menu (batifole)
duck terrine (gerhkins, the best mustardi have ever tasted), 2003 Anjou, veal tenderloin w. field mushrooms and young onions in a chestnut gravy, kircher, cheese plate (brie, a soft cheese from france, a grassy tart spreadable sheeps milk cheese from quebec, grapes, pickeld figs, some others i have forgoteen etc), cognac brulee with candle

attended
sundar, sam, erik, rachel, simone, lisa, pat, alan, danielle, raymond, colleen

the rest of the day:
meeting w. allyson in her big studio, brilliant time, hooked rachel up with some stuff, loved pauls work, thot i was smart, professional, had it together, banff really looks like its happening.

religous kitsch, parkdale fun, diner food and queen st shennigans all around w. rachel too...

happy

Things to Do in Janurary

Writing:
1) Stylus (Page France/Roseanne Cash)
2) Spec for Xtra West (R Kelly DVD)
3) Sacco (Submit to Anarachy:...)
4) Paraguay Mp3s
5) Seattle Presentation (if it happens)
6) Submission for Banff Center
7) start research on Willie (ifh)
8) continue book work (esp. map work, and geography work, move onto non quaker/lds/shaker/etc--just too big, handle it again)
9) Collate/Edit/Rewrite Poems w. Lisa
10) Submit said rewrites
(others?)

Art:
1) work the 100 stags show for oakland (proposal, theory lite, list of artists)
2) take the rest of the photos/sort out the order/size/etc for The Pick Up Truck Project
3) Meet w. Allyson/Simone/Rachel wrt Banff
4) Follow up w. Paul (& his contacts)
5) Follow up w. Harcourt
6) Find other (2) places to submit photos too
7) Get the video shot and edited w. erik when in TO

Admin:
1) Lawyer
2) Court Date
3) Dr Gross/Shrink/Doctors office
4) Call Olga (income, etc)
5) Get AISH together again
6) Do Taxes

Fun:
1) PARTY
2) On Kanawa(sp) show
3) ROM/AGO
4) Remingtons
5) Make sure Drew is still alive
6) ditto Terry
7) get ahold of Geneve

cutejapanese t shirts featuring inner organs

TwoArticles on the poltical and social implications of philosemitism and anti semitism, approached every few months, but these are more cogent then most, and better constructed. and its an ongoing story, for example: 60 million evangelical "disneyland" built in Iseal

book well worthbuying. Tom Varis took 44 photographs of people duct taping and then spray printing words like spoiled or rotten or no home on left over fridges--i think that these are the most moving photographs i have seen from katrina, b/c they deal with language--the literal (this food is spoiled, this food cannot be eaten) and metaphors (this poltical system is rotten, we havent been eating for a long time) and larger more symbolic desires of language (all of the biblical metaphors b/w eating, language, sufferage and desire for justice) amazing.

speaking of symbolic connections b/w food and language--at Gitmo americans have forced tubes thru the noses of hunger strikers, in order to make them eat.

Anglo poco critic Kwame Mckenzie talks about the sticky implications of peter jacksons aesthetics and poltics of race, making us wonder why he choses properties that have really awful subtext (thinking about this, and the tender strangeness of his early films, the satire, the sex, the loyalties that are mixed and intractable...i wonder if we can get that jackson back)

Hour long radio doc and photo essay by christopher sims, about fort bragg and a miltary family who are waiting for their families. humane, manganging to avoid obvious politics, the sentiment about noble heros, the anti war nonesne, the red state exoticism, he is just here, a silent witness to real lives, the photos are sort of artless, too which is deep artifice, and fashoionable--so maybe i am seduced by them, as deeper and more neutral then they are, tell me im wrong...


