winter?

northern hemisphere

day after Christmas

air-conditioner kicked in

mighty weird

Pensée du jour

While reading today about the Lyon Biennial I ran into the sentence: As Robert Smithson succinctly put it in 1973: 'The opposite of waste is luxury.  Both waste and luxury tend to be useless.'  My thought of the day, which is certainly not very original, is that art is luxury and, succinctly put, it too tends to be useless.

Next jour addendum: As the wife of the Ranting Economist I should know that the word "use" (unqualified) is itself rather useless....

the thought continues

…In a culture where women are impotent, it is actually possible to imagine why they would turn to violence condoned within that culture if it means that they can finally make individual decisions and take personal action.  If killing the infidel is the only non-subservient act afforded to women in said culture, it is not hard to see how the choice might make sense…  

Twisted but imaginable.

thought running through my mind since yesterday

In what kind of a petri dish does a doctrine emerge that successfully encourages a mother to abandon her newborn baby in order to die as she kills and maims?  What kind of doctrine, while proclaiming its superiority, condones an attack on a center where the most vulnerable in society go to feel safe?  No amount of western humanist relativism and spouting off of “difference” can possibly accept such a doctrine as valid.  

Welcome to the Middle Ages with modern weaponry and the complicating factor of western belief in the sanctity of life (or something like it, most of the time)....

thought of the day

... the price of your second amendment,

 the benefits of which I have yet to figure out, 

is this shit...

The Funny Thing About Dynasties

It is political season in the land and one more Bush, and one more Clinton are running for president.  I know a whole lot about this Clinton and very little about this Bush.  I am old and politically tired, or should I say tired of political spectacles, or is it spectacle politics (?).  Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce; but these days history has been repeating itself so frequently that it no longer even has the bite of farce.  Though it was not always the case, now the whole thing just tires me out.

Last week I had two young ladies come to the door handing out Jeb flyers and asking me who I was voting for only to hear me say "undecided”.  It was a warm day, but a rainy one in a whole month of rainy ones, not a fun day to be schlepping cards in the suburbs.   As it turns out, my friend John was coming down the driveway when the girls were leaving and he asked me what they were trying to sell, I said, “Jeb”.   He said, “Aren’t they a little young for that?”  We both answered with “Young Republicans” at about the same time and concluded that they must really care if they were willing to trudge through that kind of crappy weather.  We then started reminiscing about when we were young and cared about issues.  

John and I both had a similar experience in which we spent a whole night putting up flyers about something we cared about only to wake up and find them all gone after they were deemed inappropriate by some unseen and unknown power!   At this point in our lives, the censorship and affront to our first amendment right to free expression no longer surprises us, but knowing how hard it is to make things happen, we now can only marvel at the efficiency with which our expression was squashed and how fast the pamphlets we spent all night putting up were taken down.

My studio has been out of commission for structural reasons and I decided to spend the time it will take to fix it setting up a website for pictures of my work.  I was in the middle of doing that when the girls came by and when I then spent time shooting the shit with John.  I’m still working on the website and, coincidentally, just came upon the slide of the print I was telling John about, and from which I had made the pamphlets I had spent plastering all over Athens Ga that night in the political season of 1988. As it turns out, that was the year the first Bush President, George H, and Michael Dukakis were duking it out about non-issues. 

Heck, history promises to keep repeating itself; and with another of H’s sons running for Office together with the publishing of H's new book criticizing personnel choices made by W when he was in the Office, I figured it was time to dust out ye ol’ angry print and digitize it here in ye ol’ angry blog for electronic eternity.  If I did not have other things to do, I would like to insert Hilary in the background cheering on.  ...hmmmm, maybe I still care.... 

(for those too young to know or too old to remember: Vote for a Gentle America was George Bush's campaign slogan for that season)

Campaign 88

detail

Weather Patterns: Not Quite the Same

My husband refuses to believe in global warming because he keeps hanging on to the fact that at some point during early days of the discussion some scientists expounding the theory, with politics always playing some role in the background, did something hinky with the statistical models in order to prove it.  There is nothing like a statistician, my husband, to not trust in statistics....  

Whatever the bottom truth to it all is, my deciduous azalea and my rhododendron, spring flowering shrubs that have flowered for me every April-May in the past 25 years, have decided to flower in November this year. Something, whatever it is, is decidedly fucked up.