Ledelle Moe's work shows up in a strip called Zippy the Pinhead.
(Courtesy a reader.)
Three names you don't see in association every day: Annie Leibovitz, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Louis Vuitton. The photograph is nothing controversial: just reliably bland Leibovitz. But Gorbachev—he makes a lot more money on the lecture circuit that he can off a photo spread, doesn't he? And Vuitton? The endorsement of Gorby's mighty, tattooed dome means what, exactly, to the LV brand?
If you're so inclined to vote for an also-ran—to cast your vote for third-party reform—to stand up and be counted as a beardo—to vote freelance! and tell the MSM what for—you may vote for me in the Hottest Media Types contest (male, off air). If you're passing over Clinton Yates and Pat Healy, you had better be doing so on purely ideological grounds.
Still reading Potter. Absolutely not reading this (via CBT).
In visual art circles, you'll sometimes hear a critic or viewer dismiss an artwork by saying that it doesn't depict beauty—as if that were the abject goal of all art. In his Washington Post column, Ron Charles dismisses the Harry Potter series because it doesn't afford an intimate relationship between the reader and the author, a criteria for literature that's as myopic as the belief that the plastic arts must engage beauty. Here's my defense of Harry Potter as an episodic drama that is in an important sense about the reader's experience. The whole fun of it is figuring out whether Snape is good or evil, you know? And everyone reads these books exactly because everyone else is reading them—that's the other great fun to it.
Catherine and I just bought a few bottles of Felix Felicis to add to the stocks of butterbeer and The Drink That Must Not Be Named. (The liquor store doesn't sell bloody-mary mix, so no Polyjuice Potion.) With the final book in hand, however, neither of us can start reading the damned thing. Right now, I'm still reading book six and fine-tuning my case for Snape's goodness, the Hallows staring at me from the coffee table.
I'll get to it. In any case, the more wizards die, the better it'll be.
So, I think that Congress should impeach President Bush. Sober, more in anger than in sadness, etc., etc., I do declare that I believe so, and strongly.
Not that my voice carries very far on political issues—I only say so here, declaring it on my modest public forum, because I have no congressional representatives to lobby.
Among other misdemeanors, President Bush has wasted American blood and treasure and expanded dangerously executive authority through signing statements, broad executive orders, and other innovative measures. Nevertheless, up to this point, the political cost of impeachment struck me as too high a price for the Democrats to pay to address Bush administration abuses. And I can't say I see a whole lot of upshot to installing Vice President Cheney in the Oval Office.
But today, the Bush administration asserted that "the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege." A breathtaking claim—my heart actually raced when I read it. It's too much to take. President Bush has attempted to nullify an important check of the legislature; if the Congress takes no action, he has succeeded. I'm not certain how Congress can resist this claim—through a show of force? by deploying the Capitol Police to arrest Harriet Miers et al.? What then? If it's a game of chicken between the executive and legislative branches, impeachment is way preferable to force.
It's crucial that the power of the executive branch be curtailed before another president takes office. Even if President Bush is only slapping the Congress in order to ensure that no one in the administration pays any penalty for its crimes—that's what I believe—limitless executive authority, or a "term-limited monarchy" as I've seen it phrased elsewhere, is not power that should be entertained. And it's not one that the next President will give up willingly.
Impeachment is bound to provoke a national crisis, but the fact of the matter is, the crisis is already there. I say, impeach them!
On a lighter note: Scroll down to 86 for a message of hope. (Via A White Bear.)
I'm making my way over to Baltimore today for Artscape. Full report here by Monday. Holla at me if you're going.
Here's one asinine video by ANC commissioner and busybody Frank Winstead, who asks whether it's safe that people play ping-pong on a table out front of Comet. Maybe not, but God deliver us the city in which this is a problem worth attention.
I'm gonna risk it all tonight. First, though, I hope to see some rhetorical table tennis as Bob Novak takes all comers at Politics & Prose.
If anyone would be so kind as to pick up a copy of The Onion, today's edition (i.e., not the one that will be on newsstands tomorrow), I'd appreciate it. I have an A.V. Club feature on Mingering Mike that I didn't realize had already run, and I need a physical copy of that clip, unless and until it runs in the national edition (I'll let you know). Look for it while supplies last.
