Narrative Forces

It Gets Better - Pixar

2011-04-17T20:09:00.002-05:00

National Poetry Month

2011-04-17T19:56:00.003-05:00

It is National Poetry month. The New York Review of Books is offering a poem a day. Bookmark it and rejoice every day.

Flash Mob at Bank of America - Tax Weekend 2011

2011-04-17T19:52:00.001-05:00

More cowbell!

Get ready. Oh-ate is coming.

2007-10-19T20:47:00.000-05:00

Geoff Halber, one of Dwell magazine's senior designers spoke at the AIGA's 2007 design conference in Denver recently. Given only 60 seconds to present, and working under this year's theme, "Next," Geoff decided to put out a call to designer friends and friends-of-friends to make an '08 symbol. Geoff turned 60 designs into 60 frames. (Sorry about the ads at the end.)

The Black Bloggers Emerge or SILENCE IS NEVER GOLDEN

2007-10-19T19:52:00.000-05:00

Attorney Wayne Bennett is representative of the growing group of black bloggers who speak a truth that may singe your white or, even, black ego. His blog The Field Negro is tough and honest. In today's post he is articulating his thoughts about the failure to override SCHIP. On Wednesday he gathered his thoughts about conservative blacks, "The Talented Tenth Wannabes."

"You can't be against a minimum wage increase or a fair living wage for workers. Not when some poor single mother is working at Wal Mart and earning $6 an hour, and Sam Walton's fucking daughter bought a 30 million dollar painting at some art auction in New York. You can't just blindly follow the NRA and their strict interpretation of the second amendment when kids are getting slaughtered in our streets on a regular basis. You can't support free enterprise and a total deregulation of businesses when environmental racism is killing your people in places like South Texas, and Mississippi. You can't oppose affirmative action programs, and minority business set asides, but turn around and rip black folks for not starting businesses in their own neighborhoods. ( You benefited from the same affirmative action programs that you now conveniently want to get rid of. I know I know, you guys are the smart ones, you didn't need affirmative action.) You can't oppose strong voting rights enforcement, but rip your own people for not being involved enough in the political process. And finally, you can't support the death penalty when you know that more than one innocent person has been put to death by the state because of a fucked up justice system."

At other times he addresses everyday quandaries and insult.

"Black people can we talk?" he wrote in May. "Why the. . . do you all talk so loud during movies? Seriously! If I drop 30$ to see a movie (I am adding the concessions in the mix) I want to watch that. . . in peace. I really don't want to hear your kids crying, your cellphones ringing, and exactly what you will be cooking for dinner when you get home."

-or-

"I swear, white people love their pets more than they love people. Seriously, they have clothes for their pets, gourmet food for their pets, exercise schools for their pets, they take their pets in their cars with them, they have pet hotels. . . . Ten people were shot to death this past weekend in Philadelphia, but that was still page two news here. Now I guarantee you, that if there were ten dogs shot all across the city, white people would be losing their. . . minds."

It is worth reading this LA Times article if you're interested in diversity on the web.

What to do with grief and sadness.

2007-10-19T17:59:00.000-05:00

I picked up this quote from T.H White's Once and Future King. It is the wizard Merlin, who is speaking to "Wart", the future King Arthur, about what to do with his sadness.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough."

The smack of irony

2007-10-13T19:53:00.000-05:00

Secretary of State in a pensive moment w/flags.

Does anyone else enjoy the irony in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's condemnation of Putin and his ransacking of the Russian government?

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament."

She has "told the Russians that." Do they care?

This McClatchy Report quotes Michael McFaul, of Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a center for international studies, that is consistently conservative (Richard M. Schaife, a billionaire, Clinton tormentor, sits on the Executive Committee): "Bush and his aides grossly misjudged Putin..." One of Bush's aides is none other than Condi Rice, known academically as a "Russian expert." Being criticized by her own University must be painful. You have to wonder, though, how can they get everything so wrong?

Remember 2001 after his first meeting with Putin? Bush famously said he'd looked in the Russian leader's eyes, found him "trustworthy" and "was able to get a sense of his soul." If this omniscient insight weren't so gravely in error, it could be funny, instead it is just recklessly psychotic.

General Disgust

2007-10-13T18:59:00.000-05:00

Tanks in the streets, Thailand Military Coup
19 September 2006

Fortunately for the United States, we have a loyal military. That said, am I the first to wonder just how close we may come to a military revolt, dare I say, coup, of sorts? Lt. General Ricardo S. Sanchez airs his thoughts. Snachez joins 19, other retired Generals who have blasted the government. I think this certainly constitutes, at the least, a revolt.

“There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

Things are feeling a little "brinky", aren't they?

Nobel Fashionista

2007-10-13T17:49:00.000-05:00

Milan - Gucci - 2006

I needed some light hearted diversion today. I am grateful to my west coast stringer who alerted me to this wonderful LA Times parody. Writers Patrick Day and Todd Martens poke some gentle fun with a "Hit or Miss" fashion review of our 2007 Nobel Laureates. It makes me giddy to see the words "Nobel" and "fashion" in the same sentence. Hence the good fun. Enjoy.

All our hearts must be broken.

2007-10-13T08:39:00.002-05:00

Relatives and loved ones of 12 U.S. soldiers attend a group burial with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The 11 men and one woman died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. (Getty Images / October 12, 2007)

I can't look at this picture without crying. There is so much I feel I can't control right now. But, this war on Iraq seems out of everyone's control. It just goes on wasting lives, cursing families. The grief will reverberate for decades in the lives of the families whose loved ones have died so miserably in a foreign land.

I propose that every newspaper and magazine in America produce one supplement every week that includes only photos of every military burial that took place that week for soldiers who have died in Iraq (and Pakistan). As a country we are shamefully passive about the destruction of the lives of Iraqi's who now number in the hundreds of thousands. It seems this knowledge alone would move us to revolt, but, it doesn't.

Maybe, if we could see the compounding of death to just our own soldiers, we might get up in arms---an American insurgency against this nightmare. But, these images of burials are few. We are protected from this suffering. We need many, many images, over and over, day after day until the hardened American heart breaks open---until an American insurgency takes root. We must stop this war. This warring. This mindless, unconscionable waging of death.

Autoerotic Mishap

2007-10-11T20:35:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Gary Aldridge

I apologize. I cannot not post this.

Mission Accomplished

2007-10-11T14:13:00.000-05:00

Jim Holt, a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, has written a piece in the London Review of Books. It nails the Iraq oil theory nicely (he must have been reading my blog!). Holt cogently lays out the middle east stew pot. He sums up why the administration must feel, behind closed doors, that it has been wildly successful. The US now sits on one quarter of the world's oil reserves. Now, if only everyone would cooperate. A worthwhile quote that sums it up:

"Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush."

China to the rescue.

2007-10-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

Chinese police train at a military base in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province August 30, 2005.
By Herman47 at Flickr, August, 2005

The Washington Post exposes, yet, another humiliation for this Bush administration. Iraq is buying arms from China because we can't produce them quickly enough. The article could be used by some MBA study group as the foundation for a critique of all the ways a delivery system failed.

Meanwhile, General Patreaus has again insisted that Iran is providing Iraqi insurgents with arms. But, according to the latest count, 190,000 American-provided weapons are missing from the Iraq rosters. It looks to me like the primary provider of weapons to the insurgents is...the United States!

As far as China selling $100 million in arms to Iraq, maybe we could join the Iraqis and also purchase our arms from China. Since we are unable to arm our own troops in a timely fashion, let's get some help from the Chinese. They are more than happy to be of service. We'll just outsource everything.

By the way, where did Iraq get the $100 million for their arms purchase? Think about that for a moment.

Oil again.

2007-10-07T20:32:00.000-05:00

The kiss of death

I feel compelled to keep posting about the oil situation in Iraq, since, as you may know, some people think that may be what the Iraq invasion was all about. It seems from this BBC news article that the Kurds went off the reservation. They have begun signing oil deals with western countries.

The "surge" was really about giving the government time to sign the legislation that would govern the Iraq oil industry and offer protections for investments. This agreement would serve to mandate how oil profits would be distributed between Sunni, Shia and Kurds. It would also stipulate that the oil industry would be privatized (taken from the Iraqi government) and run by western oil powers. So far the Bush administration can't get the Iraq government to sign it.

The bizarre complication of the Kurds signing oil deals without Iraqi approval or governing rules is just one more insane event in the Iraq debacle. Worse, one of the companies that the Kurds have signed agreements with is Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas.

This CBS News article provides interesting background. Ray Hunt, the CEO of Hunt Oil, and a powerful conservative, is on the Board of Halliburton, is a key Bush fund raiser and sits on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. If anyone would know what a disaster it would be to have the Kurds independently signing away Iraqi oil it would be this insider, Ray Hunt. So WHAT is going on? Stay tuned.

No escape from the modern world

2007-10-07T20:05:00.000-05:00

I am trying to catch up with some things I found interesting. This post by Audrey Tempelsman over at Dwell blog---always a great place to visit---is a few days old, but who cares?

Tempelsman's post concerns an exhibition that opened in London called Psychic Vacuum. The artist is Mike Nelson, a British sculpture. Sculptors do the damnedest things lately! It might just shake you up, and, as Tempelsman suggests, isn't that what modern art is all about? Sometimes I wonder.

Don't miss the slide show of eerie spaces in the exhibition. You'll have to cursor down the page to find the link. It is an amazing and deft construction.

Herbert Muschamp Dies.

2007-10-07T19:22:00.000-05:00

Photo:Robert Maxwell for The New York Times
Herbert Muschamp in October 2006 in New York.

Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the New York Times, died October 3, at the age of 59 of lung cancer. He was an erudite man and an inspired writer and thinker. Here is the obituary providing some insight into Muschamp and quotes from his writing. I found his comments, included in the obituary, on his visit to the concentration camp in Dachau, uniquely evocative and moving. Here, also, is an Op Ed piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg offering appreciation for Muschamp. A quote from the Klinkenborg Op Ed:

"A lot of people argued with Herbert about his take on the world, and their argument with him often boiled down to the proposition that taste is not morality. I suspect that if you were talking about an ideal world, Herbert might agree. But in his own life, he saw that there was an Orwellian connection between taste and morality — that bad faith nearly always means bad buildings and that bad faith in our society is endemic."

For people who care about design, it was so helpful to have someone writing about it who was committed to it and actually addressed the value and the ethics of design without a slant toward political correctness. You might disagree with Muschamp, but you couldn't, ever, doubt his good faith. Just that, helps.

What to do?

2007-10-07T18:53:00.000-05:00

I just found this list in my sticky notes. I can't remember where they came from. Perhaps someone else saw these and will remind me from whence they came. Until then, despite their occasional sentimental quality, I think they can help to refocus the wandering mind---the one that likes to get lost in trivial pursuits and those meandering narratives. Questions 16, 17 and 18 were probably submitted by Sally Fields, don't go there. Some are a little redundant. So OK some suck. Just pick one and work with it. Focusing, matters. Paying attention, matters. I'm just tellin' ya.

