling of contamination in post-Katrina New Orleans in the Gulf Coast (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2007). The GAO found inadequate monitoring for asbestos around demolition and renovation sites. Additionally, the GAO investigation revealed that "key information released to the public about environmental contamination was neither timely nor adequate, and in some cases, easily misinterpreted to the public's detriment."
The GAO also found that EPA did not make clear until eight months later, in August 2006, that a major finding in its 2005 report--that the great majority of the data showed that adverse health effects would not be expected from exposure to sediments from previously flooded areas--applied only to short-term visits, such as to view damage to homes (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2007).
The point being, if Chin can go to the Congress and find assistance—and in fact it seems that he actually expects more in the way of a response from the executive branch, from groups like EPA, CDC, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the project will have a very significant impact on New Orleans.
Mel Chin, SAFEHOUSE, 2008.
Got a real brief preview in the new DECIDER of Mel Chin's FUNDRED/PAYDIRT project now showing at the Arlington Arts Center. The show is both an active collection site for area Fundred dollar bills and the local extension of Chin's artwork.
After talking with Chin, I feel extremely comfortable thinking that this project is a very significant contemporary artwork. It is first and foremost a petition: Chin is very plainly, if ostentatiously, asking Congress for something that he (and scores of scientists and thousands of New Orleanians and millions of schoolchidren) wants Congress to do. Now, a petition as art is no more unlikely a form than any any other strategy that has come to occupy the notion of "project." But FUNDRED/PAYDIRT is a crowdsourced piece, and for that, sourced by a very unlikely crowd. The crowd is primarily children, yes, but further, it is a representative swath of Americans: How often can anyone say he has reached out to that group?
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #14, 1978.
So, I wrote a review of Guest of Cindy Sherman that turned into a broader rumination about the ways misogyny is expressed by the market. The piece was kindly picked up by Art Fag City and Jezebel and discussed at length in those comments sections. I should get a comments section!
Greg Allen, who penned a piece on gender dynamics within the market for the New York Times back when the market going was good, had some further thoughts in AFC's comments on Sherman's place in the art world:
Sherman's rise coincides with the emergence of gender equity and institutional bias as an art market issue. [The Guerrilla Girls launched in '85 and ran their $17.7 million Jasper Johns campaign in '89.] She was a good, easy buy for "solving" collections' female problem. [sic] But then it was "solved," so the imperative to buy another Woman’s Work was lessened. But that same boxchecking afflicts artists like Minimalists Who Aren’t Named Judd or Flavin, too.That squares some circles, especially when you look at some of the relevant examples. When prodded by the Guerrilla Girls last year after opening with an inaugural exhibit featuring 97 percent male artists, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum was quick to point out to the NYT that 33 percent of the works in the show were by women. Of course, all of these were photographs by Cindy Sherman.
Why is Baltimore Sun economics writer Jay Hancock misleading his readers?
On Friday, Hancock wrote, "Arts and culture are great, but they are products of prosperity and economic growth; they do not create them." This—and little else, certainly nothing in the way of figures to frame his argument—he writes in response to a post by USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development professor Elizabeth Currid for the school's Politics and Society blog.
In her post, Currid wrote about the "algebraic joke" that the arts industry received in the stimulus package, a mere $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. Currid adds up the numbers and finds:
When you do the calculations, the sum allocated to the arts through the stimulus package actually seems a bit stingy. Just to be clear: The financial industry posts losses of $763 billion and tens of thousands of jobs, and the government commits hundreds of billions of dollars to bailing the industry out. According to Americans for the Arts, for-profit arts industries contribute $166.2 billion, generate 5.7 million jobs and return nearly $30 billion in government revenue annually — and they get $50 million from the government.Currid isn't the first to take note of the economic benefit of the arts, which employs 5 percent of the workforces of New York City and Los Angeles. Ben Adler wrote a tidy summary for The Atlantic in February, and the people at the Institute for Policy Studies declared in December that fully 1 percent, or $7.8 billion*, from the stimulus should have been directed toward the arts and provided a lot of ideas for how to spend that money. But as much as the arts are worth to Americans, they are worth much, much more to Republicans, who demagogue on the subject every opportunity they get.
No telling what beef Hancock has with Currid's argument, because he doesn't say. Does he disagree that the arts generate tax revenue and jobs, or does he have a special idea in mind with "restoring aggregate demand," or, well, I don't know what? He should clarify, since he appears to be either ignorant or wrong.
* Here I am figuring on 1 percent of the total $787 billion stimulus package. The IPS gave this figure as $6 billion, working with a December vision of a $600 stimulus package, but the IPS declaration clearly means that 1 percent of whatever the total stimulus eventually winds up being should go to the arts. And this number could go up.
Today I took a walk to Fire Pond.
I brought the map, forgot the orange vest.
Into the silence I made human sounds,
coughs and heavy steps, proclaiming, Yes
I'm here, but apart, I can't be folded
into whatever this is. My steps pressed
words onto my mind: Fire...Pond...Fire...Pond...
which changed to my own name. I let the cadence
shield me. Early dark narrowed the spaces
between pines. Still I followed the map's lines
which trickled down toward that dark, labeled place,
an ink blot deep in the woods. But no sign
told what to do once there. O, it said to
no one. Oh, I echoed, embarrassed, new.
— Jessica Garratt
(from Fire Pond)
Henrique Oliveira, Tapumes, 2008.
From an installation at Rice Gallery in Houston. At first blush I would say the work has a strong painterly identity, like the work of Chakaia Booker. Some of her work, anyway. Maybe another way to say it is that Oliveira's piece makes me want to see his painting.
Henrique Oliveira, whirlwind for turner, 2007.
