Signs along the way…📷
2022-10-10
What caught my attention…
In Times Square and Sunset Strip, “American Gurl” Subverts Femininity… as i have stated before, i have an interest in all things feminine…
In contrast to a “singular idea,” the artists in “American Gurl” offer myriad depictions of women in America. Ayanna Dozier’s “Softer” (2020) critiques the societal demands that African-American women “soften” themselves, specifically through their appearance. Christine Yuan’s “Hoyeon as the International Woman of Mystery” (2022), originally commissioned by Vogue, casts Korean model and _Squid Game_ star Jung Ho-Yeon as an Irma Vep-style vamp who remakes herself for international (read American) consumption. “iGurl” (2022) by Sarah Nicole François is a disturbing digital vision of endless surgical enhancements in search of bodily perfection. “Can we keep up with the aesthetic pushed onto us?” questions Ahmed. “Can these surgeries actually work on us as fast as we can change ourselves online?” Other participating artists include Christelle de Castro, Kasey Elise Walker, Kitty Ca$h, and Leila Jarman.
Art Writing as an Extension of Life
As an arts writer, I am always envious when I find that someone has articulated not only art theory itself, but the way it is a natural part of life for someone who takes joy in the consideration of art. Chris Kraus did this brilliantly in _I Love Dick_(Semiotext(e), 1997); Morgan Meis does this with equal (and completely different) brilliance in _The Drunken Silenus_ (Slant Books, 2020). Randall manages this feat, as the title suggests, by contemplating 12 female artists who are important to her life.
With analysis that is either deeply intuitive or directly informed by personal experience or encounters, Randall presents the life of an artist as both subject and narrator. _Artists in My Life_dissolves the fourth wall between artist, art object, and viewer, offering a welcome approach to arts writing as an extension of how artists live.
The US Could Get Its First National LGBTQ+ History Museum… i only wonder how it will get through congress with so much anit-LGBTQ+ sentiment among conservatives…
A national museum dedicated to American LGBTQ+ history and culture could be coming to Washington, DC. United States Representative Mark Pocan introduced a bill on September 29 to establish the National Museum of American LGBTQ+ History and Culture, potentially as part of Washington, DC’s Smithsonian Institutions. Pocan is a Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.
The bill establishes an eight-person committee to conduct research into the potential museum, including how much its collection would cost and whether it should in fact be part of the Smithsonian. If the bill passes, the committee will have 18 months before presenting their findings to the House of Representatives, who will then vote on a second bill to establish the museum.
Nevada GOP Secretary of State Candidate Promises to Make Trump President in 2024
At a rally for Nevada Republican candidates on Saturday, Republican nominee for secretary of state Jim Marchant promised that he and his fellow GOP nominees, if elected next month, would reinstall Donald Trump in the White House in 2024.
“We’re gonna fix the whole country and President Trump is gonna be president again,” Marchant promised as Trump stood beside him.
Judge Blocks State Abortion Ban As Attempt “To Completely Eliminate The Rights of Ohio Women”…
… who thought Gilead couldn’t happen…
According to affidavits submitted in the lawsuit, two additional minors who suffered sexual assault also had to leave the state for abortions. Cancer patients and other women with severe complications were also denied abortions. The Ohio Capital Journal summarized the evidence last month:
- The descriptions include those of three women who threatened suicide. They also include two women with cancer who couldn’t terminate their pregnancies and also couldn’t get cancer treatment while they were pregnant.
- Another three examples were of women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they couldn’t get abortions in Ohio.
- And in three cases, debilitating vomiting was caused by pregnancy—so bad in one case that a woman couldn’t get off the clinic floor. But neither could these women get abortions in Ohio, the affidavits said.
In 2020, the National Constitution Center sponsored a constitution-drafting project in which it named three groups to produce their own revised versions of the Constitution: a conservative team, a libertarian team, and a progressive one—each composed of prominent academics and other experts on constitutional law issues. The exercised revealed some important points of agreement between the three teams (even though they also predictably differed on other issues). This year, NCC reconvened the three teams and asked them to come up with a list of constitutional amendments they could jointly agree on.
