good dog!

Some of you already know that Barry and I kinda collect art things–lots of art things. So, if I occasionally make a point of talking about one artist or another in the midst of my political diatribes and my almost-cute New York anecdotes (or whatever), I guess I risk describing the merits of that particular person’s work as worthier than any not so cited. I want to make it clear that such an elevation is not the interpretation I intend, today or at any time in the future (unless otherwise specified at the time, of course).
Nevertheless, I am extremely fond of the work of Yashitomo Nara. I first literally almost tripped-over the images here in New York a very few years ago, and I haven’t been able to escape his snare since. I’m sure this impact is only remotely related to the fact that the subject of so many of his creations, the cute, pig-tailed, pissed-off little girl who won’t take any nonsense from anyone, so resembles the wondeful Sister from whom I am currently estranged.
Nara also does dogs. Today B and I walked over to Tomkins Square Park where a beautiful and moving, I guess cow-sized (not related to that horrible multiple-cow project of late memory) crying-dog sculpture rests in a very homey open pavillion, simply crying its eyes out for us and for its kind. I understand that the piece is intended to be a symbol of empathy and friendship, the tears a metaphor for the healing realized for an individual embraced by a loving community. Maybe that’s too much to ask of a plastic dog, but maybe not.
I’ve always loved that park, but it hasn’t always been easy.
Oh, the dog. He’s leaving us after this tuesday.
The installation is sponsored by Haagen-Dazs. The work is destined to be installed at the Westchester Medical Center’s new Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital.
Nara Dog in Tompkins Square Park

looking at the latest Shrubisms

Reuters caught up with the vacationing Shrub on a golf course today and shares their conversation about Saddam Hussein and Iraq with a public awaiting with baited breath.

“I described them [Iraq] as the ‘axis of evil’ once. I describe them as an enemy until proven otherwise,” Bush told reporters after teeing off at the Ridgewood Country Club Golf Course.

[something like his administration’s attitude toward U.S. government captives, American or otherwise–guilty until proved innocent, that is, if we don’t just forget all about them altogether]

Asked if Americans were prepared for casualties in a war with Iraq, Bush–whose stated policy is to seek Saddam’s ouster–replied: “That presumes there is some kind of imminent war plan. As I have said, I have no timetable.

[notice it’s his supposedly nonexistent timetable he speaks of, not ours, or even that of the government in Washington]

“But I do believe what the American people understand is that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of leaders such as Saddam Hussein are very dangerous for ourselves,” he said. “They understand the concept of blackmail.

[well, our friends, allies and every other nation on earth knows that concept, since we have been employing the device rather heavily lately]

“They know that when we speak of making the world more safe we do so not only in the context of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups but nations that have proved themselves to be bad neighbors and bad actors,” he added.

[is he for real?]

Asked if he was surprised he had not built more support for action against Saddam, Bush said: “Most people understand he is a danger, but as I have said in speech after speech I have a lot of tools at my disposal. I have also said I am a deliberate person.”

[huh?]

“They [Hussein or Iraq] obviously desire weapons of mass destruction. I presume that he still views us as an enemy.”

[where would they/he get that idea?]

a nation of cowards

[This is not a call for war of any kind. Far from it. I have no doubts that we aren’t going to fix what’s wrong with ourselves or anyone else in the world by slugging it out. The observation which follows is only an attempt to help us realize that we are not doing what we say or think we are doing, and that any truly appropriate remedy isn’t even being discussed by most of us.]
In spite of what we are being told by virtually every media source, the U.S. is really not interested in war. We are interested in wiping-out people and countries and evil-doers, but not if it involves any risk to ourselves. A magic ray gun or the equivalent high-tech toy is what we are interested in, not sending our boys to fight anything like a battle, a war.
[We’ve already shown the world that the most powerful nation on earth is even afraid of being its police force, let alone its military defense. There are 45,000 thousand peacekeepers stationed around the world at this moment. Only 700 of them are Americans. We don’t want to risk injury or death. Of course we also know now that we don’t want to risk being tried for genocide while on such police duty, although apparently the brave little countries risking the 44,300 remaining soldiers don’t seem to have the same concern.]
Obliterating cities and countries from thirty thousand feet is not war. It’s playing god.
I’ve written before about the cowardice of a nation which is so afraid of its shadow that, after a single horrendous act of free-lance terror, it closes-down its mind and its democratic culture in favor of investing a nincompoop and his handlers with divine powers and a divine aura. We are now willing to give up everything for what is only the illusion of safety. We have ceased to have a backbone; we have ceased to think for ourselves; we have ceased to be Americans.
The condition may still be reversible, but at this time we are demonstrably a nation of cowards.

Town Hall to CBGB to the subway platforms

But for Daphne, it was all just one career move. She did what she wanted to do, and did it for a very long time, and then she stopped.

Daphne Bayne Hellman, the jazz harpist who performed around the world and for three decades at the Village Gate but who had a special affection for playing on subway platforms, died on Sunday at a nursing home in Manhattan. She was 86.
Ms. Hellman, who had played on the streets of Paris at a music fair as recently as June, was recuperating from injuries suffered in a fall last month near her town house on East 61st Street, her family said.
….
“She was just the antisnob, that’s what she was,” said Art D’Lugoff, who owned the Village Gate, where Ms. Hellman and her trio, Hellman’s Angels, played every Tuesday for 30 years when she was in town. It was one of the longest nightclub runs in the city’s history.
“She had money and she knew a lot of people and she got along with everybody,” said Mr. D’Lugoff, whose club closed in 1994.
….
Her cluttered East Side town house, usually full of boarders, birds, dogs and litters of gerbils, served as the base for a kind of floating salon. And she was its musical Zelig, whose close friends included, besides Mr. Spoons, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the artist Saul Steinberg and the writer Norman Mailer.

