Breaker Baker

Single Fare 2: You can thank me later

2011-03-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

I flew to New York last week for the opening reception of Single Fare 2: Please Swipe Again, the Metrocard-themed show organized by Jean-Pierre Roy and Michael Kagan (and Alix Sloan) and on exhibition for just four more days (Wednesday through Saturday) at Sloan Fine Art on Rivington in the LES. I will cut to the quick: It’s an incredible show. More than 2,000 pieces from hundreds of artists at varying moments in their careers, the show is eclectic and packed but somehow avoids the pitfalls of being an overhung mishmash.

Roy, Kagan, and Sloan all deserve a great deal of credit for putting the thing together, and I feel a great deal of gratitude to all three of them, particularly to JP and Michael who, for the second year in a row have used this experiment to pull me out of the Roswell doldrums, force a brush into my hand, and set me to work again. It may not have been their intent, but I feel as though it wasn’t the very last thing on Jean-Pierre’s mind. They also let me crash in their studio while I was up there, so that was pretty cool, too. Blankets would have been nice, but I hardly missed them.

Really though, the show is spectacular! If you have not seen it, the gallery is not open today, but the show will be up through Saturday. If you are a collector or are looking to begin a collection, this is a truly wonderful opportunity to pick up some stellar work for next to nothing. At $100, every piece in the show is going for less than the cost of a 30-day pass! But no purchase is necessary. Just see the show. I feel lucky to have been a part of it, and I feel as though I have done someone a favor every time I've told them about it. So…you’re welcome. You can thank me later.

A Pretty Satisfying Week’s Work

2011-03-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

All right, here they are. They arrived last Monday. I started work on them on Tuesday, and I spent about 25 minutes making some final touches last night. All in all, a pretty satisfying week’s worth of work. If only I had come up with this whole painting on used Metrocards thing seven or eight years ago!

I’m going to put the paintings in the mail this afternoon, and that will be that. The next time I will see them will be on the wall in Alix’s gallery where they will be put to the work of paying for my plane ticket. If I write about this again, it will probably just be once more and after the show has opened.

[Edit: By the way, here are the show details.]

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 17th, from 6 to 9 pm 
Exhibition: Friday, March 18 through Saturday, March 26, 2011 
Gallery Hours: Noon to 6pm (Closed Monday & Tuesday)

Sloan Fine Art is located at 128 Rivington Street (corner of Norfolk) on the Lower East Side of New York City.

Numero seis.

2011-03-07T06:12:00.001-08:00

On Saturday morning, I found an old Metrocard laying under some clutter on my dresser. It expired on Halloween 2007. It must have been one of the last cards either Sarah or I bought before we left the city the first time, just after Nate was born. The first time I remember finding it was last year not long after submitting the two cards I made for the first Single Fare show. Sentiment is probably what kept it with us for the first few years, like the scuffed up playing cards Sarah used to bring home to Brooklyn after finding them on the sidewalk or in the gutter. We still have a handful of those cards stuck behind a magnet on our refrigerator in Roswell. But is wasn’t sentiment that led me to set that Metrocard aside last summer. Whereas a week before, I may have looked at the thing and felt the twinge of nostalgia, when it turned up last year, all I saw was a painting surface. So I set the thing aside on my dresser, where it stayed unnoticed and all but forgotten for the better part of a year. But I found it, finally, the Saturday before the submission deadline for the second Single Fare show, and if all goes well, I will now have six pieces in the show as opposed to five.

It's on.

2011-03-02T06:11:00.000-08:00

Following the initial request I made for them to be sent last Tuesday, the Metrocards finally arrived in the mailbox Monday afternoon. It’s weird, too. As I’ve said, I initially hadn’t planned to participate. JP called a few weekends ago asking if he should send anything, and I pretty much responded with a flat “not interested.” I was a bit more tactful than that, but I believe that’s more or less what he heard. After a months’ long period of steady studio activity last year, it’s been an equally long or longer period of inactivity since, and that’s been okay with me. I haven’t even been thinking about painting, and really, I find that to be a relatively healthy place for me to be a lot of the time, i.e., the place where I can pass by my painting supplies daily, multiple times a day, without feeling the persistent, dull ache of regret.

I don’t know if I can put my finger on what it was that pushed me to recant and ask for the cards in the first place. I still hadn’t really been thinking about painting. I hadn’t suddenly taken up a sketchbook again. My head was not heavy with the weight of images needing to be released into the world. Even as I asked him, I’m not at all sure if I actually wanted JP to send them along, or if I was just saw the request as a friendly gesture (he found my earlier lack of motivation depressing). Still, as the days passed, I found myself growing more and more impatient for their arrival, so much so that I was even a bit distressed when I went to the mailbox on Saturday only to return with two (yes TWO!) Pottery Barn catalogues and nothing else.

In any case, the wait is over. The cards are here. JP sent two last year. This year there are five. It’s a dare. If he were really my friend, I'm not sure he would dare me to do these kinds of things. Anyway, started in on a couple of them yesterday. So far so good. And that's part of what worries me.

More later.

The Doctor

2011-03-01T08:37:00.001-08:00

My father is Tom Baker. Depending on how much of a nerd you are today or were as a child, or if you happen to have the misfortune of being British, that name may mean something special to you. Some of my earlier memories involve sitting at home watching Doctor Who with my brother and sister, who are both older than me by several years. At the time, the Doctor was played by a British actor with my father’s name (something which deeply impressed my brother and sister, but was lost on me). I don’t remember much about those series, but periodically throughout my life, somebody I would have recently met will learn my father’s name and their face will light up with recognition and nostalgia. Nerds.

When the BBC rebooted the franchise several years ago with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, a guy I know from England was very keen on it. He went to great lengths to explain why I needed to be watching it, and basically gave me a spoiler-rich synopsis of the finale, in which the Doctor regenerates into David Tennant. I was more or less sold on the idea that it was something I would probably like, but it took until the fall of past year for Sarah and I to actually sit down and commit to watching any of it. By that time, it was the fifth series since the reboot, and the Doctor had regenerated again into the personage of Matt Smith. We were thoroughly won over. Not long after we finished Series 5, we decided to begin a new subscription to Netflix almost entirely for the purposes of streaming the Eccleston and Tennant shows from the beginning.

Sarah is not a fan of Eccleston. I can’t imagine that he’s very many people’s favorite Doctor, but I think he did a noble job of recreating the character and his bowing out opened the door for David Tennant, who has probably come to embody the Doctor as much as Tom Baker did a generation ago. We’re near the end of Tennant’s run, but there are new Matt Smith episodes to come, which is nice. It’s good to have something to look forward to, but I don’t look forward to the waiting.

Electric Boogaloo

2011-02-23T16:57:00.000-08:00

It's official, there are no new ideas. But this was a good one the first time around, so...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Single Fare 2: Please Swipe Again
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 17th, from 6 to 9 pm
Exhibition: Friday, March 18 through Saturday, March 26, 2011 
Gallery Hours: Noon to 6pm (Closed Monday & Tuesday)
In May 2010, Artists Jean-Pierre Roy and Michael Kagan hosted an unusual exhibition in their Brooklyn studio. Open to all artists who wanted to participate, “Single Fare” placed one constraint on the creative process: all work had to be submitted on a used MetroCard. Inspired by the notion that the city’s subways and buses allow for a kind of creative interchange unmatched in human history, “Single Fare” sought to create a unique art event where art and artists could come together to form a monumental event made from a tiny, innocuous piece of plastic: The MetroCard! The resulting exhibition featured over 700 works of art – from artists as far away as New Zealand and as close as the studio next door.
Following the tremendous success of last year’s “Single Fare,” Roy and Kagan are pleased to team up with Sloan Fine Art on the Lower East Side for “Single Fare 2: Please Swipe Again.” The themes of last year’s show ran the gamut from moments of High Abstraction to Delicate Portraiture. Three-dimensional works, documentary photography and even a video installation helped to create one of the most cohesively diverse shows in recent memory while playfully challenging artists to show what they can do with seven square inches.
While serving as a democratizing vehicle for artists of all ages and disciplines, the Single Fare exhibition also served as a fantastic platform to introduce beginning collectors to an amazing array of work while inviting the committed collector to connect to artists that might normally fall under their radar. Sloan Fine Art represents an exciting step forward for the Single Fare experience and while the exhibition will remain true to its roots, it will benefit from additional exhibition days and regular gallery hours. Please swipe again, and join us as we take a ride into the city!
Sloan Fine Art is located at 128 Rivington Street (corner of Norfolk) on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Detailed submission instructions can be found at http://single-fare.com/. For press inquiries, please contact Sloan Fine Art at info@sloanfineart.com.

I initially said no when M. Roy asked me if I wanted him to send me some cards. I've been trying to focus on writing, and a week ago I had no motivation or desire to go back into the garag...err...studio. But last night I decided that it might be a little fun. I took a look at plane tickets yesterday. I don't know if I can rationalize the expense, but I am looking. I still regret not being able to go up last year.

Assuming the cards are ever sent and they ever arrive, I might write a bit more on this later. I know, you can't wait!

Over and Out

2011-02-23T16:47:00.000-08:00

[Originally Published on January 7, 2011]

Before this week, it had been a while (maybe two years) since I had been forced to organize my thoughts and actually talk about art in a casual but remotely intelligent way. One of the things I did to try and prepare was flip through and reread passages from The Journal of Eugene Delacroix at random. For a lot of the people I know, it's sort of a required text. I picked it up again last night and found the following entry. 28 July 1854:

I have been thinking of Voltaire's novels, of the tragedies of Racine and of thousands upon thousands of other masterpieces. Can we believe that such things are done merely so that in every generation men may ask whether there is anything fresh to divert them in the way of literature? Is not this incredible output of masterpieces, produced for the human herd by the greatest minds and most sublime geniuses, enough to terrify the more sensitive portion of our unhappy race? Will the insatiable search after novelty never give anyone the idea of seeing whether the old masterpieces are not newer and fresher than the rhapsodies that pander to our idleness, and which we prefer to the masterpieces? Were these miracles of imagination and wit, of reason, gaiety, or pathos, produced by geniuses at a cost of such immense labour and sleepless nights, and rewarded, so rarely alas, by meagre praise when they first appeared - were these great works, I say, created only to lapse, after a brief appearance and a few eulogies, in the dust of libraries and the unproductive, almost dishonoring esteem of so-called savants and antiquaries? Shall college pedants tug at our sleeves and remind us that Racine is at least simple, the La Fontaine saw as much in nature as Lamartine, and that Lesage portrayed men as they really are? Are the leaders of our present civilization, these ordinary schoolmasters, who have been raised to be ministers or shepherds of the people because they once had a quarter of an hour of inspiration according to present-day standards, the men who are to make a new literature? New indeed! A fine sort of novelty!

I think it's a strange sort of comedy that I should find this entry at the end of the week, and I think it works as a fine bookend to the Cloisters piece from Monday.

Delacroix would have been 56 when he wrote that. He'd be dead inside of ten years, and most the major work for which he's celebrated would have been 20 to 30 years old by then. Already collecting dust. And while there's an undeniably embittered tone to this, I choose to find some hope.

It was 1854. As the Great Master of French Romanticism was bemoaning the sorry state of literature and of art, Gustave Courbet was toiling away at The Artist's Studio. Frederic Church had just returned from his first trip to South America. Dickens was writing Hard Times. In 1863, the year of Delacroix's death, the Paris Salon rejected a painting called Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. Its maker found another venue to display it instead. And so it went. Delacroix died, but to no surprise, art and the world moved on. Year after year great work would continue to be made by great artists, and every year, some curmudgeon stepped up to echo Delacroix's condemnation of the fashions of the moment. I hope that I did more than to simply take up that old mantle this week. I hope that I conveyed something more than that.

Before I close, I want to thank the editorial staff at The Atlantic who did their best to make my voice as palatable for as many readers as possible, it's no easy task and there's no reason it should be a thankless one. Also, thank you to Sara and Jamelle, it's been a pleasure sharing the stage with the both of you. To the Battalion, because that's the way I choose to remember you, while I would like to believe that nobody really has to force themselves to read anything I've written, I know better. I've truly cherished every comment. And, if it's okay, I choose to read your silence as awe. I will soon rejoin the ranks.

And to TNC, thanks again. I hope it was all you hoped it would be. I had a good time, anyway.

And Another Thing

2011-02-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

[Originally Posted on January 7, 2011]

When TNC first approached me about doing this, I knew I was going to say yes, but I really had no idea how the week would go. All things considered, I'm really pleased. I knew from the start that mine was not going to be the most accessible topic for all readers, but I tried my best to make things interesting and to keep the topics related but diverse. My hope going in was that my contribution would help to foster some good conversation down below, and I was very pleased when it did. I wanted to be more responsive to comments, but the week has been more hectic than I had anticipated, and I regret that my contribution to expanding the discussion has been borderline nonexistent. Now that we're at the end of the week, I want to try to follow up on at least a couple of things that some of you had said.From the Cloisters post on Monday, muckelba had the following to say:

Since I'm reading the post as distinguishing between "art that's made for the work itself" and "art that's made in order to garner attention/fame," I'm curious whether or not we might want to complicate that distinction. That is, might we be able to read the "attention/fame" as simply a different (and perhaps more expansive) style of art. Not just a social, self-centered add-on to the work itself, but a shift of focus onto the cultivation of self, such that "the work" is as much about creating a persona for the "artist" as it is about the resulting "object." Hence, the fact that...say Warhol's paintings leave one "cold" might be because Warhol's paintings were merely part of the process of artistically creating something larger: a persona or character of "the artist."

While I talk about celebrity as a motivating force, I didn't intend for that to be the primary distinguishing factor between the groups I was discussing. My real point, or what I intended to be my real point, had more to do with celebrity being less of a motivator and more of a consolation prize. What I think most artists of ambition still want is to make something like an indelible mark, but we've come of age during a time when everything is either disposable or in the process of being made obsolete. Warhol, and all of the pop-philosophy for which he's credited, is a product of that and of the conceptual lineage of Marcel Duchamp, but I'm not sure to what degree artists are still following his example or even thinking about it. Although denying the lingering effect would be silly. Still, I'm more persuaded by the idea that we're just a few generations deeper into the crisis of our own stifling obsolescence, and that, starved for some recognition of self worth, we've lost sight of the greatness of art's potential or our ability to tap into it, determining instead, that it's best to consider ourselves lucky to grab from the lowest of the hanging fruit.
In the second Moving Pictures post, the one in which I talked about Frederic Church's Heart of the Andes, a number of people drew a parallel I had, perhaps to the post's detriment, intentionally omitted. abk1985:

On a contemporary level, people who found the canvas vertiginous and sublime are probably the same who felt that way about Avatar.

A point repeated by cynic:

...almost all the same tropes were recycled in the public reception of Avatar—a record-setting, expectation-defying blockbuster in its own right, and the lineal heir to Church's Heart of the Andes.

It will probably come as no surprise that I had considered this comparison already. Not only does the presentation—a darkened room with an audience of viewers sat, entranced by the glowing light reflecting off of a big rectangle some distance away—seem to directly presage modern cinema 50 or 60 years ahead of time, there are distinct similarities in the language used to describe the effects purportedly caused by the Church and those attributed to 3-D films like Avatar. I had actually written a good amount on the subject for that post. Indeed, it was a major factor in the original conceptualization of the week and the choice to follow that piece with the bit on artists in film from yesterday, but for a number of reasons, I decided to cut it and replace it with the Lehrer/Stravinsky bit.

It's not that I don't believe it's an interesting discussion to have, but the similarities seem almost misleading to me, and I decided that I'm just not prepared to draw that conclusion, even when it seems so obvious on its face. Despite the similarities, I'm just not convinced the same words are being used to describe the same physiological response. More than that, I sort of suspect that they aren't. But when I attempted an explanation as to why, it turned into a convoluted tangent that, in the end, still wasn't very convincing. But my inability to frame a convincing argument didn't lead me to the conclusion that I was wrong. I freely admit that I may be wrong, but I feel as though I'm right about this, that we're talking about two distinctly different types of response. I'm just not sure I can persuade anybody else to feel that way, so I dropped that bit and went with the Lehrer which, ironically, I suspect has more in common Avatar than either have with Heart of the Andes.

Maybe it was a mistake on my part, but I was also wary of spending too much time and effort trying to draw an ultimately unconvincing distinction between the effect caused by a work of art and that caused by a new film technology. That's the sort of thing that leads people to infer that I don't respect film as art, which just isn't the case at all. But rather than leave that hanging out there, or preface anything with an obligatory, "I really like film, but..." I decided the post would be better served by a subtle tipping of the hat to the theatricality of the presentation of the Church and quickly moving on. Whether or not it was a good idea, I wanted to give some insight as to the though process that led me there.

Based on a True Story

2011-02-23T12:23:00.000-08:00

[Originally Published on January 6, 2011]

I recently found the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child on Netflix. It isn't great, but a good bit of it is pretty interesting. I particularly like the footage that was taken from an interview Tamra Davis, the film's director and a former friend of the artist, had shot with JMB a couple of years before his death. But Davis, like most of the talking heads and old acquaintances she interviewed for the piece, seems too close to its subject to create an honest portrait. Many of them, either for personal or professional reasons, seem too invested in the legend, too anxious to protect the idea of this angelic genius that, at times it feels as though they're not talking about a real person at all. Like he was less of a man and more of a china doll.

But the interview with JMB, which Davis uses as the backdrop of the piece, is one of the more intimate portraits of the artist that I've ever seen. He's unguarded, and reveals himself to be a funny and thoughtful, but ultimately insecure...kid. He was 25 when it was shot (he died at 27), but he'd already been rich and famous for four or five years; his career was, for the most part, behind him. The interview really makes for a great foundation on which, I think, a much better film could have been made, but the final product leaves me feeling as though the whole thing is just another in a long line of exploitations of him. Maybe it would have made a difference for me had the film not been so overt in trying to hammer it home for the viewer that he was such an important historical figure. Even in death, it's like they can't just let this guy be the stupid (and yeah, pretty smart) kid that he was.

Anyway, I did like the bits with Julian Schnabel who shows up now and again. That arrogant prick has a habit of making me like him when he's doing just about anything but painting, and it was no different here. Even if they didn't bring it up in the documentary (and they do) it would be nearly impossible to watch the The Radiant Child without thinking of Schnabel's 1996 biopic, which did the double-duty of not only revealing Julian Schnabel as pretty great filmmaker but also introducing the world to Jeffery Wright, who's just pretty great. The pretension of that film is palpable, but I still like it as much as any artist biopic I've ever seen. But I guess that's not saying a lot. Still, it's worth an embed.

In The Radiant Child, Schnabel, who knew JMB but was several years older and more established as an artist, explains the motivation behind his film as an attempt to tell the kid who always seemed so interested in his (Schnabel's) opinion that he truly respected him. I guess that's acceptable. It's kind of sweet in a condescending sort of way. (Oh, Julian! You loveable asshole!) Anyway, at least it's not all about hero worship. It helps that the film is pretty good. I wonder if Milos Forman had a good excuse for Goya's Ghosts. Not good enough, I'm sure.

I understand the impulse behind making these movies, but it so rarely works out for the best, even if it seems, at first, as though it should. Paintings may be visually interesting, but the act of making them, generally, is not, so the dilemma becomes how to force drama into a kind of boring existence. Generally, that's exactly how it feels: forced.One of the more peculiar artist films I've ever seen, and one of the better ones, decided to go in the opposite direction. It is the 1992 Spanish film: Victor Erice's El Sol del Membrillo. While the title literally translates to "The Sun of the Quince Tree," when the film was released in the US it was called Dream of Light.

The film follows the remarkable Antonio Lopez Garcia as he takes on what becomes the Sisyphean task of trying to paint a quince tree in his back garden before the fruit begins to spoil. It contains all of the major trappings of a documentary, but as the American title may allude, as is the case in dreams, the happenings in this film may not be entirely as they seem. Along with Erice, Lopez is given a writing credit, and while the film never quite tips its hand, you soon become aware that, whatever the film is, it definitely isn't a documentary.

