We spotted this wonderful, much-used Toyota last night while walking to the E train Spring Street stop. I had already taken this shot before I walked around the side of the car and saw the door emblazoned with a large “Citizen Reno” sign. Of course!
Inside on the dashboard was a small stack of her DVD, “Rebel Without a Pause.” Is our hero tempting the culturally and politically savvy thief, or just advertising?
Author: jameswagner
do you know how to get to Tiananmen Square?
Practice, practice, practice.
this tank is one of two which circled the block and then parked in front of a modest anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles yesterday evening.
This is on Wilshire Boulevard, in Westwood, people! I can’t think of anything more useful for generating civic anger and destabilizing an uneasy civil peace than the appearance of tanks in our own neighborhoods. In the 1920’s and 30’s they sent thugs out on foot with clubs, but they didn’t have a mandate then. Actually, the National Socialists never did win anything close to a majority.
For more see Bloggy.
[image from MyDD]
Queens International 2004
Troy Richards, This Light You Speak Of (2004) installation view of site-specific installation: Jolly-Ranchers, Plexiglas and resin 108″ x 51″ [QMA reception revelers faintly visible below]
We absolutely did get out to the Queens Museum of Art (QMA) last Sunday for the opening of the Queens International 2004. It was almost five when we got there, so we were pretty busy for the next hour. Most everyone in the very interesting crowd was pretty laid back, so we must have looked pretty intense as we made our way through galleries showing the art of some 50 or more Queens-based artists. Even so we managed to talk to a number of them while they hung out near their work.
There is nothing of the provinces, the “outer boroughs,” about this show – except maybe for the incredible ethnic diversity of the artists included – a heterogeneity which frequently shows up even in the compound heritage of one individual. The name of the show, “Queens International,” is a salute to that diversity. Any city in the country would be proud of the quality of the art represented. It’s a first-rate show, a first-rate New York show.
Some of my favorites:
Haeri Yoo‘s wall of childlike drawings which almost mask her sophisticated humanism
Cui Fei‘s enormous, but so delicate, sculptural evocation of Chinese caligraphy employing grape vine tendrils
Chris Dorland‘s use of World’s Fair pavilions to comment in his paintings on our utopian dreams – and follies
Aissa Deebi‘s photographic documentary of exile, using a shisha cafe in Astoria as his canvas
Matt Ducklo‘s sort-of-photojounalist suburban grotesques (especially the Kentucky shopping center/cemetary/mountain range combo)
Pascal Jalabert’s heroic paper-tape bridges in electric colors
Kurt Lightner‘s magical mylar cut-out collages (and ink drawing)
Nava Lubelski‘s abstract canvases, which she stains and then adorns with needlepoint to almost electric effect
Troy Richards‘s bold candy windows (see above)
Earl Howard‘s sound sculpture installed in the Whitney-size elevator
Shin Il Kim‘s animated video whimsical profundities
Minshik shin’s totally wonderful and sincere “American Dream” video
Because of the crowds and because of our limited time, we missed our chance to see most of the video art, so the list above is even more imperfect than usual.
[link to Haeri Yoo images was added June 6, 2005]
slain on the altar of our national suicide
I don’t know what to say about this story, but it has moved me more than I thought possible.
November 6, 2004, 4:39 PM EST
A 25-year-old university worker from Georgia shot and killed himself at ground zero Saturday morning, authorities said.
The man, Andrew Veal, of Athens, Ga., was found atop the structure housing the 1 and 9 subway lines after a hotel worker spotted what he believed was somebody sleeping inside the site around 8 a.m., said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
A shotgun was found near the body, Coleman said. No suicide note was found, he said.
Police were investigating how Veal entered the former World Trade Center site, which is protected by high fences and owned by the Port Authority.
Veal worked in a computer lab and was planning to marry, friends said Saturday.
I used to live just blocks away from the Trade Center and for over six months even here on 23rd Street I lived with the acrid smell of the fires which destroyed it on September 11. I watched out the front windows and I heard hundreds of police motorcycle-escorted ambulances speed down the street to a temporary morgue on the East Side which is still there. For a dozen years I worked at the Trade Center, each day entering and leaving the 1/9 subway line through the concrete structure on top of which Veal took his life; it’s the only part of the original complex remaining above ground today. I made repeated heartbreaking trips to the site beginning two days after its destruction. The neighborhood was my first home in New York.
