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I love the temporary PATH and subway station in the World Trade Center crater; it's a very open, airy, unpretentious concrete and steel structure--just a functional placeholder till they put in something fancy.
I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I think of another oversized tower on that location, which is the current plan, to help the greedhead owner recoup his losses, I mean, to show America doesn't learn from its construction mistakes, I mean, to show that America stands tall and doesn't cave to terrorists.
New at the temporary transit hub: a glassed-in booth near the entrance to the E train where survivors go into a soundproof chamber and tell their stories into a digital recorder. I kid you not! It's run by some nonprofit called StoryCorps dot whatever and while it is attended by humans, it looks like a glass robo-confessional out of Logan's Run or Sleeper. On the exterior, near the entrance to the booth, are all the logos of donors, corporate and governmental, that are backing StoryCorps.
Your leaders don't want you suing Saudi Arabia when its boys run wild with planes in this country, but they'll give you a little glass box where you can talk about your troubles.
"Back to Fairfax Circle" [reposted above under a new name]. This song is on the perky, upbeat tip, as opposed to the grungy, mock-doom-laden end of my musical production. I gave it a geographical place name in homage to Gary Wilson.
Above is the final version of the piece I'm donating to the Dieu Donne Papermill, titled Zipatone Omniverse. (I posted earlier stages and talked about this project here, but have since taken down the previous draft versions.) Below is a detail showing some of the fill patterns and the layering of the paper:
More on the Rove nonsense and left's sudden touching concern for the agency that brought you assassination plots and poisoned cigars. If every employee of that outfit was fired tomorrow and had to work at Burger King, would the country be better off? Worse off? I'd say better. Either they're sitting around Langley writing memos to the file or they're helping to spread corporate misery abroad--deposing democratically elected governments to put in someone more to the liking of...your boss. The cold war is over, and Islamofascism is a defense contractor-friendly canard. Where was the C1A on 9/11? Leaving it to you and me to deal with it. We all want Bush gone, but getting involved in the daily minutiae of the Washington pencil-pusher class is just nauseating--and pretty much a parlor game unless you have subpoena power and suspects in the dock. A majority of Americans have come to understand that Bush is a creep because of the Iraq dead, Schiavo, Social Security, and people like Michael Moore getting the truth out to a mass audience--no one cares about the he said she said of the Plame case. One day we bloggers are all chewing like rodents on the Downing Street memos, then--whoops, they weren't the answer, Bush didn't resign, so now we're chewing on the meaning of "covert." If you want to do something, show Fahrenheit 9/11 to some middle class Republicans--make'em watch that footage of Bush zoning out in the school and Bush calling the new robber barons his "base."
Update: Let's end this post on a less angry and class-baiting note--and I decided "our new robber barons" was a more subtle turn of phrase than, um, what was there originally--by noting that it was written before Bush inevitably changed the subject from RovePlame to the new Supreme Court nominee. If past practice is a guide, this should give us all a break from the center-left's unpacking of State Dept. memos, which has been going on for the last week in a manner recalling the 101st Fighting Keyboarders' intrepid "kerning analysis," which as we all know, blew the lid off Rathergate.
Lord God, it would be great if the lefty bloggers would shut up about Rove and Plame, Rove and Plame. Either the prosecutor has something or he doesn't. All this Hardy Boys parsing of the evidence by people who don't know squat is reminiscent of the amateur sleuthing the right wing idiots did over the Rathergate memos. "Keeping up the blog heat" could also be "burning everyone out" on the topic when the prosecutor finally does show his cards, assuming he has anything. Also, Alexander Cockburn is right--this sudden lefty concern for the covert status of a C1A agent is ridiculous. When did that agency, toppler of world governments for oil and banana companies, become the good guys? The real issue should be, when is anyone going to talk seriously about impeaching Bush for lying us into an increasingly bloody war?
Followed by a "restitution tax" on corporations and upper-income earners who got breaks in the last four years to pay reparations to the destroyed countries.
Belaboring this, but what the hell. The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo just opened a big show called "Extreme Abstraction," which is short for "Extreme(ly Large) Abstraction (Show)," since the work isn't really extreme but consists mostly of blue chip practitioners both living and dead. What would a real "extreme abstraction" show consist of?
--Work in a visual language that is neither Renaissance perspective nor Modernist allover flatness nor Kraussian "expanded field" conceptualism but something wholly new and unrecognized. Which by definition means it would not be in the show.
--Abstract art outside the range of human perception, requiring special equipment to view or hear it.
--Art that is so volatile or fugitive that it decays by the show's end.
--Abstraction that results from extremes of human behavior, as in paintings made of blood during actual cult rituals, under the influence of hallucinogens, etc. See also John Nash's "paranoia rooms" in A Beautiful Mind.
--Conceptual art practices that recontectualize abstract things from the culture, such as mathematical formulae, circuit diagrams, or botanical microphotography, all of which are completely incomprehensible to the layman.
Any others?
Update, from the comments:
--Abstract art created while doing a righteous goofy-foot 360 counter-rotation backside double-fakey. (mark)
--Thousands and thousands of yards of saffron fabric hanging from orange goal posts... (bill)
"Nine Inch Bells" [mp3 removed]
Quoting myself from an earlier thread: "Chris, thanks for the comment on the recent visual work, and no, my musicmaking is still going strong. I just picked up a slew of new programs and am slowly learning them. If anything has to give here it's going to be the damn writing."