It can be a difficult film to watch and, even more so, to describe in an interesting way. There's an awful lot of screen time devoted to the artist's methodical process, full of meticulous (to the point of being idiosyncratic) measurements and cryptic markings, and as you become more conscious of the fact that what you're watching isn't a straightforward documentary, you may begin to resent the film, or the painter, for what you could infer as an incomprehensible self-indulgence. I remember that being my first response. I remember walking away from the film feeling deeply frustrated, but the film stayed with me long after those feelings had faded.

I don't know if I can easily nail down why the film stays with me still. I think it has something to do with the devotion I talked about on Monday. Without going too deeply into the plot, when the film begins, you get the sense that it may be little more than an extended metaphor on the fruits of labor, but somewhere along the way, the dream shifts, and the film turns almost tragic--well, as tragic as film about a guy painting a tree can be. While it's unclear how much, if any, of what the film documents is real, the Antonio Lopez we're presented with by the end of the film is almost a classic antihero.

After a while you begin to realize that he's set himself up for failure, and a pointless failure at that, one that could be averted if he weren't so stubborn. But he continues to plod along uncompromisingly, and near the final act of the film, you feel as though you're Sancho Panza and that you've spent the last hour watching Don Quixote joust with the windmills. You admire him, but at the same time you just want him to stop. It's more or less how I think my wife feels if she ever has the stomach to watch me work. I think of that film and I think of her. And I think of me, and I realize that I'm an idiot. I don't know how comfortable I feel recommending the film.

[I couldn't embed a clip with subtitles. YouTube has the whole thing available and split into ten minute sections: The first of which is here. I think it's worth a shot; if you find that it grabs you, just click to the next and the next and the next. The Radiant Child is available to stream on Netflix, so it may also be only a couple of clicks away.]

Moving Pictures: A Prequel, or Church Was a Neuroscientist

2011-01-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

(Originally Published on January 5, 2011)

In the 1850s, Frederic Edwin Church was commissioned on two occasions by Cyrus West Field, of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, to travel to South America and to produce work as a chronicle of his journeys. Sometime after returning to New York, Church began work on Heart of the Andes, a monumental canvas of nearly ten feet in width that strung together elements from various sketches and paintings he made on the continent. Accounts of its theatrical unveiling and exhibition, in 1859, seem almost mythical.

The painting was displayed in an oversized walnut frame onto which curtains had been strung so that the unveiling would give the effect of a window being drawn open. The space was dimly lit with dark fabrics draping the surrounding walls to absorb the ambient light. The painting was lit by gas lights that were directed onto the picture by silver reflectors, and being the only object in the room receiving direct light, the picture reflected light back onto the audience giving the impression that the thing was being lit from within. Some accounts claim that Church filled the space with indigenous flora he had brought back from South America, but there is some discrepancy on that. It is known, however, that viewers were required to sit on benches and were provided with opera glasses to examine the painting's details from afar.

Among the first installation pieces in the history of Modern Art, the picture was a sensation.

Church's canvas had a significant effect on its viewers; a contemporary witness wrote:

women felt faint. Both men and women succumb[ed] to the dizzying combination of terror and vertigo that they recognize[d] as the sublime. Many of them will later describe a sensation of becoming immersed in, or absorbed by, this painting, whose dimensions, presentation, and subject matter speak of the divine power of nature.

For the three weeks it was on display in Church's studio, more than 12,000 people flocked to see it, for which they would willingly pay a 25-cent admission fee. The painting would soon thereafter go on tour, first of London then of the United States. When it reached St. Louis, it was seen by Samuel Clemens, who would rave that, "You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections--your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something--you hardly know what--will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture--it remains with you still." He was 25 at the time.

The thing eventually sold for $10,000, the highest price anyone had ever paid for the work of a living American artist. But that may be the least interesting part of the story for me. It's a story I think of so often when looking at art today, and while I can't remember seeing it then, or even before then, when I think back on that day and The Quintet of Remembrance, the moving image that in a dark room felt like a living painting, my thoughts quickly shift to the audiences who sat in the dark staring into the Heart of the Andes(a painting!) feeling themselves overcome by an emotional and physical response which they could barely even begin to classify, and I feel so fucking jealous. Not of Church, but of his audience, of their experience and, maybe more to the point, their capacity to have it. (And yeah, I'm probably pretty jealous of Church, too.)

It's not so much that I am jealous of their opportunity to view the piece in its original installation (although that would be pretty cool, and if anybody at the Metropolitan is reading this, just remember who it was that gave you the idea: Me that's who!), what I mean is that, even in the dark and with the assistance of tiny binoculars, part of me seriously doubts that I would even allow myself to be open to the kind of reaction the contemporary accounts describe. Maybe I'm too cynical, or maybe the opposite is true and I take the descriptions of the accounts too literally, but when I read phrases like "the dizzying combination of terror and vertigo" I can't help but look for that kind of reaction to a piece in my personal history, and I don't know if I can find it. And I really wish I could. I'd like to know that feeling.

There's a chapter in Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist that deals with the 1913 opening of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (Lehrer later retold the story to Jad and Robert for an episode of Radiolab). From the book, Lehrer describes the scene:

But spring, as T.S. Eliot pointed out is also the cruelest time. No sooner do lilacs emerge than the sweeping dissonance of Stravinsky's orchestral work begins, like "the immense sensation that all things experience at the moment when Nature renews its forms." In one of music's most brutal transitions, Stravinsky opens the second section of his work with a monstrous migraine of sound. Though the music has just started, Stravinsky is already relishing the total rejection of our expectations. Stravinsky called this section "The Augurs of Spring."

The "Augurs" don't go well. Within seconds, the bassoon's flowery folk tunes are paved over by an epileptic rhythm, the horns colliding asymmetrically against the ostinato. All of spring's creations are suddenly hollering for attention. The tension builds and builds and builds, but there is no vent. The irregular momentum is merciless, like the soundtrack to an apocalypse, the beat building to a fatal fortissimo.

This was when the audience at the premiere began to scream. The Rite had started a riot.

"For the audience," Lehrer claims, "Stravinsky's new work was the sound of remorseless originality." He goes on to weave this story and others into an interesting discussion on the topic of neuroplasticity and about the human brain's adaptability to new stimuli that may initially come as a shock. As proof, Lehrer offers that audiences did indeed warm to Stravinsky's new sound and The Rite, within a short time would be hailed a great success.

I bring this up because it's a great story, but also because I think it's analogous to the initial reactions toHeart of the Andes and how, today, I really question whether or not I could ever be affected in the same way. So much about seeing the Church would have been new to its audience. The scale, the subject, and the manner in which it was displayed, would have all felt distinctly foreign, even shocking. But the sad truth, if Lehrer is right, may be that our brains, or even our collective unconscious, have evolved beyond the point that we could even hope to will ourselves to see any of it as new again. Maybe it's not that we're cynical, but that we have become desensitized to the sublime.

But these stories, really whether they're true or not, remind us of what art can mean to us, of what it can be. They remind us that art itself can be a force of nature. They remind us of its bewitching power not simply to seduce or move us, but to shake and even startle us. To wield the disorienting force of spectacle, and to take us out of ourselves and will us to go in a direction of its choosing, often further than we would have ever been prepared to go on our own. And even today, there's got to be some hope in that.

Moving Pictures

2011-01-12T14:40:00.000-08:00

(Originally Published on January 4, 2011)

The first time I went to The Museum of Modern Art was for a Gerhard Richter retrospective in the winter of 2002. It was my final semester of college, and a couple of friends and I had made the drive up from Greensboro to visit some grad schools, see some art, and to become better acquainted with the city. Looking back, the experience is a bit of a blur (rimshot). We had gone to MoMA at the end of long and exhausting day that we'd spent at the Met, which happened to also be a suggested donation evening. Unlike the Met , MoMA is almost always an unavoidably expensive place to go (currently $20 required admission), but for a couple of hours on Friday evenings the museum is opened up to a suggested admission price, and these are reliably the busiest times you will ever see the place. On that evening, for one reason or another, public access to the permanent collection had been closed off, meaning that all comers were being filed through the handful of galleries that housed the Richter pictures. It was a mad house; way too crowded to feel comfortable stopping to look, so nobody really did. We all just sort of walked through, giving each picture a cursory read and moving on to the next and the next and the next, until we were let out into the gift shop. I didn't have the money or the inclination to buy one of the books they were hawking, so today, it's almost as if I was never there.

There you have it. My first trip to MoMA was not a memorable one. But it wasn't a total loss. It was also the day I first saw Bill Viola's The Quintet of Remembrance.

At the time, I hadn't been exposed to a great deal of video art. I was an art student sure, but I had a sort of quixotic affinity for the handmade; plus I was living in central North Carolina in a period that predated YouTube, so there wasn't a great deal of opportunity. I had seen a bunch of stills in books and magazines and a few old black and white reels in college. Early William Wegman, some Richard Serra, Dennis Oppenheim, and a few others, but beyond that, mainly student work. I found a kind of adolescent charm in some of it, but I was never really a fan. I had never been pulled in, never felt as though I was in the presence of something that was worth the time it was asking me to spend looking at it.

Video sort of emerged as a viable artistic medium during a period when artists had really begun to fetishize the concept of the conceptual and place the idea behind a work of art so high above its execution that it's often difficult to discern the difference between the real art of the period and its numerous parodies. And while I have little doubt that it was an exciting time to be an artist, the art that it produced so often falls into the realm of an amateurish spectacle of self-indulgent excess which fails to connect on either an intellectual or emotional level to anyone living outside the cocoon of space and time in which it was made.

Video artists had chosen moving pictures, a genre that presents so many opportunities of which we're all aware, but in their urgency to cast off so many the format's conventions, they were unwilling, uninterested, or, so often, incapable of even beginning to harness its potential. And, if you ask me, a lot of bad art resulted. But the medium was young, and as you'd hope, with experimentation comes experience, and with experience most living things have a habit of coming of age.

The Quintet of Remembrance is one of four videos created between 2000 and 2001 that were inspired by the artist's study of late medieval and early Renaissance Italian and Flemish paintings and their iconography. In each, a group of five people undergo a range of emotions while the camera records every nuance of their physical reaction.

Here, Viola specifically references Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns) (ca. 1490-1500, National Gallery, London), Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi (1495-1505, Getty Museum, Los Angeles), and Dieric Bouts' Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowing Madonna) (1470-75, Art Institute of Chicago). Bosch's painting acts as the visual template for the composition of this work and the strong emotions conveyed by the five people that vacillate between compassion, shock, grief, anger, fear, and rapture. Although they share a close physical space, each person is fully absorbed in his or her own emotional experience. Shot with high-speed 35-mm film, the actors' performance, which lasted approximately sixty seconds, is extended in the finished video to a little over sixteen minutes, accentuating the power and depth of each emotion.

Viola embraced the visual, specifically the aesthetic, attributes of the medium in a way unlike any video artist I'd ever seen. He seemed intent on placing the work, and the medium, into a new or, rather, much older context, engaging in a dialogue with art history while seeming to turn a deaf ear to the solipsism that had plagued the contemporary dialogue for so long.

The installation space, which you can see in the link, was sort of a box of a room, not too small, but dark with two rows of benches facing a screen onto which the glowing image was being projected. The first thing you notice is how very much like a painting it is. Viola looked to the early Renaissance for his composition and inspiration, but he lit his subjects with the dramatic flare of the Baroque, and, if not for their contemporary dress, The Quintet may at first be mistaken for a group populating the work of one of the Caravaggisti. And the piece is quiet, like a painting. There's no audio track accompanying the video, just a very low electronic hum of the projector working.

But the longer you look, the more you realize how unlike a painting it is. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the piece is changing before your eyes. It moves. The figures, who seem frozen at first, are shifting, at a snail's pace, yes, but continuously nonetheless. Captured, the moment has been prolonged, so that each of its subtleties, every minute change of expression or posture can be seen, can be read, and can be felt by the viewer. No, this was not a painting, nor a photograph. It was something else entirely. And it had me mesmerized.

While there were people constantly filing in and out, I felt the uncanny sense of being alone in there beneath a shroud of darkness and anticipation, as though I had become so entangled with the piece with the experience of experiencing it, that everyone in the space had become part of it, as though we were all players, surrounded, but each of us lost in our own encapsulated moment. And something strange happened: I stayed for the duration.

I don't know whether or not it would be right to say that I was moved. I was surprised. Sometimes that's just as good. I left the space in silence, still not sure what I had seen, but feeling as though it had been something special, something that I would not soon forget.

We spent most of the rest of the day at the Met. I remember there was a really nice show chronicling the lives and work Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and that one of my friends was especially taken by an exhibition of small works by Paul Klee, of whom he was a much bigger fan than I. And there was, of course, the permanent collection: Van Eyck, Velázquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Poussin, Goya, Chardin, Manet,Cezanne, Van Gogh, and on and on. It's really far too much to see in a day, and it's no wonder that I could barely stand to look at anything for more than a moment when the day was done. Before we made the trek down to MoMA, I'm sure we found our way to the American Wing of the Met where we would have looked for Madame X or The Gulf Stream, or some other such thing that we would have known by heart, but when I think back on that day, on sitting in the dark and the feeling of being enveloped by the glow of The Quintet, what comes to mind is a picture I don't even remember seeing until much later. The story of which, I will get into soon.

Note: The video above is not The Quintet of Remembrance. It is clip from The Quintet of Astonished. A still of the QoR can be seen in the link accompanying the blockquote.

The Cloisters: A Good Place to Start

2011-01-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

(Originally Published on January 3, 2011)

Several years ago, I was living with my wife and one-year-old son in a three-bedroom apartment we were renting in Queens. I used the third bedroom for a studio, which was actually more difficult than it may sound seeing as the entire apartment had been painted bright orange with green trim. It was not an ideal color scheme for a painting studio, but I made do as best I could. Every day I commuted to midtown, where I worked an entry-level job at an investment firm in the Chrysler Building.

It was early March 2008, when I met a friend, and painter, for a drink after work at a bar beneath Grand Central. He had just come from the Whitney Biennial, which had recently opened. The experience had left him drained and a bit cynical. I hadn't seen the show, but I knew the feeling.

There are shows that leave you so invigorated that all you want is to be back in the studio, feeling as though you could work through the night without tiring. Then there are the shows that leave you empty, pondering the foolish choices and childish ideals that led you to choose the life of an artist. And you leave these shows knowing you're supposed to want to go back to work. But who can work when there's so much drinking to be done?

So we talked for a while over some beers about the things two painters talk about when they feel the world is backwards and that nobody makes art for the right reasons. And somewhere in there, we realized that though we'd both lived as painters in the city for the better part of a decade, neither of us had ever been to The Cloisters. Finally, a problem that could be solved!

And so it happened that the following morning my friend and I met at Columbus Circle, and headed north seeking some form of creative purification or rejuvenation at a medieval monastery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

If you've never been to The Cloisters, it's really quite remarkable. The subway lets you off outside the gates of Fort Tryon Park, which is a gorgeous patch of hilly green overlooking the Hudson just to the north of the George Washington Bridge. From there it's a bit of a hike through the park's gardens and wooded passes, and by the time you finally reach the abbey you're so taken out of your surroundings that it's almost a surprise to realize that you haven't even left the city. It's a feeling you rarely get in any of the other major NYC parks, and for this place, it's an appropriate sort of artifice. For it's there, hidden away at the northern tip of Manhattan, that you can find a museum that houses what is probably the greatest medieval art collection in the New World; including, most famously, the Unicorn Tapestries.

The building is a sort of amalgam comprising architectural elements taken from various medieval European abbeys and transported to New York, in the 1930s, by John D. Rockefeller Jr., for redesign by Charles Collens. The interior is stone, and a bit cold. In the heart of the building, there's a 12th century arcade (hence: Cloisters) surrounding an open-air garden, which is closed off during the colder months, as it was then. At opposing ends of the garden, there are two chapels, built centuries apart, lit by a cool expanse of ambient natural light. The tapestries hang in more dimly lit rooms adjacent to the arcade, but the bulk of the collection on display, e.g., illuminated manuscripts, ivory carvings, early Flemish masterpieces, can be found on the lower floors.

We walked through this space with thoughts of the Biennial and of the emptiness of its brand of celebrity still fresh in our minds. I stopped before an elongated glass case that held a small ivory relief. There were two panels with hinges in the center allowing it to open and close like a book. Opened, the piece displayed four miniature scenes carved into the ivory. On the left was the Coronation of the Virgin. On the right: The Last Judgment. In the lower third of both panels, souls were being lined up, the lucky being welcomed to Paradise, the rest were being banished to damnation. It had been carved by an anonymous Frenchman in the mid-13th century.

I've seen a lot of medieval art and artifact in my life, and I have little doubt that I've walked past similarly crafted works before without taking notice. And shame on me for that. But not on this day. I remember being struck by the scale of the thing. In a world where we can become so accustomed to the over-sized, to the pretension of the monumental, here was this thing, this tiny object that I could hold in my hand, smaller than a paperback, but carrying more weight than anything I'd seen in I-don't-know-how-long. And what was this weight? Whatever it was, it seemed to flow through those halls like lava: dense and slow, but hotter than you can imagine. And it filled those spaces with a power to preserve the old as new, and leave the new cowering in shame and in awe.

The diptych was but one object of many that made us stop and just look. But it's only one of literally dozens of ivory carvings and miniatures, each sharing many of the same attributes. It was the same with the Gothic sculptures adorning the walls of a crypt from which they looked down on a variety of gorgeously rendered sarcophagi. And it was the same with the paintings. Shit. The paintings!

The Merode Altarpiece by Robert Campin may be the greatest painting I've ever seen. Humbly displayed in a quiet room the color of limestone, it sits on a perch and whispers, "Come closer." I obeyed, and I found a picture I'd seen a thousand times before in reproduction, but as is so often the case, I had yet to really see it. Three panels: the Annunciation of the Holy Motherhood by the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin in the center, flanked on either side by devout onlookers to the left and Joseph the Carpenter in his workshop to the right. A technical marvel, it's masterfully rendered in oil from a time when the medium was still in its infancy. I have yet to find a reproduction that will do it justice, but the picture is revelation, both literally and figuratively.

I've heard stories of people breaking down before a Mark Rothko. Now, I like Rothko as much the next guy, but give me a break! You want a reason to weep, go stand in front of the Campin Annunciation for twenty minutes and really look. Afterwards, try to remember why you ever thought Mark Rothko was a painter of note. Maybe you can do it. Maybe a lot of people can. I sure as hell can't. I couldn't that day, and I can't now.

I don't mean to say that the Campin has no equal, or that the Rothko lacks the power to move. I've stood in the middle of a room full of Rothko pictures and bathed in the depths of his blues and oranges; I have stood there, closed my eyes, filled my lungs with air, and felt myself falling into those fields of color, and I have been moved. But on this day, as I stood before that gloriously crafted and unassuming triptych, I stared into its turbulent world of spatial anomaly, of allegory and riddle, of symbolism and iconography, and of blind humility in the presence of the extraordinary, and I was pulled in, and my eyes were opened. I've since found that I do some of my best looking when my eyes are open.

There's a terrace with a well-manicured garden upon which museum visitors can walk out and sit while enjoying panoramic views across the Hudson and into New Jersey. It was on the terrace, while looking at a peculiar shrub whose branches had been manipulated over the years to grow like the arms of a candelabrum, that my friend and I began to piece together what we'd been seeing. And why it was all so profoundly different from what we'd become accustomed to seeing.

Had either of us been religious, then we might have been tempted to look at all of these distinctly Christian masterpieces and attribute their power or pathos to some form of divine inspiration. We are not so disposed. Nor are we of the type to be persuaded that the Old Masters were endowed with mystical secrets or otherworldly abilities. They could not, as an eloquent professor of mine once put it, shit marble. They were not, in any objective sense, special. They were just people; people with an admirable level of skill, which was innate, and a brilliant technique, which had to be learned. But they had something more.

When I mentioned to my friend that I would be writing about this, he reminded me that the word-of-the-day had been "Devotion." We decided on the terrace that afternoon that, more than skill, technique, or inspiration, the current that reverberated through the halls of that abbey and those of so many of the great museums of the world, yet so few of the places where new art is still being made and shown is nothing if not the lingering vibration of the profound and unshakeable devotion of the makers. Not to God, but to the work itself.

