I Will Watch the Watchmen

One of the great joys of The Watchmen is that not only is it about anti-heroic superheroes, but it is anti-heroic and anti-comic in structure. Written after the Star Wars phenomenon began to change most films into comics, The Watchmen helped change comic books into novels. The graphic novel blew up in the 80s with mind-blowing works such as The Dark Knight, Sandman and Sin City, but although each of those titles put forth excellent stand alone efforts most were written as series. The Watchmen could only ever have been a one off and you know that in your bones going in—it offers up a complete world, takes up its history and posits a future. A truly finite work is rare these days, rarer still is one with a great third act—a third act that leaves the world slightly changed.

Besides serializing and syndicating every frame of film that came after it, the Star Wars altered the very structure of the movies that got made in its wake [although, oddly enough, this did not hold true for A New Hope, which had a fairly slow build] . As we know, with the rise of the blockbuster era most movies, in pursuit of greater punch and bigger first weekends, started front loading the crap out of themselves. More and more films were launched with more and bang before the credits—if there even were credits. Exposition was for losers.

It would seem that if you feed people corn long enough, eventually they are going to shit corn, and since the notion of front loading came to prominence everything from film to tv to comics and the novel has been infected by that approach. Even most authors who came of age post Star Wars sucked on the tit of big first scenes and suck at endings. They have the same pressure to grab the reader early and often, and sell books based on perfectly wrought first chapters. The rest, well, fuck third acts—you can’t make a living off great third acts. But you can make immortal works of art with them.

The Watchmen has a very slow, uncanny build. At times you feel like the piece will never lift off and yet you stay with it. Rereading it, the story came back to me—in a slow build. The end fits together brilliantly, but even that has an anti-climactic bittersweet bite to it. Moore has a depressive’s mind, but it is a mind that is inexorably trying to overcome its own darkness.

I will be watching Zack Snyder. Not just to see if the man who put buff men in diapers and made it work can improve on the original’s slightly underwhelming but apt visuals, but to see if he will dare to create an anti-blockbuster blockbuster. I will be watching to see if Snyder will be able to create goofy realistic anti-super superheroes, if he will have the guts to maintain the historical sweep of Cold War America so important to the piece, but mostly I will be watching to see if he will manage to resist the temptation and no doubt he pressure to follow the standard Syd Fields formula that has been handcuffing Hollywood for 30+ years. Batman Returns certainly made it possible for mega-blockbusters to venture into new creative territory. It remains to see if anyone else will follow.


Coraline

Coraline is one film that successfully resists the shackles of Syd. Gradual and abrupt in turns like its sophisticated stop action/computer animation format, Coraline’s story proceeds like a dream and resists those classic event markers that are even more prevalent in animated films than they have become in live action films.

The most resonant image to take away from Coraline occurs once she passes beyond the borders of the Other House’s property—the Other Mother only created what was necessary. When Coraline gets far enough away the animation begins to fail and break down to a white back drop. While this moment is not new, the geniuses at Warner Bros. did this to Daffy Duck decades ago, it does seem very timely as our economy recedes and shrinks back so that only what is necessary remains.

Bag Props for Hendrik Kerstens






















Found this guy when I clicked on a photo of Scarlett Johansson as Girl with a Pearl Earring. He poses his daughter, a younger, chubbier, less groomed version of Johansson in poses from Vermeer and other Flemish masters [or in their spirit]—but with arch and subtle twists.

Some of his other pics: girl against barren sea, little girl in makeup—more expected/less enchanting. Overall, though, surprising, odd and immaculate photos.

http://www.hendrikkerstens.com/index.html

The United States of Tara

Toni Collette in The United States of Tara

Is there anything more potentially embarrassing, off-putting, fatuous and multifariously insulting than the upcoming The United States of Tara on Showtime?

The tag line on the commercials I've heard spoken by Collette herself is:

Having multiple personalities is like hosting a kegger in your brain.

That's the best they could pull from the wreckage? This is what Diablo Cody has wrought of her Academy Award gold?

