Counterlight's Peculiars

Hugh Bruce

2012-01-28T17:23:00.009-05:00

We laid Hugh Bruce to rest today in my parish.

He was a veteran of the Vietnam War, a combat medic. He came out of the war a determined peace activist, active in Veterans for Peace and close friends with Grannies for Peace.

Somewhere along the line, he came out. All of his life, he was a faithful Catholic, and found himself thrown out of his parish. He spent the last 25 years of his life in the Episcopal Church and in our parish.
His lover of many years, Carl, predeceased him.

A little story to illustrate what sort of a man Hugh was:
He and Carl stopped into a restaurant in Hampton Roads, Virginia. They kissed and held hands, and no one in the restaurant seemed to mind except one rather large and rotund man at the table next to them who kept muttering "faggots" under his breath.
Hugh got up and confronted the man, telling him that he was a Vietnam Vet and could take care of himself, and did he want to settle this outside. The large man said yes. The maitre d ran over and demanded that both men stop right there. The maitre d asked Hugh if he wished to leave or the other guy. Hugh told the maitr d that the other guy could leave, he and Carl were staying. The other man left in a huff.
As Hugh and Carl were dining, people kept sending them drinks an desserts. Carl asked the waiter what was going on.
"Don't you know who that was?" the waiter said.
"I never saw that guy in my life," replied Hugh.
"That was Jerry Falwell,"the waiter answered.

A true story reported in the local paper the next day.

So our fighting Hugh is together again with Carl, and will be waiting for us all with a big mug of beer, and he'll say, "What took ya so long?"

--condensed from Justin Allen's eulogy.

Here is Hugh himself

For Hugh, the woman for whom Chicago blues musicians used to shake off their Sunday hangovers and go to Mt. Carmel Baptist Church just to hear her sing:

Today's Newt Relief

2012-01-27T08:16:00.010-05:00

Yet another Republican debate last night.

Time for a little relief from all that ugly.

The Ultimate Hippy Stud, Joe Dallesandro in all of his glory about 1968.

And lovely British actress Freema Agyeman dispels all the ugly still, and very nicely.

Since the news cycle is likely to be dominated by Newt Gingrich's leering Jack-o-Lantern face for quite some time, I'm providing a little relief for the eyes on this blog.

The others aren't so hot either. You could cut yourself on Mitt's features. And Santorum's good little Catholic boy and star of the catechism class look with the sweater vest is just irritating. Ron Paul looks like the old guy down the street who always chases the kids and the squirrels off his lawn.

Robert Reich reminds us this morning that Dems should not be so sanguine about the prospect of a Newt candidacy, that even a 10% chance of President Gingrich is too much risk.

David Kato

2012-01-26T20:29:00.007-05:00

David Kato, the founder of Uganda's gay rights movement was murdered a year ago today.

The official police reports say it was a robbery (first they said it was over an attempted seduction).

How stupid do they think we are?

The man got death threats daily. A local newspaper in a front page editorial called for his death. He stood alone against a government effort to criminalize and kill gays and lesbians inspired and funded by American evangelicals.

May he rest in peace, and may the small seed planted with him and watered with his blood grow into a mighty tree.

"Indigo, Crimson, and Black are the Colors of the Flag that I'll Hoist Up in the Air When I'm Takin' My Dignity Back!!"

2012-01-26T08:09:00.006-05:00

Leave it to the Irish to come up with a great "I'm Mad As Hell" song.

Bankers, cops, priests, politicians, plutocrats, all the self-righteous assholes who stole the world out from under us and call us lazy and decadent ...

Fuck 'em all.

This might be worth posting again on Election Day.

Crossing the Billyburg Bridge at Nightfall

2012-01-25T15:43:00.023-05:00

Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn. It is only about 5PM and it's already nightfall. It's still too early for the bridge lights to come on.

Downtown Manhattan from the Brooklyn side of the bridge

The new #1 World Trade Center, already the tallest building in town, glows with construction lights. It still has about a dozen floors to go before topping out in April.

The pedestrian path on the bridge; the subway tracks are to the right.

The East River looking toward downtown with a star.

The Brooklyn tower in the dark

Downtown with Lower East Side traffic

The spires of Midtown; the Empire State Building is on the left, the Conde Nast Building is the mast in the center, the new Bank of America Building is on the right.

My Heroes

2012-01-25T08:27:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you have to kick the ogre in the shins to get his attention.

And Erika Baker is still my hero.

Quisling Closet Sister of the Day

2012-01-23T14:36:00.006-05:00

David Shepherd commenting on Thinking Anglicans.

I'm feeling too ill today for another flame war.

Mark Bennet comes in a close second as runner up for the rhinestone tiara.

Erika Baker is my new hero.

EXTRA:

I present the anti-gay Christianists with the artistic tribute they deserve. Here is a scene by that great and insightful master of modern avant-garde cinema, Mel Brooks;

Folks, I think this beats Monty Python.

Happy Chinese New Year!

2012-01-23T08:39:00.005-05:00

Beware the mysterious West.

I agree with my friend Wilfried, who sometimes comments here. "East is east and West is west, and never the twain shall meet."

How a lion dance is supposed to be done:

Dragon dancing at night with fireworks in Thailand:

Since 2012 will be the Year of the Dragon, here is a major work of art, The Nine Dragon Scroll by Chen Rong from 1244.

Here's a detail

And here's the whole scroll.

Easy On The Eyes

2012-01-22T17:18:00.014-05:00

Bill Maher said that politics is showbiz for ugly people.

Now that Newt Gingrich has won the SC primary, it looks like we will be waking up to his leering Jack-O-Lantern face every morning on the news for awhile. So, maybe I'll start posting pretty people here just for relief from time to time.

Requests are welcome.

I'll start with Uma Thurman in Kill Bill for you female fanciers, and James Franco on the cover of Vogue, Paris for all you man lovers.

Pretty People for Monday morning: Billy Crudup and Jessica Leccia

His Eye Is On The Sparrow

2012-01-22T07:49:00.001-05:00

"White is Right" or so we're told

2012-01-20T10:26:00.056-05:00

About 2 years ago, I wrote about the mythology of the western expansion of the USA, and the central role that mythology plays in art and in racist thinking. As I look at what will almost certainly be a very nasty election year, I remain unconvinced by the conventional wisdom of the punditariat that the driving force behind all the passionate feeling is the bad economy. I think the extremism that we are seeing this year goes much deeper than current economic statistics. The USA is undergoing major demographic and cultural changes that make a lot of people feel very threatened; especially those people used to being always in charge, and who long took their power and privilege for granted, i.e. White People. Our conflicts are not economic, but tribal. Tribal passions are the most powerful of public passions and trump economic self-interest all the time (how else would you explain the conflicts in the Balkans?). The Achilles Heel of all economic thinking is the assumption that people act rationally in their own self interest. Anyone who's spent 5 minutes in an introductory psych course knows that this is not the case. In the end, old Aristotle was right all along. We are not economic beings, but political beings.

First, I should come clean. I am a guilt ridden Southern liberal. I am painfully unlearning an awful lot that was taken for granted in the world I grew up in. I envy my students who were born and raised in a much more cosmopolitan world than the one I grew up in. They move through a world of cultural differences with an easy confidence and a lack of self-consciousness that I can only envy. And yet, as Molly Ivins once wrote somewhere, noticing and seeing the tangled self-deceptions white folk create around race is the beginning of wisdom for Southerners.

By the middle of this century, white folk will no longer be the majority in this country. No one will be the majority in this country. That demographic prospect terrifies some people and reinforces the very old and very powerful myth of the White Man's Last Stand. General Custer stands defiant to the end against the hordes of swarthy heathens who will overwhelm his tiny band of gallant men. This vision of brave doom haunted the white mind at least as far back as Nat Turner's rebellion; the conqueror's nightmare of becoming conquered in turn. Today that nightmare takes the form of Mexican hordes pouring across the southern border, and loud in-your-face black folk in the living room and in the White House. "I want my America back!" she tearfully cried.

It's no accident that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white and elderly. Yes, there are black right wingers. That they get so much media attention only demonstrates how rare and exceptional they are. Indeed, supremacism in one form or another appeals to all kinds of people. Despite Herman Cain and Alan Keyes, African Americans remain one of the most reliable of Democratic constituencies and continue to play leading roles in progressive politics.

The Tea Party and the fury of today's right wing politics are the reactions of people who believe that they are the only ones who matter, that they are the only ones who count. They see their legitimate God-given position of supremacy in danger of being usurped (I think this explains part of the emotionalism behind the opposition to gay marriage and gay rights; gays, like Jews before them, are seen as parvenus as well as perverts). This sense of aggrieved privilege drives the revival of apocalyptic fundamentalism. There is a huge element of vindictiveness in visions of The End Times. God will destroy a corrupt and rotten world, but He will save and vindicate His Chosen. The Book of Revelations shades easily into The Turner Diaries. In this, Christian fundamentalism is not much different from Islamic fundamentalism whose prophets like Sayyid Qutb or the Deobandi School preached a similar hostility to modern cosmopolitanism, a similar contempt for other cultures, and an apocalyptic vindication of The Chosen.

I think this sense of threatened supremacy also drives the embrace of market fundamentalism. The right long ago discarded the founder of modern capitalism, Adam Smith. The Cold War attempt to fit this Scottish pragmatist into the role of an ideological prophet along the lines of Marx and Lenin failed utterly. Smith couldn't care less about making an all encompassing philosophy of life. He was looking for the best way to relieve shortages. Unlike the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Smith believed that a certain measure of taxation and government regulation were necessary to maintain a decent society that anyone would want to live in. Smith even went so far as to assert that labor does indeed have a right to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions. So Adam Smith is now discarded by those who turned his economic philosophy into an ideology. They are now turning to that most radical of anti-egalitarian thinkers, Ayn Rand. Rand took the old "Survival of the Fittest" philosophy of Herbert Spencer and gave it Lenin's ruthless all-encompassing zeal. Now, the Hidden Hand of the Market does the work of God the Father separating out the wheat from the tares, the sheep from the goats. Those who already have, who begin the race already several paces ahead of everyone else must somehow be especially favored (as opposed to just lucky to be born with a trust fund). The Market now replaces War as God's shakeout of the nobility from the commons. And since White folk (especially white straight men) historically have had all the power and still control most of the assets, then they must truly be superior by the grace of God and of nature, so the reasoning goes. Poverty and misfortune must be the fault of the sufferer, a punishment for weakness and lack of foresight and responsibility, the modern version of the old superstition that misfortune was the wrath of the gods for transgressions. Now White folk have license to treat each other the way they've treated the brown and black folk. The poor must be punished for being poor. The only legitimate solutions to social and economic problems are punitive solutions. In that light, it makes sense to keep the Bible next to Atlas Shrugged on the bookshelf.

Now, we have measures like the recent one in Arizona to repeal Mexican American studies from school curricula, to ban the books for the course, and to punish students who protest with janitorial duty and jail (there's more about it here). There is no other way to explain such actions other than the idea that America The White Christian Republic is in peril.

Exactly who gets included in those sweeping three words that begin the Constitution "We the people ..." is the central conflict of American history. The history of the USA is about the very awkward relationship between a radically egalitarian document like the American Constitution and an always conflicted anti-egalitarian society split along all kinds of lines of race, gender, and class. The Original Intent of the document is a republic for white male property owners. The actual words and ideas on the pages of the Constitution speak of universal enfranchisement, especially in the Preamble (that most important part that states the whole purpose of the Constitution and declares the source of its authority and legitimacy, not from God but by the consent of the people).

My father most of his life was deeply and emotionally loyal to America the White Christian Republic. If he was alive, he would definitely place himself in the camp of Original Intent; white property owners writing a social contract for their own kind.
I am deeply and emotionally attached to The United States, the Cosmopolitan Secular Democracy whose Constitution means what it says, and says now to all people.

What I'm Working on Now

2012-01-18T17:36:00.045-05:00

My "Cave of Making," except bears are a lot tidier

So what am I working on now? I'm doing a second version of a series of paintings that I did more than 10 years ago about the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz. I'm 3 paintings into what will probably be a more extensive series than the first one. This time, I'm more interested in showing him as an artist, writer, adventurer, and political activist than a martyr.

I took all of these pictures, so I apologize for the quality. I hope to have Steven Bates make good archival quality photos of these by the Spring.

Painting David, an imaginary scene in which David Wojnarowicz sits while I try to paint his portrait. This painting will probably start the series.

...

The Green Pterodactyl, an imaginary scene of David Wojnarowicz painting one of his large murals in the now destroyed abandoned dock warehouses on the West Side.

...

What Is This Little Guy's Job In the World? This is based on text Wojnarowicz wrote for a photographic piece:

What is this little guy's job in the world. If this little guy dies does the world know? Does the world feel this? Does something get displaced? If this little guy dies does the world get a little lighter? Does the planet rotate a little faster? If this little guy dies, without his body to shift the currents of air, does the air flow perceptibly faster? What shifts if this little guy dies? Do people speak language a little bit differently? If this little guy dies does some little kid somewhere wake up with a bad dream? Does an almost imperceptible link in the chain snap? Will civilization stumble?

His original photographic piece showed his hand holding a small frog. I portrayed him holding a small mouse and asking us directly his question. I'm not exactly flinging out the flag for Free Enterprise here, and neither did David in his piece.

...

And finally there's this bit of Surrealism which is actually a very unfinished picture.

I'm painting a panel of The Risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene when she mistakes Him for the gardener. This is part of an 8 panel series being painted by 8 different artists of a proposed "Stations of the Resurrection" for my church. Everyone will eventually have hair, legs, and faces.

Enough Said

2012-01-18T07:33:00.003-05:00

Very Old Paintings

2012-01-17T20:26:00.045-05:00

While back in Dallas, I did something I've meant to do for a long time. I went through my really old paintings and culled them. I threw away a lot of old junk and photographed a lot of the junk and the youthful prodigies. This is work mostly made between 1972 and 1982 when I was in high school, and when I went to art school in my teens and early 20s. Seeing all this stuff together for the first time in a long time made me realize that I actually learned quite a lot in art school.

1968

I made my first oil paintings when I was 10 on cheap canvas panels using an oil paint set that my mother bought for me. I was taking off the paint-by-numbers training wheels. This is not my first painting, but it's close. It's a painting of the Maroon Bells outside of Aspen, Colorado based on a photo. Well, we all have to start somewhere.

1972

This is a painting in acrylic paint. I painted it in Silverton, Colorado. I used an old board that I found imitating the local painters for the tourist trade at the time. The painting is based on an old black and white photo of Wilson Peak near Telluride.

1973

I'm trying my hand at Biblical and historical subject matter here. This is Christ and the Woman of Samaria at the Well. Bad Sunday school art.

1974

When I was 16, I painted God. Still the Old Man in the Sky, but what did I know at 16?

1975

When I was 17, I painted Huck Finn. We must have been reading that book in school. This was one of my very first paintings on stretched canvas. I used a colored ground for the first time, a coating of an awful Pthalo Blue, why I don't remember.

1976

When I was 18, I painted Indians. My brother still likes these paintings. They got me into art school.

1979

A painting I made in art school, at the Kansas City Art Institute on my own initiative. It's a picture of a fellow student and friend, Dan Ellis, from life. He was a very patient sitter. This painting has its problems, and is very damaged, but I'm still fond of it.

1980

Another independent painting from art school in Kansas City days, Sandra Smith sews a button on her overcoat while sitting on the floor of her apartment. I'm sorta kinda playing around with something like modern form here.

1981

I made a long series of paintings of vertical fragments of the evening sky that year, trying to mix Friedrich and Rothko (what would be the point?). This is one of my better ones.

1982

I made this small painting from life at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. In that historic center of American modernism, I made the fateful decision to be a figurative painter, and to stop beating around the faux-moderne, juste-milieu bush. I got into a lot of trouble. The president of the college, Roy Slade, was furious. He came into my studio and turned all of my paintings upside down and said that they looked like Norman Rockwell (not a compliment in those days). My prof, George Ortman, backed my decision. Nonetheless, I left after a year.

I moved to St. Louis where I studied art history, earning a Master's degree from Washington University in 1986. I started painting again in 1985, and began exhibiting professionally that same year. In 1991, I moved to New York to finally earn that MFA at the New York Academy of Art (1993).

Bill Ferren

2012-01-16T13:46:00.008-05:00

Bill Ferren, an old friend to me and to many others at my parish of St. Luke in the Fields here in New York, died this morning at 8AM. He was a longtime pastor, first with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and then with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In his last years, he was part of our Episcopal congregation of St. Luke in the Fields. He was a native of Missouri. We gratefully remember his time with us and thank God for his service.
Though we die, and those who remember us shall die, and our place shall know us no more, we rest in hope knowing that though the world forgets, God shall always remember us and will summon us each by name. May Bill rest with the saints in light.

From John Donne's Meditations:

IF I were but mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lord’s hand made me of this dust, and the Lord’s hand shall re-collect these ashes; the Lord’s hand was the wheel upon which this vessel of clay was framed, and the Lord’s hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dust and the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to another.

Because I live, so shall you live also
--John 14:19-20

MLK

2012-01-15T18:03:00.010-05:00

Instead of the usual "I Have A Dream" speech, here is an excerpt from a sermon he delivered to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, March 18, 1968. It speaks directly to us and to our situation now with the urgency of fire.

You are here tonight to demand that Memphis do something about the conditions that our brothers face, as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total community. You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor.

You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to Hell because he didn't see the poor. And his name was Dives. There was a man by the name of Lazarus who came daily to his gate in need of the basic necessities of life. Dives didn't do anything about it. He ended up going to Hell.

But there is nothing in that parable that says that Dives went to Hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came before him talking about eternal life. And he advised him to sell all. But in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery, and not setting forth a universal diagnosis.

If you will go on and read that parable in all of its dimensions, and all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between Heaven and Hell. And on the other end of that long distance call between heaven and Hell was Abraham in Heaven talking to Dives in Hell. It wasn't a millionaire in Hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn't go to Hell because he was rich. His wealth was an opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus.

Dives went to Hell because he passed by Lazarus every day, but he never really saw him. Dives went to Hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible. Dives went to Hell because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived. Dives went to Hell because he maximized the minimum, and minimized the maximum. Dives finally went to Hell because he wanted to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."