Think of the nameless Frenchman who, with large hands and diminutive tools, more than seven hundred years ago peered through a primitive magnifying glass to deftly carve tiny Bible stories into a fresh block of ivory that had been harvested from a slaughtered elephant somewhere across the known world. He could have had no ambitions for museum exhibition. There was no such thing. The object he toiled over was not even meant for display. It had utility. It was small for a reason. It was meant to be held, to spend most of its time clasped shut, and to be opened privately by its owner who could then contemplate its lessons in solitude. That was its purpose.

It had a purpose! It wasn't even art in the modern sense of the word. Certainly no more so than a chair or a desk. But it breathes with life even today. Through a pane of glass it was never meant to be behind, it speaks. Christ! It has the power to speak to nonbelievers about life, about meaning and faith, and about devotion. It's nothing short of magical. That it is art is undeniable. But more than that, I've come to believe that it is what art, what all art, should be. What all great art has ever been. Not what it should look like or be about, but what it should strive for, and sadly what so much of art today fails to even consider. That it was made by, probably, a man with no ambition or even concept of fame only serves to underscore how far our expectations have fallen.

The art world, whatever else it is, is an insulated place. I spent the Thanksgiving prior at the home of a friend of mine who owns a gallery. Towards the end of the night, a conversation between the host and a guest I didn't know turned to an argument over who was more relevant: Jeff Koons or Matthew Barney. Koons, the host argued, was more relevant, and this was evidenced by his having had a float in that morning's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I don't really remember the argument in favor of Barney, but it probably had something to do with the Guggenheim. "Relevant to whom?" I recall asking nobody in particular. After all, while it's true that, short of being the subject of a major motion picture, Koons and Barney are probably as famous as any two living artists can get, I couldn't help but feel as though I was watching two adults heatedly argue over the relevance of two people to a world that had never heard of them, had never seen their work, and could, consequently, never be expected remember either. Relevant indeed.

Artists today are, in a way, like the 13th century ivory carver. That is to say, we don't—or shouldn't—have any illusions about being remembered by history. But unlike the ivory carver, we live in the 21st century and have therefore been endowed with a very keen sense of celebrity, which, when historical relevance is out of the question, will do in a pinch. And this brings me back to The Whitney Biennial.

It should be said that there's nothing extraordinary about hating the Biennial. Indeed, almost everybody always does. The idea, if you don't know, is a large multi-floor group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in which the curators take their best stab at defining that moment in the world of art-making and, theoretically, distinguishing it from the moments two, four, and ten years prior. The result is almost always a cacophony of the fashionably novel, a noisy mess of the superficially new.

But somehow nothing ever feels new. It's always the same things being said in slightly different ways. A grand creative dialogue, which began in earnest at some point in our distant past, has devolved into an exercise in which everybody sits quietly, waiting patiently for their turn to chime up in agreement, to take their brief solo in the endless chorus of "Me toos!" A periodical exposition of shabby cover tunes, a loud and over-hyped episode of American Idol every couple of years is all that remains of what used to be called the avant garde.

Devotion, in art as in other arenas, is a virtue to be cherished. And even if we assume at the outset that it's always been a rare commodity, it's hard to walk the halls of The Cloisters, filled as they are with centuries old masterpieces produced by human beings of whom history has little or no memory, and then find even trace amounts of that kind of devotion in the shallow pitch of "Me too." It's as though we as artists have forgotten what we are capable of doing. Or as though so many of us have simply stopped caring. But so often it seems to be that devotion—more than talent, craft, inspiration, or even time—is what separates them from us.

The work mattered to them in a way that it doesn't matter to us. Their work was precious, and their work had meaning. They had no concern for being remembered, yet their devotion moved them to create things that have bridged the centuries and can move us still today. For our part, we seem to have responded to the news that we will almost certainly be forgotten with the conviction to stop caring altogether. After all, if we can be reasonably certain that the day will come when our names will be uttered for the last time, where are we to find the motivation even to try to make something actually worth remembering?

For those who still have the energy to look, I offer The Cloisters as a good place to start.

BreakerBaker 1-9

2011-01-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

(Originally Published on January 3, 2011)

First things first. I am of course obliged to thank our generous host. I am genuinely flattered by his invitation to spend the week up top, as it were. Like many here, I've spent the last couple of years finding my way to Ta-Nehisi's space most days, multiple times a day, and I deeply appreciate the vote of confidence I think he's given me.

Now, based on a handful of comments and suggestions I've made down below over the life of this blog, TNC's asked me to talk a bit about visual art. I spent a while turning it over in my head trying to figure out what that means, or what it should mean in the context of this space, and what I've decided makes the most sense for this blog and this readership is a sort of illustrated meditation on art, the act of creation, and the experience of looking.

There will be an unavoidably autobiographical element in this, and while I feel like I know a lot of you already, I think I should provide a bit of background on me. I have good amount of art history, but I come at this from the perspective of a maker as opposed to a scholar. I studied drawing and painting, first at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, then at the New York Academy of Art. I lived and worked in New York off and on for seven years, and I continue to paint today from my home outside of Atlanta, which is more or less where I grew up. Everything I say here is from my perspective, and it's not really meant to challenge your feelings, as much as it is to express mine. I hope I am able to keep your interest, and you'll forgive me when I go a bit long.

Also, I already have the week more or less mapped out, but I am open to suggestions.

The Atlantic

2011-01-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity last week to act as guest blogger at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog on The Atlantic website. It was pretty cool, although after the second or third day I began to wish I had been allowed a bit more time to prepare. It was the first week after the holidays, after all. I was originally offered this week, but within hours TNC asked if I could take the week of the third instead.

My assumption is that Michael Chabon (who's one of the guest bloggers for this week) was too nervous about having to share the space with me. It's understandable. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm a pretty intimidating guy. It's a shame, though, because I'm confident that we could have coexisted for the week and thus avoided this collision course he and I now find ourselves on. But I'm not going to focus on that now.

Right now, I am going to focus on reposting the stuff I did last week here. That way, when I begin to try to write more new content for this space, it will feel as though I've already started.

Two guys. Seven Square Inches. One night. (Give or take)

2010-05-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

A friend told me that I should blog about an art show coming up. This was funny seeing as at the time I hadn't so much as looked at this space since last summer, but he's a good friend, and he's organizing the event, so here goes: Single Fare.

I’ll sum up: JP…err..Jean-Pierre Roy and Michael Kagan, studio mates and, like me, NYAA alums are organizing a very special exhibition in their space, and they've asked artists far and wide to participate. The only requirement for participation is that all works must have been produced on a MetroCard, the 2.125” x 3.25” plastic key to the NYC public transportation system. All works are being accepted. All works will be shown. And all works will be up for sale at what is truly a bargain price: $50 each.

I don’t know what to say. I am generally skeptical of gimmicks, but I’ve lived with the idea of the show for a few weeks and can say that I’ve genuinely been won over. I actually think it’s a really good idea—borderline great—and, failed terrorist bombings aside, it’s the first thing in months to make me feel a little down about not living in the city any longer. I guess I should thank Kagan and JP for this dull ache in the pit of my stomach the next time I see them.

At any rate, I found myself so taken by the spirit of the show, that I pushed up the conversion of my new garage into a workshop/studio space by a couple weeks, and made a couple tiny paintings for the show myself. Yesterday I entrusted the United States Postal Service with the care and transport of my two pictures from Roswell, GA to Brooklyn, NY, and they happily accepted for the reasonable fee of $0.44. If they do not arrive on time, or at all, I want JP and Michael to print out the below pics at 300 dpi and glue them to the back of a MetroCard. I still want my shot at a $100 payday, minus the 10 percent surcharge (Fucking blood-sucking independent dealers. I guess I should consider myself lucky they’re not asking for 10 percent each.).

The deadline for entry is tomorrow, so it suffices to say that if you're only hearing of the show now, then it's very nearly too late for you to participate. Then again, if you’re reading this, it’s very unlikely that this will be the first you’ve heard of it. You’re probably one of the organizers. Regardless. At the last I heard, over 200 pieces had been dropped off as of yesterday morning. I’m expecting that number to as much as double before the Saturday reception. There’s going to be a ton of art. Knowing many of the people who are likely to participate, I assure you that a lot of it will be quite nice. It will be eclectic, but I would not be at all surprised if the quality of the work (as a whole) compared favorably to any other group show that will be up in the city this year. I do not exaggerate. At least, I don’t think I do. If you’re going to be in the city on Saturday night, I implore you to consider making the trek out to Brooklyn to have a look. It will not be a waste of time. And if you’ve got it, consider bringing a fifty in tow. You will see something you want. Come early. Stay late. It should be a blast.

Such is life

2010-05-03T17:25:00.001-07:00

I will do my best to avoid speaking at length about having not blogged in such a long while. Let it simply suffice to say that I haven't. The move we were contemplating when I last blogged didn't go through. Sarah did go to New York. Received an offer, but one that was lower than we needed. We are still in Georgia, but now we're in Roswell. Sarah and I are homeowners. Our first mortgage payment is due this month.

Look Away Before You Leap.

2009-09-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

I heard reported on NPR a couple of weeks ago that only seven percent of Georgia employers will be hiring over the fourth quarter. And the seven percent is mainly comprised of construction companies and contractors who’ve received stimulus money. This is a problem for Sarah and me because today, nearly ten months since the birth of little Maggers, we’re still a one income household. And my income isn’t what it should be, either. So we’re both looking for something right now. Actually, she’s doing most of the looking for the both of us.

Sarah’s had a couple leads in Atlanta that never really panned out, but for the most part, the job market around here has more or less dried up. Whereas a couple of months ago, Sarah may find 15 or more promising local listings in a single day, lately she would be lucky to see those kinds of numbers over the course of a week or two. So for a while we’ve been widening the net a bit. The first thought was to North Carolina. It’s where we were born and went to college, and we know some people there still. It’s also not that far from here, so the logistics of interviewing, and moving and everything else didn’t seem terribly daunting. It was a few months ago that Sarah started looking in North Carolina, and we’ve yet to land a concrete lead. So within the last couple of weeks we’ve covertly begun to cast an even wider net. And so it happens that at the beginning of next week, Sarah has an interview for a job in TriBeCa about two blocks from where I went to grad school.

New York City. Again. Maybe.

As luck would have it, Sarah received the call for an interview when she would be most readily able to do it. She took the kids to visit her parents in Greensboro last weekend, and got the call on the day she was planning to return. As luck would have it, the weather was terrible yesterday, and the rain was delaying their drive home. Now it’s been delayed for the better part of another week. Sarah, the kids, and her parents will be driving to her aunt’s home in Manassas on Saturday. They’ll spend Sunday, Sarah’s birthday, visiting, and then Sarah will take Amtrak up to Penn Station on Monday morning for the afternoon interview, then back to Manassas that night.

Looking in New York again was my idea. It was an emotional decision. There were lots of reasons, really. The state of the search here was a definite catalyst, but the simple truth is that, given the choice, we want to be there and not here. And not in Raleigh. Or Charlotte. Or DC. Or anyplace else. New York is where we have spent our adult lives. It’s where we started our family. It was where we always planned to raise our children. Oddly enough, over the last seven years, it became our home. It’s where we want to be.

Of course, you can’t always get what you want, and Sarah and I had spent so much of the last year saying that it wasn’t going to happen. That it couldn’t happen. It was stricken from the realm of possibility. Then we officially crossed the one year mark. A few weeks before everybody started celebrating the anniversary of Lehman imploding, we had our own series of anniversaries. Over the Fourth of July weekend, we realized it had been a year since Indymac went caput, and Sarah was laid off. Then, August 11, Nate’s third birthday, marked a full year since Sarah and he left New York with my parents. I had my own anniversary a little over a week later.

I guess it’s only natural that anniversaries are going to make you a bit nostalgic. This one did. And it was that special brand of nostalgia that was tempered with a bit of shame and regret. So I began thinking: why not? I’m not sure I was taking the question as seriously as maybe I should have been. I mean, I had spent the better part of a year thinking precisely about why it couldn’t happen. But suddenly I was in a different state of mind entirely. My mantra was “Well, we’re going to be struggling wherever we are. Why not struggle in a place where actually want to live?” Today I’m a little unsure about how sound that logic is. But here we are. The first lead we’ve had in a month and it’s in Lower Manhattan. Precisely where we want to be. And all I can think about is, “What the fuck are we getting ourselves into?”

I mean, we think we have the money for the move. We’ll have to sell our car, and probably take the hit of a couple grand on that. But we do think we have the money to make the move. And maybe live for a month or two on a strict budget while I look for a job. We think we can do that. We think we can. We do not know. Yet here we are. It’s Friday. Sarah has an interview on Monday. In New York. I am writing this at work. In Atlanta. It’s by no means a given that Sarah will get this job, but it’s clearly plausible. And if that happens, then everything is going to change, very quickly. Things go from being theoretical to being real. Very real. Decisions will need to be made, and they’re the kind of decisions that shape the kind of person you are and are going to be. We’ve done this before. We’ve made the leap. It worked. More or less. But things were different. We had one more job and one fewer kid. It worked in the short term, but things fell apart around us. Indymac crumbled. Sarah was pregnant. We were stuck. There wasn’t going to be another job for months and months.

But those months have passed. And an opportunity may be presenting itself. An opportunity to do what? is the question. And what happens next? And do you know anybody who may want to hire me? That last one may be the most important question of all. Pay attention to that one.

The Kobayashi Maru

2009-07-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

I was recently at work listening to old episodes of Radiolab on my iPod, and I was feeling kind of sad as I don’t think the show will ever be as good as it was in the beginning. I don’t know if there’s been a genuine drop in the quality of the show. Maybe it would be better to say that the show will never be as good to me as it was when I first heard it. The fifth season of the show is over, and while the sixth must be coming soon, the long periods of hiatus between the short, five episode bundles have stopped filling me with the feeling of heavy anticipation. Now? Eh. I could sort of take the series of leave it. I almost think it would be better if there were no sixth season. The fifth season, but for a couple episodes (I liked “Sperm” a lot…teehee), was pretty ho hum. The show doesn’t feel fresh anymore. It’s still impeccably constructed and produced, but I feel like it’s lost a little something that made it special. (Although if you’ve never heard the show, do yourself a favor and check it out. There’s a free semi-weekly podcast, and I’m sure you can find any number of archived episodes streaming at WNYC.org or elsewhere on the web.)

At any rate, I was listening to “Morality,” which is a show from season two (2006). It’s not the first time I’ve heard the episode. I used to listen to the podcasts over and over again in the studio and at work, so I’ve heard this particular show a dozen times or more. It’s got chimps in it, which is always a plus. It also spends quite a bit of time centered around a couple basic morality dilemmas that I can’t recall having heard prior to listening to the podcast the first time, but which sound a lot like the sort of basic thought experiments you might expect a philosophy or ethics professor to use as a conversation starter in 100-level university classes.

It goes something like this:

Scenario One: You’re standing near some railroad tracks. Far out of ear shot, you can see five men working on the tracks. Behind them, you see an approaching train. You see the train. They do not. Nor do they hear it. They also don’t see you, so (theoretically) there’s no way for you to alert them to their impending doom. Beside you is a lever. You can pull the lever and divert the train to another set of tracks where only one man sits working, also out of earshot. Your dilemma, if it’s not yet clear is whether to pull the lever or not. You can choose not to pull the lever, in which case five people will die, or you can choose to pull the lever, in which case you save the lives of those five people, but put another man into harm’s way and effectively kill (murder?) somebody who would have been in absolutely no danger had you decided not to act at all.

Scenario Two: Similar to scenario one, you’ve got the tracks, the train, the five guys completely oblivious to the fact that they’re about to be squashed. Only this time, you’re not on the tracks; you’re standing on a pedestrian bridge that crosses above the tracks somewhere between the train and five guys. There’s no lever. No way to redirect the train. The only hope the five guys have is that the train stops before reaching them. Beside you on the bridge is a sort of hefty man, and as the two of you look down on the situation unfolding on the tracks it occurs to you that if you were to push the man off of the bridge and onto the tracks, the train would hit him and (for reasons not altogether clear to me) that would cause the train to stop. So again, your choice is to do nothing and allow five people to die, OR choose to act, this time by making physical contact with the man and pushing him to his death, and save the five guys. What do you do?

Have your answer? Anyway, as is explained to Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich by various neurologists, when people are presented with these two (virtually identical) scenarios, something like 90 percent of respondents say that they would pull the lever, but far fewer people said that they would push the fat man to his death. The show went on to try to figure out why this was the case or, more specifically, to try to figure out what the physiological nature of the thought process was. Neurologists used an fMRI to figure out what was going on in the brain at the moment where people were making the decision, and it came down, essentially to a sort of frontal lobe battle between emotion and logic. It was all very interesting in the context of the show, but personally, I couldn’t get over the original findings. Nine out of ten people are going to pull the lever? I have to hope that’s bullshit.

It’s not that I don’t accept that this was people’s honest response to the scenario. It’s just that I don’t accept that their honest response is their true response. I hope it’s not anyway. From where I stand, they either don’t understand the question or they’re saying what they want to believe they would do. In this case, for some reason, they choose to believe that the heroic thing to do is to kill the one guy to save the five. Of course, the truth is that choosing to pull the lever isn’t the least bit heroic. It’s murder. And I don’t know what it says about the world if only 10 percent of respondents understand that to be true without even thinking about it.

After the train analogy, they gave another scenario which the guys admitted having taken from the final episode of M.A.S.H. Here it is:

It’s war time, and your entire village is huddled into a basement or hut (do huts have basements?) as the enemy troops search the town. Everybody has to be very quiet to avoid being found out. It’s a given that anybody who is found will be murdered. So you’re hiding out with every man, woman and child of your village with each and every one of you making as little noise as possible. In your arms, is your baby. Your baby has a cold. Your baby could cough at any minute. If the soldiers searching the town hear your baby cough, everybody’s dead. Your option in this case is either smothering your baby or do nothing risk everybody’s life on the hope that your baby will not cough. Why those are your only two choices is beyond me. Anyway, 50 percent of respondents say they’d smother their baby, a statistic to which Jad Abumrad, the younger host, says admiringly “That’s not bad.” Oh yeah? Really? It seems pretty bad to me.

To illustrate the different perspectives (and to my mind, illustrate just how bad it is), they ask the question to a number of New Yorkers on the street. Some saying yes they would kill their baby, some saying no. Everybody who says no says it for the obvious reason: i.e. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I’m paraphrasing. Those who say they’d do it go through a series of obvious rationalizations about the greater good. The needs of the many are really heavy, and all that Vulcan bullshit (Can we all take a moment to thank Eric Bana for knocking those green-blooded, logic-obsessed, pointy-eared bastards onto the endangered species list?). Anyway, almost to typify how absurdly indefensible this position is, they bring out a girl who sounds to be no more than 19 or 20, and she proceeds to stumble through a painfully meandering rationalization that essentially uses the language of “Pro-Choice” advocacy to explain why she believes she has the right to “terminate the life of [her] baby.” A sort of post, post, post factum form of birth control, I guess.

Anyway, the people who choose to kill their baby, or so the argument goes, are the logical ones; just like the ones who pull the lever or push the man. And here I’d always thought of myself as a sort of logical guy. Not that I was necessarily a Vulcan, but maybe a half Vulcan, half human hybrid (Can they do that?*). But as it turns out, I’d always been hiding from the obvious truth. I’m not Spock at all. I’m James T. Kirk. You want to know what my answers to those scenarios are? Fuck you. That’s my answer. Fuck you and fuck all no-win situations.

The Wrath of Khan is all about the no-win situation. The movie opens with Kirstie Alley as the Vulcan Saavik who is seemingly in command of a starship responding to a distress signal sent out by The Kobayashi Maru, a ship which is under Klingon attack. A battle ensues, the bridge from which Saavik is commanding is tossed and everybody goes flying all over the place in true Star Trek fashion. The battle takes only moments. The Kobayashi Maru is destroyed, and everybody on Saavik’s bridge is killed. Or so it seems. A door opens and a silhouetted Admiral James Kirk steps onto the bridge. The lights come up and all of the dead officers rise in good spirits. As it turns out, the whole thing was just a training exercise named for the ship sending the distress beacon, which is designed as a no-win situation to help officers in training learn to deal with circumstances for which no positive outcome exists. It is later revealed that the only cadet to ever beat The Kobayashi Maru was, you guessed it, James T. Kirk.