… and these were…
- Term limits for Supreme Court justices
- Making impeachment easier (would actually make starting impeachment harder, convicting easier)
- Legislative Veto (wherein the legislature could veto executive action)
- Eliminating the requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen
- Making the Constitution easier to amend in the future
… most make sense on the face of it… the rest make sense upon reading the explanations…
2022-10-09
Letters from an American… the appalling history of racism and anti-labor sentiments…
… from a very long time conservatives have fanned the flames of fear of socialism and black and brown men… we have lived in a society of patriarchal white supremacy for the entire history of the country… we have reached a critical point in which minorities will soon overtake the patriarchal white majority in numbers… we are experiencing and existential reaction to that fact…
Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.
Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the _Boston Evening Transcript_ charged. The _Philadelphia Inquirer_ insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. _Scribner’s Monthly_warned in italics: “_the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society_.”
Stephen King on What Authentic Maine Cuisine Means to Him
- Castle Rock Kitchen: Wicked Good Recipes from the World of Stephen King.
- Also of interest, Outlander Kitchen: To the New World and Back Again
When people think of Maine cuisine, they tend to think first of clams and lobster. Never cared for clams myself; they always looked to me like snot in a shell. Lobster is tasty, but I ate too much of it as a kid. My mom was on a perpetual budget, and she’d buy day-old (or two-day-old) lobster at the IGA in Lisbon Falls. Some of those bugs were still moving, but not that many. She made lobster rolls, and there was often a pot of lobster stew simmering on the stove. She’d hide it in the oven if someone came visiting because, in those days, lobster stew was “poor food.”
Eric Adams declares state of emergency amid migrant arrivals… mayor of NYC Eric Adams declaring a state of emergency over the influx of asylum seekers being bused up from border states… pleads with congress and state lawmakers to act and provide assistance… is the political theater of bussing asylum seekers north working?…
How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany #nazism #fascism… this article about Hitler’s rise to power and how it compares to the current political situation in the U.S. is a must read…
… the big lie…
During its first four years, Weimar was under constant attack—above all, from the Big Lie that the republic was a totally illegitimate government because it owed its genesis to a “stab in the back” delivered on the home front.
… exploitation of the masses through the big lie…
Not just Hitler and the Nazis but the entire German right latched on to this message and promoted it. Two factors distinguished Hitler from the rest of the German right. First was his self-awareness and cool calculation in deploying the Big Lie. In _Mein Kampf_, published in 1925–26, he explained that “the masses _…_more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one,” and that even a propaganda claim “so impudent that people thought it insane” could ultimately prevail.
… failure to impose the appropriate consequences…
Most important, what both conservative politicians and a conservative judiciary in Bavaria failed to do was rid themselves of this dangerous agitator by expelling him from the country as an unwelcome convicted felon of Austrian citizenship. Instead, they—and eventually the old-guard establishment right throughout Germany—enabled his improbable political comeback.
… doesn’t that sound familiar?…
Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch was that he needed to pursue revolution through “the politics of legality” rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy.
… hmmmm…
By January 1933, Germany’s old guard saw that they were not remotely competitive in any election without the Nazi base, and opted to have Hitler legally appointed chancellor (or first minister). But because non-Nazi conservatives still held eight of 11 cabinet positions in the new government, they persisted in their delusion that they could control him—or, as some might say in today’s parlance, that they could preserve the “guardrails” that would contain him.
… double hmmmm…
Within five months, Germany was a one-party dictatorship and a police state.
… what author Christopher R. Browning goes on to say is that what the U.S. is most likely heading for, if the effort succeeds, is a managed democracy, an illiberal democracy ala Viktor Orban… he points to built-in vlunerabilities of the American political system… the Electoral College and the Senate both favor parts of the country where conservatives are strong… sophisticated gerrymandering, ruthlessly deployed, has given Republicans advantage in key states… and Trump plots revenge…
… and then there is this…
The GOP has now embraced an accelerated strategy of legal revolution to control the outcome of future elections. This fall, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear _Moore v. Harper_, which concerns the power of the judicial branch in North Carolina to protect the state constitution’s guarantee of free and fair elections by overturning a gerrymandered congressional redistricting map. The state-court ruling was stayed so that the Supreme Court could hear arguments and rule on the claims of the “independent state legislature doctrine,” according to which the elections and electors clauses of the Constitution vest sole authority in state legislatures to determine the manner in which federal elections are held and presidential electors selected (absent any specific mandate of federal law passed by Congress). A ruling in favor of the independent state legislature doctrine would leave gerrymandered state legislatures in total control over federal elections, unchecked by any other branch of state government.
