Author: jameswagner

not commercially packaged

Kucinich. Anthing else is a compromise, or a disaster – almost all of it under corporate labels – and unfortuantely we’ve already tried that.

Dennis J. Kucinich, the four-term Ohio Congressman, officially announced his longshot candidacy for president on Monday, laying out a populist platform of nonviolence, universal health care, workers rights and increased spending for education.

He spoke in Cleveland City Council chambers, where he had begun his political career at the age of 24.

Mr. Kucinich basked in the favorite-son status with a childlike smile on his face before offering a list of progressive agenda items from a speech scribbled on sheets of paper from white and yellow legal pads.
He said he would return to bilateral trade by revoking United States participation in Nafta and the World Trade Organization, repeal the antiterrorism legislation called the USA Patriot Act, create a universal health care system, establish universal prekindergarten schooling and create a cabinet-level Department of Peace that would bring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of nonviolence into government.

But it won’t be progressive if he loses. And can the media stop patronizing progressives? How is it smart always to go with the commercially-packaged product?

Moshiach installed in city park

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I don’t get it. Who’ve they paid off? I walked into Washington Square Park this afternoon because I wanted to know why a construction shed had been installed at the edge of the central fountain area. It wasn’t a construction shed. Instead it was the ugliest sukkah I’ve ever seen, and except for a door facing the fountain plaza it was fully-enclosed with plywood on all four sides. There is a hinged door and it can be locked.
A large sign along the side assigned to the door read in part:

THE MESSAGE OF THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE
THE ERA OF MOSHIACH (A WORLD OF PEACE AND GDLINESS) IS UPON US

I spotted at least a half dozen young uniformed touts trying to persuade people who identified themselves as Jews to enter the plywood box. Many did. I was asked if I were a Jew. He was very cute, but I politely replied in the negative.
Amazingly, the whole thing is the work of a very specific sectarian organization which proselytizes among Jews. It’s not even close to a creche, an image of Shiva or a statue of Buddha, regardless of the lack of merit for the erection of those symbols on public property.
Because I’ve always thought of sukkot as the most charming of Jewish holidays, I found this cult’s rude Washington Square incursion to be an assault to the senses as well as a violation of the fragile principle of a secular state. This is a New York City public park. Sukkot is a religious holiday. The sukkah is a religious symbol, if not actually a place of worship. It is also a structure. The moshiach, or messiah, is a religious concept. The city of New York should not be in the business of “gdliness.” I felt very uncomfortable in the park today.
This is a bad thing, and you don’t have to be an aesthete or an atheist to understand that.

Phil Collins at Maccarone

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Phil Collins, enduring freedom 2002
[the image is not part of the current NY show]
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Phil Collins, fov evevr 2003
[image currently at Maccarone Inc.]

I’ve been very bad. Barry and I went to the Phil Collins show at Maccarone Inc. last Sunday, and I’m only getting around to writing about it a week later.
It’s a wonderful, intelligent gallery and an exciting space, particularly right for this aesthetic. Rough. No, tough, but with much warmth. Collins’s work is breathtaking, and its presence in these rooms is just right. We arrived on a beautiful fall afternoon, in the full light of day. I hope you schedule something similar. You’ll be on vibrant eastern Canal Street, just before the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge.
Collins’s images are incredibly powerful even if you’re ignorant of their context. The context, at least for some of the work in this show, that dealing with asylum-seekers, refugees and the displaced, is provided by an incredible video running on the ground floor. I had gotten all of the way up the stairs before Angela told us that the raw storefront space below was now part of the gallery. We headed back down to view an extended, much-violated and frightened Kosovo family being shuffled around a large couch for a group photograph, but not before we watched one boy, a beautiful injured teenager who was unable to remember much of anything about his assault, being questioned about the scars he shyly revealed to the camera.
On the third floor are intimate but incredibly strong images of people who answered a newspaper advertisement asking for people who would agree to strip for his camera in a hotel room rented for the purpose. Collins is from Northern Ireland and has lived in parts of the former Yugoslavvia and other parts of the world which have suffered from ethnic violence. The hotel was in Basque San Sebastian. The results apparently surprised even the artist.
Collins’s larger body of work is about the impact of social and political conflicts on human beings everywhere in the world, and it’s also about his own relationship to his subjects. He is able to remove himself from the people he photographs only far enough to complete his record. He remains involved, and we are drawn in along with him, never to leave altogether.
Only after we were already home did I think about the fact that we had no idea what the photographs were selling for. In fact, were they actually for sale? It had not occurred to either of us that what we had seen might have any relationship to commerce. I still haven’t asked, but I’ll be going back.
Visit Maccarone and Collin’s work. I think you still have all of this month. Sorry, the website isn’t finished yet. The gallery, located at 45 Canal Street, near Chrystie, is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon until 6. You’ll see three floors of an old mercantile building and a great artist’s humanity – and much of the greater humanity, including the inhuman parts.

