I don’t mean to unduly upset anyone not already concerned about climate change, and I know that as scientific evidence it’s merely anecdotal, but tonight while I was sitting in front of an open window checking my email I was buzzed by a mosquito. And on the roof garden just beyond the sill our large begonia bush, like all of the other plants not cleaned out of the pots last fall, seems to be thriving.
The place: Manhattan. The date: January 6.
[image from Mosquito Netting Project]
Category: Politics
Mary Mattingly at White Box
Mary Mattingly Fore Cast: An Environmental Disaster Opera 2006 installation and performance [an image from the performance of December 19]
Because of the ambience (shadows, respectful movement and low buzz) of dozens of my fellow acolytes at the opening reception on Tuesday, “Fore Cast”, Mary Mattingly‘s ambitious “Environmental Disaster Opera” currently in engagement at White Box seemed to me to play almost as much as a recreation of a narrow historic scene as a prediction of a much larger and horrible future world. It was my birthday. I was in a very good mood, so I found myself thinking of the legendary (and much-lamented) “happenings” of the 1960’s Cold War era as I was contemplating the artist’s somewhat less happy theatrical representation of a world engaged in the details of survival during World War IV.
An extended excerpt from the press release provides a little more context:
Entering a water-filled and truncated landscape, viewers witness the land’s predicted end-state, a reversion to its primeval condition and a topographical perspective of a sick new world. The marshy waterscape is the setting for the future of a civilization ensnared in an unceasing loop of WWIV, a war Albert Einstein foreshadowed as being fought with sticks and stones. With an unparalleled innate sense of intelligence, wit and craft, Mary Mattingly creates an installation explains the tragic outcomes of this hypothesized war in the not-so-distant future.
Multiple video projectors arranged in a semi-circle fill the walls of White Box and present a “Fore Cast” that will loop for six days and one hour. (A new week, according to Mary Mattingly’s proprietary uniform time scale, derived from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian astronomical methodology and translated to a system for future use.) The videos play continuously in White Box’s waterlogged space. The main screen portrays WWIV, fought by six groups of combatants —The World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bechtel, Nestlé, The United Nations, and B.R.I.C.— colluding to capture and assert political and economic control over a shattered and borderless world. The belligerents’ leaders plot together in a corporate conference rooms, ultimately degenerating into intercontinental world-scale conflict fought with the weapons of Cain and Abel, the war unfolding in disastrous environments everywhere.
Unlike the war itself, “Fore Cast” is going to have a very short run: When it closes at 1:00 am on Christmas morning it will have been open to the public for only six days and one hour (the doors opened the morning of December 19). There will be another live performance during the closing reception at Midnight, December 24.
Target free speech
who, or what, does have the right to “speak” in public, and how much does free speech cost?
Coming home from the opening at the Whitney at Altria last night, I spotted the graffiti comment on the poster shown in a detail above.
The Times Square terminus for the S train has been turned over entirely to Target corporate images. The eponymous red logo is prominently repeated on a white ground and it’s wrapped around every column. Images of happy customers on huge shiny white posters cover almost every inch of every wall in sight.
It’s finally absolutely impossible for a fare payer to avoid the assault of advertising even while running through the station to catch a train; if you have to wait a minute or more, the pain of overload becomes acute. [This observation comes from someone who is normally almost immune to the lure of advertising campaigns in any medium.]
New Yorkers have just paid a fortune to restore or re-build their MTA stations, and public art and concerns for a decent aesthetic were both a major part of the program; who decided to sell our heritage to the highest private bidder who then would be free to corrupt a very public facility? There’s expensive new tile under those billboards, and in the image above it seems to be doing its damndest to overcome the rude advertising defacement.
angry [paper] demonstrator in West 26th Street
Iraq war now as long as WW II, but with no end in sight
American involvement in World War II lasted exactly three years, eight months and one week. As of today, the American war in Iraq has lasted exactly three years, eight months and one week.
There is of course no other equivalence.
the continued shame of an entire people
Regardless of whether the Democratic Party gains control of one or two houses in the Congress which convenes next January, the entire nation ought to be deeply ashamed tonight.
After what the Republican majority has clearly done in the last few years to destroy, perhaps permanently, both this country and the entire planet, it should be deeply embarassing to admit that a shift of a mere four or five percentage points in the distribution of party representation is all we can scrape together to show ourselves and the world that we will no longer stand for it.
