Karl Rove Runs from Global Warming as Served Up by Laurie David and Sheryl Crow at the White House Correspondent's Dinner

This is an entertaining read. You get the sense from reading this -- and also from remembering what Karl Rove looks like -- that he was socially outcast as a child.

Every time someone calls him to answer for his idiocies he mumbles into childhood regression.

In the blink of an eye it's no longer a couple activists trying to extract answers about global warming. It's Butch and The Woim trying to extract his lunch money and ready to give him an Atomic Wedgie if he doesn't pony up, pronto.

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More Terror Distractions from a Thoroughly Discredited and Humiliated White House Administration

Faced with the catastrophic failure of Troop Surge 2007, the hideous embarrassment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony before congress and prosecutorial prospects aplenty courtesy of the rabidly enraged Democratic congress, the Bush/Cheney Co-Presidency sends another player onto the field.

Can an Op-Ed piece ostensibly written by the much-discredited Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff kick up enough smoke and fear to distract Americans from the international debacle that is Team Bush?

Not bloody likely.

Six catastrophic years and the loss of their loved ones have convinced the very Americans who voted these imbeciles into office that nothing -- absolutely nothing -- published by their president, vice-president, or anyone working in league with them, can be believed.

Sadly, Chertoff resorted to taking flaccid stabs at a true scholar and expert on foreign relations, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As has happened often when the lips of any Bush administration supporter are moving, Chertoff distorts the facts and hopes you won't notice.

The impulse to minimize the threat we face is eerily reminiscent of the way America's leaders played down the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary fanaticism in the late 1970s. That naive approach ultimately foundered on the kidnapping of our diplomats in Tehran.

What Chertoff hopes you missed in the above statement is that it was Brzezinski who championed the idea of a strong military response to Iran. Carter's Secretary of State Cyrus Vance wanted to come to terms with Khomeini. Jimmy Carter couldn't come up with a coherent plan in the face of these differing opinions, with the result that no successful action was taken in Iran.

The Sept. 11 attacks were the most devastating single blow ever visited upon our homeland by foreign enemies.

I'm sure even Chertoff remembers the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, where America's defensive capabilities were seriously diminished. That Hawaii was at that point a territory and not a state diminishes nothing from the argument; America alone had substantial interests and populations residing there. The strike there was as effective as a similarly-sized strike on the mainland would have been. The September 11 attacks were scary as hell for the average American, but did nothing to diminish America's defensive or economic capabilities whatsoever.

Perhaps the rhetoric of war makes Brzezinski and others uncomfortable. But history teaches that the false comfort of complacency is a dangerous indulgence in the face of a determined enemy.

This is where Chertoff looks most ridiculous, as is the case whenever anyone in Team Bush tries to strike a pose of expertise. As regards the understanding war, history and power, he's simply not in Brzezinski's league.

Blowing smoke -- pushing the fear button -- trying to take down a true expert and failing miserably -- chalk up yet one more humiliation for Team Bush.

Michael Chertoff leaves the field in shame.

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No More Limbo for Babies? The Pope Sez, "That's Right."

Let's see -- the Roman Catholic Church claims to be protecting the lives of unborn babies by declaring it a mortal sin to have an abortion.

Yet just today the church made what I consider to be a very anti-baby move by taking away limbo.

If you've played it before you know that the limbo is easily one of the funnest games babies ever play.

Why, Pope Benedict, why?

Babies love the Calypso music, and they're absolute wizards at getting underneath that stick. You have to hold it practically an inch off the carpet before they start having trouble at all. In fact, when I do the limbo, if babies are playing too I never win.

But there's a consolation prize if you're the only non-baby at the limbo party: the banana daiquiri competition reduces to zero.

I don't know who's going to break the news to all the Catholic babies, but don't count on me to do it, Benny. Sorry dude -- I can't face all the tears.

You should be the one to tell them anyway. They won't cry then, because they'll be distracted by your funny hat.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee Waterboards US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

You'd have been proud of some of your congressmen and women, had you tuned in today to the Alberto Gonzales Extraordinary Rendition. None of the usual mincing around, none of the typical politeness and niceties. They just got down to business and savaged this shadow of a man like no Quentin Tarantino flick you've ever seen.

