little red convertible, dusk, Williamsburg Bridge
Barry and I had the delightful experience of being whisked to Williamsburg for an opening at Schroeder Romero Gallery on Wednesday evening in our friends’ bright red open car, but the unfamiliar luxury of the carriage subtracted nothing from our experience of the political or aesthetic power of the show curated by Marc Lepson. The title of the exhibition, referencing the notorious post 9/11 warning delivered by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleisher, is “Watch What We Say.”
Many of these provocative and very beautiful works are documented on the gallery’s own site or that of Joy Garnet (who has two pieces in the show) but I managed to capture a couple of detail or installation shots which may still be useful to the curious.
William Pope L. Bill is Upset 1955-2004 (2004) mixed media 12″ x 11″
Christopher Knowles Alert Paintings (2003) acrylic on canvas; five parts 4′ x 10′ installed [installation view]
Joy Garnett Smoke (2003) oil on canvas 54″ x 60″
Carrie Moyer Psychogeographic Landscape v.2 (2004) acrylic on canvas 84″ x 72″ [detail]
Dread Scott Beloved (2003) silkscreenon paper 22″ x 17″
what it feels like to be in New York right now
This is the image which accompanies the lead story on the CNN site at this moment. The headline on the front page? “New York stands guard.” I see it as, “Republican Guards hold up New York.” We are an occupied city tonight, as I listen to the sirens wailing up and down the avenues and helicopters scanning with high-powered searchlights as they whop, whop, whop overhead.
I’m punching this post into my blog as we’re listening to a remarkable webstream reporting tonight’s ongoing, historical Critical Mass through the streets of Manhattan, including live accounts by the cyclist participants. There are reports that scores of people have been arrested already – for bicycling while smiling. The police are funnelling them into police vans and buses, chasing away the public and prohibiting photographs.
In the end, 50,000 cops in one city are going to find something to keep them amused.
Bloomberg and Kelly are doing Bush’s work. Nothing could be more effective in radicalizing and provoking orderly protests than this outrageous over-reaction.
UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that nearly 250 bicyclists were arrested. This is insane!
I’m Gonna Kill the President”
One scene in the play we saw last night accounted for what I’ll say was the scariest evening I’ve ever spent in a theatre. While I think it’s generally billed as comedy (well maybe political satire) don’t underestimate its seriousness. Yes it’s hysterically funny and the players are really impressive, but there’s much, much more in store for the brave souls who make it to a venue revealed (eventually) only to those who reserve tickets. Performances run through next Saturday.
I don’t come across too many playwrights working with the kind of political material I find inside my own head. Barry writes, “I love a play where “moderate” is an insult.”
Many, many thanks to the anonymous crew responsible.
ACT UP, still beautiful after all these years
protesting in the altogether
It’s AIDS, stupid!
ACT UP pulled off a classic action this afternoon across from Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican National Convention, scheduled to open formally on Monday.
In the spirit and the extremity of these strange times, the boys and girls did it while entirely naked, and a beautiful sight they were.
Excerpt from the ACT UP New York/ACT UP Philladelphia press release:
A dozen activists stopped traffic in front of Madison Square Garden and
stripped naked, exposing the fact that when it comes to AIDS, “the emperor
Bush has no clothes.” Slogans were painted on their bodies that read “Drop
The Dept” and “Stop AIDS Now,” while [two other activists] held a banner
with the same message – another was dropped over one of the trailers parked
nearby.
We were protesting the Bush administration’s refusal to agree with the
proposal of other G7 nations to cancel 100% of the debt of poor nations –
money that could be used to fight AIDS.
While Bush has promised $15 billion over 5 years to fight Global AIDS, poor
nations pay that amount each year in debt payments. Cancelling the debt
would have significant impact on money spent toward health care and other
desperately needed social programs.
After blocking traffic for 15 minutes, the naked activists were arrested and
taken into custody.