Questions:

1. What do I want to accomplish today?
2. What is the most important thing I need to do today? (Do it first!)
3. Is this the best use of my time right now?
4. What am I trying to accomplish right now?
5. What can I cross off my list by deleting or delegating? What is not important?
6. What can I do right now to take the next leap instead of the next step?
7. Who can I learn from today?
8. Who can I thank today?
9. What am I grateful for?
10. How can I eliminate distractions right now?
11. What are my top 3 current goals?
12. What is most important to me in life?
13. If the my world was going to end within one year, what would I be doing right now?
14. What will I do today towards my major goals?
15. What action can I take instead of worry right now?
16. Who should I thank today?
17. Who needs some love today?
18. How can I be a kinder person today?
19. How can I have more compassion today?
20. What can I do right now to release negative energy in a positive way?
21. What can I do to let go of my anger?
22. How can I put worry on hold right now?
23. How can I choose happiness right now?
24. What can I do to slow down today?
25. What am I learning right now?
26. What beneficial routines can I start today?
27. What will I do, see, explore, or experience today that is new?
28. How and with whom can I partner today to make 1+1=3?
29. How can I be more compassionate today?
30. What will I celebrate today?
31. Where did I find Joy today?
32. What did I learn today?
33. How will I “pay it forward” today?
34. How will I make today great? How do I define great?
35. What can I stop holding/clinging to help me break free?
36. How can I let go with peace?
37. Who can I help today?
38. How can I add Peace to the world today?
39. What’s the most powerful thing I can do right now, today to increase my business?
40. What have I been avoiding that I can do today?

Bad, sad day.

2007-10-06T21:19:00.000-05:00

Marion Jones confesses. After lying to her public and to federal investigators for over three years, Jones tells the truth, sort of. She still insists that she didn't know her trainer was giving her banned performance enhancing drugs. She thought it was "flax seed oil." Jones faces a jail term of six months. One could assume that she probably, finally, confessed because to continue to insist she is innocent in the face of overwhelming evidence, would mean a longer jail sentence. There seems to be little redemption in this one.

It is hard to sympathize given the scope of her fabrications. She even sued Victor Conte, founder of Blanco, the performance enhancing drug company, for millions of dollars, claiming slander and defamation. He testified that he saw here inject herself with the drugs. She has now dropped the suit. But, how devious of her.

It is hard not to feel sorry for her. However, I am afraid that four years of denial, when it was pretty clear there was a serious problem, stretched everyone's trust. She has few supporters remaining. It is very bad and sad.

Can someone please tell me how an athlete can be a doper and NOT get caught? Why does an Olympic athlete take these drugs? Aren't they always tested and found out? It seems to be a gamble with zero chance of success. I continue to be baffled.

Anthropolgizing the Military

2007-10-04T22:01:00.000-05:00

What took so long?

Glenn Gould Anniversary

2007-10-04T20:31:00.000-05:00

Just this video will give you some sense of Glenn Gould's amazingly touching understanding of the music he performs. There he is, bent over the piano, murmuring to himself in a state of wonder. He is playing Bach BWV 828 - 3 - Courante. Go to YouTube and play everything Gould. Buy his Goldberg Variations. Listen religiously.

Glenn Gould died 25 years ago at the age of 50. He remains the classical genius of the century. Here is a wonderful piece by jazz pianist Jessica Williams on Gould along with her thoughts on "dead music." Her appreciation of Gould helps to illuminate the broader understanding of his importance and gift.

Then there is this from Toronto, Gould's home town. "Could there ever be another Glenn Gould?" It is hard to imagine. And then, I offer again my own April post on Gould and that adorable picture of him at the piano with his teacher. This post helps to explain some of the techniques Gould used.

Recent conjecture that Gould had Asperger Syndrome, explaining some of conditions that might relate to his curious eccentricities, does nothing, in my judgment, to diminish the full wonder of his talent. Genius is funny stuff. Try as we might, there is no way to fully understand it. I have to believe that genius does not arise from the norm, but, rather, from the ability to escape the norm. Most of us are trying so hard to be normal, we haven't a chance at being a genius. It may be that an innate disregard, for whatever reason, of the worth of being normal holds the most promise for a stab at genius. Gould had no fear of his oddness, but neither did he champion it in any way. He just was who he was.

All of this is not to say that the mystery of genius or Gould is simple. It is baffling. But when genius is manifest, one doesn't think about its origins, just its presence and astounding poise.

Why Don't They Like Us?

2007-10-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

Yesterday in the Washington Post Anne Applebaum offered an interesting conclusion as to why USA prestige in the world has declined. Hint: it has nothing to do with our bully tactics and arrogance.

"If you're really worried about Iran, do you want to put your faith in the United States, the country that bungled Iraq? If you really care about Islamic fundamentalism, do you want to be led by the country that, distracted by Iraq, failed to predict the return of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan?

There are other factors, of course: As I (and many others) have written before, we've been bad at looking after our allies over the past five years, bad at thanking them or compensating them for military contributions to Iraq, bad at maintaining very basic aspects of public diplomacy, such as student-exchange programs. Still, NATO will not fall apart because our president has been rude to his German counterpart or a few Britons don't get scholarships. NATO will fall apart, however, if its American leaders are perceived as inept. And even if the surge works, even if the roadside bombs vanish, "inept" is a word that will always be used about the Iraq invasion."

The word for this American decade: inept. Which is putting it mildly!

Arms Sales to Deveoping Countries

2007-10-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

The United States of America, bringing peace to the world, one gun at a time.

Alabama?

2007-10-01T21:22:00.000-05:00

A closer inspection of this map here spurs many interesting thoughts. Primary among them, for me, was the realization that Iran's GDP is equivalent to the economy of Alabama! Alabama! Not to disparage Alabama, and for god's sake the Clemson Tigers, but, Alabama?

Isn't Iran the country that is going to become an unstoppable military power that is about to devour the Middle East? Isn't this the terrifyingly, powerful force that the administration feels it must carpet and fire bomb, now, before it becomes the new Germany/Hitler state of no mercy? How will Iran define the new world order with the budget of Alabama?!

Just imagine those 'Bama boys producing a massive armament program destined to change the world order on the back of their State economy. Evidently, Governor Bob Riley, who just announced that October is "Alabama Food Products Month," is unaware that October should be "Militarize Alabama Month." If he tried to militarize his state, according to the Bush/Cheney Better Business Evaluation Institute, Riley has the funds and brain power to do it. I guess he just lacks the Ahmadinejad chutzpah. If Riley dared to get that hairy-cheeked, Bush/Cheney Co would bomb Alabama back into the stone ages, which is where everyone thought Alabama damn well was.

Remember what we found in the Soviet Union once the walls came tumbling down? Nothing. That big fearsome RED giant, the communist terror that threatened our very existence, day after day, was impotent...a big bag of wind. The Soviet Union turned out to be a mediocre, blustering idiot.

How can we ever get to a reality-based world perspective? There are so many political purposes obscuring reason. Alabama? Oh, for gods sake.

She wins hearts and minds.

2007-10-01T06:19:00.000-05:00

The NYT provides a glowing review for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Marin Alsop conducted the BSO for the first time this weekend in her role as Music Director. This review from the Times puts Baltimore even more assuredly in the upper tier of wonderful cities to live in.

Ms. Alsop has lived to survive the denigration and icy welcome from the BSO musicians, who wanted someone of higher caliber (male?) to lead them. What a joke. What chutzpah!

Baltimore is witnessing the rise of one of the great world conductors. I thank the gods for this magnificent, musical blessing for this dear city. Welcome Ms. Alsop!

The white myth.

2007-09-30T19:44:00.000-05:00

My west coast stringer sends me this east coast lead. The Sackler Museum in DC has opened and interesting exhibition entitled "Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity." I have often heard that classical architecture and sculpture was vividly painted and breathtaking. Finally, two scholars have managed through UV light technology to recreate some of those classic pieces in their original colors. The sculpture of character Paris above is pretty dazzling. No?

"The sculpture and architecture of the ancient world was, in fact, brightly and elaborately painted. The only reason it appears white to us is that centuries of weathering have worn off most of the paint.

So entrenched has the association become between classical art and the look of white, unblemished marble, that the idea of an Athenian acropolis as colorfully painted as a circus wagon is difficult to imagine if not downright blasphemous. But now an exhibition at the Sackler Museum can help us envision what a color-drenched classical world might have looked like."

I think we moderns are going to look, by comparison, rather drab. The exhibition is opened until January 20, 2008. Go forth, colorfully.

Burman - Aung San Suu Kyi

2007-09-30T09:47:00.000-05:00

Here is some background from the BBC and a biographical timeline from nobelprize.org, on Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced "sue chee"), the leader of the Democracy Movement in Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi has been held in prison or under house detention for 11 of the past 14 years for her part in leading the Democracy Movement. She was winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Her story is compelling. Her equanimity, powerful.

If Burma had oil...

2007-09-30T06:57:00.000-05:00

This from Burma.

"Security forces there have restricted the movement of Buddhist monks and locked most of the monasteries, "effectively barring the Buddhist clergy from marching on the streets in protest, the report said... In response, monks chanted words of "loving kindness," the report said." (Emphasis added.)

Loving kindness, metta, is the Buddhist's response to suffering.

Here are some photos from demonstrations around the world in support of Burma's Democracy movement.

If Burma had oil, the US would be in there in 24 hours. These people organically and spiritually identify with democratic governance, but we offer only words in their defense. We have not protected people who democratically elected a government that was subsequently imprisoned or murdered by the military junta. Instead, we are in Iraq where democracy is anathema, but oil is the prize. The hypocrisy of Bush's intention to spread democracy and freedom is heartbreakingly clear. For this administration, blood is shed only for a good capitalistic cause.

Mass MoCA Mess

2007-09-29T21:45:00.000-05:00

Of all the information I have read and comments I have received, this response from Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes sums up the Christoph Buchel and Mass MoCA dispute best. In brief, two wrongs make one big wrong. Here's my post in August, if you would like a little background.

Citizen's Quiz - Are YOU the right stuff?

2007-09-29T21:13:00.000-05:00

In the event you want to prove your worthiness for citizenship, here in the left-hand column are ten of the most challenging questions on the redesigned naturalization questionnaire. Try them first. No cheating. After that encounter, look at the third choice in the left column. It is the full "Civics Test" with all the questions and answers. No yawning.

Burma and Metta

2007-09-28T18:06:00.001-05:00

I was elated to see these words in this Burma photo today, and in English, no less. Monks, nuns and followers of Buddhist teachings repeat these words, or some version of them, throughout their day, throughout their lives. It is called metta. The closest definition of this word is "loving kindness." (See the link for a more thorough explanation.)

An important point is that no one is excluded from this idea, this giving. It is unconditional. All living beings and creatures are included. What I also appreciate about metta is that at anytime of the day or night there is some Buddhist somewhere in the world repeating some form of this simple phrase, sending out metta to everyone. I find this comforting and hopeful.

The practice of repeating the metta phrase also brings calm to the one saying it. Its repetition is intended to open one's heart to the suffering inherent in being human and bring the heart to peace. It is a hard practice, metta, simply because no one is excluded. Even your enemy, or maybe, especially your enemy, is offered metta. Offering loved ones and friends metta is easier. Picturing someone who is difficult for you and offering them this powerful "wish" takes practice. This simple way of being loving can actually be pretty arduous. Think about it the next time someone cuts you off on the highway and offer them these thoughts: "May you be well and happy. May you be free from harm and anger. May you be peaceful."

So the Monks, revered and loved, walked and repeated this phrase as they walked. They offered these words for everyone, including their hate-filled junta. As they were beaten, they were also repeating these words for those who were striking them. They offered these words because there is little else of importance. This kind of humility is hard for us to imagine, let alone accept.