Peaeable Kingdom by Edward Hickman, early american qauker--the thing i didnt notice about this work, before, is the europeans riding in from ships in the top left corner--so the work is basically saying America was a paradise before we came there, we are responsible for a 2nd fall, the presence of white men ruins paradise for the rest of us...ties into the idea that america was eden, literally or symbolically (and by absence refuses to talk about first nations people) (im ignoring the babes playing with the wolves and lambs, as it is part of the illustration from isiah that this work illuminates, of cours, but also because i think that children, infants, are not encorprated as people in Hickman's corpus) (ie europeans not mentioned in isaiah, kids are)

Cherokee national court, in the US allows for lesbian couple to be "married"

here are some ed rushcas (from the website of his CR)

1973 Powder and Flake

1974 Gospel

LA 1978 (Pepto and Caviar)

Belladonna, 1962

English DRama, 1973

Robin, 1968

Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon. Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, Becker said
From here
I dont think people should go to jail for oral sex, but this guy was an asshole, and deserves his trauma

Jessica Simpson's "The Sweetest Sin" is still one of my favourite singles of the decade, though I imagine if anyone heard it and was turned off by it, they'd mostly be turned off by how "mature" it sounds. It's sort of an aching, grand piano-driven, bombastic elegance, a sound that, if it even exists in pop these days, I assume it would exist only in places like Josh Groban (places I assume I probably wouldn't care to visit)--much moreso anyway than in "teen" music. I can't think of a current pop song that less resembles Jessica's sister and Kelly Clarkson and Hilary Duff (or anyway, the little that I've heard by them). Not sure if this has anything to do with anything, but I agree with the point about teen-as-AC.
Frank Kogan

The Decemberist logs four historic debates about executive power in recent history. he logs and comments on the precedents, and then works Bush into the mix
someone hunts a deer with a howitzer.


Carracci. 18th Century, ITalian, mostly known for his ott jesus in heavens with whipped cream cloud stuff

Albert Von Keller, German, 19th/20th century
Both from:The Rare Erotica Blog

The batshit preacher from ST Louis, SM Davis, Fill in the Blank sermons---MadLibs ahoy.


Thomas Kincaide sculpture of Jesus as Harbour (like the painting fredreick church did in the 1850s, with a liberty figure as high as the mountains striding the great plains)

A Toronto Conceptual Artist posts 105 pictures of his toothpaste on his toothbrush...this man is a genius.


SF made out of Jello

Jamie Hilder is a poet, and print maker, who makes giant signs with amusing slogans that hang over highway overpasses...he is also a really clever essayist, and this history named after one of his peices, is basically SI 101, but smarter then most.

MS Magazine reports on Solider Rape in the US Miltary, i know they tend to panic, but they b/c of their postion, are the only ones picking this up. The US Miltary has commoisend 18 reports in 15 years, and the rapes keep hapeening, in the current theater of operations, in the schools that teach and in american bases.

ELmo asks toddlers Who Wants to DIe


1960 Motorla Illustration of Perfect housing
more here

Chinese Marxistsvisit Trier, where Marx was born. They shop, they listen to scandal, they dont eat the pralines, and they go home. Farcical.

Russiashuts off Ukraines supplies of National Gas, and then offers a loan so that they can pay for the increased prices--strangely like a landlord tennant dispute--and is really indicitve of the empire building and parcholism in which Putin sees the former soviet republics.

British documents surrounding issues of torture, the false war, the downing street memos, and other embarrasments to Blair's legacy.

essay and extensive pictures of the Kirkbride asylums, a method of containment in the last 19th century, that was both humane and solved a number of needs for a number of patients--qouting the site:
Dr. Kirkbride envisioned an asylum with a central administration building flanked by two wings comprised of tiered wards. This "linear plan" facilitated a hierarchical segregation of residents according to sex and symptoms of illness. Male patients were housed in one wing, female patients in the other. Each wing was then sub-divided by ward with the more "excited" patients placed on the lower floors, farthest from the central administrative structure, and the better-behaved, more rational patients situated in the upper floors and closer to the administrative center. Ideally, this arrangement would make patients' asylum experience more comfortable and productive by isolating them from other patients with illnesses antagonistic to their own while still allowing fresh air, natural light, and views of the asylum grounds from all sides of each ward.
almost all of the kirkbrides are no longer in use, and in various states of disrepair--instutional buildings (prisons, asylums, hospitals) tend to avoid being saved by heritage foundations, for mostly superstitous reaons, which is a real shame, the pictures have a tragic eerieness...