But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness." This may well be the indictment on America that says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, "If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me."…

Now you're doing something else here. You are highlighting the economic issues. You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is distinct…

Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now, that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger? What does it profit a man to be able to eat at the swankest integrated restaurant when he doesn't even earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit one to have access to the hotels of our cities, and the hotels of our highways, when we don't earn enough money to take our family on a vacation? What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn't earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?

So we assemble here tonight. You have assembled for more than thirty days now to say, "We are tired. We are tired of being at the bottom. We are tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. We are tired of our children having to attend overcrowded, inferior, quality-less schools. We are tired of having to live in dilapidated, substandard housing conditions where we don't have wall to wall carpet, but so often we end up with wall to wall rats and roaches.

"We are tired of smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. We are tired of walking up the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life. We are tired of our men being emasculated, so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white ladies' kitchens, cleaning up, unable to be with our children, to give them the time and the attention that they need. We are tired."

So in Memphis we have begun. We are saying, "Now is the time." Get the word across to everybody in power in this town that now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children, now is the time to make the real promises of democracy. Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children, now is the time for city hall to take a position for that which is just and honest. Now is the time for justice to roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Now is the time.

EXTRA:

Paul Krugman gets it.

Visiting the Cemetery

2012-01-13T15:56:00.074-05:00

The Blanchard family plot at Restland cemetery in Dallas

My folk don’t visit cemeteries. The dead are out of sight and out of mind. So it must have surprised my brother when I asked to see the family plot on a short visit to Dallas this month. I was surprised that he so readily agreed. Neither of us had visited the family burial plot since my grandmother’s funeral in July of 1977.

My grandparents on my father’s side are buried in a large commercial cemetery right out of The Loved One; not the Evelyn Waugh novel, but the Tony Richardson movie. “Restland” is the name of the cemetery, and my family kept a plot there since 1928. I can remember when Restland cemetery was in the middle of the countryside on Greenville Avenue between Dallas and Richardson. Cattle used to graze in pastureland opposite the main gate. Today, suburban sprawl surrounds it with apartment complexes, office buildings, strip malls, and cul-de-sac neighborhoods. Far from suffering from the change, Restland is a booming business. The cemetery almost doubled its size since my grandmother’s funeral in 1977. And, it is aggressively seeking out new, potentially high paying customers. Restland now incorporates Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, a measure of how much Dallas has changed since my grandmother died.
My brother and I drove in his red pickup truck into the main gate. My brother claimed to have a vague idea of where it was, but after 5 minutes in a wilderness of gravesites, we headed back to the gatehouse for some information.

A well-dressed gentleman greeted me with a combination of courtesy and wariness. It took awhile to find the Blanchard gravesites. He had to pull out some old maps and dig up some old records on an out-of-date computer program, and it didn’t help that I had misspelled a couple of names. We found it. He gave me a copy of the map, and got in his car and guided us out to where the plot was. When we arrived, he said that this was an old part of the cemetery that hadn’t seen much activity in a long time. My brother worried that he’d give us big sales pitch, but no, he just said goodbye and drove off.

Four people are buried in the Blanchard plot, my grandfather Ray, my grandmother Nell, and my step-grandfather, Paul Ebstrup. I discovered that my great grandmother, Mintie Ann is buried in the plot. I’m guessing that my grandfather Ray bought the plot when she died in 1928.

My great grandmother; all I know about her is that she was in Galveston during the 1900 hurricane and lived to tell about it. There are pictures of her, but I don't have any.

Great grandmother was the first one buried here.

It is remarkable how much a mute little tombstone and a patch of ground conceal. They indicate nothing of the drama and the history of the lives that ended there.

Grandfather Ray about 1920

Grandfather Ray in 1907

Grandfather Ray on the right with a friend in Dallas about 1910

I never knew my grandfather, Ray Burleigh Blanchard. All I know about him is what my father told me, and the few relics and records that survive. He was born the second of 2 sons in Warsaw, MO. His older brother was named Frank. Their father died when they were young. They both had to find work to support the family. They ended up working together in a telegraph office in Hannibal, MO. For reasons unknown and forgotten, my grandfather ran away from his job and from home when he was about 17 or 18 and spent 3 years riding the rails all through the Midwest and South. He carried a wicker suitcase, which we still have, and kept a diary in Morse code that my cousin Gerry has. Gerry had the diary translated and it doesn’t say much. It’s mostly very terse records of what town he passed through, the weather, etc. Sometimes there is a revealing little detail of pawning a coat or about how little he had to eat, but not much else. There was enough information in the diary for Gerry to map out grandfather’s travels. His older brother Frank moved to Dallas to work for Western Union, and offered my grandfather a job with the company. My grandfather accepted and worked for Western Union for the rest of his life. My father said that Frank went on to be a major executive in the company and moved to New York to work in the company headquarters. My father told me that grandfather never rose higher in the company than a small district sales manager because he was involved in a failed attempt to unionize telegraph workers in the 1920s.
My grandfather served in the Army Signal Corps during WWI. He was stationed down in the Rio Grande Valley when the American government worried that the Germans might goad Mexico into attacking or raiding border towns. When that didn’t happen, he was stationed in San Diego. While there, a rich society woman became smitten with his good looks and married him. She very quickly discarded him after only 3 months. He returned to Dallas and to Western Union and spent the Great Depression in relatively secure, though modest employment.
My father was very close to my grandfather. Both men shared a taste for practical jokes. My grandfather’s jokes were harmless. When my father brought a stray dog home, my grandfather lectured my dad that he was responsible for feeding and cleaning up after the dog. When my father left the room, grandfather put a rubber dog poop on the floor and demanded that my father clean it up. When dad very squeamishly tried to pick it up with a wad of tissues, grandfather picked it up and put in his pocket and walked off. My father’s idea of practical joking was not quite so harmless. When he was a teenager, he stole garden furniture, hubcaps, bicycles, and vandalized trolleys stopping traffic sometimes. How he avoided reform school is a mystery to me.
My grandfather died very suddenly and unexpectedly in 1948. He went in the hospital for routine gall bladder surgery and died of a heart attack during the night. The hospital had not yet informed his family when they arrived to visit. My father discovered him in his hospital room with a sheet pulled over his head.

Grandma Nell (right) in Dallas sometime in the 1930s

My great aunt Helen and her sister, Grandma Nell in Colorado in 1951

Grandma Nell with a very awkward adolescent me in 1975

I remember Grandma Nell vividly. That my feelings about her are mixed is an understatement. For all of her piety, she came across as a vaguely louche character. She was a bad alcoholic with a bad temper. She could be a very mean drunk. I remember that my mother was very reluctant to spend much time with her, anxious that my brother and I not be exposed to the loud drunken brawls she had with her sister Helen, or with her older son, my uncle Ray. She sometimes flirted with me and with my brother, especially when we were teens. That made us both very uncomfortable.
Though born and raised in the Methodist Church, my grandmother’s religious tastes inclined more toward the Biblically literal and apocalyptic than the Methodist Church allowed for at the time. She was a devoted fan of Pat Robertson and The 700 Club toward the end of her life. At the same time, my grandmother believed passionately in astrology and apparently was quite expert at it. After her death, we discovered that she made star charts for me, my brother, and for my cousins Gerry, Julia, and Beth when each of us was born. Yes, I know that belief in Astrology is inconsistent with Christian belief in Free Will, but all of this ran together in my grandmother’s mind. For her, the world swarmed with spirits both good and bad. The spiritual warfare in the cosmos was palpable reality for her. Like many fundamentalist Christians, hers was a very Manichean view of the world as a battleground between the forces of Light and Darkness with the outcome uncertain for each of us.
In all fairness to my grandmother, her life was hardly a bed of roses. She began her life in destitution. She was born in Clarendon, Texas in the Panhandle. Her mother came from a prosperous family in Waxahachie, Texas. Great grandmother fell in love with a man her family did not approve of, and the couple eloped. Sadly, the family was right. Great grandfather turned out to be a drunk who drank away all of her money, and then abandoned her and their children (5 I think) in Clarendon. Great grandfather later died of tuberculosis in a state hospital in Terrell, Texas. When my grandmother was born, her mother and siblings were sharecroppers working in the cotton fields. My grandmother spent her childhood picking cotton and hauling water from a public pump in the town. My father said that there were times when they were so hard up that they had to take shelter in the town jail. One of my grandmother’s brothers died of alcoholism. One of her sisters died of tuberculosis (my father remembered her; he said that she had her own plate and silverware and that they were thoroughly boiled after she ate).
The family eventually moved to Midlothian just south of Dallas.
She married my grandfather sometime in the 1920s. My grandmother had a mean streak. My father recalled (without any bitterness or irony) that she used to beat him and his older brother Ray with a riding crop filled with buckshot. That’s not as exceptional as it sounds. Texas always believed in the iron-rod-of-discipline school of child rearing, especially for boys. That was still true when I was young. I doubt things have changed much.
When grandfather died in 1948, she married again in 1949 to Paul Christian Ebstrup, an immigrant from Denmark. He died in 1974.
My grandmother was born poor, but she did not die poor. Where exactly her money came from I’m not sure and neither is my mother. It may have all come from my uncle Ray who for a time was very rich from banking and real estate.
My grandmother died in the summer of 1977 of a heart attack apparently in her sleep. My father discovered her in her apartment in bed. She had been dead for 2 weeks. My father discovered both of his parent’s deaths.
Grandmother had her problems, but if it wasn’t for her, none of the rest of us would be where we are today. Probably her biggest saving grace was that she valued education, unlike a lot of other people from that poor hardscrabble part of Texas. She never finished grade school, but both of her sons went to college. Her oldest son Ray went to Rice University on scholarship and graduated with honors. My father went to college (against his will), and barely finished with an engineering degree. Grandma Nell certainly encouraged me even when I disappointed my own mother and studied art.

Paul Ebstrup in 1951

My father and Paul Ebstrup about 1949; my father was very fond of Grandfather Paul.

Grandfather Paul on his way to Copenhagen in May, 1959

I remember my Granddaddy Paul very fondly, but not very well. So much time has gone by since he died in 1974. There is so little that I know about him that I can be certain of. I’ve heard lots of disparate stories about him, but nothing like a coherent narrative of his life. I remember him as the very embodiment of rectitude, decency, and kindness in the midst of my melodramatic decadent Texas family. All of those characters in that bad Tennessee Williams play that was my family behaved themselves around him. He was hardly commanding. He certainly was not some kind of grumpy Wilfred Brimley type (though he looked the part). I never remember hearing him raise his voice, even in anger. He was nothing less than perfectly kind to me, my brother, and especially to my cousins. My cousin Gerry adored him (Grandfather Paul protected Gerry and his sisters from the drunken rages of my Uncle Ray and Grandma Nell), and even my mother, who hated just about every one of her in-laws, loved Grandfather Paul. He commanded great respect just by quietly being himself.
He was an immigrant from Denmark who spoke with a Danish accent. He came over to the USA with his brother Eric. From what my father told me, they came over together because they were both misfits in their family. I’m not sure when they came over. Somewhere along the line, grandfather Paul was a concert pianist. He kept a baby grand in the apartment he shared with my grandmother in Dallas. He played it for us from time to time, usually big showy Romantic things by Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky. Somewhere along the line, he sold insurance, according to my father, and also tried to start a farm and almost starved to death in the attempt.
What I do know about him for sure is that he and his brother Eric started one of the very first ski lodges in Aspen, Colorado in about 1950 back when Aspen was a forgotten half-abandoned old mining town. They built The Blue Spruce ski lodge on the corner of East Durant and Monarch right across the street from Wagner Park. There’s not a scrap of it left now. Grandfather Paul and Grandma Nell managed it personally for many years, until about 1965. I could have been born and raised in Aspen (and joined the rest of the natives in the trailer parks outside town when the plutocrats moved in). Eric painted all of the pictures that hung in the rooms of the lodge. I now own 2 of them. Grandfather Paul decorated the front lawn of the lodge with an old street lamp he brought back from Copenhagen. My grandparents offered my father the job of managing the lodge, but he refused, wisely since customer service was not one of my father’s talents. Grandfather Paul loved Colorado, and loved the mountains. He learned to ski after the age of 50, and according to my father upset my grandmother by being something of a daredevil on the slopes.
My grandmother decided to sell the lodge in 1970, a move that broke my grandfather’s heart. He spent the happiest years of his life in Colorado and left only reluctantly.
He died in 1974 of a heart attack following gall bladder surgery.
According to the evidence he left behind after his death, Grandfather Paul was a very literate man. I inherited his copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Nabokov’s Speak Memory. He also had numerous titles in Danish and German including a volume of Goethe. These were not display editions, but cheap to mid-price books that were read.
I deeply regret that he is not around now. I wish I could have known him better.

Me with my brother Brian visiting the Grandparents about 1963

We visit cemeteries to remember our dead, who never really leave us. We also go there to reflect upon the brevity of life. Those complex and dramatic lives are now each a silent tombstone and a quiet patch of grass. All of the 125,000 or so tombstones in that cemetery bear witness to lives that were unique, unprecedented, and that will never be repeated. In the end, we own nothing. We don’t own anything in any final or absolute sense. Everything we have, even our own bodies, is ultimately on loan, to be reclaimed by the earth from which it came. Our lives and all the projects and ambitions that fill them are but a flicker in the end. Wealth and power exist to be lost or stolen (as my uncle found out the hard way). They too return to the earth from which they came, and always sooner than we would like. We will all die, and those who remember us will die, and the world will roll on ruthlessly over our graves filling our places and forgetting us as it gets on with the business of living. And yet, there was never anyone like each of us before, and there will never be anyone like each of us again. May all those who remember us do so happily.

My brother Brian

My shadow

Willem de Kooning: The "Melodrama of Vulgarity"

2012-01-04T18:56:00.224-05:00

De Kooning's Excavation in the Chicago Art Institute

Willem de Kooning in his studio in 1950

Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950

I stood in line with legions of tourists on Monday to get into the Museum of Modern Art to see the de Kooning show for a second and last time. I heard German in one ear and French in the other, Russian in front of me and Japanese behind me. The place was packed with tourists, art students on vacation, and artists (of course, I was one of those). The tourists mostly filled the permanent collection galleries crowding around modern warhorses like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and
Dali’s Persistence of Memory, photographing and being photographed with those very famous paintings.
The de Kooning show on the top floor was indeed crowded. I was a little surprised because he’s not quite my idea of a crowd pleaser. The show was crowded, but not packed. I had no trouble seeing and spending time with the art. For a longtime de Kooning fan like myself, the show was a feast. Almost all of the Women paintings were there from all three series. It was quite an experience to see them all hanging together. I doubt there will be another opportunity in my life to go back and forth among the originals hanging next to each other. His great abstract works from the 1940s and 50s were almost all there including the great Excavation from Chicago, and a lot of wonderful work that was new to me. There was a very generous selection of his under-rated (in my opinion) later painting from the 1970s and 80s. There was also a collection of his over-rated (in my opinion) sculpture.

The de Kooning show here in the Museum of Modern Art in New York brings back a lot of memories for me, especially from my earliest days in art school. Those memories came flooding back when I contemplated deKooning’s great Excavation. I remember twice traveling in a small carpool from Kansas City to Chicago with Ron Slowinski’s painting class from the Kansas City Art Institute to see the Art Institute of Chicago. Excavation was always a highlight of the trip. Professor Slowinski loved this painting, and so did we. I still love this painting 30 years later. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the finest paintings ever produced in the United States, and still one of the best of the 20th century. It’s a painting created out of all the issues and conflicts of modern painting, and yet, it remains a very difficult and mysterious picture. It’s hard to pin down exactly what it is and what it’s about. Even the title is a mystery.

Excavation is a great picture and de Kooning’s largest easel painting, the culmination of about 6 years work in a new kind of painterly abstraction that he first learned from his close friend, the artist Arshile Gorky. It is a large all-over centerless composition perhaps intended to be a reply to Jackson Pollock’s centerless drip paintings which he began making in 1947. For all of Pollock’s paint spattering, de Kooning’s painting comes off as much more aggressive and complex in its structure. As in Pollock’s painting, no one part is more important than any other, but there is a clear sense of structure, of a kind of architecture holding up that seething field of shifting passages that shoot here and there like lightning. Big thick meaty strokes of a warm cream-colored paint seem to be laid on top of a more colorful painting underneath. Thin calligraphic black lines made with a sign painter’s lining brush in very thin enamel paint tie those thick strokes of creamy paint back into forms that are very suggestive of everything from body parts to buildings without ever describing anything definitively. De Kooning apparently went back into the painting here and there with touches of very bright greens, yellows, reds, blues, and lavenders. But, much of the color seems to be coming from earlier phases of the painting beneath (perhaps that’s why it’s called Excavation). Pollock’s drips can be flat as a pan or as deep as outer space depending on how you look at them. De Kooning gives us a kind of crumpled and more ambiguous space that is neither the clarity of linear perspective, nor the entirely flat picture plane of pure abstraction in a work by Malevich or Mondrian. It is closer to the ambiguous space created by Picasso and George Braque in their Analytical Cubist paintings from 40 years before Excavation. As in that earlier Cubist work, the distinction between figure and ground, mass and volume, near and far, foreground and background, is completely collapsed. Instead of the Cubist grid, there is a much more jagged structure in deKooning’s painting created by the interactions of colors and brushstrokes. This is a violent electrically charged painting with no recognizably violent imagery.

De Kooning spent much of 1950 working on Excavation in a dark cramped studio on 4th Avenue across the street from Grace Church. The painting went through many phases, beginning as a group of figures in an interior with a door and a skylight. A vestige of the door survives in the bottom center of the painting. We can see an early phase of the painting in some color photographs taken as de Kooning worked on the picture. It is dramatically different from the painting we see now.

De Kooning photographed in his studio on 4th Avenue in 1950 with Excavation in an early state.

The critic Harold Rosenberg, who coined the term "action painting" and was an early champion of de Kooning's work, with de Kooning in the 4th Avenue studio in front of the unfinished Excavation. The toothed grin that appears in the finished painting appears here right above Rosenberg's left arm.