I’m still in New York today and I’ve grown to love it even more than I did when its wonders first brought me here. This also means, strictly speaking, that I’m still in the country where I was born, but I no longer feel that I am. If this was true before the election on Tuesday, the results which were announced have confirmed my exile.
Andrew Veal felt that dispossession more deeply than most. His despair brought him to the site which is still cynically being used to feed the agony in which so many of us share, and there Veal at least was able to end it.
actually, the Republicans stole the election again
Why were the exit polls so completely “wrong” in Ohio, Florida and certain other states this year? Was it because of massive election fraud?
The administration didn’t need an October surprise; they knew it was already wrapped up – by their own people strategically placed where they really counted. And we were all fools to imagine otherwise. We’ll be even greater fools if we let them get away with it a second time, but we’ll have to hurry if it’s going to be resolved without civil war. The Electoral College meets on December 13, and Congress counts their votes out loud on January 6.
My own representative, Jerrold Nadler, is one of the three Congressmen who asked on Friday that the General Accounting Office immediately begin an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesdays elections. [Incidently, Nadler won re-election handily on Tuesday (80 points) against the stealth Republican, Peter Hort. Hort would presumably not have seen anything irregular about his leader’s second “victory,” and I expect that at some time in the near future his brethren will reward his sacrificial candidature with a juicy patronage appointment.]
“Haroun and the Sea of Stories”
Wednesday, the stage at the New York State Theater, before the lights darkened
We went to New York City Opera Wednesday night to see Charles Wuorinen’s new opera based on a short novel by Salmon Rushdie, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.”
Almost totally bummed because of the national disasters reported over the previous 24 hours, we really weren’t expecting to be greatly amused. According to the reviews we had read we would find a delightful story seriously handicapped by its dependence upon the composer’s complex 12-tone techniques.
We both loved it on every level, for each of its elements.
We knew the story and it really is delightful. It’s definitely not simply a children’s story, although there were plenty of smart New York kids there with their parents. It was written while Rushdie was forced to hide from the mortal threat of the fatwa directed against him because of his writings. The book is a fable about free expression. It’s as fresh as tomorrow morning’s bread. In Act II the evil Khattam-Shud complains about the limits of his dark authority, singing,
Inside every single story
There lies a world, a story world,
That I cannot rule ar all.
It is beyond my control . . .
It spoils everything!
The libretto by the poet James Fenton, necessarily more condensed than the book, did so with great success, tightly playing with the pleasure of words both real and imagined, in delightful groups strung together and wound around or threaded through each other.
I admit that serial music holds no terrors for me and under normal circumstances I would have been delighted to be looking forward to a live performance of an entire opera using its forms. We have a large wall cabinet stacked with the sadness of 12-tone opera sound-only recordings, their visuals unfulfilled. I was surprised and delighted to find that Wuorinen’s score was a perfect foil for the story, the singers and the glorious sights unfolding on the stage.
And what sights they were! In their totally uninhibited color and movement, and with imagination not bound to any reality or even to the usual conventions of fantasy, the sets and costumes fulfilled the promise of the story. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more delightful on a stage, opera or otherwise. I’m not normally sighted shrieking in glee from a seat in Linclon Center.
Election? What election?
There are still three more performances, one tomorrow afternoon and one in the evening on Tuesday and on Thursday.
showing Iraqis American freedoms up close
Why don’t we just order everyone (except males under 45, meaning “the enemy”) to leave Iraq altogether? We’re going to level this city of 300,000 people (since a ground battle would mean too many casualties for the good guys, that is, the ones belonging to the country which invaded theirs), and Ramadi, where there are 600,000 more people hungering for our freedoms, is obviously going to be next. The logic of our scorched-streets policy will require that we go on to do the same thing in every city of Iraq, so why prolong the agony for these people?