Manassas "Virginia restricts households to immediate relatives, even when the total is below the occupancy limit". The law is essentially racist, intended to elimanate new immigrants, and Latino/as, who are more likely to live with extended families

“Girls call me Jolly Rancher, Cuz I stay so hard, You suck me for a long time, Oh my God! I sit back like a playa, And sippin' Grey Goose Feelin' all loose.” Laffy Taffy, D4L

IN 2006 MORE COCK, MORE JESUS, MORE GIN, MORE PUSSY, MORE SWEDISH POP, MORE WOMBATS, MORE ROBOTS, MORE COMMENTS ON FRIENDS SPECIAL BITS, MORE SAYING RUDE WORDS, MORE THEORY, LESS THEORY, ALL THE THEORY IN THE WORLD, NO THEORY LEFT, MORE SLASH FICTION FEATURING FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS, MORE HOMOEROTICISM, MORE HETROEROTICISM, LESS BORDERS, LESS NATION STATES, MORE MYSTIC ORGASMS, LESS PHALLOCENTRIC PRESENTATION, MORE SASQUATCH PORN, MORE HANDICRAFT, MORE CONFUSION, MORE CHAOS, MORE FUN, LESS GOVERNMENT, MORE MONEY, LESS AISH, MORE ESSAYS ABOUT TRIVIAL MATTERS, MORE FISH, MORE SUSHI, MORE COMICS, LESS PANIX, MORE HOLLYWOOD, MORE INDIE, MORE SUGUAR, MORE MEAT, MORE 16TH CENTURY DUTCH HERSEY, MORE 20TH CENTURY ARABIC HERSEY, MORE ENGLAND, MORE AUSTRALIA, MORE PANCAKES, MORE HOLIDAYS SURROUNDING PANCAKES, MORE JOY, MORE GAY COWBOYS, MORE COWBOYS WHO FUCK OTHER COWBOYS, MORE COWGIRLS, MORE RODEO QUEENS, LESS FORD BOYCOTTS, MORE EXTENDED FAMILIES, LESS NUCLEAR FAMILES, MORE JAKE GYLLENHALL, LESS CLOTHES, MORE BAD SITCOMS, MORE BAD REALITY SHOWS, LESS CONFLICT, MORE NOIZE, MORE QUIET, MORE DECORATIVE, MORE PRETTY, MORE BACON, MORE SONG OF SOLOMON, LESS PAUL, MORE THOMAS, MORE DOUBT, MORE SOULSEARCHING, MORE BLOJOBS, MORE CUDDLING, MORE SHERRY, MORE PORT, LESS LIGHT BEER, MORE THINGS PUBLISHED, LESS COMPROMISES, MORE PHOTOS OF THINGS NO ONE WOULD LOOK AT, MORE NIPPLES, MANY MORE NIPPLES, LESS THREE HOUR MOVIES, MORE 20 MINUTE SHORTS, MORE NEON LIGHTS ON WET GRAVEL, LESS GOOD TASTE, MORE BAD TASTE, MORE JOHNNY KNOXVILLE, MORE PRO-AM, LESS CLUSTERFUX, MORE SUCK AND FUX, LESS SHAKESPEARE, MOE ROCHESTER, LESS RUSHDIE, MORE TARIQ ALI.. LESS BOOKS ON SEXISM MORE BOOKS ON SEX, LESS BOOKS ON HATE AND MORE BOOKS ON LOVE, LESS BUSH AND MORE CUNT, MORE COUNTRY SONGS ABOUT DRUNKEN FUMBLING, MORE SONGS ABOUT BLOJOBS IN THE BACK OF PICKUP TRUX, MORE WARHOL, MORE KOONS, MORE BATHHOUSES, MORE ADULT THEATERS, MORE CRUSING, MORE RAMBLES, MORE EXCESS, MORE PLEASURE.

