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So far, Atrios called it correctly when he predicted, on March 14, that "the horrible case in Fresno, where a man...allegedly slaughtered his 7 children, [will get] about 1/50th of the media coverage that the Andrea Yates case did." Andrea Yates, you will recall, had a history of depression and drowned her five kids; she's now doing prison time while her fundamentalist Christian husband has remarried. Alleged cult weirdo and woman-controller Marcus Wesson has been charged by the Fresno police with shooting his seven kids and two grandkids and stacking their bodies in the back of his house, which had ten coffins in it; he is believed to have fathered the grandkids by impregnating two of the now-deceased children. Sure enough, it looks like the latter is being treated as "local news" and we won't be hearing much more about it. Atrios doesn't spell out why he predicted what he did, so please allow me to state the obvious: Wesson is a man and has the right to sire as many children as he pleases and then destroy them at his whim, while Yates is a woman and has no greater duty than the sacred trust of child-rearing. The media knows this; everybody knows this. That monster, how could she? I'm getting all upset just thinking about her case again.
UPDATE: As Barry mentions in his comment, Wesson is black and Yates is white, which may also have something to do with the disparity in coverage. A Seventh Day Adventist, Wesson lived in a reasonably affluent neighborhood but no one ever really asked what he and all those women dressed in black were doing with the schoolbus parked in the driveway (transporting coffins, among other things). Control freak to the core, he allegedly murdered the children when he became convinced the authorities might take them away from him. Hardly any ingredients of a national story here.
UPDATE 2: The story has picked up unexpected juice with the revelation that the Fresno police may have been cooling their heels at Wesson's front door while Wesson went into the back of the house and shot the children. "Fresno's police chief acknowledged Wednesday that his department is looking into whether Marcus Wesson fatally shot nine of his children while police waited outside his house, despite frantic pleas from relatives to intervene." (CNN). The google count on "Marcus Wesson" jumped from 9000 to 11,000 since this morning.
UPDATE 3: The newspaper account of the Wesson arrest was rewritten several times after publication. More here.
From the NY Times today:
A defiant Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused Thursday to remove himself from a case involving his good friend, Vice President Dick Cheney, dismissing suggestions of a conflict of interest. In an unusual 21-page memorandum, he rejected a request by the Sierra Club. The environmental group said it was improper for Scalia to take a hunting trip with Cheney while the court was considering whether the White House must release information about private meetings of Cheney's energy task force. Scalia said the remote Louisiana hunting camp used for a duck hunting and fishing trip "was not an intimate setting." [...] For the first time, Scalia revealed details of his trip with Cheney. Scalia said he was the go-between to invite Cheney to hunt with a Scalia friend, Wallace Carline, who owns an oil rig services firm, Scalia wrote. Scalia and Cheney are friends from their days working in the Ford administration, Scalia noted. "I conveyed the invitation, with my own warm recommendation, in the spring of 2003 and received an acceptance," Scalia wrote. When the time came for the trip, Scalia and Cheney flew together, accompanied by one of Scalia's sons and a son-in-law, Scalia wrote.Got that? The hunting trip was OK because (1) Scalia and Cheney were chaperoned and (2) the trip was really about Cheney getting together for some male bonding with an oil industry tycoon, and Scalia just hooked the two up. These people are so deeply in bed they expect normal people to think rules of etiquette like "avoid the wet spot" means "never met the dude."
I'm finally getting around to scanning the ad that ran in Artforum for my Munich show with Gregor Passens in May 2002. It's pretty murky, but the source image originally came off the internet and it's been copied umpteen times. The guitarist is a semi-famous musician who played at the Aldrich Museum, where my sphere piece was installed, using the piece as an impromptu backdrop. It seemed reasonable to borrow his guitar-playin' bod for my ad, with his face eradicated to avoid "likeness rights" issues and as an homage to Boards of Canada. homeroom director Courtenay Smith is currently the curator at lothringer dreizehn, a Munich art space that is opening a new show this weekend, "Changing Rooms," featuring the work of Monica Kapfer, Aylin Langreuter, Martin Schmidt, and Tom Früchtl.
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, is a fascinating book and an enjoyable guilty read for antiwar types with a passing interest in things military (I'm describing myself here). Nevertheless it's flawed and also kind of sick, and its cult in the military should be questioned. Here's a quick, dashed-off criticism for anyone who hasn't read the book.
(1) The book envisions a society shaped by years of war against a relentless enemy from space. The government is coldly totalitarian and kids are watched for special aptitudes and recruited at like, age 6. Family members are pitted against each other in competition for coveted slots in the military.
(2) The military training passages are well-imagined and I can see where they'd be useful in educating troops in a total-war mindset. But they're kind of gratuitous in terms of the plot, since Ender ultimately saves the world not through bonding with his buddies but with his solitary videogame-playing skills. More than one critic pointed out that the book, which came out in the early '80s, flattered the adolescent reader who was spending a lot of time hanging out in arcades.
(3) Card, the author, is a practicing Mormon and, just like our President, thinks in terms of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, so a plot like this is not farfetched to him, but it's still an escapist fantasy, and to imagine we have enemies as implacable as the Buggers from outer space just plays into the neocon propaganda line.
(4) Gratuitous editorial: A strong, well-trained military is of course necessary when your country is threatened militarily. But otherwise, it's a dangerous thing to have because then you feel like you have to use it. Thus, you send it off periodically to keep it in trim conquering weaker countries (always in the service of humanitarian goals, of course).
(The above comments originally appeared on Jim's page, about a year ago, right after the Iraq invasion was launched and bombs were bursting in the air. I'm reprinting them here as a kind of tribute to a former co-worker who joined the Marines thinking he was going to be doing "communications" and is about to be shipped over to you-know-where.)
