POLITICS, THEATER, ART, DISCO BALLS ETC.

RIDICULOUSLY LO-RES IMAGE OF THE DAY:

Another indoor object in an outdoor setting.

POLITICAL OBSERVATIONS OF THE DAY:

Righteous of the Times to make the Libby headline so huge.  Finally a liar from the White House who is actually being punished for it. He clearly lied at the behest (whether explicit or implicit) of Cheney and hence the jury's verdict is a conviction by proxy of the Imperial Veep Creep. 

After the Libby conviction, Cheney remarked: “As I have said before, Scooter has served our nation tirelessly and with great distinction through many years of public service” --recalling his tribute to the then recently resigned Rumsfeld (“The Greatest Secretary of State in the history of our nation.”).

I have to suggest that the only thing more damning than a glowing tribute from Cheney is a promotion by Bush.

FURTHER POLITICAL OBSERVATIONS OF THE DAY:

There is all this talk of Bush pardoning Libby. Hell with that.  Bush should pardon the nation for the crime of being stupid enough to have believed him.

Newt Gingrich admitted that he was having an affair all during the Clinton-Lewinski witch hunt.  That's freaking rich.  Very rich.  That's not just rich. That's Ging rich. 

RANDOM SCENARIO OF THE DAY:

A guy leaves his office to do something.  He suddenly forgets where he was going, what he was trying to do.  He stops and stands there and nothing comes.  He says to himself, "Ok, if I go back to my office, I'll suddenly remember what I had left it to do."  He goes back to his office and it hits him:  “Oh yeah, I have to pee.” 

NEW CATEGORIES OF THE DAY:

For the slo-witted or the reflex-challenged:  The split-minute reaction and the split-hour reaction.

CHARLIE ROSE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE OF THE DAY: />
Let me act all eager and interested in my fascinating guest when all I really want to do is hear myself talk in the presence of my fascinating guest…unless she is Maureen Dowd…in which case I just want to crawl across the table and lick her.

DESCRIPTIVE FRAGMENT OF THE DAY:

They were gathered together in the shared certainty of wondrous givenness and ineluctable loss. 

THEATER ANECDOTES OF THE DAY:

1) My mother and I are at P.S. 122 to see the play “Goodness.”   All we know about it is that it's the winner of the Edinburgh Theater Festival and is about the holocaust.  As the lights dim, two people on the stage and a few people (now revealed to be actors) sitting in the first row of the theater  begin singing a very soulful African folk song.  My mother leans over to me and says, just a bit too loud, “That doesn't sound like holocaust music to me.”

I almost have one of those laughing during assembly experiences. 

2) Later in the same week, I find myself seated at "A Chorus Line" where I have taken my father for his birthday. Despite the pleasure I take in seeing how much he is enjoying the show, I am bored out of my skull. I keep reworking my fantasy hoops line-up for the week in my mind and keep checking the songs on the song list--checking off the ones we've suffered through like things on a gruelling "To Do" list. I am extremely myopic and, at this point in my life, I really have to take my glasses off to read small print. The reason I mention this is that at one point, after taking off my glasses to see how many more songs were left, I discovered that in my uncorrected myopic state, the thin singing creatures on the stage become these puffy fuzzy blobs with tiny arm-like extensions. I am so delighted by this trippy discovery that I watch the rest of the musical in this manner and even sort of enjoy it. Suddenly the songs are sort of pleasurable when pouring out of a blurry little Thalidamide ball of light. Indeed, without my glasses, "A Chorus Line" became one of the most entertaining theatrical events of the season!

EXPERIENCE-ENHANCING PRODUCT IDEA OF THE DAY:

At the theater in which "A Chorus Line" is playing, they should hand out distortion lenses for people who don't have the gift of severe myopia.

BRIEF MOVIE COMMENT OF THE DAY:

(A propos of The Black Dahlia)

Everything in Brian DePalma's movies --from the dialogue to the perfomances-- is fascinatingly false.

PRODUCT IDEA OF THE DAY #2:

Deep Tissue (tissues with profound quotes written on them..from Lao-Tzu, The Bible, Plato etc.)

CONCEPT OF THE DAY/BAND NAME OF THE DAY:

Radio on Mute.