RADICAL REINVENTIONS, BABY, THATS ALL I WANT, IS RADICAL REINVENTIONS AND PLEASURE, LETS MAKE 2006 THE YEAR OF FUMBLING ORGIES (METAPHORICALLY AND LITERALLY)


thanks to the following people for another year where i made it thru:
ashley,andrew, bryan, colleen, danielle,d, drew, glenys, rachel, rachel, lisa, susan, mark sinker, remy, martin skidmore, chris, raymond, himdavidallen, mike robot, jesus, thomas.

Ten Americans, by Ray

10. Richard Cheney
Dick has become the epitome of all that is wrong with America - corporate greed, technocratic power, obsessive secrecy, manifest destiny, public lies, personal betrayals, illicit profit, and a sense of entitlement to all of these. His political lineage goes back to Nixon, he moves in all the right circles, and has become the shadow emperor he has always dreamt of. First on my list of those I'd like to see nailed to the wall.

9. William "Boss" Tweed
Boss begat and perfected the machine that grips America to this day, and made Tammany Hall into the blueprint for the nation. Curse his corrupt and blighted soul, if he ever had one.

8. J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer built the bomb in whose shadow we live today, and worse, he knew what he was doing.

7. Henry Ford
Ford found a new way to build things. He built them well enough, and built so many, the rest could do nothing but emulate him. He also hated Jews, and hated unions, and hated anyone who did not subscribe to his particular version of how the world should work, and spread his hate with his methods. Also, Fords suck.

6. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
Joe was everything an American is supposed to be: a banker, a politician, a millionare, a moviemaker, a whiskey smuggler, a dynastic figure. He bent and dodged rules, used insider info, sold short, bought and sold and threatened people, and refused to let the inconvenient death of his intended heir stop him from constructing a president.

5. Ulysses S. Grant/Robert E. Lee
The first was direct and brutal, the second elegant and graceful. One almost won the war, the other did. Both fought for the wrong sides. One was a corrupt president, ushering in the era of corporate domination and almost destroying any chance of reconciliation. The other fought entirely on principle, and freed his few slaves upon his death. The two were the snake and mongoose that very nearly made the Civil War a permanent affair. (And perhaps, in some ways, did.)

4. Lyndon B. Johnson/Robert S. McNamara
These two also worked only as a pair, both enslaving themselves to their concept of duty and nearly destroying their country in the process. Johnson fought Hoover and won, fought the segregationists and won, fought the hawks and lost. McNamara fought the old ideas and won, only to realize afterwards that his victory was the more devastating alternative. Both exemplified the American affliction of technocratic power that destroyed what it was supposed to save.

3. Richard Nixon/Henry Kissenger
As with Johnson/McNamara, but subtracting loftier ideals and adding paranoia, secrecy, higher body counts and a fervent belief that the populace must be lied to constantly. Nixon was Shakespearean in his hubris and his conflicts, being a warring Quaker and an untrusting person who wanted to be trusted. Kissenger questions every theology of redemption ever devised.

2. J. Edgar Hoover
Hoover was the most successful spymaster since Francis Walsingham in the court of Elizabeth. He knew everyone and almost everything, and his schemes infected American politics for forty years. He hated himself and everyone else. Still, he made the FBI into something from nothing, and American lawmen into something besides sherriffs. And until Cheney, there was no better example of a shadow ruler. Machiavelli would have smiled, then wept.

1. Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's fundamental contradiction between man and myth, between who could be free and who should be, between the words that still stir many a heart and Sally Hemmings fucked in a back room is the basis for the schizophrenia of what should have been the greatest nation on earth.

