American as Baseball, Apple Pie, and Random Gun Violence

Has anyone bothered to notice that 30 people have died in gun rampages in the USA since last Sunday, including one in Pittsburgh today?  That lunatic killed 3 cops and held the SWAT team at bay in a 4 hour gun battle before getting wounded himself and giving up.  The cops are outgunned by the wingnuts and the drug cartel entrepreneurs.  And just where do they get those heavy weapons?  How about states where it's as easy to buy a gun as a can of tunafish?  Could those same states be the source of all the heavy weaponry fueling the drug wars in Mexico?  Perish the thought!

There are those who insist that we'd all be safer if we all packed heat.  Fine, let's save ourselves a big pile of tax money and get rid of the police department.  Let's save an even bigger pile of tax money and get rid of the military while we're at it.

As I recall, Lebanon in the 1970s had more guns than people, and look how safe that place was.

UPDATE:

That number just went up by 5, this time all children.

Speaking of Working stiffs...

It ain't the John Galt wannabees who are left holding the bag and paying the price for the current economic meltdown.
The Little People are selfishly demanding accountability after seeing all that profit, that their hard underpaid labor created, squandered at the casino.

Atlas Shrugged indeed!

Hat tip to Toujourdan at Culture Choc for finding this.

The Working Stiff in Art: Tatlin's Tower

Vladimir Tatlin wearing a coat of his own design, and standing next to an energy efficient stove he designed, circa 1919

Vladimir Tatlin was the great proletarian hero of early 20th century art, internationally celebrated both for his pioneering genius as an artist, and as a true son of the working class. Avant Garde artists and poets from around the world sang his praises in the years following World War I and the Russian Revolution. When he died in 1953, he was almost entirely forgotten. He survived the reign of Stalin, painted camouflage in World War II and died in poverty and obscurity in Moscow. His Russian avant garde colleagues all went into exile, or perished in the gulags under Stalin.
Tatlin was born the son of a railroad engineer in Kharkov in Ukraine. He ran away from home at age 18 and became a sailor. Unlike so many runaways to the sea in literature, Tatlin apparently had a wonderful time as a sailor, visiting ports throughout the Middle East that fired his imagination. He decided to become an artist. He was very poor in his early years as an artist. He worked all kinds of odd jobs, usually as a muscian for Russian folk music groups. One time, he even worked as a professional wrestler and lost part of his hearing in a losing match. He was a good musician and a poor athlete.
Early on, he became an enthusiastic admirer of modern art, especially the work of Picasso. There is a great story about him visiting Picasso in Paris whose entire truth I wonder about. His music troupe performed in Berlin in 1913. Supposedly, Tatlin performed as a busker with his accordion on the street one day and was heard by the Kaiser himself, who gave him a gold watch. Tatlin sold the watch and used the money to go to Paris to visit Picasso. He begged Picasso to let him work for him, offering to sweep his floors, clean his brushes, and stretch canvases for him. Picasso refused to employ him, but allowed him to visit and spend time in his studio. Supposedly Tatlin would entertain Picasso with Russian folk music. Eventually Picasso decided he had enough crazy Russians in his life with his future wife Olga Khoklova and the Ballets Russe, and sent Tatlin home.

In Picasso's studio, Tatlin saw his analytic cubist paintings, and his sheet metal sculpture of a guitar which had a huge effect on him. Tatlin would take Picasso's conflation of mass and volume, object and surrounding space, further in a much more radical direction when he returned to Russia.
Tatlin was a true believer in the Communist ideology which took power in Russia under the Bolsheviks in 1917. He believed in its apocalyptic vision of a new world of liberated labor and technological power with a religious intensity. He produced icons for this new religion in the form of what he called "relief paintings" assembled from industrial materials like metal, glass, plaster, wood, and wire. So far as I know, none of these survive in the original. We know them entirely from a set of photographs taken in 1921.

"Painting Relief" made of wood and sheet metal from about 1917


Corner relief made of sheet metal, glass and wire, that was intended to hang right in the same corner of honor where the icon hangs in a traditional Russian household.

Tatlin, like a lot of his Russian avant-garde colleagues, wanted to remove art from its privileged position and integrate it into modern life. Instead of marble and bronze, Tatlin used the materials of modern industry and construction in works that were likewise constructed. "Real materials in real space," he said. In the corner reliefs, he got rid of the frame and the background altogether in his attempt to integrate a new form language into modern life. He was fascinated by the possiblity of flight, and tried to create the illusion that his corner reliefs were somehow floating or flying on the wall. He even tried to build his own flying machine with little success, not even a test flight. Tatlin and his colleagues dreamed of an art that was practical, useful, and above all affordable and accessible to the average worker. No more museums, no more frames, no more pedestals. Art would be completely integrated into productive life.

The new Soviet government had much bigger matters to attend to than the dreams of a small band of utopians, no matter how brilliant. Lenin was contemptuously indifferent towards them. "Let the artists live off their enthusiasm," he said. They did have one friend in the Soviet government in the person of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the education and culture minister who encourarged their work. It was through Lunacharsky that Tatlin was commissioned to make the biggest, most outlandish, project of them all, a monument to the Third International  Congress of the Communist Party. I have no idea what the Soviet government expected, but I'm sure it was not what Tatlin presented them.

Tatlin's original model for the Monument to the 3rd International in wood and wire displayed at the VIIIth Congress of the Soviets held in December, 1920. Note the man in the lower right corner for a sense of the size of the model.

