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This is not the Onion, this is from CNN:
Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs"Testy US mobs?" Protesting, say, the Iraq war? Bad immigration bills? An Air Force that wants to cook US citizens for "good public relations"? Michael Wynne would be a great test subject. We could all laugh when he staggers to the ground, incapacitated by painful invisible rays.
POSTED: 7:56 p.m. EDT, September 12, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.
The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.
Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.
Public sculpture that's actually good: Matthew Geller's Awash, which opened tonight in Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan, and will be installed through November 25. It's a "portable fountain" made of sidewalk scaffolding, Plexigas, and PVC pipe. As you sit in the swings, water flows over your head like rain sliding down a loft skylight, and is then recycled through the PVC ductwork and back up through a pump in the water tank. It's romantic, carefree, and absurd at the same time, and the materials are completely unassuming. Last year, Geller's piece Foggy Day--notable for its artificial fog bank in Chinatown's Cortlandt Alley--was criticized by no less than the New York Sun and Fox News as socially dubious "fog art." The site for this new, budgetarily conscious urban earthwork is Collect Pond Park, a bland but historically charged spot across from the Tombs (bounded by Franklin, Leonard, Centre and Lafayette). In Manhattan's early history this was once a beautiful lake called the Collect, which became putrescent with urbanization, was drained, and served as the boggy foundations for the Five Points slum, made famous in The Gangs of New York. Now the land's surrounded by courthouses and other government buildings, and is in bad need of being rescued by something as funky as this. (One thinks also of the World Trade Center kiddie pool memorial--but that wasn't supposed to be funky.)
Re: the twilight photo
Update: photo lightened and color-corrected from the original crepuscular blue; another photo moved to the comments that is still blue but shows the flowing water more clearly. Yes, I fell down in my role of NY art documentarian. I got lost in the Five Points government building maze and the hour was getting later and later...
Update: Here are some better pictures from the LMCC blog:
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Chris Ashley, Untitled, 20060906, HTML, 250 x 200 pixels
After a run of "auto-pixelated" media imagery combined with abstraction that I wasn't too wild about, Ashley is making pixel art-sized abstractions that are rather tasty. This is one. Minimalism is not dead, it just got smaller. You should peep the code on this one if you can, it goes on forever.Heh, on the Bloglines RSS reader, which consistently makes hash of this page, Ashley's piece reads as...invisible. The caption reads "Very Small Abstractions." Not that small. Bloglines, kindly eat me.
People magazine weighs in on stingrays, post-Irwin.
Thank heavens the 9/11 anniversary is over. "A wounded but resilient America paused to remember a calamitous day," says the New York Times. Oh, poor pitiful us. In the name of "9/11" we invaded and essentially destroyed an entire Mideast country that had nothing to do with the attacks, but it's important that we spend time reflecting and obsessing over our own wounds. The best course now for citizens who really want to respond to that day is to hand Bush his ass on a platter in the next election. No, we don't get to vote against him personally, as if we ever did, but returning the House and Senate to the opposition party at least creates the possibility of putting some brakes on this maniac. Two years of Congressional investigations of various White House misdeeds, hauling one functionary after another from this secretive Administration before righteous Senators and Congressmen to explain their misdeeds, would be delightful. I think we could handle the resulting "paralysis" of our ability to wage elective wars. I know the rest of the world would like a breather from us.
The image at the top was on the front page of the New York Times online edition. I hate to further exploit this woman's grief, but it bugs me that the "pool" in the photo is just a temporary prop assembled for a photo-op, because five years after 9/11/2001 no memorial exists. The photographer who took this picture, and/or the editor(s) who cropped it, are, in effect, liars. The bottom photo is from a series of wide angle shots on the DailyKos website showing the pool without the cropping.
The Huffington Post notes the similarity between the poster for Disney/ABC's pro-Bush propaganda movie, The Path to 9/11, about America's inability to root out the terrorists among us (lurking behind the flag) and the poster for the 1996 TV series Dark Skies, which depicts those terrorists as they really are: lemur-eyed extraterrestrials. Slightly off topic, I was almost late for w*rk today because my train, which enters Manhattan through the gaping hole formerly known as the World Trade Center, was cancelled from 3:30 to 5:00 for a Bush-and-wife wreath-laying photo-op at the former base of the former tower(s). He never misses an opportunity to milk tragedy for political gain. No ill respect meant to the dead--here's hoping that the truth will come out eventually about the events of that horrible day--as opposed to the Administration whitewash and exploitation we've had so far.
Momenta Art, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, recently moved to a new location at 359 Bedford Ave., between S. 4th and S. 5th in Williamsburg. The gallery consistently serves up engaged, political (or politically-tinged) art and introduces many artists who go on to be exploited by the system, I mean, become stars. One of the great things about New York is there are pockets of cultural life here that resist the prevailing "happy talk" that started with '70s news media and gradually spread to every facet of our society. Momenta is such a pocket. Consider this press release for "The Unhumane Society," opening Friday, September 15, from 6-8 pm:
The work of each of the artists in this exhibition slides easily between the human and the animal world. In a video by Daniel Herskowitz, the artist eavesdrops upon conversations among primatologists. As they discuss group behaviors of lower primates, the group dynamics of the scientists seem not so distant. In Stefaan Dheedene’s video an African hunter methodically describes his process of trapping and killing animals. Our attention is displaced by his clinical description of his work punctuated by the diminishing screams of a baby antelope as he clubs it to death. Similarly, in a video by David Burns, a farm family considers the interpersonal relations of their chickens and discuss which chicken must die – as the video presents the loser chicken, beheaded and plucked in reverse. In a video by Liselot van der Heijden, the viewer is left alone to commune with the endlessly looping final breath of a dying zebra. Tom Moore also offers a kind of quiet communion. His photographs of primate cages from the Berlin Zoo, also empty of humans (and of animals) document a frighteningly perfect animal habitat that fulfills every need. And Mark Dion's natural history photographs offer the disquietude of our animal curiosity.One is tempted to say, lighten up, guys. For sure no Chelsea gallery would ever send out a press release that disturbingly bleak. (A member of the patron class might get "bummed out" and stop coming in.) But I happen to believe that humanity will have much to answer for vis a vis the rest of nature when we stand before the Immortal Aliens for cosmic judgment, so kudos to Momenta--this sounds great.
The other works in the show slip more precipitously between the human and the animal. Rachel Lowther offers us a sculpture representing the glistening inflated-to-bursting obscene reality that is a rat urinary and genital system after said rat has 'received' excess amounts of testosterone in the form of Perandren. Breyer/P-Orridge’s absurd, fetishistic sculptural object of a wheeled gumball machine filled with used tampons and topped with a wolf’s head suggests the machinistic fetishization of a feminine primal order. Human/animal hybrids are more directly represented in the works of Rita Ackerman and Jason Fox – with his painting of a pathetic creature separated from the viewer by a chain-link barrier and her charming, brutal, doe-like vampires. All pretense falls away with the work of Grace Roselli. In her classically rendered painting, a pregnant woman hunches over skeletal human remains in a post apocalyptic sewage-scape; unable to cope with the human world she becomes subsumed in an idealized nightmare of our animal side taking over. As pathological as it is clinical, it is a nightmare that we all share.