Why is the show insulting and to whom? People afflicted with dissociative identity disorder probably do not feel like they are hosting keggers--in their minds or otherwise--ever, but I can't precisely speak to that. I have not known anyone afflicted with dissociative identity disorder. I have, however, known schizophrenics with less sit-com compatible forms of the disease and they, to a person, are most assuredly not hosting frat mixers in their brains.

On a broader scale of offensiveness, why is Collete's "normal/original/baseline" persona Tara? Tara is, as described in the show's literature,

...a working mother of two who paints nursery room murals that totally rock and sometimes doesn’t feel like herself.

No, Showtime, you rock--you self-serving cable slum!

Why can't Tara's "real" personalility be the dude? That can't happen of course because no woman would ever really have a male personality? Certainly not on Showtime. Though I have etched in my mind several brilliant and enduring images to the contrary from the recently closed Catherine Opie retrospective at the Guggenheim. Her photo masterpieces of diversely gender identified individuals and families display more genuine humanity than a lifetime of Showtime.

Of course it would be even more beyond the pale for the brain trust behind the show [among them Steven Spielberg] to contemplate Collette's normal personality as being the retro mom, Alice. Alice, again from the literature,

...is the perfect homemaker who believes in good, traditional values and bakes cakes that would make Betty Crocker jealous.

It would have been completely too risque for Alice to have been her "real" personality. At least Hilary Swank made lady dudes sort of cool, but traditional homemakers?

Neither Buddy nor Alice could be real people in Showtime demographic land, they are merely funny and pathetic ciphers compared to the real women meant to watch the show [as Showtime attempts to stuff more and more working mothers of two into its dope dealing, bogus lesbian pie hole]. No doubt, however, we will come to love her inferior, loser personalities in spite of how superior we [and Tara] are to them. Yech.

Futrhermore, as a dude, I get pretty insulted by the way some women actors play men. Milton Berle had more insight into women when he played one [wigless and smoking a cigar] than Collette has into men when she plays Buck who...

...is a fan of beer and motorcycles who’s always up for a good night at he titty bar and isn’t afraid to kick some ass.

Wow! Could this project get any more nuanced?

But hey, lest the men folk become put off, The United States of Tara has shoe-horned in one more personality to appease us. Just for us emotionally stunted dudes out there forced to watch the show with our de rigueur mothers of two, they chucked in a hot teenager personality for Collette! Count me in!

Yech again.

It's a pity that Collette, who broke into film as a talented young actress playing a young woman totally against stereotype in "Muriel's Wedding," has chosen to play to and abuse so many stereotypes in what reeks of eau de talented actress vehicle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a cake to bake.

No, Martha

Martha Rosler
Great Power
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th St. [btwn 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.744.7400, www.miandn.com

Sept 6 – October 11, 2008

The entrance to Martha Rosler’s show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was blocked off by a black and chrome turnstile. With no written explanation. I was told that I had to pay a quarter to be able to gain entrance to the show. I was told that it was for charity—Artists Against Whatever. I was also told I wouldn’t be able to get anything else like it for a quarter.

It would be easy to make comments here about not wanting to pay money to see photo-collages, but that is not the point [and Jerry Saltz made it better: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/] . The point is that being able to go to galleries free is one of the greatest gifts we are given and I don’t want that taken away. While a quarter is indeed cheap, I’m old enough to remember when we were told that paying for tv would be a great idea and that it would only ever be for a tiny fee.

Worse though is that Rosler’s strategy is, writ small, the exact kind of left wing tyranny that turned so many people off to most of the other right headed thinking embraced by progressives. It provided kindling for so much of the reactionary behavior of the past 30 years because it turned so many people so decidedly off.

Consider that my .$25, Martha.


Yes, Richard

Richard Kern

Feature Inc., 276 Bowery [just below Houston], New York, NY 10012, 212.675.7772, http://www.featureinc.com/ October 2 - November 1, 2008

I was on my way up the Bowery to visit the new Feature for the first time. I ran into Deb. I hadn’t seen Deb in a long time. I told her I was on my way to visit the new Feature for the first time. We talked about Richard Kern. She had seen the show and told me he was revisiting his toothpaste cum shots. She told me she had come up with that idea when she posed for him back in the day. She didn’t want to take her clothes off and did that instead. She’s that girl with the braces.