Patrick Leahy started things off by duct-taping Gonzales to a chair. Then Arlen Specter took a gas-powered weed-whacker to his face while screaming, "Incompetent!" over and over again. When Tom Coburn fired up the chainsaw I almost couldn't watch. Chuck Schumer got some licks in too, and let me tell you, this man is a wizard with the nunchucks.

For his part Gonzales sounded like a high school senior caught with weed, trying to disown all responsibility while also claiming to take responsibility for the sole purpose of wanting to appear like a responsible guy -- mostly so no one takes his driver's license away. I kept waiting for him to cry.

This is the result of weeks of preparation? This is the man in charge of US Justice? It was pathetic, people. Buy the DVD -- you won't be sorry.

Word from anonymous White House aides is that the Bush/Cheney Co-Presidency is flabbergasted at the Attorney General's soon-to-be-highly-publicized self-immolation.

Could it be any wonder that someone of this epic level of incompetence is at America's service, courtesy of Your Boy President?

Incidentally, I finally figured out who Alberto Gonzales reminds me of.

Uncanny, isn't it?

UPDATE 4/20 (WHAT?):
Courtesy of the Times UK, because sometimes an outsider sees it even better than you:

"...asked if he had considered resignation, he insisted that he could still do the job, adding: “Every day I ask myself that question. The moment I believe I can no longer be effective I will resign as Attorney-General.”"

Crazy thing about it, Alberto, is that your own record proves over and over that you're simply not qualified to assess the effectiveness of anyone at any task.

You're hardly qualified to be your own office manager.

If we learn only one thing from the past eight years it has to be this: people must be hired based on proven competence and nothing else.

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Graffiti Artist Alain Maridueña -- aka Alan Ket -- Keeping It Real?

Like a number of you I lived in New York City during the '80s and saw the graffiti scene in all or most of its glory. It combined punk rock's defiant anarchy with old school rap's rhythmic exuberance. There was no time off for good behavior; the pressure was on to get street cred by painting trains late at night, risking arrest or getting thrashed by competitors or by the guy whose graffiti you just painted over.

And, kids, let me tell you, it was electric to stand on a subway platform late at night, watching all the trains but yours sail past festooned to the windows and sometimes to the roof with the retina-searing lyrical grind of kids whose big bubbly graffiti names would one day be lost forever.

Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point talks about the beginning of the end for graffiti, and many years later I met one of the people responsible for bringing this about in the NYC government.

According to Gladwell and confirmed by my associate, the NYC authorities would park a clean-up crew in an unlit corner of the train yards -- armed, I'd guess -- to watch a kid complete an artwork. Then, just as the kid's packing his paint cans back into his backpack, the clean-up crew would sidle on over and, with the kid watching, they'd clean off the entire thing.

Hours of work, the built-up anticipation of street cred and local fame, and one magnificent piece of art -- erased in a few minutes.

Didn't take more than a couple years of that to reach the tipping point for graffiti. By the time I left New York in May of 1990 the trains gleamed silver and the song was dead.

My point in bringing this up now is to point out that the "paint on a train" style of graffiti is essentially over.

I know, I know, I know -- stencils are another thing. Stencil won't die. That's an older, more resilient and more insidious form. You and I can make some fabulous stencils right now. We can slam up twenty or thirty good images on the walls and streets and be home before anyone knows we're alive.

Apparently graffiti artist Alain Maridueña didn't get the news that train-based graffiti is dead. He's kept the whole culture going in this century including foisting around a graffiti name: Ket.

He's not alone, I realize. Any ride from New Haven to New York will show you that there are still a few hermits out there plying that ancient art, just like there are some photographers nowadays who like to use daguerreotype. Ket's the only non-stenciller I've read about in America in a long time.

I know I've seen Ket's work. It's OK, but the couple pieces I've seen don't hold a candle to the legitimate old-school crowd.