Just as von Hindenburg and the rest of Weimar’s old guard chose complicity with Hitler’s Big Lie, dooming Germany’s interwar democracy, today’s Republican faithful are going along with Trump’s Big Lie, which casts Biden’s Democrats as the November criminals of 2020 and Trump himself as the patriotic defender of American freedom. America is not Weimar, Trump is not Hitler, Republicans are not Nazis, yet the fate of this republic hangs in the balance.
I will be awash with chickens soon… I needed some inspiration…
Finally settling into a good written journal habit. My tools… moleskin journal book… palomino blackwing 602 pencil… blackwing pencil sharpener… blackwing pencil cap…
Long corridor…
Streetscape…
Jack Davidson’s Alchemical Photographic Etchings
“I’ve never been a darkroom kid,” says British photographer Jack Davison. “I tried, [but] it just didn’t appeal to me.” With a new solo exhibition, Photographic Etchings, opening in north London’s Cob Gallery, Davison is instead reflecting on the tactile wonders and alchemical magic of photogravure, a labour-intensive, high-cost alternative to the darkroom that lies at the heart of this exhibition.
Jack Davison, Untitled (JD-08), 2022© the artist, courtesy of Cob Gallery
… what is it about snarling or perhaps just snapping or perhaps just skulking in a menacing way?… and depicted in a shadowy, high contrast way… see Daido Moriyama’s stray dog…
Somaya Critchlow, the Artist Reconfiguring the Black Female Nude
12 of Critchlow’s new paintings and drawings are now on display at Maximillian William gallery in London, in an exhibition called Afternoon’s Darkness. A sense of the macabre lingers across these new works, in which Black women are depicted revelling in their solitude – nude, semi-nude or in costume – backdropped by dimly-lit, domestic interiors.
Count Me Out, 2022© Somaya Critchlow. Image courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photography: Prudence Cuming Associates.
… increasingly, women artists are portraying women in ways that do invite the male gaze… the male gaze is such a convoluted gaze… is it appropriate or not in this “hashtag me too” era?… at the end of the day, we feel what we feel when we look at images of beautiful women partially or fully undressed… it’s what we do with those feelings that matters… do we treat such images as gateway invitations to the abuse of womanhood or do we simply appreciate the beauty of the female body?… have we matured as a culture?… patriarchy is alive and well… there are risks to trying to break through to a new attitude…
Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community
This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship.
… i have all but abandoned FB and Instagram, using the former to check in with “friends” now and again and the latter to post an image here and there… i never did have much use of twitter… these days i can be found on Vero (@smbk) and Micro.blog (@mbkriegh)…
“Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend… to work miracles.” Henry Miller
Disgruntled American Tourist Smashes Roman Busts at the Vatican
An American man visiting the Vatican threw two Ancient Roman busts to the ground in a fit of rage after being informed that he could not see the Pope, Italian newspapers report.
… ok, the headline, “Disgruntled American”?… click bait really… when i first read it, it seemed unfortunately natural to think of any American as being an angry child…
The man who vandalized the sculptures, aged 65 and apparently “psychologically distressed,” seemed to have been visiting the Vatican alone and was turned over to Italian authorities the same day. He received an aggravated property damage charge and was subsequently released.
… and then i read the bit about “psychologically distressed” and wondered why not this headline… “Psychologically Distressed Tourist Smashes Roman Busts at the Vatican”?… then we would discover the tourist was American… which fact is more important?… “American” if you think or want people to think all Americans are childish rage-holics, and “psychologically distressed” if we are talking about the general propensity in humanity for there to be people not in their right mind…
Find My Friends… an app that tells you where your friends are at any given moment in time?… beyond the obvious serendipitous being in close by places at the same time… meet up!… there are the also obvious ways this might not be a good idea…
I feel so unispired. Inspiration. Can I have some of yours?
… my wife is a huge fan of David Bowie, me, not so much, but i love Nick Cave!… and i love his Red Hand Files in which he answers questions sent to him by his fans… that he seems to have his head on really straight helps too…
In my experience, inspiration is not something that finds you, or offers itself to you, nor for that matter is faith. Inspiration and faith are similar in so far as they both ask something of us. They each require real and constant practical application. For me, inspiration comes only when I practice certain things regularly and rigorously. I must commit fully to the task in hand, sit down each day, pick up my pencil (actually it is a medium black or blue Bic Biro) and get to work. It is not exactly toiling down the coal mines, but it is labour enough, and I undertake it through the good times and the bad, through the dry periods and the periods of abundance, and I keep on going regardless of my successes or failures. Inspiration comes because I put in the work.