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From Maccarone’s third floor, Barry included

[Enduring Freedom image from Kerlin Gallery, Missing from fashionoffice]

“pixilated man”

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Nineteenth-century German ceramic doll

He made his own path.
John Darcy Noble, noted eccentric and expert on playthings of all ages, a leading museum curator, theorist and collector and creator of toys as amusements and as art, died in Vista, California, September 21 at the age of 80. He leaves his companion of 44 years, Robert M. Clement.
He was born the son of a blacksmith in Brockley, a town outside London which he captivatingly described as Dickensian in character. He studied art, he painted and he produced theater props and costumes. He collected and sold antiques. He was a lifelong friend of Quentin Crisp, whom he first met at Goldsmith’s College of Art.
In London during the 40’s and 50’s Noble cultivated friendships with the avant-garde, but his career only became defined fully when, during a long summer holiday on Fire Island in 1960 [This really is a fairy tale.], he made personal contacts which soon resulted in the creation of the totally new position of curator of toys at the Museum of the City of New York. [Barry just whispered something about “velvet mafia.”] He retired in 1985.
Noble made us realize toys are at least as important as they are fun. Historically, “toys weren’t bought by children,” he observed.

Mr. Noble more than doubled the museum’s toy and doll collection. He championed the emerging contemporary artists who were making dolls, with exhibitions called “Faerieland in New York” and “Flights of Fancy.”
Mr. Noble was consecrated a bishop in the Church of the Beloved Disciple in 1980, a Manhattan church created to reach out to the gay and lesbian community. He and Mr. Clement, who is also a bishop, were in the process of founding another branch of the church in Los Angeles.
Phyllis Magidson, curator of costumes and textiles at the City Museum, recalled Mr. Noble as “a pixilated man — as in whimsy and playfulness,” and chuckled at the memory of one of his favorite lecture topics. In it, he pooh-poohed the sanctity of the pristine preservation of dolls.
The lecture’s title: “Go Ahead and Re-dress It, Honey; No One Will Ever Know.”

[image from Mingei International Museum]

DITCHs

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DITCHs on Astor Place September 8th

We spotted the elusive DITCH outside of Harvey Milk High School early in September. The acronym represents the “Dykes’ International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.” the precise name still not settled just one month ago, when we inquired.
Tomorrow afternoon the new lesbian activist group will unveil itself officially, in Lefty-historic Union Square, with a sassy street party, dubbed “Double D,” expected to go from 1 to 4.
Time Out New York has a feature article on the group in its Gay & Lesbian section this week, but the magazine is too cheap to put anything on their website, so go borrow or steal it for the picture and the text.
Continuing direct action in the wonderful tradition of the Lesbian Avengers, with continuity provided by the fabulous Maxine Wolf.

“There are a million things that I’m enraged about,” declares Marisa Ragonese, 25, before elaborating. “People have elected a right-wing lunatic. Thre are countless issues of race and class dicrimination,” she says. “And I still can’t walk outside my house without being harassed for being a woman.”

Gosh, I hope they can get Max to start using email – even if she won’t get herself a website!