Soothing the Soul

2007-09-26T20:34:00.000-05:00

This is Krystian Zimerman playing two Gershwin preludes for an audience in Japan. I picked this up at Jessica Duchen's UK classical music blog. The blog is pretty wonderful.

Evidently, before KZ played Gershwin, he had a few words to say about the US and Iraq. We are doing so well internationally. Always referenced.

Burma

2007-09-26T19:21:00.000-05:00

It is hard for me to write about the monks in Burma who are confronting the insane military junta. They are spiritual heroes to me and to all who follow Buddhist teachings. It is unimaginable that anyone would harm a Buddhist monk or nun. They practice only compassion. Here is a first person report on what is happening.

For me the monks are the epitome of gentleness and honesty. To imagine that they are threatened by the perversity of the junta is too, too difficult to imagine. That they are leading the Resistance movement means so much. They, like the monks in Vietnam in the 60s, are willing to sacrifice their lives for the well being of others.

The western world cannot begin to understand the purity of this commitment to others.

Capital Gains

2007-09-24T21:43:00.000-05:00

This strange and creepy article featured in the NYT Travel section gave me a case of hee-bee-gee-bee, hilarious, nausea. Attached to this article is this multimedia show illuminating the most outrageously priced clothing a person could wear in any city. The clothing is worn by surreal models who truly capture the look of this stiff, humorless, deathly administration. Washington, the article coos, is now "hip." Read Bush RICH. (By the way, what's with the Louboutin shoes? Is there no end to the obscenity of luxury items? $1,245 for the "Bling-Bling Peep-toe shoes"?) With Bush, shopping is patriotic. And big shopping is very patriotic. I think this article, coupled with the multimedia show is an effective slam on the whole Washington aristocracy of Bush/Cheney Co. War fashion. The fashion of War.

Put this together with Glenn Greenwald's excoriation of Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and you have the full flavor of the loss effected by the slide into the sludge of privilege. Have I said enough? Enough.

Modern Architecture Fans meet MIMOA

2007-09-24T20:59:00.000-05:00

Captioned: "Blink and Miss it" from MIMOA

MIMOA was started by two women in Holland, Mieke Vollings and "Naomi." It is an amazing offering for the modern architecture fan traveling in Europe. Everyone is familiar with the big names and big buildings. But these women wanted to exploit that delicious experience one has when they accidentally stumble upon smaller projects that move the spirit. So MIMOA was formed to provide a place to register and map your modern architectural finds for others to savor.

"It is the best source of information for your city trip in Europe with all Modern Architecture in one view. MIMOA shows Europe’s Modern Architecture on a map with the address and all additional information you need to actually find and visit interiors, parks, public places, buildings and bridges."

If modern architecture spurs your creative juices, and you are traveling to Europe, here's your best source for scouting. (Oh, yes, the big buildings are listed, too.)

Time for some serious thought.

2007-09-24T20:10:00.000-05:00

OK, this video has partisan overtones. OK, it is a little dumb with the hip-hop sound bite. OK, using the same footage at least three times weakens its effect. OK. But, when you get to the end of the video and learn that Blackwater mercenary troops were disbursed to New Orleans to "fight crime" in the aftermath of Katrina (take note that this seems to be the only thing immediately and effectively organized before, during or after Katrina), you begin to think about this a little differently. Blackwater troops are being disbursed in American cities? Shout this question out your windows!! By Whom? Under what laws? Folks this is serious.

This administration came into office with a fierce agenda for privatization---schools, prisons, hospitals, highways, social security, health care, etc. If corporations are in charge in the privatized world, who is in charge of this privatized military? Apparently not our military. Put it all together and things look a little scarier...even.

I have found two definitions of "blackwater:" 1) any of several human or animal diseases characterized by dark urine resulting from rapid breakdown of red blood cells and 2) domestic wastewater containing human wastes. I'll leave you with that.

Time for some fun.

2007-09-24T19:41:00.000-05:00

"Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) rebel Gabriele Pauli arrives for the New Year reception of the Bavarian government in Munich January 12, 2007. Bavaria's most glamorous politician -- a flame-haired motorcyclist who helped bring down state premier Edmund Stoiber -- has shocked the Catholic state in Germany by suggesting marriage should last just 7 years. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle."

Here's the article about this jazzy dame.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

2007-09-16T20:35:00.000-05:00

(image: Elaine Thompson/AP. Via YahooNews.)

I hadn't seen this photo anywhere. Here's the caption:

"A police officer begins to lift a weapon toward protesters as a presidential limousine drives past behind Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, in Bellevue, Wash. President Bush arrived Monday afternoon to headline a fundraiser for Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., just hours after the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez."

I found this photo over at BagNews, a site that analyzes the language and messages of current photography, particularly political photography. It is a cogent site that provides a means for evaluating photos in the news.

My "read" of this photo is the sense that we are just one trigger-happy police officer away from martial law. Because of the tenor of this administration, there is a 24/7, fear/hate mongering atmosphere. "If you're not with us, you're a traitor." It is hard to imagine what prompted the officer in Bellevue, WA, of all places, to raise his enormous gun (I read that it is actually 40mm grenade launcher, often used a a tear gas gun). When an officer raises his gun, isn't there the implication that the situation warrants severe action, that an officer doesn't raise his gun unless he is getting prepared to shoot. Otherwise, the gun stays at rest. And look at his eyes.

Here are some quotes from the comments section under this photo at BagNews:

"Not only are the "unfriendly" citizens not admitted to public events, to ask questions or even to be present in "unfriendly T-shirts or wearing a wrong color," but even in the streets the police protection of the ruler is following the rule, that these are not the times to protest, to raise voices, time to shut up!"

"I grew up in Bellevue. Last time I checked, it was so Republican that the NYT does not even offer home delivery. Had this shot been taken in Baghdad, it would more understandable."

"Darcy Burner, Democratic candidate for this seat, narrowly lost in 2006. To match this fund raising visit by Bush, there was a huge online effort to donate to Darcy's campaign. Also, Darcy held a Virtual Town Hall, with this video invitation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJjxN8Iw62Q

No doubt, the Secret Service et al. thought that might mean some sort of threat on the ground as well. The caption reads "protesters" but they are not shown.

YouTube has a number of videos, and this one by AuntBee09 captures the variety of law enforcement groups as well as protesters. Midway through it, as the Presidential motorcade speeds by, the police dispatcher says "The package is en route" several times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iQCQuCF9Wk&mode=related&search="

What an iconic photo!

Turn, Turn, Turn.

2007-09-16T18:54:00.001-05:00

This YouTube video of The Byrds singing "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You're Gone)" on Hullabaloo in 1965, is a swift reminder of just how much the world has changed. Or maybe it's a good reminder that one cannot know when great change waits just ahead, when you are about to go over the brink into the unimaginable.

Look at those Go Go Dancers! Look at that choreography! Look at the whole stage set shaking! Look at them doing The Pony! Finally, I can say it: I do not miss this!

But, I must admit this period was one, wonderful, wild step into a new creative exuberance. Nothing compares to that brief, window of creative and optimistic energy. It was so unsophisticated, so unselfconscious in a surprising way. Look at it...the beaming, goofy energy of those dancers on black and white TV. They almost glow. The following year President Kennedy will be assassinated and the innocence will ebb from all those bobbing bodies. Then MLK. Then JFK. Then Vietnam. And worse. So when I think of that era, it is in comparison to where it all went. How dark it would get. How changed we would all be. Where we would arrive, today.

The Byrds biggest hits: Pete Seeger's Turn,Turn, Turn and Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man. Then there was the, at the time, controversial Eight Miles High. The Eight Miles High psychedelic video is hysterical. I believe you can select it from the thumbnails after the above video concludes.

Reports of seizures and vomiting.

2007-09-14T20:15:00.000-05:00

OK. Already there are reports of seizures and vomiting when this design was unveiled. Here it is, yet another hideous design catastrophe: the London 2012 Olympics logo. I would have thought we could have trusted the British, the home of Pentagram Design and all. But, no. A disaster of this sort, causing not only seizures, but stink, comes too late in the history of design to be acceptable, or forgiven. If design were a government project, this would be the result. However, this design is not of the civil service. It is of commerce. May it rot.

Architecture as a force.

2007-09-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

Interview Room, Secret Service Headquarters, Los Angeles

Richard Ross, a Professor at the University of California, has published a book entitled Architecture of Authority. Ross examines a spectrum of places that provide the visual expression of authority. The photos are powerful and some are gut-wrenching. In speaking of his photographs, with interviewer Nicole Palsuka, Ross says the following:

"I hope they all ask the viewers to judge where they exist and view themselves as potential participants. I hope the next time a person walks into the DMV or the principal’s office, or a police station, they understand how spaces are overtly constructed to socialize, herd, conform, or coax a certain behavior or obedience."

Follow this link to a sample of his photographs and scroll down to read his interview about the book. All images © Richard Ross.

For the love of nuns.

2007-09-11T06:48:00.000-05:00

The nuns are getting support by an astonished public.

Don't Ask!

2007-09-09T20:55:00.000-05:00

It use to be that reporters called up government sources and asked questions of them and received answers. Here's the new way, in La Plata, Maryland:

"1. Submit your questions, in writing, preferably via e-mail, to Judith Frazier, La Plata's town clerk.

2. Frazier will forward your questions to the appropriate town official. She also will notify the mayor and all council members of the media inquiry.

3. By the next business day, Frazier will send the official's prepared response via e-mail.

If your question is prompted by something discussed during a Town Council meeting, don't think about asking an official when the meeting ends. Instead, send an e-mail to Frazier, and she will "strive to send the responses the following business day."

I guess this is the state of journalism in the Republican Age. Heaven forbid that an elected government representative would have to answer questions on the phone, or worse,directly at a Town Council Meeting. For this town in Charles County, Maryland with 8,500 residents to have a pompous little press policy of this nature is baffling. Maybe the city officials are just incompetents, unaware of or unable to communicate exactly what it is they are doing. They have to put their heads together with every question and come up with an answer! Tough work.

Can't anyone just say something any more? Must the press refrain from asking a question after a Town Council Meeting? What is a Town Council Meeting FOR? Does even this little town need to prepare "filtered" comments to the press? Is this going to spread?

If you have answers to any of the above questions, please submit them in writing to me no later than the next business day. (My staff prefers duplicate, hard copies. No email.) Please clear your answers through your press / marketing/ communication / executive / campaign staff prior to submission. Thank you and let freedom ring.

She's home!

2007-09-09T15:19:00.000-05:00

Haleh Esfandiari at Evin prison, in Iran, shortly after her release.
She was reportedly quite sick at the time.

Readers know I have been following the imprisonment of Haleh Esfandiari in Iran. Esfandiari was imprisoned for over 100 days and then released to house arrest. Lee Hamilton, former Democratic Congressman and member of the Iraq Study Group, and now Director of the Woodrow Wilson Institute, where Esfandiari is Director of Middle Easter Studies, sent a letter that somehow moved the government to release her. Why his appeal worked, where others did not, is still a mystery.

In all, Esfandiari spent eight months under siege by the Iran government. This article will bring you up to speed. She agreed to be interviewed by CNN and that video is here. Although the interview is typical CNN cheese, it is good to see Esfandiari alive, well and very happy to be in her home.

The imprisonment of Esfandiari has sent a chill throughout the community of middle-eastern scholars. The force of terror, on all sides, is narrowing the possibilities in people's imagination. The shut down is pervasive.