Part of the enduring appeal of westerns is the display of brotherhood, unhindered by sexualisation. You often hear the phrase 'to be a straight-shooter'. That means to speak plain truths and walk easily amid the natural bonds of affection, without the distraction of misplaced sexual urges. In other words, the audience can relax. Their hero is not going to get weird on them. The western was a morality tale, so to make immorality the heart of this western is to violate the code of westerns. That's why it's not going to work. I think Ang Lee is off his rocker if he thinks he can have the same commercial success with two cowboys instead of a cowboy and a cowgirl, as other movies do.
Robert Knight, Brokeback Mountain, director of the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women of America

From this article: http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1675408,00.html

via Geoff

Trophies, Justne Cooper. 2005

more workhere

hey are about taxonomy, about the implications of recording wrt photography, what ordering means, and a play on marking life, on the precise marking of differences that occurs in both sci and aesthetic circles...their precision is a meta-contextual dialouge about form like Loretta Luxes photos of art and painting

Ten Most Evil Americans:
for this: here

1. J Edgar Hoover
The ultimate self hating queer, the destruction and paranoia that slit any of the American core values that might have existed, his paranoia of communism made generations of genuinely progressive folks withered. Add to this his racism, his homophobia, his misogyny and his seeking to make every man, woman and child fall under a kind of eugenic whiteness.
2. Richard Nixon The closest thing that America ever got to Richard the Third, his biggest crimes were not the ones he had to resign for (ie the Break in) but for the desperate re-centering of the Executive Branch, and also this genuine belief that lying to the American people was not only right but necessary. He is why America refuses its leaders.
3. Nathan Bedford Forrest He founded the Ku Klux Klan.
4. Francis Fukuyama Not only responsible for the idiotic book The End of History, which is as amusing to read as any utopia, and as dangerous (ask London, Bali, New York, Iraq, Delhi or Barcelona if history had ended). He also helped found the agit-prop wing of the hard neo-cons. The project has been more responsible for spreading the poisonous bromide that free markets=free people, for the continued disavowal of the third world, for getting America into the next Vietnam, and really desperately misunderstanding the plurality of Islamic voices.
5. George Custer The logical extension of the genocidal, and incompetent internal policies of the American government against the first nations people , and one of any number examples I can use of the misguided, and fundamentally evil policy of Manifest Destiny.
6. Jeffery Amherst Small Pox Ridden Blankets, one of the first examples of biological warfare.
7. Father Caughlin The abuse this man, made of the words of Christ, the fascism, the demagoguery, the fear of immigrants and wrapping patriotism into the true cross—responsible for every single example of jesus loves America ever since.
8. Leo Strauss A dishonest motherfucker. The best example of the abuses of the Eurocentric the best example of technocratic speech used to obfuscate on purpose (all those right wingers who hate Derrida, would do well to pay attention to this mans politics of language) His cult of worship in the American academies, relates to a genuine fear of pleasure, sexuality, and the vox populi, as evidenced by the boring and self centered Alan Bloom.
9. Dick Cheney The puppet master, responsible for the theory work behind Nixon’s egomania, Regan’s monomania, the cold bureaucratic steel of Bush the First, and bringing Bush II to power. Excellent at weaseling.
10. Anslinger The war against some drugs began as an attempt to destroy African American and Hispanic citizens, and ended with shotgunning any of the more important amendments in the Constitution. I can’t believe this was an accident.

James McAdams makes an end table that can be broken down into a bat and a sheild, defensive and offensive weapons.

all the accesoriesfor yr not fucking lifestyle.