The picture that we see today came about not through any process of elimination as in Mondrian’s paintings, but through addition. De Kooning kept putting more and more stuff into the painting. There’s a lot of speculation about the origins of the painting and about what it was supposed to be about. The big areas of cream-colored paint suggest body parts. Indeed, there is the suggestion of eyes here and there, backs, shoulders, legs, breasts, and buttocks all scattered about. There is even a toothy grin with a large eye in the left center of the painting. Some critics link this painting to images from World War II, to news photographs of mass graves in the death camps. Many note the compositional similarities between this painting and Picasso’s Charnel House that was based on death camp imagery. I’m a little skeptical of this idea, 1950 seems late for this kind of subject matter. While de Kooning certainly cared about what happened to his native Rotterdam, he had no direct experience of the War. He was in the USA and not eligible for military service (he was an illegal alien). Also, the emotional tone of the painting is very cool. This is not a mournful or horrified painting. De Kooning’s painting remains very colorful while Picasso paints his Charnel House in a very mournful black and white monochrome. Perhaps the best explanation for the painting is from de Kooning himself, “I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in – like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.” I was very gratified to see this quote on the wall text next to this painting in the MoMA show.

I’m not sure de Kooning’s creation of Excavation, or of most of his paintings, was quite as deliberate as some critics seem to presume. I doubt that he began with any kind of theme or narrative in mind. A theme or subject would materialize as he worked on the painting. De Kooning was an improviser. He would begin with a shape or a color and improvise visual riffs off of that. He would then do riffs off his previous riffs. Sometimes, he began his paintings with an image, and they would end up abstract, as Excavation did. Other times, a shape would become an image or a series of recognizable images.
De Kooning loved jazz all of his life (he frequented legendary jazz joints like George’s in the Village and The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem as early as 1929), and if his work is like anything, it is like jazz. As Charley Parker or Miles Davis use a tune as a kind of platform from which to launch spontaneous invention, so De Kooning uses the old Cubist grid, Cubist space, Surrealist automatism, or even straightforward imagery as structures upon which to improvise. Jazz musicians riff off the structure of a song and off of each other. De Kooning, the solitary artist, would continue to invent out of his previous inventions, and sometimes dramatically edit a painting by blocking out whole sections with opaque paint, or restore structure to a chaotic area with his liner’s brush dripping with black enamel paint. We see all of that in abundance in Excavation. The “drama, pain, anger, love” that he talked about found its way into his work through the inventions of his brush. The sense of tragedy in jazz comes out in the way a tune is played, not in the tune itself. Billy Holiday probably could sing “You Are My Sunshine” in a way that could break hearts. Similarly, de Kooning invested his paintings with triumph or disaster, not in their subject matter, but in the way that they are painted. The “messiness” or painterliness of his work is a big part of its appeal. It always just skirts the edges of chaos like a daring figure skater on thin ice. The forces that play across his paintings are barely held in check by a perfectly calibrated sense of structure.

A detail of Excavation, the toothed grin.

Excavation was de Kooning's first major critical success. This painting transformed him from being an underground figure with a cult following to an artist with an established reputation as a leader of American modernism. The Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr Jr., chose Excavation and 3 more works by de Kooning for the American pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale. Excavation was included in MoMA's Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America show in 1951. The painting swept all the top prizes at the Chicago Art Institute's annual exhibition of contemporary American art in 1952. The Art Institute bought the painting for its permanent collection despite conflict within the acquisitions committee over the decision (there was similar resistance from the Metropolitan Museum's Board of Trustees over the decision to purchase Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm). Excavation has resided in Chicago ever since.

Willem de Kooning lived to be 92 years old, as old as Picasso with a career about as long. He lived long enough to see himself celebrated as one of the greatest artists in the USA. And yet, he was always at heart a 22 year old poor Dutch kid who just jumped ship, and was always dazzled by size, the energy, and the opulence of the USA. Like almost all the other Abstract Expressionists, he began life poor in a broken home. He was born in Rotterdam. His parents divorced when he was 5. Though the Dutch courts awarded his father custody, his mother abducted him and kept him for 7 years. His mother was a large domineering and abusive woman who owned and ran a low dive bar near the Rotterdam dockyards. She was the bartender and the bouncer in a bar that catered to sailors and other rough customers.

Since his boyhood, de Kooning was a striver who worked hard and played hard.

Willem de Kooning, Still Life, c.1921

This is a charcoal drawing from de Kooning's days in art school in Rotterdam, the only known surviving drawing from those years. He worked during the day and studied nights at the Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences in Rotterdam. This drawing is probably from his 4th year there. It's a first rate piece of student work that shows a very precise and confident drawing hand. He also studied carpentry at this same school.
He worked for a department store in Rotterdam doing commercial illustration and building window and floor displays.

In 1926, de Kooning boarded the SS Shelley as a stowaway in the engine room. He jumped ship at Newport News, Virginia. He worked his way as an engine-stoker on another ship to Boston and jumped ship there. He eventually made his way to New York without speaking any English, with no money, and no papers. He would become one of America's most famous illegal immigrants.

Willem de Kooning in 1926 in Hoboken on the steps of the
Stevens Institute of Technology

When he arrived in New York he worked doing odd jobs, carpentry, house painting, construction, illustration and display for department stores, and commercial murals, "fake Bouchers and Fragonards" for wealthy private homes according to a co-worker from the time. I did the same thing almost 80 years later. I painted my share of fake Bouchers and Fragonards. Some things never change. Legend says that de Kooning painted murals for speakeasies during Prohibition.
De Kooning was ambitious as a fine artist, and specifically as a modern one. He sought out other artists in New York, went to museums and galleries, and began painting on his own in his spare time.

Willem de Kooning with his mother, Cornelia Nobel,
on Coney Island in Brooklyn, 1935

De Kooning, study for a WPA mural project for a housing project in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, 1936

De Kooning quit his job to work for the WPA, an unusual thing to do during the Great Depression. Most people at that time were glad to have any employment. The WPA gave De Kooning an opportunity to work full time as an artist for the first time. He loved the regular company of other artists and felt accepted as a part of the United States for the first time. He met a number of other European artists in exile employed by the program. He worked as an assistant to the great French Cubist painter Fernand Leger when he was in the USA painting murals for the WPA. De Kooning met his closest and most influential friend of the time, the Armenian immigrant Arshile Gorky in the WPA. Leger and Gorky encouraged de Kooning to experiment with modern and abstract form, even in public commissions. De Kooning lost his WPA job because of his dubious immigration status.

De Kooning, untitled, 1948 - 9

This painting was an unknown treasure for me in the MoMA show. It's part of a series of abstractions done in black and white from this time and painted with cheap enamel house paints mixed with oil paints. The story is that de Kooning was too poor to buy regular oil paints at this time. That may be true, but he turned that shortage into an opportunity.

De Kooning, Painting, 1948

De Kooning used black and white monochrome in the same way that Picasso and Braque used monochrome in their Analytical Cubist paintings from about 1910 to 1914. De Kooning also used surrealist automatism and chance at the suggestion of his friend Arshile Gorky letting his mind come up shapes begin look like things but never quite describe anything. Paint is allowed run and drip suggesting more things by chance. On the right are square forms suggesting a table edge locating this in an interior. Across the picture, shapes suggest all kinds of things without really describing anything definite. Space in this painting conflates foreground and background, mass and volume in a manner similar to Cubism.

De Kooning, Attic, 1949

What worked with black also works with white, what one critic called a "photo negative" of the black paintings.

De Kooning, Zot, 1949

“Zot “is Dutch for “fool” and the word appears in lower left corner of this small painting. Cubist painters put words into their paintings where they always seem to float surface above the collapsed space of the painting. De Kooning made letters and words part of the structure his paintings as he does here. De Kooning may also be experimenting with all-over composition perhaps influenced by Jackson Pollock.

De Kooning, Asheville, 1948

De Kooning painted this while teaching one summer at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. The exiled Bauhaus professor Josef Albers invited de Kooning to teach there for a summer session in 1948. This was the first of de Kooning's abstractions to incorporate color.

De Kooning, Ganesvoort Street, 1949

Named for a street in the former meat packing district on the West Side, this beautiful small painting is another revelation of the MoMA show.

De Kooning in his studio on West 22nd street in 1937

While the critic Clement Greenberg described de Kooning as "an outright abstract painter," little did he know that de Kooning painted figuratively and continued to paint figuratively at the same time that he painted abstractly.

De Kooning, Elaine Fried (Elaine de Kooning), pencil drawing, c1940 – 1941

A surprising and beautiful drawing of the only woman de Kooning would marry, probably made shortly after they first met. De Kooning was, with many other artists, a great admirer of the very precise and superbly efficient portrait drawings of Ingres. He does his own version of an Ingres pencil drawing here.

De Kooning was a notorious womanizer starting at an early age. He carried on with models, a trapeze artist, dancers, cashiers; whoever was available and interested (since the young de Kooning had striking good looks, there were a lot of interested women). He once carried on a ménage a trois with 2 mistresses. He was certainly not faithful to Elaine. Theirs was a stormy marriage with numerous separations and reconciliations, but they never divorced. Though long separated, they were still officially married when she died in 1989. Elaine was a very successful artist in her own right, so there was almost certainly an element of rivalry between them.

De Kooning, Seated Woman, c. 1940

An elegant painting for which Elaine probably posed. It combines memories of Picasso’s portraits of Marie Therese Walter and Dora Maar from the 1920s and 30s with the precise elegance and finality of Ingres. The very open brushwork and color is entirely de Kooning’s own. The colors are definitely not the tonal palette of Classical art, nor is this the modern chromatic palette. These are the lush brilliant colors of American commercialism. These are the kinds of colors you would see in ad spreads in big glossy picture magazines of the day like Life or The Saturday Evening Post.

This painting begins the first of 3 series of paintings of women that de Kooning painted together with his abstract work. Who is the “woman” in de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings? She’s not anyone in particular. She’s not the Venus of European art from Praxiteles to Matisse. She’s certainly not the Virgin Mary. She’s the siren of American advertising, the luscious sales rep ready to please, eager to make the sale, inhabiting the ripe paradise of the huge supermarket and the stuffed refrigerator. This was the emerging American Eden of the post War boom years. Perhaps outsiders like de Kooning best appreciated this aspect of life in the USA. Other artists of the day avoided the vulgarity of American commercialism like the plague. For de Kooning, the landscape of American advertising was his imaginary playground.
De Kooning felt the flip side of the American commercial paradise, the paranoia and xenophobia. De Kooning had a lifelong terror of police and any kind of public official. This remained true even in his old age when he received medals and citations from Presidents of the United States. He was an illegal alien and lived in constant fear of deportation when he was young.

De Kooning, The Queen of Hearts. c. 1943 - 1946

Another elegant lady from de Kooning’s first series of “Woman” paintings

De Kooning, The Queen of Hearts, detail

The beautifully drawn and slightly ludicrous face of the Queen, perhaps reflecting the influence of his friend, the now almost forgotten painter John Graham

De Kooning, Pink Angels, c. 1945

A breakthrough painting, arms and other parts always threatened to come off and start on their own in de Kooning’s first Woman paintings. Here, they finally come apart into suggestive shapes. De Kooning goes back into the painting while it is still wet with a stick of charcoal, anticipating the calligraphic line of black paint drawn with a sign painter’s line brush in paintings like Asheville and Excavation.

De Kooning, Woman, 1949

Painted at the same time as the black and white abstractions, this second “Woman” series is very different in look and feeling from the first. The old elegance and withdrawn mood of that first series is gone, replaced with distorted shrieking monsters. The siren of American advertising gets run through the blender of 1920’s Picasso. Here and there, she is filleted into something boneless. At the same time she grows menacing teeth and eyes. The paint application is a lot more aggressive. Instead of fields of bright color scumbled carefully over pencil drawing, big fat strokes of black paint wrestle all these shrieking colors and slashing strokes of the brush into the form of a nude red headed woman seated in a chair.

De Kooning, Woman, 1949 – 1950

The smiling luscious sales rep becomes a monster. That toothed smile that in advertising is supposed to radiate friendliness and sociability here threatens to eat us. Her right hand becomes an immense grasping claw. The breasts are anything but lusciously inviting. They are reduced here to 2 sharp loops of black paint as alluring as razors.

De Kooning, Woman, detail

This head with that distorted mouth is amazing. Where do these monsters come from? Perhaps these are every Casanova’s nightmare of castration and venereal disease. That was certainly true of Picasso’s monster women. Perhaps these are manifestations of the menace that lurks behind the inviting sales patter. Maybe these are the force that manifests itself when the mark fails to fall for the pitch.

De Kooning, Woman I, 1950 – 1952

Critics largely ignored de Kooning’s figurative works until this painting. This is de Kooning’s most famous painting. Excavation established his reputation as a major modern artist. Woman I made him famous and notorious. Now the critics paid attention and they were deeply divided. The painting infuriated Clement Greenberg, offending his idea of the reconciliation of form and content through reductivism, a reductivism that permitted no figurative form.
The shrieking monsters of the Second Woman series now become a single immense creature that dominates the whole painting. Whoever she is, she is immense and powerful, turning and facing us squarely. She is seated and looks straight at us with huge staring eyes. She smiles, or is that a grimace she flashes at us? She has huge shoulders, immense breasts, and grasping claw-like hands. She is the Bride of Frankenstein, Queen of the Amazons, an ancient fertility goddess, a ludicrous freak of nature, all in one. She owes nothing in form or spirit to Picasso. She is an entirely original creation. She is menacing, grotesque, awe inspiring, and ridiculous. Some critics speculate that she might be in part the ghost of de Kooning’s large domineering bartender/ bouncer mother, Cornelia Nobel.
Whoever she is, de Kooning paints her with his most aggressive and violent technique yet. The deftly controlled chaos of Excavation is gone. De Kooning attacks this canvas with great slashing strokes that spatter the paint and cause it to run here and there. And yet, the color is surprisingly delicate, much more so than in the previous Woman series. Red, orange, yellow, green, pink, and aqua blue peek out from a matrix of pearly gray.

De Kooning, Woman I, detail

Here is a close-up of that smile/ grimace and those big staring eyes. De Kooning worked very hard to get that snarling smile just right. He wiped it out and started it over several times. The huge eyes make me think of the wide staring eyes on ancient Sumerian votive figurines from Tel Asmar. Some of those figurines are on display at the Metropolitan Museum, and may have been familiar to de Kooning.
That de Kooning could make the toothy smile of American advertizing into such a menacing snarl is a real stroke of imagination.

Photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt of an early stage of Woman I.

Woman I went through several stages before becoming the painting we know today. It is almost unrecognizable in this early phase. De Kooning tacked and pasted big cut out pieces of tracing paper on his paintings, some of which you can see here if you look closely. This is a technique he learned from commercial painting to try out various solutions before committing to one.

Photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt of a later stage of Woman I

The painting we know today is starting to take shape. The smile in this painting is cut out of a magazine with another practice smile underneath it. For a long time, he could not get the smile to work, so he just cut one out of a magazine ad and glued it on while he worked on the rest of the painting.

Ad for Camel cigarettes featuring the “T- zone.”

The ads from which he harvested mouths were ads like these for Camels. De Kooning was fascinated with the “T-zone,” how it seems to emphasize and separate out the woman’s smile at the same time.

De Kooning, Study for Woman I with a cutout of a
mouth from a Camel “T-zone” ad, 1950

Much to the dismay of his champion, the critic Harold Rosenberg, de Kooning frequently made preliminary studies for his paintings. Rosenberg considered this deliberation and experimentation to be an offense to the purity of impulse in action painting. De Kooning considered this very traditional way of working a useful step in realizing a final painting. The very idea of a final painting is an offense against modern aesthetic where the process of realization counts for more than the final product.
In this study, we can see a mouth cut out from a Camel ad used here.

De Kooning, Woman VI, 1956

De Kooning did several large paintings in this third and last Woman series. They are all grand and magnificent, as is this one. And yet none of them have the menace of the first one.

De Kooning, Easter Monday, 1955 – 1956

The iron discipline of the black line disappears from de Kooning’s abstract work from this time. Color now finds its own structure.

De Kooning, Easter Monday, detail

De Kooning borrowed the titles for a lot of paintings from this period from cheap crime novels. He also transferred newspaper images into the wet oil paint as can be seen here in this detail. This was something that happened at first by accident. He would use cut-out sections of newspaper upon which to try out things on the canvas and discovered that the paint picked up the news print. He decided to leave these backwards and ghostly transfers in his work anticipating the silkscreen images in Robert Rauschenberg’s work.

De Kooning was always the odd man out in Abstract Expressionism. He couldn’t have cared less about Jungian psychology with its ideas about a collective unconscious manifesting itself as myth and symbol that drove artists like Pollock and Rothko. If anything, de Kooning was closer in spirit to Pop Art. However, de Kooning’s attitude toward popular culture was more passionate engagement than the ironic emotional distancing of Johns or Warhol.

De Kooning, Suburb in Havanna, 1958

In the late 1950s, de Kooning was rich and famous. He left New York and built a large new studio on land he bought in eastern Long Island, in Springs (where Pollock once had his studio). He began large paintings with enormous sweeping brushstrokes like this one. Unlike his previous work that found its origins in urban experience, these begin to engage landscape.

De Kooning, Woman, Sag Harbor, 1964

Springs softened de Kooning, or at least softened his form sense. His Woman now becomes openly seductive and sexually available. We feel safe now to yield to the alluring sales rep without fear of her morphing into the devouring repo man. While New York and the rest of the art world was starting to go through the rapid succession of multiple “-isms” making competing claims on The Future, de Kooning began a long engagement with the time honored subject of figures in a landscape. De Kooning was fascinated by the shimmering light and color of water and vegetation in his new home out in Springs (back when it was still rural and before that area turned into a WASP Establishment playground for the international plutocracy, The Hamptons).

De Kooning, … Whose Name Was Writ in Water, 1974

I think that this painting ultimately has nothing to do with Keats or with his epitaph or with mortality. I think it is more about the literal sense of the phrase, about writing on water. It is about that shimmering flickering brush stroke, like waves and currents of water that took over de Kooning’s work in the 1960s and 70s. It is a lot like the flickering brushstroke in the late work of Claude Monet, only without that direct tie to literal visual experience. To my mind, this is the most uneven period of de Kooning’s work. Sometimes these paintings are marvelous, other times they are barely coherent.