Priests $660 million, Nuns $0

2007-09-09T14:44:00.000-05:00

My "Stringer," on the west coast alerted me to this recent travesty. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is supposedly selling 50 of its assets to cover the recently announced $660 million settlement to resolve the sex abuses of their pedophile priests.

For 43 years, the Sisters of Bethany convent has served the many poor and undocumented residents of their parish. The Sisters received a letter from their archdiocese (because a personal visit would have been a lot of trouble) informing them that they are being evicted from the small convent house because the convent house is one of the archdiocese assets that is being sold to raise funds to cover the multi-million dollar settlement.

The nuns, not being fools, realize what their work and their home are being forfeited for:

"We're just so hurt by this," Escalera, the order's local superior, said this week. "And what hurts the most is what the money will be used for, to help pay for the pedophile priests. We have to sacrifice our home for that?"

The three nuns have four months to move out. WWJD?!

Shift Happens

2007-09-09T14:18:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting video composite of what is being referred to as "cultural shift." (The music is a little annoying, but you can turn it down.) Not only are things beginning to shift, but they are shifting at an unimaginable speed. If you combine a viewing of this video with a visit to this collection of commentary videos here, (click "Explore the MEMEbase" and then select videos) you will begin to grasp the enormity of the processes going on around us. Hold onto your seats!

Thanks to SL in NYC for the heads up.

Strange beings.

2007-09-05T21:04:00.000-05:00

Isn't this just the strangest photo. Ok, it is nighttime and the three are being illumined by probably huge klieg lights. They have landed in Anbar province at the hugely fortified air base; it is, perhaps, the only place they could set down where they would not have to wear flack vests during their photo op.

There are the three of them, disconnected from each other, Condi and Gates staring at the ground. They look very unhappy to be there. Condi is wearing spiked heels for god's sakes, in the desert, among soldiers. Bush is in his Kennebunkport sport coat, his hands hanging like dead hams. Gates is in his usual funereal black suit, white shirt and tie. And, there's those Hummers all set up in the background. Bee-u-tee-ful.

I feel they are about to enter the Disneyland of Iraq, where Sunnis are now the best friends of the USA. The best pals of violence and terror, of its own virulent Iraqi nature. How do these three people go on with there lives knowing all they know? All those secrets. All that falsehood. All that death on their hands, their minds. The sheer magnitude of the disaster.

She's coming home.

2007-09-03T11:13:00.001-05:00

American scholar, Haleh Esfandiari has been released by the Iranians after seven months in solitary confinement, followed by uncertain weeks of house arrest. The "bail" to get out of prison was the mortgage on her 93 year old mother's home in Tehran. This post from last month fills out the story.

It turns out that it may have been Lee Hamilton, President of the Wilson Center, former Democratic Congressman and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, who helped liberate Esfandiari. His plea to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei received a response and Khamenei's pledge of commitment to try to resolve Esfandiari's case. One wonders why a plea becomes THE plea that facilitates action. Her story when she returns will be fascinating. Although, I believe that she will not embellish the narrative, to insure her mother's continued safety in Tehran.

What I ate on my summer vacation.

2007-09-02T02:28:00.000-05:00

AA Gill, the London Times food critic, is the best writer. He is out of control and precise at the same time. I wish I could say as much for myself. This recent column is a great read, especially the letter from the Smith family on dining at La Fourchette Folle, in Rubia, France, on their summer vacation. "Roubia has a population of 500 during the holiday season, falling to a population of two old ladies and a stray dog in the winter."

But before you go to the Gill's column, here is Gill on fungi:

"The best things I ate this summer were cooked in a truck-driver’s home in Tuscany. The first was a mushroom soup: glossy and thick as a mink muff, and darkly cunning with the mulchy, crepuscular flavours of the wood. Fungi have the most complex and dissembling tastes. Born of corruption, they are smooth and pale and pristine, but always a hair’s breadth away from gut-twisting murder. These ones were wild ceps, gathered from secret places and damp clefts."

This description is bettered by the review of Yakitori, the Japanese equivalent of tapas. Food lovers rejoice, rejoice.

Gustavo Dudamel

2007-09-01T21:53:00.000-05:00

If you have not heard this name recently, you soon will. Gustavo Dudamel, a 26 year old prodigy, was recently appointed Musical Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which some argue is the best orchestra in the country. Gustavo Dudamel grew up in poverty in the interior of Venezuela. It is a story full of faith and conviction that you must read.

This wild performance is conducted by Dudamel with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, a whole story in itself. These young musicians, like Dudamel, come for the most part from desperate shantytowns of Venezuela, not the conservatoires of Vienna or Berlin. They are performing Leonard Bernstein's "Mambo" from West Side Story in London. Each musician has come to his or her music through a Venezuelan national program referred to colloquially as El Sistema. El Sistema now harbors over 270,000 young musicians and 220 youth orchestras performing from the Andes to the Caribbean. These children have been spared the horrors of the violent barrios through a process that Dudamel describes as "music as a social savior." It is an auspicious story and another one of the continuing signs of hope.

In speaking of Dudamel, acclaimed British Conductor, Sir Simon Rattle calls him "the most astonishingly gifted conductor I have ever come across." His young orchestra has even bettered seasoned European ensembles to record for the world's most prominent classical-music label, Deutsche Grammophon. Their North American tour will hit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York in November. Good luck on those tickets!

Senator Larry Craig's Fallout

2007-09-01T09:36:00.000-05:00

In the 90s I worked on a Senate staff. It was a tremendous, reality-based experience that I won't belabor here. My thoughts, over the impending Craig resignation, among other things, go to the junior staff. Junior staffers don't get paid much, so they struggle to get by while doing the work of their Member's bidding which ranges from significant (replying to constituent mail and requests) to embarrassing (picking up your Senator's cloths at the cleaners).

The young, junior staff, tend to live shoe-horned into apartments with four or five other people because the living space is so expensive in the District. The junior staff work ten to fourteen hour days with little recognition. Because of their schedules and poverty, they tend to eat poorly. Many meals are grabbed at evening social affairs thrown by lobbyists where food and drink is free. Juniors haunt these events in search of food, some of which goes into purses and pockets for the next day. It is a somewhat ridiculous life lived for the glory of being close to the power of politics.

To wake up to find that you will soon be jobless because your (now powerless) Senator has been arrested in a gay sex sting in an airport men's room is the final insult, not to mention, shock. Some staffers will stay to transition the next Idaho Senator into office. Their tenure is iffy, at best, as new Senators want their own staff at their side. Some will segue to a barista position at Starbucks, some will luck out and win a position on another Senate staff, some will head back to mom and dad's house to recoup.

There are thousands of these college grads working in Congress. They are the flotsam and jetsam of a Senator's or Congress person's entourage. They are as disposable as paper cups. They are as resilient as Styrofoam peanuts. They will all be fine, but it is a god-awful spot to be put in.

Ballet Montage?

2007-08-30T21:32:00.000-05:00

Ok. There is an 18 year old in Brazil who loves ballet and Caetano Veloso. S/he calls her/him self "thepraddo." S/he has found footage of Larisa Lezhina dancing Diana and Acteon, Pas de deux, composed by Cesare Pugni and choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev, and laid under the video Caetano Veloso (you know how I love this guy) singing Patricia. It is a funny and sweet. And it is astonishing how well the movements to the classical Diana work with the popular Brazilian hit Patricia. And then there are all those Nureyev leaps!

Two Years After Katrina

2007-08-30T19:55:00.000-05:00

It is difficult to fathom the the mind-set of the Administration. We know its political thinking is based on the desire to flush government down the toilet and let market forces and the military determine the future of human life. But, it is the cruelty of their politics that infuriates. Here's what Bush said when he finally showed up in NOLA:

"Tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again."

The following is an excerpt from a post at The Daily Dish:

"Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding? And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine."

A report from the Institute of Southern Studies gives some details:

"Although it's tricky to unravel the maze of federal reports, our best estimate of agency data is that only $35 billion has been appropriated for long-term rebuilding.

Even worse, less than 42 percent of the money set aside has even been spent, much less gotten to those most in need. For example:

* Washington set aside $16.7 billion for Community Development Block Grants, one of the two biggest sources of rebuilding funds, especially for housing. But as of March 2007, only $1 billion -- just 6 percent -- had been spent, almost all of it in Mississippi. Following bad publicity, HUD spent another $3.8 billion on the program between March and July, leaving 70 percent of the funds still unused.

* The other major source of rebuilding help was supposed to be FEMA's Public Assistance Program. But of the $8.2 billion earmarked, only $3.4 billion was meant for nonemergency projects like fixing up schools and hospitals.

* Louisiana officials recently testified that FEMA has also "low-balled" project costs, underestimating the true expenses by a factor of four or five. For example, for 11 Louisiana rebuilding projects, the lowest bids came to $5.5 million -- but FEMA approved only $1.9 million.

* After the failure of federal levees flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received $8.4 billion to restore storm defenses. But as of July 2007, less than 20 percent of the funds have been spent, even as the Corps admits that levee repair won't be completed until as late as 2011.

The fact that, two years later, most federal Katrina funds remain bottled up in bureaucracy is especially shocking considering that the amounts Washington allocated come nowhere near the anticipated costs of Gulf rebuilding.

For example, the $3.4 billion FEMA has available to recover local public infrastructure would only cover about one-eighth of the damage suffered in Louisiana alone. But this money is spread across five states -- Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas -- and covers damage from three 2005 hurricanes, Katrina, Rita and Wilma."

While George W. Bush celebrated John McCain's birthday, this administration left people to die in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Now it is leaving the city of New Orleans to die."

Brotherly Love

2007-08-28T18:12:00.001-05:00

Medieval times are often referred to as the Dark Ages, although there is a considerable body of information developing that points to the period as being not so dark, with a generous amount of the period (11th to the 13th centuries) providing the civil society and creative energy that launched the Renaissance.

Allen Tulchin of Shippensberg University in Pennsylvania writes in the September Issue of the Journal of Modern History that there is historical evidence that during the Medieval period there existed the arrangement legally referred to as "affrerements" between men. These were sanctioned civil unions in which each man pledged "un pain, un vin et une bourse" (one bread, one wine, one purse) before a notary and witnesses. Here's the news.

One wonders, of course, what options women may have had. I guess that requires a further study...with the usual grim findings. I think we would find that the women had no "purse" to share and therefore could not, like the men, establish the security of a sanctioned union. Just my guess.

One Soldier's Free Thoughts

2007-08-26T08:33:00.000-05:00

The Pentagon has shut down as many soldier's blogs as they can find. Here's one that they haven't shut down, Army Dude. A guest blogger (Steve Clemons) at Andrew Sullivan's blog at the Atlantic Magazine online, Dish, posted this information. Read it before the government kills it.

As you may have read, the administration is setting up a 24/7 "Iraq Communications Desk" in Baghdad that will provide more immediate information about military activities in Iraq. Here's a link to the information posted at Talking Points Memo. Here's the nut of it:

The Defense Department insists it simply wants to disseminate reliable information quickly and efficiently, and this has nothing to do with serving any political agenda. Fine. Here's a fairly straightforward test: will the "Iraq Communications Desk" be just as diligent in publicizing discouraging news as it is putting a positive spin on developments on the ground? Will it back up assertions with data that is open to public scrutiny? Will it steer clear of White House-approved political rhetoric?

If the answer is "yes," it's a helpful public resource. If "no," it's a propaganda tool. Time well tell.