Later still, it is revealed that Kirk didn’t beat the scenario as it was, he rewrote it so that it could be won. He cheated. Not because he wanted to win, but because he wanted the chance to win. He rejected the premise of the test and any lessons it had to teach him. Saavik is offended when she learns of the stubborn and childish lengths Kirk had gone to avoid the shame of losing. Stupid Vulcan Scientologist.

At the end of Wrath of Khan, the Enterprise is marooned in space as Reliant, a hijacked Federation starship that carries the Genesis device(if you have to ask, then maybe you should’ve stopped reading a long time ago), is about to explode nearby. The blast from both Reliant and Genesis would surely destroy the Enterprise and everyone on it. But the Enterprise has no warp drive, and there’s no way she could clear the blast area on impulse power alone. Without giving too much away, Spock goes down to engineering, repairs the drive allowing Enterprise to jump to warp speed ahead of the shock wave of the blast, but in doing so, Spock exposes himself to the radiation of the warp core and, in one of the most touching sequences in American film history, he speaks to his friend Jim for the last time (theoretically) through a pane of protective glass. This, as Spock explains, was his response to The Kobayashi Maru. The ship is saved. Spock dies. Before he dies, he explains why his decision was the logical one: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. The very justification used to pull the lever, push the man, and smother the baby. But Spock, it’s important to note, doesn’t do any of that stuff. He doesn’t pull the lever and he doesn’t push the man off the bridge. He jumps off the bridge himself.

What Spock understands, and what all of these respondents so eager to pull the lever or push the fat guy don’t seem to get, is that the many includes the fat man. Your baby is one of the many, too. The one? That’s you. And if you’re standing on a bridge trying to stop the train, and the only thing you can think to do is push the guy next to you onto the tracks, you’re not thinking hard enough. Not by a long shot. Mind you, I’m not saying I would jump. I’d probably hope the guy next to me would jump, and then spend the next movie trying to figure out how to bring him back to life. Although, not if it meant listening to those damned Klingon bastards kill my son. That, I think, is a bridge too far.

*That’s a joke, son.

One-to-One

2009-02-21T14:04:00.000-08:00

So, Scully started the one-to-one blog. Good for him. Curious to know what one of those ones might be, but I am going to make believe they stand for one (hundred push-ups) and one (day). It's less dirty to think of it that way.

Anyway, ever since he started it, I've been trying to get a few sets of push-ups in every day. I was doing between 100 and 120 daily there for a while. Then the job and second kid came along, and I've been either too busy or lazy to make it work. And I fell out of the habit altogether.

Now, I've decided to reprioritize. Push-ups every day. Eventually, back to a hundred or more a day. I've also bought a pull-up bar (not just any pull-up bar). It's a rather humbling thing to have if you're as weak as me. But I will tame the beast yet.

Right now, all I can do is reverse pull-ups, which is kind of embarrassing. I'll try to keep you posted. Oh yeah, also going back to painting.

Judy

2009-01-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

As I begin to write this, I’m at work. I just got off the phone with Sarah. Judy Lefaive died. She was the mother of one of Sarah and my oldest friends. One of the solitary friends we still have who could truly and unequivocally be described as ours. I met Sarah on Pearl Harbor Day in 1996. I met Scott about a week later. Sarah knew him already, but my relationship with him and my relationship with Sarah began almost simultaneously. We graduated from high school together. We went to college together. For a brief period we all lived together. Scott could have been the Best Man at our wedding. He could have been the Maid of Honor. We’ve seen each other infrequently over the years since Sarah and I moved to New York in 2002. But we are still friends. Absence aside, we’re still dear friends, I think.

Scott’s mom was a lovely person, who clearly loved her husband and her two children undyingly. And they all loved her. I won’t go into the specifics of her illness or her passing. And while I was fortunate enough to be her presence last week, as I try to absorb this expected news, I will prefer to think of the next to last time I saw her. It was December 2006. Sarah and I had been in Greensboro to spend Christmas with her family and to show our infant son off to anyone we could. Even though Scott was in Charlotte, Sarah insisted that we bring Nate to meet his parents, so we drove to their house, and we had a nice visit with the two of them. It was brief. But today, it feels somehow important that we were there.

In the end, you never know how people feel about you. I can be bristly. In the early days of my friendship with Scott, I could be exceedingly so, at times. I don’t know how Judy felt about me. I think she liked me. I know she liked Sarah. For us, she and Mike, and Niki, and Scott were like family to Sarah and me. They’ve gone through a long and difficult period to get to today, the start of another long and difficult period. My thoughts are with them. And with Judy.

Magnolia Jane

2009-01-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

So it's been a long time since I last posted here. A lot of that has to do with the job I started the day after the election. A lot of the blame lies on the shoulder of the little lady pictured above. She was born the day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday), and has taken quite a bit of my time. She's also responsible for my much earlier curfew. (It's almost ten. I really should be in bed.) She's only about 12 hours old in the picture. She was eight weeks old on this past Friday.

I'm going to try to post more frequently. In addition to the baby, a lot has been happening. Sarah and I have put in an offer on a house, which is a weird experience, and one that I will no doubt feel the need to speak about in some fashion as the days and weeks go by.

That's all I really wanted to say for the time being. Over and out.

Where has the day gone?

2008-11-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

In September, there was no gas in Atlanta. If a station had gas, or was rumored to be getting gas, people would line up in their cars for hours. Sarah and I went out one night and sat for a few minutes in a line of cars at a nearby QT station. Luckily, we had a line of sight to the pumps, and I noticed that nobody was pumping. When Sarah got out to ask the people what was up, she was told by a guy that the station had run out of gas at six in the morning, that stations are not supposed to be out for more than 12 hours, so he had shown up at three that afternoon for a spot. It was after nine, and there was no sign of a gas truck.

When the pipelines started pumping to the southeast again, we were paying between $4-$4.25 for a gallon of regular.

I just filled up at the local Kroger for $1.68.

$3.19? Where's the day gone?

The job

2008-11-07T15:07:00.000-08:00

So I'm in the last phase of my head cold. It's the longest phase, when you feel basically fine but a little stuffy, and go to bed every night thinking that it's bound to be cleared up by tomorrow only to wake up with a fullness in the back of your throat.

Anyway, I'm not at a hundred percent yet, but I'm in the low 90s. I've started a new job. It's at an engineering and construction company. I'm still not entirely sure what that means. Basically, the company receives all sorts of government contracts, works with all sorts of government agencies and helps them build and repair infrastructure here and abroad. My job, so far, is to print out a bunch of stuff and put it in three-ring binders.

I wonder what it's like to have a job that you don't feel any 15 year old could do.

Today was my third day. A guy who wasn't at work on my first day and came in around midday yesterday, was fired today. I never met him. Don't know his name. I think he would have been somebody to funnel work my way. I never shook his hand or introduced myself, but he sat about ten feet from me. I figured we'd meet at some point. Guess not.

Underestimating Hussein

2008-11-06T17:13:00.000-08:00

This is from about a year ago.

As I write this, it's a little more than 48 hours after Pennsylvania was called for Obama, and he was almost certain to win the election. And he did. It's sort of amazing. Barack Hussein Obama? Did you know that was his middle name?

I remember a few years ago when I saw it printed, and I had--I'm sure--the same reaction just about everybody had: Shit, I guess that guy's not going to be the first black president, afterall. I mean, I like the way he talks and all, but there are simply some things Americans don't do, and I think voting for a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is somewhere near the top of that list.

I mean, the guy's first name rhymes with Iraq; his middle name is the same as the dude we deposed and essentially assassinated; and his last name not only rhymes with Osama, it's almost spelled Osama. And now, the guy is the president-elect of the United States of America.

I'm going to need a little more time to think about all of this. I will return to all the happenings of the week sometime in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I need to get ready to get ready for bed. I leave for work at 6 am.

President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama

2008-11-05T17:44:00.000-08:00

No words. They should have sent a poet. They should have sent a poet.

Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.

2008-11-04T16:46:00.000-08:00

Um...I'm not going to be doing any real time blogging of this. Just want to say that I have a head cold, and it's not helping my vibe. I'm going to need them to call Virginia for Obama. Indiana would be nice too. I'm not greedy. I'll let McCain keep Georgia. I just need some red toss-ups called for Obama. And I need them soon.

I know that all the figures are still saying big night for Obama, but I'm beginning to feel the finality of the vote set in, and I need some good news to push me in the direction of this being a good night.

Also: Apparently my uncle Jim (my father's brother) is running for mayor of tiny Gordonsville, TN. I think there are five or six people in the race.

Anyway, the next thing I post here will come only after the results are clear.

Vote

2008-11-04T05:57:00.000-08:00

How does this happen?

2008-11-03T17:57:00.000-08:00

How does it happen that a white woman is born in Kansas in the 1920's, has a daughter while her husband is serving in the Second World War, eventually moves with daughter and husband to Hawaii, welcomes an African college student into her home in the early 1960's, tolerates the young man's wooing and impregnation of and eventual marriage to her teenage daughter, welcomes and helps to raise her mixed race grandson after his father abandons the family to attend school and eventually return to Kenya, later takes a more full time roll in the raising of her outwardly black grandson and mixed race granddaughter while their mother is attending school and living overseas, sends her grandson to Columbia and eventually to Harvard Law, seeing him elected to the State Senate then the US Senate, along the line watching her husband and her daughter die, and finally watching her grandson become the first African American to be nominated by a major party to the presidency of the United States only to die the day before he's likely to win the election?

How does that happen? It's not that she never knew the fruits of her labor. She most certainly did. But what kind of sick irony is it that this woman passes the day before the grand affirmation of her family's existence? That may be crass. It most certainly is not meant to sound that way.

I'm just amazed that this sort of thing happens. How many old black people are going to die tonight never knowing the outcome? How many have died this year knowing the opportunity to vote for a black man for president was finally upon them if they could only make it to November?

How does this woman die the day before her grandson is elected president?

The day after tomorrow (cont.)

2008-11-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

They say you're either a Leonard Cohen guy or a Tom Waits guy. I used to be a Leonard Cohen guy, but I don't think I am one anymore. He's basically a lounge singer. He's a fair lyricist, but he's no Tom Waits or Dylan.

Over at the Daily Dish, Sullivan posted a performance of Democracy. Go look at it if you want. There are a couple nice lines, but I can't bring myself to embed a song in which a Canadian talks about democracy coming to the USA. I've got a little Hacksaw Jim Duggan in me, too. Sullivan is British, so he can do what he pleases.

Me, I'll take an American bar singer over a Canadian lounge act any day of the week. In that light:

Beware of Foreign Objects

2008-11-03T06:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, quickie post. A Sarah Palin rally is on CNN. She was introducing a bunch of people behind her. At some point she asked all the veterans to raise their hands. She thanked them, and then she did the silliest thing I've ever seen: She started a USA chant from the podium!

The video is not online yet, but I went onto Youtube and found the next best thing:

The day after tomorrow.

2008-11-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

There's going to be an Obama rally at UNC-Charlotte this evening. It's really only a three hour drive from here, so I spent an hour or two yesterday thinking about making the drive. Tomorrow is the day, and the guy will be about 24 hours from being elected president when he walks on stage tonight. No matter how you look at it, that's a pretty historic event, and a three hour drive is not reason enough not to go.

Unfortunately, I have other reasons. I've been beating back a cold for days, Nate has a cold, and Sarah is too deep into her pregnancy to try and stand in a field of tens of thousands of people or have me three hours away, so I will not be in attendance of history tonight in Charlotte. Ho-hum. Parking would have been a nightmare anyway, and I can only imagine the line has already begun to form at nine in the morning for an event that starts at 5:30.

I do have other things to do today. I have to submit to a drug test, so that I can start a new job the day after tomorrow. Today was supposed to be my first day, but they lost my application materials and HR didn't send out my employment packet until the end of last week, so instead of it being the day before the election, it will be the day after.

I actually have an interview at another place tomorrow morning. Unless I can figure out a way to be offered a job I'm not interviewing for--one with benefits--it'll be just a formality. Either way, I'm more than likely going to have my first day of work since August on November 5. I will likely be sleepy. Hopefully, I will not be depressed.

One Day More

2008-11-03T05:34:00.000-08:00

Since I know how much you all love Les Miserables.

Let's hope it's not the blood bath the Student Revolution was.

Fucking Georgia Rednecks

2008-11-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

So both Sarah and Nate (and to a lesser extent me) spent last night battling sore throats. Sarah woke me up at 7 this morning, and said she was going to Kroger to get some liquid Tylenol. I'm a good husband, so I went instead. When I left the house, it was still pretty dark out, but the sun was rising and there was a fair amount of light by the time I returned.

Yesterday I linked to all those images of black people standing in impossibly long lines for early voting. Those people were in Fulton, Dekalb, and Gwinnett counties where there is a large black population. When I was growing up, we lived in Gwinnett county; this was before the mid 1990s when there was a migration in which many of the black families left the city for some of the more suburban, white counties. Not to be integrated, a lot of the white families moved north to the less developed parts of Fulton, the more conservative Cobb (Newt Gingrich country), and the far less densely populated hill country of Cherokee, where I live today.

Last night, Sarah and I took Nate trick or treating through half of the neighborhood. It's an overly white neighborhood. There are a lot of McCain/Palin signs, especially near the entrance of the development. I learned last night that there is a Latino family that lives a couple of doors down from my parents. There's also an older Asian woman who was giving out candy a bit farther away, and a black family that lives a couple doors down from her.

A black family!

Anyway, the guy seems to get really in to Halloween. He had a bunch of lawn witches, a smoke machine, and he piped out spooky music to get the trick or treaters. Anyway, surprise, surprise, he seems like a perfectly nice fellow: a wonderful black ambassador to a bunch of McCain supporters who would rather live an hour out of town than to live in a neighborhood with more than one black person.

Apparently, his good nature is not good enough. As I drove home from Kroger this morning at dawn, I saw what I had not seen when I left. The dude's house had been rolled (or TP'd or toilet papered, depending on your regional dialect). Not only that, but his was the ONLY house in the entire development that had been rolled. I don't want to call anybody racist or anything, but when I got home, I saw that my parents's Obama lawn sign was also gone.

Joe the idiot.

2008-10-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

Another voting early post

2008-10-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

Sarah and I voted last week. It was during the period of so-called 'Early Voting' that started in Georgia about a month ago and ended last Friday. In Cherokee County, there was only one Early Voting location, and it was at the county seat in Canton. It's kind of out of the way, so while there was a steady stream of folks at around 10 in the morning, there wasn't a real wait of any kind.

Long waits had been reported throughout the Early Voting period in Cobb and Fulton, Cherokee's larger bordering counties which are closer to or contain the city of Atlanta. Like I said, Early Voting ended last week. This week, "Advanced Voting" began. Advanced Voting is essentially the same thing as Early Voting except for the fact that there are far more Advanced Voting locations than there were Early Voting locations.

As of this morning, more than 1.4 million voters had cast their ballots in the state of Georgia. That is nearly half the total that voted at all in 2004. Today is the final day of Advanced Voting. Sarah and I were at one of the local Cherokee libraries today and there was a line around the building. It was probably about an hour to an hour and a half wait. To vote early! I thought that seemed pretty amazing. Then I saw this. And this.

And this:

Holy fucking shit.

Vote.

2008-10-31T13:14:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin is worried about losing her First Amendment rights. Who, you may ask, is infringing on her rights? You're gonna like this one: It's the free press! That's right, according to the potential (though not really) next vice president, the press, by being critical of the things she says are infringing on her right to free speech!

Just for the hell of it, here's the actual amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." [Emphasis mine]

In other words, she is attempting to intimidate the press by claiming that in exercising its own first amendment right it is somehow muzzling her! Hop on, this logic goes round and round.

Even if her contention were true, and she felt intimidated into not exercising her right to free speech, that would not and could not even be construed as a violation of her First Amendment right.

The Bill of Rights outlines the ten fundamental protections of the people from the government. These are the fundamental freedoms granted to we the people, by the people, from the government. The government is therefore, the one and only entity who can infringe upon these freedoms.

Anyway, get out and vote. If you do, there's a chance this woman will fade away as quick as Joe the Plumber.

Rachel Maddow is a coward.

2008-10-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

I like Barack Obama best when he's lecturing super liberal folks about how they don't have any business telling him his business. Watching this Rachel Maddow interview, she tries to get him to take up the gauntlet of defending the Democratic party and liberalism by trashing conservatism. He totally ignores the bait, as well he should. She's frustrated. Every time I see her on TV she's talking about how worried she is.

At some point, these Democrats and "progressives" are going to finally see what they've got: A winner. Someday they're going to wake up from the illusion of their electoral victimization and realize that for a group that's always bragging about their own intelligence they've lost not because they've been robbed, but because they've been dumb. And weak. And unpersuasive.

At some point, they're going to wake up to the fact that you don't win by acting like you're losing; or like you're winning. You win by first knowing that you can and then working hard to make it happen. When was the last time Democrats actually tried to win? 1992? I guess. But where would all of that work gotten them had Ross Perot not garnered 19% of the vote?

The last time Democrats earned 50% of the vote was 1976--when Carter beat a hapless Gerald Ford who, while he was technically the president, had never run for state-wide office, let alone been on a national ticket. Before then? 1964. I'm sure it was hard for LBJ to figure out a way to get over 50% a year after Kennedy was shot. I guess it's safe to say that Kennedy had to try hard to get elected; he was running against the vice president, after all, and it was a super close election.

I think I was trying to make a point about how Democrats only win by technicality (a plurality in a three-way race) or when it's inconceivable that they would lose (after Watergate or the Kennedy assassination). That's a half century of history.

Cry about 2000 all you want, but nobody would give a fuck about Florida if Al Gore had won his own home state. Ohio might have been meaningless had Kerry--who ended the 2004 election $3,000,000 in the black--decided to spend every dime that he had. I guess it's easier to blame somebody else.

How's this for an affecting piece of propaganda?

2008-10-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

Look away... look away... look away... Dixieland

2008-10-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

I grew up in the south. I lived in NC and GA almost exclusively (there was a period of six months in MD when I was 15) from birth until I was 23. I have a fairly faint southern accent. It's there, it just takes a trained ear to spot it. When they first meet me, if they think about it at all, people tend to suspect I hail from someplace in the midwest, and are always pretty surprised when they learn the truth.

Inevitably, somebody will ask whether I made a conscientious effort to rid myself of the drawl. The answer to that is no. I don't know whether my accent changed that much, but if, in early childhood, I had a thicker accent than I have today, its fading was not the result of my efforts.

But my not having a thick accent--or an accompanying backwoods dialect--has made more than a few people in the south and elsewhere skeptical of my Dixieland bona fides. It's always seemed silly to me. In the end, and with a few clear exceptions, my childhood was more stereotypically white suburban than it was stereotypically white southern. But I've spent enough evenings watching laser beams bounce off Confederate Soldiers while Elvis Presley sang the American Trilogy to feel pretty comfortable in my southern roots.

That being said, sometimes I wonder about this place. I few days ago I posted a Saxby Chambliss clip that's running ad nauseum here in which the onscreen text seems to imply that Jim Martin, Chambliss's opponent, is a child killer. Today, I came across an ad that is just as classy from Elizabeth Dole--up for reelection in the state of my birth.

A name you can trust

2008-10-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

A year ago yesterday, I moved back to New York City sans Sarah and Nate. A year ago today was my first day at the firm where I worked until August. Thirty-two years ago today, Raphael Sassi was born someplace near the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was the happiest day of his life.

Happy Birthday Raph.

Update: Raph was apparently born in Pennsylvania not Maryland.

