indulgent horizons & thrown brick

News Flash: "Franco Won"

I went to see "Pan's Labyrinth" with high expectations but had to revise it as the movie went on. I see this movie as a muddy political venture made for adults and ergo fair game for interpretations other than it's fairy tale trolling. Guillermo Del Toro is Mexican, not Spanish, and he has delved into Franco's Spainish civil war before with "The Devils Backbone". So I get to ask of him the same I would ask of any current Spanish intellectuals/artists when dealing with that fascist victory era. Like, what the fuck happened to my country? You can't just use it as a backdrop and sally forth with a fairy tale unscathed. I'm very rusty on my Bruno Bettelheim (has history washed him away?) but I thought fairy tales empowered children for a dangerous world. And the point of authoritarian rule is to turn a nation into children. Del Toro has a lot to work with here. So why do I feel he gave us a get out of jail for free pass. I am a big sucker for movie magic, phantasy and special effects, but he crossed a weird apolitical line and spoiled this movie. The news flash here is Franco won, he died of old age, and those plucky heroes up in the hills, they all died died died first. They did not run circles around Key Stone cop brown shirts. Is this really fairy tale material where we are given a little princess (us, you and me) to escape these unfortunates with a few slight-of-hand yucky CGI quest. Peek your head out of the Never-Neverland hole and not like what you see and pop back in it?. That movie almost seemed comfortable shrugging off it's all to real violence with it's pixie dust escape clause. It's like he invented a new genre: the revisionist fairy tale. There was a chance for this movie to have worked for me. That was the important scene where the drugged Captain (Franco figure) walked up behind the princess holding her stolen brother. I could have had a choice here. See through her eyes, her conversation with the deceitful faun, and believe in fairy tale protection, or see through his eyes, a child talking into plain air, and realize sometimes there aint no magic and sometimes bad guys win, and what you going to do about that. But that is a stretch on my part so this movie pissed me off.
For my money a good fairy tale movie maneuvering around 20th century fascism is:
Volker Schlondorff's "The Ogre" with John Malkovich,
or the better Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom"

Gregory is Remembered

I half thought this would happen, quietly bit by bit new balloons and stuffed animals were lashed to my telephone pole. Friends and relatives paid their mylar and ducktape respect to fallen Gregory, one year to the day, to the event I have described here. This happened once before, a couple of months after his killing I left in the morning to go to the market. When I returned new shiney balloons floated over the old deflated ones and small toys were stuffed on top of the old exhaust grimmed ones. It took me a while to realise it was his birthday or it use to be until his deathday entered the calendar. Althought these offerings are crude and depressing I will never remove them from my alley. It is not my place and I wont interupt the flow and peace these childlike gifts seem to offer the family. Does the killing in Baltimore continue....duh...yes....did Gregory's murder shake some hopper to the bone, get him out off the corner...of course it did.

bottle diggers winter

Bottle diggers hit the side of my house this week. Boom boom my room was flickering. I have a delicate house, a single course brickwall structure that I believe will fall down from the minimal of everyday doings. So protection makes me run outside. Bottle digger's A and B were breaking through the concrete pad next to my wall with an man high crowbar. I know these guys from before, they're poking around for the civil war era outhouses, "privy". They come around here about every 3 years as they make their Washington, Baltimore, Annapolis circuit. They hit the sheered off, the "avert your gaze America", parts of our cities that are as broken as the porcelain crapper pots pulled from it's history holes. After breaking throught the cincrete digger A slant drills till he hits the brick lining of the original privy, using a long probe he claims it's square and 10 feet down. Outhouse soil pokes freely with no obstructions the whole way down. Digger B starts with his shovel and in 4 hours is unseen spelunking 8 feet down, serviced by a large tripod bucket & pullel system to bring up the dirt and treasure. Their finding the usual civil war era medicine bottles and pottery, nothing special. Buttons from pants too hurriedly removed from nature's sudden calls. They're searching for the illusive soda bottles made in Baltimore during the war era. All the cities in the east had local soda brands but all required a deposite for the bottle by the merchant. You drink your soda and you sure the hell took the bottle back for your deposite. Money is money and you aint going to throw it down the crapper. But if some one had a load of Boston or Philly sodas, your not likely to hussle up there for returns. So in Baltimore outhouses you find lots of Philly, Boston NYC soda bottles, the rare teasure is a local one. Is this a cool hobby or what? Digger C arrives to run the pulley and his mouth. I like him. Tells me about the broken toys they find, speculates about sibling rivalries where the loser gets their toy or doll thrown in the outhouse, gone forever. You didn't have many toys in those days. I ask digger C if he ever found an unopened medicine bottle. He controls a smile from behind his beard and tells of finding an pristine bottle of Piso's Cure, a concoction of all the known pain killing narcotics floating in an cannabis extract. He said he and a buddy dunked their joints in this 100 year bottle and proceeded to get more wrecked than humanly possible. Is this man lying? I don't think so, he still too happy..... They dug late into the night, flashlights. All said and done nothing worth keeping, gave me about 6 iridescent little med bottles, civil war era, they had zillions. The next morning I see the hole left half unfilled and a mound of dirt on the side walk, screwed again.

Wed, January 11, 2006
gregory is murdered ll

My alley has come full circle. A week has passed. Candle wax and teddy bears replace police tape. A helium tombstone is tided to the telephone pole. Mylar replaces granite and blows like a haunt in the wind. Gregory. Dead guy has a name, a mother, sisters and enough friends to fill the alley for his candle light vigil. The family members have the quicky made t-shirts pulled over their winter clothes. A silkscreen picture of smiling Gregory surrounded by clip art hearts and the Lord's prayer. They look huge. So does Gregory's smile. Number one sister delivers a blistering sermon for her lost brother. Here, on this tainted ground she was was going to hammer away all the wrong that lead him to this spot with remembrence for a good and caring brother. She is immensely moving and mother sobs. I have no way of knowing if Gregory dealt out as much pain as was dealt to him that night. The drug game is vicious. From a cynical view, this is a broken record, caught in a groove played 100's of times in our blood and wax streets. But this was too close to home. So I went outside with my own candle and joined the vigil. Maybe it will never happen again, ever.

Mon, January 2, 2006
gregory is murdered

My alley is full of crime tape, the rain has gnarled it into muddy piles. Last night, after mid-night, I heard 3 quick bangs, could have been a gun or fireworks. I did what I am conditioned to do, nothing. 10 minutes later someone is seriously pounding on my door, the street is full of cops. A rag doll of a man lying dead in front of my door, half in the alley, half on the sidewalk. A policewomen calls me down outside, what did I hear, how many shots. She says it's a shame how young the victim is, wanting me to empathize incase I was holding something back. Someone called in the shooting but didn't leave a name, she thinks it might be me. I guess that's her method for dealing with people afraid to get involved. I have no info. I don't feel empathy, I feel lessened. I stay in the street and more cops arrive with flashlights and catch up gossip. Ambulance parks in front of my door and I watch dead guy on the gurney as he passes. His shirt is half removed with a bullet hole below his nipple, no blood, he died before he hit the ground. I don't regret watching, I just feel lessened. I go to my upstairs window. I over hear they have a name for the victim, he's got a drug record. Now it's raining and the flashlights have umbrellas. At the end of the alley over the tops of the police cars behind the tape a crowd has gathered to watch. Part of them looks like some of the aggressive drug dealers that recently started running the New York Fried Chicken corner. One among them is darting backing and forth making shooting gestures with his out stretched arm, like playing cowboys and indians from a more innocent time. It's dark, he is far away but he keeps making 3 shot pantomimes and I thinking, holy shit, this guy did it, there he is, there are the cops, one big cancerous game. This is so fucked up. Thank you War on Drugs, smashing job. Thank you gun manufactures, your products fill our every need, thank you justice system for opening a new prison every 15 days, thank you CIA for jump starting the crack epidemic, thank you drug dealers who embrace death, thank you dead guy for leaving your family with wonderful memories. Thanks for the lessening.
I get to clean up the crime tape...

astalavista, tookie

For a lot of us it is a given that the death penalty is never justified no matter the particulars of the crime, I am one, it's no big deal. But I don't tow the argument that it is wrong because it is unfair by race and class, or that it's process is too expensive. If that is the flaw, then all the State has to do is execute more affluent white folks, buy electric chairs from Walmart and potassium chloride from Canadian pharmacies. It is simple to me, don't give the State the power to kill, we are not at our collective best in this. Much goes unsaid within the care the authorities take to prevent the condemned from taking their own life, ergo cheating the system. Suicide watch on death row......how much social conditioning does it take not to see the absurdity in that. I am also stymied by the "closure" theme, how does that work anyway? How did that get morphed into a lynch mob mantra, a money back guaranty without scrutiny or PO Box.
I am not surprised Tookie was killed. It seems the whole battle was to deep six his redemption or embrace it. Define it, rate it, scale from 1 to 10. Peer into the soul, the ultimate Patriot Actor's voodoo, a warrant-less deep creep and peek. Feed this mystical data into the rectal port of a handy narcissistic cyborg and it's "astalavista, baby".
Most of the pro death hostility I found revealing was not directed at his refusal to apologize for the murders, he either did the crime or not, and so apologize or not, but at his refusal to snitch. The gist was, how could Tookie do so much good educating kids with his books and brokering peace among gangs but not comply to be a revolving door witness for the courts to prosecute old gang activities. For those books and himself to be taken serious I think he had to be seen as an unbroken force, unbowed to power and still speak through the ground rules of the street. Change it from within. Power can't tolerate that. I am not romanticizing here, just observing this is the way of the world, especially for the outsider. He defined himself as a perpetrator and victim in a fucked up system so he wasn't going to turn around and be a tool of the same justice system. I think his clemency hung on this and so he was doomed.
Now I am going to mix apples and oranges. In the spirit of these times how was the establishment not going to kill Tookie? How were they going to with a straight face spare the life of a complicated story like Tookie while at the same time coerce from us a simple guilt free blessing for the daily land, sea, and air rain of death on the people of Iraq? Killing is political currency for many. How you going to be squeamish about a 12 minute "in vein drilling" to a gurney strapped Tookie when "water boarding" is soon to be a indispensable Boy Scout merit badge.... with proper adult supervision of course.....scotty