Control of the narrative is the quintessential urge of the present and it will be the most highly developed and rewarded skill of the future. The odd and unexpected emergence of the web and its bloggers is the one thing standing in the way of this controlling urge. It is the most important media challenging this rapid movement toward control of the story. Our main stream media is lost to us, wholly owned and controlled by corporate interests. Our political parties are locked-down in talking points and in the gaming of ideas.

As messy as the blog scene gets, it is one reliable place where a free press is at work. I still think it is amazing that the web came along when it did, to provide a challenge to the Rovian ethos and to become the new free press, when the MSM failed us.
.

What Would George W. Bush Do?

2007-08-25T07:07:00.000-05:00

Click to make image larger

Wicked Wiccan World

2007-08-24T19:57:00.000-05:00

It's not often that one gains access to a look inside the disputes in the Wiccan community. Today the Boston Herald has uncovered the possibility of allegedly "wicked" Wiccans gone wild. The wildness seems to include raccoon heads, entrails and offal. It sounds so, er, Wiccan. Here is the up-to-the-minute coverage. You read it here second (after the vaunted Boston Herald).

When is big, too BIG? or You Promised me a Fuselage.

2007-08-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

Building 5 at MASS MoCA
Cai Guo-Qiang's pyrotechnic installation

One of my favorite museums in the country is in a BIG friggin' mess. And I thought I had troubles!

Swiss artist Christoph Buchel and MASS MoCA Director, Joe Thompson are in a struggle that will not end easily or cleanly. The matter raises all kinds of legal contractual questions and it looks like only the courts can answer them.

Anyone who has visited MASS MoCA remembers what was in Building 5 when they visited. My memory is enlivened by my photo of Cai Guo-Qiang's floating / exploding cars that were there on my visit. Building 5 is mammoth. Buchel's idea for his installation, "Training Ground for Democracy," in Building 5, was to include the following, and then some:

"1 Fuel Tanker, Cleaned … 1,000 green beverage cups from race track. . . 9 10'x8'x20' Sea Containers … 10 Used Toothbrushes … 6 French barricades … 4 Ink Pads … Credit Card Reader … Bouillon Cubes … 21 Satellite Dishes …Heart-rate Monitor … Balloons from election rallies."

...not to mention and entire two-story Cape Cod house. The museum lost heart when Buchel asked for the fuselage of an airplane. This would make one hell of a mock-umentary.

Fahrenheit 451 - A remake!

2007-08-22T20:01:00.000-05:00

Finally, a re-make of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Frank Darabont will direct. Darabont directed Shawshank Redemption, the Indiana Jones series, the Green Mile, to name a few. His recent comments regarding Fahrenheit 451 are worth repeating. In describing the movie, where firemen start fires rather than putting them out, Darabont says:

"It's a rabidly anti-intellectual world — a world in which literature is destroyed or otherwise censored; the intellectually curious are chastised and punished to the point of distraction by nonstop, insipid programming; and meaningful knowledge and interpersonal relationships are shunted in favor of empty propaganda and personal apathy.

Welcome to Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," where "fireman" Guy Montag burns books while prosecuting, and in one instance killing, those who cling to them.

Welcome to President Bush's America, said director Frank Darabont, a culture that proves that there is more than one way to burn a book."

Given today's news that the AP-Ipsos poll found 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book within the past year, compared with 34 percent of conservatives. You know this is a timely film. See it and weep.

Nina Berman, Award Winning Photographer

2007-08-22T19:36:00.000-05:00

Click for larger view

UPDATE: 22 August 2007
I would like to repost this entry today. It seems the world is just catching up to Nina Berman. The NYT did a story on her today. You read it here first, 15 March 2007. It is time for another look.
_________________________________________________________________

Once I saw Nina Berman's "Marine Wedding" photographs, I couldn't stop thinking about them. I kept asking people if they had seen them. No one I knew had. So I thought I would put a post up about her / them.

Encountering these pictures is difficult. Her portfolio found here is powerful---some photos are like a blow to the heart. If you visit this site, look at the multimedia piece, too. The sound track is a mashup of sounds with Laurie Anderson, singing "O Superman" from her 1982 album Big Science, over the visuals of S.W.A.T. teams training. Those "supermen" are pumping it up everywhere today---sometimes, just for fun. A recent interview with Berman in Salon provides some insight into her work (and also, a photo of the Marine, before the Iraq war).

I am thinking that her "Purple Heart" and "Marine Wedding" collection are like the American Friend's Service Committe (AFCS) "Eyes Wide Open" traveling presentation on tour last year. That presentation provided a mournful sight of boots in an orderly arrangement of rows, as well as with piles of, mostly, children's shoes, representing, respectively, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians who have died in Bush's war. Berman's soldier's pictures are like that AFSC presentation for peace. In these photos, however, the reality-based world takes over from the mournful sight of the boots. Berman is totally in our faces.

Photograph, Nina Berman, "Homeland Insecurity."

Mama knows hair and music.

2007-08-21T19:29:00.000-05:00

Dave of Ted Leo and the Phamacists
photo by Your Mama's Hair aka Becka

Your Mama's Hair (you must see the Sunkist guy in Brooklyn) gave me the lead on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, what a great sound. Some of you Mozart/Leonard Cohen/Bill Evans fans may need to get through the edge of the guitar razzle, funk at the intro, to get to the rock of it all, but its worth the happy wait. Thanks, Mama.

Barb, Do Not Rest!

2007-08-21T17:47:00.000-05:00

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, my Senator, issued a statement today regarding Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute:

“I join Dr. Esfandiari’s friends and family in relief and joy at today’s news that, after more than 100 days of unjust imprisonment, she has been released by the Iranian government. This is an important first step, but I will not rest until Dr. Esfandiari is allowed to return to her family in Maryland.”

GO Barb!

Ms. Esfandiari, the 67 year old scholar and Director of Middle East Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, who was held at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran, was on her twice-yearly visit to her elderly mother in Tehran when she was arrested and accused of spying for the CIA. She has reportedly lost a considerable about of weight and has suffered.

This is what mindless, foreign countries do to people. However, this kind of blindness is now a basic form of justice practiced by the Bush administration. To think that the US has lowered itself to the atrocious practices of mindless, foreign despotic governments is appalling.

Because of our Abu Graib and Gitmo, we are unable to argue persuasively for freedom and justice. We are in such violation of these concepts.

Send Ms. Esfandari home to America. We beg of you.

Here comes the future again.

2007-08-19T10:42:00.000-05:00

A giant block of Aerogel
"Frozen Smoke"

New materials are always interesting. A product called Aerogel was discovered in 1933, but has only recently been mastered for mass production. Times UK provides an overview at the above link. It has amazing properties with lasting implications for environmental applications. Look for it right with all that nano-technology. Here's the nut of it:

"Aerogel is also being tested for future bombproof housing and armour for military vehicles. In the laboratory, a metal plate coated in 6mm of aerogel was left almost unscathed by a direct dynamite blast.

It also has green credentials. Aerogel is described by scientists as the “ultimate sponge”, with millions of tiny pores on its surface making it ideal for absorbing pollutants in water.

Kanatzidis has created a new version of aerogel designed to mop up lead and mercury from water. Other versions are designed to absorb oil spills...Earlier this year Bob Stoker, 66, from Nottingham, became the first Briton to have his property insulated with aerogel. “The heating has improved significantly. I turned the thermostat down five degrees. It’s been a remarkable transformation,” he said.

Mountain climbers are also converts. Last year Anne Parmenter, a British mountaineer, climbed Everest using boots that had aerogel insoles, as well as sleeping bags padded with the material. She said at the time: “The only problem I had was that my feet were too hot, which is a great problem to have as a mountaineer.”

However, it has failed to convince the fashion world. Hugo Boss created a line of winter jackets out of the material but had to withdraw them after complaints that they were too hot."

More Mumble

2007-08-19T07:02:00.000-05:00

The Village Voice weighs in. This seems like a more lively, critical piece.

When Did Noise Become the Measure of Celebration?

2007-08-18T16:59:00.000-05:00

I recently joined two friends for lite-fare and a drink at a local wine bar. To the rear of the wine bar was a group of twenty women, 20 to 30-somethings, celebrating something. The noise level of their "conversations" was intolerable. We were finally forced to leave because we were unable to hear each other speak. When did noise become the measure of celebration, or, for that matter, a good time?

The elimination of quiet in public places now seems complete. It is difficult to find any convivial quiet place. Though it seems sudden, I think this progress toward the loss of quiet places has been gradual and relentless. Quiet places for reflection, or the experience of a vivid sense of tranquility, or the possibility of finding or renewing one's self in quiet space has been extinguished by noise---noise that is being ratcheted up to numbing levels.

Even more insidious is the insertion of music into ever space. When music is everywhere, is music anywhere? From clothing stores, to churches, to grocery stores, elevators, telephone on-hold systems, booming car sound systems, the infernal ice cream trucks (this may be Baltimore specific), offices, the Jiffy Lube, the doctors office, waiting rooms, to name a few. This incessant muzak-ed mush is deadening.

The iPod has contributed to this in another way. Once the head phones are on, the wearer enters their own sound isolation, removed from all that is around them. A friend of mine in DC, who takes the bus to work, is one of a rare few who does not plug into an iPod on the bus. She said recently that she realized in the midst of the bus ride that she may have been the only one who was actually there.

My friends and I went to another place around the corner that had tables outside. It was quieter, but even at the little outside bistro area, music was being piped out. Isn't it getting a little scary? Does this immersion in noise/personal sound have something to do with closeness? Does this noise create spaces where people are protected from closer personal interaction or saved from being alone, in the scary quiet? Is the constant intrusion of sound a measure of the loneliness we feel?

Generation D.I.Y.

2007-08-18T15:56:00.000-05:00

From left, Ry Russo-Young and Greta Gerwig in “Hannah Takes the Stairs,”
directed by Joe Swanberg, one of the leading practitioners of mumblecore.

My favorite film fan sent me this must-read from the New York Times. If you like knowing the latest about film, here it is: "mumblecore."

"Huh?," you may mumble to yourself, "waasat?" Post-collegiate filmmakers have managed, through the availability of technology unthinkable even five years ago, to make films of a personal nature that aren't, in the first instance, seeking a distributor. Here's the nut of it:

"But what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight. Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships. A favorite setting is the party that goes subtly but disastrously astray. Events are often set in motion by an impulsive, ill-judged act of intimacy.

Artists who mine life’s minutiae are by no means new, but mumblecore bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience. 'This is the first time, mostly because of technology, that someone like me can go out and make a film with no money and no connections,' said Aaron Katz, whose movies “Dance Party USA” and “Quiet City” will be shown as part of a 10-film mumblecore series at the IFC Center that begins Wednesday and continues through Sept. 4."

Did you get that? A mumblecore festival! In a few months you will be thanking me for keeping you so up to date. Most of these films were too indie to even make Sundance. How great is THAT? You need only mumble "mumblecore" at your next party to confirm your film chops. The amazing part, in this day and age, is that these trends can move through quite quickly. Those filmmakers who founded this artistic expression, Aaron Katz, Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, Frank V. Ross (white males all), are reaching their 30s now and moving on to other kinds of film making. We shall see if the 10-film series at IFC will mean the expansion or the end of the genre.

Coffee Comedy

2007-08-18T09:57:00.000-05:00

A guy called "Winter," just "Winter," has set out to visit every Starbucks in the world. He seems to be having a very good time and is engaged in a task without end. Here are all the Starbucks and their photos that he lists for Baltimore.