De Kooning, Figures in a Landscape, drawing, 1974

De Kooning remained a first rate draftsman all of his life. Sometimes that flickering stroke that shapes his visions of figures in landscape works better in graphic form.

De Kooning, Untitled II, 1983

Toward the end of his life, the old structural discipline begins to return to his work. The flickering brushstrokes begin to disappear. The calligraphic line begins to return. Also, his old practice of painting out large sections of his work returns with a vengeance. In his old age, it would be huge strokes of Titanium white painted over more colorful older painting while it was still wet. De Kooning was in his late 70s and 80s when he did these paintings and suffering from ill health and the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease. There appears a compulsion at the end of his life to pare down his work to the structural essences that guided him all of his life. While the critics are still divided over their assessment of these paintings, I think that they are magnificent, better than anything being done at the time by 2 or 3 generations of younger artists.

De Kooning, Rider (Untitled VII), 1985

At the end of his life, that paring down to structural essences becomes more radical than ever. In reproduction, these paintings always look like thinned out paint over blank canvas. They are not at all. This is paint laid on thick with vast areas blocked out by large thick sheets of titanium white. There is a lot of controversy over how much of these final paintings is de Kooning’s work and how much is the work of his assistants. How much of this work is the creation of his imagination, and how much is it shaped by his growing decrepitude and Alzheimer’s. I think whether the assistants painted most of these or not, de Kooning was clearly in charge and they were taking orders (Matisse did the same thing at the end of his life when he was too frail to work directly, supervising assistants). As for the Alzheimer’s, this would not be the first time in his life that de Kooning worked without full possession of his conscious faculties. In his younger days, he was as bad an alcoholic as Pollock. Whereas long benders kept Pollock from working, de Kooning worked right through them with no discernible sacrifice of quality.

De Kooning stopped painting entirely after 1987 and closed his studio. He was not told of Elaine’s death in 1989. He finally died in 1997 at the age of 92 and after a career of more than 70 years.

De Kooning in his studio in Springs, Long Island, 1981

For Willem de Kooning, a lifelong jazz fan, whose own work was full of riffs, here are Charlie Parker and Miles Davis together.

Waltzing Into Another Year

2012-01-02T09:21:00.006-05:00

"The situation is hopeless, but not serious" -- Viennese proverb

Sorry about Willi und Franz staring at us here.

The best part of the whole movie:

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T07:35:00.003-05:00

I'm grateful for old friends and new ones, and for all of my friends through the internet. A Happy and Prosperous New Year to you all!

To celebrate, here is my all time favorite Busby Berkeley number where he goes all dark and expressionist with a disturbing twist at the end.

Happy New Year!!

The Ultimate Answer

2011-12-29T20:38:00.006-05:00

On my Facebook page and on IT's blog, people have been discussing relations between religion and atheism. I say let's settle this thing once and for all and use a computer.

Well, there you have it.

What Happened to Christmas?

2011-12-27T08:27:00.073-05:00

I must confess that Christmas is not my favorite holiday, probably for my own reasons. My birthday is on December 25th, so I’ve always felt overshadowed by the holiday. It’s a little like not having a birthday. The presents weren’t the problem. I could not have a party that day, or even get together with friends and go out. I’d have to be like the Queen and have 2 birthdays, the actual one, and an official one more convenient for people to celebrate.
Also, after doing 6 years time in retail, it’s hard to come out of that experience without a very jaundiced view of the whole holiday. I can be as sour on the Christmas holiday as any atheist celebrating Festivus. Even in the midst of celebrations that I truly love, the whole thing sometimes has a forced treacley quality about it.

Like almost everyone brought up in Christendom, I loved Christmas as a child. The smell of Christmas evergreens transports me back 45 years to my own early childhood. So what happened? Is it simply a matter of growing up? Or did the holiday itself change somehow in recent years?

To me, Christmas these days can be an unholy consumer culture potlatch with all of its former sentiments turned into sales pitches. Small wonder that the relentless and ruthlessly enforced good cheer drives the grief-stricken into even deeper despair. Our geniuses in marketing and advertising research always conspire to find new ways to squeeze more profits out of the holiday and make it ever more dreary. Needs and desires must be created where there were none before, compounding the sense of frustration and disappointment that comes with the whole gift exchange, and driving up higher and higher sales as people try to fill the new found emptiness. There are times when I think Christmas is becoming almost as dreary as airline travel, and I wonder why people still bother with it (a growing number of people don’t; a number of people I know who still celebrate the holiday have dropped the whole gift exchange part of it entirely).

I make a distinction now between that annual actuarial economic event called Christmas, and the religious holiday it replaced formerly known as The Feast of the Nativity. I usually focus my attentions on the latter and deal with the former as little as possible. The happiest and most satisfying part of it for me these days is Midnight Mass at my parish church. It’s a beautiful ceremony with a lot of before and after feasting that usually begins at 6PM and doesn’t end until the wee hours of the morning. We usually have beautiful music, ancient pageantry, and a packed house. I usually play a small part in the liturgy, which is deeply satisfying. There is lots of gemütlichkeit (for lack of a better word) in the informal dinner at a neighborhood restaurant for all those participating in the service, and more in the little party in the parish gym that follows the Eucharist. A new part of Christmas that really pulls the sting out of my birthday problem is Facebook. I used to feel very isolated on Christmas, and now I get pages full of birthday greetings from around the world. I love it! Thank God for social media!

Christmas at my parish this year (photos courtesy of Vince Chiumento):

Yours Truly on the left carrying a candle

The crowds watching our rector, Reverend Mother Stacey, lay the infant effigy in the creche

Our Italian Rococo Baby Jesus all strapped into his safety belt for the procession to the creche

A 13th century fresco by Giotto's shop showing St. Francis instituting the creche at Greccio. The painting shows a scene close to what still takes place in many churches (including ours) to this day. The original creche at Greccio was in a cave with a live baby playing the starring role.

We also had magnificent music such as this Mass setting by Cesar Franck, though not quite this lavishly orchestrated. We had a harpist, a cellist, a very hardworking organist, in addition to our magnificent choir.

In former times, Christmas was a rich and long holiday. Today’s secular celebration only lasts for a day, but the official religious feast lasts 12 days, from December 25th to Epiphany on January 6th. In between are other feasts like that of St. Stephen, Holy Name, the 2 Sundays of Christmas, etc.

Christmas, like all Christian holy days, has a lot of pre-Christian and pagan content. To all the secularists and neo-pagans who love pointing this out to me, I give the same answer that Italians give to American evangelicals who point out the pagan origins of all of those ex-votos and miracle working images in Italian churches, “e allora” (so what?). We all know the ancient pre-Christian origins of Christmas trees (I can remember a time when many churches banned Christmas trees from their premises for that very reason). Yule logs are definitely from ancient pre-Christian Europe, a legacy of ancient solstice rites. There are a number of extreme Christian fundamentalist denominations, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that consider Christmas to be a pagan holiday and will have nothing to do with it.

A Yule Log

Probably the tastiest manifestation of the Yule Log, the French holiday dessert buche de noel.

The pagan content of Christmas and so many Christian holy days is perhaps a legacy of ancient missionaries like St. Patrick and the Irish monks who restored Christianity to Europe after the tribal invasions of Europe in the wake of Rome’s fall. The early church fathers like St. Jerome were revolutionaries who wanted nothing to do with former religions. Christians were supposed to smash the idols and plant the cross. The missionaries were pragmatists (unlike the Church Fathers) who used the native religions of various peoples as a path to the Gospel. Patrick’s shamrock is the most famous example of this pragmatic hybridization. Ancient Irish Gospel books and stone crosses swarm with pre-Christian patterns and images that lost none of their magical powers in their conversion to Christianity. Frequently, pre-Christian rituals and practices survived the transition through widespread popular usage and pragmatic tolerance. Christmas and other Christian holy days are a hybrid of Christian and pre-Christian beliefs and practices. Religion is a messy and untidy business, as untidy as people themselves. Those who would tidy it up frequently do more harm than good.

In pre-industrial times, Christmas was a long celebration in the darkest days of winter when the fields were fallow after the last harvest. There was little to do except to dispel the darkness with as much feasting as possible. The calendar of religious feasts (much more of them then than now) provided necessary breaks and opportunities to blow off steam in an age when labor was always hard and seldom rewarding.

From the most famous of all books of hours, Les Tres Riches Heures painted by the Limborg Brothers for the Duc du Berry in the 15th century, showing the month of January. The Duke seated before a fire screen on the right feasts lavishly in one of his many chateaux. The guest Bishop of Chartres in the center exclaims at the lavish gold and silver ware.

The month of February from the Tres Riches Heures showing what the peasants on the Duke's estates would be doing in winter, struggling to stay warm.

A very original conception of Christmas by Pieter Brueghel the Elder; if you look carefully, you can see Mary and Joseph arriving in a 16th century Flemish village in December transforming it into Bethlehem. On the lower right, children play with toys on the ice. On the left is a busy inn with hogs being slaughtered and bled for Christmas feasting (for that legendary boar's head and for blood sausages). Snow covered casks of ale have just arrived. And crowds of people gather to be counted in the census and pay the tax described in the Biblical account. A big Christmas wreath hangs over the entrance to the inn. On the upper left through the tree branches, a red winter sun rises.

The weekend is an invention of the American labor movement, and like so many inventions of the labor movement, it is in the process of being eliminated (the dark side of the repeal of Sunday closing hours together with the reality of global markets that never sleep). Those celebrations could be rowdy, lewd, and crude as people let loose. The celebrations of the Christmas holidays in all their drunken revelry survived the Reformation, even in the very Calvinist Dutch Republic, celebrations of everything from Saint Nicholas Day to Epiphany were every bit as rough and drunken as in former times, as the artist and innkeeper Jan Steen records in his paintings.

Jan Steen, The Feast of Saint Nicholas

Jan Steen, Twelfth Night

Christmas almost did not survive the Industrial Revolution. Time was now money, and the integrated global economy no longer had time available for the proles to frolic. Production schedules and profit margins had to be met ASAP. Christmas became attenuated down to one day on the 25th day of December, and frequently not even that.

As Adam Gopnik points out in a recent article in The New Yorker, what we in the English speaking world call Christmas is entirely an invention of the Victorian era, from Santa Claus to Christmas cards.

A sampling of some Victorian Christmas cards:

Christmas as we've inherited it from the Victorians is the invention of writers, especially Charles Dickens, with reformist sympathies eager to relieve some of the brutality of life for the toiling classes without necessarily sacrificing their own comfort. Those of a much less generous nature saw the humanitarian reforming agenda behind the melodrama and sentimentality of Dickens’ serialized stories. Thomas Carlyle, in words and tone that sound like an angry pundit from a libertarian think tank today, said Dickens “thought that men ought to be buttered up and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right.”

Indeed there is a Tea Party affiliated economist today who thinks Carlyle doesn’t go far enough:

Dickens's ignorance of basic economics would, if acted upon by Scrooge, have produced adverse consequences for Cratchit himself. Had Ebeneezer paid Cratchit a higher salary for his work, he [Scrooge] would very likely have been able to attract a larger number of job applicants from which he could have selected employees whose enhanced marginal productivity might have earned Scrooge even greater profits. At such a point, terminating Cratchit's employment would have been an economically rational act by Scrooge. As matters now stand, Scrooge's employment policies have left him with the kind of groveling, ergophobic, humanoid sponge we have come to know as Bob Cratchit; a man we are expected to take into our hearts as an expression of some warped sense of the "Christmas spirit." Being an astute businessmen, Ebeneezer Scrooge was well aware of the marketplace maxim that "you get what you pay for."
Unaccustomed as Commissar Dickens is to the informal processes of the marketplace, we would not expect him to tell us anything about competitive alternatives for Cratchit's services. Perhaps there are employers out there prepared to pay him a higher wage than he is receiving from my client. If this is so, then we must ask ourselves: did Bob Cratchit simply lack the ambition to seek higher-paying employment? It would appear so. At no time do we see this man exhibiting any interest in trying to better his and his family's lot.

Social Darwinists then and now don’t like Dickens, and in their heart of hearts, they really don’t like Christmas and what it stands for either.

A big problem with the Victorian Christmas is that it created a candied version of the original Christian story of the Incarnation. We can blame the Victorians for today’s Nativity Scene with Gentle Joseph, Mary in Blue, The Sweet Baby Jesus, The Shepherds, and The Little Drummer Boy. It’s a soft candy version of what is really a very dark story. Christ was born a bastard to an unwed teenaged mother, the result of a divine act of adultery that transformed poor fiance Joseph into history’s most famous cuckold. Christ was born on the run and spent His early childhood in hiding or in exile with a price on His head. His parents arrived in Bethlehem to satisfy some bureaucratic command from a far-away colonial power, to be counted in a census designed to control and tax a rebellious population. His mother was a pariah, and certainly people talked about her fiancé. They were astonished that he would keep her around, especially in her condition. The innkeeper turned her away probably because of her scandal as much as any over-crowding. She was forced to give birth out back in a stable with the animals. Then God Almighty appeared on earth as a completely helpless crying drooling infant whose diapers needed to be changed. A local warlord and client of the colonial power heard some wild prophecy about a king born in Bethlehem and sent in his military to murder every child under age 2 in the town. The little family barely escaped in time and fled to Egypt as homeless refugees. As so many who have commented on this story have pointed out, the Nativity story, literally true or not, graphically demonstrates what sort of Messiah this was to be. Bethlehem today is actually a lot closer to Bethlehem then than we would care to admit; a small out-of-the-way town occupied by a colonial power and deeply divided by sectarian and national conflicts.

The security wall near Bethlehem

Manger Square in Bethlehem with the Church of the Nativity; note all the little security precautions like all the bollards to direct traffic.

There are some on the left, Christian and not, who recognize the scandal of Christ’s birth and want to recover some of the original revolutionary challenge to established power so heavily implied in this story. For example, here is a recent Christmas message issued by Occupy Denver:

Today, some are celebrating an underprivileged mom giving birth in a stable, to a baby who grew up to be a prominent activist for peace, love and anti-capitalist values; who preferred the company of honest prostitutes, the poor and the disabled than that of the religious or financial elite; who partook in radical direct action against the banking system and who, at the conclusion of his life, was executed publicly as an enemy of state. Jesus was a revolutionary -- Merry Christmas

Indeed, Christmas is the one time of year when Mainstream America celebrates the birth of a bastard child to an unwed teenaged mother. Ben Franklin may have said that “God helps those who help themselves,” but it’s only the wishful thinking of some Americans determined to believe that God Himself ordained that “Nothing $ucceed$ like $ucce$$,” that put that phrase into Scripture. Jesus actually said quite the opposite throughout the course of His short life on earth.

The Captains of Industry and Masters of the Universe soon figured out that there was a lot of money to be made off of Christmas, and off of the Victorian version of it. And now our marketing wizards are busy creating desires and needs where there were none before. Christmas is now the year’s biggest retail accounting event.

The secularization of Christmas may bother Bill O’Reilly, but it does not bother me. Asking people to believe in virgin birth these days is asking an awful lot. The return of pre-Christian Yule by all sorts of Neo-Pagan groups doesn’t bother me either. Why shouldn’t Christmas have more than one meaning? Everybody needs a party at the darkest time of year.

What bothers me is the commercialization of it all, and how the drive for ever higher sales and profits so warps the holiday in both its sacred and secular meanings. Commerce transforms a time to get together, to make a little light in the dark, to eat, drink, and be merry, to enjoy a little life when all the world is in frozen suspension, into an orgy of greed and selfishness. Such a world of pervasive corruption and casual brutality is a gold mine for satire. One of the sharpest and most brilliant of current satirists gives The Holiday Season created for us by our corporate Betters the send up it deserves.

But hey, there's still 10 days left, so let's party.

Person of the Year

2011-12-26T10:15:00.006-05:00

Counterlight's Peculiar's first annual Person of the Year,

Mohammed Bouazizi

It's Still Christmas

2011-12-26T08:23:00.001-05:00

Louie Crew sent this to me for my birthday yesterday.

It Ain't Over Yet!

2011-12-26T07:59:00.002-05:00

Still 11 days left in Christmas, 2 days left in Hannukkah, the Solstice is over but the Yule log is still with us.

Happy Holidays from Brooklyn and from Hollis, Queens!

Christmas

2011-12-23T17:04:00.005-05:00

On Christmas, every child is the Christ Child.

Iraqi orphan

Santa Maria Gloriosa

2011-12-23T09:00:00.088-05:00

A 12th century apse mosaic from Torcello near Venice

The Virgin of Vladimir, a magnificent 12th century icon from Constantinople sent to Kiev. A painting that has been worshiped to death; probably all that is left of the original are the faces of the Mother and Child. The rest is later restorations.

The Donskaya Virgin by Theophanes the Greek, a variation on the Virgin of Vladimir by one of the few medieval Russian icon painters who was not ordained.

The Blue Virgin from one of the oldest surviving windows in Chartres Cathedral, from the end of the 12th century

The North Rose window of Chartres Cathedral given by Queen Blanche of Castille. The window is about Christ's first coming. The Virgin and Child sit in the center surrounded by the ancestors of Christ described in the opening of the Gospel of Matthew,and by prophets who foretold His coming.

Fra Angelico, The Linaioli Tabernacle

Fra Angelico, The Cortona Polyptych

Donatello, The Madonna of the Clouds

Luca della Robbia, The Madonna of the Apple

Jan Van Eyck, The Dresden Triptych

Jan Van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. The artists of the Renaissance identified the Virgin Mary with the natural world, especially in this painting where Jan Van Eyck includes one of his most splendid landscapes in the background, a view of a city and surrounding countryside with distant mountains lit by the morning sunlight.

Jan Van Eyck, detail of the landscape from the Rolin Madonna. The painting is probably based on the Venite recited at the morning office in most books of hours at the time. As the Venite is a hymn to God the Creator, so is this painting as we view a sparkling morning landscape through the Trinitarian symbolism of three arches.