4th Mayor's Cultural Town Meeting

I made it through the crappy weather last night to the 4th Mayor's Cultural Town Meeting with guess speaker topic, "Why Invest In Culture". I've Been to all the meetings, find them rewarding, connecting, feel good gatherings about Baltimore art scene. But whoa, last night, what a soulless wish I had read the fine print not gone affair. If, as it looks, the corporatize feeding frenzy of civic life as won and their crowd gets to sit pretty on the panels managing the "noblesse oblige" how do you distinguish good from bad money. There is bad money isn't there? I find it hard to sit judgment free and applaud as The Maryland State Arts Council man Phillips from Lockheed Martin Foundation brags about it's companies spirited $600,000 yearly art grants. What is that, the cost of a replacement windshield for a hefty flying war machine. Can you return the cash to these people in exchange for canceling a Raptor Stealthfighter..... Can  His
presentation ending bombshell that Lockheed Martin landing the contract to build the new White House presidential helicopter made me think I was in the wrong building. 
Background:
According to the Arms Trade Resource Center, Lockheed Martin gets $105 from each U.S. taxpayer and $228 from each U.S. household. In 2002 the company was effectively taxed at 7.7% compared to an average tax rate for individuals of 21-33%
The world's #1 military contractor, responsible for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, F-16, F/A-22 fighter jet, and Javelin missiles. They've also made millions through insider trading, falsifying accounts, and bribing officials. Military contracts 2004: $20.7 billion. Campaign contributions in 2004: $1.78 million (defense related) $1.9 million (total) This Bethesda, Maryland-based company is the world's #1 military contractor as well as the world’s largest arms exporter. Lockheed Martin built the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Today they make F-16, F/A-22 jet fighter, Hellfire and Javelin missiles, as well as designing nuclear weapons. Its F-117 stealth attack fighters were used to “shock and awe” the population of Iraq at the start of the US invasion, while since the start of that war the Air Force has increased production of Lockheed’s PAC-3 Patriot missile – which cost $91 million per copy. ......continued > http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=9 <
Was not all a wash, as always Martin O'Malley showed he has a deep appreciation and extended hand to our art community, and I now know how our Sowebo non-profit signs up for a DUNS & BRADSTREET number, heaven forbid we be left out of the Creative Industries surveillance. .continued....

Here comes the story of the Hurricane
Last night I watched as much TV news as I could stand. It's sickening. Where in the hell are the helicopters, why aren't they commandeering Perrier trucks and dropping them all over that city. New Orleans is turning into Grover Norquist's bathtub right in front of our eyes. I wonder how the media is going to play up or shoot down the stories about all the competent people who have left FEMA, discouraged and bullied by the cutbacks.
We often speculate why this country went to war, but as far as Bush's personal motivation, best take him at his word. His narcissistic reading of history told him that WAR presidents get their agendas pushed through, no questions asked. If given the opportunity to be a WAR president, he'd grab it, bang bang shoot shoot. No questions asked.
Bye-bye Miss American pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee....was not as important as Fallujah.

Camp Casey
OK, it's Baez, cringe a little, but take heart that there no is expiration date for an anti-war voice, no diminishment inflicted by the smearing of 60's counter culture or it's fickled fading stars. The war dog's ridicule doesn' t get to hold a USDA Inspection Stamp to our exposed rumps. It's true the radical right with money, anger, and patience has retooled much of this country's weird fragile ego. Yelling and sneering answers to the mysteries of life. Their gargoles and castrati pour the snakeoil over our amnesia conveyor belt, and the blinking Dems stare enviously as Bush picks at the scabs of a smirk war. Their not blowing up Cindy's movement because she hangs with silly people, their blowing her up because she is a disturbance in their crystal ball, staring back at them with a history where they have lost.
Direction and velocity Mom....
So when George finishes his nap down in Crawford, move this camp of hope and remembrance to all the WAR enabler's offices, demand from HIllary Rodham Clinton the answer to the same question, "what noble cause will more sons die for in this war you embrace and finance. That's when the Cindy's Mom movement will start turning over the furniture...
www.meetwithcindy.org

Marticks Rumor Control

Rumor control......... Marticks French Restaurant is not closing. So says Morris. For those he don't know, Marticks from the late 60's has been a sanctuary, a purgatory, a schmuck bootcamp, a free meal, a $20 to get you through the weekend, a lesson on the unfairness of life, an out of the frying pan into the fire best job you ever had to hundreds of artists, especially during their Institute (MICA) years. He is one of a kind. So says I.
Trust me , we will know when Marticks closes.......the day Morris calls it quits, from mortal coil or other, 214 W. Mulberry will crumble to dust, much the way every movie prop castle of Dracula's crumbles when that stake finds it's mark. Puff....all over. Live TV news helicopters will hover over the hole wondering what the hell happened..........
So how in the hell has it outlasted Louie's and who cares?
I went with the original bunch from Marticks that Jimmy Rouse syphoned off when he bought the old Krammer Books and Afterwords and turned it into Louie's. Some folks might not know it but Jimmy was a schmuck waiter for Morris for many years, schmuck being the class conscious pride you hold in knowing all you really do is feed human sheep for chump change, making sure their mitochondria survives another day. Jimmy was notoriously in the kitchen for ordering in a palsy alphabet cobbled together from Roswell crash debris. I cooked for a lot of grays. Morris spoke their tongue. Louie's may have been bigger, meaner, faster, but it still harbored a little Martick's absurdity, you could trace the infection back to patient zero: Morris.
But until then...ringing the bell with garlic around my neck........scotty, one of Morris's illegitimate schmucks.....

SoWeBitch and Whine

Letter to the Citypaper in response to Charles Cohen's www.citypaper.com/news/story

Oh sweet easy money. I bet a fortune in hell bank notes that the City paper was incapable of writing an article about this year Sowebo Festival without turning it into another hatchet job on our neighborhood. It's been about a year since the last one and sure enough along comes Charles Cohen's June 8 "All Quiet on the Southwestern Front". Forget about opening your eyes and ears to the amazing festival so many strove so hard to create that day. More noir traveling down memory lane to last year's cop melee, picking at the scab, feeling the pulse of the traumatized, simmering up the anxiety we might have with the police this year. I'll let you on to a little secret, we got over it. We had great up to the last minute communications with the police and have nothing but good things to say about their service this time round. Look, sorry we couldn't supply you with a riot again, sorry the 50 bands bored you, sorry the 80 arts & craft vendors and Carriage House art show didn't catch your eye, sorry the children played and painted, sorry the weather was great and the beer flowed, sorry this was one of the most successful festival in years. Jesus, of all the photos you could pick from an 9 hour festival you choose the sad closing moment of a palooka busted by the cops, and I don't mean to take anything away from Frank Klein's great photography, I mean to take away from the Citypaper's lazy inability to connect to our community. I know you are not obligated to write a boring fluff piece on a stupid neighborhood festival. But as community with so many challenges that manages year in year out to pull this festival off we expect more than to be a backdrop for a police blotter. I don't know why the Citypaper has it in for us. Maybe you never forgave us for losing those watering holes so long ago. But hey, what the hell, anytime you need a bogeyman to scare the bejesus out of some upstart urban living experiment, I am glad we are here for you. Boo! Corner drug dealers. Boo! Section eight housing. Boo! No familiar restaurant bars to get drunk in.... As far as the positive happenings in the hood, we included those in a letter last year as a rebuttal to a previous hatchet job, you're not getting it twice.

Jim Crow Buddha

So suckered and so brutally disappointed. It could be the election was stolen, nickeled and dimed and rigged throughout the system. But hoping that is true doesn't take the spiritual whipping out of what just happened. It is really hard to accept that this god cult America sees George Bush as a Joseph Campbell reluctant hero, forced to rise above his weaknesses and become bigger than the sum of his flaws. Bush is bulletproof to them, Mt. Rushmore worthy, his lies are scripture. It is madding. Not to long ago the moral challenge in the South was to risk all in the fight for civil rights and all the human dignity that falls in place with that. But the resentment sure has turned full circle. The new Southern moral virtue is to bare any hardships, wars, crappy jobs, crappy schools, triage doctoring, and strike a righteous blow against the liberals that now stand in the way of their personal relationship with Jesus. End the New Deal intrusions that interferes with their personal relationship with Jesus. Shut up this science that interferes their personal relationship with Jesus. Outlaw the complexity of human pairing that interferes with their personal relationship with Jesus. Is George W their Martin Luther King or Mussolini?, Il Duce was a bumbling ridiculed fool too.
Ever since I was 14 I have been getting away with murder. Meaning this has been a permissive, push the envelope, eyes wide open america to grow up in. Pretty much could listen, read, see, say, think what I wanted to. Rude, beautiful, inspiring, scary, but possible because the horizon seemed always going and going. The god cult is here to put it all back in a bottle. Make us 14 again, cut off those paths. They will fail. I don't know when they will put Fred Flintstone and superstition in the textbooks. I don't know when they will up the dose of rat poison in Rehnquist dinner bowl, turn abortion into breeding, start hurting gays, but they will fail. The government is in enemy hands, we're 14 again and in it for the long haul! Alexander Cockburn wrote that Bill Clinton was the most successful political retreat in American politics. If the corporate democrats can't figure a damn thing to do about this then leave'm behind.....scotty

Brother, can you spare a dime?