He claims he hasn't actually vandalized anything in a while. And why should he? He's had major gigs with huge corporations: Atari, Moët & Chandon and MTV.

This 36-year-old kid is financed.

So why, according to the NYTimes.com article this morning, is Alain Maridueña answering to vandalism charges that could send him to Riker's Island for fourteen years?

He blames copycats, says he was nowhere near the stations involved and it's just like getting your credit card stolen -- other vandals are copying and using his Ket identity.

I seriously doubt he'll pull fourteen years even if he is convicted. But the one thing that makes me kind of sick about this whole affair is that it's beyond pointless.

It's like going to jail for streaking.

Wake up, kids. Run DMC broke up. Sugar Hill Gang is no more.

"Say Ho-tel Mo-tel
Whatcha gonna do today? (Say WHAT?)

Gonna get a fly girl gonna get some spankin
drive off in a DEF O J!"

It was sweet, to be sure, but it's long gone, and some seriously twisted forces have taken over hip-hop to terrible effect. But that's another post.

The real graffiti scene now is stealth and Pop Art-inflected. The best of it has a razor-sharp cynically humorous edge.

Cutting deals with corporations? Serious graffiti mocks corporations. It beats them about the face and neck with a hunk of rebar and laughs as they crumple to the sidewalk. See Banksy for some highly publicized examples.

Taking graffiti cash from Atari, Moët & Chandon and MTV.
Cracka, please!

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Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubismat Pace Wildenstein, E. 57th St.

Randy Kennedy's NYTimes.com article When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies appears to be part of the publicity package for Arne Glimcher's show at Pace Wildenstein's 57th Street gallery, Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism.

It's an interesting two-pager, obviously generated for the most part from material supplied by the gallery.

In case you missed it, Mr. Glimcher's thesis is that cinema was a much greater influence on Picasso and Braque's analytic cubism than has previously been noted.

Oddly enough the most direct correspondence Mr. Kennedy presents between Cubism and film comes from a source other than this show:

The most extensive consideration of movies and Cubism was made by Natasha Staller in 2001, in her book “A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism,” in which she found specific correspondences between some of Picasso’s work and the images and techniques in the films of Georges Méliès, the French moviemaker and special-effects pioneer.

“Picasso appropriated Méliès’s techniques of jarring multiple perspectives, fragmented bodies and body parts, a comic self-conscious dialogue between apparent art and apparent reality,” Ms. Staller wrote.

I find this moderately interesting. Maybe Mr. Kennedy didn't list show-specific examples because that would be like telling you the end of a movie you haven't seen.

For the most part my response to Mr. Glimcher's show is this: didn't everyone think, "Hmmm, I'll bet these Cubist guys saw a lot of movies" at one time or another during those endless Art History slideshows?

This far from Cubism's beginnings and in the absence of supporting narrative contemporary to the artists, can moderately valuable -- read fairly specific -- correspondences between their work and film be more than conjecture?

How much more is anyone going to take away from this show than "Yeah, I guess those Cubist guys really did watch a lot of movies"?

How much more gold is to be found in sifting through the Cubist bone yard?

For answers to these and other questions, hike on up to 57th street and see the show. Let me know how it hangs.

The real payoff, I'm guessing, will be the spike in prices of analytical cubist works.

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Harvey Fierstein Postscripts the Imus Debacle

Two related thoughts occurred to me in watching Don Imus's media flame-out:

1. Imus openly caricatures every group to which he does not personally belong.
2. Everyone inwardly caricatures every group to which we do not belong.

This is why the shock jock formula is so successful. To paraphrase the worthless and disgusting Howard Stern, "I say what you're thinking."

Harvey Fierstein seems to agree, according to his Op-Ed piece at NYTimes.com, Our Prejudices, Ourselves. Where we disagree somewhat is that the hoarsely entertaining Mr. Fierstein slathers this thought with accusation.

What I am really enjoying is watching the rest of you act as if you had no idea that prejudice was alive and well in your hearts and minds.

As he points out himself, Mr. F. is a member of two groups that are frequent targets of mockery and hatespeak: gay people and overweight people.