Rogier Van Der Weyden, center panel of the Columba Altarpiece

Rogier Van Der Weyden, detail from the Columba Altarpiece, to my mind, one of the finest Madonnas ever to come out of the Flemish painting tradition.

Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranite

Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat; Botticelli was a conservative reactionary who wanted to return to something like the romance and transcendence of earlier Pre-Renaissance painting. In an age when most artists used oil paints, Botticelli resolutely painted in tempera, by then a very old fashioned painting medium. Like all conservatives who want to return to the past, he ended up innovating. Mimicking the styles of the past would lead into the dead end of pastiche. So Botticelli created a very original and personal style.

Giovanni Bellini, a Renaissance Madonna in a beautiful landscape with echos of the old Byzantine icon tradition well known in Bellini's native Venice.

Giovanni Bellini, The Barbarigo Madonna; one of Bellini's best and least visited Madonnas in a church on the island of Murano near Venice.

Giovanni Bellini, detail from the Barbarigo Madonna, a splendid landscape.

Titian, Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine and John the Baptist; Titian's magnificent continuation of the natural poetry begun by Bellini.

Raphael, The Sistine Madonna; There's good reason why Raphael's Madonnas are such classics and so popular. He creates the impression that the Virgin and Child with 2 saints are descending from the realms of light to greet us. Raphael perfectly calibrates just the right amount of emotion, compositional harmony, and dynamism to create a perfectly gratifying image. This was the last Madonna Raphael painted entirely by his own hand. It was originally commissioned by Pope Julius II for the church of San Sisto in Piacenza. The Pope intended it to be a gift to Piacenza for the city's support for his military campaign to subdue the Papal States in Emilia Romagna. After the Pope's unexpected death, Raphael turned it into a memorial picture including Pope Julius' features on the figure of Saint Sixtus. Some historians argue that the wooden part that the adorable cherubini are leaning on is the Pope's coffin. Perhaps. St. Barbara on the right looks, not out at us, but down at the cherubs and the "coffin." At that time, St. Barbara was invoked at the time of death, along with the Virgin Mary. The parting curtain can be seen in a lot of Italian tomb art since the 13th century. It is as though the bed curtains part and the Virgin Mary and the host of Heaven arrive to greet the deceased. To my mind, it's a Christian version of a Japanese Buddhist raigo painting.

Correggio, Rest on the Flight Into Egypt with St, Francis

Nicholas Poussin, Holy Family on the Steps; Poussin's most magnificent variation on Raphael's work.

Rembrandt, Virgin and Child, etching; a Protestant interpretation of a traditionally Catholic subject

Giovanni Batista Tiepolo; one of Tiepolo's regal Rococo Madonnas

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, pastel; not a religious picture, but I believe it belongs here. Her work is in that long tradition of Madonnas that begins with the Renaissance, though here secularized and brought into the modern era. While Cassatt discarded the transcendence, she lost none of the tenderness inherent in the subject matter.

Henry Moore, Virgin and Child carved for St. Matthew's Church in Northampton in 1943; a 20th century attempt to return to some kind of suggestion of transcendence in an age where all the traditional language and imagery of religion are in doubt.

My favorite remarks on this subject come not from Dante or Saint Bernard, but from a scientist and author, a secularized Jew, Dr. Jacob Bronowski:

Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, HG Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, for a thousand years. But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead, ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island -- why, they even look like Mussolini! That is not the essence of the human personality, even in terms of biology. Biologically, a human being is changeable, sensitive, mutable, fitted to so many environments, and not static. The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, The Holy Family.
When I was a boy in my teens, I used to walk on Saturday afternoons from the East End of London to the British Museum, in order to look at the single statue from the Easter Islands which somehow they had not got inside the Museum. So I am fond of these ancient ancestral faces. But in the end, all of them are not worth one child's dimpled face.

Happy Holidays to All.

Vaclav Havel

2011-12-23T07:20:00.011-05:00

Vaclav Havel, who is to be buried today, belonged to that rarest of species, the leader who took on an empire, and won without firing a shot. He was a playwright with roots in absurdist and surrealist literature. Like his fellow Czech national, Franz Kafka, he realized that the absurdity and misery reflected in his work came not from his psyche, but from the reality of life under the heel of arbitrary and lawless power. For Kafka, it was the dying absolute monarchy of Austria-Hungary. For Havel, it started with Hitler's occupation and extended into the long years of Soviet domination. The basic requirements of his literary work forced him into politics. The very absurdity that Havel wrote about could be turned back upon the quisling regime and create a space where people could breathe freely, if only for a moment. He needed that little moment of space in order to write. Almost against his will, he found himself involved in dissident politics, and at the forefront of the effort to end the Soviet occupation of his country.

While the North Koreans wail over the death of their god king, and others mourn for Christopher Hitchens, I'm saving my grief for Havel who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk.

Havel was a lifelong Zappa fan.

Note to My Readers

2011-12-16T08:13:00.008-05:00

... all 2 of you out there.

This blog has been rather spotty the past few days. I'm buried in work right now with the end of the semester. Believe it or not, I have a lot of projects underway in my studio, but none of them are getting finished and are on hold. Not only the workload, but also some necessary construction prevents me from going there. They are installing new windows and heating in my studio, but they are also having plumbing problems in the building (as in port-o-potties in the back lot).

On top of all that, I'm back on the insomnia/ depression treadmill up at 3AM playing solitaire and feeling like crap in the morning. And yes, I do go to bed earlier these days, usually around 10PM.

Above all, I'm feeling an overwhelming sense of futility these days. Maybe it's just the annual holiday blues and it will pass as soon as Xmas is over.

I hope to be back to regular posting shortly after Christmas, if not before.

And since Brad Evans, our resident sociopath, is back in business, I'm taking the comments offline. If you wish to speak to me, then do so on Facebook or by email.

Two Cheers for Obama

2011-12-15T20:07:00.015-05:00

Barack Obama is the ultimate dream date heart-breaker. One minute he makes your fondest dreams come true, and then the next he's flirting with your worst enemy right in front of you.

Barack Obama is the best president on gay issues ever, hands down. Far more than any of his predecessors (and more than his successors I fear), he's been out front and in the lead on gay civil rights. Of course it's political calculation, but that doesn't preclude genuine conviction and some courageous leadership. Ending the ban on gays serving openly in the military was a major accomplishment, and in the teeth of a hostile Republican House. He's now out front of Europe on the issue of international recognition for the basic human rights of gays and lesbians.

One of his unsung accomplishments is in the area of education, especially the student loan program. He brought a certain measure of sanity to a program long out of control by taking the profiteers out of it. Tuition hikes are still out of control, but at least some measure of law and order returns to the once very lawless and profitable business of interest, penalties, and fees. Loan repayments are still a huge burden on the young, affecting their decisions about careers (there's a reason why a lot of MDs these days are foreign; most Americans can't afford the quarter million dollar debt load to go to medical school, while other countries see paying the high tuition and expenses as an investment in their best and brightest).

The health insurance reform plan is a lot less than the Medicare-for-all solution that I'd like to see. But, it is the most significant piece of progressive legislation since the Medicare Act of 1965. It will end many of the worst abuses by the insurance and health provider industries. It will make health insurance available for many more people, though not for everyone.

Barack Obama decisively ended the reckless go-it-alone cowboy foreign policy of the second Bush Administration. While the damage is not undone, there is a new and more cooperative approach to the rest of the world that goes a long way toward restoring at least some of the lost authority and power of the USA. Obama deserves credit for ending the Iraq War and drawing a line under the Afghan War.

And yet, he is the whole reason the Occupy movement exists.

Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, depends on corporate patronage, and most of it came from Wall Street. That patronage kept him from sensible policies like seizing and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks that even the Reagan Administration used on the collapsing savings and loan industry. Wall Street influence on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue kept post-crash regulatory reforms very minimal and full of loopholes. The SEC remains an emasculated agency. The current reforms are far short of a necessary revival of the Glass-Steagall Act that once forbade banks to gamble with depositors' assets.

That same financial industry influence keeps any real relief for underwater homeowners a very remote prospect.

The House Republicans humiliated the President in last summer's budget battles. He allowed himself to be humiliated with his repeated preemptive surrenders on major budget policies. He nearly lost my support entirely when he offered near unilateral surrender on Social Security and Medicare. I'm willing to delay and even halt progress in the name of political expediency, but I'm not willing to go backward.

Obama's absence on the issue of economic justice is the whole reason for the rise of Occupy Wall Street. That's the problem with being a progressive. The leaders of the Democratic Party are usually in bed with the very people making life miserable for everyone else. As a consequence, the rank and file must take matters into their own hands.

His worst offense of all is his continued expansion of the National Security State begun by Cheney and Company. Obama's decision not to veto a bill mandating the arbitrary detention of American citizens by the military puts the long term health of our democracy in doubt.

On some issues, Obama is another FDR. On most others, he's another Grover Cleveland.

Since it looks like the Republicans are offering us a choice between Gordon Gekko and WC Fields with a back up chorus of assorted crazies, then there is no question who this blog will endorse in the coming election year.

Four more years of the black guy in the White House. We could do a whole lot worse.

Is There Something In The Water?

2011-12-11T08:01:00.022-05:00

Unfortunately for the future plutonomy, it looks like the unwashed masses will not make a return to serfdom quite so smoothly and quietly after all.

It's hard to return to servitude and humiliation after tasting freedom and dignity.

Expectation, the spark of revolution. Something to contemplate for Advent.

Moscow

London

Cairo

Tel Aviv

Santiago, Chile

New York

Dallas

Oh Hell, It's Christmas

2011-12-09T19:24:00.016-05:00

And after all these years, I finally found an Xmas album that I can really enjoy.

Christmas with The Vandals

Duck and cover Bill O'Reilly because here comes the War on Christmas!
Bombs away!

Let's start with the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Up yours Tchaikovsky!

Here's a swift kick for Santa.

So far, I think this is my favorite, "A Gun For Christmas."

And here's what it's all about...

Let's end this with a little heat-warming fellowship:

"If God came down on Christmas Day, I know exactly what He'd say. He'd say Oi to the punks and Oi to the skins, but Oi to the world and everybody wins!"

The War on Christmas, Why We Fight

The annual Christmas treacle with the enforced good cheer (plus the memory of 6 long years in retail) brings out this side of me.

Enjoy.

EXTRA:

Here are the artists. Not exactly the Longine Symphonette.

Dying

2011-12-08T16:22:00.027-05:00

Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Extreme Unction

A friendly acquaintance of mine died yesterday of cancer. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in June and died yesterday; in my experience, a swift cancer death. I visited him for the last time on Sunday in a hospice in Brooklyn. All the years that I knew him, he was a fairly robust looking man. When I saw him on Sunday, he was shrunken down to barely 100 pounds. He was almost blind. Even with a continuous morphine drip, he was in so much pain that he could hardly bear to be touched. I was told that 2 weeks before he was able to walk and join friends for lunch at a diner near the hospice. He deteriorated very fast. I'm reasonably sure that he greeted his end as a relief.

I've visited dying friends and family many times before, but each experience is always deeply painful. Dying is so horrible.

Mercifully, he died in the company of many old friends who visited him faithfully through the whole duration of his illness. One of his oldest friends took on the responsibility of caring for him, spending 8 to 10 hours daily at the hospice with him. I give credit to my parish priests who visited him daily while he was in the hospice, as he had requested. Not every church would do that for a parishoner. Not every church has the resources for that kind of care.

***

And then there is the case of Jacob Rogers in Tennessee another teen who killed himself after constant bullying because he was perceived to be gay. His parents are so poor that they could not afford to bury him.
Within 2 hours, the readers of JoeMyGod and 2 other blogs raised $5000 to pay for his funeral.

While my friend died an untimely death among old friends, Jacob Rogers died his untimely death in a terrible solitude.

Dying is so horrible.

And in the face of it, all we have is the love of family and friends, seen and unseen, and for many of us, a hope -- and only a hope, not a certainty -- that dying is not the end of the whole story, that old things shall be made new again.

Yes, This Blog Will Endorse Obama

2011-12-08T16:12:00.008-05:00

Because of this ...

The sales staff down at the used car lot.

... a great argument for taking the bus.

When the party agenda is based on cherished prejudices instead of actual experience, then these are the sorts of folks you can expect to run on that agenda.

And of course, there's this reason:

A sloshing bucket o'slime.

I hope this sets some minds at ease.

The New Nationalism

2011-12-07T07:23:00.010-05:00

In light of President Obama's speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas on the centennial of a once famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt. It might be worth pondering some passages from Roosevelt's speech a century ago.

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.

...

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?

Now, this means that our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice-full, fair, and complete-and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

...

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

Pearl Harbor Day 70

2011-12-07T06:45:00.004-05:00

Instead of the usual film of the destruction of the Arizona, I want to remember the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor with this poster from World War II, a reminder of what that war was all about, and of what we still struggle for today.

I remember today my older cousin James Corey who was a Marine stationed on the Arizona when the bombs struck this morning 70 years ago, and survived to fight again in the Pacific. He was one of 13 survivors from that ship.

Hillary Clinton's Speech on LGBT Rights to the UN in Geneva

2011-12-06T21:14:00.010-05:00

This is historic. Never in my younger years did I ever imagine that I would live to hear such a speech.

Eleanor Roosevelt of fond memory with what may be her greatest accomplishment. This document was belittled and ignored all through the Cold War, but now seems to be coming into its own as a major historical watershed.

Someone else who richly deserves credit for the UN Human Rights Declaration, Dag Hamarskjöld, who would have been particularly gratified by today's speech.

And this speech is a culmination of a long hard journey that began with these folks in 1969.

The Badass New Yorker

2011-12-05T17:18:00.006-05:00

"Ooo! Jesus is coming back! I love him! I hope I can get tickets!"

"Feed and walk my children, I'll be home later."

"Oh look! a publicist with somewhere else to be!"

Very funny, and creepily accurate.

Hat tip to JoeMyGod.

What's At Stake

2011-12-04T20:04:00.002-05:00

Here is a lengthy quote from a new star troll over at Thinking Anglicans. This is so wrong-headed and wrong-hearted on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.

Marriage does not come into the sphere or ecclesiology but moral theology; the first is confined to Church order. All of the conditions defined by the Prayer Book lead to the ultimate aim of creating new life, of increaing and multiplying, of stabilising society. Homosexuality does not enter the questions. Barrenness has never been a ground for nullity; failure to consummate a marriage has. But I believe that fertile couples who want to marry without the intention of having children should question their reasons. In the Catholic Church this provides grounds for annulment.

Patriarchy does not enter homosexual relationships unless they are trying to perpetrate a parody of the norm. For illumination on the woman as chattel myth, read Ephesians which defines marriage as a state founded on equality and complementarity. What radical homosexuals of the past resented was the imposition of a social norm on a condition that was inimical to the applied model. Why, they asked, should we be pressured into adopting a heterosexual lifestyle when we are not heterosexuals? Marriage was seen, rightly I believe, as the heart of the heterosexual norm.

I am sorry that Nat has only heard of heterosexual life, rather than actually knowing it. The watershed for heterosexual physical relations was the availability of the contraceptive pill which for the first time put women on an equal basis for promiscuity as men.
This led to the present sexual turmoil. The pill does not affect homosexuals because they are incapable of creating life. But look at the results of excessive promiscuity in the 1970s, the era when the concept of gay 'marriage' was derided by many homosexuals. That lay in AIDS which has been responsible for millions of deaths on a universal scale and has spread into heterosexual life with devastating consequences. I support a charity set up to help children infected by AIDS in the womb and I have seen personally the devastation it has caused. Nat may, or may not, know that AIDS was once known as the gay plague, not least among homosexuals themselves.
Posted by: John Bowles on Sunday, 4 December 2011 at 10:25am GMT

As I said, there is so much wrong that I don't know where to begin, so I won't.

Instead, I'll take this whole argument out of the realm of abstraction with this:

Dropping Out of Church

2011-12-03T17:52:00.014-05:00

According to a report I heard on the radio, The drop out rate from Christianity, all of it from fundamentalist to liberal, among people aged 15 to 29 is 60%. That's right, sixty percent. If that was a school district, entire schools would be closing down and mayors would be declaring martial law.

There are a lot of very existential issues behind this statistic for us to ponder.

Why is this? The radio report cites a number of reasons, but the primary reason is one I've thought about for a long time. Kids live in a world dominated by radical changes in science and technology that affect all of us personally. Christianity carries with it a huge amount of supernatural content that becomes more and more of a problem, if not an outright liability, in an age where mechanical explanations for natural phenomena continue to have dramatic success.

Another big reason is cultural and social changes. The younger generations are comfortable in a much more cosmopolitan world than the rest of us older folks are. I've observed this myself. They move through a world of myriad cultural differences with an easy unselfconsciousness that I find astonishing (I was born in Civil Rights era Texas where EVERYONE was very anxiously self conscious about all kinds of differences). Teh Gay, which is tearing churches apart, is not an issue at all for most of the kids, even for those who consider themselves to be conservative (a difference I've also noted over the years teaching).

Apparently, most younger people's experience of church is one of constraint, backwardness, and superstition.

Do we think this whole Christian thing is worth keeping? Is there a distinction between the Christian faith and the Christian religion? Most churches would say "no," but are they right? I think not. I don't think what could be called Christendom, that whole spectrum of cultural and institutional identities around the Christian Evangel, has much of a future. I can foresee a near future in which the historic and not-so-historic churches will be as past as the religion of ancient Egypt. Will Christianity survive the loss of its institutions? Should it survive? Maybe, but it may continue in forms that might be hard for us to recognize as Christian or even as religious. What's worth saving and what's worth discarding? Yes, God is eternal, but we of a more universalist bent proclaim a God who is beyond any one religion, and beyond religion itself. Does God worry about Christianity surviving? Should He? Should we?

Do we Christian progressives have a future? Perhaps, but only as small mammals in a world dominated by huge flesh-eating dinosaurs. The right and the fundamentalists seem to have successfully copyrighted Christianity. It is their terms that dominate all of the public debate about the faith these days. It seems we shall have to make our way between a throwback to 19th century Positivism that's far more zealous today, or a throwback to late Medieval Christianity that's become more legalistic and crazier.