To all the museums that forbid photos and sketching, and for the sake of all the fragile copyrights, maybe we should check-in our eyes with our coats and cameras before entering. They are the culprits that desire, the Achilles heel of copyrights, the chiseling at the amber. Or maybe a chemical inducing amnesia spray on the way out the exit to fog the memory and spare the art from inappropriate reproduction....A Phillip K Dick solution for museums where everything is new and never seen before or victim to coping. The good news is I spent xmas in NY and went to the new MoMA. There they refuse to check your camera. You are free to take all the pictures you want. So I took macro close ups of their Beckman and Guston's for no other reason than that I could. It's like all of a sudden the zookeeper said it was OK to feed the tigers. Joyous!
My 2 cents on not a Damn Dime. I wonder what Yip Harburg would think of this as we are asked to flip him on his head. He asked us to imagine what it is like to lose the dignity of the dream and work and to be reduced to asking for just one spare dime. Course it wasn't a panhandlers anthem, it was a call for just society. Fast forward 73 years and the country is back in the hands of unjust visionaries and Damn Dime brainstorms an asinine protest of tinkering what day corporate america ledgers in our money in the plus column. I'll follow the advice of Yip and DBS....etc and pick a needy group to spare a dime, but it a cautionary choice......http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly12272004.html . Just as the revolution will not be televised it will not be a debt on my Visa card.
I entered the Maryland Institute the last year of Bud Leake as president. He was a great great guy and painter and his longevity had to be a gift brought on by his connectedness with painting and nature. Craig Hankin, you were lucky to have been his friend all these years......scotty

Hey Mister, that voting machine ate my coin!

I have been going through a lot of political soul searching these past months, trying to reconcile a principled Nader vote as this reality based world gets freaking unbelievable. I reach in my pocket for a 3 side coin and only retrieve a line drawn in the quicksand for a flippant taunt. But borrowing from scfi talk, "we have an aberration in the timeline Bones". 9 Bush 11. He wasn't suppose to be here, this messianic late bloomer with the executioner's twinkle. We weren't supposed to be bewitched with the transformative powers of dark limitations. We were suppose to be taking on the gonzo capitalism, naked globalism, balancing earth back with truces and good science. Instead we got the aberration, neither tweedle dee nor tweedle dum, but a folksy pruned cruelty that hoodwinked grief into horizonless war. Not even likable Kerry will pull the plug now and let the blood dry, that would evidence. I am winching, goo goo g' joob. Bush is a shit eating zombie, the big amigo, the empowering smirk, with the disturbingly punctuated winch at the end, as if he is remembering that exact moment back behind the barn when his hands tightened around the neighbor's cat and cracked it's larynx. Winch. It's there in the eyes. Now I am getting cruel, but the whole idea of a curious future on the ropes is demoralizing..... We propped up a tyrant for oil, we broke a country for oil, now the country is going to have a civil war, and there is nothing like a turkey shoot to start the whole process all over again. "Here's your Oscar Bush", avant garde pioneer of underground beheading films. I wonder if President Kerry will lift the photography ban for our coffin draped sons and daughters landing at Dover? The fact that there is not a product placement moment during the debates.... means only we were gipped.
I still believe in Nader's clarion call against the corporate hijacking of participatory democracy. It is the truth that both parties unify around to hide. But his unwillingness to call a timeout on this, no matter how the democrats and republicans seesaw back and forth on cultural issues, is a huge gamble. He is asking us to confront the corporatazation of our lives first, and ignore the puffed codpiece tangled in the puppet strings. But it is becoming harder for me wrap my mind around a strategy that has been so utterly and viciously isolated that I might very well forfeit my voice for the day after the election, when the shit will hit the fan. When the prospect of another stolen presidency can't be accepted. Maybe Nader can't wrap his mind around the aberration.
So do I have to dumb down my world view to fight this superstitious god boy, ride a candidate that brags as a young man he once answered the call to burned some witches? The swift boat frauds, the yin to his yang. Got, what is it, 1 day to decide. Looks like Nader is trying to influence a future he will to old to rumble in, but maybe I am still to young and scared to imagine.
The pragmatists are in full bloom. It means the system is not broke and we just have to work hard to de-fang the extremist. That Nader is a waste of time. A side of me wants them to be right. But I flail in dialectics and see Nader as part of the symptoms/contradictions of a 2 party system that is breaking. The problem here is the 2 party system is breaking under top heavy corruption. How can a country so diverse and complicated be shackled with a 2 sided coin toss for our representation and creative visions. Any 3rd party (and by the way do you know how silly that sounds, like children counting on their toes, 1, 2 , ah... 3 , no....stop..., no 3's yet, we're not old enough for 3's.... ) candidate who dares speak their mind is a spoiler in this winner take all schoolyard. No wonder these campaigns boil down to baby talk sound bites. In a parliamentary government Nader would be an accepted power block seating in office wheeling and dealing along side many other voices this 2 party system shuts out. Allows for the possibility of a nuanced citizenry, blemishes and all. I really fear for our system, it is turning us into 5 year old cowboys and indians. I have a more shrill take on these times and believe those internal compromising and engineering behind the walls of power is too obscured. Don't believe we experience them as de-facto proportional representation. The question I and others are asking of ourself, is it broke enough to go down to the wire, to be as risky/reckless now as I was 3 months ago. Is the polarization as deep as the hype.. I am afraid of Bush and Co. But they didn't come flying out of the head of Zeus, they've been power building through the cultural clashes and working class contradictions while the Dems were watered down their spines at the DLC cash registers. Are they something that can be put back in the bottle to collect dust with a 2 sided coin? This aberration? I'm not happy with my answer, poor me. Nader is basing his candidacy that progressives are permanently locked out of the dems, big money is the currency of deals and compromise. It was never about actually holding office. A perpetual stalemate describes equal powers refusing, a perpetual shaft describes rebellion. Who's door at the democratic HQ do you knock on to start compromising with, what button on the elevator do you push and how many clearance badges do you wear, how much money in an envelope do you bring to show your good faith. The "shut up hippy" DLC runs the applause meter while thinking adults are hardened into clobbering time aficionados.
Frankly I don't give a rat's keister that cynical republicans have helped put Nader on ballots, they are after all my fellow Americans, destructive wood rot, but powerless to make you vote for him once you step into the booth. That little mystery is all up to Kerry's and Nader's story. If it can't be said any different then say Nader didn't lose Florida for Gore, the people who voted for Nader lost Florida for Gore. It aint about Nader, it's about voters that didn't get their issues addressed by the dems. Riddle me this, why do 50% sit it all out.
So what am I going to do. I will be living in the contradiction, I will trade votes with a Nader supporter in a swing state to allow him or her to vote for Kerry. I'll vote here for Ralph for them. In higgley-piggley essences I am handing Kerry a vote he was not getting in a state where it counts while threatening him not in state that is already his. He gets a two-fer ....wooosh, dizzy. It's my illusionary foray into proportional representation farce.....scotty

Where will this Luddite romance power has with technology go, love it, hate it, use it, smash it, buy it, ban it.

Wilma!!!
Artmob thread:
Anyone who wants to truly be liberated needs to understand what Orwell was writing about and think long and hard about his message.
&
The only way to avoid corruption of thought is to resist joining.

I have problems with that. I have been heavily involved in "group think" before and came out okaley dokaley. There has been so much failed potential this century that I can see the want for a moral security, to never be accused of being as flawed as your enemy, or told you're no better than your opponent, to stay out of the fray. But to use it as a moral bludgeon to assume others bad faith, to predict deception, kinda harsh. Safe and sound, chiding messy history pretending the social quantum mechanics of clean hands has no guilt. Whether Orwell likes it or not you can hold to the idea that you are correct and that others are wrong and try to make the world better by it. Surprise, the human frailty for corruption, hypocrisy, capacity for violence smolders in social movements. Could be a brave thing is to fight it within as a participant. It is the risk in engaging in change, the constant . And I am not talking about that "you've got breaks some eggs to make an omelet", not the purposeful decision for force, but the brutalizing of ones moral principals within your actions, "animal farm stuff". At the end of every Flintstones show there's Fred putting the sabretooth tiger out the front door, only to have it sneak back in and lock him out. Funny as hell. What Fred didn't get was the sabretooth lived there too and there will never be a night when he isn't going to have to throw the cat back outside. The same is true with the perverting of your groups idealism, it lives in the house too, not a guest or burglar, and you gotta throw it out every night. How nice that Orwell can sit this one out. So rattle off histories horrors, I'll not disagree with any of them but to say they happened because the good people got out maneuvered in the rush. Rattle off histories successes and the opposite is true.I object to exaggerating the motives of anti-war and other progressive moments and then throw a prickly Orwell in to close the deal. A lot of wise people have thought long and hard on what went wrong with the 20th Century and that can include criticizing Orwell. We all get carried away with our heros, I have been guilty of that recently over Nader, and I will monitor it, but just saying Orwell said it so doesn't mean ones intentions are destined for darkness working where he chose not to go. If it turns out you have different definitions than Orwell then you can't hang on his every word.Especially if such channelling comes up with Moore is America's Goebbels.
There is always a time you are flirting with disaster by not organizing.