His unadorned, weird web site joins the mass of Starbucks media available on the web. The McDonald's of coffee houses (44 million customers a week!) has its fans and detractors. It has been suggested that Starbucks has created a sense of belonging for its customers. The belonging is engendered by the insider knowledge of coffee combinations, such as an order for venti-caramel-decaf-soy-latte-20 pump. Or the "short cappuccino" which is not on the menu and known only to the truly inside cappuccino aficionados.

One of the most entertaining articles I have read to date on the Starbucks phenomenon is Michael Agger's piece, Hacking Starbucks: Where to Learn about the Ghetto Latte, Barista Gossip and Nicole Kidman's Usual, was posted at Slate on August 15. It is full of funny links, like the link to Mark Malkoff's goofy video of his visit to all 171 Starbucks in NYC in 24 hours. I enjoyed this article and the serious enterprise Starbucks is, as contrasted to its presence as a foil for good comedy.

I am blogging this from a local indie cafe, Spoons Coffee House and Roastery, 24 E. Cross St. Federal Hill across from the Cross Street Market. I'll say no more.

Iraqi "Oil Bill"

2007-08-15T19:55:00.000-05:00

An apparently little explored ingredient of the Administration's exit plan for Iraq is the passage of the "Oil Bill" which provides for the care and distribution of Iraqi oil. The bill, formulated at US direction, is a center-piece of the Administration. I continue to read about this bill, but it is always understated and reported with little investigation. The Administration is particularly adamant about its passage by the Iraqi congress. My understanding is that the bill cedes all control of Iraqi oil to "foreign" oil companies. The Administration urgently wanted it passed before the Iraqi congress left for their August break. The Iraqis did no such thing. This appeared today in the blog Iraq Today:

"A statement, signed by 419 Iraqi oil experts, economists and intellectuals, expresses grave concern that the newly proposed law would deprive

Iraq

from its most vital natural resource, oil, and give foreign oil companies ultimate domination over

Iraq

's oil wealth.

Iraq

's intellectuals demand a fundamental modification to the proposed law, and a referendum, the statement said. The law is expected to be discussed in the Iraqi parliament next month, after the parliamentary summer holiday is over."

It is not that we have wondered whether the War on Iraq was first, last and always about OIL. The suggestion has always been denied at best, mocked at worst, by the right as an example of leftest paranoia. Now that we have rained hell upon the people of Iraq, we are trying to move the Iraqis to give away their oil resources. We strive to control their oil for ourselves and also give it away as a reward to the members of the "Coalition of the Willing."

If there is one thing the Administration could point to is that even if we withdraw, we win...if we can get that OIL. No matter how many people die.

One wonders what it would take to get the Iraqi congress to pass this bill. Do we just pay enough of them off? Offer a million dollars to every legislator who votes for the bill? The country certainly does not want for corrupt officials and the audacity of the Administration is legend. With a war costing $10 billion a month, any bribe our government would offer individuals would look like a smart deal. Too, cynical? I can't tell anymore. After all Iraq and its people have suffered, I hope they hold steadfast to retain this vital resource of their country, that they do not pass this bill.

Fred and Rita to the Rescue.

2007-08-08T17:21:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Camille Paglia's enormous sense of good taste, I spotted this video in a recent Salon.com article of hers. I hate to wax nostalgic. It seems regressive and geriatric of me, and I am neither, but, looking at the current state of the culture, the planet seems in need of civility, as well as sensuousness and some non-virtual loveliness. We need some kind of grace, some relief from the bombardment of empty spectacle and the overwrought sensationalism of a lot of really non-events. We need a respite from all the technological hoo-haw between us and other humans. With the increasing use of CGI in filmmaking, when "real" would do the job, I feel further removed from a simpler beauty and a direct encounter with a real, er, role model.

This video says much about a kind of joyfulness of spirit that is refreshing, and, well, just plain happy. That the video is scored with one of my favorite Mazzy Star songs, Fade into You, maxes the pleasure. The song is woeful and somber and a brilliant counterpoint to the Fred Astaire / Rita Haworth footage. The conceit of musical melancholia driving the visual, affective sumptuousness...knocks me out.

Site of the Day...

2007-08-06T20:37:00.000-05:00

...or Happy Birthday Andy Warhol! Warhol would be a ripe, fluffy-haired, 79 years old today. Yipes!

Warhol was a collector of much stuff. He placed the stuff in over 600 small boxes, like the one above, sealed them up and stored them away. After his death, the boxes were given to Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum for cataloging. Hundreds of professionals and volunteers have spent a long time opening and cataloging all the ephemera. This site, Time Capsule 21, (TC21) gives the visitor an opportunity to explore one of those boxes. It's a very, very cool site. Very dynamic. You'll learn some interesting details about Warhol and the context of his art.

My visit to TC21 enlivened my appreciation for the weightiness of the everyday. I have read that Warhol considered these boxes proper art commodities. He talked of placing a drawing on each box and then selling them, each at the same price, to patrons without them knowing the contents. Perfect Warhol.

Missing the point.

2007-08-05T19:29:00.001-05:00

The Annaul Kos Convention generated some sparks over the debate about taking lobbyist's money, as explained in The Caucus, the NYT political blog. Hillary said she would continue to seek and accept contributions from lobbyists. Edwards and Obama, principally, said that they would not. I think the controversy over this issue (read the comments at the end of the article) misses the point.

Politicians need millions and millions of dollars. As they raise it they necessarily create questionable alliances---every candidate should rightly be considered under a cloud because of all this money. They travel from the enclaves of North Hampton to the enclaves of Los Angeles and every enclave in between seeking cash. The question we should be asking is why must candidates raise all this money?

I believe that the bulk of this money goes to buy air-time on network television. If a candidate does not buy air-time, they are history. I think the campaign cash raked in by the networks is really at the heart of this dilemma. Think of what power the networks hold in our political process. It is outrageous. They hold the keys to the power! And candidates must buy it from them.

Next question. Why should our candidates be forced to sell their souls so that networks can make billions from campaigns---local, state and national? Air-time for elections should be free and it should be equally distributed to qualifying candidates on the, ahem, "public air-waves." I think this could greatly reduce the corruption of campaign financing and help to support candidates who may be unappealing to corporations and PACs, but who may be very appealing---maybe even exciting, imagine---to the American people. Maybe we would hear less of this canned, co-opted, empty, studied babble offered by both parties, ad infinitum. Maybe interesting language and words with meaning might emerge.

We don't think much about it anymore, but isn't it strange that there are regular reports on how much money a candidate raises? THIS ability, or lack of ability, becomes the measure of the candidate's viability. Their viability is NOT being measured by their ideas, integrity, skills. It is being measured by the acquisition of cash.

It does matter from whom a candidate takes cash: lobbyist, drug companies, real estate cartels, lawyers, Wall Street, AIPAC, even unions. They demand their pound of flesh. As Obama said, it is doubtful that lobbyists and corporations are giving this money for the public good. But, the bigger issue is that candidates must raise this boat load of money in the first place. Let's insist that networks serve the public good by providing free air-time for elections. This would help reduce the burden of raising the money and reduce the corruption of campaign financing. There is a better way. One piece of that "better way" is significantly reducing the monies that a candidate must raise to be viable. Candidates having to buy time from network television is a big part of this nasty problem.

In case you're looking for a spare tire.

2007-08-01T21:06:00.000-05:00

This is a marketing video from the Military Times. I cringe at a lot of what is being said, but the line..."to leave our footprint as small as possible" is just nuts. Preposterous.

Cucurrucucu Paloma

2007-07-31T19:42:00.000-05:00

I am posting this Spanish song. You may recall hearing it for the first time in Pedro Almodovar's film "Hable Con Ella" (Talk to Her). The voice singing that song is Cataeno Veloso, for whom I have had my one and only, big celebrity crush. I don't know how I came to know his voice, but it is tender and alive and extraordinary. I am posting this concert performance of his with this wonderful string arrangement by the cellist and musical director, Jaques Morelenbaum.

At the moment in the film when the song is sung, the character realizes he has lost his only real love. The song, appropriately, recounts the story of a man who dies from the pain of the loss of someone he loved. It is lushly romantic and very unAmerican. What I love about Cataeno Veloso is his ability, especially in this performance, to walk a line between restraint and manipulation. His voice is just so touching and perfect. For me, it is the restraint that makes the song so wildly beautiful.

In Spanish the lyrics by Tomás Méndez are:

Dicen que por las noches no más se le iba en puro llorar.
Dicen que no comía, no más se le iba en puro tomar.
Juran que el mismo cielo se estremecía al oír su llanto.
Cómo sufría por ella, que hasta en su muerte la fue llamando!

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, cantaba.
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, gemía.
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, cantaba.
De pasión mortal moría.

Que una paloma triste muy de mañana le va a cantar
A la casita sola con sus puertitas de par en par.
Juran que esa paloma no es otra cosa más que su alma,
Que él todavía la espera a que regrese, la desdichada.

Cucurrucucú, paloma,
Wucurrucucú, no llores.
Las piedras jamás, paloma,
Qué van a saber de amores?

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
Wucurrucucú, paloma,
Ya no le llores.
In English these lyrics transalate into:
They say that at night he didn’t do anything but cry.
They say that he didn’t eat and didn’t do anything but drink.
They swear that heaven shuddered when it heard his cry,
How he suffered for her, calling out to her even as he died.

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, he sang.
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, he wept.
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, he sang.
As he died of mortal passion.

That a sad dove came that morning to sing to him,
To the small house with its windows open wide.
They swear that the dove is nothing less than his soul,
That is still waiting for her to come back, her, the unfortunate.

Cucurrucucú, dove,
Cucurrucucú, don’t cry.
The stones never do, dove,
What do they know of love?

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
Cucurrucucú, you don’t cry any more.

Cucurrucucu Paloma

2007-07-31T16:37:00.000-05:00

Here is Perla Batalla singing the same wonderful song as Veloso, above. I think she is more manipulative with the sound than Veloso. She is riding a wave, just behind the crest, having a wonderful time. I like this version, too. There's little more of a pop feeling to it, but such a voice. Her version is moving, even without the benefit of a full string orchestra supporting her.

Batalla was a backup singer for Leonard Cohen and sang on his film and tribute album I'm Your Man. If you saw the film you may remember her and Julie Christensen. They were hard to miss. They preformed some duos that are still vivid in my mind. Here's Batalla...see what you think of her Cucurrucucu.

Anne Truitt

2007-07-30T19:40:00.000-05:00

I wanted to bring attention to this post by Tyler Green, regarding Anne Truitt on his blog Modern Art News. Truitt died in 2004, at the age of 83, in Washington, DC. It has been said that it is she who started the minimalist movement. She resisted being called a minimalist. She felt her work was different from that movement in that it was created with her own hands, while the minimalists tended to be working with the manipulation of industrial materials.

It is hard to explain Truitt's work or one's deep attraction to it. Truitt's work is so simple that it feels too obvious. I understand that her life was moved by color. In the way a savant must understand numbers, I think Truitt understood color and shape. It was intuitive and unexplainable. The Hirshhorn is planning a Truitt retrospective in 2008, which prompted my reflection on her. Surprisingly, there are only a few examples of her work that I have found on the web. The one above is too small and lame. I like Truitt's picture looming over the art.