All things being equal, bullshit is still bullshit

2008-10-27T18:30:00.001-07:00

So last week I found myself on line at the grocery and drug store a couple of times. It seems that for the life of me, I couldn't escape this cover of US Magazine. Jenny McCarthy, who's made something of a career out of motherhood (publishing books about pregnancy and early motherhood, as well as shilling for a weight loss giant), has spent the last couple of years becoming one of the more visible advocates of the widely discredited movement pushing the widely disproven link between a supposed surge of incidents of childhood autism over the past twenty years and the administration of vaccines containing thimerosal.

Not to dive too deeply into the whole thimerosal debate, but my personal belief is that there probably hasn't been so much a surge of incidents as there has been a surge in diagnoses predictably accompanying an broadened definition of the disorder. For instance, while it was in the 1940s that Hans Asperger first described a social disorder he referred to as autistic psychopathy exhibited by some of the children in his practice, it wasn't until the early 1990s that Asperger syndrome was a recognised diagnosis by the WHO and APA. Likewise, other forms of high-functioning autism (those with an average or above-average IQ) used to go completely undiagnosed. In fact, prior to the 1940s, there were no diagnosed cases of autism at all; if children exhibited symptoms we would now recognise as autism, they may have been diagnosed as schizophrenics, idiots, or not diagnosed at all. Such is the history of psychiatric disorders, I'm afraid (not to sound like a Scientologist or anything); the past is rife with misdiagnoses and missed diagnoses.

Today, though, autism treatment is a growth industry; there are considerably more cases being diagnosed as autism at present than in decades past. I honestly don't know what to think of that other than that it is to be expected for reasons I've already addressed. I don't know whether these children should be diagnosed as having the same disorder or not, but I do know that when you allow for a widening spectrum of diagnoses, you're going to have a widening occurrence of the disorder.

Clearly the parents of diagnosed children are dealing with a trauma--at the point of diagnosis and thereafter--so I don't mean to demean their experience. Still, I find it difficult to take the substance of the thimerasol hypothesis seriously. Once upon a time, maybe, but today, it's just a conspiracy theory concocted to help the grief-stricken to cope and to direct blame. Something that relies on the lack of evidence of what's apparent to confirm that which has already been disproven. At this point, there's very little that separates this theory from that of 9/11 truthers or Natural Design proponents. The science is simply not there; the preponderance of evidence suggests otherwise; Occam's razor, and so on.

As a matter of fact, it could be argued that while this dubious connection between vaccinations and the onset of autism is grounded in far more sympathetic origins--the suffering of parents and children--than that of either 9/11 Truthers (anarchic and excessive political distrust) or Natural Designers (the pitiful need to hold tight to archaic religious dogma), that it is still a far more nefarious and consequential theory because it actually puts children at risk. Today, many parents are so afraid of this fairy tale connection that they choose to not have their child immunized. Forget the fact that the trace levels of thimerasol have been removed from all major vaccinations, many parents are still not getting their children immunized. It's reckless. It's not reasonable. And it borders on abuse.

Now, with that off my chest, on to Jenny McCarthy.

Sarah actually read her pregnancy and early motherhood books while we waiting on Nate. Sarah will read anything--especially if it has something to do with babies, especially during that first pregnancy. Even if it was written by Jenny McCarthy, Sarah would read it. Alas, I did not read either of the books. I imagine that there was probably a lot of talk about feeling fat and farting. After Sarah finished, the books and their author left our collective consciousness only to reappear occasionally shilling for some Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers program.

Then, sometime last year, she showed up again. This time, she had a new story to tell. It was a touching story to be sure. Her son, whom she had written about fairly extensively, had been diagnosed with autism. Apparently his version of the disorder was characterized by seizures and by the child's tendency to arrange his toys in a line. While I found the story, or what I read of it, to be touching (if not all that insightful), I was left somewhat skeptical by her utter lack of skepticism. Clearly, her son had something wrong with him--he was having debilitating seizures--but from the way she describes the initial diagnosis, all it took was a couple observed quirks and the word autism to shake her very perception of who--or what--her child was.

Maybe it was an editorial choice, but there's no mention in this short piece of her seeking a second opinion, no frank discussion of the struggle involved in learning to communicate with her child, no talk at all about what it is to be a parent of an autistic kid. All she said was that she looked on the Internet and got help from UCLA (I imagine she means the medical facilities and not the university library) and a doctor, and abracadabra, three years later the kid is a quirky, but essentially normal kid. Not only that, but now she's CURED him! I'm sorry, I don't mean to be crass, but I'm just going to have to step back and call bullshit on this one.

I'm not even sure what part of this story is bullshit: the original diagnosis, her easy acceptance of it, the sensationalistic nature with which she's exploited the story, or the messianic one with which she claims to have solved the unsolvable. One thing I do know: There's bullshit in that story, and it's the kind that gets all mixed up in the works; now the whole thing stinks. And since I don't know who to be mad at, I'm going to choose to be mad at the one who's trying to make a buck selling the story.

What the fuck is this woman thinking? Does she actually believe she's cured her son of autism? Does she understand how stupid that makes her sound? How her insistence that such a cure can be found may do more harm than good? Where is her skepticism? Why state clearly that he's been cured? Why not ask yourself for a moment, did he have it in the first place?

When I was four or five, the doctors at Emory--the preeminent cancer treatment facility in the United States--thought I had leukemia. I had all the major symptoms, only I never tested positive for the disease, and when they took my marrow, they determined I must have had something else. It was like an episode of House, only I wasn't dying and no diagnosis ever came. I just got better. Most would argue that I had some kind of weird illness that mirrored the symptoms of leukemia, but was clearly not leukemia. There may even be a name for it, they just didn't know it at the time. My aunt, on the other hand, told me a few Christmases ago that to this day she believes I had leukemia and that contained within my blood is the necessary antibodies to defeat it! As cool as it would be, I'm skeptical. Occam's razor and all.

Maybe I'm a natural born skeptic, so this sort of thing comes easy to me, but I'm blown away by the ability of people to accept a dogma that requires a suspension of reason in order to sustain itself. This autism sensation is so rife with selective moments of self-delusion that if it weren't so painfully serious for so many people, it would be comical.

But this whole Jenny McCarthy thing seems especially farcical. How does one approach this story without skepticism? She's a former Playboy model and MTV personality whose been seeking a greater celebrity for herself since she peaked in the middle of the last decade. She's exploited her every opportunity to remain in the spotlight down to this weird decision to be at once a spokesperson for autistic parents while at the same time claiming she no longer is one. And since she never questioned any of this, she expects us to accept it all at face value. Personally, I don't know what the truth is. I have a good idea of what the truth isn't, though. Occam's razor and all.

J

2008-10-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

I'm on record as saying that I've stopped seeing the humor in the whole crazy race-baiting bitch cutting herself thing (did she beat herself up to?), but I do think this is kind of funny.

The McCain Mutiny

2008-10-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

I'm guessing the ad wizards who came up with this one have never read Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a naval vessel helmed by an experienced, yet erratic, Lt. Commander Queeg. If you've never read it, you should, it's awesome.

Is Drudge going too far?

2008-10-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

Five or six years ago, I would never find myself at the Drudge Report. Somewhere along the line, though, I gave in and started to look at the site. I was actually pretty surprised at what I found. It was a pretty good site. Sure, the links had a certain sensationalism to them, one that reflected an editorial bias, but as an online portal to various news sources, one that was being constantly refreshed, I found what a lot of people have found, that Drudge is unmatched.

Lately, though, I feel like he's pushing the sensationalism too far. He's been pushing these dubious stories of political violence in which Obama supporters supposedly victimize the weak, white McCain folk, and while he was burnt yesterday by the mutilation debacle, he's still at it.

This morning, with the news that the mother and brother of Jennifer Hudson (that American Idol girl who won an Oscar for Dreamgirls) were murdered in their Chicago home, at the top of the page, Drudge is running these banners:

In short, Drudge is exploiting the death of two people (and there's a missing child, too), so that he can continue to connect Barack Obama to violent crime.

It's been a while since I felt this way, but let me say today with no equivocation that Matt Drudge is terrible person. Fucking douche.

B is for "Bustin' up Chifferobe"

2008-10-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I've spent much of the last day or so getting as much humor as I can out of the story of the McCain worker and the phantom negro. This morning, it occurs to me that it's not all that funny.

One last thing: The AP Poll

2008-10-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, the Associated Press was considered to be the most impartial of all news services. Since the wire service is where most newspapers get the bulk of their news content, it certainly would be a nice reality to live in.

Today, the AP released a national tracking poll of the presidential election that showed Obama leading McCain 44%-43% among "likely" voters. A statistical tie that Drudge--who's spent the last few weeks highlighting outlier polls (including a Nickelodeon online poll of children) showing McCain within five points--naturally jumped all over.

A statistical tie? you say. That's right, a statistical tie! But, you ask, don't most polls show Obama at or near 50%? Yes they do. So why does this one show him six points lower than that? That's exactly the question I asked the Internet, and somebody called AmericaBlog answered. Ready?

I'll summarize the biggest point: As with all polls of so-called "likely voters" (as opposed to registered voters) the AP is performing a little precognition to determine what the likely make-up of the electorate will be. There's all sorts of methodology, to figure out the general demographics, but "likely voters" generally reflect the make-up of the last election, making it, in my opinion and in this election, a bit of a problematic designation. Still, most polling agencies have some way of determining the what a likely voter is, and differences in methodology account for some differences in polling results.

Now, you say, this summary sure does seem to go on and on without saying much.

Keep your pantyhose on, I'm getting there. In this particular poll, 44% of the likely voter pool is comprised as self-identified evangelicals. If you think that seems like a big number, don't worry, history proves you right. As I said before, likely voter tabulations are determined, in part, by looking to the past (i.e. Exit polls from recent elections).

The problem with the 44% number is that it is nearly double the evangelical turnout from 2004, and nearly four times that of the 2000 election. In short, the AP is assuming evangelicals will make up nearly half of the over all electorate when the most they've ever amounted to is a little less than a quarter. If you consider that evangelicals voted Republican in 2004 by a ratio of 4:1, the AP, by doubling the evangelical proportional turnout from 2004, is essentially assuming that a group that gave Bush, a president they felt was one of their own, about 16% of the overall vote is going to give McCain, a candidate they generally mistrust, about 32% of the overall vote. Not 32% of his vote--one third of the entire electorate!

Anyhow, the point I'm trying to make, is that if you saw that AP Poll and felt a little worried. Forget about it. But still vote, okay? You know, just in case.

Update: Nate Silver, noted sports statistician and honcho at FiveThirtyEight.com, discusses the discrepancy between likely voters and registered voters in a way that leaves little doubt as to whether or not some of these polls are a bit more suspect than they let on. Worth a read.

They do both start with PRE

2008-10-22T16:20:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin just told Brian Williams that she defines precondition as 'strategy'. In other words, when she says Obama will sit down with dictators without preconditions, she believes that what that means is that Obama will go to sit with dictators for the hell of it, and with no established plan or purpose for the talks.

Okay, if that were the definition of preconditions, I would finally understand why people have been so against this idea of meeting without them.

Of course, this is not the definition of precondition. That is much closer to the definition of the word preparation. A precondition is requirement established by a figure of authority that must be met by the subordinate prior to a reward. In this case, the president would be the figure of authority, the subordinate would be a dictator or whomever, the reward would be the meetings, and the precondition would be something akin to displaying a commitment to democracy or human rights. In other words, Barack Obama will not stipulate that Kim Jong-il or whomever renounce his evil ways as a condition for the two meeting.

What Sarah Palin thinks, apparently, is that Obama plans on meeting with dictators with no idea as to what the meeting is going to be about, no concept of what may be the desired result, and no strategy as to how to get that accomplished. In other words, she heard people call Obama's position naive, knew that was supposed to be her opinion, and then used her imagination to figure out what a naive person would forget to do when meeting with bad people...STRATEGY!

Of course, Obama has repeatedly asserted that he would not schedule meetings without necessary preparations. His critics have long considered this to be a case of Obama parsing language, and stepping away from his original position.

But it's not parsing to know the meaning of words, and to use them properly. It's not parsing to make note of the fact that your critics are misunderstanding or misrepresenting your position by imposing false definitions on the words you've used. It's called getting it right the first time, and standing up for yourself when you know you're right.

Not to sound too forgiving of Obama or anything, but throughout this campaign, he's taken simple and uncontroversial positions, but because his opponents so resented having to run against a rookie, they deemed any opportunity to condescend to be an opportunity they could not pass up. Intellectual honesty be damned.

On the bright side, this is not a case of Palin lacking in scruples, it's a case of her lacking the basic knowledge and skill set that should have been a prerequisite to her being selected for the position she's in today.

Socialism

2008-10-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic makes a couple good points about the whole silly socialism card. The first, I'd been thinking about, but thought was too obvious to spend time writing about. The second, I hadn't spent enough time considering. Until now.

This socialism thing.
A, it would have been more convincing had McCain opposed the original bailout and not proposed austerity for everyone and then ruled out lots of programs and then proposed lots of new spending.
B - Palin is going on about Obama and wealth redistribution.
Palin taxed oil company profits and cut $1200 checks for every Alaskans.
That's spreading the wealth. Redistributing some money.
The McCain campaign talks about Palin's executive experience.
So Obama might have socialistic inclinations... Palin's gotten it done.

What took them so long?

2008-10-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

Rudy Giuliani is up today calling Obama soft on crime. He has one of these charming robocalls I've been hearing so much about claiming that Obama opposes "mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers.' Now, if we put aside the wildly misleading conflation of mandatory minimums with 'mandatory prison sentences' (implying Obama doesn't think rapists, drug dealers, or murderers should be sent to prison at all) my only question is, what took them so long with this line of attack?

I mean, it can't be that they were so afraid of being called racists that they held this one back. Can it?

And yes, this is a racist line of attack. It would be racist whether or not Obama were a black man. The fact that he is a black man makes this all the more overtly racist. It's no surprise, now that a number of Republican surrogates (Giuliani being one of them) are wanting to focus on Obama's teenage drug use, that they would decide to go the good old fashioned soft on crime (Read: Black People) argument.

Oh well. I've already voted. Couldn't take it back if I wanted to. Ho hum.

Is this ever a good idea?

2008-10-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

So Terrence Howard is apparently out of the Iron Man sequel (I think it's going to be called Iron Man 2). I don't really know how it works beyond what I've seen in Entourage, but according to Howard, he was surprised to learn he'd been pushed out of the role of James Rhodes when the studio decided to go with Don Cheadle, the perennial black actor extraordinaire.

I would think there would have been some sort of sequel/pay or play clause written into Howard's contract (I mean, even Billy D. got paid when Schumacher cast Tommy Lee Jones as Harvey Dent), but I guess not. Personally, I think the decision to create a continuity problem by recasting important characters for movie sequels is always a bad idea--I can't think of a single time in movies or television where it's worked for me. Can you?

James Bond? Sorry, that doesn't count. While a few of the secondary actors played opposite numerous Bonds, since there's no continuous narrative in those movies, the need for continuity within the greater narrative is less impactful. One could also make the argument that James Bond as played by Connery, Moore, Dalton, and Lazenby are to an extent, different characters (It wouldn't be a great argument, but it could be made).

But if we forget about Bond, when has it worked? Dumbledore? Maybe, but that doesn't count either since A: Richard Harris died, and B: He was still better than Michael Gambon.

So what then? There were a few attempts this year, and none of them worked for me. While Katie Holmes was a total distraction in Batman Begins, recasting the role for The Dark Knight with Maggie Gyllenhaal made for an even bigger distraction--one that forced critically minded viewers to question the necessity of including the Rachel Dawes character in the sequel at all, since she was essentially nothing more than a prop designed to cut corners on character development and motivation. There was a period over the summer when I blamed that movie sucking on the decision to recast that character, but I came to my senses. It sucked for a lot more reasons than that--not the least of which was the decision to recast the role of Gotham City.

What else happened this summer? The third Mummy movie recast Maria Bello in the role originally played by Rachel Weisze. Didn't see it, but I can't imagine continuity was the worst thing that movie had going for it.

If there's anything I can say about Marvel's decision to recast the role of James Rhodes, is that at least they're trading up--Don Cheadle is a lot better than Terrence Howard. I still think it's a terrible idea, but if you're going to take the continuity hit, it's almost always better to trade up than trade down, which is what Marvel did for almost every aspect of The Incredible Hulk.

It's really a weird decision, if you ask me. In Iron Man, Terrence Howard teases the role of War Machine, and now they're going to Don Cheadle to play him? This is how the world works in this new Marvel (Movie) Universe? Isn't the whole idea behind creating a universe about creating an even greater continuity? Or is it just about increasing revenue and marketing tie-ins?

I've found that a walk down the toy aisles at Target answers that question for me.

It's on.

2008-10-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

Both Sarah and I were born in Greensboro, NC; with the exception of the last six years when we were spending our days and nights in New York, she's really never lived anywhere else, so it didn't really bother me when Governor Palin said that our small home town (whose city population of about 230,000 is more than one-third the population of Alaska; and whose metropolitan area population is twice the size of Alaska's) was among the really pro-American parts of the country*.

But now John McCain is saying Western Pennsylvania is more American than Greensboro?!? You've. Got. To. Be. Kidding. me. Western Pennsylvania? Really? I mean, this video (even if you put aside his hilarious garbling of his own message) seems to suggest he's addressing a Western PA crowd, still, has the man ever spent time there?

*Although she would go to Elon to say that sort of thing. There's about eight colleges in Greensboro, and she has to find the one whose main campus is really in Burlington. Fucking Elon. Elon???

New Kicks

2008-10-21T17:00:00.001-07:00

Breaking these in. A bit to my chagrin, they're not quite the hansa yellow you see here. They're more of a cadmium yellow medium than a cadmium light, so they don't quite scream "YELLOW!" in the way I was sort of hoping.

Color Guide.

Sarah Palin lies to children!

2008-10-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know which would be worse: If she believed this to be true or if she was lying. But the fact remains that she wants people to believe this to be true, a vote for John McCain is a vote to put Sarah Palin in charge of the senate!

Do with it what you will, but by all means, take that idea to the polls with you two weeks from today.

Me Vote Pretty One Day

2008-10-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not always a big David Sedaris guy. He can be pretty funny, but he an also be a bit tiresome. This piece is neither all that funny, nor all that tiresome, but it did give me the chance to post what seemed like a funny heading at the time.

From the New Yorker.

Voting Early: Cont.

2008-10-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

Two weeks until election day, and the election is already over for Sarah and me. We dropped Nate off for his first few hours of day care this morning, and drove into Canton to cast our votes. There was a steady flow of people, but no real wait. Cherokee County went for Bush by a count of about 4:1 in 2004, and judging from the demographics at the polls this morning (and the number of McCain/Palin signs around town) I don't see the country turning purple this year.

But we have cast our votes, and, assuming we can trust Diebold, our votes will be tabulated accurately, and there may be some chance that Georgia seems a little less red than it did four years ago.

On a side note: While Obama is unlikely to win the state, the senate race between Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democratic challenger Jim Martin seems to be creating some concern inside the GOP. Chambliss is the guy who found national attention when he defeated Max Cleland, triple amputee and Vietnam veteran, in 2002 after running an ad featuring both Cleland and Osama bin Laden in a split screen.

Clearly concerned, he's got an even classier ad up attacking Jim Martin. It's another one where the image of what is on screen is a lot more important than the words the announcer is being paid to say. See if you can spot the sensationalism in this one (Hint: You have to read it).

Books

2008-10-20T14:55:00.001-07:00

I haven't read but one or two real books from start to finish since Nate was born. I had been on a pretty steady pace there for about five years or so, but once that kid came around, it's been pretty much down hill on the literary front. Sarah was more of less than same way. She's been going to the library every week to get a couple of books for her and a few nighttime books for Nate. I don't read anywhere near as quickly as she does, so I tend to be more of a book collector than a book renter.

This weekend I picked a couple of books I'd been wanting to read for a while. The first was No Country for Old Men. It'll be the first Cormac McCarthy book I've read. While I haven't read more than the first page, the tone seems pretty close to the movie, which I thought was probably the best movie that I saw from last year. I'm actually not as well versed in Southern Gothic literature as I tend to think I should be--I've read the major works of Faulkner, a bunch of Flannery O'Connor short stories, and a Harry Crews book (shout-out HKW), but that's about it (I just looked at the Wikipedia page for the genre, and I've read some more supposedly notable works from the genre, but they don't meet my personal definition, so I exclude them).

