Arrogance

An acquaintance of mine has a Brazilian au pair working for her.  I’m not sure what the arrangement is; but if I recall correctly, the young woman can stay here for two years while working as a maid with a fancy French name.  This particular “au pair” has a Brazilian boyfriend. 

This boyfriend happens to be an engineer with a job and family ties in Brazil.  He wanted to come visit her and applied for a tourist visa to do it.  He was denied. Twice. As usual the officials who denied his visa are assuming, based on nothing other than an over-inflated view of this country and a prejudicial one of all of South America, that he will want to stay here illegally. They claim he has no ties to Brazil.
Get real America!  He has a job and he has a family.  If you are an American, that does constitute as ties; but if not, it doesn't. This is a double standard born of arrogance.

Brazil is one of the economies that is actually growing in this recession we started with our failed economic policies and policing.  The boy has a job, and a skilled one, in Brazil.   Why on earth would he want to come here where there are no jobs?  And to be an illegal immigrant to boot?!   And god forbid this skilled young man tries to immigrate here legally; it would be no easier.  Our policies make it no easier for skilled individuals to move here than it makes it for the "great unwashed" we seem so scared of, and that still pour into this country like water through a sieve no matter how many bigoted and misguided policies we put into place.  They keep coming precisely because we like hiring them to do the hard and dirty labor we've long ago gotten too lazy to do well ourselves.

We need more engineers, and every year we produce fewer and fewer on account of the terrible state of our precollege education and of the fact that our people, like all peoples of dying empires, have become just plain old fat, lazy and a little stupid.  Despite the need to revitalize our country by importing skilled labor, we still make it hard for people with skills to come in. 

Our current approach to immigration, like so many things in our government, is totally dysfunctional.  Ours are the misdirected policies of an arrogant country that long ago ceased to have anything to be arrogant about.

Therapy

I've been painting the house and remembering how much I love to be outside in the sun.  Since it has been 40 degrees and 90% humidity until last week, I have jokingly called it a quasi religious experience due to the quasi hallucinatory state one can get in that kind of weather. A good friend, pure of heart, made a good case for my act actually being religion. But what good is a religion of one that is not interested in conquering minds or amassing power?  So yeah, definitely therapy:

...but then if cleanliness is close to godliness... we're soaring  (-;  ...back to work...

pet peeve of the day

assholes, like the two I saw coming out of a pickup this morning at the Lowe's, who park in handicap spaces and are not handicapped- what the fuck is up with that!

Like my swollen figs...

...a marker of the inevitable end of summer...

Thought for the day

These days I often describe myself as crazy. It's so much easier for people to accept "crazy" rather than "different", different tastes, different desires, different views, different opinions.  People accept crazy but they like to argue with different.  When one wants to be left alone, crazy is a hell of a lot easier...

The Evolution of a Joke

photo by Carlyn Tucker
stand by John Foster

I started this piece in response to an irritant and as a tongue in cheek game to dispel personal demons, not as art.  I did a quick and dirty Google search on how to make voodoo dolls, made one, and started impaling her with pins in an orderly fashion. 

I have always loved Lucas Samaras’ work, especially all those pieces in which he obsessively covered and transformed objects of personal significance with pins. The act of repetitively and consciously skewering and transmuting my own object with pins quickly became reflective, and I acquired a haptic sense of appreciation for what Samaras had done so long ago.  Still fun to make, the doll was no longer just a joke.  Altered physically by acquiring heft and an outer shell, it became a fetish embodying characteristics that also had to do with art.

Lucas Samaras

From the beginning, as part of the joke, it was my intention to photograph the doll after each “pinning session” and to download the pictures to a blog I created for that purpose at  http://voodart.blogspot.com/.  In all but the last couple of entries in which the doll’s face is covered and defined by real multicolored pins, I had fun using Photoshop to virtually cover her face with John Baldessari-like face-obliterating shapes.   And as I played with these during the object’s physical transformation from doll to pin cushion, I forgot Baldessari’s and started creating masks of my own. 

John Baldessari

At some point during the process of photographing and blogging, I also decided to compose one picture using the blog entries in order to have it printed on paper, thus effecting one more transubstantiation from virtual into real space as I had done with the use of colored pins on the doll’s face.  What started as a joke acquired a transformative magic all its own; and when Flemming called telling me she had run across my blog and wanted to show the doll and its evolution at Riverworks, the metamorphosis was complete.   

                                                   

The Evolution of a Joke comment

since it is impossible to edit these things without affecting format spacing, I leave Allison's trace of being here while cutting and pasting on entry above--- blogspot is amazing but has its effing problems...