A few quick unrelated items: (1) dan at erase reports on a Squarepusher/Steve Reich/Aphex Twin-related live gig in the UK that sounds like a lot of fun. He's also been posting links to good online mixes, such as this
tech-house assortment [since removed--"Eucalyptus" and "Night Herbs" were the ones I recommended] and this 80s/00s electro jam. (2) The Doris Piserchia Website has been updated with a sample chapter from her 1981 novel Earth in Twilight, and a review of that novel reprinted from Nathan Shumate's website. (3) A friend lent me his Cowboy Bebop series DVDs, which are fairly mindblowing. In the .GIF at left, bounty hunter Spike is opening the Bebop airlock so he can push a refrigerator out into space. He left a lobster in there a year before and it mutated into a blue springy thing that escaped and bit all of his shipmates and put them in comas. More horrible stuff was breeding in the icebox, hence his need to space it. And his skin isn't really yellow-green except in a 16-color .GIF.UPDATE: The mixtapes mentioned above are by Sami Koivikko, from Finland, who makes tracks when he's not dj'ing. The "Night Herbs" mix is flawlessly beat-matched and contains a number of those angelic arrangements of 3 or 4 confectionary notes that probably have a more precise musical term but are what I like most about house tracks, especially of the minimal/tech variety. Producers such as Losoul, John Tejada, Paul Kalkbrenner and other favorites are included in the mix.
How cool is it that the people of Spain reacted to the terrorist attacks in Madrid by firing their right-wing government? And that the new government plans to bring the country's troops home? Let's do that here! Unfortunately we have to wait eight months before we can get rid of George Bush Jr., whose crappy leadership the Spanish have also implicitly rejected. Or maybe we don't--for the crime of lying us into war with the wrong country (and general all around corruption), how about impeaching the perpetrator? To get an idea of how bad things are over in Iraq--our tax dollars at work--please read Robert Fisk's one year recap. Here's the plan: send Bush back to the Midland Racquet Club, then pressure Kerry to end the occupation post haste. After paying reparations, we'll only be out a few hundred billion for our little adventure.
If you are a fan of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, here's bad news for you. Sit down, have a drink, please don't bite my head off when I tell you. OK, here goes: it's being made into a film written, directed, and starring Edward ("Fight Club") Norton as Lionel Essrog, the detective with Tourette's. Oh, yeah, and it's being "loosely adapted," according to Norton's website (which I'm not linking to) to be "set in the 1950s." If you're wondering why that's bad, I mean good, please read my preReview. And while you're there, check out all the new preReviewers: since the site was last plugged here, it got listed on memepool and a bunch of "cool site" indexes and its traffic went up into the stratosphere. It is now the Internet Phenomenon this page always said it was. Joe McKay, the editor, is tooling around Gotham in a Lincoln town car, smoking Te-Amo Toro Lights, and has taken to wearing a pinky ring.
I still haven't finished Lethem's "Great Book," Fortress of Solitude. The idea of revisiting 7th and 8th grade (and summer camp!) with him, even with adult hindsight, is just too grim. The last passage I read, describing a Brooklyn street party where he's the only white kid, rang false somehow, even though the book is based on his own childhood: it read more like pop culture research than something that actually happened to anyone. Let's pray he goes back to writing intellectually suspect fiction and stops believing his own hype about being the "poet of Brooklyn" or whatever.
A book you should read, though, is Takedown, by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century. Cowan is the undercover cop who singlehandedly broke open the Mob-run garbage-hauling cartel that cheated New York businesses for 50 years. Like many people, I believed the spin that it was District Attorney Morgenthau and the out of town corporate criminals at BFI who did the hit--the book is partly to set the record straight. Until Cowan infiltrated the Mafia, at the highest levels, pretending to be an executive with a DUMBO paper recycling company, every building in NY had to pay up to ten times market rates to have their trash hauled away. The book gives an excellent history of how those conditions came about, and is as gripping and amusing as a Sopranos episode in its retelling of Cowan's story. I laughed, I cried, I broke up with my goombah 'cause I couldn't put it down.
Chelsea NYC suddenly feels like a giant actor's workshop, not that that's bad. Wander around the 20s and you'll see performance videos as entertaining as movies and TV (no, really!) but several steps removed and looking askance at the conventions of the Industry: a kind of Deconstructo-Sundance. At Sonnabend Candice Breitz shows discontinuous loops of emotional scenes from chick flicks such as Pretty Baby, You've Got Mail, and...um, that's all I recognized, while at the same time lip-synching and pantomiming the actresses' moves. She's a good mimic, capturing everything from Jennifer Lopez's wooden blubbering to that subtly self-aware Commedia del'Arte eye-pop when Reese Witherspoon says "You're breaking up with me? I thought you were going to propose!" (Note to self: rent Legally Blonde sometime.) At Elizabeth Dee, Alex Bag shows the famous, weirdly affectless P4r1s H1lton s3x t4pe intercut with fake commercials, where Bag impersonates everyone from a bearded AOL websurfer to a graveyard zombie hawking maxipads to Private Jessica Lynch pitching Halliburton services from a teleprompter--badly. Political satire has gotten better since the dazed "you can't say that, this is wartime" days. Lastly, at Mary Boone, Barbara Kruger, the Don Rickles of the art world, casts obvious LA residents as talking heads abusing one another from across the room, on large screens corresponding to each head's position at some kind of eating table (restaurant, dining room, school cafeteria, breakfast nook). Artists, filmmakers, families, couples, students--everybody's pissed at each other in Babs' world. The dialogue is funny, though. Hey-oh.