I am not sure why I don’t hate Richard Kern. He has the exact job I would love to have, and yet I don’t resent him for it. It is not hard to understand why. Like Helmut Newton before him and unlike Larry Clarke, Kern seems to be honest, professional and non-exploitative [or as non-exploitative as one can be in these things] about what he does. He’s also really good at it. I don’t know if he is good at finding sexy women or finding women sexy. Either way [or both] there is no denying that the kind of old school pornography that Richard Kern practices oozes a love of women. Kern’s women seem most decidedly in charge of their sexuality. Go to a Richard Kern exhibition and you will leave it looking at the world differently [that’s what art does for you]. You will be surprised to find all the sexy out there. Women you might otherwise have overlooked, Kern finds them and makes you want them and it seems like you can have them because they seem to want you, want sex. These are not women who secretly want to be spanked and hope you catch on; these are women who pull down their pants, slap their asses and tell you to step up and smack it like a man.

But I digress.

Just as Morandi is the painters’ painter, Richard Kern is the pornographers’ pornographer. The internet has served to explode the porn phenomenon and saturate our consciousnesses and our cookies. It has not, however, succeeded in undercutting or diminishing Kern’s work, because, like desire, porn is infinite and like the priapus continually [we hope] reconstituting itself. In this show Kern has borrowed back from the web with upskirts, wet t-shirts and two girls in a tub—all now staple genres. He even includes among some of his framed shots the actual panties worn by, and/or shared by his models [order now].

No matter what pops up in my inbox or google searches, few experiences will ever outstrip the times I spent pouring over books of Kern’s pics at the old St. Marks’ Bookstore back in the day. I stood there among my fellow hipster art book aficionados hungrily poring over each page and with each page, I was laid bare, seduced and dismissed by one dirty ev girl after another. I was left sweaty, exhausted and utterly in love. Stay hard dude.

The ARTHOLE Is Back!

I wrote the entry below last January fully intending to continue my sporadic contributions to this blog. I am well aware of the fact that in the two plus years I’ve posted to this blog I have consistently missed the point of the whole format which is to quickly spew out commentary. Though anally and orally expulsive by nature, I have chosen to interpret this most logorrheaic of forms in a completely tight-assed manner. Like an idiot I chose to edit my work!

Despite how tightly I grip onto my words, I never intended this nearly yearlong gap to ensue. That was another matter. The key to the break, and my almost near complete abandonment of art writing, lies in my ultimate response to the new New Museum as explicated below. I was dispirited.

The cause of that dispiriting is flushed out as specifically as I could manage below. My reaction to the space was so negative that I thought it had to be me and so I held off printing it. However, my one visit to that museum is something I replay over and over in my head, and so I have come to believe it means something.

What I believe my response to the museum means, and why I believe it is worth publishing [and resuming writing] is because I have managed to find a nugget of cultural and artistic relevance in all this. Even if most culture has ceased to resonate for me and even if I have become yet another burnt out art writer, there is something emblematic in the failure of the institutions that were responsible for the creation of the museum and the failure of the institutions whose job it was to receive that creation that makes the phenomenon resonate beyond the reality of it being one more crappy contemporary museum. These institutional failures function as the one truly cultural gesture embedded in the whole painful affair. They echo the litany of disasters our think tanks, government and press have perpetrated on the world at large in the past 8 years with precious little, if any, retribution. SANAA keeps designing. Fukuyama keeps publishing.


Bad Museum



For all the bullshit written about architecture, all the journals and magazines and newspaper articles, for all the conferences and talks and symposiums, for all the fact finding missions and juried contests, for all the seminars and lovely scale models and computer animations, board presentation and board reviews and for all the MONEY spent on all these things all in the name of architecture, why is it that none of these a-wipes know fuck-all or give fuck-all about a simple little thing called flow?