Henrich Roberts takes photos of GErman Industrial sites. more here in big black and white

interestingarticle on how a forum about chinese poetry became a coded way to exchange information on how the PRC killed hundreds of demonstraters in rural regions, who were worried about access and land.

i keep thinking that was the making of post modern architechture course and stupid, making it about decoration and refusing to work with the ideas of place, use, function and the like, we have done a great disservice to the work of scott-brown and venturi...i think even vegas, who began with the people and ended with bad spectacle, doesnt have room for the people who gave it a voice--even worse, the love of vencular, human sized forms, are bing destoryed by fast food joints and big box stores, the diner vs macdonalds, woolworths vs walmart. venturi is fantastic for finding the history and form of a buildign and putting it into place, the nfl building in canton ohio, with the electronic scoreboard as proper as the handsome gloss of neo-classical facade of the national gallery in london, there is so little of that work, which is clever and useful (cf lillian smith library in Toronto, the Pacfic Place Building in Vancover, the first nations school in Beaver Lake, Northern Alberta, the Ban works with Container Ships, almsot nothing compared to all those liebskinds, gehrys, calvanas, even norman foster, all are not about the auidence but the ego of the architect, not about the gods, or even the temples but the temple builders--maybe thats why venturi and scott-brown are no longer any ones heros, they are egoless, (odd to say, looking at the website of there is a new documentary, and having it so eye bleedingly loud, would say egoless, but i maintain its there...
website here with huge records of video...is a good example.

Three to Read
Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Steven M. Wasserstrom),
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Bart D. Ehrman),
Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Jonathan Z. Smith)

and some Links:
a ny times about a town in alabama who has an enmourous collection of well designed, aesthically important buildings...the best thing about it, is Hale County, where the town is located, has students beg, borrow and scrounge material to make housing for the poorest people, this was the county that Agee and Walkins wrote about, and the grinding poverty has only really gotten worse...here is a qoute:
students identified the poorest of the poor, and built them modest dwellings. Materials were rudimentary - whatever they could beg or borrow - and so the students made their mark with quirky details: a window inserted on a 30-degree angle, a concrete wall studded with soda bottles to let bits of light through. One house has walls made of car tires; another is made of hay bales; yet another of stacks of carpet tiles.

The story qoutes GEhry as a source, but aside from the late 80s work w. fencign and steel, it seems closer of course to Venturi, who keeps being over looked as a source; and Shingurua Ban; in that updating of found sources.

Friends of BIll W make comics drawn by the second string of Archie, hardcore and amusing melodrama...

Lucite Stages Head Chandilear from a Toronto DEsign Collective called Science and Son, their website isnt worked...

7 lions attempt to down a v. v. large bull elephant, and almost succeed. pretty exciting.

Dick Cheney Slash gave me a hard on


Rug Tags, various artits, from Toy Factory DEsigns, UK

This is a man from Flordia's Xmas decorations--it is a reindeer being hung from his roof, and being feild dressed. The red bulbs are blood from a shotgun wound.



Stephen Shore, from American Surfaces, now at PS 1, NYC
I like this b/c
1) the colours (the coulour of the milk container, the cabinets, the kraft container, etc provide an explicit themeatic linking
2) the size (8x10) is somewhere b/w looking too large and being too cutely small.
3) i like the flith,
I dont like this b/c
1) it is almost slumming, playing against a lower class.
2) the filth seems too cute, too obvious, an intensely self aware parody of his own qoutidion tendencies...

i wrote this today about page france, and there song chariot...
Thinking about freakytigger's recent discovery of Sufjan, and how he did not really understand the Jesus stuff, he is English. 80 per cent of Americans are Xian’s, and most suburban indie saddos are as well--Sufjan and the others are an attempt to find the genuine message of Christ, an earnest exploring of tender religious devotion... (And its two days before Christmas, the occasional reminder of why some of us find the holiday important is all right, amongst the Santas and hippos, I figure)

It is hard to explain to Europe, North America's obsession with Jesus. It is even harder to explain the popularity of young and smart creative types wrestling with a neo-orthodox Jacob, parental rebellion and dissatisfaction with the culture only go so far.

I cannot explain it, because I feel so much--and others who have tried, have been bogged down with variations of pop anthropology (the excellent Anne Powers on the alternative worship services at Mars Hill.) But to understand it, is to listen to it--and while I am sure that he has heard the Danielson Familee, and Sufjan, and he has gone into the freak folk missions in the 60s, through Gareth Lee, and I will not inflict praise and worship here, I want him to listen to this.