Mr. Fierstein's proposition implies to me that somehow we can be fabulously unprejudiced and indifferent creatures, and further, that he is indeed one of these perfect humans.

Does Mr. Fierstein never get even the slightest bit queasy when a six hundred pound man sits next to him at a restaurant, or steps next to him on an elevator?

Does he never inwardly mock the blond hetero uber-jocks hurtling their Spandexed Aryan physiques down the New York streets?

Has he never done an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation?

And, really, is this the pinnacle of human perfection: to be able to be around people of every different kind and not notice, in a humorous way, the differences between us?

Noticing these differences, and even communicating them in ways that result in good art of all sorts, isn't the problem in my view. It's propagating memes that hurt, demean and destroy. And that's the only problem.

Being able to tell the difference between these two points -- between positive communication and destructive communication -- requires a degree of nuance. But this is not an age of nuance at all. This is an ad-saturated age characterized by maximum volume and intensity as each force trying to squeeze every last dime or vote from the populace struggles to outshout every other such force.

To add to the problem, everyone takes themselves much too seriously. The public school focus on self-esteem at the expense of self-evaluation has created one hell of a self-infatuated generation.

Worse still, the importance of every superficial distinction is ridiculously magnified nowadays.

Don't forget the all-consuming importance of maintaining street cred. Never let anyone say anything bad about you. And whatever you do, never, ever laugh at yourself.

Fierstein equates noticing differences with harboring malice. I completely disagree. Noticing that someone is different in an amusing way does not even remotely lead to my taking a baseball bat to his head.

Violence against people of difference is not the result of noticing their differences. It's the result of being a violent person.

We don't all need to become robots that don't perceive our many differences. But some of us badly need to become less violent. And many of us badly need to take ourselves less seriously.

I agree with the last paragraph of Harvey Fierstein's piece:

The real point is that you cannot harbor malice toward others and then cry foul when someone displays intolerance against you. Prejudice tolerated is intolerance encouraged. Rise up in righteousness when you witness the words and deeds of hate, but only if you are willing to rise up against them all, including your own. Otherwise suffer the slings and arrows of disrespect silently.

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Lars Cuzner: Detecting Airborne Viruses at the Art Museum

Someone visited Lars Cuzner's site and then visited mine, and that's how I learned about him.

I haven't had time to digest this all, but my initial reaction is that this is one interesting agent. I'll be getting back to it later, but maybe you'll have some thoughts or reactions, or maybe you're totally familiar with Mr. Cuzner's work and will fill me in on the details.

The idea of detecting viruses in an art museum comes off as pretty funny to me, not having read any further into it. The viral nature of memes, and the capacity of visual art to transmit memes, all play into my initial reaction.

It's funny to think that an art museum could be so ineffective, so wholly devoted to the obsolete, that one would need a special high-tech detector to tell if anything serious or substantial is going on there.

That's my two cents; now I've got to run a few miles before a big Noreaster blows in.
Let me know what you're thinking.

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More Images from Mark Creegan's Show New Paint Things at Dangerous Curve

Tim (from Dangerous Curve? Set me straight, Timbo) sent me a link to Dangerous Curve's official shots of Mark Creegan's latest Los Angeles show New Paint Things. If you're like me and you couldn't make it to LA for the show, then fer cryin' out loud, click here!

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Roberta Smith on NYTimes.com:"Space Redefined in Chelsea"

Roberta Smith is one of the art critics whose work I've enjoyed for a number of years now. She offers an interesting and insightful article in today's NYTimes.com regarding the Big Box-like spaces in Chelsea and the way artists are using them.

You can almost feel your ears pop when you step into the gargantuan vaults of Calvinist splendor that characterize Chelsea's more Wal-Martian galleries.

I invoke Sam Walton's premier small-business-slayer with only a partial tongue-in-cheek. If there's one thing I've come to realize after a few years of paying attention to the New York art scene it's that it's the medium and small-sized galleries that are carrying the burden of bringing new, cutting-edge and, most importantly for me, relevant art to the cultural stage.