The MOMA re-do is infuriating. In a one billion dollar boondoggle swipe of his tidy hand, Tanaguchi managed to bind Prometheus—and in so doing shackle the greatest collection of modern art in the world. The Rose Center is simply annoying—critics love it because it looks good from the outside, but let’s say you actually want to, uh, go from point “A” to point “B” within the structure. Try it; it’s fucktarded. The new New Museum is something else entirely. The new New Museum is…dispiriting.

It took me a moment to find the word. I am normally fairly glib, but I could not find the word. I could not find the word because it was not a word I usually feel. Especially when I go to museums.

I have been to folk museums in tenements in Lublin and in white washed villages in Bulgaria. I have been to too many Holocaust and Concentration Camp Museums. I have been to children’s museums, craft museums and science museums. I have been to the Tolstoy museum and admired the leather wheels on the bicycle he took up riding when he was 70. I have been to museums tucked away in ancient synagogues, cathedrals and mosques. I did the Hermitage in one day: long story.

My first museum was the Brooklyn. I loved it for its large slowly unraveling charm, the giant totem poles, Aztec temple models and American paintings. I loved it for the treasure hunts it offered: my mom and I would track down a list of items tucked away in paintings and sculptures and amid period rooms. It taught me to look in an active way. We did this while my sister took art classes. I was too young for classes. I was 4.

From then on and within the scores of other museums I subsequently visited and revisited, I have felt every range of emotion. I have wept and mourned in museums. I have fallen in love and been heartbroken in museums. I have become abject, inspired and even redeemed within the walls of the world's museums great and small. Even when museums were bad or pathetic, I could find some perverse humor in them, some poignancy or bittersweet pain. Something. Never in my life have I been dispirited. After descending from the 5th to the 2nd floor galleries in the New Museum, I was at last dispirited.

Why?

In the past decade or so, something has been creeping into the equation of museum going. That something else has involved the complicity of the architect, the museum board and the various institutions that revolved around them. There are and have been many new museums and museum expansions that took place prior to this last decade. But never before were so many of these projects so intrusive and obstrusive. Never before had they promised so much, seemed so aware of their tasks, created so much bullshit and bullshit literature ululating their projects, and yet ultimately delivered so little. Never before had these projects so consistently failed to deliver and on such grand and depressing scales.

In spite of all the missions statements and douche bag verbiage generated around museums, especially contemporary museums, as they blather about community and education and environments, all museums have pretty much the same mission: to exhibit whatever it is they want to exhibit in the best manner possible. It doesn’t matter if your purview is Etruscan Art or middling contemporary art with political/global leanings: you put the shows up, write the wall texts, stock the the gift shop and open the fucker up.

I’ve seen enough contemporary museums to know and resignedly understand that most contemporary architects hate most contemporary art and find it a nuisance even when building spaces for it. Consequently, my expectations were low when I went to the New Museum. However, I was suspicious of my suspicion of star-chitecture. Perhaps I was just jealous? Perhaps I was merely overreacting to what my insecurities perceived as a spate of over-hyped, overfunded public works that failed to function for the actual living, breathing public despite all the lip service that was paid to said public.

Not wanting to let my overarching bitterness color my judgment [yet again], I walked up the Bowery with an open mind.

From a distance the building’s outer skin brought to mind the fences on roof gyms in schools across New York City. As I drew nearer though, it brought to mind less chain link fences than speaker covers, in fact the whole thing could be pass for an oversized overdesigned iPod dock. That’s ok. What's more, the thing sits fairly well on the street, though the big glass opening with the art nerds hanging out in front not smoking seems like an open wound in the street—a gash infected with arties such as myself. Not wanting my self-loathing to overwhelm me, I kept an open mind.

The lobby was fine if too small: open, and all done up in grays and whites and blacks. Someone’s LED boxes crawled with second generation Holzer style platitudes. Very New Museum – they’re entitled. It’s their purview.