Fahrenheit 666

Been in the shadows during some interesting post, wanted to join in with Ricardo & DSB on pragmatism but a day late dollar short, if you all ever do it again....But I saw 911 opening night. The lesson here is that Moore's film is WAR TIME PROPAGANDA during WAR TIME. Use it or lose it, the clock is ticking. The Europeans know this, it wasn't the best film at the 2004 Cannes Festival it was the one with a lit fuse. We live in an topsy-turvey sometimes murky free society, Moore spread his agitation in Megaplexes instead of secret drops, and hollowed out bibles. If you think your time is best spent in "crossing the T's and dotting the I's" arguments with rightwingers, knock yourself out. Wanna use it to elect Kerry, heave ho. Me, I will use it as ammo for my support of Nader. Put down the popcorn, Bush is bringing the war home and this "play fair Mr. Moore" is a diversion. If they don't like it let Let Mel Gibson make Fahrenheit 666. Moore's a big smorgasbord of outrage. Take the cleaver and hack off what you crave and get out of line. What fattened me up were the Senate floor scenes of Al Gore, gavel in hand, officiating, over his own demise. Laugh or cry. Forget for a moment that the film framed it as one black caucus member after another being shot down and humilated, but see it as a
party that was so incapable of taking on the radical right because it had long ago stop talking to its progressive left. And those Mandarins have the nerve to say Nader lost their election. I am gaining a lot more respect for Ralph these days. Not many people would do what he is doing, sacrificing a life time of good work and flaws to this short term memory crucifying as he makes one last political stance. All these crocodile tears for his legacy and sanity. Means nothing if participatory democracy passes in history like his Corvair. So bite, scratch, claw, howl, and snarl Ralph in one last moral campaign, plant a few seeds and die never being president. You only got a few years, your old. 20 years from now when President Bush & President Kerry are mere ledger entries in the corporate expenditure columns we are going to revisit Nader's burn out and see it for what it is, that the invasion of the body snatchers was real and corporate control over our country, culture, and bodies dwarfs Nader's so called ego.......scotty

Sowebo Festival Cop Riot

Hello mobbers...been a long time since i posted, been busy, and would have preferred my first post in such a long time would be about more pleasant things. I am tried and upset so bare with me. A few of you are wondering about what happened at the sowebo fest and the cops saying "i was there, had a wonderful time and i didn't see anything". Well, very few did because it happened in the cover of dark, late, when a number of police officers decided to violently shut down the last 2 stages and have a little miniature melee. We are still dumbfounded and want answers. How do i know this? I spent most of today with fellow fest organizers piecing together a timeline and narrative and then attending the meeting at the Broom Factory called by some people who experienced this crap and wanted voice and justice to what happened to themselves and friends. I started out the day very suspicious of their motives leery that some had political agendas that might not serve sowebo well. So far I am wrong, I walked away feeling these were decent people of different backgrounds who came to enjoy the festival but had enough political savvy to know you need to speak out to an injustice. I and also frustrated because i was just around the corner from the Arlington Street stage moving around to much and didn't witness the violence, only the repercussions, and I have to piece things together events through others filters. This is not the time for a definitive recap, we still have another meeting of info gathering and at this point to be honest we probably possess a mix of enough true and false info that we will have to retract stuff. We have plenty of witnesses. Brief. No names. Southern District cops patrolled the day and we think we have a good relations with them. It is after 9pm and most people have gone home, Market Stage & Outlaw stage are over. Cops do their first heavy handed take down arrest of 2 "punkrockers" one with a dog. On, a girl is known to us. I scooted up to see her and had my first experience of the night that these cops had out of proportion attitude. I mistook her for a garbage bag at a cop's foot the way she was handcuffed. We have been told that around this time a radio report went out "a cop in distress", her arrest might have triggered that. She was that threatening. 10 or so patrol cars with paddy wagon arrived setting up a command post at Hollins and carrollton + carey. These we believe were Western District. They should have seen this for what it was and gone back on patrol. Instead they brought with them a confrontational "we don't need to talk to anyone in charge" policy and proceeded to moved down Hollins turned on Arlington with swat like mannerisms. The first of them went into the sound tent and on to the stage and ordered a stop and everyone leave. They never asked to speak to an organizer although we were there with our staff t-shirts on. I witness this and when it was obvious the stage was complying i scooted down to the tribe stage, for whatever reason some some angry cops were shutting us down. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. It was during this time that that more cops entered Arlington and in front of many our organizers eyes started to clear the dark street clubbing people. They pulled one guy down , held him and tasered him 3 or 4 times. There was loud screaming and disbelief. It is the subjective opinion of our witnesses that they targeted people with rastafarian hair. One of the fest workers kept a digital camera on the video setting and tried to keep pace with the unfolding without being seen. The imaging is bad but the audio tells the story. Lots of screaming and why are you doing this. People starting clearing out fast and many left up Hollins including Keisha, her husband, children and Mother Saray with cops following. They were going to their car to leave. They were taking down hard, dragged, put in paddy wagon, in front of their children. She is pregnant and attending todays meeting. She faces court. So far 5 arrest, with 2 women to go to court. We are still waiting for more info on those who got hit but not arrested, they went home and maybe a little frightened. The cops then moved down to the better lighted Tribe Stage and Carriage House and ordered everyone off the street or be arrested. I believe the quick thinking of one the fest leaders there on that stage got people in in time to prevent a second waylaying. We are still learning of more events. I just talked late tonight to a long time sowebo res who was walking home past the patrol cars and was hit blind-sighted and thrown into one of the cars. He managed to get cops name limped home. He calls the police later to complain about being struck and they sent the very officer + 2 who hit him to to take his statement...this officer then calls him a fucking liar. I will stop now. Will I have to retract some of these statements, probably, will new ones be added, count on it. All I know is when I finally felt safe enough to scoot home through the gauntlet of cop still mulling around long after their party there was palatable air of "we own this and you are game". I buzzed by 3 cops joking, one with his baton in hand acted out kung fu moves with celebratory glee. I got to tell you, I know this is small potatoes and a pretty puny in the world as it is now. But this is my community and we worked hard to make a great festival, this was the biggest event the young people that make up the Tribe ever did and it bonded them to sowebo. And at the very last moment when it's time to hug and celebrate they treated like this from public servants......this aint over, we are pissed, let the internal investigations begin.


RADAR 9
Available now
Dan Keplinger review:

Expressionistic figure painting, so close to the edge, often settles for a truce with desire. Towson artist Dan Keplinger born with Cerebral Palsy but given a voice through painting never flinches. Connecting and communicating with a powerful understanding of line and color Dan’s journey into art freed his spirit and body to express himself beyond the walls thrown up at disabilities.

Painting with a brush in his headgear Dan moves paint exploring the uncharted territory of self and friends in large powerful portraits. Their luminous faces emerge from a purposeful dark palette crackling with the memory and voyage of the moment. Capturing the changes in people and himself is an important component of his art. A life in motion is never the same face twice and Dan’s portraits have the brave beauty and reckless range of an examined life. His still lifes and wheelchair series have a charged disembodied feel that seem to pierce to his relationship with the material world.

Dan is represented by the New York Phyllis Kind Gallery but thanks to the strong commitment from the Fleckenstein Gallery he will have his first solo show here. His new work is a meaty fleshly series, showing the joyous carousing of friends with a drink or two in hand embracing and tweaking life. Dan’s story is documented in Susan Hadary’s film “King Gimp” which won the 2000 Academy Award for short documentary. He is “King Gimp,” a battle cry for the spirit.

RADAR, again

The Oct 25 unveiling of the Media Deconstruction Kit at the Digital Media Center of Johns Hopkins University is the brainchild of Secretary Randell Packer and Wesley Smith from the The Department of Art Technology. In a world were our plumage strutting warrior president can play dress up the DAT likewise dawns the make believe the trappings of power vowing revolution against the right wing media domination of our receptors, to tweak them with their own weapons. This artist driven hydra-headed call to arms is a shadow government residing in the democratized virtual world linking artists with in the Experimental Party and Tel-Span. As it’s embattled Secretary Packer’s claim ““We will confront corporate control of mass media, We will appropriate with magisterial fearlessness, transforming CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News into magical images, and bring about the systematic reordering of the senses through the deconstruction of live, broadcast media.” Victory by 2004. This has roots far back to the French surrealist. On theTel-Span website artist Andy Dick’s video “Ad Infinitum” serves back the commodity gaze and Rick Silva’s “Grandmaster Bush”

The Oct.25 unveiling of the MDK at Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center is a different story
This first demo for their “there is nothing wrong with your television set, we control the horizontal, we control the vertical” do it yourself software was pretty toothless for all it’s confrontational claims to power. How susceptible is a power that has mastered media so well that can embrace simultaneously a crayola Jesus, war, and a narcissistic millionaire cyborg is the first demo that doesn’t rise much past kaleidoscope tinkering of CNN and Fox. But getting down the serious Luddite brass and tacks world serious shit going down in the front lines, stirrings in the union strike meeting, the community soup kitchens, the boisterous PTAs and church gatherings, and antiwar campaigns who desperately reach for artists to help articulate undefined rumblings.
Propaganda that leapfrogs the real worlds problems with winking befuddlement ends up being big fish in little pond campus agitation. Becomes a looped sneer and makes about as much sense as Sue Coe doodling on a sidewalk at ground zero the day after. Didn’t a wise man once say “the revolution will not be televised. I can't help but seeing Carl Rove and W high 5-ing themselves knowing the how safe they are if the extent of political awaking over here is the confrontational free high tech scribbling on the man on the TV screen to block out what he is saying.

Broadcasting and make believe dispatches from a embattled fictitious federal department.
meat and potato

Artmobile post on pertual motion.