These are the places where the directors seem to be most in touch and in love with their own programs, and where they're taking some real risks. Examples that come immediately to mind are Winkleman, Zach Feuer, D'amelio Terras, Christopher Henry and Feature, Inc.

I'm almost never disappointed during a visit to these galleries, and occasionally I'm really blown away.

The big box spaces -- Gagosian, Mary Boone, Pace, et al -- they frequently, but not always, show established, well-known artists, and, particularly, artists from the progressive narrative who have been pushing the same buttons for more than a decade.

I realize that this is part of the gallery system architecture; that massive highly expensive real estate needs to be financed by reliable income sources, and these galleries aren't known or even interested in launching new talent.

Even so, I'd suggest that they go further than is necessary to keep the mortgage paid.

What's to be gained, for example, by a gallery showing in Chelsea of anything by Andy Warhol? Isn't this what museums are for? Hasn't Warhol contributed everything he's ever going to contribute to our culture?

Isn't Warhol part of the narrative that we've all watched through its death throes, that we all helped bury? If so, (and it is so), why not at least send his work uptown, where nobody expects anything new to happen?

The exceptions are refreshing and underscore how right I am about how unnecessary it is to sift through the bone yards to fill gallery space in Chelsea. Lehmann Maupin, to name just one, is a somewhat big-boxy gallery, but practically every time I've stopped by there's been something unusual and at least relatively new. Jennifer Steinkamp's video installation is only one superb example.

On another not-entirely-unrelated topic, scuttlebutt is that the art market bubble's about to burst.

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IraqSlogger

Now that the Bush/Cheney Co-Presidency's Troop Surge 2007 has proven to be such an unparalleled success, you'll want to stay informed with up-to-the-nanosecond information as the sweet blessings of liberty spread from Baghdad to Tikrit to Anbar Province and throughout the entire fertile peace-loving Jeffersonian Democracy of Iraq.

That's why you'd better subscribe to IraqSlogger, right away.

Here's the overly dense "About Us" blurb from IraqSlogger's otherwise-professional-quality website:

IraqSlogger is the world's premier Iraq-focused Web site. The free 24/7 up-to-the-minute news service provides an unrivaled combination of exclusive and third party reporting and analysis on Iraq. IraqSlogger reports on traditional topics as well as extraordinary topics: black market prices in Baghdad, the buzz on Iraq's streets, the latest graffiti in Iraq, and more. IraqSlogger's contributors include journalists in Iraq, the U.S., and elsewhere who are committed to providing insightful and, at times, unconventional, reporting and analysis, as well as links to, and critiques of, reporting and analysis in U.S. and Iraqi news outlets. IraqSlogger is committed to providing clarity, truth, and confidence in reporting on Iraq. The founding team includes Eason Jordan, Robert Young Pelton, Nir Rosen, Zeyad, Amer Mohsen, and Anna Shen. Our contributors include 50 Iraq-based correspondents, experts, and tipsters; and reporters and Iraq analysts in the U.S. and elsewhere.

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Imus Crucified

CEOs at NBC and CBS have never once had a problem cashing the fat paychecks that were partially subsidized by Imus's boundary-shoving routine.

This time around, as appalling as his mistake was, Imus is being treated as though he's suddenly become a white-sheet-wearing swastika-tattooed cross-burning David Duke-wannabee white supremacist.

Decide for yourself if Don Imus's career should really be destroyed for one idiotic verbal gaffe. But if you decide that the kind of treatment Imus has gotten over the past few days is fair and proportional, tell me this: where is this kind of treatment going to stop?

Where and when does the ferocious, self-righteous, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, self-propagating outrage end?

At what point will it become much more than one enraged clergyman-politician's very conveniently timed opportunity to put a very public and publicly powerful man's head on his wall?

At what point will it become your neighbors assaulting and harassing you over your stupid verbal gaffe, your misunderstood suggestion, your unintended slight -- encouraged now by the success others have had in taking Imus down?

Keep in mind you own this, like so many things in this desperately sick, hype-addled, self-centered and peripherally blind culture.