Iraqis have obviously given Bush the same unqualified mandate he got from me.
we’ve destroyed it, and we have no excuses
Can you sucker yourself? Maybe, if you’re an incurable optimist. For a few days I actually had convinced myself that this country would redeem itself, and yesterday evening I was bursting with such confidence that I posted this almost giddy secular Te Deum. I’m now cured, almost certainly for good (or evil).
NEWS FLASH: Kerry has just conceded* (Didn’t he repeatedly say something about making sure all the votes are counted this time?)
Right now I’ll only add a few words to the piles accumulating everywhere in reaction to yesterday’s debacle.
Americans have destroyed their own country out of ignorance, superstition, bigotry and fear.
And we have absolutely no excuse. Unlike other nations which have resorted to autocracy, fascism, dictatorship (by party, cabal or leader) our majority decision to endorse this regime was done with eyes wide open, without threat of invasion, not prostrate in defeat, and even absent economic depression or civil war. In fact the U.S. stood on top of the world, the most admired, the richest and most powerful state of all time, and that’s when we blew it, big time:
For four years the gang we have now installed legitimately (although by only a narrow majority), in full view of the rest of the world, has shown that it really believes in our balloting system of “winner-take-all.” Since the beginning of 2000 the Republicans have operated as if there were no interests other than their own; Never before in American history have the welfare or the concerns of the “losers” been so totally eliminated from the agenda of the party in power, and it’s now going to get worse.
From today we will be living in a nation whose Republican executive will have no restraints, whose Congressional Republican majorities will soon be larger and therefore more alarming than ever and whose courts, above all the Supreme Court, will be in the posession of a radical Republican Party for decades, regardless of the longevity of its dominance elsewhere.
And it gets still worse. The more alarming consequence of this election will be the real evil its winners do here and abroad, and attract, here and abroad. But the most depressing thought of all is that things will absolutely have to get much worst before they could get better, and there’s no guarantee of that.
Although the blue sky I included in yesterday’s post is still there (I cannot strike a line through it, like I did everything I wrote), and it is still above New York this afternoon, the heavens never did care what was happening down here. We’re on our own.
Listening to: Gustav Mahler, Adagietto (Sehr Langsam), Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor (Haitink, Berlin Philharmonic)
*They used us, the Republicans did, to swing their cultists to the polls. So Bush’s victory is ultimately my fault and the fault of every other faggot for choosing our “lifestyle,” even if only some of us were bent on shredding into pieces the other 50 percent of the precious marriages they hadn’t already destroyed themselves.
Bush is history
The skys are blue again, all over the world.
But the real work is only beginning.
It’s not going to be easy rebuilding a nation and removing the curse which has rested so heavily on the planet [the cultists will remain to plague our wounded polity, and a hundred thousand lives have been wiped out in Iraq alone], but tonight Barry and I will be celebrating a new world with champagne. It will be French, of course, by definiton – and by choice.
Listening to: Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2 in C minor “Resurrection” (Klemperer, Philharmonia, Schwarzkopf, Hilde Rössel-Majdan)
[image taken on Sunday afternoon outside our windows, about the time I was first convinced that Bush would not survive this referendum, at least without overturning it]
Yuh-Shioh Wong
Yuh-Shioh Wong Despite the Sun (2004) pigment, oil, styrofoam, concrete, MDF 14″ x 12″
Yuh-Shioh Wong Being Invisible (2004) oil, styrofoam, concrete, MDF 36″ x 27″
I told myself while at the opening on October 23rd that I really had to stop reporting on so many Foxy Production shows (they’re very, very good), since it looks like I’m virtually living on the sixth floor above 27th Street.
But that same evening, just before my almost-resolution, I had asked for some JPEG images of Yuh-Shioh Wong’s work (one of three artists included in the current show), and they just arrived today. Now there was just no way I wasn’t going to share these wonderful sculptural paintings with others.
Barry and I had first seen her work as drawings at *sixtyseven when that gallery (now simply sixtyseven) was still in Williamsburg and we thought they were terrific, but we had missed what photographs document must have been an extraordinary installation at the excellent ATM Gallery in the East Village.
The prominent three-dimensional physicality, the robust surface textures, and the lusty colors describe what are totally winsome shapes, but there are hints that something just a little more disturbing is working itself out here.