Politics and art.... I have an idea for a perpetual motion machine. Build a giant gerbil running cage and fill it with politicians. Just out of their reach dangling some sneering artist on a rope. As the enraged politicians run uselessly in place trying to get the artists they spin an axle that drives a turbine generator in a liberal arts university that churns out an endless supply of politician and artist replacement fuel. Patent pending. Hey Ricardo, rant away! They are spoiling for a fight. Your dissection of PC's bastard birth, though brutally long, can't be improved on. I see these young warriors of the American right and their spiritual gurus as damaged goods. They are on the losing side of evolution and are desperately fighting back. How else would you describe these Tom Paine's of privilege who insist that the most noblest form of free speech on campus is the return of high octane ridicule of "the other". Laughing stock poverty is the rightful position of most of the world so you losers get over it. Capitalism of consumptive pleasure trumps everyone, thing, and mother earth and you New Dealers wasted a half century of wealth accumulation on undeserving hands. And on they go. Would you agree this is all smoke and mirrors and that these well funded college conservatives agendas aint really about the right to tell "uppity coon" and "femiNazis" jokes but to put the genie back in the bottle, reversing the material gains of progressive movements from the New Deal on. And they have bigger fish to fry too: the anti-globalization troublemakers.
As surprising as it might sound I agree with Steve that we need to cut ourselves a break when jumping to judge art with political theory. We live in compartmentalizing times and feminist theory carries a tempting big axe to a history overgrown with infestation. I am still enough of a Marxist to know feminism was inevitable and like everything else contained contractions to be abused. Called growing pains. Can be sloppy or brilliant but it has rubbed off on all of us now. I am grateful for another ism in my tool box. These ism are handy wedges to pound aside obstructive boulders of an unexamined life. I just not sure art is a boulder anymore, its more a slippery primordial soup meant to be ladled out in obscene proportions. I know sexist art when i see it, can't help it, the genie is out of the bottle, no going back. But I have seen some provocative sexist art that IMHO is great art. Robert Crumb comes to mind, god bless Robert Crumb. And I have seen IMHO some really bad art whose soul reason to be made was an ernest swipe at sexism. Might be the best art blurs our demons together. At the end of the day you gotta ask yourself is the accumulating zeitgeist floating around in your head the better or the worst with this piece of art whirling in it. Years ago Katie Brennan had 2 German women students staying with her while they traveling the states. We were talking on her porch about film theory and I said how much I like Tarkovsky's film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, unaware that feminist studies had deconstructed Tarkosky and Lem and found both of them wanting. So I got a lesson. I had pretty much read all of his books but had never noticed that Solaris was set in motion with the the hero burdened with the guilt of a weak women and that Tarkosky film upped the ante of the women's drain. They won the day and I felt really crappy trying to reconcile a great artist with sexism. But they lost too denying 2 visionaries their due. But thats how we are when we're young, we huff and puff. I hope I am off that horse for good now, believing art is all about evolving and cutting yourself and other artists a little slack for our petry dish trespasses. (although their will always be totally asinine work out there to flip your wig.....like MDK). This year I reread an early Lem novel "Return From the Stars". In the jacket it had an older Lem reflecting on how he would not write the book now in the same way, to much brawn in his men and to little expression in his heroine. He wasn't knuckling under to anyones theories, just evolving. Soups on!

Radar Review / Issue 8 /“Stealth Media”, for Media Deconstruction Kit, (long version)
The Media Deconstruction Kit (MDK) is an offshoot and brainchild of Randell Packer (Instructor MICA) and Wesley Smith from the Department of Art and Technology (www.usdat.us) (DAT). This artist driven call to arms is a "hydra-headed shadow government" residing in the democratized virtual world linking multimedia artists to respond to the Bush agenda and it’s wagon circling rightwing corporate media. In a world were our plumage strutting president can play dress up, DAT likewise dawns the trappings of make believe power, vowing a revolution to liberate our receptors by tweaking broadcast media with their own electronic weapons.
For all its revolutionary bluster the Oct. 25 MDK performance video at the Digital Media Center Of Johns Hopkins University was magically tame. Randell and Smith’s software captures real time news broadcast and commercials rearranging them into kaleidoscoping distortions, blurs and colors, vibrating away its corporate powers of persuasion into video and audio displacement. Although a visually kick, “deconstructing” incoming particles of our airways into opiate wallpaper and claiming victory hardly takes Bush’s America serious. It’s hard to grok how this high-tech scribbling on the man in the TV screen because you don’t like what he says challenges a corporate administration that has so mastered the absurd. Is this really the achilles heel of a gang that simultaneously embraces a crayola Jesus, war, and narcissistic cyborgs. I hate sounding like a brass and tack Luddite here but how useful is this in the frontline battles stirring all round us. In the union halls, the soup kitchens, PTAs, churches, antiwar and social justice movements, people are desperately struggling to articulate what they are up against, something artists are very good at. The politics of the absurd is a hoot and has roots back to the Dadaist, but leapfrogging meat and potato engagement with a winking “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical” befuddlement ends up being big fish in little pond campus agitation. Becomes a looped sneer and makes about as much sense as Sue Coe doodling on a sidewalk at ground zero the day after. Didn’t a wise man once say “the revolution will not be televised". 

Artmobile post on Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3.
I got the dubious task of defending my Cremaster 3 experience. Something I very much enjoyed. Cremaster filled a hole, ever so briefly, left behind by all the films that have screwed me, cranked out with their utter fidelity to the narrative, to character development, with field tested endings, and hollow thuds. Dubious revenge. This was an extremely flawed piece of art with a structure like a battlefield surgeon more amused by the slippery body parts than with saving. He either can't do it or wont do it. Fair enough. His film doesn't complete a circuit, he hamstrung it, it's all about a laundry list of what worked and what annoyed. But it got to me at times. Those miniscule tomfoolery plots of the engineers and the mason's herculean filling the elevator with cement to make taunt harp strings blew on the back of my neck. Turning on those little wonderment smiles inside that I don't get very often. That I can appreciate and take to the art bank. The slapstick of the the bartender, the hybrid, the servant, neither a worker nor engineer, made sense, the hopeless bridge to amuse us with. Don't see slapstick often so thanks Barney. More laundry list. The car demolition took long but maybe it takes long to kill a child spirt of a building. Especially if you forgo dialog and push the story along out of the elements, earth, metal, water, wood, and fire. Enough laundry list, I guess I took his bait, Barney offered up intriguing spaces crafted with unexpected beauty and twistedness hinting at hero's cycle that got horribly derailed and he.........dropped the ball, but it was his ball.
The Guggenheim episode was so bad I have to blame the parents, what can you say, they gave him the keys to the joint, they should have known better.

Please fell free not to take me serious. What if evolution had taken a bizarro turn and we lived in a Dr. Dolittle universe where we walk and talk and squawk with the animals. Wouldn't our history books be full the tragic story of the Dodo Bird. A gentle species colonized and persecution to extinction despite their heroic civil rights movement, their marches with eloquent speeches and doomed court battles. And as the end neared a few last desperate Dodos strap on explosive belts and hurl themselves in the nearest watering hole to take out as many lions and tigers and bears as they could with them. Silly or course but who could blame any entity wanting to stick around a little longer. Including cashiers. Evolution wouldn't seem so morally neutral or a great model/excuse for greedy industries itching to replace workers with automation. The problem with automation/microchip is that it "replaces" muscle, unlike the industrial revolutions first breakthroughs steam/coal/electric that "augmented" muscle and made us more productive. Subversive simplicity: 10 full time workers make planned obsolescence wonder widgets. Boss says "me bought robot, you 9 fired. Robot expensive, you remaining 1 no more benefits, work over time". 9 got no more money to buy wonder widget so they find jobs making wonder wizzer. New boss says "me buy robot, you 9 fired..............." This is a pyramid scheme and the current business model of Globalism+microchip. One could argue the better evolutionary path is for the 9 to change the rules that were made when the steam shovel ruled. But then there is that Pinkerton thug to deal with.
PS. I know Dodos checked out in the 1600s...but they seem so sympathetic . Please fell free to substitute any of the thousands of species wiped out this century.

I got a pretty simplistic world view that is good for a sprint but not distance, so I'll try a little more.
The MBAs can't help themselves, they can no more prevent overheated economies like the 90's than they can stop the drive of the microchip to automate. Especially if other parts of the world have dropped the ball. Its hardwired in the laws of Capital that they are always looking over their shoulder at the other widget maker about to undercut them. This country is full of crocodile teared MBA's who laid and will continue lay off tens of thousands of workers and move entire industries to the underdeveloped cheap labor. To play a global game of cat and mouse selling their widgets where sections of economies are on the healthier side of the pendulum swing or flush with irresponsible loan credits. If profits are not found through outside sales it will be found cannibalizing at home. They answer to the investor not the workers. Alan Greenspan, et al, only really exist in the first place because the contradictions of capital don't always assure the right side wins.
I throughout the 9 because they fit my simple world view that whether with good intention or bad widgets markets gotta expand or die. And little nimble hands are going to be replaced with robots. At some point in the unknowable distant future Capital wont be able digest the labor replacing microchip like it did with muscly steam and electricity and keep the 9 afloat in merry-go-round employment. Not if you have 9 Malaysians, 9 Chinese, 9 Spaniards etc.... Not unless they want to convince every soul on the planet to use mother earth like a drag strip suicide.
I think we are fascinated with automation because it holds in it all our inklings of a utopia or a dystopia. What does it mean to to over produce so many widgets. Do you pass them out like candy and give the 9 a holiday for a job well done, or do you hire 2 to shoot the 7 that desperately need the unsaleable widgets locked up behind the walls.
I agree automation is a boogieman, baring in mind that the original boogieman, the very real boogie pirates off the waters of colonized east Java, terrorized English sailors so much that when they returned home they used his spectral to scare the begeebees out of unruly victorian children. That he was going to get them if they didn't behave.
I use to think i had a reasoned possibility. It is now in flux.

 

Artmobile and the death of Leni Riefenstahl. I remember being total engrossed during wonderful horrible live of Leni Riefenstahl documentary, almost mesmerized by her stunning filmmaking and achievements as a woman artist in a man's world. But I couldn't help always being brought back to this central point: she decided to STAY in Germany. She chose the intoxication of the Nazi privileged, burning fast and bright along with their fortunes, then crashing back to earth when my father's generation sacrifice so much to put it out. Imagine the impact she could of had had she come to Hollywood or New York. Fled the Fascist lure along with her contemporaries, the great artist, painters, filmmakers, actors: Lang, Dietrich, Wilder, Beckman etc.... She could of have been a part of them as they proceeded to evaluate and interpret this century into the art that all of us here in artmobile could rattle off in our sleep. Leni didn't, she stayed, she chose to swam with sharks, she stunted herself and wasted her prime years away, remembered as much for her denials as for her genius in olympia and triumph of the will. What a waste. Thats the tragedy I assign to her from the purely artist's point a view. There is also the the question of what degree is she is a war criminal, using forced gypsy labor in a film she was making late in the war..................

