Leon Golub

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Leon Golub Disappear You acrylic on linen 77″ x 165.9″

An artist who created “heroic-scale figures,” but also a man of heroic-scale human commitment, Leon Golub died on Sunday. Holland Cotter memorializes him in today’s NYTimes.

Leon Golub, an American painter of expressionistic, heroic-scale figures that reflect dire modern political conditions, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 82 and lived in Manhattan.
. . . .
His [work] was firmly rooted in a critically engaged version of Western humanism and in the tradition of history painting.
His subject was Man with a capital M – as a symbol of social and spiritual ambition, often irrational and destructive, depicted in paintings of monumental scale.

The work won’t disappear.

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Leon Golub Dream Song Oil stick and ink on Bristol 10″ x 8″

[images from artnet]

Gemini, Gehry, good works

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Ed Ruscha Other color lithograph 11 1/4” x 14 3/4”

While in Los Angeles last week we stopped at the West Hollywood workshop and galleries of Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited). Ok, to be honest, the draw had been the building itself, whose interest had been touted by an artist friend of ours; we didn’t know about the galleries, and hadn’t really expected to get inside. In fact, we were really welcomed, and graciously invited to walk about the exhibition spaces on our own.
Gemini has collaborated with famous artists nationwide in a great portfolio of first-rate prints, “Artists Coming Together,” to help ACT (America Coming Together) defeat Bush and elect Democrats in federal, state and local elections in November. The prints are available, for those with pockets ample enough, individually or as a series. Here‘s more information.
Back to the building. It’s less than two blocks from the Schindler House, and shows curious references to that structure, which was erected more than half a century earlier. The architecture is that of Frank Gehry, but it’s the really good Gehry, the one whose early modest originality excited an entire world now so eager for duplicates of Bilbao flamboyance. These are a couple of almost abstract images of the Gemini shelter’s 1976 shapes and textures:

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[travel tip from Dennis Kane]

Central Park IS the rally site

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peace and goodness in the park before 9/11 – and after 8/29

I’m not going to any rally on the West Side Highway. I am not a car. After marching past Madison Square Garden I’ll be in our great Central Park on August 29th, and I expect a million others will be with me. Bloomberg, Kelly and all the Republican invaders be damned.
See the latest stories in the local paper, from yesterday and today.
This is an excerpt from an email received this afternoon from United for Peace and Justice:

WE ARE MARCHING! On August 29, United for Peace and Justice will hold a massive, impassioned, peaceful, and legal march past Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican Convention, to protest the Bush Administration’s deceit and destruction.
But we will NOT be rallying afterwards on the West Side Highway. As we announced in a press conference today, exiling us to a remote stretch of sun-baked highway makes a mockery of our right to assembly: The deal is off.
Our medics have told us that the West Side Highway isn’t a safe place for seniors, children, and people with disabilities to rally. Our sound engineers have told us that it’s not possible to set up a quality sound system there. Many of our members have told us that they simply will not go to such an awful and marginal location. And our common sense has told us that this deal was a set-up by a Republican mayor openly hostile to free speech.
Central Park is the only sensible place for us to rally. We filed a new permit application today with the NYC Parks Department to rally in Central Park on August 29, using the Great Lawn, North Meadow, and East Meadow. We will keep you informed of the City’s response.

These guys (who are actually all of us) need help to pay for what has been and will continue to be a costly legal fight. If you can help, here’s where to go:

You can donate in several ways:
* Using a credit card online at http://www.unitedforpeace.org/donate
* By calling in a credit card donation to 212-868-5545
* By mailing a check or money order to UFPJ, P.O. Box 607, Times Square Station, NY NY 10108

[image from galanter.net]

Porter Goss would be disastrous

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To head the most imprtant part of an intelligence community already disastrously overly-politicized, the President whose party already contols the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, has proposed, yes, a Republican politician.
And Porter Goss is not just any politician but the one who currently chairs the House Committee on Intelligence, the Congressional watchdog which has rolled over for the Administration for more than three years.
A few minutes ago I heard him on NPR, speaking since his nomination. He says the CIA needs more muscle, that the U.S. shouldn’t be loved around the world, but rather respected (read, feared), and that if, within the U.S., it’s to be a question of Big Brother or dead brother, he would see to it that there are no more dead brothers.
Doesn’t sound like intelligence to me.
Digby has more.

Let’s just say that when push comes to shove, old Porter is a partisan Republican first and a guardian of the CIA second. Be warned.

[image from Capitol Shopping Mall]

Kerry says he’d vote for the war again

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not thinking

The man so many people hope will lead us back to sanity and save the Republic told us yesterday that he would have voted for the (current) war in Iraq even if he had known what he knows now about the absence of WMDs or a connection to Al Qaeda.
Is this the man we’re told we’ve all chosen as our standard-bearer? Is this the man we must follow blindly, without questions, to the point where we excoriate or gag any who would demur? This is a man who himself blindly followed, without questions, an idiot and his cynical handlers, and now says he would do it again!
I’m thinking for myself, and I do not hope.

[image from Hermes Press]