The other book I bought was Dreams From My Father, despite what you may have heard, the one and only Barack Obama memoir. I've actually used Obama's use of language as a major reason for my initial--at least abstract--support of his candidacy. I've never been a huge fan of him as a speaker, but the text of his speeches have carried with them a certain lyricism and philosophical structure that I have long found to be fairly compelling. I've heard a lot of people, Christopher Buckley most recently, that when asked to justify their decision to vote for Obama, cite this book. This one, I've read the first chapter. It's actually quite elegant prose. More so than I expected.

I've seen that a number of conservative outlets are spreading rumors to the effect that Obama did not write the book. The proof they provide is some bad poetry Obama wrote as an early undergraduate something like 15 years before the book was published, and an uninspired legal article he wrote in the late 1980s. While I'm impressed by good writing, I'm hardly mystified by it. I don't know whether Obama wrote his memoir in the way I don't know if Armstrong walked on the moon, but I tend to believe both happened because the arguments against such things having happened are simply not plausible. I don't really grasp their logic, and I don't understand why people think it's true--other than their obvious desire for that to be the case.

Here's a couple facts: Teenage poetry sucks. Most people are miserable writers when they're teenagers. Many good writers are miserable poets no matter how old they are, and even if we ignore the relative age of the writer, comparing a poem or a legal paper to a memoir is absolutely ridiculous. Anyway, I don't think it's a big rumor, but it's out there.

I will probably find time to write about both of these books once I've read them. The election will probably be over by then. Weird.

The hunt

2008-10-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

I went for my first interview today. I'm still not 100% clear on what the job is. Or the company for that matter. It's a government contractor. They develop 'turnkey' systems in the fields of engineering, energy, and construction. The bulk of their business right now seems to do with rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq. Will that make me a war profiteer? I will not speak any further on this topic now.

McCain on Palin

2008-10-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

Watch him smile as if the words he's saying display qualities worthy of pride. Weird.

Dots

2008-10-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

Having said a little about what I thought the Powell endorsement would lead to, that is to say, a reevaluation of Powell (for better or worse) more than anything, I thought I would say something about what I think it says.

While he went to great lengths to offer kind words for John McCain, whom he has known for decades, Powell essentially laid blamed for all of the worst moments of negativity throughout the entire campaign at the feet of his friend of thirty years. He said that John McCain could be a good president, but that the party he leads is becoming smaller, and has become trapped in the muck of nationalistic purity and religious zealotry; that John McCain was given an opportunity to be the conscience of the Republican party, to lead the party out of purgatory. But instead of being the party's conscience, McCain surrendered his own in the hope of winning an election.

I'm sure a parallel could be drawn to Colin Powell in 2002. He may have been the only man respected enough in that administration to convince the president to delay or forgo an invasion of Iraq; instead he sold the war to the American people and the UN. Whether either of these men see the parallel, McCain is likely about to enter a period of his life Powell entered years ago, one of deep regret and roads not taken.

In the end, there may not have been a road to victory for John McCain that would not have lead through the mud. I imagine that's a calculation his campaign made much earlier than their first mentioning of Obama's supposed friendship with terrorists. Indeed, McCain's slogan "Country First," unveiled at the end of the primaries, betrays a willingness (if not a readiness, at the time) to call into question his opponent's patriotism.

Put everything else aside, that decision, that jingoistic nonsense is what set the stage for everything that followed. The early ads, considered by the media to be entirely positive, spoke of an "American President Americans had been waiting for." These were the first dots the McCain campaign asked you to connect.

You know in a connect-the-dots puzzle, how it takes you a while to figure out what the picture's going to be, but how at some point the picture--maybe halfway through, maybe more, maybe less--becomes pretty clear? Once you've crossed that point of discovery, you don't have to look at the numbers anymore; you don't even have to complete the puzzle; finishing the picture is just a rote exercise.

This is how I felt at the beginning of the summer. I speak as somebody who came into this election year with a certain level of respect for John McCain. I actually thought the surge was a good idea, albeit for different reasons than John McCain. Still, I have to say that once they pulled that Country First and American President bullshit out of their hat, I felt like a fucking cartographer on already charted ground. I had this campaign mapped out from beginning to end. I knew exactly where we were going, and it wasn't to higher ground.

After that, none of the dots really mattered anymore. I didn't matter that Obama chose to lose a war over an election, or that he was a global celebrity, or that he was best friends with Bill Ayers, or even that the Governor of fucking Alaska was being nominated for the vice presidency. None of any of that mattered. Before any of those dots showed up, picture was already clear: It was Barack Obama wearing a fucking turban; It was Michelle Obama with an afro and a Kalashnikov; It was a couple of black Olympians standing on a podium, heads down, with their black-gloved fists in the air as the Star Spangled Banner played. This was the picture. And we are left to ask what became of John McCain's campaign? Where did it go wrong? We ask this now that even his friends say he should lose. But the answer is pretty clear.

Like I said, I don't know whether there was a righteous path to victory for John McCain, but if you're a man who values character and honor above all else, it's in those times that you choose to be righteous. In the end, John McCain chose another path; it was one Colin Powell knew from experience, and one that he clearly sees unworthy of reward.

I don't know if this endorsement is Colin Powell's attempt at redemption, if it's a dot that's gonna help map out an image of General Powell he hasn't quite resembled since he came to Midtown back in 2002. I don't know whether he seeks redemption at all, if he even considers himself or his image in need of redeeming. Still, the words he said today were strong, indeed, there were moments (speaking about the Muslim soldier buried at Arlington) where he was quite moving, and the image he struck was that of a man who was capable of showing a great deal more character and sensibility than maybe we've come to expect of a politician.

He was a military man who never became a politician. And while he was long considered to be a credible contender to be the first African American president, he never was a candidate. We will never know what kind of candidate he may have been, but today we were given a good idea of the campaign he would have run. And for the first time, I recognise the loss we incurred when he chose not to enter the primaries in 2000.

Dog Bites Man?

2008-10-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

I was wondering how long it was going to take. Meet the Press runs here at 10AM. At about 9:30 Powell left the studio where the show is shot, and every cable news station carried a short press conference in which he gave a quick summary of his rationale for voting for Barack Obama. The reasoning was essentially the same that many have stated for why they Obama has shown himself to be more capable than McCain over the past weeks and months of the campaign: temperament, base negativity, Palin, etc.

After the press conference was over, I switched to Fox News to see how the folks at Fox and Friends Sunday were reacting. In short: They were pissed. They washed their hands of Powell, blamed him for the war, claimed half of his criticism of McCain campaign and the Republican party of late were simply not true, and could generally not be bothered to hide their contempt. Still, there was no reference (that I heard) to a Powell endorsement of Obama being a non story based around the issue of it being little more than a black guy endorsing the black candidate.

I knew it was coming. I just wondered how long it would take. Leave it to Drudge. Now this is a man who understands the power of an ironic banner. "Powell for Obama: It's Not About Race." Nice.

In case you missed the point, Matt links to a piece quoting Powell speaking to students that an African-American president would be electrifying. Nice. Alas, if you still miss the point, Drudge has removed the pic of Powell on stage with two hip-hop stars that he's been running for the past couple of days. Lame.

I don't know whether or not this is going to be a big endorsement. I don't even know what qualifies as a big endorsement anymore. If even such a thing exists. I tend to think a lot of people will consider this a Dog Bites Man story. He's another 73 year old black man voting for the black guy for president.

I remember all of those Hillary supporters claiming Oprah had sold out sisterhood for race. In the end, a lot of white people are going to respond to Powell as they've always responded to Powell, like he's a black guy. For decades, he's been the black guy they want all black guys to be: "well spoken," patriotic, Republican. Hell, his was the hypothetical face they'd imagine when telling pollsters that they would vote for a black man. He was for many Republicans what Barack Obama was for Democrats two years ago: the black guy who they said they'd vote for, but hoped to never have the chance. Today, for many of those same people, I think he's beginning to look like just another black guy.

Update: Limbaugh goes further than Drudge, but maintains some level of playful innuendo. Douche.

Voting Early

2008-10-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

My parents just got back from voting. Good for them. It's not that they wouldn't have voted anyway, but if the general idea is to get more people to participate in the process, allowing for people to vote before election day is crucial to higher turnout. Not only does it ease the process for people for whom it would be difficult to make it to the polls on November 4, it also ensures that lines will be shorter on election day and fewer people will be scared away by an impossibly long wait.

They say the whole thing was kind of anti-climactic.

With her vote, my mother has determined herself to become more involved from this point onward. They took food to one of the local Obama headquarters, and now there's an Obama sign in the front lawn. This is a nice step forward for her. It sort of signals that she, a long time and avid supporter of John Edwards (who insisted two weeks after the sex scandal broke that Edwards was still the most electable Democrat), is beginning to come around in her support for Obama.

I guess this is what unity looks like.

A question.

2008-10-17T08:08:00.001-07:00

Am I leaning too heavily on You Tube clips?

I like you better when you're funny

2008-10-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

I was going to talk about the debate, but honestly, it's all been said before. It was actually the better debate of the three, but I think the result was essentially the same, and therefore unnecessary to speak about.

Twenty-four hours after the third and final debate, the two candidates were telling jokes in white ties and tails. For anybody who didn't see it, it was actually pretty funny. Both candidates were given good material to work with.

Humorous self deprication is generally an effective trope, and last night was one of those nights where America was treated to the reminder that this campaign could have been a lot more civil than it has been.

Since the whole thing was an illusion, I guess it's fitting that they were dressed as magicians. Still, here's the video.

Yikes

2008-10-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

This ad apparently ran somewhere after the debate last night (which I'll probably get around to saying something about sooner or later). I honestly don't know what to think about it. I don't know how effective this sort of thing is. It's definitely more effective than anything MoveOn has ever done. Still, I don't know.

JCVD

2008-10-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ or venereal disease. It does seem something like a love letter to the boyhood me, but I've been burned by that before. It is this trailer for which you can blame the Road House post.

A polar bear fell on me

2008-10-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

Initially, this was going to be a long post about how my relationship with movies has been waning. What’s probably one of my best and worst habits when it comes to writing is my tendency to over-contextualize. Even as I write this, I feel myself falling into a hole. Basically, the end game to the whole piece was going to be that Rambo was awesome and that The Dark Knight sucked. I was going to tie that to something I saw the other day, but that was going to be the payoff to the whole piece.

Somewhere along the line, I decided that it was not going to be a terribly satisfying payoff, so I cut that one short. Still, in abandoning it, I cannot abandon the post’s message, so let me say it again for good measure: Rambo was awesome. The Dark Knight sucked.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, here’s something related, but different.

****

A couple years ago, I was at an art opening for a painter I know. In the interest of people’s feelings and in the faint possibility that this artist has been directed to this web log, I’m going to be a little vague with regard to this artist’s identity.

(Note: My use of the pronoun ‘he’ does not necessarily reflect the artist’s gender; it reflects my desire to not use the crude ‘s/he’ or the distractingly plural ‘they.’)

Anyway, I was at this gallery in the city. A painter I know sort of casually, had a solo show. I remember it being kind of hot, so it must have been either late spring or early fall (I guess that’s a clue for all of you painters out there, did you have a show in the late spring or early fall a few years back???). To put it mildly, I was underwhelmed. The work was well executed, but impressively and unintentionally superficial.

I guess it’s important to say that I don’t really like openings. They’re cramped; packed with people you don’t know or, a lot of times, wish you didn’t know. In the end, they’re parties that are less about art and more about networking. People blow a lot smoke up people’s asses. There’s usually free booze though, so…

Depending on the type of mood you’re in, they can be a pretty good time or they can be a claustrophobic nightmare. I remember it being hot, and I think it’s important that it was hot because it helps to explain my reaction to the whole event. I wasn’t there for long. The whole process took maybe ten minutes, and for most of that time, I was outside the gallery which (another hint!!!) was at street level.

It was crowded, and it was hot. I did a quick and quiet scan of the space. I did the respectful thing you do even when you know the work is terrible: I looked at every painting, and tried to think of some moment somewhere in one of the paintings to compliment when I talked to the artist. I couldn’t come up with anything, so I decided to do the next best thing: I listened to see if the people around me were saying anything that I could steal as my own.
A fool’s errand. While there was no mistaking their reaction to the work—they were spellbound—none of them offered the most remote or helpful reason to like the work. It was all “It looks just like a photo!” or “So beautiful!” or some other meaningless platitude that I wasn’t going to get caught stealing to save my life, let alone blow smoke up a person’s ass whom I barely knew and who was unlikely to help me in the future.

It’s important for me to say that I don’t like most art. I don’t go to shows expecting to like the work. Good art is a wonderful surprise, but I don’t let bad art piss me off or affect me in any visceral way. I’m genuinely happy for an artist when he is given the opportunity to show, and while I didn’t know this artist particularly well, I went into the show knowing exactly what to expect, and was absolutely prepared to be supportive of his lifeless art. But somewhere, somehow, and for some reason, something inside me changed.

I don’t know whether it was the heat, or the work, or the people’s reaction to the work, but I began to feel myself losing control. I was angry. I was angry at the work. I was angry at the people. I was angry at my friends for not being there to calm me down. I was angry at myself for not making marketable work, and for living in New York, and for coming to shows where I would be forced to talk to bad painters living off of their rich girlfriends, worse painters living off of their bad art.

I guess I was having an anxiety attack. I would see a friend of mine talking to somebody else, and would go up to them and sit, speechless. All the time thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? I hate these people. Why isn’t anybody asking me what’s wrong? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with them? Mother fuckers.”

Now, I’m not an angry drunk, but I wasn’t even drinking.

Anyway, the whole spectacle lasted no more than twenty minutes and I was gone. I was still in control enough that I knew when the evening was unsalvageable, and that no after-party was going to pull me back from the abyss. So I left. I breached etiquette and didn’t say hello to the artist, didn’t congratulate him on a job well done, didn’t sign the guestbook. I left.

But it didn’t end there. I walked to the subway; waited at the platform; took the train; transferred at 14th street; and headed back to Brooklyn, and the entire time, I was flipping out. Gone. Like I was Superman looking for some missile destruct device in a lead box full of Kryptonite; only I wasn’t looking for a missile destruct device. I was just looking for a free glass of wine.

When I got home, I wasn’t much better. Sarah was there. She had expected me to be gone until late, and it was barely dark yet. I still couldn’t bring myself to talk more than a few syllables. I walked past Sarah and into the bedroom. I expected to just fall asleep, but I turned on the television instead. Sometimes you make the best decisions when you’re not even trying.

The channel: TNT.

The Scene: A bar with rowdy clientele and a stage on which a rhythm and blues band plays behind a chain link fence. The singer, a white boy with the soul of a black man. He’s blind, but you get the feeling that he sees life a little clearer than anyone else. He plays a slide guitar, and sings Little Richard numbers while beer bottles break against the steel cage around the stage. The bouncer is Terry Funk! Keith David keeps the place stocked with whiskey. It’s a violent place to be sure, but the kind of place you feel could get cleaned up if they could only find somebody with the right attitude and experience (even if that experience involved ripping a man’s throat out in “self-defense.”)

The place is a powder keg ready to explode, and in he walks. “The name is Dalton.”

It was like coming up for air. No, it was like a polar bear fell on me, in a good way. Literally, everything I had been feeling fell away. Sometimes, in life, you’re going to feel a little pain, but in the end, pain don’t hurt. And Nobody ever wins a fight.

An important distinction

2008-10-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

Voter fraud takes place at the polls. It doesn't need to be widespread to be serious.

Voter registration fraud takes place long before the vote. It occurs when fictional or ineligible people attempt to register. In order for this to be a problem of any significance, Mickey Mouse would not only have to make it on the voter rolls, but also make it to the polls to vote. That would be voter fraud. Short of that occurring, voter registration fraud is something akin to a prank phone call.

Fox News and the McCain campaign are trying to say that wide-spread voter fraud is occurring exactly three weeks to the day before the wide-spread opening of the polls.

BTW: This is being brought up to justify voter suppression which is, because it is a direct violation of the civil rights of the individual, as great, if not a greater betrayal of the ideals of democracy than voter fraud.

Paul Krugman

2008-10-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

Here's Paul Krugman's August 8, 2005 column on what he worried was a looming housing crisis: That Hissing Sound.

Here's a blog posting from the same day in 2005, written by John Hinderaker, a fellow at the Claremont Institute who writes for the National Review, in which he openly mocks Krugman's contention that there was a housing bubble and a crisis at the horizon: That Hissing Sound is Krugman.

Can you guess which one of the two of these guys just won the Nobel Prize for Economics?

h/t: Sullivan

The hunt.

2008-10-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Sarah doesn't think I'm looking hard enough for a job. Or, she's afraid that I'm not. Never one to give myself the benefit of the doubt, I think it's kind of a fair assumption. I mean, I am sending out a bunch of resumes on a daily basis. Monday is not a good day, generally speaking, but I make up for it by the end of the week.

I do have a bit of a motivational problem. I've discussed before how the hunt has been going, and there are no major shifts either positive or negative. I've gotten a bunch of responses, but all but one of them were for fake jobs. The outlier may or may not have involved a job, but it definitely involved a strap-on, so it was not without its own drawbacks.

In the end, I got here in mid-August. Two months is not that long when you think about it. As the hunt goes on, I will keep you all abreast of any new developments.

Christopher Hitchens

2008-10-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

An endorsement.

William Kristol

2008-10-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

What. A. Hack.

A New Week; An Entirely New Campaign?

2008-10-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

Is this sort of thing allowed? Not that I am displeased with the shift away from race baiting, but how many times can a candidate make top-to-bottom changes to his campaign and message before the entire country begins to consider him completely unsure about why or whether he wants to be president in the first place?

For a guy who spent all of last week asking who his opponent was, John McCain is up this morning with an entirely new explanation of who he is and why we should vote for him. It has something to do with comebacks and drapes.

BTW: The day after the debate last week, I was certain the new argument, when it came, would have something to do with divided government. Something akin to: "Remember how inept we were when we had control of the Congress and the White House? Do you really want the Democrats to have the same unchecked power we brilliantly misused? I didn't think so."

Enough with all of that.

2008-10-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

I don't know what that last post was all about. It was one of those grand ideas that seemed to get smaller with the execution. At any rate, I'm tired of talking about race and politics. Hopefully most of what's on my mind this week will have little to do with either.

I'll leave the last word on the matter to this guy.

Of Monkeys and Men

2008-10-12T09:18:00.001-07:00

In the summer of 2006, Sarah was pregnant for the first time. Nate had a name and a face, but we only knew one of them. We wouldn't know his face or his voice until August. It seems like an impossibly long time ago.

It was a hot summer in New York. In the weeks before Nate would be born, the threat of brown outs loomed, and Sarah and I both somehow found a way to stop taking the subway during the morning rush while keeping our jobs. It wasn't just the crowd, it was the reasonable fear that the subway would lose power and that Sarah would find herself eight months pregnant and trapped on a crowded subway somewhere beneath the East River with temperatures underground exceeding 100 degrees.

It was a brutal time.

I'm reminded of that summer now and again. Sarah is 33 weeks into her second pregnancy. We know the name of the little girl in her belly, but her face (4d ultrasound notwithstanding) and voice are still a mystery. Today it feels more like autumn than it ever did during the summer of 2006, but this morning I saw something that brought me back to a specific day, two years and a few months ago.

It was early summer. The heatwave that began in late July and dragged throughout the month of August had not yet begun, but it was summer in New York, and it was hot, and it was unpleasant. Still, it wasn't unbearable, and Sarah and I were looking for memorable moments of that time somewhere between duet and trio. That day, we were at the Central Park Zoo.

The zoo, not that one in particular, but zoos in general have always played a role in our lives. We both like zoos. We have no qualms about liking zoos, and think people who hate zoos are of bad moral fiber. She actually worked at a zoo and interned at the Duke Primate Center (not exactly a zoo) while we were in college, and if she had her druthers, I think that's something she'd be pleased to spend the rest of her life doing. None of this is important except to drive home the point I've already stated, that we like zoos.