[image from Bloggy, via NY1, may be supplemented later]
UPDATE: As I had anticipated earlier today, I now have a photo of at least partial images of the action’s neatly-lettered text messages, “DROP the DEBT” and “STOP AIDS:”
[second image from Health Global Access Project (GAP), via James Wentzy; there’s much more on their site]
Bill Dobbs
“life could be beautiful”
I really like him. Those who know William K. Dobbs know that’s not so easy to say, but now that he’s become the subject a modest but delightful profile in the NYTimes, written by Michael Brick, it may be easier for me to explain why.
Sure, from the very first time I heard him speak in front of an ACT UP meeting in the late 80’s I’ve always respected him, as virtually without equal among some really tough competition, even if early on that also meant hoping I could stay out of the line of his fire, the kind of fire usually associated with biblical prophets. In the years since however I’ve managed to overcome some of my timidity and the rewards of knowing him just a bit better include (and he’d laugh at me for this) real affection.
He was admired for his mind and his integrity throughout the activist community from the very beginning, but he could be intimidating. His devotion to principle was uncompromising. We may have been wrong, but most of us had the strong impression that he would not be easy to know personally. Saints can be extremely tough to live with.
Dobbs stayed around. Within the AIDS and Queer movements the authority of his stentorian voice and his facile pen represented a strong focus and a highly-intelligent conscience within groups with many rivals for those roles, but few equal to or even faintly resembling Bill. I think we were all fascinated with our mysterious intellectual Clark Kent. There were certainly many crushes.
Today Brick describes Dobbs as “a main organizer and the official spokesman of United for Peace and Justice.” How did he get to opposition to the Iraq war, the Bush administration and eventually both major political parties from the more narrow focus of his earlier activism? It’s not a big step for for many of us, but here’s Dobbs’s account:
“Gay is the lens that I look at life through,” he said, sitting recently in a diner near Madison Square Garden, the convention site. “Is there a connection between that and antiwar work? I feel a connection, but it’s not easy to articulate. It’s about power. It’s a visceral need to stop war based on the lessons I’ve learned as a gay man.”
. . . .
Mr. Dobbs says he is motivated to protest by the cruelty of fate, the nature of power and the virtue of free expression. “Life could be beautiful, but it won’t,” he says, paraphrasing Lily Tomlin. “What’s wrong with the world?”
OK, but like Bill himself, we’re still going to keep trying to make a difference. Let’s get out there this weekend (and stay out there for as long as it takes), let’s make it very colorful and let’s keep it very safe.
[image from the NYTimes]
the police occupation of Chelsea
Area frozen!
We arrived back at the apartment tonight at midnight after an evening in Williamsburg and the first thing we spotted as we exited our friend’s car was this sign.
How much of New York are the Republicans going to need? Even as of this morning we were still being told that few streets other than those immediately surrounding Madison Square Garden (which occupies the two blocks between 31st and 33rd Streets) would be impacted by police security measures for the Republican Convention. In fact, even the closing of 8th Avenue from 23rd Street to 34th Street was to be effective only during the hours the Convention was in session.
These signs are posted every few feet on both sides of the broad crosstown course of 23rd Street, at least along the block where we live, between 7th and 8th Avenue (I haven’t yet looked further afield; maybe tomorrow).
Are we going to find a military staging area set up outside our windows on Saturday morning?
the enemy is here, not in Iraq
The judge has just said no to the coalition, United for Peace and Justice, but no judge can tell individual free Americans and their friends to stay out of Central Park on a Sunday afternoon.
It’s still our park, not Bloomberg’s, and we’re going to be there four days from now.
At the end of the march up 7th Avenue, after the crowd passes the site of the Convention, the police may be successful in dispersing half a million people in every direction. Tens and hundreds at a time may be diverted east and west as they arrive at 34th Street, but everyone knows Central Park is the destination. Half a million people will end up in the Park, but now half a million people will have to obstruct more than just one avenue as they make their way north to our great public Commons.