If this is what you want for Don Imus and for everyone else who makes the same idiotic mistake, you had better be ready for the day that this also arrives on your doorstep holding a pink slip, or a subpoena, or an arrest warrant, or, if things have gotten really out of hand as happens when unrestrained outrage transforms into something else, maybe even a Molotov cocktail.

EDIT 4/15
What Kinky Said.

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Sol Lewitt 1928 - 2007

The Hartford Courant reports today that artist Sol Lewitt lost a long battle with cancer this past Sunday at the age of 78.

For a long time I've considered Lewitt's work to be hyper-cerebral, too reliant on art history itself and too reliant on the esoteric knowledge of the artist's specific concept. To me it seemed essentially closed to interpretation. It's art from the progressive narrative in every sense.

But I felt somewhat more akin to Lewitt after reading his Sentences on Conceptual Art, which for my money should probably be renamed Sentences on Art, since everything I read in them applies to all serious art.

After reapproaching his work with these sentences in mind, and also after he appeared to be having more fun with his previously-dry-as-hell murals, I gained some admiration for what he was doing and in some cases for the way he seemed to be caricaturing himself.

Having said this I must confess I still find it difficult to reconcile the cubic structures and the flat, dry murals with the vibrant artist whose voice emerges from the Sentences.

The Courant article runs three pages and is filled with all kinds of nuggets that I'd never bothered to learn. For example:

Tom Doyle of Roxbury remembers his old friend's schedule. "He went to work at 5 p.m.," Doyle said. "He'd go home, sleep, get up at 5 a.m. and work. Around noon, he'd show up at my studio," a block or two away from LeWitt's. "He was always stopping and talking to people." At the time, LeWitt was making sketches of Old Master paintings, searching for something original to create.

"I had reached a low point of my art life," he told an interviewer years later. "I had no idea what to do."

Give it your time, if for no other reason then as your own private memorium to a real coffee achiever who left many marks on the world, most of which were extremely straight and narrow.

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Some recent work

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The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) at El Museo del Barrio

In this morning's NYTimes.com Holland Cotter reviews a show that, from the images provided, appears to be quite breathtaking.

"The 15 artists in the show are all from Latin American countries that experienced totalitarian regimes in the late 20th century, when almost every family had friends who disappeared or were themselves forced into hiding or exile. Directly or indirectly, their art is about these experiences."

Don't miss the multimedia slideshow.

Anyone who still sees New York as the center of the art world should know that this show originated in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and organized under the obviously very capable and discerning eye of Laurel Reuter, founding director and chief curator of the North Dakota Museum of Art. As Mr. Cotter puts it,

From Ms. Reuter’s stunning essay to the supplementary material, it is a total- immersion emotional experience.

I could blab a lot more about thoughts and ideas this article generates, but Cotter's review is superb writing, as is often the case. Read it now.

The Disappeared will be in East Harlem until June 17. Sounds like a don't miss exhibition to me. Hope I can make it.

El Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street)
East Harlem, NY
(212) 831-7272
http://www.elmuseo.org

PS -- Ever get a great idea for an artwork, then see that somebody else has beaten you to it? That's my experience of the Nicolás Guagnini piece above. You know what they say about great minds --

Image from NYTimes.com

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Propagander at This: NPZLB

Sean Gonsalves left some simple nuggets of wisdom over at Alternet in an article that's worth your time, even if much of it is review: The Hand that Rocks the Craddle.

This may resonate for you as strongly as it did for me:

Without any real constitutional checks against using violence to coerce action, totalitarian rulers don't really have to worry about what you think. They tell you what to think with a gun to your head. But it's much more difficult to use naked state-sanctioned violence in democracies, which is why "democratic" rulers subject the masses to a mind-numbing amount of propaganda.

Unfortunately, "education," as it's been constructed, is what lays the foundation for people to be propagandized. In fact, the more "education" someone has, the more susceptible they are to propaganda because most schooling is geared toward teaching what to think; not how to think.

That last paragraph probably rings true for many like me who work in secondary education. Much of what we're doing is setting up students for a life of nine-to-five servility and obedience.