I wanted to start at the top and work my way down. The three elevators are an increase on the available elevator space at the far larger and even more appallingly laid out MOMA, and still we waited. The very top was reserved for offices. The 5th floor, the highest floor open to the public, is the site for the obligatory study center. [What, if not study, are we meant to be doing on the other floors?] The center consisted of some photos of the neighborhood the museum was in the process of paving over and a very nice reading room that lead to some very tony looking offices. The exhibit proper started on the 4th floor and featured an assortment of new sculpture mostly based on crap and crap assemblages, again all very New Museum and that’s fine—it’s their purview.

The room itself was very tall and fairly big and all on one side of the elevator banks. Not wanting to wait for the elevators again, never wanting to wait for the elevators again, I ducked into the unmarked stairwell the runs down the off center of the building. A couple below me were stopped half way down the grand height of the next floor because they were unsure whether the stairs opened onto the 3rd floor or only onto the lobby. There was no signage hung on the already cracking cement that comprised the stairs.

With a little encouragement, I got us all to the next floor: another big fluorescent bin with a little more to it because of its stair feature. Starchitects don’t design well formed and functioning spaces; they design features. Think about it: what newish structure doesn’t have a skin- or glass- or water- or stair-feature? This stair-feature is long and thin and runs all the way down to the second floor behind the enclosed and unmarked un-featured actual staircase. Nevermind that halfway down the feature a speaker droned out a voice so nasal and annoying that you automatically wanted to disagree with everything it said. Nevermind that: at least at last some flow! A way to get from one floor to the next without waiting or opening up a door into a blind stairwell! The stair-feature also had a light-feature—extremely self and, no doubt, energy conscious incandescent style fluorescents that stuck out perpendicularly from the wall. Both these lights and the overhead lights in the galleries proper cast such a harsh hue that I pity the paintings that will ever have to hang here [as of my visit the wall collages that were to be part of the crap show were not yet up]. I’m hardly a lighting expert, but even I know that there are warm fluorescent options available. If only there were some neighborhood in New York City where a person could go and explore lighting options…

Done with the third floor I pinned all my hopes on the 2nd floor grand gallery. The 5th through 3rd floors of this BRAND NEW museum were distinctly nothing much. I’d already had enough of the stunted basement at the beginning of my visit. If there were any hope that this museum, after all the time and all the hype, would not be joining the ranks of the other overhyped and flowtarded, money wasting, shitbag museums and museum expansions that have infected this city---if there were any hope it lay in the second floor.

I went around the gallery bin on the 3rd floor to resume the long stair and take it down to the 2nd floor. But no monsieur. I had forgotten. The long thin stair being a stair-feature was unburdened by such pedestrians matters as, well, pedestrians. Where it should have continued, the stair feature merely ended. The space beneath the stair from the 4th to the 3rd was a vast narrow wasted space with a packing crate leaning against one wall—and to make sure that no one attempted to activate the space, it was roped off. Roped off dead space in a urban micro museum?!? Children with blocks make better use of space in buildings they intend to destroy by chucking action-figures at them. Children with blocks have more consideration for the placement of said action figures in their sweet doomed structures then SANAA had for us poor sap, sucker, pant-shitter, momma boy visitards.

So it was back to the blind stairwell, and, at last, clutching what feathers were still left un-plucked of my hope, I burst onto the grand 2nd floor. And at last: another even bigger bin! More fluorescents!! And this time instead of stair feature or a psyche out stair feature on the other side of the elevator bank, there was an long narrow gallery featuring actual art work!!!

And that was it. There was nothing else to be had of it. Millions of dollars and millions of words and all we got, pretty much, was three big rooms improperly connected.

Dispiriting isn’t it?

Does anyone who writes about, designs or selects these things actually visit museums?

The Bowery’s Up

I went to the Bowery the other day. I went to see some shows, but I also went to the Doughnut Plant and Pickle Guys. I had a great time. It's exhilarating to view art in the midst of life and not amid a sterile warren of sameness, long blocks and huge void galleries [sorry Chelsea]. I can’t say I know the galleries on the ground on the Lower East Side well, but even between Envoy [see below] and the imminent return of Feature to its downtown roots, I find myself excited about the prospect of an afternoon viewing art there as I haven’t been since the last fully vested days of Soho!