Page France, I know nothing about, and it is much better then the other update of Chariot symbolism this year (Gretchen Wilson). This song, about the rapture, and about the end of the world, is so tender, hopeful, optimistic, and free of fire and brimstone. It is about what people feel in the heart of hearts, to use a cliché.

In Matthew Christ tells us to go into the closet, and close the door to pray--there is something so hard about this...it is easy to mock lo-fi emo boys with their 4 tracks, singing love songs to girls who will never really love them, imagine finding a girl who will love you forever, all of that trepidation about adolescent desire remains, but their is a surety there too

and i wanted to expand the bit on gretchen wilson.

i know the authentic vs inauthentic debate is long dead, and artifice has won, but i keep hearing the two songs together, b/c of the way that i tunes works, and i do not believe wilson, i think its too am packed, too perfect, too clean, and tries too hard on its weirdness, its genre jumping.

i keep thinking of it against being religous, as having the plasticy (forgive me for using that word) hipness of nugod types--another version of that praise and worship is really rock and roll shit--and then i keep thinking about it, the jesus music i really liked this year, was all folky, simple, hymn singing, and people with guitars--and that might be where i am at, but it made me think...

where are the shiny post modern jesus masterpeices, either in country or something else==kayne doing jesus walks is the closest i could fnid

some comics i got recently

mome fall 2005
glossy, beautifully constructed 1/4ly anthology from fantagraphix, 15 artists or so, mostly shit...really really pointless and boring indie autobiographical shit in adrian tomine/dan clowes mode: (a guy feeding pigeons, a girl meeting her mother) or in scratch and scrawl julie doucet/chester brown mode...a chester brown comic about a friend od'ing on heroin that had less emotion and less drama then the ones about the cd he bought, a sophie crumb that was as fake and pseduo-transgressive as any jt leroy, with a cloying and sentimental ending, some mocking of obvious targets, some useless pop oddness, really mostly disposable...

except: anders nilson short story, an art historical/abstract exploration of form, but also of realtionships and humanity, 10 pages of sqaures and circles, with a narrative underneath, it made me sad and made me keep loving how strange and thourough his enchantment with the edges of comix are---equal parts ellsworth kelly and charles schultz, may be the best comic ive read all year. also in troduced to david heatley, who is like harvey darger doing harvey comix...its really bright, colourful, cute, normal funny animal innocent kids stuff, and then interupted with kiddie fucking, incest, hustler magazine and christ on the cross--this impure freudian working out, and im not sure how explotive it is.

also got
poor sailor, from the mousspant story, almost silent, this little sqaure thing, spare and lovely, a snow storm is indicated by four blank pages, several panels of intimacy, (of a man and a woman in bed, of them making a house, of woods and chickens) and several of isloation, landscapes and ships on sea...i dont want to ruin it, but actually is not as cute as it seems

david b's one from the new ignatz line has a poor and unguided narrative, that is basicalyl a rip off of the genius eplipetic, and the drawing has a chaotic, horryfing nightmare imagery that becomes claustrophobic and exhausting, it is hard to read...

the thing that marks its brilliance though, is a secton of about 6 pages, called the ways of war, that made me frightened and uncomfortable, a manic and destructive history of the war in biafra, the plain news of history is countered with black/red images, that are iconic, but never easy: corpses, igbo masks, bayonets gouging eyes, a man set on fire and a man in a mask...it has a panelling that is encorprated themtically, the man who is crucided makes a section into four panels, a heavy man rests on his outstretched arms, underneath, a general looks forward, a mask of malvenlonce behind him, the man on fire has a beast scissoring his insides, like an ibis and a frog...one of the pages has a starbing skeltion arching over miltary strong arms, who contains a crocidle running munitions...another has dozens of skeltions, fire, soilders and bombs in the folds of a decorative pink forrest--im not explaining it well, of courseits too strange and personal a text, too self containted to write about--but its horrorfying.
it also colludes conolial and post colonial sources in a unique way (i counted classical egyption, igbo, ibio, henri rossoueu(sp), radical german and french woodcuts, mexican death imagery, anti veitnam agirprop from the americas, keith harring, the haida and irqouis...)

