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From a Salon Premium piece today, arguing that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kennedy should recuse himself from the case on mandatory school drug testing:
Before the court was a school district's regulation requiring drug tests of students involved in any extracurricular activity. Although there was no reason to suspect that the plaintiff, Lindsay Earls, had ever used drugs, she was called out of choir and tested -- specifically, ordered to urinate under a teacher's supervision. Earls passed, but brought suit against what she believes was an invasion of privacy and an unconstitutional search.
"Most surprising," said the New York Times, "was Justice Kennedy's implied slur on the plaintiffs." The justice imagined a school district with a "drug testing school" and a "druggie school," and told the lawyer representing the Earls family that no parent would send a child to the druggie school "except maybe your client." This was remarkable in two ways. First, it was indeed a slur: Lindsay Earls had passed the drug test, and her cause was not drugs but the Fourth Amendment. Second, the very irrationality of Kennedy's remarks, coupled with his demeanor -- the Boston Globe described him as red with emotion as he launched his "bitter verbal attack" -- betrayed an uncontainable anger toward a litigant that is entirely absent from Supreme Court arguments on even the most heinous murder cases.
Evidently Kennedy's fixated on the perceived moral failings of high school students right now. According to a recent article on cnn.com, he was disappointed by the "lack of moral outrage" of some Muslim students following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. He also disliked hearing that other kids (presumably non-Muslim) thought the 9/11 attacks were payback for some very bad U.S. policies abroad. Therefore, he's created an American Bar Association-sponsored program, in partnership with First Lady Laura Bush (so much for separation of powers), to teach kids about "fundamental values and universal moral precepts." The program sends lawyers and judges to high schools to talk about "core democratic values" in light of the terrorist attacks.
Yet if there are high school students who can see the connection between 9/11 and US support of oppressive regimes abroad, thankfully, there will be high school students who can recognize a pompous, belligerent, propagandizing hypocrite when they see one. Should they should listen to a member of the 5-person Supreme Court majority that installed a president by judicial fiat on the subject of "democracy"? Should they take the advice of a man who insults kids--in a red, slobbering rage--when they actually stand up for their rights? Perhaps, when he comes to their schools, they'll stand up again and say that maybe their "problem" isn't so much a lack of moral values as disagreement with his.
New additions to my artwork archive have been added this week: several pieces from 2002 (from scans of polaroids--eventually I'll get slides made), and "Volume One" of my early, photorealistic work (and other images, ranging randomly from 1978-94). Also, my review of Ross Knight's 1999 solo show has been added to the writing archive.
Charles Stagg lives in a home he built for himself in the woods outside Vidor, Texas. A Klan stronghold near the Louisiana border, Vidor (pronounced "vy der") is also the ancestral home and namesake of the Hollywood film director King Vidor (pronounced "vee dor"), who filmed Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Like Howard Roark in that movie, Stagg has a vision and is willing to go it alone until it's recognized.
UPDATE: Below is a more recent photo of Charles Stagg in his studio (inside the dome). The photographer is John Fulbright. More information can be found in the comments to this post.
UPDATE 2: Another website is referenced in the comments with photos of the Stagg house. This (from the 3rd Stagg gallery on that site) is how I remember the studio looking 15 years ago. He has since painted many of the sculptures but I prefere them "raw" like this:
Anime Diary. Titles rented recently: The Wings of Honneamise, Video Girl Ai, Patlabor 1, more Blue Seed. Saw my first bloody nose (in Video Girl Ai), a "uniquely Japanese [symbol of] sexual frustration," according to Clements & McCarthy's Anime Encyclopedia (the book's example--to the right--is from Tales of Sintillation, 1990).
Techno Diary. Geogaddi, the new Boards of Canada CD, is good, but I actually prefer their four-track release from 2002, in a beautiful place out in the country, with its herky jerky rhythms and subtle allusions to David Koresh and Waco. The standout track from the new CD is "1969," with its Stephen Sondheim-like vocoder duet, ending on the repeated phrase "1969 in the sunshine." Meaning "1969 basking in the cathode rays cast by a dreary after-school special from the Canadian Film Board, waiting for the Big One to drop." Three late ('97-'98) CDs by Larry Heard, "house music's one true bona fide genius"--an assessment from Mixmag I'm inclined to agree with. Heard processes Sly Stone, Pat Metheny, and Happy the Man's Kit Watkins through house's 4/4 thump and arpeggiated loops, pulling the warmest imaginable sounds from those machines of his in Memphis. Heard rules! Finally getting around to early '90s Alec Empire, when he was still a My Bloody Valentine-meets-ambient groove machine. Limited Editions 1990-94 is highly recommended and still available. The first third of John Tejada's Backstock is a nice self-mix of his own tracks; gets a little dull and then perks up at the end. More consistently exciting is Roni Size's mix of recent Full Cycle tracks on Through the Eyes. Yes, I still like Drum and Bass. Some stuff bought blind off Forced Exposure: Electronic Cosmetics on Salo (a nice comp of recent, tuneful Berlin techno) and Monolight's Free Music, a bit more abstract but very listenable selection of three-synths-and-an-effects-deck chittering.
Below is the Artforum ad layout for my upcoming show with Gregor Passens in Munich. In the finished ad the artists' and gallery's names will be italicized, the dates will be changed to May 3 - June 14, 2002, and the type will be legible.
[ad removed for remodeling]
Mark Mellon's story "The Favor," an excerpt from his World War II novel-in-progress Hammer and Skull, appears in the e-zine Behold. We got a soiled glimpse of the Russian side of World War II in the movie Enemy at the Gates, a moral black hole where commanders shoot their own troops if they don't advance and everyone's spying on everyone. My favorite parts of Hammer and Skull are set in this human wasteland. Mellon learned Russian in the U. S. Army and he's done quite a bit of research to transport the reader convincingly to a time and place most of us know very little about. From popular culture we have a good sense of how the war played out in the West, but no Red Army equivalent of Hogan's Heroes.
It should be mentioned, sadly, that the novel is appealing not so much because it allows us to feel smug about ourselves vis a vis the former Soviet Union, but because it mirrors our own increasingly callous society in the era of Enron, a bought Congress, and endless proxy wars. How does a person armed only with an internal moral compass navigate this wilderness of sleaze and heartlessness? Answer: look to ordinary Russians; they've been living under such conditions for quite a while.
Jessica 12502, ink on paper, 45" X 34"
New "miscellaneous" pages have been added to this log (click here) and The Doris Piserchia Site (click here). They are weblog-style pages that serve as footnotes, or notes for future posts, on the respective sites. For example, if a New York Times article is discussed here, the relevant section can be found on the "miscellaneous" page, sparing the reader a link that would require signing in at the Times. On the Piserchia page, I've sampled some of the great writing on the author's work from other websites (because you never know when they'll disappear), as well as some posts from the Piserchia page at Yahoo! Clubs, which is now practically unusable since it's been rolled into Yahoo! Groups and saturated with banners and pop-ups. Also recently added to my writing archive is a piece on Drew Dominick's "psycho-garage-mechanic" show from 1996.