PIckle Guys, 49 Essex St. [betwn. Grand & Hester STs.], 888.4.PICKLE, pickleguys@yahoo.com, http://www.nycpickleguys.com/index.html.

Doughnut Plant, 379 Grand St. [betwn. Norfolk & Suffolk Sts.], 212.505.3700, http://www.doughnutplant.com.



Kanishka Raja: In the Future No One Will Have a Past
Through November 17

Envoy Gallery, 131 Chrystie St [betwn. Broome & Delancey Sts.], 212.226.4555, office@envoygallery.com, http://www.envoygallery.com.

I do not seek affirmation in what I do very often, yet it is thrilling when on that rare occasion affirmation seeks me out. Kanishka Raja’s project touches upon so many of the themes with which I’ve been enthralled over the years:
1. He uses constructed landscapes in one spur of his work and multiple versions of remembered spaces in another.
2. His work has spurs.
3. He uses photos, but in purely handmade paintings.
4. He likes patterns and screens.
5. He likes smoke.
6. He is earnest in his project.
7. His paintings are linked to each other in sequence.
8. The world he creates is based on and directly in reference to this world.
9. He likes to paint.
Except for my family members, I don’t have nine reasons for liking most anything or anybody. There’s so much to absorb in the downtown show alone [his memory paintings are up at Tilton] that I really need a re-view. However, of what I’ve managed to absorb, In The Future No One Will Have A Past (part 5) rocks the hardest because in it the paint begins to take on a life beyond the project and the composition it has been called on to serve—a true glimpse of the future! Rock on Kanishka!

Criminalized Apples
Come Halloween, who among us has not occasionally felt the urge to embed razor blades in crisp ripe apples, dip those apples in yummy candy or caramel coatings and serve them up on sticks to eager ghosts, goblins, witches and princesses?! Or simply sprinkle roach powder on fresh popped popcorn? But then you think:
1. Ok, but too much work.
2. Homemade stuff is easily traceable back to its source.
3. I’ll come off like some homemade hippie cheapskate even before I’m arrested and my house will probably get egged.
4. The candy industry, in the face of a surge in homemade hippie cheapskate types in the late 60s/early 70s, managed to convince the American public that anyone handing out homemade treats on Halloween is either:
a. A serial killer
b. Homemade hippie cheapskate type
Thus, even if you do decide to go to the trouble of doctoring you own homemade treats, most kids are trained to throw the stuff out and call the police on your striped and drawstring panted ass.

So, what’s a Halloween tamperer to do? Sadly, there’s not much that can be done. I know, I know, it’s tempting to give in and just waddle down to the local Duance Reades and buy a bag of mini O’Henrys or Snickers. Sure, it’s easy and anonymous enough to buy the candy and use one of Uncle Ed’s (dirty) insulin needles to shoot a bit of “I’m sleepy” juice into the heart of a Three Musketeer bar. But is it truly feasible and worthwhile? Let’s consider:
1. Where’s the fun in doing that?
2. How will anyone ever know it’s you? On any given Halloween there are about 3 million Milky Ways floating around—no one could ever trace one poisonous bar to one poisonous person. How will you ever get your 15 minutes of fame and ripped from the headlines tv emulation?
3. Little do most prospective candy tamperers know it, but the same candy industry that criminalized homemade Halloween treats also invented impervious candy. If you’re a first-time candy tamperer, you may not know it, but what looks to the naked eye a lot like a lump of variegated corn syrup wrapped in brightly colored paper is really a “smart” nugget. “Factory sealed” does not just mean that the wrapper has been machined glued shut in a factory manned by underpaid workers who just lost their pensions and health benefits and who would, therefore, never in a million years have any motivation to sabotage their company by tampering with its product. No, my friends, “factory sealed” means hermetically sealed in a wrapper that only looks like paper, but is really a micro-shield impervious to needles, gases or even radiation of any kind. The only method of penetrating these wrappers is with the use of fat little fingers eager for more, more, more!