............probably was being a very sloppy in my comparisons. Got Isabella distracting my mind, seeing how she will most likely blow my 3 Little Pig house down. A couple of weeks ago I did caught most of a great Frontline (?) on PBS on the hollywood blacklisting that focused in on Kazan and Author Miller. How their friendship was ruined by each others decision to testify and not to. Your facts about Kazan's pressure's and consents before testifying are all true. But documentary revealed that as the years went by Kazan became more convinced and unrepentant what he did was right and in his later years he was highly supportive of the of the whole sordid history and procedures of the HUAC. Miller took the opposite route. They both seemed to have created their strongest works as a mirror to hold up to the other, The Crucible and On the Water Front to justify their beliefs. What I was trying to suggest is that Leni could have remained in the USA and denounced Hitler's Germany. Amending her previous beliefs like a lot of famous people in the USA wound up doing when Hitler got serious. Your right that she could have never have done that in Germany, not without going down a nightmarish fairy tale ending like Oskar Schemmer painting camouflage nets at the bitter end or Soutine living and dying like a werewolf in Paris. I was sloppy for throwing in HUAC as an example where artists publicly reversing past beliefs and demonstrating newfound patriotism. Should have just stating the obvious that one trying to jump on the band wagon of histories right decisions can allow a person to remake themselves. No more silly speculations about Leni from me. I chose Hammett cuzz he was just way to cool and ballzy to knuckle under to those bastards.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/hammett_d.html
At another time i will try to find info on the true story of Hans & Sophie Scholl. A German sister and brother who passed out anti-Hitler leaflets at their university knowing they would hang, they did. I saw the opera "The White Rose" made from their letters and diaries.. It was the most emotion thing i have ever seen...

A dream translation~ I am born a renaissance hieroglyphic, a stickman of the court, a muted tapestry ordered pulled out by the barest thread before the king and his falconer. I smile with a ruby thread and step forward from the wall hanging with a thread of blue and green legs. My shirt with white ruffles deceives the eye yellow highlights and umber shadows. I don't breath or talk, I just be, thats all there is in the 2 dimension. "Run!" says the king and in a flashing grid of harsh angles I run to a field of crops deep in the kingdom. “Chase!” says the king and the falconer follows. Run again and I am in a forest stretching my farthest strand of thread to the farthest point on the land and coiling back. I make a monkey out of 3 dimension moving so fast i return more often than not to where i began. I stop to make sense of the world, to see it only in lines, the veins in the leaves, the peasant's fences. I am thread so thin that I brush against nothing leaving no trail, I am thread and feel and fear only the wind. And that is how the falconer will catch me. So imperceptible is my flight that the falconer counts every leaf on every tree and every blade of grass asking each one did the wind pass you by for someone else. I am losing traveling the narrowing lines that sector the kingdom. When I feel the falconer behind me I hold still using the faded thread side of me to catch the sun and hide from sight. I begin to pull myself apart down to the last inch of precious silver thread making up my dagger and softly place it into a skin pore on the falconer's leg. Years will go by and one day I will wake up and put a magnifying glass to skin and see the silver dagger in my pore resting on it's side and know it to be an heirloom from centuries gone by.

Artmobile: I have always dreamed a lot. They are the record and subject matter for all my morse code paintings these days. I use to have an acupuncturist who wanted to know the elements in my dreams and the role they played in the imagery. Earth, wood, fire, water, metal: you will find them hinting of the strengths and weaknesses you are going through. I think dreams are a lot like the 2 little guys that sit on your shoulders, the one dress as an angel whispering in your ear that there is a good way to travel through life and the other guy in the devil suit whispering screw that, indulge in your fears and panic. When I bought my derelict house in sowebo I constantly had bad dreams about it. Like immersed in mud on an abandoned beach, or a Lincoln-log puzzle of smoldering collapsed beams, or a falling snaggle toothed brick wall maze. I was totally stressed with angry elements. Then one night I dreamed I was on the second floor hammering the last of the plaster exposing the brick wall. There imbedded in the brick and motor like a fossil was a skeleton of a giant bengal tiger. I woke up and stopped worrying about the house. It plenty strong in spirit. Sometimes dreams can use the most unimaginably blunt instrument to conk you over the head. After Mary Alice died I found grieving to be unbearable. I hated it. It wouldn't go away. One morning I dreamed Mary Alice was sitting on a couch in what appeared to be the hull of a dark empty freighter. I was on my knees in front of her with 2 enormous hounds between us. They were monsters snaring and howling and lunging at me. They were hell terrible, drooling and puking gallons of bile on the floor. My heart was breaking and I was crying tears into their slop. Mary Alice just sat with a peaceful unconcerned look on her face. I bent over and began to mop up their poison with my long length hair, drenching myself in it. I woke up shaking wonder how a dream could be so cruel. I thought about it all day till it hit me, Mary Alice was on her journey and she wasn't worried anymore. The hell hounds where my anger and pain and I had to stop soaking it up like a blinded Samson. A burden began to lift that day. Michelle, if you read this, it really does happened at some point. These dreams we have so rich in imagery, in whispers and physics gone wild, its hard to believe their just cherry picking from the waking time.

 

I am ending contact, and therefore friendship, with one of the nicest guys and one of my closest friends of 27 years. He is in the late stages of alcoholism with permanent health damage. I have reached a point were I believe my friendship with all the it's pleading, reasoning, and humor not only does no good but seems to fuel his willfulness. I don't really understand addiction, I haven't got the genes, I over drink I puke. I can only approach it in the abstract, what people tell me. All my life I've heard drunks chase away their loved ones in the end, that some have to fall to the bottom before they decide to live. But this has huge risk, jobless, car-less, rapid health decline, isolation. He has one foot in all of these. He is not the man I new 20 years ago. He has narrowed down and surrounded himself with a cocoon of loved ones that in his own words have become broken records. I feel like the Korean grocer suspicious of a $20 bill when dealing with him now, reaching for that special marker to cross over his forehead to see if it's a counterfeit bullshitting to me. All his relationships are with people he has mastered. I've gone from friend to chump. Here is a man who would rather die than talk to me about going to an AA meeting. I don't get it, I don't get it, I don't get it. I meet him at the Institute, he was a strong artist, he let me used his kitchen and bath for the years I had none, he put me up when my heart was broke, he introduced to music and hung together at the Marble Bar. But I never saw that demon slip into his drink. I only feel guilty. Maybe we are no use to each other anymore. Leave and it's just him and the bottle no distractions. Mano e mano.

When I hear the word skin I reach for my sunblock
All this talk of skin makes me itchy. Skin, it tells when me I'm cold, it shows me getting old, and under the right stimulus it literally crawls. It's where the tattoos go and is the tastiest part of deep fry. It slurs. Prick it deep enough and you drizzle out completely. Art is a chameleon and has a good laugh at all our skins. At my best I approach camouflage, chameleon's idiot brother.
Saw the Matrix the same week I watched Kurosawa's Seven Samuria again. Not making a comparison here. Just thinking how the Seven Samurai is the most perfect of movies and work of art. There is not a neutral exchange in the entire movie, not a scene I am not asked to make a moral affirmation. I believe every peasant and bruised samurai had a childhood and future outside the film, that Kurosawa wrote enough DNA into them to form strings of chromosomes and off with an independent life they went. Sometimes art has a genome viable enough to live on its own, discarding the artist like a cicada skin. Grab the boy in Seurat's "Bathers at Asnieres" by the ears, march him down to lost and found and watch him sneak home when no one is looking. Beat a Giacometti limb-less with a lead pipe and watch them grow back with the precision of a starfish. Coax a Francis Bacon out of the frame for a night of booze and sex but be ready to meet bail.
The Matrix: welcome to the desert of the really bloated. But isn't that the end all and be all of America today?......

art definitions ha ha
I don't find "Art" very obliging these days, playing fair and holding still for a definition. But I probably could finger it in a police lineup after it's broken out my windows. So I will have to take small comfort in good old fashion name calling and recriminations. "Art" is a sulking forced march guttersnipe perched in the corner of my studio plinking my cold ears with it's cold nails. It's a gasbagging sneak thief that trashes my work, squeezing the paint tubes from the middle while guzzling terp leaving me high and dry like exhausted hotel maid as it skips out on the bill. Art writes down the secrets of everything I ever wanted on a stick and makes me play fetch in a thorn thicket field. Like a grinning tar baby Buddha I foolishly punch or a hoary fishwife with a raised skillet, art gets the last laugh every time. I am lucky if at the end of the day I can walk away with a limping truce. It makes me hoarse when it is quiet. I love it.
It was here first, we're just passing through putting on our sunday best in front of it's fun house mirror.

I'll be honest....tv is a narcotic and on any given week I have the track lines in my eyes to prove it. Its an animal tranquilizerjacking my reptilian stem. Relax, it is nighttime and the blue glow emanates out a million opium dens, take a little drag and mellow out, all your friends are here, your never alone. Its Got yer angel dust berserker castoff empathy talk shows and wrestling, it's got your paranoia downer "their going to get me" investigative TV hour, it's got your competitive "marry me a_______, pick me a_______ ", communal Rohypnol. It's a trickster shroom that blows my mind, makes me think I can connect the all dots after an hour of nature and history shows. But like all drug induced revelations it doesn't really stick, and the "I saw on tv once" jumbles images and symphonic high points and the unlearning begins. Shame on me, read a book.
Heard Greenaway on a radio interview long time ago. Said he never wanted to do the same thing twice, as an artist how couldhe do otherwise. Hell of a challenge.