I read Daybook: Journal of an Artist by Truitt years ago. It inspired a long period of work for me that was better than any I have known since. Her struggle with trying to make art on a confined schedule resonated for me at the time and helped me work long into the night. I have had few periods since then where my imagination so clearly took over and lifted me. I feel I owe that period to her inspiration. Daybook is revered by writer Jesse Larsen as one of the 500 Great Books by Women. If you like diarists and/or art, Truit's Daybook is well worth your time.

Anne Truitt is a Marylander. Although born in Baltimore, she was mostly embraced and claimed by DC, where her studio was for many years. She grew up in Easton, Maryland on the shore, where legend has it that she was apparently so visually impaired as a young child, that it was not until she got glasses that she realized that trees had individual leaves. She saw only shapes and masses of color. Some attribute the quality of her work to this childhood condition.

"I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form," she said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1987. "That's what I've spent my life doing, and it's never been understood."

Is "it", or are we, ever "understood"?

Truitt worked in isolation in her studio through the years. The isolation is critical to the work, so often. And perhaps it is the isolation that creates the feeling of distance and a mild paranoia. One seems not to be able to have both society and art, garrulousness and introspection, understanding and revolutionary work.

Finally, this from Daybook. Truitt reflects on human legacy as she sits at the National Gallery:

"I sat for a long while in one of the rectangular courtyards, listening to the fountain. Feeling the artists all around me, I slowly took an unassuming place (for two of my own sculptures were somewhere in the museum) among the people whose lives, as all lives do, had been distilled into objects that outlasted them. Quilts, pin cushions, chairs, tables, houses, sculptures, paintings, tilled and retilled fields, gardens, poems -- all of validity and integrity. Like earthworms, whose lives are spent making more earth, we human beings also spend ourselves into the physical. A few of us leave behind objects judged, at least temporarily, worthy of preservation by the culture into which we were born. The process is, however, the same for us all. Ordered into the physical, in time we leave the physical, and leave behind us what we have made in the physical."

Seriously Funny

2007-07-30T17:36:00.000-05:00

Keep your eye on this new comic, Charlyne Yi. She's got something going on in her very young mind. This YouTube "Man on the Street" routine up above is just hilarious. I can't quite imagine a grown up Charlyne, but I guarantee...it's going to happen. That face. Those crazy eyes. That goofy grin. It is zany and refreshingly simple. I don't know how far she can take it, but she seems to have the prerequisite daring that can take a person a long way. Her effort reveals not an ounce of cynicism, or for that matter, wit. She is just sheer fun.

No End in Sight - the trailer

2007-07-27T22:05:00.001-05:00

This looks difficult to bear. It is just so insane.

ComicCon - San Diego - Frenzy Abounds

2007-07-27T06:46:00.000-05:00

click to enlarge

Women are still doing it for themselves. And lemonade helps. Here is a quick article from out at the really funny ComicCon convention in San Diego. Organizations like Friends of Lulu (FOL) are helping to promote women in the comic book industry. Women are joining together to foster other women who write in this wonderful genre of literature / art.

Rock your local comic store. In Baltimore, of course, you would go immediately to Atomic Books in Hampden. Ask for the women writer's by name. Buy their work. Read it. You will know enjoyment. Check out the links in the article for a fuller appreciation of the breadth of the graphic novel. If all else fails, go to the ComicCon blog at the Los Angeles Times for a fuller look at the frenzy. Shaky Bacon anyone? You heard it first...right here.

Your Mama's Hair

2007-07-26T19:57:00.000-05:00

Your Mama?

...and another thing about Art Scape. I was photographed by the woman above who is called "Your Mama" (I think her employers call her Bekkah.) She has a new Baltimore blog, called "Your Mama's Hair" and she shot mine at Art Scape and posted it on her blog.

Your Mama likes: hair, curls, dreads, cornrows, dye jobs, perms, flat irons, scrunchies, barrettes, buzz cuts, mohawks, bangs, braids, pigtails, beehives, updos, bed-head, highlights, lowlights, bad hair days, colors, fros. Her blog is dedicated to the hair of Baltimore. Her collection has just begun. I would suggest you send your favorite hair pictures to Your Mama's blog.

OK. I don't like the picture of myself that Your Mama posted. I am much better looking when the light's right and the angle is correct and the gel hasn't melted in the 94 degree heat and I have had my hair stylist do that scrunchie thing before I actually go out to meet the public, and I am wearing something other than a pink shirt. I prefer something black. I didn't even know I was wearing the god-awful pink shirt. So scroll w-a-a-ay down the page and find the spikey-white haired woman, hugging herself in the hideous pink shirt. Here's Your Mama's Hair. Also Your Mama and I are mutually linked to each other which is kind of sexy. Umm.

Art and celebrity

2007-07-25T21:07:00.000-05:00

Henninger's Tavern - Marking the passing of Tammy Faye in its own way

The last few days were pretty wonderful. First a soiree at Jack's where literary purpose of the event was to hear readings of Jamaica Kincaid's short stories. The non-literary purpose was to taste three great wines. A cozy evening on a warm Baltimore night. We all seemed hungry for written words, brilliantly arranged.

Of course there was Art Scape, a dreadful event that is "good" for the people of the city. There are sparkling moments that you must know beforehand are happening and get there for them. There is wonderful artwork so wedged into the crowds of people that you can barely get near it. There are tons of questionable crafts, most of which you can barely get close to because you would have to fight your way through the masses of people moving slowly, slowly in the summer heat. Some very nice black and white photography. I aways find great stuff in the Fox and Brown buildings at MICA. Here are some small works I really liked.

Then there was a modest but heartfelt celebration of Tammy Faye Messner's camp, gay icon, extreme makeup, wacky life at the beloved Henninger's Tavern. I still cannot get my head around her appearance on Larry King and then her death almost immediately afterwards. Celebrity in America is a driven, freaky thing. May Tammy rest peacefully.

The frustrations of truth.

2007-07-25T19:46:00.000-05:00

Richard Engel, a highly respected NBC correspondent and longtime reporter in Iraq, provides one of the clearest explanations of the complexity of the political/religious environment in Iraq that I have read. His report appears in Harvard Education, Nieman Reports Summer 2007 Issue. We Americans like our problems reduced to simple images, as Karl Rove so well understands. But these reductions only diminish our ability to tolerate the understanding of the context of a truth and complexity of truth. Too, the administration is really hog-tied in its own swill. It wallows around its own untruthful, sometimes alarming, simplicities, when deeper perceptions and presentations might unite so many efforts to end this war.

Please note that Engel's report on Iraq required far fewer words than any adminsitration presentation I have heard. So maybe the truth can be simply told, rather than endlessly spun. The quote that follows puts to death one more administration "talking point."

"U.S. politicians and military commanders often complain that the Iraqi government "won't step up and do its job." The impression they give is that Iraqi officials are sitting around smoking hooka pipes and refusing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, while U.S. troops are fighting and dying to "get the job done." Perhaps the question should be, "Which job?" American soldiers often ask me when the Iraqis will "step up and fight for their own country." They are already fighting for their country. Iraqi officials, religious leaders, militia groups, Syria, Iran and al-Qaeda are struggling and dying to get a "job done" in Iraq, though it does not appear to be the job the White House would like them to be doing.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned during his April visit to Iraq that America's "patience is running out." If he's waiting for Iraqis and the wider Middle East to start fighting the war of Freedom Lovers against Freedom Haters, Americans might need to have considerably more patience in the years ahead."

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

2007-07-25T04:21:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal's editorial policy is to use no actual pictures in their news stories. After all, "a word is worth a thousand pictures," no? To do this, the Journal developed a portrait illustration technique that reduces an individual to lines and dots. This process is done by hand. No kidding. The above illustration is included in a brief article on the history and style of the process called HedCuts.

A real live illustrator uses a combination of parallel counter lines, cross-hatching and dotting technique to create each individual portrait. Each portrait takes somewhere between 3-5 hours to create. As the world becomes more infused with technology, it is a hoot to realize that the Journal continues to use illustrators to faithfully reduce a photo to its most basic lines. This consistent style spares the reader from the manipulation of the editorial comments subtly, and not so subtly, made by the photos selected for a story. And then, all that gray is soothing. Even the worst news and individuals seem tolerable. No ruffled feathers. I'm sure Ruppert Murdoch can fix that.

The art nobody can escape...

2007-07-23T21:50:00.000-05:00

Another reflection on the essential quality of the modernist movement:

"The culture of the twentieth century is littered with Utopian schemes. That none of them succeeded, we take for granted; in fact, we have got so used to accepting the failure of Utopia that we find it hard to understand our cultural grandparents, many of whom believed, with the utmost passion, that its historical destiny was to succeed. The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one's economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape."

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

The Japanese are so clever.

2007-07-19T19:07:00.000-05:00

Haaaaaaave fun! Click on the various forms at bottom-left.

Found Poem

2007-07-18T21:18:00.000-05:00

On my desk was this poem...

Tuna sandwich, sliced toms
Corn salad w/lime + cilantro
Tom + cuke + feta + v/o + s/p
Crusty bread
Pellagrino H2O
Chilled lemonade
Energy bars (no chocolate)

...or was it a picnic? Or, is it a picnic-poem?

Andrew and John Wed

2007-07-09T19:27:00.000-05:00

Andrew Solomon and John Habich
The Spencer Estate, England

This was some wedding! The article is kind of vacuous, as most of these NYT wedding reviews seem to read, whether they are about gay or straight weddings. The articles contain a consistent tone of schmaltz. But, it is a wedding, after all---that event filled with enormous optimism and adoration, blind to all history. However, the wealth of the two men sets a different twist to the story and suggests an elevation of the of gay knot tying ceremony to a new height. I pray it is a wild glitch that won't need repeating. Excess is a difficult thing to watch, so you may not even want to look at the article's media offering, but then again...

Say what you will...

2007-07-08T16:32:00.003-05:00

...the energy she brings to a stage is fabulous. Madonna at Live Earth. Let's dance!

Could the Iraq tragedy get more strange?

2007-07-06T20:38:00.001-05:00

"There are more US-paid private contractors than there are American troops in Iraq."

I hope you can see this tiny chart above from the LA Times article explaining this graphic and the issue of private US-paid contractors. We have been hearing rumors about the vast numbers of private contractors PAID by the US. This seems to be the first time that real numbers have emerged.

What does it mean that 118,000 of these people are Iraqis? We're fighting Iraqis and we're hiring Iraqis? These companies that are hiring the Iraqis are being paid billions of dollars a MONTH. Are the employed Iraqis receiving the better part of this money? What about the underfunded, underpaid Iraqi military we are supposed to be training to take over? What does it mean to fight a war with private contractors...who exceed the number of troops? Why did we refuse to send enough troops and then hire enough civilians to out-number the troops? To hide the real cost? To hide the truth that we are not able to even raise enough troops?

There are just so many questions that this war arouses that will never be answered. There are not enough answers. Not in a hundred years will we investigate all these mounting, astounding issues and receive answers for all the questions provoked.

One haunting question is, where will all these companies go when we leave Iraq? Imagine the lobbying "surge" they will put forth to insure they continue to sustain and increase earnings. I think these bloody, greedy war merchants are going to be very desirous of a NEW war.

The Vision-thing.

2007-07-01T14:34:00.000-05:00

Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Marin Alsop, Director

There has been a considerable push by web pundits who write about music and art to implore the critics of the arts at papers like the NYT and WP to get out of the city and into the countryside. The effort is to encourage these writers to recognize the wealth of artistic endeavors flourishing in the "hinterlands." One critic seems to have taken up the challenge. The New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross did "three orchestras, three cities, two days." His report is here.