The only thing for a would-be candy tamperer/apple trapper/popcorn poisoner to do is relent and give up on the whole urge. The Mars company and others like it, through their wisdom and care, have made it impossible for the average ne’er do well to ne’er do well. The only way our children can be harmed now on Halloween is via the traditional twin pillars of sugar and fat. The only thing left for those of us who prefer trick to treats is to give up on the whole treat giving business all together. Get out of the house and do a little trick or treating yourself. Dress up like a homemade hippie cheapskate handing out homemade treats. That’ll scare the crap out of them.

Design Flaws

Due to circumstances beyond our control [too much wine at a benefit auction], we ended up renting a house in Maine for a week in August. Camden, Maine—the prettiest town in Maine—or so we were told. What we were not told is that US 1 runs directly through the town as it does through so many of Maine’s charming coastal villages. The “1” it would seem stands for “the ‘1’ and only road in Maine.” Without exaggeration there was more traffic on that road then on 106th St. on any given day. A perpetual flow made more pokey because in Maine if a pedestrian so much as dangles a pinky toe onto the road, all traffic must instantly stop. This means that anytime a tourist can’t decide which side of the street to stroll down, coastal Maine grinds to a halt. And there was no shortage of pedestrians. The highway was jammed with broken heroes: tow headed kids and their clenched parents sprinkled in among the heartier locals—white haired ruddy skinned men and women nearly alike to one another with their large sunglasses, high pants and low breasts. And who says WASPs don’t age well?

Here’s what else I learned about WASPs on my summer vacation:

1. They lack joie de vivre.
2. Not only do they lack joie do vivre, but to the WASP, in the cold stone sober light of day, Joie de Vivre and Bonhomie are just two more towns in France they’ll never visit unless forced to as part of an invading army.
3. They’re generally much better at golf than I.

On a less cantankerous note: Belfast is a lovely town. If you go there and choose to take a Lobstering Cruise on the Good Return, afterwards have Captain Melissa Terry direct you to her uncle, Mike Hutchings. He’s the harbor master and he sells lobster, clams and crabs from his home a little bit inland. Generally speaking, as we slowly learned, if you want to get away from the brutal triaffic and $40 lobsters, you have to go a little bit inland—it’s a whole other Maine.

http://www.belfastbaycruises.com/cruiseinformation.html

Mike Hutchings, M&L Seafood, 638 Beach Road, Lincolnville, ME 04849, 207.763.3983.

iMiracle

The other day I searched through all my 46 of my Ween songs for a particular dittie. I couldn’t remember the piece’s title but I had a sense of what it might be called. Finally despairing of finding it, I flipped on “Shuffle Songs.” The song I had been searching for popped up first: Mutherfuker by Beck not Ween. The odds of that occurring: 1 in 2587.

My erstwhile assistant told me that kind of stuff happens to her all the time. Any other icoincidences out there?



The End of the Ave

Beth and I were painting the attic floor of what was to become the boys’ bedroom of our brand new 1840’s farmhouse just up Rte. 217 from Philmont, NY. As we were spreading newspapers, Beth noticed Edward Avedesian’s NY Times obituary among them. Avedesian had died in a nursing home about ½ a mile down Rte. 217 from our brand new 1840’s farmhouse.

Back in 1994 when I was a younger art writer still happily careening about what was still a gallery packed Soho, I came across the works of Avedesian in a little storefront gallery off Sullivan St. The gallery was run by a NY city public school science teacher named Mitchell Algus. That far corner of Soho soon became my de facto home away from home, and Mitchell’s first show of Avedesian’s there blew my fucking mind.

The Avedesian show was one of the first strands of many lost threads that Algus gathered for those of us who were lucky enough to find our way to him. Many of Algus’ lost lights were brilliant and some were better left unlit, but none were as gripping or revelatory as those early Avedesians. Here were flat abstractions that were pure sight: the first glimmer of post hypnotic pop op absent any of the acid tainted automations that were to color most subsequent efforts. Avedesian left those paintings as a gift for us and continued along his path.