The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, witty, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre.
His answer to this question just blew me away. The man is amazing.
October 07, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022
Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.
“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.
… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…
Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer
… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…
- Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here
- How long until I love it? Probably 16 hours after you first put it on, as one application promises to last that long
- How planet-/people-friendly is it? As part of Dior Beauty’s Responsible Formulation Charter, the brand aims to source all ingredients in the most socially and environmentally responsible way possible
- How do I use it? Make sure your lips are primed and moisturised with a good balm, then add a slick of Rouge Dior Forever and leave to dry for three minutes
They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.
Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers
… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…
Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.
Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.
Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions
In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.
Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani
Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico
The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.
French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature
Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.
Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love
Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”
10-04-2022
… HCR this morning mostly about the mounting trouble for various actors on the far right and the challenge to democracy… the noose closing around 45’s neck and the violence he seeks to sponsor to distract and prevent… it is a race to see if he becomes president before he is jailed, in which case he would never be jailed… the Oath Keepers go on trial… Moore v Harper was heard by SCOTUS… the conservative judges are flirting with giving states absolute rights to determine elections… the so called “independent state legislature” doctrine is being determined… 45 has been definitively tied to withholding documents from the government by a witness… Herschel Walker continues to melt down…
In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”
… read with interest Zeba Blay’s review of Blonde… her main complaint is that it fetishize Monroe’s pain to no good purpose and that the movie was boring… H agreed with that assessment… i did not… i thought it effectively showed the appalling behavior of patriarchal males while not pandering to that behavior with highly erotic (to most people) scenes… to the extent that nudity and sex were in the film, and there was lots of both, it wasn’t very titillating, at least not to me… still, one needs to pay attention to women on the subject because they know things men will never know about being a woman in a patriarchal society…
… Sidelined No More: Reading List of Fiercely Political Women… so many books one could read… so little time… the article makes an extensive argument that women still are not taken seriously when they write about politics seriously and offers up a selection of books by women authors past and present…
Among the Washington Post’s columnists, who mostly cover politics, 57 are men and 26 are women. In the last two months, the New York Times’s opinion pages published 77 political analyses by men and only 29 by women. Half of those women-authored pieces had a male co-author.
Male domination of writing on politics in America is most extreme in the conservative press. In the National Review, 90% of the recent political analyses were by men, and the quarterly Claremont Review of Books—which prides itself on being the intellectual heart of the American right—has gone two and a half entire years without publishing a single feature essay written by a woman.
The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, a moral one. Readers are denied something by this exclusion. Sometimes women have an especially intimate way of writing about politics that’s both close-up—examining the psychology and the erotics of power—and carries an interesting objectivity and distance, thanks, perhaps, to their own history of being distanced from the political sphere.
… relative to HCR’s post above is J. Michael Luttig’s piece in The Atlantic arguing that the “Independent State Legislature” theory is bunk…
If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.
That as many as six justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with the independent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling. There is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.
The state supreme court’s decision under the North Carolina constitution is conclusive under that constitution, and it is only reviewable by the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States thereafter for a determination of whether that decision violates the federal Constitution.
All of which goes to confirm that the Constitution neither contemplates nor permits federal constitutional commandeering of the states’ constitutions and their judicial processes. Rather, it contemplates and provides only for federal judicial review of the state supreme courts’ state constitutional decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court for consistency with the United States Constitution.
… we will know next summer how bad the current iteration of SCOTUS is… there is, unfortunately, reason to be concerned…
Beware the cloven hooved beast…
From yesterday’s walk…
Madonna and child.
Gay pride decorations on Block Island, RI, USA.
Shadow self with rock halo…
My Niece Shaina… if you live near or visit the Hudson Valley find your way to her restaurant… you won’t regret!
Clouds illusions…
A quick dinner, part recipe, part improvised: jalapeño sausage, fennel bulb and apple. The recipe called for sweet Italian sausage, fennel and orange. I rather liked my version.
🍸 olive, up close and personal.
Waiting to board the ferry. Two weeks on Block Island here we come!
Morning sun and shadow…
Good morning!
I am in awe of Nick Cave…
We reach out and find each other in the common darkness. By doing so we triumph over our collective and personal loss. Through kindness we slant, shockingly and miraculously, toward meaning.
“Sacred” geometry in the wild…