I love my Episcopal parish with its 1821 Federal style church and its high church liturgy. I love the heavy silver Victorian processional cross in the sacristy. I love our magnificent choir singing Mass settings by Palestrina and Monteverdi. I love the Book of Common Prayer. I love what all the congregations I've belonged to have done for their larger communities. I love all the remarkable and generous people I've known through the Church for decades. And yet, I cannot help but feel that our days are numbered.

I think our future will ultimately be in house-churches, and even in small lefty churches that meet in the back of a bar like this one near where I live.

So, what do you think?

EXTRA:

Speaking of small mammals in a world dominated by huge flesh-eating dinosaurs, our parish is getting threats from a far-right terrorist group (apparently it's one of those groups that murders abortion providers). We haven't exactly been singled out, but we are one of a number of gay-friendly congregations getting hate mail and threats to our staff and to some of our parishoners (not me, I get enough hate and abuse from the trolls on Thinking Anglicans and Fr. Harris' blog). The FBI has been contacted.

Economic Thoughts For The Day

2011-12-02T21:01:00.006-05:00

**Considering all the recent revelations about the 2008 bank bailout, it would have been cheaper, and more productive, just to write a $25000 check to everyone with a Social Security number, a point Atrios (among others) has been making for a long time now.

**I'm sure that Spain, Greece, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Ireland will be delighted to cede a significant portion of their sovereignty to a central European bank dominated by Germany. Why let a few really bad memories stand between them and more austerity? What could possibly go wrong?
The idea of impoverishing for prosperity makes about as much sense to me as fucking for chastity (to paraphrase an old joke from the Vietnam War).
Maybe it would be cheaper and more productive to write a check for 15000 Euros to everyone in the Eurozone with a Social Security number.

All the world seems to be ruled by a mean stingy rich uncle in the Mafia (or by the ghost of Leona Helmsley who disinherited her kids and left all her fortune to her dog).

Mahler

2011-12-02T20:38:00.001-05:00

... and very dark Mahler. Symphony #10, the Adagio

Jamiel Terry

2011-12-02T07:25:00.006-05:00

Randall Terry's adopted son Jamiel, who came out as gay about 5 years ago, died yesterday in a car crash in Georgia.

In case some of you don't remember, Terry publicly disowned his son, and said this about him to beliefnet:

For me, the issue is that there has been an unbelievable lack of honesty. For me the breach is that I cannot have him in my home while I know that at any point, he could take pictures and sell them. I'm not going to have that kind of intrusion into my home.

And here's more from the beliefnet interview with Randall Terry about his son:

You regard homosexuality not as something in a person's nature but a behavior one falls into. Is that correct?

Behaviors are a choice. I do not contend that they ask for the feelings anymore than any of us ask for feelings. Feelings are sometimes out of our control. Behavior has to do with choices.

Have your views shifted at all since you found out Jamiel is gay?

No. There are three options when you find out a family member is homosexual. One is accept them and their lifestyle as if it's normal. Two is to reject them and sever your relationship. Three is to love them unconditionally, but to tell them you do not accept their behavior as normal, and to tell them the truth. If I love my son, I can't say to him, "Hey, you're committing suicide on the installment plan. This is a great lifestyle." I have to be honest with him. Take out the word homosexuality and put in alcoholism or put in drug addiction. Would you tell a drug addict, "I accept you. This is your choice, this is your life and I will stand by you"? The average death age of a male homosexual is 42 years old because of disease, because of suicide, because of alcoholism, because of drugs, because of violence. It's just not a good world. It's a self-abusive, self-destructive sexual addiction.

As imperfect as my parents were, thank God I didn't have Randall Terry for a father, adopted or otherwise.

May Jamiel find the love his father denied him in this life.

Who Is Occupy Wall Street?

2011-12-01T15:58:00.015-05:00

Ray Kachel in Liberty Plaza/ Zuccotti Park a few weeks ago.

George Packer wrote an outstanding article in The New Yorker on a handful of the occupiers just before Liberty Plaza was cleared out by the cops. The article focuses on 53 year old Ray Kachel from Seattle, whose story before Occupy is very compelling and illustrative of what happened to a lot of highly skilled and educated professionals over the past 3 years. Mr. Kachel, a former high tech jack of all trades from Seattle, once did quite well and prospered doing odd jobs and freelance work in the once broadly tolerant culture of Seattle's tech industry. His opportunities all dried up over the last 2 years. He spent his last $250 on a bus ticket from Seattle to New York to join Occupy, and is now officially homeless on the streets of New York.

Packer concentrates on Kachel, but uses him as a means of getting to know a number of other people in and around the encampment, all of whom have their own remarkable stories. Kachel, and a number of others in the encampment, found friendship and community for the first time in their lives in Liberty Plaza.

I must admit that I had similar experiences in political activity from various gay causes to union organizing. There is that rapturous experience of discovering fellow travelers, and the pleasant surprise of finding them in unexpected places. And there is the thrilling experience of waking up from the usual dull resignation we all live in to discover that together, we might actually be able to move that huge inert tonnage called history even a fraction of an inch. These experiences could be described as "pentecostal."

I still keep in contact with friends I made during an effort to unionize a Borders Books store. That was more than 12 years ago.

What does it say about me, or about church, that I've had far more of these experiences outside of church, or even the bounds of what could be called "religious?"

Something that the article touches on is institutional failure. A defining feature of our day is the across-the-board failure of institutions to do their jobs; from governments to businesses to academies to churches. Economist Duncan Black yearns for a "well-functioning and trustworthy banking system, and not one built on a foundation of crime and fraud." I yearn for a government answerable to the people who are supposed to be its source of legitimacy. I yearn for churches that are more about binding up the wounds of a bleeding world and sewing hope and love where there are none than about enforcement of social and cultural norms. More often than not, institutions betrayed their charters, their founding principles, for the sake of self-serving and self-preservation. Small wonder Anarchism, once the common enemy of communist and capitalist , enjoys a resurgence these days.

I'm not an Anarchist. I believe in the rule of law and in the necessity of institutions to make life bearable for everyone. But I definitely have my Anarchist sympathies.

CLARIFICATION:

What I meant by "pentecostal" is the experience described in these 2 paragraphs from George Packer's article:

The sense of togetherness in the park that night was like nothing he’d ever felt. Garofalo still found the drummers annoying, and the activists who dreamed of an alternate world of pure democracy, without rules, were not for him. Still, he now felt responsible for keeping Occupy Wall Street going. He wanted others to make the pilgrimage: “If you bring someone down here for a day, they’ll attach so much emotion to being here that it will have an effect next year, even if this isn’t here the day before the election.”
A period in Garofalo’s life had ended—the period when being amusing was the highest goal because being serious felt futile. He was now ready to carry a sign on the sidewalk along Broadway. He stayed up nights trying to think of the right one: “I have a job, but I think being here is important”; “You’re cynical, lazy, and would be ashamed to tell your kids you did nothing.” Finally, one morning, he went down to Zuccotti Park with a signboard that said, in red block letters, “I Don’t Have a Lobbyist, Can I Still Have 3/5 of a Vote?” Garofalo was split, seventy-thirty, on his own sign: he thought that it was witty, but the reference to slavery was only a few steps away from invoking the Nazis. Yet he stood on the sidewalk for more than an hour and held the sign aloft while people paused to read it.

Read the article folks. It's definitely worth the time.

Thought For the Day

2011-11-28T19:48:00.002-05:00

I never imagined that the New Deal policies my parents took for granted when I was growing up would become the fringey lefty dreams of young anarchists. I never foresaw The New Deal becoming the stuff of radicalism.

A Holiday Classic

2011-11-28T18:14:00.000-05:00

A Little List

2011-11-28T18:08:00.001-05:00

This bit of fake Gilbert and Sullivan is so cranky it makes me smile.

Seth MacFarlane may or may not be a threat to civilization, but he is very funny.

Heimat Sicherheit

2011-11-26T09:48:00.007-05:00

Naomi Wolf on the coordinated crackdown on #Occupy. Someone is feeling very threatened by this. My friend David Kaplan thinks this is all perfectly obvious. The Establishment is deeply worried that this might catch on and spread. The fact that the whole movement (so far) is entirely pacifist and democratic makes them even more threatening to our rulers. Occupy would be so much easier to control and eradicate if it was a terrorist movement with a military command structure.

Ignore the numerous police informants (or use them to send misleading information). Beware the provocateurs. And don't be afraid. That's what our little union drive at Borders did 13 years ago.

*NOTE
Dan Sloan on Facebook cautions that this story of DHS coordination between police departments is still dubious with reasons for skepticism.
Dan Sloan adds:

I should add that Naomi Wolf isn't a journalist and the commentisfree section of the Guardian is open to anyone who wants to publish - no vetting or fact checking required.

The one advantage we've had over right-wingnuts is that we've had verifiable facts and truth on our side, even when they don't further our goals. But I've been seeing more Fox News style reporting and conspiracy theory spinning in liberal sources recently. I think that's going to hurt us if we don't call it out. Wolf may be right, but that article is flimsy and her sources are dubious at best.

I wonder if any real journalists (e.g. Pro Publica affiliated) might be looking into this story to see if there's any truth to it.

The whole thing seems to rest on the flimsy but tantalizing evidence of Mayor Jean Quan's admission to consulting with other mayors before her crackdown on Occupy Oakland protesters. If she meant a coordinated conference call among mayors, that's one thing. If she meant a phone call or two for advice, that's something else entirely.

Moral Christians

2011-11-25T10:32:00.006-05:00

There are days when I think not even God can stand to be around those spiteful narrow-minded kill-joys who call themselves Christians.

Could it be, Maggie, that people are giving you a hard time over this issue because you are just plain wrong about it, and that you advocate effectively stigmatizing and disenfranchising whole classes of people? Could it be that the heat you feel coming back at you is because you enable those who dehumanize and harm lgbtq folk?

Both of these are from JoeMyGod. Joe Jervis has a cast iron stomach for this sort of thing.

Rather than argue against all of this myself, I'll let someone who was much better with words than I'll ever be make my point.

If Moral Virtue was Christianity,
Christ’s Pretensions were all Vanity,
And Cai’phas & Pilate Men
Praise Worthy, & the Lion’s Den
And not the Sheepfold, Allegories
Of God & Heaven & their Glories.
The Moral Christian is the Cause
of the Unbeliever & his Laws.
The Roman Virtues, Warlike Fame,
Take Jesus’ & Jehovah’s Name;
For what is Antichrist but those
Who against Sinners Heaven close
With Iron bars, in Virtuous State,
And Rhadamanthus at the Gate?

--William Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel”

EXTRA: As far as Maggie is concerned, I'm a hell-bound sodomite and a universalist antinomian heretic. Fine. If I must err (and EVERYONE errs in these matters), then I would err on the side of Love rather than Law.

Thank You Sweet Baby Jesus I Don't Work In Retail Anymore!

2011-11-25T08:37:00.005-05:00

And they're off!

Hat tip to JoeMyGod. No reports -- yet -- of any store clerks killed this year.

EXTRA:

No deaths yet, but apparently there have been some very serious injuries.

My best wishes go out to all of you retail clerks out there on the front lines dodging the shrapnel.

Oh Crap! It's Christmas!

2011-11-25T08:32:00.002-05:00

Mel Brooks once said that the entertainment industry was the creation of Jews and gay men for the consumption of heterosexual gentiles.

You could say the same thing about Christmas.

Not exactly butch Johnny Mathis sings a Christmas classic by not exactly Presbyterian Mel Torme.

Imperial Storm Troopers

2011-11-24T10:51:00.003-05:00

Thanks

2011-11-24T08:31:00.007-05:00

I'm grateful for so many things.

I'm thankful for Michael who has ended my loneliness, given me new courage, and a new home. I'm thankful for a whole new family as my old one passes away.

I'm thankful for old friends and for new ones.

I'm thankful for all the animals in my life, now and in the past.

I'm thankful for art. It's given me a reason to get up in the morning and be glad to face a new day for most of my life. It takes the random dull mess of life and fills it with wonder and meaning. It's one of those miraculous things we do despite our being mortal and fallible.

I'm thankful for my work and for all of its exceptional gratifications, for my colleagues, for my students.

I'm especially grateful for the satisfaction of knowing that after so many years of being told that I couldn't and shouldn't, I could and I did. I started out painting on canvas panels in my room when I was 10, using a pie tin for a palette, and now I'm an artist with a studio in Manhattan.

I'm thankful that I can pay my bills. A lot of people can't say that now.

I'm thankful that I have a job, and that I like it. A lot of people can't say that these days.

I'm thankful for relatively good health. I can still walk and talk. My vision is excellent for my age.

I'm thankful for the internet. It's made a profound difference in my life. I'm not sure that I'd have much of what I have now if it wasn't around.

Even though I'm always behind the curve and slow to catch up, I'm grateful for technology. The computer has made so much of my work a lot easier and more manageable. Tech continues to open up new possibilities.

I've done a little traveling, I've had some great adventures along the way, and I hope I've accomplished a few things which make life a little better for a few others.

And The Silly Season Begins!

2011-11-23T15:04:00.003-05:00

Just in time for Advent, Jesus has a "wardrobe malfunction." A video that has been flying around the internet.

Hat tip to Madpriest and a whole lot of other people.

And for Thanksgiving, here is an old classic. Be sure to sing along.

Here Comes Another Election Year (Yawn)

2011-11-22T17:48:00.009-05:00

Another year where we have to choose between Coke and Pepsi, and NO this is not another rant about how the political parties are both the same. This is a rant about how none of the most important issues for the future of this country will even be touched in this election cycle. All of those crucial issues about the role of money in our politics, whether we really want a democracy, or whether an oligarchy would just be easier, don't expect to hear those even mentioned. And if we formally and legally transition to oligarchy, then what about individual rights or constraints on the powerful? Does fairness mean anything to an ideology of supremacism, national or social? Does that inscription over the Supreme Court Building, "Equal Justice Under Law" still mean anything, or is it a quaint antique and it's time to retire it? Do we really want to be the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave," or do we want to be just another empire lording it over a sullen world? Those questions will be addressed, but outside the political campaigns and outside the official public forum.

I'm predicting a very boring election year. All of the "debates" will be about what amount to tweaks one way or another of the Center-Right consensus that's dominated our politics since the 1970s. The idea that the whole political process is rotten, just so much legalized corruption, will never come up. The idea that public office is nothing more than a revolving door for plutocrats and their minions who go in to make regulatory law, and then go out to profit from those regulations will never even be mentioned.

God and Jesus will be invoked repeatedly will barrels full of oily public piety. The Prince of Peace will be dragooned into blessing a society increasingly coarse, brutal, predatory, and nihilistic, a society where "even three in the morning is lit up with the glow of money going rotten," to quote the late John Updike. The God of Love will be invoked to legitimize policies that stigmatize and disenfranchise entire classes of people. The One who said that "foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head" will be drafted into blessing those who have multiple homes at the expense of those who have none. The money changers will continue to be welcome into the Temple. Caiphas and the Sanhedrin will continue to believe that they are martyrs suffering for the cause of right, when in fact they believe with all their hearts and all their minds and all their souls that might makes right.

In the end, Russell Baker said it best, "Watching a politician claim the high road is like watching a hog take a bath."

Put on your wet suits everyone.

The President's hand holding a note slipped to him by an OWS protester in New Hampshire.

Robert Reich talks about an issue that certainly won't be mentioned in any campaign. Both parties have patrons that they cannot afford to offend.

When "Serve and Protect" Becomes "Comply or Hurt"

2011-11-22T10:10:00.005-05:00

I was going to write a whole post about the militarization of the cops, and the increasingly free use of "non-lethal" weapons (never mind that some people have died from taser attacks and even pepper-spray).

But Digby beat me to it and wrote a much better essay than I could have.

EXTRA:

James Fallows quotes extensively from two people with sharply differing experiences and perspectives on the police. This is a follow up to another post he made about the militarization of local police.

St. Cecilia's Day

2011-11-22T09:23:00.005-05:00

Have a happy one all you musicians out there.

Those of us who are not musicians will always be grateful for what you do.

November 22nd

2011-11-22T08:01:00.000-05:00

If you are from Dallas and are of a certain age, this date is unforgettable.

Silent Protest

2011-11-21T15:28:00.002-05:00

This is extraordinary. I've never seen anything like this. The Chancellor of UC Davis walks out to her car and is met by a huge, but completely silent, student protest.

EXTRA:

Apparently Chancellor Katehi is taking the bureaucrats way out, the old "time to move on and put this behind us" excuse in which we sweep the whole unpleasantness under the rug and get on with our lives. This, of course, leaves her and all others responsible free from any accountability. Where have we heard this excuse before over the last ten years? I can think of several places from Washington to Beizhing.

Lift Up The People's Banner

2011-11-19T21:29:00.006-05:00

A May Day print by Walter Crane

A hymn from the Christian Socialist movement in 19th century England, a hymn no church will sing tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.

This is for all of those wounded and arrested by aggressive police crackdowns on peaceful protesters over the past few weeks.

To the Tune of We Plow The Fields and Scatter

1. You faithful saints and martyrs
Who fought for truth and right,
We ask your prayers and blessings
To aid us in our fight.
Your faith shall be our watchword,
Your cause shall be our own -
To fight against oppression
Till it be overthrown.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

2. In many a golden story,
On many a golden page,
The poets in their poems
Have sung the golden age,
The age of love and beauty,
The age of joy and peace,
When everyone lived gladly
And shared the earth's increase.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

3. Today the tyrants triumph
And bind us for their gains,
But Jesus Christ our Saviour
Will free us from our chains,
And love, the only master,
Will strive with might and greed,
Till might is right no longer,
And right is might indeed.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

4. God is the only Landlord
To whom our rents are due.
God made the earth for everyone
And not for just a few.
The four parts of creation --
Earth, water, air, and fire --
God made and ranked and stationed
For everyone's desire.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

5. God made the earth for freedom
And God alone is Lord,
And we will win our birthright
By truth's eternal sword;
And all the powers of darkness
And all the hosts of pride
Shall pass and be forgotten
For God is by our side.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

6. Christ blessed the meek and told them
That they the earth should own.
And he will lead the battle
From his eternal throne.
O have no fear, my comrades,
Cry out in holy mirth!
For God to us has promised
His Kingdom here on earth.

