These posts are either "jump pages" for my weblog or posts-in-process that will eventually appear there. For what it's worth, here's an archive of these random bits. The picture to the left is by a famous comic book artist.
View current page
...more recent posts
Print Legitimizes.
NEW YORK TIMES: ART IN REVIEW
Published: August 6, 2004
'The Infinite Fill Group Show'
Foxy Production
547 West 27th Street, Chelsea
Through Aug. 20
How many different ways can a work of art combine black, white and repetition? An answer is essayed by "The Infinite Fill Group Show," a densely installed display of overlapping patterns, drawings, collages, paintings, textiles, photographs, prints and videos by more than 50 artists. With not a speck of color in sight, the show resembles a photo-negative of the floor-to-ceiling, color-saturated conventions of the so-called "bedroom shows," those showcases for collaboratively minded young artists that reached an apotheosis of sorts in Dearraindrop's extravaganza at Deitch Projects in SoHo, which closes tomorrow.
"Infinite Fill" was organized by the artists and brothers Cory and Jamie Arcangel on a casually structured open-call, word-of-mouth basis that included quite a bit of word of mouth. Give or take a few off-the-charts proposals, everything submitted was accepted, including beautiful Styrofoam prints by art students from Van Arsdale High School.
The show's entrance requirements were met in various ways. The collective MTAA contributed a DVD loop of Phil Hartman playing the talk-show host Phil Donahue, endlessly shaking his head in a two-second loop from some long-ago "Saturday Night Live" segment. Jillian Mcdonald's video tape "Billy Bob Tattoo" shows her relettering the movie star's name, in ink on her knee, daily from June 1 to June 30.
The organizers' mother, Maureen Arcangel, contributed one of her painted-pattern linoleum floor-coverings, while Andrew M. K. Warren supplied color photographs of his feet, while skate-boarding in black-and-white checked Vans sneakers. Elyse Allen's "Tooth wug" is a gnarled little tapestry involving knit pile, leather, fur and nail heads in the shape of a molar.
Sabrina Gschwandtner has contributed various found objects, including a pillowcase and a coffeemaker. Perhaps the show's most graphic moment comes from Joy Garnett's "Death Penalty in Black and White," which tabulates the racial imbalance between federal prosecutors and prisoners on death row. I also recommend Justin Samson's collage, Tyson Reeder's rendition of customized sneakers, the line drawings on paper and buttons by Noah Lyon and the cartoonish, woodblocklike ink drawings by Frankie Martin.
The show is intended as a homage to Mac Paint, an early computer application (released in 1984) that enabled the user to click and drag a range of black-and-white patterns into images of any kind. Its effects are conjured up in a collage by Katherine Grayson and "While We Slept," a rather too-relevant video of a city being bombed, by Michael Bell-Smith. Paper Rad and Orit Ben-Shitrit have used the original program to make what constitute, at least in part, vintage prints.
ROBERTA SMITH
back to weblog
The Review of Reviews
New York Times Editorial
August 3, 2004
The beginning of the end came last February, when anonymous book reviews on Amazon.com's Canadian site were posted with reviewers' real names. For some, it was an embarrassing unmasking. Several authors had raved about their own books. A number of reviewers had tried to skew the Amazon system, supporting friends or attacking enemies with anonymous or pseudonymous reviews. What kept this from being merely laughable is the scale of Amazon's business and the role customers' reviews play in its social and financial economy. Like eBay, Amazon.com is a community, and trust is one of its most important commodities. Just visit Amazon's discussion boards if you don't believe it.
That's why Amazon recently stopped accepting anonymous customer reviews, replacing them with a program called Real Names. Reviewers who use their own names will have a Real Name badge posted next to their reviews. (Pen Names are permitted, but they're less acceptable.) According to its Web site, Amazon believes that "a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher-quality content."
That is certainly possible. The problem is proving your identity. To get a Real Name, you must have a credit card on file or "a reasonable purchase history." What "reasonable" means is up to the company. If you use a credit card, your identity becomes synonymous with its number, which is not made public, of course. That may be a mordant comment on the state of modern identity, but, as some Amazon reviewers have noted, it's hardly an ironclad guarantee against reviewer fraud.
Real Names is as much about adding subtlety to Amazon's internal ranking system as it is about outing cheaters. In fact, there's something eerily recursive about the entire situation. Customers review Amazon's products. Customers also review other customers' reviews. Your "reputation" depends upon the reviews of your reviews, and your reviews get more weight with a "Real Name" badge, which prevents you from reviewing yourself. But in the discussion boards - which only true zealots see - reviewers often discuss reviews of their reviews. In the end, it's probably easier just to go to the library and browse.
back to weblog
Frank Rich: Beautiful minds and ugly truths
Frank Rich NYT
Friday, May 21, 2004
NEW YORK "But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer." - Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America," March 18, 2003.
She needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President George Bush about 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV interview - minutes before he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake," said Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke, the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news spread of the assassination of a widely admired post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the entrance to America's "safe" headquarters in Baghdad, the Green Zone.
Whatever you think of Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources - foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video - he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, once again, Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Bush, he described it as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere that it's no longer news.
Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."
Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded Iraqis in a holding pen near Samara in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: Why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?
The New York Times reported in March 2003 that Americans were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at CIA interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the U.S. Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.
Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high-school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."
The movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described "conservative Democrat" from Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, whose son, Sergeant Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Lipscomb, who "always hated" antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. She clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper.
Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending "the bible and books and candy," but not before writing of the president: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama." By this point, Moore's jokes have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So, pretty much, has Moore himself. He can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
A particularly unappetizing spectacle in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his hair. This is not the image we usually see of the deputy defense secretary, who has been ritualistically presented in the U.S. press as the most refined of intellectuals - a guy with, as Barbara Bush would have it, a beautiful mind.
No one would ever accuse Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.