As in he liked to listen to radio on mute. Actually, this came out of a less glibly Stephen Wrightean paradoxicial line of thought.  I was thinking about how there are few auditory experiences more pleasurable than that of a baseball game on the radio.  It is the soundtrack of summer.  Eternal in its subtle rhythms, its long lulls and sudden spasms of excitement. But I was thinking how sad it was that I pretty much can't stand most of the baseball radio announcers on the air today.  I was thinking it would be great if you could mute out the live announcer and continue to hear the ambient sounds of the game.  But alas.  Technology has yet to become that gloriously customizeable and user friendly.

ART COMMENT OF THE DAY:

Impressions from an exhibit.

Saw the Gordon Matta Clark exhibit at the Whitney.  Matta Clark's work for me has an inherent nostalgia.  It evokes an age of radical and essentially optimistic  exploration, a time (the sixties and early seventies) when things still seemed possible.  I was very much impressed with his work but still prefer his contemporary conceptual artistic pioneer and fellow premature fatality Robert Smithson.  Smithson, in his earth works, ultimately is governed by aesthetic concern.  The spiral jetty--for all its conceptual rigor and commitment to process-- is first and foremost (or, at least I should say, ultimately) pleasing to the eye.  Same with his scattered glass installations.  There is a geometric simplicity to them --an elemental fascination with shape and pattern--that is very closely aligned with my aesthetic sensibility.  Matta Clark on the other hand is primarily committed to radically redefining the phenomenology of domestic space. Certainly, he is governed by aesthetic concerns as well, but they seem subordinated to his curiosity about how the perceptual field can be tampered with, expanded, re-oriented, transformed.  He is interested in boggling the mind more than gratifying the eye.  He is --ultimately--more interested in experience than in beauty.

Certainly it might be argued that  his commitment to something beyond mere beauty makes him a greater artist than Smithson.  Perhaps.  But you like what you like.

In one of the alcoves of the exhibit, they showed a documentary about the making of one of his projects.   Watching  a bunch of shirtless 20 something guys (one of them Matta Clark) power sawing through a house in order to radically rearrange it, I couldn't help but think how the time of innocent and earnest artistic exploration that allowed for this kind of endeavor was over in America:  An effort like this today would no doubt be turned into a reality TV series and cobranded as a sexy quasi pornographic Abercrombie catalogue.. the imagery of  pure artistic undertaking lending the brand it's vital aura of authenticitude.

(HYPER) CRITICAL COMMENT OF THE DAY:

Speaking of this bygone era: The next morning I read an article in the NYT Magazine about Susan Sontag and her contempt for American conformist consumerism and her nostalgia for the nobility of European intellectualism, I could not help but remember how, as a young man, mired in Heidegger, Derrida and Blanchot, I thought of her and even her eurpoean heros (Arendt, Sartre etc.) as intellectually second tier and, truth be told, sort of still do. But that said, it is striking just how far American critical discourse has fallen
since the 70s. What would have been a run of the mill socially acceptable critique of American hegemony, moral hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism in the 70s, was considered in the post 9/11 world (right before her death), a radical heresy verging on the treasonous. ( I speak of a much vilified piece she wrote in the New Yorker after 9/11.)

She is the closest thing America has produced to a serious intellectual in a long time--at least according to the European ideal. So my lingering low regard for her as a serious intellectual is a bit ungenerous and self-damning. (Note to self: "What the hell have YOU done?!?--Arrogant, judgemental, blog-scribbling turd!!")

I would not be surprised if The Gap comes out with a clothing line soon called SONTAG--linked with some focus-grouped, consumer-pre-approved cause du jour. SONTAG. Not critique but the illusion of critique. Not commitment but the illusion of commitment. Now availaible in 100% natural fibers.

Despite my misgivings about her status as a serious thinker, I would no doubt express my solidarity with her in perpetuity by refusing to buy more than one or two items from the line.

Unless the stuff was really nice.

TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE OF THE DAY:

To be, suddenly, out of the reach of feeling.  Of the people and poems and songs that once, without reflection, claimed you heart and soul. 

CARTOON WITHOUT ILLUSTRATION OF THE DAY:

“If you want to diminish the experience by calling it a disco ball, fine.  But I prefer to think of it as a cosmic event.”

RANDOM SINGLE SENTENCE PORTRAIT OF THE DAY:

He spent a lifetime waiting for his magnum opus to write itself.

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Posted on 3/13/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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