Lift up the people's banner
And let the ancient cry
For justice and for freedom
Re-echo to the sky.

Cops

2011-11-19T20:05:00.012-05:00

In some ways, I am still very bourgeois. I usually like to cut the cops some slack. It's a rotten job with rotten pay, but it's necessary. The Port Authority cops were very good friends to us underpaid bookstore clerks when we organized our union at the World Trade Center Borders many years ago.

And then I see stuff like this, and that very white middle class assumption that The Police Are Our Friends just melts away in horror and disgust. Of course, not-so-white folk have had very different experiences with the police since always. I doubt any of this would surprise them.

I can remember a time when folks used to turn over cop cars and set them on fire in response to stuff like this. What does it mean that people don't resort to that kind of thing in this video? Is it a measure of the protesters determination to be peaceful? Is it that they are afraid?

I'm wondering if there's a concerted effort between mayors out there to "make an example" of people to discourage potential protesters. The New York DA plans to press serious felony charges against protesters who refuse to take a plea deal (a lot of them). All of this force and violence is so disproportionate. It reminds me of the police over-kill during the Civil Rights protests. Someone somewhere is feeling very threatened by all of these dirty drug crazed hippies and their kooky flower power.

To me this is an extension of the crap that all of us have to live with these days: all of those penalty charges, debts, and interest piled on top of debts, threats and demands from insurance companies, that turn life into such a God awful treadmill of never enough work, never enough pay, a soul crushing chase after money money money, always just short of breaking free. The cops are the ultimate collection agency.

All of this money and manpower is being deployed against unarmed and peaceful protesters. Meanwhile, where are the raids on Citicorp? on Goldman Sachs? on Bank of America? on Chase? I thought so.

A friend of mine from Argentina made the point that middle class Americans are now getting a taste of what their government exported to all the rest of the world, especially to Latin America.

Justice in an age when EVERYTHING is for sale. You can sit in an expensive corner office suite and commit larceny on a cosmic scale, and there will be no consequences. Hell, our government will just write you a check to get you out of trouble.

But if you so much as step off a curb or bump a barricade, then God help you.

Here is a now famous picture of 84 year old Dorli Rainey in Seattle after taking a face full of pepper spray.

Because you're never too old ...

Shocking

2011-11-19T17:45:00.017-05:00

I took some students through MoMA today. It is remarkable that so many works in its collection which many people once found shocking and deeply offensive now wear the aura of "classic." It is amazing to think that the most recent work reproduced below, Johns' Flag, is more than 50 years old. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is now more than a century old.

I read somewhere a story related by Edward Mendelsohn about what people considered shocking and offensive in 1920s Paris. A woman stood up in the middle of a performance of a chamber work by Maurice Ravel (RAVEL?!!) and loudly asked if this was music suitable for war veterans or widows.

Here is a small sample of works in MoMA that once made legions of people furious.

Auguste Rodin, Balzac

Pablo Picasso, Le Demoiselles d'Avignon

Meret Oppenheim, Luncheon in Fur

Kazimir Malevich, White on White Painting

Jasper Johns, Flag

The OWS "Bat Signal"

2011-11-19T10:43:00.004-05:00

Weiben and I saw this whole show from the Brooklyn Bridge during the march on November 17th. The crowd loved it and read it all aloud and loudly. Traffic slowed down on the Bridge to look at it. I don't know why, but for some reason a lot of people (including yours truly) found this to be incredibly moving. This video is entirely silent. Those are not the conditions in which I saw this. I saw this on a cold windy night full of cheering and applause, car honking, and loud chanting.

The story behind this projection is itself remarkable and incredibly moving; creativity meets resourcefulness meets courage meets generosity meets graciousness,

EXTRA:

Someone is feeling politically threatened by all those dirty drug-crazed hippies in tents, threatened enough to spend $850,000 on a publicity campaign to discredit them.

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on Occupy's Birthday

2011-11-18T11:52:00.097-05:00

Foley Square last night; the Federal Courthouse is in the center, and the Municipal Building is to the right

After attending a day full of meetings, I went to the biggest meeting of the day, the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Foley Square put on by various labor unions in support of the movement, and as a "family friendly" event for those who didn't want to go mano a mano with New York's Finest. Some people did take on the cops anyway. There were about 2 dozen arrests at this event, most near the Brooklyn Bridge where people tried to jump police barricades.

I met 2 friends there, Weiben Wang, an old hand at events like this going back to Anti-Apartheid demonstrations in the 80s, and another artist, James Middleton. I was very naughty and skipped my third meeting for the day to attend this to its finish. James left the rally early and went in my place, bless him.

Both Weiben and I brought cameras. Most of these are mine. Some are his.

Weiben's picture of me as the march across the Brooklyn Bridge gets started.

Here is dangerous incendiary Weiben Wang in a picture I took with his camera. Actually, maybe James took this picture.

Here is my picture of Weiben taken with my camera.

Here is Weiben's picture of me taking his picture. James is on the right.

Foley Square about a half hour before the rally started. People were already gathering. There was a huge police presence in the square and in the surrounding streets. The cops seemed determined to keep the whole thing penned in the middle of the square. In minutes, the crowd filled the square from wall to wall, and the barricades came down.

The rally begins.

I didn't get to move much during the rally. People were packed in tightly.

Indeed.

Fond memories of MLK and JFK who were there in spirit.

A passage from the Magnificat in Foley Square

The USA seems to be one of the few countries where it is relatively safe to bring small children to political rallies. I saw a lot at this one, and in all the anti-war rallies when the Iraq War started.

Lots of people gathered on the African American Memorial.

Signs from my union, PSC-CUNY (Professional Staff Congress, City University of New York); The SEIU, Unite!, the UAW, and other unions were heavily represented.

The march to the Brooklyn Bridge begins, and it takes forever to get these thousands of people through the bottle-neck on Centre Street in front of the Municipal Building.

Lots of Guy Fawkes masks, thank you Anonymous.

Occupy that ledge on the City Records Building!

The Woolworth Building at night with protesters.

A big reason for the bottleneck, police were determined to keep traffic moving on this street, a main artery for traffic off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Some of the unions like Unite sent parade marshals to put themselves between the marchers and the cops to prevent trouble, a tactic that seemed to work.

Finally, we're starting across the Brooklyn Bridge. My camera's battery died soon after this shot, so the rest of the pictures will be Weiben's.
The marchers crossed over the boardwalk above the traffic lanes. A lot of cars honked in solidarity with drivers waving us and giving us V signs. One woman in an apartment building on the Brooklyn side flashed her room lights and waved at us.

Someone somewhere had a Powerpoint projector and did an impromptu projection on the side of the Verizon Building where everyone could see it from the bridge. You can see it on the lower right of the building. Weiben's picture.

Here's part of that giant Powerpoint show on the Verizon building. Weiben's picture.

Weiben's picture of the crowds coming out on the other end of the Bridge. The mood of the marchers was festive, jubilant, and triumphant with vivid memories of an earlier attempt by Occupy demonstrators to cross this same bridge.

Here's a lot more of Weiben's pictures from last night.

Weiben characterized this march, and this movement, as "genteel." I'm not quite entirely sure what he meant by that. The crowd struck me as very middle class (James noted the remarkably correct spelling and grammar on so many of the signs). Even though minorities were substantially represented, the crowd remained far whiter than the proportional makeup of the city. Weiben is right about that. All ages attended, but most of the crowd was young, 20s to late 30s.

The press so far ignored last night's huge protest march in today's papers, but then they ignored the big marches against the Iraq War and at the 2004 GOP Convention that each drew around a million participants.

The press coverage since the beginning of Occupy is hostile, patronizing, or indifferent. And yet the movement continues to expand rapidly despite that hostility. I very much wonder how different press coverage would be if Occupy was a far-right movement demanding no regulations on the financial industry, and demanding further punishments on "undeserving" poor people, especially if they are black, brown, or young. I would imagine Fox News would give them prime-time live coverage praising as heroes and patriots those mostly white, elderly, and affluent people who would man such an occupation in heated prefab huts supplied by some corporate PAC (that 84 year old protester in Seattle who got a face full of pepper spray would be officially designated as either amusingly odd or senile). Fox News would write the panegyrics and the rest of the press would sing the choruses. It's not necessary to resort to conspiracy theories to explain this. It's simply a matter of "who pays the fiddler calls the tune."

As you can see from the photos, these folks are not the dirty drug crazed hippies described by Fox News and parroted by everyone else who's had little or no direct experience with the protesters. A lot of the ones around us last night were professional people. Indeed, the core of Occupy seems to be very well educated professionals who found themselves marginalized, or who voluntarily left what they saw as a corrupt mainstream (recent veterans are disproportionately represented in the Occupy movements). The creativity and resourcefulness of this whole movement continues to astonish me. Occupy emerged out of those very middle class virtues of initiative and independence to fight those very middle class vices of conformity and hypocrisy in order to take on a serious threat to democracy.

One of the very few reporters to actually talk to and get to know some of the protesters in Zuccotti Park before it was cleared was Michael Greenberg in his article in the current New York Review of Books. One of the protesters he talked to was a young documentary film maker originally from Tomball, Texas who left behind politically right wing and fundamentalist Christian parents to pursue her own path (sounds familiar). Another protester Greenberg got to know was a doctor newly minted from medical school and residency who put his career on hold to work full time for this movement. A now famous casualty of the police raid on Zuccotti Park is the Occupy Wall Street Library run by an all volunteer professional library staff complete with their own website including a complete online catalog of their titles. Until its recent destruction, this was the only public library below Canal Street. Since Borders closed, there aren't even any bookstores in the neighborhood, the fastest growing in New York, and one of the fastest growing in the USA.

It remains to be seen what the future will be. Who knows if this movement will survive the loss of their permanent settlements, or if this is really a blessing in disguise. There certainly are divisions within over the direction to go. Part of it is a reawakened left (which attracts the support of unions; for them, the kids in tents are a godsend breathing new life into a movement long on the defensive), and a middle class newly wakened from its 30 year long political slumber. Professionals woke up to find that they are now reduced to the status of wage-earners. Students woke up to the prospect of finding themselves indentured as debtors for the rest of their lives. While the movement attracts a lot of minority support, it still needs to make a more serious effort to incorporate minority populations (who also have found themselves on the defensive fighting the erosion of hard-fought gains over the last 3 decades).

My role in all this is only as a cheer-leading spectator. I'm not really a participant. I've attended a couple of "General Assemblies," but only to watch. I have no idea where all of this will ultimately lead, but I continue to have high hopes. After 30 years of bitter resignation, that in itself is a major accomplishment.

EXTRA:

Here's an interview with the folks responsible for the Verizon Building "Bat Signal." No, it wasn't Powerpoint. Thanks to Frank Episale for sending this.

EXTRA EXTRA:

Matt Taibibi's essay in Rolling Stone is the best I've read yet on OWS. Here's a sample:

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

I Will Be There In Spirit

2011-11-17T08:10:00.006-05:00

Alas, I will be in meetings all day into the night today.

Who does these posters? They are brilliant! Anyone who can remember back to 1989 should recognize the image immediately.

*Actually, there's a 5PM rally in Foley Square. If the Library Committee lets out early or on time, I could make that one before the next meeting at 7PM.

Vent

2011-11-16T07:01:00.002-05:00

I'm rotten at multitasking. All of my efforts to master it so far are ending in profound frustration and regret.

I can't wait for the semester to be over.

I can't wait for Xmas and the holiday madness to be over.

I look forward to at least a temporary break from the depression/ insomnia two-step I've been doing for weeks now.

Crassus Wins

2011-11-15T18:37:00.000-05:00

... for now.

Bloomberg Clears Out Liberty Plaza

2011-11-15T08:11:00.009-05:00

Poster by Shepard Fairey

No democracy for YOU!

--At the moment, according to the radio, protesters are marching from Foley Square to City Hall and are attempting to block off the gates to City Hall while Bloomberg holds a press conference there.

--Hundreds of people are now gathering at 6th avenue and Canal street with the intent of marching back to Liberty Plaza. Unions are now making plans to join the protesters later today.

--A judge has now ruled that the protesters may return and bring their tents. The mayor filed an immediate appeal and is keeping the park closed.

--At a press conference the mayor claims that the raid is in the name of "public safety." Occupy unofficial spoksesperson Jesse LaGreca calls the mayor a "third world dictator."

--The Transit Workers Union together with some other unions will rally at 3PM in support of the evicted protesters, on the same day that contract negotiations begin for transit workers.

This ain't over folks.

EXTRA:

Keith Olberman tells us what he really thinks of our plutocrat mayor, and pulls no punches. Thanks to Paul (A) for sending this in.

Swellegant

2011-11-14T18:49:00.016-05:00

Michael and I dressed to the teeth on Sunday for his sister Linda's wedding. She married her longtime boyfriend Evan down at Brooklyn Bridge Park on the East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. The park is a popular spot for weddings and wedding photos. Lots of brides posed on the river rocks in frothy white for various photographers.

Here we are in our best. I look so much like my Dad. He looks nothing like his Dad.

Michael took this picture of us together. The hat comes in handy. I don't know how much longer the comb-over will last.

A very elegant Michael

Myself looking like Karl Malden without the nose.

Michael with the radiant bride. We both agreed that her choice of 1930s glam over standard issue Victorian bridal froth was truly inspired.

Here are the lovely young couple. They met in college 9 years ago.

The ceremony by the river. Vive l'amour! I took this picture, and I'm real proud of it.

Johnny Cash

2011-11-14T18:43:00.001-05:00

He sings a cover of a beautiful Beatles' song. I love this.

Economics As Morality

2011-11-13T07:50:00.028-05:00

sugar

Italy is now about to join Greece, becoming effectively a dependent colony of the EU governed by appointed "experts" from Brussels and from various central banks. Whatever dysfunctions peculiar to the way Italy has run its affairs over the past century, the experts will impose severe austerity measures that ultimately do nothing for Italians, but assure the banks that their losses will be minimal. The various leaders of Europe from Angela Merkel to David Cameron will trot out the usual sermons about "responsibility" and "consequences" and say nothing about the willingness of banks to lend despite their own knowledge of the risks and despite their own dubious lending practices.

In this country the suggestion that people might be poor because of the way society is so ordered is rank heresy. That people are poor because of their own fault is the conventional wisdom, and has been since the mid 19th century. And now, it's the fault of people that they are only middle class in a world where being middle class counts for less and less, where professionals are frequently reduced to the status of wage earners. This is an extremely convenient and self-serving world view if you are loaded with money and assets. It absolves you of any responsibility toward your neighbors and allows you to turn a deaf ear to their sufferings.

This point of view fails to take into account something that has always been true, and is still true. People never choose the circumstances into which they are born and that the playing field of life is never level or fair, and never was. Those who have will always tilt the tables and rig the game in their own favor and at the expense of those who have not. The very rich among us do this at the expense of all the rest of us, and we do this together at the expense of the rest of the world, and we do this without even thinking.

The real morality play in this world is not the irresponsible debtor, but that our ease and convenience always depends on someone else's misery. The sugar that I put in my tea always came at a high human cost. Modern slavery began in the 16th century in order to satisfy the insatiable sweet tooth of Europe. My insatiable sweet tooth still requires the hard brutal labor of harvesting and processing sugar cane, and the setting aside of sustenance crops for a lucrative cash crop.

What we call history, society, and even civilization is frequently nothing more than the natural struggle for survival and supremacy projected into the social realm. We should remember that the phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined not by Charles Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer. Spencer coined the phrase not to describe the natural world, but the economy. Cornelius Vanderbilt described labor as a class to be sacrificed for the good of civilization. The novelists of the 19th century from Dickens to Thackery to Edith Wharton wrote about the savagery that lay just underneath the thin brittle veneer of respectability in the Victorian world. That savagery still lies at the heart of our own world, and still inspires writers to draw back the veils of our own social conventions. It seems to me that so often what we call "values" are ultimately survival skills. Our leaders drone on and on about "values" in a capitalist world that denies the very idea of "value," that anything has any intrinsic value apart from use and exchange.

Despite all of our technology and all of our political and social progress, we are still miles and miles away from the Great Good Place where we can all be happy, one and all.

Police beat a striking child garment worker in Bangladesh.

Frida Kahlo

2011-11-12T14:13:00.054-05:00

Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait in Tehuana Dress (Thinking of Diego), 1943

Frida Kahlo photographed in 1931 by Imogen Cunningham

My students love Frida Kahlo. I get many papers about her every year, some of them very good, and a few are excellent. I frequently can’t tell if they love her work or if they love her. Usually, they get so caught up in the drama of her stormy life that they forget to write about her paintings. Whichever the case, Frida Kahlo seems to have struck a nerve with so many people these days, and not just women. She’s just as popular a topic with my male students. Frida Kahlo is now the object of an entire industry built on her story from calendars to a feature length movie. Her fame now eclipses that of her once very famous husband, Diego Rivera, the most well known of the great Mexican muralists of the early 20th century. Indeed, one of my male students referred to him as Frida Kahlo’s husband. Probably more than any other early 20th century figure in art or in literature, Frida Kahlo really speaks to people these days. But, how great an artist was she really?

For a long time, I never thought much of her art. I considered it to be formally slight and solipsistic, and there are still a lot of critics who feel that way. Recently, I’ve begun to take another look at her work and to rethink my former opinions. So have the critics. Not long ago, the consensus of critics saw her work as appealing to exclusively feminist tastes. Now, a new critical consensus is emerging saying that Frida Kahlo, and not her husband, was the greatest Mexican painter of that generation of artists inspired by the wave of nationalism in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of about 1910 to 1920. A lot of critics today would say that she belongs to Mexico as much as to feminism, and that her ties to specifically Mexican art and heritage are more authentic and subtle than those of Diego Rivera’s art for all its vast size and national ambition.

What a change from Frida’s own lifetime.