What cannot be known is whether and to what extent this passage will be accomplished without police violence. While it would be of no comfort to liberty, to the movement or to individuals who might feel it physically, any violence will be the fault of one incredibly myopic mayor.
The war has finally come home, but the enemy isn’t in Iraq.
FOOTNOTE:
Justice Jacqueline W. Silbermann wrote in her ruling that the protesters’ group, United for Peace and Justice, was “guilty of inexcusable and inequitable delay” in bringing its case against the city, according to The Associated Press.
In fact, UfPJ applied to the City for the Central Park permit early last year, but received no reply until this past July.
talking back to the little man in the White House
Even when I try to just do a “culture” post these days I often find I have to add it to the “political” category as well. But it’s a sign of our dangerous times, and if I have a complaint, it’s about the times, not the signs.
Last night we visited the oddly festive, and certainly very social, opening of “amBUSH!” at the Van Brunt Gallery, recently installed on Washington Street in the former meat market district below 14th Street.
Historical note:
The clean, well-lit space occupies almost the exact site of the legendary 1970’s-80’s gay sex club, the Mineshaft.
In a routine which has become familiar in Bloomberg’s New York, while we were with the crowd inside we were suddenly joined by several uniformed police (we seem to have a surfeit of these in the last few years, and especially this summer, but at least they weren’t carrying assault rifles this time) who were very concerned about guests sipping wine outside the packed rooms and obstructing free passage on the sidewalk.
I never saw the police there on my rare visits around twenty-five years ago, but if they ever did make an appearance then, it would not have been the wine or the sidewalk which attracted their interest. On the other hand, decades ago there wouldn’t have been a dozen miniature cameras documenting cops while they talked to the proprietor of the establishment. We love cameras.
The sensual goodies available last night, and available continuing through September 18th, were of a special kind. One of the show notices had announced, “The message of this exhibition is simple: Bush must go!” Some 36 artists exhibited twice as many angry works, with varying kinds and degrees of success, none of them leaving any doubts about their passion or commitment. For visitors who won’t be satisfied with a passive political role even inside an art gallery, there are a number of participatory stations throughout the show. Raise some creative hell, or just tell the White House what you think.
Some time after 8 o’clock an additional dimension was supplied by a musical and video performance, “TERRORVISION,” created and performed by Bill Jones & Ben Neill.
First screened/performed at Exit Art, Spring 2004, it consists of four linked computers–a “Power Book band”–that merge Neill’s three-belled, computer interfaced mutantrumpet, keyboards, and other instruments with live MIDI controlled digital video. They play the moving pictures to create “video remixes” breathing life into real-time and recorded video. Expect everything from deep ambient soundscapes to funky electronic breakbeats.
Exactly.
Elise Engler showed a pencil-drawing quintych, “Wrapped in the Flag,” begun last year, which now represents 1087 dead soldiers in Iraq, although it’s unfortunately a continuing work.
Guy Richards Smit included “You Can’t Kill Us, Man, We’re Already Dead,” in a statement still obvious to only a few Americans.
Associated Artists for Propaganda Research, with their installation, “The Black Box (Downing of Air Force One),” may be the most incendiary contribution. Phew.
David Humphrey‘s cardboard sign, “Bush is Offensive,” might be considered in arguable taste in some circles, but it will be eminently practical in others, especially this week and into the next: It’s equipped with a convenient handle.
our own “Dolchstoßlegende”
but we won’t let go of our own myth
Thirty years on, the Viet Nam War still has the power to enrage both those who survived its battles and those who stayed at home, and it now seems that a new generation may have inherited its unreason. The War remains a particular obsession for the American Right, and its memory is a fundamental component of the ideology of today’s neoconservatives as well as a very useful political instrument.
We don’t seem to have learned a thing.
It only took the Germans 25 years to get over their own stab-in-the-back legend (Dolchstoßlegende), even if 40 million people had to die first. In the U.S. our own version of the betrayal myth has already survived 36 years, and it has performed an ugly role in every major election since 1968. While we haven’t scored numbers nearly as big as the old German militarism did beginning in 1939, the great and endless war declared after September 11 offers all kinds of opportunities for the future.