Who are the kids who do poorly in secondary education? Often they're the ones with learning and/or emotional disabilities. But sometimes they're smarter than the system and have no intention of being led about like sheep.

And sometimes it's tough to distinguish one kind of student from the other.

A funny thing crossed my mind while reading Gonsalves' article: the Americans responsible for putting Team Bush in the White House are -- could there be any doubt? -- the same who fall for Rush Limbaugh and the Rush wannabees. Millions upon millions of American voters literally open their minds every weekday for three hours and let big fat Rush pour in whatever the Bush machine has designed for them.

That's what put Bush in the White House and it's also what's kept him there.

Yet Limbaugh has been vociferous about the failure of American education. I think he needs to rethink that approach entirely. The reason is that American education is the very thing that made Rush Limbaugh and Team Bush-Cheney, America's First Co-Presidency, possible.

Credit American education, with its emphasis on submission to authority and on teaching what to think at the expense of teaching how to think or, better still, on teaching how to find new ways of thinking, for creating millions of people who are highly receptive and even energetic about being propaganda's pawns.

Rewind to the early 1980s: Vast hoards of loyal, vaguely literate, workforce-ready and highly vaccinated propaganda zombies -- a resource such as the Earth had never before seen -- stood waiting for someone to tell them what to think and how to live their lives.

Although religions and cults had noted and used this kind of resource centuries ago, Republican strategists were the first in our era to fully recognize the potential of this vast resource and the first to put it to work.

Due in no small part to their self-destructive nature, they will in all likelihood be the last. This is true because, for the most part, this resource has lost much of its power.

To keep a millions-strong army of propaganda zombies going you need to greatly restrict their access to information. If you think that's easy in America, try taking twenty zombies for a walk in the city and make sure that not even one of them stumbles into a newspaper stand.

Keeping in mind the sheer population involved, it wasn't too many years -- five or six, anyway -- before a few of the Living Brain-Dead ambled on to some information that Team Bush would have preferred they not discover. And, as we've seen over the past eight months or so, they are capable of waking up from the utter confusion of their lives and realizing that nothing they've thought for the past couple decades makes any sense.

Even propaganda zombies can learn. And that, incidentally, is the entire reason behind this blog post and behind the new program I'm launching.

NPZLB -- No Propaganda Zombies Left Behind.

Whoa -- I just got goose-bumps. Did you? The rhetorical power of that just about threw me out of my chair.

Under NPZLB, every and any propaganda zombie in America must be re-educated by the year 2008. This is going to be intense, people, but you know we can do this; we're the same America that won World War Two, give or take a little fat, laziness and/or stupidity.

First we need to set up some standards. To be successful under NPZLB, propaganda zombies must be able to:

• Listen critically to all sides of a debate and use reason to arrive at a decision
• Discern and reject propaganda in all its forms
• Reject flawed logic even if it comes from favored sources
• Reject party politics, period
• Rigorously research topics vital to their own and national interest and make decisions that benefit each in its turn
• Spend $250 per month on contemporary art (humor me)
  

The thing is the drop-dead deadline date is just a year and a half away, so we need to compress the timescale substantially to achieve all of our goals.

As the self-appointed Secretary of NPZLB, I hereby decree that testing of all propaganda zombies must take place every day at 9:15 am, and run until 11:30 am.

Tests for each entire week will be distributed every Monday to all who are responsible for the re-education of propaganda zombies. To these dedicated re-educators I would also urge this unsolicited advice: teach to the test.

If a propaganda zombie scores below the minimum (95) for two tests in a row, its re-educator must attend seminars. Re-educators will submit their photographs and biographical information to me and I will determine which will attend seminars here in my studio and which will attend the seminars being given nightly at a tequila stand in their own district.

After three sub-minimal test scores the propaganda zombie will be issued a voucher which can be exchanged for a free copy of the Yellow Submarine DVD, a paperback copy of Philip K. Dick's sci-fi classic The Man in the High Castle, or an afternoon of fishing on Bud 'n' Mary's Miss Islamorada.