The Central Park Zoo is at the southeast corner of the park, it's small, and regardless of what you may have seen in the movies, there are no lions, giraffes, hippos, or zebras (though there are penguins). It's cute though, and it's an inexpensive and fine way to spend an afternoon.

The basic layout of the place is something like I imagine zoos being thirty or forty years ago. Like the zoo in Rocky II or the one in The Graduate: unapologetically artificial. It's all concrete and open. The enclosures are not cages like they definitely would have been decades ago, but there's nothing about them that seem designed to create the illusion of a natural environment.

Maybe I'm a sucker for primates, but the best exhibit in the entire place is the Macaques. It's the largest enclosure in the zoo: a big rocky tree hill in the center of a little pond on which a whole community of little macaques spend their days sleeping, grooming, and playing. It's clearly the centerpiece of the entire zoo, and I've rarely been there when the monkeys weren't doing something interesting. But again, I'm a sucker for primates, and I find friendly grooming to be fascinating.

On this day, with Sarah seven or eight months pregnant, what caught my attention was a child macaque playing near the water's edge. He grabbed (with his foot) a branch that grew out over the water, so that he could use both hands to reach for wood chips, or leaves, or whatever was floating near the drop off. He seemed neither confident nor cavalier. He was just being a kid, I guess, and as I watched him, I felt myself becoming a father. I knew he was going to fall in, and I had no way to stop it.

Now, I think macaques, Japanese Macaques anyway, may be the only species of primate (besides humans) that can swim. I may be wrong about that, but my mind is full of all sorts of images of Japanese Snow Macaques swimming in the hot springs, so I know some Macaques can swim. I don't know whether the behavior is learned or inherent. Nor do I know whether the African Macaque shares its cousin's ability to swim, so as I watched this monkey playing precariously at the drop off, I believed with some certainty that I might be about to witness a monkey drown.

But that didn't happen. What happened was the little monkey catching the eye of one of Central Park's ugly geese, a mammoth white bird with barnacled red face. A territorial dispute was in the making, and the little guy stretching over the water was apparently too much of an affront for the goose to bare.

The goose swam at steady pace directly at the little monkey, displaying his wings, baring his tongue and making a sound recognizeable to most small children who've thrown a little too much bread to the ducks and not quite enough to the geese: Hisssthsssss!

Keep in mind, the goose probably outweighs the monkey five or six to one; he's huge, and the monkey is tiny. Either out of instinct or force of habit, the little monkey retreats to solid ground, but the goose is unsatisfied. He speeds towards the shore, now flapping his wings wildly. And a moment after I had worried about seeing the child drown, I fairly confident that I was about to watch him be manhandled by a bird. Luckily for the little monkey, I wasn't the only one watching.

It happened so quickly that the visuals are something of a blur. But I remember the screaming. The island was not the home to one monkey, but many, and as the bird approached shore, two adolescent monkeys arrived, but the screams were bigger than them. They seemed to come from everywhere. One monkey became three, which became five, then eight, all jumping and screaming like australopithcines stumbling upon an obelisk. The goose continued to display, but stopped short of stepping on shore.

He should have stopped a little shorter than that.

Monkeys, I've always sort of known, but learned without a doubt that day, run a lot faster than a goose can swim. Another thing I learned, which I'd already known, was that you do not mess with the little monkey when his daddy is nearby. Alpha monkey, still probably outweighed by the goose two-to-one, tears to the front of the pack, gets his feet wet, in one hand he grabs the branch the little one had been using for support, with the other hand, he grabs the goose by the breast, and he began to pull.

That was when Sarah turned her head.

Nobody died that day. Nobody at that zoo anyway. The goose, the bully, was easily overpowered by the considerably smaller (but stringy) monkey, and had the monkey truly wanted to, he could've dispensed with that bird in seconds. But that didn't happen. The bird was pulled halfway onto the island before the monkey let go. The goose swam back to his mate at the far side of the pond, and a patch of white feathers drifted off in another direction.

And that was it. The single most wonderful and horrible thing I've ever witnessed at a zoo. A clash of cultures. A clash of continents. A real life version of Animal Face-Off that, while its outcome could never truly be in doubt, was exhilarating nonetheless because it was at once impossible yet happening before my eyes.

It brought Sarah to tears. It was too much for her. Not because she was pregnant, or not entirely; it was very nearly too much for me. Nearly, but not quite. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was lucky to be there. To have witnessed it. At any rate, it was a moment that will forever stay with me. For better or worse, it's one of a handful of memories from the Nate pregnancy that is forever burned into my psyche.

****

Nate was born on August 11, 2006.

Something else happened that day. George Allen who was, at the time, the junior United States Senator from the commonwealth of Virginia was having an outdoor rally in Breaks, near the Kentucky border. Allen's opponent, Democrat Jim Webb had a supporter in the crowd. The Webb supporter, an Indian American named S.R. Sidarth, was recording the rally for opposition purposes.

Allen recognised Sidarth, one of (if not the) only non-white face in an Appalachian Virginia crowd, as someone who worked for Webb. Given the choice between making note of his presence or ignoring it, Allen chose the former. It was without a doubt the beginning of the end of his senate career and what many considered a bright political future.

Here's what he said:

"This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent... Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

You know what happened next. It's sort of a bellwether moment for YouTube and for the Internet as a political tool. Some people, journalists in particular, felt the need to give Allen the benefit of the doubt. That is to say that it's unclear whether he called the lone brown face in a sea of white a monkey. After all, a Macaque is a monkey. Macaca isn't really anything, right?

Actually, that's not right. "Macaca" is the genus to which all species of macaques belong. I actually didn't know that at the time, but I did know that he was calling him a monkey. There was part of me at the time, and part of me still that wonder whether he knew he was calling Mr. Sidarth a monkey. It could easily have been an inherited racial slur passed down from an older generation whose meaning was somewhat hazy for the good senator. What didn't cross my mind then and what seems inconceivable to me today is that he didn't recognize it as a slur or, more specifically, a racial slur. And that's important. He singled out a brown face in a crowd of white people and ridiculed him in a way he felt they would understand.

Did he mean to call him a monkey? Maybe not. Did he call him a monkey? You're god dammed right he did. And in the end, everybody knew it. Or if they didn't know that, they knew that he called him something he would not have called the sole white face in a sea of brown people. And really, that's all they needed to know.

****

I was reminded of both of these stories today when I saw this:

Earlier in the year, Rush Limbaugh got a call from a woman who thought it was hilarious that her daughter thought Barack Obama looked like Curious George. Limbaugh laughed initially, but apologized later, claiming he'd never heard of the beloved cartoon monkey whose been in print since the early 1940s. Limbaugh, racist or not, knows one thing for certain, you don't call a black person a monkey or laugh at another person making the characterization. Or, you may do those things, but not in mixed company.

I don't know whether George Allen is a racist. I do know that he peddles in racial slurs to ridicule people of color when he is among white folk. I know this because there's video of him doing it. I have no idea whether or not either John McCain or Sarah Palin are racists. My assumption is that at least one of them is not. Still, this is who they're attracting. These are not simply the votes they want, they are the votes they need to have any chance at being elected in November.

And some of these people are unapologetic racists. These are people who flaunt their racism. And they may be the only people still excited about a John McCain candidacy. As disappointed as I've been with the tone of the last few weeks, I can only imagine the shame John McCain must feel today. This is who he has left. It's most definitely a bed of his own making, but he clearly didn't mean for this to happen. Not in this way.

When Photo Ops Go Bad

2008-10-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

The McCain campaign has spent the last week having to wrestle the storyline away from its own crowds. The problem seems to be spreading.

Amphibian DNA

2008-10-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

This, from Nathan Thornburgh at Time, is pretty similar to my take away from this whole Troopergate thing. Two word synopsis: Amateur Hour.

Money quote:

"[T]he Branchflower report still makes for good reading, if only because it convincingly answers a question nobody had even thought to ask: Is the Palin administration shockingly amateurish? Yes, it is. Disturbingly so. The 263 pages of the report show a coordinated application of pressure on Monegan so transparent and ham-handed that it was almost certain to end in public embarrassment for the governor."

Putting aside for a moment the very real and serious questions this raises (or, rather answers) with regard to the nature of Sarah Palin's respect for ethics and honesty, it also displays a simple incompetence from an administrative perspective that seems to have been, to this point, somewhat overlooked.

The Democratic line for so long has been that John McCain was a third Bush term, that he was McSame as Bush and so on. Like he was, let's say, a clone of Bush made from the blood harvested from a prehistoric mosquito perfectly preserved in amber.

The only problem with cloning somebody using blood harvested from a mosquito frozen in amber is that you're going to have to overcome some degradation in the genetic code. In layman's terms, there are going to be some holes that need filling. This probably accounts for why a hypothetical McCain presidency has never really felt to me like a third term of George W. Bush. The code was simply incomplete, and if you're looking to patch some holes in an oil/baseball man's genetic code, where is a good place to start? That's right: A hockey mom from Alaska!

The rest is hardly Nucular Physics; it's basically cloning 101. Further explained here.

Things to do in Georgia

2008-10-11T16:04:00.001-07:00

In the last two weeks, Sarah and I have taken Nate to a dairy,an apple orchard, and a pumpkin patch. We're quickly running out of places to go where we can be reasonably certain to find a petting zoo.

For a kid who's spent so much of his first two years living in New York City, Nate is making up for lost time in the country. I lived my first twenty-two years in Georgia and North Carolina, but he's quickly gaining on me in things that apparently qualify as southern living.

Pictures for your enjoyment. Notice that Nate is experimenting with a new fake smile. I challenge one and all, if you think yourself capable of making a kid half as cute as mine, give it a try. I dare you.

A Classless Society

2008-10-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

On the day Barack Obama gave his speech at the Democratic National Convention a lot was being made of a secret advertisement John McCain had purchased time to run directly after the speech. The McCain campaign was describing it as the first of its kind. A lot of Democrats feared that it would be the announcement of John McCain's VP pick. I had a different idea.

My feeling was that announcing the vice presidential pick would be seen as a silly and disrespectful tactic. It was the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington, and the first African American in United States history was accepting the nomination of a major party for the presidency. What kind of a douche would try and step on the historical significance of that achievement on that night?

As I told Sarah that day, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to use the moment to congratulate Obama and to personally recognise the history of the moment. Such an announcement would signal an end to what had been a fairly small and trite summer campaign, and a beginning to the dignified campaign both candidates had promised in the primary.

I'm not telling this story to brag about my foresight. In the end, though, what I thought he should do is exactly what he did do. He put aside all of the celebrity taunts he and his campaign had been spewing for weeks, and offered a singular note of congratulations to his opponent.

I bring this up to make a single point: It was the last classy move that's come out of John McCain's campaign.

Since then:

The next day, he announced his selection for VP: A female governor of a tiny (population-wise) state, who'd been elected only 20 months before, whom he'd met for the first and only time this year, and with whom he'd only carried on one telephone conversation before offering her the job.
He spent much of the next week trying to figure out how to exploit for political purposes what could have been, but turned out not to be, the catastrophic hurricane in New Orleans on the third year anniversary of Katrina.
The day after devoting a night of his convention to national service, he allowed Giuliani and Palin to openly mock community service.
After Obama likened placing the change label on generic Republican policies to "putting lipstick on a pig," the McCain campaign insisted that Obama was openly calling Palin a pig.
When asked directly about whether McCain thought Obama was calling her a pig, McCain said no, but that he did imply it.
The campaign released an ad stating that, by supporting a piece of legislation calling for comprehensive sex education that included teaching kindergartners how to avoid sexual predators, Obama, the father of two young girls, wanted to teach children about sex before teaching them to read.
After speaking with Obama and agreeing to release a joint-statement regarding the economic crisis and bailout plan, John McCain sabotaged that effort, went on television by himself and made the dubious claim that he was suspending his campaign until a deal was reached (paid campaign surrogates continued to criticize Barack Obama on television while during the so-called suspension, also during that period, thousands of McCain ads ran, and no deal was reached by the time McCain returned to the trail).
John McCain spent an hour an a half standing on the same stage with Barack Obama without addressing him directly or so much as looking in his eye.
Twice in the last week, people introducing Sarah Palin have referred to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama. The fact that this has begun to happen again at the exact moment Palin's begun to refer to Obama as somebody who pals around with terrorists, we're supposed to accept as coincidence.
"That One."

That happened. It all began the day after John McCain recognised the nomination of Obama as a good day for America. To make a long story short (too late), he's not saying that anymore.

At the same time that the tenor of the McCain campaign has made it's most recent and most drastic turn into the muck, a nice companion story has begun to emerge. Much is being made, for good reason, of the crowds gathering at McCain/Palin events. They've quite rightly been referred to as angry mobs. They dutifully connect the dots of "Hussein" and "palling around with terrorists" and the picture they get is the one intended:

They call him a terrorist. And they don't mean it ironically. They actually believe he's a terrorist. They believe that's even a possibility. Hell, I have family who honestly believe he's the Anti-Christ.

People coming to these events believe that Obama wants to do this country harm! And what do we do, I ask, with somebody who wants to do our country harm? The answer.

John McCain cannot be blamed for every word uttered by the folks that show up to hear his running mate speak (and file for the exit when he's introduced). That being said, this shit is going on. He knows it's going on. And, to this point, he's remained silent.

I understand that he's given up on class. That's fine. But it's high time that the man who uses the word "honorable" at least as often as he uses the word "maverick" began to remind the American people that he was once a man who valued honor as something more than an empty form of self-aggrandizement.

That is, assuming, the McCain brand was ever something more than just effective branding.

Update 1: This could be a good start. Again, you can only hold the man responsible for what he and his campaign say or do. While I certainly believe McCain and his campaign are responsible for the tone they've established of the last week, it's also true that a lot of foolish people are going to support him. That may indeed, be all he has left. Still, at the very least, he has the responsibility to set an example. Be a leader, if you will.

Update 2: I'm a little less impressed with the above given the talking points they were working with just hours before the candidate's supporters forced him into walking back the entire past week.

Update 3: Also from earlier in the afternoon, the McCain campaign has begun to direct their innuendo at Michelle Obama. Something tells me the Ayers and terrorist references are not going away.

The Dow

2008-10-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know a ton about the economy. I did work in an investment firm for most of the last year, though. My experience is probably the equivalent of staying in a Holiday Inn Express. Still, I've never invested, but I spent a lot of the last year watching the market; a habit I think a lot of the uninvested have picked up in the last few weeks.

As I write this, the Dow is at 9183, down about 76 points from yesterday's close. On Friday, the Dow closed at 10,325.38. That's a drop of 1142.38 points or 11.06 percent in less than a week!

On September 26, the Dow closed at 11,143.13. That's almost 2000 points or 17.6 percent over the last two weeks.

On October 9, 2007, a year ago today, the Dow closed at 14,164.43. In other words, it took a year for the Dow to drop nearly 5,000 points or 35.17 percent off an all time high.

When, on September 15, John McCain assured Americans that the fundamentals of our economy were strong, the Dow stood at 11,416.37. Forgetting for a moment that it would fall 500 points that day, it is helpful to remember that it had been only 11 months since the Dow had hit an all-time high. It is helpful to recall that he had made the claim no fewer than 16 times in that period, and in that period, the Dow dropped 2,748.06 points or 19.4 percent. Since the last time he assured us that our economy was fundamentally strong, that number has nearly doubled.

Now, I don't know what any of that means, but holy fucking shit, right?

Update: The Dow finished the day at 8579.19. That's a daily drop of 678.91 or 7.33 percent. If Barack Obama is not the next President of the United States, explanations besides racism are running pretty thin.

Why so mad, Cindy?

2008-10-09T06:50:00.000-07:00

I was skeptical of this whole temperament meme at first, but I've come around. It's not that I didn't believe the stories of McCain's apparently legendary temper, it's that I didn't think it would be an effective angle to play. I didn't think McCain and his campaign were undisciplined enough to allow his anger to be revealed to the public at large.

That ship seems to have sailed. John McCain hasn't blown up (and he's unlikely to), but his demeanor has, for weeks now, regularly betrayed something ugly bubbling up beneath the surface. It's been especially clear when viewed in contrast to Barack Obama whose characteristic coolness, once considered a liability, is being seen more and more as a reassuring calm in a storm.

And John McCain doesn't like it one bit.

Neither, it seems, does Cindy McCain. In fact, she's kind of pissed. A lot has been made of her speech yesterday about Barack Obama apparently voting to kill her son (I think that's what she said anyway), but getting somewhat less attention is her assertion from a couple days ago that Barack Obama has run "the dirtiest campaign in American history."

Lucky for her, Cindy wasn't asked the obvious follow-up about why it's not only dirtier to call somebody old and cranky (the most negative implication put out by the Obama campaign) than it is to call them Hussein and say they pal around with terrorists, but it's also worse than going to South Carolina and telling people her adoptive daughter is really her husband's black love child. Lucky for Cindy, she wasn't asked why she's more offended by an arguably true characterization of her husband (the candidate) than she is a plainly false attack involving her daughter, an attack whose sole purpose was to stoke racial antipathy.

I mean, putting aside the obvious hyperbole that Obama is somehow meaner than any candidate in the 232 year history of the United States, I'd say Cindy McCain is pretty lucky that no follow-up came. Not knowing her personally, I tend to think that even she would find it difficult to argue that Obama's was the dirtiest campaign in the history of her husband running for president, let alone the history of the United States.

Alas, no follow-up came. Women, the McCain campaign believes, are owed a certain deference, and part of that means the media should not be able to show the slightest skepticism with even the most overtly stupid shit they say. Also deserving of deference: senior citizens.

Still, this obviously bone-headed comment got me wondering. What if she does believe it? Does that mean she believes she and her husband are the victims of the two ugliest campaigns in American history? I know it's hard to think rationally when you're in the middle of something, but what kind of narcissism does that sort of thinking require?

It's not that they're angry. A lot of people are angry. People are losing their homes and their nest eggs. They're scared. They're cynical. And they're angry. So it makes sense, if you're going to run a populist campaign (as McCain is trying to do), that you show a little anger now and again. It can be very effective. What's weird is that the McCains don't seem angry for the same reason everybody else is angry. They're not angry at the same people.

While the American people find themselves in a period of crisis, John and Cindy McCain also find themselves facing crisis. The problem is that it's not the same crisis. Oh, there are similarities. Like John and Cindy McCain, the American people have been working and planning for decades for a reward that seems more out of reach today than it was ten years ago, but unlike the McCains, the American people do not have tens of millions of dollars and seven or eight homes to break their fall when the bottom fell out of their dreams. And unlike the American people, John and Cindy McCain know exactly who's to blame for their gosh darn problems: Barack Hussein Obama.

Why is Barack Obama dirtier than George W. Bush (don't say it's because he's black)? It seems clear that the answer lies less with Obama than with John McCain. Simply put: He's old. Eight years ago, he was 64! Four years from now, he's going to be 76.

Make no mistake about it, John McCain has wanted to be president for decades, and today, it seems just as apparent that Cindy McCain has wanted to be first lady for at least that long. They are less than a month away from the realization that it's never going to happen. I almost feel sorry for them. Cynical or not, they are people too. And they're crushed.

What's striking to me, and it sort of mirrors the Democratic primaries, is that they're so politically daft that they can't even create the illusion that the pain they feel has anything to do with you or me. Much like the Clintons, the McCains pain is their own, and rather than using this as an opportunity to display their capacity for empathy to the American people, they're coming to us, asking for ours. Fuck'em.

To John McCain: It's not that you're a racist...

2008-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's that you're a shameless cynic who sees racial antipathy as an asset to your candidacy.

There's an anecdote I remember from towards the end of the Democratic Primary. Bill Clinton was stumping for his wife in North Carolina (a state, you'll remember that went overwhelmingly for Obama). He met a couple of women on the rope line, and asked if they would be supporting Hillary. One of them, an African American woman, said that North Carolina was Obama country and she was going to support Obama. Bill Clinton responded to this by asking simply, "Do you think I'm a racist?"