The beautiful new world I saw created by the end of the 1960’s by what seemed to be a new Enlightenment seemed to be confirmed in its success with the victory of the antiwar movement and the end of the Viet Nam War. We had finally come to our senses in our politics both at home and abroad. I thought at the time that the absolute rightness of the movement had ensured the success, and would guarantee the permanence of both Liberalism and the Peace Movement.
Only a few years later, some time after emerging from living in a place and a period on the other end of the earth and of modern times (1970’s Apartheid South Africa), I was shocked to find that virtually all that had been accomplished by the 60’s was being gradually reversed by a new, subtle Reaction. I confess that although I had studied history almost all my (then) young life, my loyalties and my naivety allowed me to imagine things would just get better and better.
But even then I did not notice the degree to which this country had been unable to resolve the problem of Viet Nam. Of course I myself no longer saw any problem. Today however, because of the most recent absurd developments in the current Kerry/Bush campaigns, I believe that national divisions over that war are likely to survive even the death of the last participant, not unlike the way its nearest relation, the Civil War, remains an enormous presence almost 150 years after it began.
May we somehow still be saved from demagogues, fools and our own ignorance.
[image from Städtisches Louise-Schroeder-Gymnasium]
but can we survive even a Kerry victory?
Tweedledumdee
That’s it! I’m not voting for Kerry. The man wants to be remembered as a hero, and with good reason, but he wants to hide the one part of his history which finally distinguished him as a truly great hero, his noble efforts to end the Viet Nam War. And the reason is that he’s desperate to establish credentials as the same kind of warrior who thirty and more years ago ran the insane conflict from which he was fortunate to escape with his life. On war, including apparently even the War in Southeast Asia, and on just about every other subject he has addressed during his candidacy his position is almost indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush.
I have to admit that it’s only because New York State has absolutely no chance of awarding its electoral votes to Kerry’s Commander-in-Chief that once again I will not have to contribute to the end of the American experiment by voting for either of the Right-wing candidates held up by our two Right-wing parties.
Of course if I were unfortunate enough to find myself registered in one of those confused realms whose voters four years ago didn’t seem to understand what was happening to them, I would probably find myself holding my nose tightly with one hand while I flipped the lever or touched the screen for the Democratic Party’s candidate on November 2, hoping it might help my state swing toward Mr. Anything.
Kerry and the Democratic Party offer little more than somewhat inferior copies of what Bush and the Republican Party already represent very well. Most progressives would like to ignore this, operating on the now-familiar and almost universal, desperate principle of “Anything But Bush.” Alexander Cockburn writes in The Nation this month,
Can someone win the presidency entirely on the basis of a negative asset? I wouldn’t have thought so, but here’s John Kerry, just about 90 days shy of election day, promoting himself as a man of presidential caliber entirely on the basis that he’s the Anyone in “Anyone But Bush”. Aside from the flag wagging , that’s what it comes down to, unless you take the probably realistic view that when it comes to war-fighting in the service of Empire he’s far more bloodthirsty. Come next January the Anyone behind the desk in the Oval Office may be a bit taller. There’ll be medals on the book shelf showing he killed Vietnamese in the service of his country. Most everything else will stay the same. Kerry’s been pretty clear about that, letting his core constituencies know that as President Anyone he’s not going to cut them any favors.
One more, very prococative thought, and I’ll close down for the night. In the same article Cockburn reports the real concern which Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, expressed to the Washington Post‘s David Broder on the floor of the Democratic Convention. Cockburn describes Stern as saying, “another four years of Bush might be less damaging than the stifling of needed reform within the party and the labor movement that would occur if Kerry becomes president.”
Stern later recanted, but I don’t think I’m the only one who wonders about the wisdom of his conversion.
Ralph Nader was there first, and he hasn’t left, bless him.
[image from MSNBC]