The rest of his path may not have been for most of us: “textured” abstractions, Birchfieldesque landscapes and Paul Cadmus redux—manly men fixing cars in the Hudson valley, but it was Edward’s path and he diligently followed it; career be damned. That’s the way an artist does it.


Gandalf’s Staff

Some very thoughtful people made it possible for Beth and me to be in the center of the front row of the Harvey Theater for the first U.S. night of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. I’d always loved Lear and I really wanted to see Sir Ian’s stab at it. I won’t kid you: Magneto and Gandalf sealed the deal for me with Mckellan—in my book he earned his peerage just for the way he stood there when he first entered as Gandalf the White in Two Towers. Sir Ian did not disappoint, but Trevor Nunn and most of the RSC did.

Whereas McKellan gave it his all to lend Lear the air of verisimilitude, the rest of the company and the production mostly did everything but: we had a slow motion suicide by a poor old Gloucester who seemed, like many in the cast, to be still jet lagged. Scary to think they might all be tired given that the company will be doing double duty on Lear and The Seagull—sometimes in the same day. The stage fights were about as real looking as those in old Star Trek episodes, and, when the Fool was hung in plain sight on stage, he struggled about as valiantly as Paris Hilton would against a strip search.

Speaking of stripping: in a subplot that parallels Cordelia’s plight, Gloucester’s son, Edgar, is cast out and criminalized. In order to protect himself he takes on the persona of Mad Tom, strips off his clothes, rends his flesh and rolls around in the mud. In the text there are numerous references to Tom being naked, but in this production he wears a loin cloth. Even though the dude playing Tom and the rest of the cast, chose to be soft in their choices, Sir Ian refused to rest on his laurels. When the rapidly deteriorating Lear decides to emulate Mad Tom, our valiant hero [McKellan not Lear] decides to get real and truly naked in the middle of the stage. And there it was: Gandalf’s staff waving in the breeze and me and the mrs. just 10 feet away.

--You shall not pass!

You bet your flat white ass we won’t—now put that thing away before you put out an eye, pal!

Even more distracting than Sir Ian’s Willy, and for reasons that I’ve yet to figure out, Trevor Nunn dressed the cast like 19th Century Russians. It did not seem as if there were any point to that choice besides his wanting to look at a different era of clothing for a change; there’s not a lot of coin to be made going after late Czarist Russia. If Nunn were looking to make political parallels why not put them in Blue Brooks Brothers suits with red ties and be done with it, or just do the friggin thing right:

Lear is a an all-out pagan bloodbath and blood rite. It starts as if it were the ending to a traditional Shakespearian comedy--as a buildup to a wedding, and then something goes horribly, horribly wrong. One old man’s folly leads to 10 of the cast killed by the entire spectrum of means [Shakespeare really emptied his kit bag out in this his last tragedy] and a war between England and France [though most anything could have caused that back then]. What we are left with after this bloodletting is no burst of wisdom or moment of clarity [or lasting democracy], but rather just “Howl, howl, howl.”

Nunn made sure we were aware of the pagan aspect of Lear’s time. When characters in the play beseeched the heavens, they did not pray to JC or his Dad, but most pointedly to pagan gods instead. Too bad Nunn didn’t also stage the play as the pre-Christian, pre-Roman primal bloodletting the damn thing was crying out to be and put the fire to his players to boot. Howl, howl, howl…

Jerry Saltz’s Balls

Jerry Saltz has more hair on his balls than any other art critic has on his balls [or her ovaries]. Not only does he speak truth to power, but unlike the rest of us safely sniping from the sides, Saltz goes after power he undoubtedly rubs elbows with at this function or that. In an art world in which people are notorious for not putting anything at risk ever—even when there’s precious little to risk—Saltz continues to go all in. He is making the most of his new perch at New York, slowly turning it into a bully pulpit. Bully for you, Jerry. Rave on.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/37639/index1.html