Sorry to be so gloomy tonight, but I just had to say it.
sentence first – verdict afterwards
“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
“Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
Surprise! contrary to what most of us may have assumed, there is no verdict yet in the political show trial of Saddam Hussein even if the sentence has arrived, fabulously, just in time for the American voting audience.
[thanks to Barry for the news tip, to Google and Billmon for pulling up the Lewis Carroll text, and to ebbemunk for the John Tenniel image]
come Tueday, Republican goblins gonna get us again, maybe
NOTE: After I had completed a political post last night I accidentally deleted it – irretrievably. I didn’t think then that I would try to reconstruct it, but the subject keeps knawing on me and it definitely couldn’t be much more timely than it is this week, and perhaps specifically tonight.
(one way, or another, they’re gonna get ya )
It’s a very scary story, but it has two parts. The first has to be familiar to anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave. It’s the second part that surpasses anything you’ll find outside in the Halloween darkness tonight. The story is briefly recounted in The New Yorker this week in a piece by Hendrik Hertzberg. Sadly we are already acquainted with the impressive litany of plagues which have visited us since Bush was selected President in 2000, but Hertzberg’s prose is a frightening reminder:
That the record is appalling is by now beyond serious dispute. It includes an unending deficit – this year, its $260 billion – that has already added $1.5 trillion to the national debt; the subcontracting of environmental, energy, labor, and health-care policymaking to corporate interests; repeated efforts to suppress scientific truth; a set of economic and fiscal policies that have slowed growth, spurred inequality, replenished the ranks of the poor and uninsured, and exacerbated the insecurities of the middle class; and, on Capitol Hill, a festival of bribery, some prosecutable (such as the felonies that have put one prominent Republican member of Congress in prison, while another awaits sentencing), some not (such as the reported two-million-dollar salary conferred upon a Republican congressman who became the pharmaceutical industrys top lobbyist immediately after shepherding into law a bill forbidding the government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs).
In 2002 and 2004, the ruling party avoided retribution for offenses like these by exploiting the fear of terrorism. What is different this time is that the overwhelming failure of the Administrations Iraq gamble is now apparent to all. This war of choice has pointlessly drained American military strength, undermined what had originally appeared to be success in Afghanistan, handed the Iranian mullahs a strategic victory, immunized the North Korean regime from a forceful response to its nuclear defiance, and compromised American leadership of the democratic world.
The fact that these horrors are finally recognized by an overwhelming majority of Americans, and just before midterm elections, should finally give us hope for emerging from the the dark and frightened society to which we have been reduced, but such a denouement is actually far from certain. Even if we could forget the role of dirty tricks, the continuing possibility of an October or November surprise, and the effect of an expected psychological, physical or electronic manipulation of the polls, we aren’t out of the woods yet. Unfortunately we are struggling within a fundamentally undemocratic system and there’s nothing we can do about it, no matter how many of us wish to throw out the fools and, indeed, the real goblins and demons.
In a normal democracy, given the state of public opinion and the record of the incumbent government, it would be taken for granted that come next Tuesday the ruling party would be turned out. But, for reasons that have less to do with the wizardry of Karl Rove than with the structural biases of Americas electoral machinery, Democrats enter every race carrying a bag of sand. The Senates fifty-five Republicans represent fewer Americans than do its forty-five Democrats. On the House side, Democratic candidates have won a higher proportion of the average district vote than Republicans in four of the five biennial elections since 1994, but – thanks to a combination of gerrymandering and demographics – Republicans remain in the majority.
I’m not holding my breath.
[Thomas Nast image from Wikipedia]
if you see something, say something.
about terror far more real than that imagined by hysterical post-9/11 SubTalk warnings
[altered poster sighted on the C train this afternoon]
Kim Jong-il a Republican?
North Korea threatens war against U.S. [AP]
Oh great. It seems the Republicans have somehow managed to persuade Kim Jong-il to save their hold on Congress. Get ready to be whipped up over another war just weeks before the election. I used to think only Trey Parker and Matt Stone could come up with the kind of scenarios we now regularly watch unfolding from the White House.
On a serious note, could the evidence for this administration’s repeated foreign policy failures be any more clear? Five years ago North Korea’s nuclear program was under lock and key and its main nuclear center was watched 24 hours a day by UN cameras. Bush has refused to talk to North Korea since he took office.
[image from solarvoyager]