Author: jameswagner

will we vote for more of the same?

Bad news for “the business of America“: Business is bad, and America finally knows it.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Worries about jobs and a possible U.S. attack on Iraq pummeled consumer confidence to its lowest level in nine years in October, a report said on Tuesday, boosting chances the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates next week.
Financial markets were rattled by the dramatic drop in The Conference Board’s October Consumer Confidence Index to 79.4, a low not seen since November 1993, and far below the trough of 84.9 carved after last year’s Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Gosh, maybe this is only a coincidence, but wouldn’t counting nine years back set us down right in the remnants of the last Bush administration?
Regardless of where the blame really rests, we can at least hope that a gloomy report of gloom like this does not bode well for the current regime’s partisan election hopes for next tuesday. Could voters possibly ask for more of the same after all they’ve already gotten?

follow-up on G.M.’s fundamentalism

Now for a completely different read [NYTimes letter] on the item I posted recently.

CHEVY GETS THE FAITH
To the Editor:
Re “G.M. Gets Criticism for Backing Tour of Christian Music Performers” (Business Day, Oct. 24):
Chevrolet’s sponsorship of a Christian concert tour reveals how some evangelical leaders have resorted to superficial marketing techniques to promote their religious views. These leaders are becoming like business managers who design market-driven programs to reach targeted audiences.
Spirituality becomes dependent upon providing church members with entertaining worship services that offer messages on success and psychological comfort. A growing number of evangelicals are promoting the development of programs and beliefs that foster cultural conformity.
It is tragic that Christian concerts have trivialized God by resorting to cheap marketing methods. America needs religious groups that encourage people to be cultural creators who embrace a spirituality that has a moral vision for the common good.
BRENT MUIRHEAD
Alpharetta, Ga., Oct. 24, 2002

Is it using SUVs to sell god that trivializes the writer’s imaginary friend, or is it using god to sell SUVs?

vote green this time

Don’t let them keep getting away with it. [The Democrat-Republican party oligarchy, that is.] And we won’t even be helping Pataki when we do it!
Barry says it all on Bloggy:

I see no reason to vote for Carl McCall in this election. Pataki, whom I despise as much as the next person, appears ready to win in a landslide. He has been endorsed by all of the major newspapers in the state, and the latest polls show that McCall might even get less votes than Golisano.
So my advice: McCall’s going to lose big anyway, so vote for the Green candidate, Stanley Aronowitz. You’ll help keep the Green Party on the state ballot without them having to go through and expensive petition process.
Aronowitz is a great candidate. He was a steelworker and union organizer, and he is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Every endorsement of Pataki has talked about how dysfunctional Albany is, with most decisions made by just three people: Pataki, Sheldon Silver, and Joe Bruno. Why reward the two major parties by letting them continue to operate this way? 98% of state legislators are re-elected in each election.
I’m very, very serious about this. We have watched the Democrats collapse in front of the Republicans over civil rights, drug laws, health care, tax cuts for the wealthy, and war. When you have a chance to vote for a Green, particularly when doing so doesn’t help a Republican, you must do it.
Good coverage of NY Politics, including the poll numbers, can be found on PoliticsNY.com.

When less is sometimes almost enough

I love The Onion, so I hope they will excuse me when I say that sometimes it’s enough just to read through the cheeky headlines. Well, at least when you’re in a big hurry. A small sample from the last two weeks:

NEWLY OUT GAY MAN OVERDOING IT
STARVING THIRD WORLD MASSES WARNED AGAINST EVILS OF CONTRACEPTION
AMERICAN PEOPLE SHRUG, LINE UP FOR FINGERPRINTING
DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TYPO RESULTS IN U.S. ATTACK ON IRA
63 PERCENT OF U.S. IMPLICATED IN NEW SCANDAL
SUNKEN OIL TANKER WILL BE HABITAT FOR MARINE LIFE, SHELL EXECUTIVES SAY WITH STRAIGHT FACE
LINEBACKER FACES SUSPENSION FOR GENOCIDE

Well, you get the idea. If you don’t, you probably aren’t reading this weblog.

more on the numbers game in Washington

The Washington Post redeemed itself this time. The later edition of their article on the D.C. anti-war demonstration is a pretty fair report. No, it’s a damn good one!

Luigi Procopio, 45, a social worker from the district, wore a pink triangle with “$ FOR AIDS NOT WAR” written on it. He said even though he normally focuses his activism on issues in the gay community, he and at least a dozen friends came to protest the war in Iraq.
“It’s time, man. . . .it feels imminent,” he said. “Congress has just rolled over.”

what’s the message here?

It’s a salon Premium article, so the regular Salon site includes only a precis, but it’s all that’s really needed to begin to put the story into perspective.]

The media is fixating on John Allen Muhammad’s Muslim beliefs. But the most relevant fact about him could be his record of terrorizing his family members — and how that didn’t stop him from getting his hands on guns. [Jaw–even while he was under a restraining order]

Paul Wellstone

A poet salutes his friend.