One of her long-term musical collaborators marvelled, “She loved to do whatever she knew you weren’t supposed to do.”

report from purgatory (Palestine)

Well, if it’s not total hell for everyone, it’s still a very long way from the promise of this beautiful land, and it’s very much a purgatory for all. Even if you don’t believe in the concept of expiation, it’s certainly going to be a long wait.
Anees, a dear friend of ours, recently flew from his home in New York to visit his Palestinian family in Jerusalem, where he remains at this time. When I asked for his permission, he said I could log this email report, and I expect there will be others. I believe that his account will at least fill some of the blanks left by our media’s coverage, and that it succeeds in humanizing the consequences of our society’s politics of indifference.

It is quiet and safe here in East Jerusalem. in fact, it is almost like living in an illusion since all the hell is happening elsewhere, just a few kilometers away. Here people stay home after work, if they can get to work at all, and watch a lot of satellite television. I like the Hair Bear Bunch on the Cartoon Network. My sister is coming tomorrow and my brother’s wedding is on Tuesday. (There are so many people getting hitched. It is marriage season here.)
The other day my brother’s friends arranged a very nice dinner for him and his wife-to-be and I came along. It was in a Maronite Christian monastery in the middle of the old city. Those Lebanese sisters sure know how to cook. Everything was scrumptious. I went up to the roof of the monastery before eating, and the view was just amazing. It showed everything inside the walls, yet was not so high up that you couldn;t see the details. It was as if I was seeing something with fresh eyes. Strange this time; as if I have been sufficiently ‘away’, mentally as well as geographically, to see things differently now. I notice more keenly the graceful old white-stone Arab houses. Even the men I find somehow more attractive than before. (Perhaps the arabophile homos I befriended last year have rubbed off on me.) But the rest I complain endlessly about: the bagel seller who touches the bagels and money with his bare hands; the vulgar signage on stores; the total lack of order in queues. Third-worlditis.
A couple weeks ago my parents and I went up to a panoramic look-out area on Mount Scopus, overlooking the walled old city. That was the day before the Hamas shithead blew himself up to kill the more enlightened of people–students, just a few minutes’ distance away on the same hill. All around Jerusalem Israelis continue to seize key hills, key buildings. The nicer hills and the nicer old buildings. We later went to the old city to grab some Armenian pizza. As we were walking around, the muezzin started the melodic call for prayer. My dad, an atheist, smirked; he said something like, ‘At least they can’t do anything about the muezzins; they must get so pissed every time they hear it’. ‘They’ meaning the Israelis that are agressively judaizing the city, leaving us with bitterness and disappointment.
I might be stuck here for a while since the US consulate has changed rules. For Palestinians the INS will take 45 days or more to process the request, they said. Probably I will miss the beginning of the semester. Meanwhile, my parents are stuffing me silly with food hoping to fatten me up. little do they know of my hyper metabolism. It is the new yorker in me.

bribing our way toward war crimes

–for total hegemony.
You want our money, you want us to not make trouble for you? Then you’d better sign here right now, giving us the right to do our war-crime thing and our genocide thing without any interference.
The people who occupy the White House intend to buy-off the world’s governments in order to spread the blessings of their regime to the rest of the planet.

The Bush administration, still wary of the new International Criminal Court, is trying to line up nations one by one to pledge not to extradite Americans for trial, administration officials said today.
So far, the administration has signed agreements with Romania and Israel. Both countries have agreed that they will not send American peacekeepers or other personnel to the court, whose purpose is to prosecute individuals for war crimes and genocide when national governments refuse to act.

And what do our sorta-elected representatives think of this?

In Congress, lawmakers from both parties said the administration’s tactics were both legal and welcome.

Blinking toadies.

“CEOs’ behaving badly”

From TIME, for gawds’s sake!
Nader’s a saint. Alright, he looks like Abe Lincoln, but he really comes just after Francis of Assisi. Here he is on “CEO’s behaving badly.” [TIME‘s phrase]

For almost four decades, Ralph Nader has been the scold of corporate America. Now the man and the moment have merged as America recoils at CEOs’ behaving badly. TIME’s Matthew Cooper spoke to Nader about greed, corruption and why the presidential spoiler won’t even think about playing golf.
Did you think there was this much corporate corruption?
No. And isn’t it saying something that it exceeded my anticipation? It is impossible to exaggerate the supermarket of crime. It’s greed on steroids.
Why didn’t we know about it all sooner?
What amazes me is that there are thousands of people who could have been whistle-blowers, from the boards of directors to corporate insiders to the accounting firms to the lawyers working for these firms to the credit-rating agencies. All these people! Would a despotic dictatorship have been more efficient in silencing them and producing the perverse incentives for them all to keep quiet? The system is so efficient that there’s total silence. I mean, the Soviet Union had enough dissidents to fill Gulags.

we pay, they make out

[straight from a Citizen Works email]

Citizen Works made national news last week by noting that during Vice President Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO, the number of Halliburton subsidiaries incorporated in offshore foreign tax havens rose from 9 to 44.
Meanwhile, Cheney is supportive of a heavily expanded military budget, a budget that is increasingly being picked up by ordinary taxpayers who can’t funnel their money through offshore tax havens. And a solid chunk of that military budget will go straight to Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary that has a $1.8 billion contract to support U.S. troops through 2004. Despite being under federal investigation for fraud, Brown & Root is the Army’s only private supplier of troop support services over the next decade, according to the Associated Press. The corporate state in action invites citizen action!
Check out Citizen Works in a Washington Post story.
Also, check out Reuters.

So it’s on to Iraq! Tomorrow the rest of the world!