subjective backbone

Not feeling very surefooted these days with political world views definitions, that "what brand color glasses is one filtering the emotionally charged issues of this war with. As my betters pitched their the progressive vs liberal vs conservative thing, I sat back fuming, feeling sheared off. Hammer hard enough on a progressive and he'll pop out in China a conservative and visa versa, hammer hammer and out pops the liberal again. Truth is hammer on me long enough and I just go crazy. Always talk of continuums and pendulums in history. All I see is a weedwacker. I would probably agree with guy at the other end of a wiretap that I should be classified as left wing loon. But it is wishful thinking and history. My subjectivity is all over the map spurned on by sense of betrayal that there is no one going to rescue my idealism. I'm missing those buck fever truths formed when you live through hard, shiny, hurtful, bodycountish monstrosity of the world for the first time. Starting to except that my passions and the passions of opposing views in this war-zoned nation are in control and gleefully full of falsehoods. And that is as it should be. To think that objective rational minds have put this in play is surrealler than surreal. Sometimes objectivity has to take an asskicking, having stretched itself out too far over burning coals. It holds a belly full of contradictions just like subjectivity. This War incinerates the building blocks in the mind as much as it does the habitat. Sit back and marinate in the men in fatigues connecting all the dots. What do you do when the country is being lead by an angry dry drunk who selfishly communes with a crayola crayon Jesus tattooed to his back. I miss my backbone, I hope it comes back soon.
As far as the Academy Awards goes, I caught Michael Moores tantrum and cringed a little. Why in the hell did I cringe when all I seen for weeks is tantrum throwing warmongers hogging the airwaves. I blame it on contrast. I've been conditioned and lulled into thinking that that cart and pony show meant something and worthy of relevance even in the time of war. My bad, 'twas a "turd" until Michael took the stage and returned to one after he left.News flash.stork delivers after all

This speculation, though a lame butchering of eastern thought, does help me take some of sting out of the consequences of abortion and life and death. A choice I very much support. People have been slamming the oven door on god's soufflés accidently and on purpose for a long time. He/she has surely found ways to work around us. I don't really believe a god lets us "kill" a life that he has just started. We just delay it for another day. Supposing god does grant a soul at the moment of conception. Putting aside the choice to abort, there is constantly pregnancies failing, quite early on, naturally, all over the world all the time. Often without the women even knowing she was pregnant. Considering how fallible those 9 months are it s almost too horrible to contemplate that our souls have one and only one shot at a corporeal trip. God would be no better than a casino mobster. I rationalize that he/she had 2 choices. One: to keep filling up heaven with fetus angels. Beings with no memories of ever taken a breath, speaking a thought, making a friend, never participating in this quagmire called life. I guess they could set up angel kindergartens and playgrounds and career centers to simulate a life, fair tale stuff. Good chance these zombies with souls would outnumber those who died fair and square pursuing the "good life". The second choice, better asset management. Yes a weary god observes, people are ham-fisted with life but I'll keep sending these souls back until each and everyone of them takes. Send them again, send them again.
When I was 2 my mother 7 months pregnant lost what was to be my baby brother. I don't think my little unborn brother is waiting for me in heaven. I think I've grow old along side him in the real world the whole time. He's my sister born 3 years later.
No matter how much we twist god's arm with laws or scriptures, abortions by intent or bad luck, I choose to believe god is going give every soul a ride on the merry-go-round....... I'm sure it took a couple of times to get my sorry ass here....
Of course all this is contingent on me believing in God and all that stuff....far from a done deal.

batting practice cheat
Practice......practice makes perfect........impatience, practice's evil twin, feels perfect.........I don't have time to practice. I am finite, only so much time to leave some much behind. Meat and potatoes. Once saw Warhol asked what he thought ART was, he said ART was short for ARTIST. I tried to refute this: BASEBALL, baseball is short for BASEBALL PLAYER. Kind of made sense. Enter the studio, build a fire, step up to the plate and swing. I am insecure. If I swing fairly with the skills I'm tethered too,.... well .........comes a Renaissance fast ball.......strike one...............comes a impressionist slider........strike 2.......comes a expressionist spitball.........strike 3. Art history's apron string is like barbwire in my hands. So I reach for a corked bat.....am I alone in this.

I am going to do my best to go on the art train friday. I have never seen Judy Chicago's work in the "flesh" . Thats the only way you can ever decide where you are going to put an artist in your pantheon, ism's be damned. Problem is I'm sick as a dog right now. Would also like to see the three works by Walter Sickert at the National, the British impressionist (1860-1942, disciple of Degas and Whistler), who of late has been in the sites of pop crime writer Patricia Cornwell as the true Jack the Ripper. Not a ripologist myself but I read her December Vanity Fair article and the story in the NY Times and have taken a knee-jerk dislike to her and her art interpretation. She builds an interesting circumstantial case about Sickert's whereabouts and travels during the killings, his early acting career stage name " jack the ripper", his writing habits and stationary, and what is speculated to be unloving relationships with women. But in her interpretation of his art there is this galling "Reverend Wildmon / Giuliani / Helms" fear of violence and the unknown in the gestures and materials of art they don't like or understand. Deciphering punch-drunk brushwork on the female nude as a profile marker for a killer throws a dragnet over the whole 20 century. Imagine all your favorite artist you could put in that police lineup. Maybe this guy is the killer but perusing his work on the net I don't see it and makes me want to defend one "of our own". A dark pallet painter with guttural brushstrokes hitting the working class streets, pallor rooms, and theaters. Later in life, decades after jack, he starts painting from newspaper photos including crime scenes, kind of a head of his time stuff. Painted lonely clothed static men sitting on dark beds with nude women staring at walls. A lot of faceless folks. I believe ugly work is confessional. These are confessional but Cornwell wants us believe these are jack's confessions, ergo my knee-jerk resistance. Maybe I am being Polly Anna (hey I loved "Frida"), anyone else following this or looked at Sickerts paintings? Wonder what Judy Chicago would say.
Sidebar. Patricia Cornwell spent a fortune on this investigation including buying many of his painting, some cut up in search of his fingerprints and DNA. A cautionary tale why one should never piss, spit, bleed, or you know what on your paintings.

To answer Megan question: the movie going experience in Singapore was nothing like here. I was there for my high school years 68-73. The city lived for its movies. There was about a dozen huge theaters, kind of like our Senator, but theirs included balconies. Seats had different prices depending what you picked from the cashiers map and ushers escorted you by flashlight . Movies sold out with long lines all the time. Before the movie you would get 20 minutes of different language commercials totting things like badminton rackets, essences of mongoose medicinal elixir, and Guinness Stout. The marques had giant hand painted billboards in a huge adventure/romance poster style. Smaller version covered the city with the heartthrob action stars. Somewhere an army of Artist were cranking these out overnight for the never ending new movie on slot.
The Shaw Brothers ruled supreme as producers over there. They made hundreds of kung fu movies, comedies, and two hanky romances every year. I remember stories that they had an island off Hong Kong where the actors lived in barracks, never slept, and the theatrical blood was ordered in 55 gallon oil drums. But this teenage kid would believe
anything. Run Run Shaw lived in Hong Kong running 1/2 the empire from there. Run Me Shaw ruled in Singapore and drove around in a white stretch limo with a police motorcycle escort that was larger than the PM's. He still managed to get himself kidnapped and keep the countries attention glued to his wife as she publicly dickered for weeks with the villains over the price. Would of made a good movie.Singapore had an obsessively censorious gov'mint with protective tentacles in all walks of life. Western films got neutered or banned a lot. I remember a Peter Sellers/Goldie Hawn movie "A Girl in My Soup where the bawdy Rubensque art on Sellers bachelor pad walls was blocked out with magic marker directly on the film by the censors. The result was a fabulous scribbling animation dance in the back ground that was
funnier than the movie. You could still pick out the "lewd" art as Sellers or Hawn walked back and forth creating a see through halo. American movies were real popular. Disney's "Herbie, The Love Bug" set a record staying at a theater for almost 2 years, Then "Patton" came along and broke it. Sometimes the censors fell asleep at the wheel. An alert English teacher of ours saw that Ken Russell's "The Devils" had made it through so he took us out of class to see it. Did a number on our collective head. That was it one and only showing. Someone woke back up.The year I came to B-town my mom wrote me, said the "Exorcist was playing and selling out but that an ambulance was always parked outside
the theater because so many people were passing out. To find something comparable to thats cities grief to Bruce Lee's death over here, you would probably would have to throw Cal Ripkin into Dale Earnhardt NASCAR.Not making fun of Singaporeans here. Those were just coercively naive wonderful times. I wish I was still capable at fainting at what culture
toss my way.


Not to be flippant but there have been lots of young people protesting and marching against al-Quaida's crimes, they'recalled troop movements. They get paid and are not constrained by pacifist tendencies.

shadowboxing

I woke this morning in the middle of a destabilizing dream. I was alone on a ladder leaning against my 2 storey brick wall. My house had no neighborhood anymore. I clumsily held a giant draftsman's compass and was struggling to draw the beginnings of a huge 60's peace sign the size of my house. Troubling to hold the center point in place and pass the circuling lead over the rows of brick's locking mortar joints, the pencil lead broke. The endless bricks were impassable and unified in their opposition to draw any peace. Seems my unconscious is shadow boxing with whirling airways as it relentless tries to morph this country into a country it shouldn't be. A bellicose emollient on a soapbox of vengeance trying to give us a shared experience, coercing a shared response.....
Wishing now that Abbie Hoffman and the peacemakers had had their way and the Pentagon was still levitating high in the sky out of harms way...........out of everybody's way ............scotty

Artmob post on Nader

I really didn't want to comment on the Nader thing anymore, but one more time wont kill me or try change many minds. Just want to reassure myself this gordian knot nightmare we find ourself in can be seen outside the gun site of a circular firing squad. I found the Gladwell article an unconvincing indictment of Nader. >http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_06_11_a_crash.htm< Gladwell's thing is a pop sociology that views movements as the ripple effect of personalities. He can distill down something as complicated as the war between auto makers and safety to Nader's intransigence alone. Not one individual from the automaker side, their designers, bean-counters, or in-their-pocket politicians stick out like a sore thumb in the historical narrative or their massive influence. Sloppy.
I think there is a belief out there that if Gore was prez we would have, no war, no Ashcroft, no point of no return environmental devastation, no dry drunk doctrine of obedience. That we have this idiot Bush because of the butterfly effect of a guy named Nader shearing off the disaffected left-wing of the democratic party who didn't believe the party of FDR was up for sell. Some of us believe that butterfly left the building long ago. When the corporate leaning Clintons democrats decided to swing the Reagan pendulum only a hairs notch, hovering dead center over the crown jewel of Clinton's presidency "The era of big government is over" State of the Union speech. Kissing off unions, healthcare, civil rights for the magic bullet of gobalism and privatized corporate model. Some of us believe the butterfly left the building when the Clinton democrats gave away the public airways to money, to the very ones who use it now to cow and dribble before the Bushes. The butterfly left when they pretty much told the progressive grass-root's world to take a hike.
I would have liked to have voted for Gore. I wish i could have said to myself there was the massive political party with all its rich history out there to connect with. One to make give an take compromises with. What I saw as the campaigned neared the end was the party of Gore conniving behind the scenes to prevent Nader in the debates. Never allowing us to see our man up on the stage seriously challenging and BEING challenge next to Gore was an unforgivable mistake. I really believe that would have given Gore a chance to appropriate many of Nader's agenda in a palatable form and given many of us the go ahead to vote for him and accept Naders un-electablity. But no, he wouldn't risk it and we Naderites voted in an idealistic protected bubble-vacuum. He gave us the finger and we gave it back. But the butterfly was already out of the bag by then.