Hmm, let's not leave the post at that. Here, I've got a question. Why does Whole Foods sell packaged quinoa cheaper than bulk quinoa? Packaged quinoa, which comes with a handy, stay-fresh, ziplockable seal, is $1.69 per pound. Bulk, the stuff's $2.19 per pound. Bulk quinoa might taste better, but so much better that twisty-tying the bag wins out over that satisfying feeling you get when you thumb close a ziplock seal and it resists just a little bit before it snaps into position? No, not likely. Quinoa is tiny bitter alien spawn.
Awfully crunchy, I know, buying quinoa. I like to think I made up for it at the pumpkin-spice-and-raisin granola bulk dispenser, which wasn't pouring, damn thing, and which I shook so hard that the adjacent dispenser spilled almonds everywhere and brought the attention of the authorities.
Tonight at Fort Reno, The DCeiver told me no lies about a couple interesting things. One: President Bush made a little girl cry today. Nice work, a-hole pres. Did you learn nothing during your summit with Putin?
Two: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is coming to the District as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. Chicago's longest-running show, it's a dice-based production of chance in which the company, the Neo-Futurists, attempts to stage 30 plays in 60 minutes. Dice? So, for example, the company writes a dozen micro-plays the week of the production; a roll of the dice determines how many of the new plays are subbed in.
Now, when you see it in Chicago, your ticket price is also determined by chance: $x + your roll. But at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, tickets over the eight-show run are $25. Sure, you could roll that—if you're rolling d20! snarf!!
Point being: Enter "SPAC" as a promotional discount code when you buy the tickets online, and you can have the tickets for $10. It's no great tip, I found out via myspace. But ten smackers is a deal: You wouldn't beat that shooting craps.
Nerd gossip! I got caught up in a conversation about Vietnam with a friend at the bar and ended up missing all those bands. Funny, just last night, I was at this chic place on the Lower East Side and someone was telling me I should check out this new band called Middle Distance Runner.
Off to New York for a few days. When I went up last month, I scheduled a whirlwind daytrip and ran into a bunch of frustrations: such-and-such gallery was installing, so-and-so's gallery wasn't in fact opening until Thursday, summer hours, and so on. Why didn't anyone tell me that the MoMA is closed on Tuesdays? This time around, I'm swearing I'll get some work done.
So I have at least a good dozen ideas for things to write here, and some shows to discuss (and some shows to discuss that are now closed), but I'm much shorter on time than I thought I'd be at this point into the summer. This is good thing, as I was half worried that my freelance career might come to an end when I starved to death for lack of work.
I might post some things if I get any writing done on the bus ride awesome stealth jet trip up there. Otherwise, you should look around for writing this week in the City Paper, Express, and Onion.
Here's a note: I think I don't like Brooklyn, or rather the parts of Williamsburg I've had the good fortune to visit and stay in when I've been up there. If it's on a grid, I can't tell. There doesn't seem to be any way to get from north burrough to south, and some of the young hip kid activities that take place in McLaren Park are hopelessly, appalling, unforgivably twee.
On the other hand, it's not a far jog from there to this place, which might be my favorite restaurant.
I'm jurying Crafty Bastards today and tomorrow. Probably gonna be slow here until Monday.
Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Valencia, 2005.
Owen Hatherly of Nasty, Brutalist, and Short:
Isn't there something truly avant-garde about the lunatic model of heritage held by the Moscow authorities? Building whole series of extra stories atop 17th century villas, 'finishing' a ruined 18th century castle, putting billboards of historical buildings over their soon-to-be-demolished ruins, treating the whole city as totally mutable and extendible: isn't this the dreams of the indeterminates and metabolists finally fulfilled by the revivalists? [sic]It is indeed awesome that one politician, Yuri Luzhkov, under the banner of "restoration," has made Moscow his personal palimpsest.
The comprehensive Moscow Architecture Preservation Society/SAVE European Heritage report published last month hasn't yet been released stateside. (I suppose it is an "over there" sort of report.) But I'm hoping to get my hands on a copy. I find that the Narkomfin and Melnikov House receive a lot of press over here and in the West generally (to wit), in part because those buildings fit a familiar narrative: The public dislikes them or doesn't understand them, but a scrappy band of tweedy underdogs hopes to convince them—and the city—that they're worth saving.
