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Tonight, Thursday, September 29, is the exhibition preview of original works created for Dieu Donné Papermill's 6th Annual Benefit. The artwork I made using their paper (uncharacteristically nice material for me, but I tore it up quite a bit in the printer) is depicted below, as well as a detail. The piece can also be viewed in a thumbnail index along with other donated works.
More info:
This year's benefit auction, entitled Shangri-La, brings together over 120 artists who have generously donated original works created on Dieu Donné Paper.
AUCTION PREVIEW NIGHT
Thursday, September 29, 2005, 5:30-7:30pm
The Gallery at Dieu Donné Papermill
433 Broome Street, New York City
DIEU DONNÉ PAPERMILL’S ANNUAL BENEFIT: SHANGRI-LA
Thursday, October 20, 2005, 6-11pm
Live & Silent Auctions, Cocktails, Dim Sum
The Grand Harmony Restaurant
98 Mott Street, New York City
(between Hester Street & Canal Street)
VIEW LIVE & SILENT AUCTION ARTWORK
September 15-October 14, 2005
The Gallery at Dieu Donné Papermill
433 Broome Street, New York City
"Be Three Dub" [mp3 removed]. Van Der Graaf Generator meets the Bee Gees.
Changing the subject slightly, there's a soundware package I've been eyeing called "Cult Sampler." That's really perverse--16-bit, 44.1 KHz recordings of old 8-bit material from the early '80s, played on sampling synths like the Fairlight, Synclavier, and Emu II. I'd be more interested in those sounds because they seemed unfamiliar and gritty in today's smoothed-over softsynth environment than for the hit of recognition associated with some '80s pop song. (Whoops, on second thought these ultra-nerdy reviews find Cult Sampler wanting--too stingy on the weird synth sounds in favor of bland orchestral samples, so I'll probably pass.)
Changing subjects again, I've been listening to demos of some of the software instruments I've been using and boy do they suck. No one makes anything weird, it all sounds like Tangerine Dream, played entirely on one synth. TD actually got better in the '90s, continuing to digress here, with Edgar Froese's son adding some clubland oomph to their sound. I was really surprised how good some of it was.
Can you believe it--our House Majority Leader for all these years has just been indicted! The former Houston bug exterminator Tom Delay, angered by the "gummint red tape" that hampered his business, rose to unbelievable heights of power in Washington as a Congressman. It has always amazed me how deferential the moneyed elite has been to this sick cracker. It's McCarthyism all over again--a bully everyone fears (the other is Bush). Here's hoping the slush-funds and redistricting scams Delay instigated will all come to light and the Thousand Year Republican Reich he, Norquist, Abramoff, and Bush were building will all start to come apart. Criminal scum--I mean, alleged criminal scum.
Jimmy Carter Did Not Wear a Sweater Because of Energy
"Dick Cheney carpooling downtown with Brownie? Rummy Rollerblading down the bike path to the Pentagon? Condi huddling by a Watergate fireplace in a gray cardigan?" That's catty Maureen Dowd on Bush's recent call for energy conservation. All fine, all fair, except for the reference to Jimmy Carter's cardigan. The following was posted here three years ago, and will continue to be reposted periodically until people stop repeating the myth that Carter wore a sweater because of energy:
One issue that came up [in an an earlier thread] is the popular myth that back in 1979, Jimmy Carter urged Americans to wear sweaters and turn down the thermostat to 68 degrees, an image trotted out by right-wing commentators to show the impotence and nerdiness of energy conservation (as opposed to the Cheney approach, which is to secure foreign oil supplies by force). The only problem with the Carter story is it isn't exactly true. In the "crisis of confidence speech," given at a time of gas lines and rationing, Carter urged Americans to turn down thermostats--perfectly sensible advice--but didn't bore us with a precise setting. He also didn't say anything about sweaters. Yes, he was wearing a sweater, as he had been doing since his Inauguration in '77. Admittedly dorky, the cardigan was meant to be a symbol of his laid-back Populism, after the Imperial excesses of the Nixon years. It had nothing to do with energy--that's pure Republican disinfo. Unfortunately it's become tenacious urban folklore, as a Google search of "carter sweater thermostat" shows.
A disgusted loved one in Texas sent this, which is making the rounds of email forwards down South with the caption "Why Texas Had Few Looters." Uh, I think Texas had few looters because it had Rita and not Katrina. These suburban wankers would last about two minutes in a real gunfight.
Nancy Smith has posted a selection of her photos of the Art@!)Work show on her site artloversnewyork. That's the group-show-in-a-cube-farm where I kept "office hours" over several weeks in May. The top shot is me drawing and "drinking the Koolaid" at the opening, looking happier than any man in a cubicle has a right to be. Several people pointed out that my Wacom tablet--discreetly in shadow in the photo--wasn't "period" if I was truly trying to channel my art-at-work life circa 1995. I know, I know. But there were other discrepancies, the main one being I never tacked up anything visual in the cube in '95. It was all hidden.
Cindy Sheehan--destined to be Time's Person of the Year, or to borrow Lincoln's pre-women's rights phrase, the Little Woman Who Ended the Big War--just got arrested outside the White House. The opposed forces are becoming pretty clear: a huge corporate-based megastructure including everything from defense contractors to the news media, which backs Bush because he's "good for business" even though in the long run his foreign policy blunders are going to set everybody back, versus most Americans, who are finally seeing this meat grinder for what it is.
The current death rate of our troops in Iraq is entirely Bush's fault. His decision to flatten Fallujah after the 2004 election, out of spite, because of some dead mercenaries who aren't even American troops, began turning the whole of Iraq against us, starting with the disenfranchised Sunni Arabs who stepped up the insurgency attacks. There is no hope there now of "winning" and ordinary folks realize this.
The media doesn't seem capable of changing its script that Bush is a popular, tough-minded President and the only people opposed to his war are hippies. More arrests and marches will slowly alter it--Sheehan and everyone who marched this past weekend are heroes in my book--but I fear the only things that will stop the slaughter are a spectacular, strategically significant attack by insurgents or that the erratic, feeble minded Bush, rumored to be back on the bottle, will finally crack, as in a complete on-camera meltdown. Actually I don't fear the latter except it means the second incompetent in command, Dick "I'll have some more fries" Cheney, would become President.
UPDATE: Paul Craig Roberts, who served in the Reagan administration but has opposed Bush's war from the outset, describes what's wrong with laser-like clarity. He makes the excellent point that outsourcing and "global labor arbitrage" are greater dangers to US stability than terrorism. Also good: "With the exceptions of Reps. Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers, Democrats fled the scene of the Sept. 24 antiwar rally in Washington DC. The cynical Democrats are apparently owned by the same interest groups that own the Republicans and are refusing the mantle of majority party that the electorate is offering to the party that will end the war."
UPDATE 2: For the record. it wasn't just Sheehan; from the WaPo: "About 370 antiwar demonstrators were arrested yesterday after planting themselves on the sidewalk in front of the White House, a protest that stretched out for nearly five hours as police removed them in stages to avoid a backlog at a processing center." Yes!