i t hink that his art is better then his sotrytelling, but it is so frighenting and distended, its worth seeing

conell, simens, st johns, the new college of sarasota, evergreen

st johns has a great books program, everyone takes the same programs, and everyone reads the same books, for four years--classics, the first year, the bible and the church fathers the second, european lit from the 17th and 18th century the third and then american founders, and people like Hegel, Neichese, and FReud for the last.

it sounds great, except its all white and its all male...

This is Nixon on David Frost, in the 70s...
FROST: So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition.

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.

what is needed to be remembered is that Cheney was Nixon's cheif of staff, and the recent scandals wrt domestic spying, are really about Cheney correcting past fuck ups, continuing the narrative of Nixon, fixing things that he didnt have the chance to do in the past...

the question then, is that in the 70s, this was self correcting, the terrorism was harder to pin down, it was there, but it was post vietnam and it was american (weather people), and so the american people began not to trust either the radical left or the executive branch of the government... (domestically Nixon was more liberal then any democrat since, with the exception of carter, as well--wether that was b/c the public in the 70s was more liberal is v. debatable)

the terrorism right now is (mostly) exterior, and easier to launch into excuses, but it isnt self correcting, the (center) left is allowing the executive branch to do things that they thot was obscene 30 yrs ago, why is that? it cant just be 9/11.

we need to remind ourselves of the people in Bush;s life came to power under Nixon (rove and his dirty tricks against atwater come immediately to mind), and continue it unfinished business, keep recent past more current.

also Cheney has appeared on cnn/fox and the sunday morning shows actually running this dog to the hunt, he has stated it over and over again, plainly and w/o conflict--he believes that the constituion allows for any action that the president wishes to do, and he also has managed to push the agenda of wartime presidency into a kind of orwellian permanant war--the list of at least 100 orgs that they have spied on, include queer groups, qaukers, ordinary pacifists, and little musilms...

(thinking about this more, the ny times knew about hte domestic spying program, just before novemember 04, maybe earlier. b/w holding onto this, judith miller's cuddling realtionship to the admin, and their reporting on yellowcake, who thinks of the time as left/liberal anymore, how actually believes in the myth of the liberal media?

This is Nixon on David Frost, in the 70s...
FROST: So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition.

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.

what is needed to be remembered is that Cheney was Nixon's cheif of staff, and the recent scandals wrt domestic spying, are really about Cheney correcting past fuck ups, continuing the narrative of Nixon, fixing things that he didnt have the chance to do in the past...

the question then, is that in the 70s, this was self correcting, the terrorism was harder to pin down, it was there, but it was post vietnam and it was american (weather people), and so the american people began not to trust either the radical left of the executive branch of the government...

the terrorism right now is (mostly) exterior, and easier to launch into excuses, but it isnt self correcting, the (center) left is allowing the executive branch to do things that they thot was obscene 30 yrs ago, why is that? it cant just be 9/11.

we need to remind ourselves of the people in Bush;s life came to power under Nixon (rove and his dirty tricks against atwater come immediately to mind), and continue it unfinished business, keep recent past more current.

also Cheney has appeared on cnn/fox and the sunday morning shows actually running this dog to the hunt, he has stated it over and over again, plainly and w/o conflict--he believes that the constituion allows for any action that the president wishes to do, and he also has managed to push the agenda of wartime presidency into a kind of orwellian permanant war--the list of at least 100 orgs that they have spied on, include queer groups, qaukers, ordinary pacifists, and little musilms...

(thinking about this more, the ny times knew about hte domestic spying program, just before novemember 04, maybe earlier. b/w holding onto this, judith miller's cuddling realtionship to the admin, and their reporting on yellowcake, who thinks of the time as left/liberal anymore, how actually believes in the myth of the liberal media?