Sidebar: The lesson of Florida is not how we will never really know who won or how Gore got out witted but that the trend of privatizing and shrinking government opens the door like the one where Florida hires a republican tied firm ChoicePoint to scrub the voter roles looking for "felons" but instead targeted 1000's of innocent black voters. This is but a taste to come if Bush groupie Diebold Election Systems "answering to no one"computer voting machines become the law of the land.
Sidebar: Let's not forget it was Clinton's military that Bush used to cluster bomb the Iraqi army into clumps of mad human disease. It sad to think of the military Bush will be passing on, so steeped in the the Israeli occupation model.........scotty

Subject: waitress....there's gum on my museum...
Actually, I always considered "recontextualize" one of those $3 words, so by my ciphering McNatt owes the Walters two- fifty. The first time I laid eyes on the Walters I wondered what the hell the concrete shields on the exterior were for. If there was ever a museum that didn't need reactive armor to hide from the public it's the Walters. Giant flyswatters. I didn't like the Facing Museums. But no kudos for McNatt, he was going to have his thumb on the scale good, bad, or indifferent. I felt it was a painful stretch to empathize with the "reconsidered" art pieces. The pink casts on the wall had for me all the visual appeal of a roadside dinner table flipped over exposing a years worth of chewing gum. Maybe the collaborators are right in pointing out these works of art have lost value in our complacency or in their stodgy surroundings. Seems like the opportunity was missed up there on the wall with all the pneumatic hammers and drills when they didn't just scurrying over to the back side, loosing the anchors and let the whole drab slab crash into Cathedral St. There is your Turning the Museum Inside out in one fell swoop.
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For those who read, loved and marveled at Keseys contribution to this Carl Sagan "dot" we're glued to, run to the Vagabond Theater and catch their production of "One flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". I saw it sunday and they're giving it their all.

I agree the that we will never outgrow Eakins, Millet, and Sargent.Their portrayals of the world, the intangables they put in the paintings transcended their "mastery of technique". They went out side the box of academia. I can spend time with them in a museum and head straight for the Pollacks and Kiefirs without a smidgen of vertigo. They're kindred spirits. A lot of people think that's what greatness is. Which brings me back to Bouguereau who in Ricardo P's argument is held as the yard stick for uniting renaissance skill and humanism. I think a lot are perplexed at this choice of traditionist painters to swing the saber charge against modernism. It calls in to question whether he really gets Di Vinci, Ingres and all. Bouguereau was no Millet. He was one of those historical figures whose virtuosity was more than what he had t say. I think the unfortunate neo-conservative politically correct choice of words, quote, " He (Bouguereau) took the lowest forms of life peasants, surfs, homeless and turned them in something like Gods" rings true to the essences of what's wrong with his paintings. There is an explotive, subserviant, paternalistic, cut off from the root of truth gaze in theses paintings that have an Uncle Tom's Cabin quality about them. No matter how "correctly" painted" they seem peopled by a 9 to 5 modeling agency, punching the clock, vogueing in sterile pantamines speaking nothing about the past or whats to come. Van Goh's sympathy and sincerity of the toilers of the earth did and that's why he is he and Bouguereau will forever stomp up and down screaming "Look at me". These are the paintings of a decadant aristocracy partying as an army of gendarmes keep'em safe from the business end of those very "idyllic peasants" pitchforks. Bouguereau's "The Bohemian" ( www.artrenewal.org )is a perfect example of art lacking "the sweat ot the brow" of a
Millet, "the drama " of a Homer/Eakins", or "the personal connection " of a Sargent. (Corny apology). This is a "pretty" vacuous painting good for an old codger to hang on the mantle, muse over with brandy, before slumbering off ringing the servants bell for his nightclothes . He used his draftsman skills to illustrate fluff. There were so many better.

Pointless rebutals:Progressive history brought down the Royal Academy clay feet, it's pratronage and Cannons, not a couple of out gunned conspiring petty bourgeois art dealing uncles of Van Goh. And one last stab at great art as crowd control. Didn't matter how many Davids Napoleon had in the attic to dangle in front of the mobs, when he could no longer pay the conscripts, grease the economy with war booty, or bring bread and firewood into the cities, he was burnt umber.
I'll follow Richards advice and cool it on this discussion. Nobody changing any minds.-----------------------------------

Dave and Steves "where's the art, wheres the original, where's the experience?" reminded me of John Berger's stomping grounds (Brit novelist, bad boy marxist art critic, essayist , and self made french peasant). Who owns the experience of a work of art when the ablity to instanty and endless reproduce it, with or without permission, accurately or not, leaving in the dust the original a geographic afterthought. In the thenadays you had to embark on pilgrimages to faraway chapels or schmooz the titled classes to look at art in a setting and experence probably not to different from the artist intent. Nowadays reproducton of an art piece seems like a game of charades, whispering its original intent in someone's ears, who in turn continues the whispering in someone's ears, who in turn continues the whispering.....subtly reinterpreting the unhearing till the response is what ever the last man standing brought with him to the table. How many ears did the Etruscan mask or the Modanna and Child or Fluxus art whisper through before it shouted in our eyes. Personally I love my walls covered with higgly-piggly array of art reproductions and photos like a tower of babel. Reproductions are a gestalt experience. Although this wonderful relativism can jump up and bite your ass. When but a young art student me and my friends were in love with Belgium painter James Ensor. We passed back and forth this huge book full of large
beautiful bright color prints of his painting. We rushed to the Guggenheim for his giant show , took a few steps in and said what the hell happened to the paintings..there so dull and gray..where are the bright colors like in the book, these stink and we've been jipped. The book publisher had jazzed up the color and I had to spend the entire day relearning how to appreciate James Ensor. .......scotty

I find this argument on what kind of artist is better suited to play the piper for totalitarianism (political correctness and art market for another day please) really interesting. As Sally pointed out we can pretty well put the Hitler question to rest. A book I no longer have " Hitler And The Artist" pointed out his life long obsession with art in culture and his bitterness at being rejected into art school. In every speech he gave, no matter the audience, he'd include a lengthily critique on the role and duty of artist to be subservient to the state. He'd admonish artist, architects, and composers to produce art, and lots of it, that portrayed a glorious mythical heroic past. Basically an art that shrinks people down to a shared heartbeat. The speeches always ended on the high note condemning as treason the degenerate individualist "Jewish Bohshevism" of modern art. He was especially fond of giving this lecture in front of the troops. How different the world would be if there had only been affirmative action for bitter little hateful men in the Vienna art schools. The rejection that was heard arround the world. I don't how many remember that Oskar Schlemmer retrospect and the BMA years back. He was one of the founders of The Bauhaus that raised the hackles of Third Reich asthetics. I can still see last photo as you exited the show. In it was a highlighted grainy figure in prison garb making camouflage nets with hundreds of others in a nazi starvation labor camp. It was Schlemmer in his last days on earth. Some people back up their criticism of modern art with teeth. Last week I caught a few hours of the PBS Napoleon documentary. I was amazed at the hundreds and hundreds of paintings and etchings documenting the daily reign of Napoleon done by France's greatest artist and court chroniclers. All that wonderful, beautifully executed work subservient to one mans ambition and his need to substitute himself for a nation. Boot licking lap dog pageantry art. Interesting the two " modern artist" of that time Beethoven and Goya came out swinging against the boogie man. Beethoven renounced him as a despot and Goya recorded the French army atrocities in Spain. When Napoleon needed artist "easy to control", "feed the lies", and "bow to his godhead", he
found them in the royal academies. When history needed an artist to tell the truth it found it in the "grotesques" of a lone modernist named Goya. He was bitchin..............scotty
http://chomsky.arts.adelaide.edu.au/person/DHart/ResponsesToWar/Art/Study
Guides/Goya.html

I too dabbled in TM back in the early 70s and as MadasHell tells it, the coercion was none to see. Me and an Institute buddy plopped down 2 sawbucks, a ripe red apple, and a clean new handkerchief in exchange for some basic guidance and a personalized "my ears only" mantra. Although years may go by without using it, I still, when times are rough, fall back on it to help center the old bruised and battered spirit. But all this reminded me of the Moonies I use to run into downtown around the Inner Harbor right after it was built. In those days they weren't as sophisticated and stealthy as they are now. With big posters on street easels they diagramed for the hell bound tourist and office drones the fallibility of atheist Marxism and it's humanist goals against the terrible need to surrender all humanistic frailties to God the Father via the Church of Unification via Rev. Moon. On one especially weird day while reading a Cerebus comic at a table in the Harbor Place one of the Moonies sat down at my table and started telling me through clever questions how miserable and lost I was. Of course she was right, she had made lose my place in the comic. I ask her about herself and how the Rev. had changed her life around. She was Israeli and as a teenager jumped in and out of socialistic causes until she f