Except, in Moscow, that's not what's actually happening. It's Narkomfin, but also Detsky Mir. It's Melnikov House, but also St. Basil's Cathedral. Moscow's architectural crisis is many pronged. Age, decades of Soviet disrepair, greed and corruption, the incredible influence of oil and development, and incompetence and just-plain sloppiness conspire to snuff out inconvenient buildings and imperil cherished monuments. And, yeah, in the sense that this is a comprehensive crisis owing to administrative permissiveness rather than any systematic or ideological program, it is the novel crisis that Hatherly suggests.
This is a half full, half empty question. As you read that headline ad nauseum over the next two years, are you 1) comforted that the executive branch is still subject to oversight or 2) appalled that we live in a banana republic? In any case, today the name in the blank (and off the docket) is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Paul Gaugin, The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling With the Angel), 1888.
Here's a painting that really might be a contender for the 20th century title, if it weren't 12 years too early: Paul Gaugin's 1888 The Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel). To my knowledge, this is the first instance of a painter using abstraction to distinguish some phenomenological state. The red field is on the pictorial plane, but it is not of the pictorial plane.
Peter Plagens asks in Newsweek: Which is the most influential work of art of the last 100 years? Plagens lists the candidates commanding the most support in the primaries (Kazimir Malevich, Jackson Pollock*, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol). The presumed frontrunner has the critics sounding a lot like the pundits this week: How are Les Dems doing in the polls?
Les desmoiselles d'avignon, the inevitable victor, is doing just fine—though it's hardly garnered the support of the talking heads. Beyond Plagens, who sums up the conventional support for Picasso's cubist invention, and Clare Margetson, who remembers in hushed tones seeing a slide of the painting for the first time, no one's taken up the funky femmes in their Fortress of Solitude.
Jeffry Cudlin and Tyler Green form a Matissian bloc, backing, respectively, The Red Studio** (1939) and Blue Nude (1907). I've a hunch that when The Modern Kicks weighs in on the campaign, JL joins the Matissian center, too.
[Sidebar: You know, I wish that there were still sculptors. Like Dick Gephardt wished there was Big Labor in 2004, I wish there were sculptors. Some party to take up Alexander Calder's standard, boasting that no painter reshaped painting like Calder reshaped sculpture. I could get behind that. But sculptors don't identify "sculptor" these days—they all work in "media".]
I'll take a leftist tack and argue for Malevich's Black Square.
Now, as far as influence goes, Malevich runs into the same problem that Matisse's supporters have to argue down: Malevich's collectors and boosters were the wrong sort of people. Cudlin notes that "the wrong Steins—Sarah and Michael, not Gertrude and Leo—bought some of [Matisse's] boldest early pieces." Of course, in Malevich's case, the consequences of ignominy were somewhat more dire—and also ran the opposite direction. Consider poor Fedor Kumpan, director of the Kiev Art Gallery, arrested and sentenced to prison in 1929 for mounting a one-man exhibition of Malevich's work.
By that point, Malevich had long since completed his grand Suprematist experiment, which lasted him all of three years. That's all it took him to grandfather automatic painting. He identified with Black Square a singular form that could not be found in nature, and in ensuing paintings, transposed and commuted and revolved that square like a four-letter sequence of DNA to build his Suprematist body: up, over, through, in color. His 1913 masterpiece opened up a unique set of strategies that later artists, gratefully or not, would adopt and expand. I see towering over Frank Stella the shadow of the Kaz.***
Malevich later deviated from strict formalism to re-imagine the peasant, to create the new Soviet man. This work looks less good, and it was the work that found him trouble. But it was work not unlike that being done by Malevich's art-historical cohort—Arp, the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Schwitters, and to lesser extents Chagall and then Mondrian, all artists of immense influence. Malevich's project ground to a halt by the forced collapse of the kulak class under collectivization, and he wasn't seen again until Glasnost. His work collected actual dust for something like six decades. That'll cut short an artist's reach.
Nevertheless several questions survive him. One question that surrounds him is immediate and apparent to artists today: the nexus of art and politics and the will to power and the responsibility or usefulness of art within a society. One question that Malevich himself asked was how paint could operate as pure abstraction, entirely removed from a representational context, a question that artists continue to quote and critique.
* Confidential to MSNBC: The name is Pollock.
** Which of these is The Red Studio?
*** Every time I close my eyes, in fact.