A model of Tatlin's Monument carried in a May Day parade in Petrograd (today's Saint Petersburg) in 1920.

This proposed tower would have straddled the Moscow river in the heart of the city, and risen to a height of 1300 feet, a third taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It would have been made entirely out of steel and glass, a great slanting spiral with moving parts. A huge glass cylinder in the base housing an assembly hall for the party would turn once every year. A glass cone above that containing government offices would turn once a month. And at the top, a glass sphere containing telegraph and radio broadcasting offices would turn once a day.  It would have had loudspeakers to broadcast news and propaganda.  It was to have a massive projector to shine images and slogans onto the clouds at night.  It was a huge monument to dynamism, to energy, to motion, from the movements of the planets to the movement of the earth itself, to the movements of history toward its fulfillment in the worker state. It was about the dynamism of constant production. Instead of a stable symmetrical form, the whole thing would be designed around that most dynamic and unstable form of all, the diagonal.

The thing was unbuildable. There was not enough steel in all of Russia at that time for such a monument. The technology to build it and make it work did not exist.   A model of this Modern As Tomorrow monument had to be pulled by horses through the streets of Petrograd in the May Day parade pictured above. It remains an unrealized vision of a thoroughly impractical monument to practicality.

Anti-systematic thinker and anti-ideologue that I am, I don't believe in utopias. And yet, I find Tatlin's story very moving and his crazy tower to be absolutely exhilarating with its massive leaning spiral pointing emphatically toward Tomorrow. To me, that's what separates the modern from the post-modern; that belief in Tomorrow, that sense of expectation that drove so much of modernity is now gone. It ended in Europe with World War II, and it ended in this country with Vietnam. I can't decide if we are worse off or better off without it.

The Working Stiff in Art: Ancient Greece.

There are those cultures where workers are scarce to non-existent in their art. Ancient Greece was one of them. On those rare occasions when Greek art shows people at work, it is usually on a vase painting. The red and black figure vases that we see in solemn display in museums around the world were once the tableware and centerpieces of symposia, those competitive parties of conversation, drinking, and sex that were absolutely nothing like a modern symposium.
Ancient Greece was an aristocratic warrior culture. Labor, even skilled labor, was a grim necessity of life, and despised as such. That a man had to depend on a trade or a business for a living was a misfortune, not an honor. The only activities considered fit for free men were war, sports (a subset of war; Greek athletics have their origin in military training), and politics. The market was for slaves and women (even in the sexist ancient world, Greece stands out).
Slavery was a fact of life in the ancient world, but ancient Greece (as well as ancient Rome) was unusually dependent upon it. Most slaves in the ancient world began as the vanquished in war. In ancient times, the victor had absolute power and rights over the vanquished. Whole cities could be, and were, sold into slavery. Kidnapping was also a steady source of slaves. Captives who did not fetch a ransom were sold on the slave market. Apparently in Greece as in most of the rest of the ancient world, slavery was about status and not about race or nationality. Most of the huge slave population of ancient Greece was Greek.
In most of the ancient world, slaves were farm workers, miners, quarry workers, household servants, and bedroom toys. Greece went a step further incorporating slavery into skilled labor and manufacturing, even banking.
As we might expect, slaves are largely invisible in Greek art. We get a rare glimpse of slaves in Greek tombstones where a faithful slave will be shown with deceased. A slave girl waits upon her seated mistress in the grave stele of a woman named Hegeso.


Free workers and craftsmen are even more scarce in Greek art. As mentioned above, when they appear at all is is on vessels for parties where they were probably intended to be the butt of fun. So far as I know, there are no gods who preside over agricultural labor, but plenty who preside over agricultural products beginning with Demeter.

Skilled craftsmen did have their god, Hephaistos. Since the Greeks allegorized just about everything, the skilled laborer appears in allegorized form as the god Hephaistos.

Here is Hephaistos with the goddess Thetis presenting the new armor he made for Achilles in a 5th century BC red figure ceramic painting.

It is telling of what kind of esteem the Greeks had for skilled labor that Hephaistos was the only one of the gods to be described as ugly and lame. His skill is a source of wonder and renown, but the man who possesses it is despised because he works with his hands (at something other than war). Amazingly, he was the (much cuckolded) husband of the goddess Aphrodite. The goddess of love was married to a skilled steady provider, but just couldn't keep her eye off the handsome glamorous god of war, Ares.
It was Hephaistos' axe that caused Athena's birth. Hephaistos struck Zeus in the head with his axe, splitting it open, and out popped fully grown and armed Athena. For this reason, Hephaistos was specially revered in Athens with his own temple in the Agora.

Hephaistos (with crutch) appears seated with Athena on the Parthenon frieze.

Below are some views of the Temple of Hephaistos in the Agora in Athens.






The temple once contained a famous cult image of the god leaning on his crutch by the sculptor Alkamenes.

So, Who Do You Know in Iowa?

The Iowa supreme court unanimously strikes down the state's gay marriage ban.

Raul Alfonsin 1927 - 2009

The man who effectively ended military rule in Argentina is dead.

If only we could summon up the nerve to prosecute those involved in our own much smaller attempts to subvert the rule of law.

Holiday for Strings

The "No more caffeine for you!" version:




This version is even sillier than the one by Spike Jones:




I love Spike Jones.  So sue me!:




My favorite, a version by Glenn Miller (or more likely, his Orchestra). I have no idea what the weird Japanese animation has to do with it.

Time to send the shades of David Rose and Red Skelton back to Valhalla.

Now wasn't that nice?

You're welcome!