This was the first and only time I remember him phrasing the sentiment in the form of a question. The Clinton campaign had spent a lot of time since January, or December really, insisting they were not racists. They were the only campaign actually using the word racist, but they were staging it as a defense of an accusation that nobody was making (at least not publicly). It's true that there were various suggestions that the Clinton campaign was peddling in racially loaded and insensitive language, but rarely was the motivation for this language attributed to an antipathy the Clintons had towards black people.

Off the top of my head, here's a list of what came out of the Clinton campaign from December through late January:

Billy Shaheen (NH Clinton co-chair): Gives an interview in which he ponders whether or not Barack Obama was ever a drug dealer.
Bill Clinton: Taking numerous quotes of Obama's out of context suggests his stated opposition to the war was 'the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen.'
Hillary Clinton: responding to comparisons of Obama to MLK and JFK, decides to compare herself to LBJ and in so doing, minimized the role of MLK in civil rights legislation.
Francine Torge (a Clinton NH surrogate): While introducing HRC stated: 'Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually' passed the civil rights legislation.
The Clinton campaign defends a lawsuit brought by the Nevada Teachers Union that sought to change the caucus rules by closing down at-large precinct locations, thereby limiting access to the caucuses for union employees and effectively suppressing voter participation among a disproportionately minority group.
Robert Johnson (Clinton supporter and founder of BET): Makes deliberate and mocking reference to Obama's candidness with regard to drug use in his youth. Later asserts that he was instead referring to his time as a community organizer.
Hillary Clinton: In the SC debate Clinton responds to a reference of her history working on the Board at WalMart with a statement that while she was working for families, Obama was representing his "contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago."
Bill Clinton: In attempt to minimize Obama's overwhelming victory in South Carolina, and in an apparent non-sequitorial response to a question, compares Obama's victory in a primary to Jesse Jackson winning caucuses in South Carolina.

One could most certainly go on from there. I haven't even brought up Geraldine Ferraro. The point is with all of this going on, the harshest thing that ever came out of the Obama campaign was the suggestion that all of these incidence viewed together could be construed as a disturbing pattern. From that statement, the Clinton campaign claimed Obama was playing the so-called "race card," and from that point on Bill Clinton repeatedly asserted that he was not a racist.

Nobody in the media ever pointed out to Clinton that he wasn't being called a racist. Nobody ever pointed out to the Clinton campaign that simply not being racist did not absolve white people from any incidents of racial insensitivity. That it was possible for the Clintons to offend black people, and that insisting they were somehow the victims of their own insensitivity would only make them appear more boorish than if they were to accept the potential for their words to offend in the first place.

One of the fundamental flaws of the Clinton campaign (and perhaps the Clintons as people) was an inability to accept responsibility even when they were clearly at fault. Instead, they doubled down on their insensitivity. The African American community had, in questioning their motives, wronged the Clintons, so in true Clinton form, the campaign turned their backs on the community they could always rely on. To hell with them.

It became acceptable for Gloria Steinem to compare the plight of African Americans to the plight of women and to suggest because women received the right to vote in the 20th century and blacks sort of got the right to vote in the 19th (even though they were still being hanged in the 1960s for attempting to register) that it was historically worse to be a woman in America than it was to be black.

It became acceptable for Geraldine Ferraro to go on Fox before the Pennsylvania Primary and essentially claim that Barack Obama was another unqualified black man taking a job from a white woman who supposedly had 35 years of experience.

It became acceptable for the Clintons to go along with the demonization of an African American minister Bill Clinton had invited to the White House as a form of absolution during the Lewinsky scandal.

It became acceptable for Hillary Clinton to take a quote regarding why white working class voters tend to vote against their economic better interest out of context and use it to portray Obama as a condescending elitist.

It became acceptable for Hillary Clinton to equivocate on 60 Minutes about whether or not she believed Obama was a Muslim.

Somewhere along the line the Clintons decided they weren't going to win the black vote, so they had to compensate by winning a disproportionate share of the white vote. This meant holding their nose and exploiting the deep-seeded racial animosity they knew existed within a sizable portion of the white working class Democratic electorate. They did it not because they were racists, but because they were sons of bitches who understood that history is written by the winners and who believe there's therefore no such thing as a noble defeat.

They were wrong.

And I have to believe the McCain campaign is wrong if they believe the overtly and unquestionably racist tactic they've adopted of late is going to payoff in the end.

Barack Obama is not simply the first African American to be nominated by a major party for the office of the presidency, he's a father of two small children who are too young to understand that John McCain doesn't think their father is a terrorist--regardless of his middle name or his former pastor. The thing is, John McCain is too old not to understand that his campaign is now teetering on the edge, not of forever damaging his brand, but of inciting violence against a man who very well may be the next President of the United States.

So to John McCain, I just have to say, it's not that you're a racist, it's that you're a narcissistic scumbag, an irresponsible and despicable person who, while not terribly bright, should be smart enough to understand when a line that needn't be crossed has been crossed.

Burying the Lede

2008-10-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for a job for a few weeks now. It's pretty slow going. There isn't really a reliable method for finding work. As a matter of necessity, job posting boards favor the client (i.e. the employer) rather than the applicant. I found this to clearly be the case when I was about to leave my last job and posted it on Craigslist--there were two hundred responses in the first hour, and probably close to 1000 when all was said and done.

It's not that my job was all that enviable; it's just that a lot of people are looking for work...a lot more than are posting jobs. In New York, Craigslist charges the employer something like $25 per listing. If you want to list the ad in multiple boards (e.g. My title was Equity Research Assistant and I posted it in the Administrative board and the Finance board), you're charged the same fee per board.

Presently, Craig doesn't charge employers in the Atlanta area to post ads. The snag being that the Atlanta site is plagued by fake ads--spammers mining for email addresses. It's a problem I've never run into while applying for jobs in New York, but having been at this casually for a little over a month, and in a more serious way for the last three weeks, I think I've received close to ten responses directing me to data mining sites and survey sites. Ironically, they're always sent with the expressed intent being that the company wants to weed out spam. Until Wednesday, the only responses I had received fell into this category. On Wednesday though, I got an actual phone call.

I had submitted a resume to a company called Sahni Enterprises (pronounced Sony) for a Graphic Designer position. The way the position was described in the ad sounded less like graphic design and more like layout and production design with some graphic work, but that's not important. It's not exactly my field, but I have some experience with that sort of thing, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to fake what I don't know.

Anyway, I was at a playground chasing Nate around (while getting the distinct impression that the mothers on the playground did not like the look of me showing up where they take their little boys and girls to play), and I got this call from a guy at this place who said he thought my resume met the necessary qualifications. I said great. He asked me what my salary range was, I low-balled, and regretted it after the fact, then he told me to expect a phone call from HR later in the day or on Thursday. I don't know why, but from the moment I hung up the phone, I felt that something was not right. I was optimistic, but dubious.

Anyway, I didn't hear from them on Wednesday. By mid-day Thursday, Sarah was asking me to call the guy back. I was hesitant not simply because I was growing more skeptical but because I never got the name of the guy who called, and I didn't want to call the company's receptionist and say 'I don't know who I spoke with, but...' Sarah was frustrated. She went on Craigslist and found this:

Now, I was not at all surprised to find this. Like I said, I was dubious, and there aside from the spammers, Craigslist is filled with all sorts of predatory types looking to steal work from naive craftspeople (generally writers, illustrators, or graphic designers), but I was disappointed. I do need a job, and this was the first thing that felt like it could lead to something, and this listing seems to confirm some of my worst apprehensions about the job.

Notice that I say some of my worst fears. That was Thursday. For the rest of my fears to be confirmed, I would have to wait until Friday.

Anyway, today's Friday. I waited until the afternoon to call number who had called me. As I had feared, the line was answered by a receptionist. I didn't catch the name of the company, but it was Sahni Enterprises. I fumbled through my explanation of how somebody had called me about my resume, and how I was supposed to receive a callback that never came. She was polite enough, and told me to hold while she found somebody to help me out.

I was put on hold.

A little background. The company, as it was described to me on the phone and as it is described on its website is a wholesaler for merchandise produced in Asia. The job was going to involve doing layout work for catalogues and fliers. The website describes the merchandise into a number of benign categories (furniture, gifts, etc.). Imagine my surprise then, when the voice during the company's hold message described what great deals I could get on vibrators and strap-ons.

Yes, this mild-mannered wholesaler apparently also specializes (while keeping it on the down low) on the inexpensive sex toys and adult entertainment. I can only attribute my hanging up to something akin to a gag reflex. Something out of childhood. It was like I didn't want to get in trouble for having listened to the hold message. Now I regret it. Not because I want to work there. But because I want to get to the bottom of this.

I hope they call back.

In the Spirit of Shoutouts: Art From Anxious Times

2008-10-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

Jean-Pierre Roy, "The Defeat of Anthropy"

October 1 - 27, 2008
Art From Anxious Times
A group exhibition that examines how contemporary artists are expressing or reflecting concern about terrorism, war, environmental degradation and globalization. Artists include: Maya Lin, Jean-Pierre Roy, David Opdyke, Joan Fontcuberta, Dozier Bell, Robert Selwyn and others.

The opening was last night. Being in Atlanta, I will not be able to see the show. JP Roy is a good friend of mine, and assuming he's not the only person who will read this blog, I encourage everybody who can to go up to 59th St and check it out. It's a show about big things that are hard to effectively address in art. Still, it's a good roster, and I imagine it's a pretty solid show.

Here's his website: http://www.jean-pierreroy.com/

On a Related Topic: Whose side is Matt Drudge on?

2008-10-03T11:29:00.001-07:00

Isn't there a more flattering picture of Sarah Palin from last night? I mean, Drudge has clearly decided to return to his Republican boosting comfort zone, but geez, this is a really odd choice. No?

The One Where I Positively Quote George W. Bush!

2008-10-03T09:31:00.001-07:00

I don't know how many people tuned in last night to the debate expecting Sarah Palin to run off stage in tears. The media definitely played that up as a halfway plausible outcome. They're hardly disinterested parties when it comes to stoking expectations of a catastrophic moment of good television, so the lead up was full of references to Biden's historical tendency to say apolitical things and Palin's recent tendency to say incomprehensible things.

Surprise! Neither performed down to their worst! Republicans and Democrats alike breathe a sigh of relief. Independents, one supposes, continue their steady pace toward Obama.

Sorry fellas, this wasn't a tie. No. It wasn't even close. Anybody who claims that Joe Biden did anything other than destroy Sarah Palin last night betrays either their bias toward the Republican ticket or a perception that one Texas Governor once called the 'soft bigotry of low expectations.'

Sarah Palin did not run off stage in disgrace. Did you really think she was going to do that? What she did do--from the beginning--was make a point to not answer any question she didn't feel like answering. That's nothing new among politicians. People always say don't answer the question you get; answer the one you wish you had gotten.

A cynical strategy to be sure, but one that has worked time and again. Not last night, though. It seems to me that in order for the evasion to work, it has to be stealth-like evasion. In other words, you have to at least give the appearance that you're answering the question (RE: That ridiculous episode in the primary where Edwards claimed his biggest weakness was that he has too much of an emotional connection with the people who are struggling, and Clinton said she was impatient to see change happen. Meanwhile, Obama, who went first, said he's not always the most organized), you have to at least pay lip service to the question you've been given. What Palin did last night, and did early was assume this position that she's a maverick, and as a maverick, she was not going to "answer the questions the way [Joe Biden] or the moderator want to hear, but I 'm going to talk to the American people."

WTF? If that's not the most ridiculous piece of debating tactics I've ever heard, I don't know what is. Take a defensive position, as if you're being attacked when you're not, and then say you simply are not going to accept the most basic premise of any debate, which is to address issues specifically on the table. I feel like John McCain and Hillary Clinton when they lecture Obama on striking targets in Pakistan. It's a position both of them clearly share but, according to them, you just don't say that out loud. I want to say, Sarah--can I call you Sarah?--Sarah, I know you're not going to answer the questions, but that's not the sort of thing you say out loud. You don't announce that you're not going to answer the questions. You show up, and when asked a question, you say whatever the hell you want. BUT YOU DON'T SAY THAT!

Anyhow, I thought that was an obscene blunder. To me, it seemed like her mistaking different aspects of her coaching. For me, it brought forth images of her what her debate prep must have been like. If she became too bogged down with a question, I see her handlers (be it Joe Lieberman or whoever), reminding her, 'Sarah, you don't have to answer the questions the way they want you to.'

But not answering the questions was the strategy. The tactics for implementing that strategy were a series of talking points that she returned to again and again throughout the debate. But when she turned her evasiveness into a talking point, she mistook strategy for tactics, undermined both.

On the flip side, Biden was masterful. I've seen criticism of his wonkishness, but that's exactly what he needed to do. His job was the opposite of Obama's from last week. Obama's job was to show he not only belonged on the stage, but that he could go toe-to-toe with John McCain. He did that.

Biden's job last night was to project the contrast between the two tickets, to never portray Palin as being explicitly unready, but to be so dominant on issues and facts, that anybody who could be persuaded would see that she clearly was out of her league. I believe he did that.

I don't believe this is the beginning of the end for the McCain campaign. I think it's the middle of the end. It seems like people are wanting less and less to vote for John McCain, and I tend to think that is a bad place to be a month before an election (actually, the election is underway in states all over the country). He's got very few options left in turning this thing around.

For all that was made about the votes lost to the 2004 Swift Boat campaign, Kerry probably lost more votes in key states because Karl Rove got homosexuality on the ballot. Today, not only is that issue far less polarizing, it isn't going to be on the ballot on any swing-able state. There are no major swing issues out there. Make no mistake, if Obama loses, it will be racial prejudice that kills his campaign. But I think racial prejudice is the reason it's as close as it is. If Obama can make people feel comfortable with him, as he seems to be doing of late, I think he'll win over 300 electoral votes.

Day 2

2008-09-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

I'm still not sure what this blog is supposed to be. So far, I've made a self-centered introduction, a cryptically pro-life post, and a rambling analysis of the debate. As the week goes, hopefully I'll be able to find some better idea of what I'm doing here.

The debate

2008-09-27T10:31:00.001-07:00

I don't know how much needs to be said about the debate last night. There's certainly not much left to add to the endless chattering it's already caused online and in the media. My initial take was that neither candidate performed especially poorly. I thought supporters on either side would be able to successfully spin a victory out of the night.

I thought McCain came off as unnecessarily condescending and overtly contemptuous (as evidenced by his unwillingness or inability to ever look Obama in the eye or conform to a basic format of the debate and address him directly). I understand that part of the strategy is to paint Obama as both naive and unready, but the tactic of repeatedly suggesting Obama doesn't understand basic concepts (e.g. the difference between 'tactic' and 'strategy') made McCain seem sort of petty. The fact that Obama more than stood his ground when discussing foreign policy issues made McCain's condescending tone seem not only inappropriate, but detached from reality. As for McCain's body language, it was what kept me interested through what was something of a unexciting debate. From the first handshake (pictured above) to the initial proddings by Jim Lehrer to the closing handshake, John McCain didn't look at Barack Obama a single time. This was odd, because the format of the debate was supposed to be divided so that each candidate would have two minutes to respond to a topic and then five minutes for a direct back and forth. Initially, Obama didn't address McCain either, but after prompting from the moderator, during the five minute sections Obama repeatedly spoke directly to McCain, calling him John. But McCain didn't only refuse to speak to Obama, he refused to look at him. Obviously nobody knows why for sure. I assign contempt. Some people say John McCain, a former fighter pilot and POW, was literally afraid to look a junior senator in the eye. I guess that's not implausible. Still, I think contempt is a far more likely explanation. After all, John McCain didn't even want to be there last night. He wanted to postpone the whole thing. His campaign has had a terrible last couple of weeks culminating in a catastrophic Sarah Palin interview and a trip to Washington that few now see as anything other than a failed political stunt. Victory seems like a distant hope. These days, John McCain is simply trying to avoid public humiliation. He's anxious. He's pissed. And he blames Barack Obama for every self-inflicted wound that's befallen his campaign. In short, it's like the primary all over again. Whatever prevented him from looking his opponent in the eye, it clearly wasn't part of the plan, and will likely be something the campaign has him work on for the remaining debates.

At any rate, Obama was what he always is: cool headed, smart, deferential, mature, strong, and polite. He was also in greater command of his cadence than in some of his weaker debate performances. He received a lot of initial criticism for being too agreeable. Too willing to grant points to his opponent. This is, of course, utter horse shit. It's like these em effers haven't learned a thing from the last 22 months. Who put together the team and strategy that badly embarrassed the Clintons? I know it wasn't Chris Matthews.

Anyway, a day later, my unbiased perspective is that Obama pretty clearly showed himself to be the more presidential of the two and, that being the case, I'd say it's fairly difficult to consider him anything other than the winner. Apparently, initial polling and focus groups of undecideds seem to support that. I'm not sure if anybody's going to remember this debate next month, though. Sadly, it may depend on the SNL cold opening.

The fourth dimension

2008-09-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

Last week was Sarah's birthday. We went to a '4-d' ultrasound center. Basic ultrasound technology is pretty incredible. If you've never had children, or if you're children were born in the 1980s or before, then you probably don't have an appreciation for how incredible it is. Most people come out of the ultrasound session with a handful of sonograms which, while wonderful, pale in comparison to the full motion images they saw during the session itself, so if you've never been in the room during the procedure, then all you've seen are filtered fragments of the experience itself.

As somebody who believes there are a number of sad realities in our civilization that make abortion rights a terrible necessity, I also believe that ultrasound technology has in many ways revealed many of the traditional arguments in favor of 'choice' to be petty, amoral, and wrongheaded. There are a number of rational arguments in favor of the necessity of abortion rights; respectfully, 'choice' is not one of them.

My belly button.

2008-09-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

A new blog. The world has been waiting, and here I am bringing it. I've recently moved in with my parents after all, so it seemed only right to turn to the Internet. When I was in New York and unable to make art for lack of motivation and time (split between work and family) I thought I might begin an art blog. It never materialized because, as it turns out, I don't really like art all that much, and the only reason to write about art is to promote what you like.

At any rate, I am not in New York anymore. I am in Georgia. I hear rumors about the Atlanta art scene, but I don't live in Atlanta. I live in Woodstock, a hilly suburb about a half an hour to the northwest of the city. Plus, I'm more than a little dubious about any art scene, let alone a tiny one I would have to waste so much gas to find. I don't even know why I'd consider going anymore. For me, art galleries were more about motivation; about showing me how far off everybody else was from getting it right; about all of the stupid misconceptions artists have about what art is supposed to be about; and, fundamentally, about reminding me that I needed to be in the studio. Today, though, it seems fairly clear that I'm not going to be much of an artist.

It may or may not be for a lack of trying. I'm easily distracted. I haven't always tried my best. In fact, it's been a pretty long time since I tried at all. At some point, you have to reassess, and if it's over it's over. That's what I've spent the last couple of months doing. Here's what I've come up with:

A husband. A father of a two year old (with another on the way). I'm unemployed during what could very well be one of the bleakest moments in the history of the American economy. I'm living with my parents in a state where I have virtually no connections beyond family. I haven't worked in a studio for six months (and even then it was fairly sporadic); I haven't really thought about painting for almost that long. There are things I need. I need to find a paycheck. My family needs a home of our own.

I do need an outlet, but it's not going to be painting. That ship has sailed. It may never return. If not, my only regret at the moment is in the years wasted. I'm 29 years old. I'm fairly intelligent, but my education and work experience is such that I am about as employable as the average 24 year old with a BA in philosophy. I could have been a lot smarter about how I did a lot of things. But I went to art school. It's not difficult for me to admit my failure as an artist. That being said, it's hard to come to grips with how my decision to commit to that failed path led to my abject failure as a provider for my family.

At any rate, a period of my life is over. A new period begins. I've begun this blog as part of that. I don't know what shape it will take. Or if I will have the diligence to keep it going. But like I've said, I need an outlet. Something to act as a catalyst that will keep my mind focused while I get my life moving again. That's the idea anyway.

Forgive me my naval gazing.