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Eating the Cosmos

Stars eject photons -- packets of energy -- that travel for millions of years until they zip through your corneas and splash on the insides of your eyes.

EDIT
The line above was once a much longer post, a kind of photon fable dreamed up in a caffeine-induced delirium. After the java wore off I read it again and, mortified by my own shameless verbosity, I shaved it down to the essential thought that inspired the original post.

Then Steven LaRose commented with this pithy insight:

What's missing from your update, but what I thought was in the original version, is how our eyes are made of the stuff that we are seeing.

Brilliant: with this statement Steve connects that we're made of matter forged at the cores of stars that have been dead now for eons, and that this star matter that we are is now beholding its origins in living stars.

Through us the universe beholds itself.

This has everything to do with art. Take a look at what Steve's been up to for a while now. Also consider Jackson Pollock's working approach.

I realize not all artists work this way, but the way I work is a kind of call-and-response with material and with the thing as it develops. In fact I think many artists work this way, and many non-artists have a grasp of it.

The other side of it is that the thing we're creating engages us as well. This I think might be a little harder for non-artists to grasp.

In a certain sense it's as if the thing we're creating is using us to bring itself into physical manifestation.

Thanks, Steve.

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Mark Creegan: New Paint Things at Dangerous Curve in Los Angeles

Mark Creegan was the first contemporary artist whose work made me feel like I really, badly needed to loosen up. I consider it to be some of the most conceptually limber work out there at this point in time.

Now he's got a solo show called New Paint Things at Dangerous Curve in LA. There's some very clever stuff here. Check it out!

I get a particular chuckle out of his use of empty watercolor pans.

Here's the way you should do this: Fly to LA, forget about the ocean because it's too cold -- go see Mark Creegan's show, buy a cool piece of art, and then head out to Tokyo Delve in Marina del Rey for sushi. They do this crazy game there involving a mug of beer, a shot of saki and a couple chopsticks.

Then go to Venice Beach and hang around. The next day, without fail, hit the Getty Museum.

After you've been there a while gorging on superb world class artworks, take a break. Go into the big couryard area, order up some cheap champagne, then tap the coral panels on the outsides of the building with the palms of your hands and note that each makes its own note. Compose a tune in the sun right there, with LA shining far down below.

You could spend your time in infinitely worse ways than this.

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Jackson Pollock: Contributions to the New Art Narrative

People generally interpret the phrase "painting like Pollock" as imitating his drip style.

But listen to the man and watch him work in the fragment below from Hans Namuth's film.

He's responding intuitively to the paint and to the thing that's taking form beneath him.

I don't believe he absolutely required this particular technique to achieve this. But this technique is how he learned it. It would have been fun to see him move on to other mediums, although it doesn't appear as though he was inclined to do so, short of a few small wire-and-plaster sculpture models for a maquette of Betty Parsons' gallery.

To make anything without a preconception, letting it form, giving existence to something you haven't limited by your imagination or by your need to understand it fully first -- for me this is Pollock's most powerful and enduring contribution.

It easily jumps the synaptic chasm from the previous art narrative to the present one.

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Richard Dawkins (1998) Clears the Post-Modernist Muck

This past Sunday Richard Dawkins' website re-published his superb review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.

From their stance as academics, Dawkins and the authors show the vacuity of a number of Post-Modern philosophical writers, decoding their balderdash and identifying a number of buzzwords in common use at that time.

Here's a piece of the kind of writing discussed and derided by Sokal and Bricmont, who refer to it as "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered."

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable,' endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

We've all seen art writing like this, although not so much in the past four or five years.

Dawkins' review contains some interesting thoughts such as this:

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious?

This reminds me of a number of Post-Modern artworks from the nineteen-eighties, and some of the art writing I recall from that time. While many artworks were clever in their own way, didn't many of them come off as terribly dry? I'm thinking now of Sherri Levine's imitations, and her large plywood pieces. Sure, I suppose they had a gag element to them, but the laughs lasted not terribly long.

What interests me is the relationship between profundity and pretentiousness. The difference between them might be the difference Dawkins and the authors point to: one requires content, the other does not.

More to come...

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