When she was alive, people always thought of her as Diego Rivera’s eccentric wife who just happened to paint too. Whereas her husband painted frescoes on a vast scale, Frida Kahlo always painted small easel pictures. Her work appeared dwarfed just by the sheer scale of her husband’s work, just as Diego’s immense physical size dwarfed her small and slight frame.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Frida Kahlo, Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931

Most people thought of her as a peculiar amateur, certainly not the equal of her husband. There were some notable exceptions. Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, enthusiastically admired her work. Diego himself also admired it, and took Frida’s paintings quite seriously. There was no shortage of admiring collectors who bought her work. There was a strong current of rivalry that played a large role in their conflicted and stormy marriage.

Diego Rivera, Panorama of Mexican History in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City

Diego Rivera gave up a brilliant career as one of the best and most poetic Cubist painters in Paris, apart from Picasso and Braque themselves, to return to Mexico to help his fellow citizens rediscover their national identity through vast walls of color. He completely rejected the poetic Cubism that made him famous in Paris for a much more directly communicative art of the human figure, an art that he concocted from memories of the great Italian fresco painters of the Renaissance, and from native Mexican sources. To my eye, what Rivera came up with in the end looks more like Art Deco than like any ancient Meso-American frescoes from Bonampak or Teotihuacan. He painted vast crowded panoramas of the whole history of Mexico on the walls of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City.

W.H. Auden once wrote that “Mad Ireland” hurt WB Yeats into poetry. Frida Kahlo was quite literally hurt into painting. She took up painting to fill the time during a long recovery confined to a body cast and to bed after a horrific accident. A bus she was riding collided with a tram in 1925 breaking her spine and pelvis in several places, shattering her left leg, and impaling her through the abdomen with a guard rail. Doctors thought she might not live. Her injuries caused her pain all of her life. She went through 35 surgeries in the course of her life to fix the damage and to relieve the pain. The damage to her pelvis and from the impalement left her unable to carry a child. Her injuries forced her to terminate 3 pregnancies. Even before the accident, she was not in the best of health. She survived a childhood bout of polio that left her right leg crooked and stunted. Her lifelong pain and ill health caused her to feel profoundly isolated, as indeed she was.

Frida Kahlo’s art is primarily about her own suffering and her life. Her greatness lies in her ability to universalize upon very personal catastrophes, to cause them to resonate with people who’ve never experienced such disaster and suffering.

She chose to record the events of her life, and other events, in the form of a retablo.

A retablo from 1885 showing a father praying to the Virgin Mary to cure his daughter's madness

Retablo ex votos are a peculiarly Mexican variation on a Latin American art form, a kind of devotional picture made in thanksgiving for prayers answered, or in expectation of some kind of divine intervention. Anonymous artists with little training in large workshops made retablos. The Mexican retablo ex voto usually showed the miracle or divine intervention with an inscription recording it on the bottom. Frida Kahlo would use this format repeatedly over the course of her life.

Some of her most striking retablos are not about her, but about the misfortunes of other women. One of her most striking pictures was made on a commission from Clare Boothe Luce (of all people; I’d never imagine Frida Kahlo and Clare Boothe Luce in the same room, but apparently they were friends). Luce commissioned a memorial for her friend Dorothy Hale who died the previous year by suicide.

Frida Kahlo, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1938

Dorothy Hale married a successful society portraitist named Gardiner Hale. His death in an auto accident left her in great debt. She unsuccessfully tried her hand at acting and modeling. Finally, in despair with foreclosures and bankruptcy on the near horizon, she threw herself out of a window of the Richmond Hotel in New York.

Clare Boothe Luce was horrified when she received this picture, and had to be talked out of destroying it. She expected a kind of portrait, but got instead a retablo of her friend’s violent death. Hale appears 3 times in the picture jumping out of the hotel window and falling toward us through the clouds and haze. She lies bloodied on the bottom wearing the very same black dress and corsage that she wore when she killed herself. The inscription below, in blood red paint, records the circumstances of her death. Clare Boothe Luce obliterated the part of the inscription that noted that she commissioned the painting.

Another painting in the form of a retablo is this one, A Few Little Pricks. It is based on a lurid murder that appeared in the local newspapers.

Frida Kahlo, A Few Little Pricks, 1935

A man stabbed his wife repeatedly in a frenzy of jealous rage. He defended his act in court with the words, “But it was just a few little pricks!” Kahlo shows the murderer standing calmly in the center of the picture above the corpse of his murdered wife. The painting seems filled with blood, on the bed, on the floor, on the murderer’s cloths, even on the frame of the painting. Black and white doves hold up a banderole with the murderer’s excuse. The pathetic quality of the excuse stands in stark contrast to the cold violence of the murder scene before us.

Kahlo painted this during a very turbulent period in her marriage to Diego Rivera. Neither of them were models of faithful spouses. Both Diego and Frida had affairs and they both knew about it. Frida had affairs with men and women. Diego tolerated her affairs with women, but exploded into rage when he found out about her affairs with men. She suffered his affairs mostly in silence. Frida ended that stoic silence when she found out that Diego was involved with her younger sister Cristina. Kahlo moved out, and by 1939, the two artists were divorced.

Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous pictures shortly after Rivera divorced her. It is a painting about her profound isolation and her conflicted sense of herself.

Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939

She portrays herself twice in the same picture sitting in a completely empty landscape. She sits on the right taking the hand of herself on the left to console herself. Both Fridas have exposed hearts connected by a thin artery. The Frida on the left holds another artery with a surgical clamp that continues to bleed conspicuously upon her white dress. The different dresses play a large role in this painting. They refer to Frida Kahlo’s dual ethnic heritage. She claimed that her Father, Guillermo Kahlo, was originally a Hungarian Jew. In fact, he was a German Protestant. Her mother was Amerindian with some Spanish ancestry, and was a devout Catholic. The Frida on the left wears a white very European dress. The Frida on the right wears the traditional dress of a Tehuana.
Her divorce seems to be creating a crisis of identity. The Tehuana Frida, while holding a small portrait of Diego, consoles the European Frida who slowly bleeds to death. Perhaps she feels that the intensely nationalistic Diego is rejecting that European part of her as insufficiently Mexican, and that is the part that suffers the isolation most acutely. Such a rejection must have been a very bitter blow for Frida Kahlo who identified so closely with the Mexican Revolution claiming for years that she was born with the Revolution in 1910. In fact, she was born in 1907.

The pain of her injuries only grew worse as she grew older. She went through more surgeries to try to relieve it. Her deteriorating spine forced her to wear a metal corset in order to stand up straight. She commemorated that suffering in the painting, The Broken Column.

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944

She appears again in a barren landscape to show her isolation. She rises before us baring her upper torso. The skin of the torso opens for us to reveal a classical column broken in several places. The scaffold of the metal corset appears to compensate for the crumbling column only at the cost of great pain. That pain appears in the form of nails that pierce her all over calling to mind famous religious images of suffering from the crucified Christ to St. Sebastian. The oblique religious reference may be mocking, a rejection of the facile consolations of conventional religious doctrine.

While she rejected religious belief, in the last year of her life she turned to Marxism with a religious fervor, using the language of religion in her work.

Frida Kahlo, Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, 1954

She throws down her crutches like a pilgrim healed at Lourdes. Karl Marx appears in the role of God the Father strangling the Great Satan of the USA while sending his large hands of dialectical materialist compassion, complete with a watchful Eye of God (i.e. Almighty Dialectic) in the palm. The Dove of Peace plays the role of inspiring Paraclete. She devoutly hopes that what religion failed to deliver will come through political ideology. The painting is both deeply moving and profoundly sad.

Frida Kahlo died in 1954 soon after this painting was completed. Her husband Diego Rivera was devastated. He died soon after in 1957.

No other artist of the 20th century so clearly foretold the insight that is a commonplace in our century, that the personal is political and the political is personal. In our time, that once clear line between the public and private has become very blurred. As Communist ideologues of the previous century wanted to swallow up the Private in the Public, so in our day, Libertarian ideologues would see the Public annihilated by the Private. Both proposed solutions to our dilemma are abstractions that are no solutions at all. Neither of them speaks to actual experience as we all live it between the home fire and the public forum. Frida Kahlo testified so eloquently to that frequently painful place we all dwell in now where our private affairs resonate in the public realm.

A Question to Ponder for Veteran's Day: Should We Bring Back the Wartime Draft?

2011-11-11T10:19:00.007-05:00

That old anti-warhorse former Senator George McGovern thinks we should.

Is an all-volunteer professional military democratic? Is it wise, especially for a democracy, to have a largely separate military caste to fight all of its wars? Would political leaders be quite so enthusiastic about military action, especially unilateral military action, if they knew that they would have to resort to the draft? Is it right to effectively outsource our military responsibilities to a very small portion of the population and expect them to bear all the costs? What is the responsibility of a larger society that benefits from military action toward those who must actually do that action? Is it right to expect that small professional military to do multiple tours of duty just to spare us the draft? Is it healthy for a democracy to augment troop numbers with "government contractors" i.e. mercenaries?

This goes to a fundamental question at the heart of the ideological warfare tearing apart this country: what are the responsibilities and duties of citizenship? Is being a citizen the same as being a "customer" or a "member?" There are those very ancient Greek concepts of citizenship where all citizens of the polis were responsible, individually and collectively, for the maintenance and defense of their city-state. Does any of that ancient understanding of citizenship have any relevance today? What are the obligations of citizens if we transition away from equality toward a more stratified shareholder state?

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

2011-11-11T08:44:00.003-05:00

The Last Post at the Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium

Armistice Day

EXTRA:

The economist Duncan Black reminds us to remember the dead from the First World War, and to remember all the rulers, military nobles, profiteers, politicians, and nationalist fanatics who blew up the world for no good reason. Today the United States looks more like the very stratified oligarchic Europe of 1914 than the USA of 1914. Perhaps we Yanks should remember The War To End All Wars that we've long forgotten and consigned to to barely understood and crumbling war memorials.

Dvorak

2011-11-10T07:20:00.000-05:00

Reports on the Transition of the USA from Democracy to Oligarchy May Be Premature

2011-11-09T07:23:00.008-05:00

Voters in Ohio rejected efforts to curb collective bargaining rights by a big margin handing Governor Kasich a big defeat.

Voters in Mississippi said no, every sperm is not sacred by an unexpectedly wide margin.

Down Easters in Maine voted to keep their 38 year old same day voter registration law handing their Teabag governor a big defeat.

State Senator Russell Pearce, architect of Arizona's immigration law, was recalled by the voters, defeated by a Republican moderate.

It was a good night for gay kids. Lotsa gay boys and girls got elected last night. Houston voted to keep their lesbian mayor. Holyoke Massachusetts elected a 22 year old gay mayor. The Dems hung on to the Iowa State Senate defeating any chance for same sex marriage repeal this session.

No On Marriage and The Family Research Council had a very bad night at the polls, Thank God.

Plutocracy and its favorite weapon, divide et impera, had a very bad night. Good!

EXTRA:

Your Betters do not like to be contradicted:

Know your place peasants!

Prayer in Liberty Plaza, Pictures

2011-11-06T18:11:00.014-05:00

There is an interfaith prayer service down at Liberty Plaza every Sunday at 3:30. David Kaplan and I have been going regularly, and today I finally remembered my camera. As might be expected after 4 weeks, the numbers are dwindling for this service. Kaplan and I just about qualify for "hard core" for this service. In the beginning, we had everything from rabbis to Buddhist monks to Franciscans. Today, we just had a handful of clergy.

I wasn't feeling my best today. I had a bad night of insomnia the previous night. I originally planned to do church and this, but I just couldn't do both today, so I went to Liberty Plaza for church.

Flags at the Plaza

Tents, contrary to regulations and the mayor's wishes, now spring up in the park. In the foreground is the camp library.

The prayer service begins with a Methodist minister who has been there every Sunday. To the left is a Unitarian minister. The minister on the right is from the Shalom Church which I'm not familiar with.

An Episcopal priest from Brooklyn addresses the crowd.

Some people in the crowd, dirty drug crazed hippies all.

"Welcome to the Gates of Heaven!"

A gesture of solidarity from the ironworkers building WTC #4, a sign facing Liberty Plaza.

If there's anyone in the New York area, or visiting, who'd like to participate in an Occupy event, this one meets regularly on Sundays at 3:30 near the corner of Broadway and Liberty street.

And Just How Truly Representative Is Congress?

2011-11-05T08:26:00.041-04:00

Here's a chart making its way round the internets that demonstrates a point I've been making (along with other smarter more widely read people) for some time. Congress does not really represent us, especially under our current system of legalized corruption.

I stole this chart from IT.

As the "Citizens United" decision of the Supreme Court affects more elections, expect this very lopsided chart to look even more lopsided.

Here's what this crazy pot-smoking hippy idealist would like to see done about it:

--a constitutional amendment to repeal "Citizens United"

--public financing of campaigns with donations limited to a maximum $100

--Congressional redistricting taken out of the hands of state legislatures and given to independent commissions

--The size of the House of Representatives should be dramatically expanded, at least doubled, to reflect the great expansion in the US population over the last half century; The House and Senate together are about 600 people. The British House of Commons is over 600 people representing a much smaller population.

--no more privileged Congressional benefits. Representatives and Senators should live and work under the same health insurance and retirement plans as all the rest of us.

--Congressional term limits. I would limit senators to 2, maybe 3, terms, and representatives to 10, maybe 12 terms. Public office is not a lifetime sinecure. The spectacles of Strom Thurmond in office well into his 90s, and Joe Lieberman changing parties to dodge a primary result in order to keep his office are shameful.

I think there's another deeper problem underlying all this corruption and erosion of our democracy. We've forgotten what democracy really is and what it's for over the past few decades.

We're of two minds about our government.

One is a consequence of Vietnam and all the similar conflicts since. We can't trust our government anymore (and not just the federal government). This distrust is common to all points along the political spectrum ( the right has its conspiracy theories and so does the left). On a certain level, that suspicion is healthy, the necessary corrective to the decades before when government was usually seen as benign and paternal. From The New Deal to the Cold War, the father figures in public office ("I Like Ike!") would always be there for us protecting us from destitution and Communist invasion. With the Vietnam War and Watergate, we found out how ready the daddies were to sell us out.

The other is a consequence of consumer culture. We tend to see our government as a kind of hotel management. We expect it to fix everything for us since we are paying customers. We expect the military to clean up the mess we made in the Middle East because of our oil consumption, and we certainly don't expect to be handed a mop and bucket or to be billed for the extra service (especially for the medical care of those who manned the mops). We expect our streets to be cleaned and repaired; we expect to feel secure behind everything from police and fire departments to food and drug safety to military protection; we expect our trash to be picked up and our children to be educated; and we expect to get all of this at a discount with no extra payment, and certainly no participation from us. And then we expect the government to mind its own business and stay out of our business, even when our business interferes with someone else's business. We're all spoiled adolescents and we expect government to be Mom, to clean our room and make us dinner, and then to leave us the hell alone. We all want government services, and none of us wants to pay for them or to do the necessary work to provide them.

As so many from Thucydides to John Dewey pointed out, democracy is a way of life in which everyone participates and everyone assumes some measure of responsibility to maintain. Yes, we've been robbed. We've been shaken down since the 1980s (at least). Our pockets have been picked. Our nest eggs were stolen in order to line the pockets of a tiny and disproportionately powerful minority. But on a certain level, we let them do it so long as we could continue to compensate for our stagnant wages by spending on credit or borrowing against the value of our houses, and they were oh so helpful with that too. So long as we could continue to play with our toys and Those People didn't move in next to us (whatever they are, they're not Us and we don't like them), we were content to let the Big Boys run the whole show while robbing us blind.

And now, it's morning in America, and we are waking up to find our houses empty and looted, with a pink slip in our pockets, with delinquent bills in the mailbox, and with a foreclosure notice on the door. On top of that, we face a future of indenture as the debt slaves of those we thought we could trust (after all, they looked so much like Us and not like Those People).

In a democracy, the government is us. It's not King Louis XIV and his ministers Colbert and Fouquet making decrees and implementing policies in which we could not possibly have any say. We are supposed to be the ones who choose our governments and their policies. We are as sovereign in our country as King Louis was over France (in theory at least). The government is supposed to be our Lord Chancellor, our Prime Minister, implementing policies we have chosen. On a certain level, we have the government and the policies that we wanted (or thought we wanted) for the last 4 decades. Those guys who sold us that car with a cracked engine block now have the deed to our house.

It's time to wake up and to begin the hard work of reclaiming our rights and our inheritance as citizens; not as employees, or customers, or debtors, but as citizens. If it means paying extra, or getting out and actually bothering to vote, or even if it means sleeping in a tent in the winter cold and facing cops in riot gear, then so be it.

Occupy Denver in the snow recently

But What Are Your Demands? What Is Your Agenda?

2011-11-03T22:01:00.003-04:00

Bill Moyers answers that question with great eloquence from personal experience. I too come from Texas cotton pickers. Bill's were from East Texas. Mine were from the Panhandle (from Clarendon).

EXTRA:

Paul Krugman says Amen to Bill Moyers.

Batbaby Go!

2011-11-03T21:29:00.008-04:00

Don't blame me, blame Michael, and Fred Schneider.

The Twilight franchise has a new movie out, so this might be appropriate after all.

Michelle, our own little batbaby!

...from New York, where it's ALWAYS Halloween!

The Archbishop of Canterbury Speaks

2011-11-02T08:22:00.003-04:00

Rowan Williams finally comments on the Occupy London SX camp outside St. Paul's, and on the issues driving it.

A swing and a miss.

For reasons that are mysterious to me, the same ++Rowan Williams who came out swinging at the Tory austerity program, hedges his bets on this issue above all issues.

Good For The Greeks!

2011-11-01T18:35:00.002-04:00

Tell 'em to take their austerity and shove it!

ADDENDUM:

Robert Reich on the Greeks and on the choice between democracy or financial markets.

Saint Paul's Backs Off

2011-11-01T09:39:00.004-04:00

The Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral in London suspends its legal action against the protesters. It took awhile and about 3 resignations for common sense and decency to finally prevail.

My favorite comment so far about the whole near-disaster:

"One does have to wonder if the collapse at St pauls is now completely swamping the issues raised by the campers." (Martin Reynolds)

Yes, and, at the same time, the St. Paul's debacle is one and the same with the issues raised by the campers. At the core, the issue is the challenge to the undeserved privilege of entrenched power.
Posted by: Lois Keen on Tuesday, 1 November 2011 at 9:26am GMT