Paul Wellstone was an unlikely politician in a place like Minnesota — land of walleyes, cornfields and phlegmatic Scandinavians. He was an urban Jew, son of immigrants, a college professor at the fanciest of Minnesota’s private colleges. And, probably worst of all for his non-talkative constituents, he was a passionate orator, a skilled rouser of rabble over issues he loved and an unapologetic populist liberal.

Bush doctrine

Perhaps equally casual about distinguishing between those who “are either with us or against us,” Bush’s “new friend” has “weapons of mass destruction,” and he doesn’t seem to hestitate in using them even “against his own people.”

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) — A raid by Russian troops to free hostages held by Chechen rebels in a Moscow theatre is coming under scrutiny amid fears a nerve agent used may have contributed to the deaths of 118 hostages. [JAW–the number, it is now believed, may exceed 200]

By the way, in another parallel to Iraq, Chechnyans are regarded by Moscow as “their [Moscow’s] own people,” since that is the official basis for Russian opposition to the nation’s secession, and Russia is alleged to have used chemical weapons there during the ten years of the current war.
Are we going to invade Russia now?

U.S. now pariah more than paragon

Clinton and his administration were no great shakes when it came to their domestic policy programs or their real successes, but Bush and his own people make their predecessors look like progressives and political geniuses if we look at not even a full two years of the current regime’s reactionary policy articulations and our concomitant economic and social disasters.
Hardly an argument there, but what about foreign policy? During the Clinton era the U.S. was basically at peace and seemed to be able to look forward to a continuation of peace. We were admired by a good part of the world, or so we were led to believe, and much if not most of the planet had or was about to adopt our own well-advertised recipes for both political and economic success, especially economic success (even if the economic prescription presented perilous consequences for many, here as well as outside the country). Today U.S. influence in the world has been disastrously compromised, and what remains is in great peril. The Bush administration has totally squandered the immense good will and support which had accrued to us after the disaster of September, 2001, but its policies independent of those events had already and continue to increasingly alienate the entire planet.
Brilliant in his judgment and the economy of words, Daniel Shore delivered a scathing assessment of the White House’s disastrous foreign policy failures around the globe on NPR this morning.

BUSH FOREIGN POLICY — NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr assesses President Bush’s commitment, expressed during the 2000 campaign, to a foreign policy based on humility.

[Sorry, but I’m only able to link to an audio record, not a printed text.]

back to new art stuff

Ah, that’s better.
I’ve been feeling so distanced from the visual arts thing for months, I was beginning to think I was going through another change of life (-style).
This afternoon’s outing put the kibosh on that notion.
The galleries in Chelsea were at their best today. It was a wonderful day, and worth being pulled out of bed at the crack of ten a.m. by houseguests eager to go out to “brunch.” Actually, I thought “brunch” had been replaced by something more, oh, edgy(?) during the years I’ve been sleeping late and preferring to defer to the cereal boxes on the top shelf.
What did we see?
There was Gustav Kluge at Klemens Gasser (Barry noted that German expressionism isn’t dead after all).
There was a great show from David Shrigley at Anton Kern (Gee, it seems that Glasgow has created a special silly sweet sensibility shared by several of its sons).
We’re also really excited about Kiniko Ivic’s very sympathetic-pathetic paint things at Andrew Kreps. [No picture links; what are these galleries thinking?]
Oh and don’t pass up Maurizio Cattalan’s “Wrong Gallery” (the installation space is only about ten inches by thirty-six inches!) through the door immediately adjacent, where you will see a piece by Martin Creed, the Turner Prize guy the conservatives love to hate.
How often does a woman born in 1919 in Carinthia, Austria, get a solo show in Chelsea? Don’t bother asking, but look in on the work of Maria Lassing at Petzel, especially the work on paper in the rear space.
I’m a sucker for good car stuff (It started while I was growing up in Detroit during its halcyon years), but even Barry liked the brilliant shapes and colors on Peter Cain‘s canvases at Matthew Marks on 22nd Street. Very sexy images from an artist we miss a lot.
Peter Campus innovative 1970’s video work projections seemed today to be upstaging his current work at Leslie Tonkonow, but I have to admit we did not stay long enough to really see the new stuff on the small screens. Gotta go back.
I’m crazy about Yoshitomo Nara, and have been from the moment I first saw his tough little cartoon girl, several years back. Yes, she reminds me of my equally tough little sister years ago, but she and her gestures also seem more and more to represent at least one absolutely appropriate attitude to a more and more stupid and threatening world.
The young Israeli artist, Tomer Ganihar, has a provocative installation of photographs at Paul Rodgers/9W. He chronicles a group he refers to as the “New Jews,” a “spontaneously emerging youth movement” in Israel.
We were both really enchanted with the show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, where Rob Fischer has installed a fantastic shed/plane/boat/greenhouse/trailer construction I would really, really like to live with, if not in, on a permanent basis (but just where, other than in the field for which I would never trade my own cozy New York warren of rooms?). The small works on paper in the back and, in the reception nook, a lightbox-mounted photograph of hoary Minnesota boathouses looking like a model of a stone-age fishing village sans villagers, are a bit more portable and almost as wonderful.