I am a fan of this immersion method. The experience is exciting and an adventure. Ross candidly reports his genuine surprise at what he found. Which is satisfying. "Listening to America’s regional orchestras, you realize that the notion of a stratospheric orchestral élite is deceptive." I'll say! But my favorite line was one that really captures the dynamics of any ensemble effort.

Great performances can happen anytime skilled players respond with unusual fervor to a conductor whose vision is secure.

It is not just the generation and communication of a vision that is important. I was caught by the phrase about the conductor's vision at the end of the sentence: whose vision is secure. I have not heard those two words put together before, secure vision. I hadn't thought about it.

Ross did not say that skilled players respond to a conductor with vision. There's more to it; there is the vision that is anchored with a sense of security. One of the things this sense of security provides is freedom for the ensemble. They needn't wobble with the vagaries of the vision that is not held with confidence. In the case of the conductor whose vision is secure, anxiety must be reduced considerably. It is like having a mature and wise parent, rather than a young and uncertain parent who may behave with confidence, but whose sense of confidence is ungrounded, and all the children know it. In this case, it is difficult to act with freedom and ease in the presence of insecurity. The performance suffers.

This same idea may be applied to organizations of all natures and size. Without a leader whose vision is secure, the performance suffers.

Design Alert

2007-07-01T13:30:00.000-05:00

If someone mentioned to you that wine was now available in cans, your expression might slip into a puzzled frown. You might think, bleah! Or blech!! But here is a good example of the power of design to change your perceived value of wine in a bottle, if not your drinking habits, quickly.

The Italian Blessing

2007-06-28T21:04:00.000-05:00

I have done some editing and now I am ready to publish the Flickr slide show of photos from the Italian vacation, with a brief lay-over in London at the Tate Modern. There are, gads!, 243 photos---after editing. If you look at them, be sure to click the "fast" button at bottom, left, if things seem to be going a little slow. I realize this is not everyone's idea of an stimulating way to spend their precious time. I, however, am a fan of people's photos. I could look at them endlessly. I will spare you an analysis of my photo fetish, but I think it has something to do with a deprived childhood and a dysfunctional family...what else could it be?

Italy renewed my sense of freedom from the emotional and cultural bonds of an American life. I don't reject my American life. Rather, I am more interested in my capacity to elude its stifling homogeneity. I need a kick in the cultural butt, frequently, in order to remain creative, open-hearted and aware.

I doubted that travel in a western country could be anything but more of America. I was wrong, yet, again. The Italians have two things going for them that we don't, at least in northern Tuscany. These two things are "slow" and "home to anarchy." I'll say more about this another time, but you get my drift.

Travel for me, even at its worst, is always a blessing of renewal. Italy nourished me, and I am not talking about food, which was wonderful. I am talking out the traveler's experience. I was happy and sad in a traveler's way. I think that is the blessing of travel, the happy and sad, being awash in the whole spectrum of feeling. There is no closing down to survive the day. There is the opening, the encounter, the seeing---the sudden newness of everything.

Here are the photos.

Theo Jansen - Kenetic Sculptor

2007-06-20T21:16:00.000-05:00

Theo Jansen is an artist and kinetic sculptor living and working in Holland. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals which are wind-driven. They appear to walk like living creatures. He hopes to provide a place where they can all just walk around and have a "life." If you value design, here's a feast. Don't stop until you see the "elephant".

Infuriating Phrases Competition.

2007-06-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

The British have too much fun. The Telegraph, in the UK, asked readers to compose a piece of prose crammed with as many infuriating phrases as possible. This was one of my favorites by someone named R.G. Banks. You can read others here.

"Let’s stop obsessing and get down to the nitty gritty of fleshing out the gender issues, John. I’m wanting to hear inclusiveness and ethnicity here. A raft of blue sky thinking to challenge accepted orthodoxies. The bottom line is about empowerment and at the end of the day getting up to speed working 24/7 towards a coalition of understanding through best practice. This can only be fully achieved if the glass ceiling, in inverted commas, is transformed into a level playing field where the goal posts cannot be moved without leaving a substantial carbon footprint which inevitably would consign us all to the expediency of existing between a rock and a hard place. We must pick up the ball and run because we can no longer wait for the smoking gun of the next denial of service attack to consign us all to the wheely bin of history."

Keep your cliches to yourself. Ya know what I mean? Ya see what I'm sayin'?

Art Schmart.

2007-06-20T19:14:00.000-05:00

Call it like it is Dana Gioia, new NEA Chairman! Chairman Gioia (pronounced Joy-a) spoke to the graduates of Stanford, who apparently disdained Gioia's lack of personal celebrity. His address was about the vapidness of current culture. This is an informative, if sketchy, read from the San Francisco Chronicle. Stanford snored.

Patti Smith Alert!

2007-06-20T18:17:00.000-05:00

I received a Patti Smith alert about her US summer concert tour. The closest show to me is Philly, standing room only at Tracadero, but I can't seem to get an invitation. I was checking out the Santa Monica Twilight Series where she is appearing on August 16 (you, in LA, and you know who you are, you should get your tush to this show), I saw this funny show note offered by the Santa Monica Pier promoters:

"NEW bike valet! So successful, so appreciated at the City's Farmer's Markets and other local events, we are pleased to offer free valet bike parking to our patrons at the western entrance to the shows."

I don't believe bike valet service has hit critical mass here on the east coast, yet. Bike valet service! I just see this big concert with thousands of people in garish spandex. All those big rubber butts swaying. Water bottles sloshing. Reflective vests shining. Helmet safety lights blinking maddly...Patti Smith grining.

Back In the U. S. of A.

2007-06-19T18:54:00.000-05:00

If you click the picture above you will see the house on the hillside, beautifully perched below the morning fog, in northern Tuscany. I took this picture early one morning from where I stood on a roadside hill I had climbed. It nicely represents the feeling of the sublime I had, morning after morning, walking the roads and little trails.

The quiet was remarkable and necessary. I don't know why I need quiet, what part of my experience brings me back to it and its powerful cathartic offering. But, this trip renewed my appreciation of it. Maybe my cares and woes are just leached from my body out into the quiet---in environments of noise, the cares and woes have nowhere to go?

Since returning two days ago, I avoid the news, web cruising or any media, except books (currently, "The Kalahari Typing School for Men"). I am in a restful place, the place that is open and allows insights---some good and nourishing, some revealing a spectrum of regret. I crest with them like a big blue boat on a rolling sea. I seem to hang in air and them settle into the eye of something looming. Words elude me.

So. Italy was more than I expected. I am getting some other pictures together. I would like the photos to reveal the trip somehow, but, as always, the experience of the travel is rarely revealed in the photos. Too, it usually takes me a while to articulate what I have experienced, so off-balanced am I by most anything. You'd think I was some ninny if you could conceive of my tipsy nature. Someday I will be stable and sure and easy.

On Vacation Until June 18!

2007-05-31T21:55:00.001-05:00

The Bicycle Thief.

2007-05-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

The well-locked bike sculpture.

This is a bike / bike lock sculpture from Vancouver. This is just the way I sometimes feel about my bike. I want to protect it from whoever it is that steals bikes. I went into a deli near where I am living on Saturday morning to buy milk. I rode my road bike to the deli. Though I would be in the store for, maybe, a minute or so, I was totally afraid to leave my bike outside, and, at the same time, I don't want to lock my bike up. I took my bike into the store and propped it against the wall, grabbed the milk, paid and hurried back outside with my bike. I rode home, lopsided with the milk, and cursed the world of fear and the hyped angst of life.

There is just a lot of fear swirling around. You only have to watch the nightly news for about ten minutes to get the drift of the invasion of fear. I am trying to shake it off, but it grabs me and reduces me to a caricature of a person who has possessions that must be protected. It is the last place I want to visit. This possession protection is crazy and tiring. The sculpture is a great representation of this crazed feeling.

Chain, chain, chain...

2007-05-25T20:44:00.000-05:00

There has long been afoot the effort to emasculate the import of the 60s. First the era was demonized by the right as nothing but wanton, self-indulgence in sex and drugs . This narrowed and superficial view has for decades become the standard understanding of that era. Little analysis is given to the era's powerful creative vitality of a singularly unique nature. The intelligence and meaning of the politics, and the art of the political voice, is woefully unexamined. Now that it has been emasculated, the new trend is toward sanitized, commercial presentations of the period. These slick, brightly colored exhibitions miss altogether the gravitas of the time.

Thankfully, Holland Cotter's NYT review of the Whitney Museum's exhibition, Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, catches them in the act. It is well worth the read. This brief quote helps nail-down the problem.

"To many people who came of age between 1963 to 1972 political intensity was the defining feature of the period and its most interesting art. It never let up.

In 1965 antiwar protests started — 25,000 students marched on Washington that year — and they grew larger and more frequent. By 1967, more than 400,000 troops have been sent to Vietnam. Che Guevara was killed that year; the Black Panthers had formed the year before. In 1968 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Racial uprisings spread across the country. The Democratic convention brought the war home to the Chicago streets. In 1969: university takeovers, Altamont. In 1970: Jimi dead. Janis dead. Cambodia. Kent State.

You will learn almost nothing about any of this from the show. Or about the gay liberation movement. Or about the gathering women’s movement, although militant feminism makes total sense given the relentless sexism of psychedelic art, in which all women are young, nude, available “chicks,” and very rarely artists.

Nor would you have any inkling that, for Americans at least, pop culture during these years meant black culture. Apart from Hendrix’s presence, the show is overwhelmingly white. Aretha Franklin’s first big hits — “Respect,” “Chain of Fools” and “Natural Woman” — were all 1967. You won’t find her here. Nor will you find Marvin, or Smokey, or Otis, or Fontella or Ray. Again, take one style for the whole picture, you leave most of the picture out."

That brief window of time and the events that formed and moved it were really like no other. I continually think that such faith in the power and art of audacious action will return, especially given our current urgencies (which is putting it mildly) and our abusive government(again, putting it mildly). The youth of today seem more geared to getting in on the game. What they fail to realize is the game is a scam. When they do, it could be rock and roll all over again. Until then, steal this blog.

Believe It or Not.

2007-05-24T18:58:00.001-05:00

Anthony Gottlieb, in The New Yorker, provides a delicious perspective on religious belief, through a review of an atheist tri-fecta: Christopher Hitchens new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Gottlieb muses about belief and discovers that the fourth largest group of believers are non-believers. After Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, by current estimates, the fourth largest belief system is atheism. Unbelief, it seems, is a relatively modern concept, prevalent in mostly wealthy countries, other than the US and Ireland. Its "followers" total some 500 million people.

Gottlieb is rightly puzzled about how religious thought could produce both merciless slaughter, superstition, subjugation and hatred on the one hand and the exquisite St. Matthew Passion on the other. This will always be the gut shame of it all. If, as Gottlieb reports, we are presumed to be hard-wired for religion, we seem to be in one last, horrific, short-circuiting of it all. It is an irony that atheism takes its place on the stage as a revelatory force for clarity and sanity.

Dumb and Stoopid

2007-05-23T21:48:00.000-05:00

In my hometown, Detroit, the Detroit Institute of Art is trying to figure out how to prevent museum visitors from feeling dumb. They are furiously reviewing wall cards and considering removing words like "Baroque" that might make visitors feel dumb. This is SO sad. I am crying.