jeffery mcnary

FAVORITE POEM PROJECT HITS CHICAGO

2011-03-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

(Chicago, IL) In the fine tradition of National Poetry Month, writers Keith Peterson and Jeffery McNary will host a, 'Favorite Poem Project' read on Friday, April 8th at 'Selected Works Books', 410 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

Participants are encourage to read their favorite published poem by a writer of their choice. The Project was intitiated by former Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky in

1997 to further an appreciation of poetry.

The event will begin at 6 PM and conclude at 9 PM.

(photo: robert pinsky with jeffery mcnary)

canticle

2010-07-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

canticle… je vous ai voulu pour toujours
july, 2010
jeffery mcnary

arriving single-edged in all her forms...
amidst the swirling mist, un-veiled,
treasured and high minded...comes the rain-goddess,
with her wind blown hair... something from a fairy tale,
deliberate
and dressed for the occasion,
tipped sideward with invitations to view the world upside-down she smiled…
and waved…she behaved in that way....

ah, there you are…as a foreign film full of fiction and giggle…
there’s you,
enchanted,
repairing detachment with the giddy while draped in the elegance of your purposed simplicity… lingering long in scenes all of your own…there’s you…
…welcoming in the distance…

we’re collected works now …formed by believing, possibly defying…
we’re quick moments…messages startling and sudden…waded through…
we’re constructed histories with layers of edits...mediums carved from implication…
of passions and ambitions wailing…of stalled out anthems…
we both know paths. dicta and destinations,
should you care to notice…are more than meet the eye now

ah, there you are…amid the swish of painted, rustling silks with
your magic lamp.. your uncommon way…your roots grown deeper
than asked for from your traditional sources and rituals…
those grandly imperfect episodes of revealing, un-yielding, viewed
…with others eyes and subtle public magic…

i’ve seen those pilloried in past lives...faces on stamps. i saw a republic, with eyes missing. i believed in the wild and in spring, though not exactly. then i saw autumn
with a thousand faces at the door...i saw those who hated very much...those of whom
the poets sang and the ancients warned...then i saw you, with your warnings
and your own wide unblinking eyes.. ‘AAs’ as you said...shimmering in my desert...

i wanted to settle properly…brazenly…into casual tones…to wash your hair
with herbs…to wipe the moon with promise while experiencing the harmony
of all that without conjured things in patterns and alchemy…without
threads running between us. but mockingly you’ve kept a straight face,
…swearing off fantasy, and in the fullness of our brief days i dreamt your sigh…
……echoing…“envie de te toucher, tu es loin”… as i stepped from the shade and
……… righteously stepped back into circulation…now writing such things…

…there are no tenses today…no wrong answers…there’s just your rhapsody
…and little to explain, only to understand...and your way…your airy, ethereal way…
as fragile and gentle as a saffron metaphor
…as naked trees in a falling rain

i have left a chest of things there
…..linen and candles
……….things for the return
……………things and oils of earth tones and magus

listen for me…listen for my calling

ZG GALLERY SPRING GROUP SHOW

2010-05-03T17:15:00.000-07:00

April 16 – May 22
jeffery mcnary
The ZG Gallery opened its powerful Spring Group Show with the works of thirteen artists, each laying out their individual imagery along side stylistic differences in a generalized dissociation. There is a delicate balance in such a vivid experience, with many of the works holding connections to the “natural”, the exhibitions curator, Meg Sheehy points out, “The show is seasonal, and serves as a boost and equal exposure. It’s a profile of the Gallery and demonstrates the kind of work we’ll be showing.” These are pieces to see, not just to look at.

Queried on her pieces, Anna Joelsdottir shared early on, “I understand that they have one wall and good breathing space which is tricky in a group show of many”. Joelsdottir’s work, “no one knew or will ever know”, mixed media on Mylar, reflects a softening adjective, ethereal which lingers on from her most recent exhibition at the gallery. “The transparency creates an added depth/space effect that is hard to do on canvas or paper”, she shares. “I started to use mylar for installation purposes, folded in 3d you wrote about my installation at Zg last summer”, reminding me of a previous review. The artist remains eager to explore how this would work, flat, as individual paintings. This is one such piece which has made her métier. “I also wanted to see if I could do small paintings that look like they are large or could be large.”

Ben Butler cast an enigmatic captivating slice of the show with an, ‘untitled’, ink with earl grey tea, presenting an organic feel. With his system the viewer comes upon small boxes with tiny X’s through them, establishing an overall unique design while producing somewhat of a meditative state with relaxed grace.

The viewer is casually launched in a different direction and toward a different style with Martina Nehrling’s bold, bright colors and their own language. “Often I begin a painting with an agenda of content and formal strategies in mind,” Nehrling says. “But sometimes I just start, acting on a whim. I was turned on by the vibrancy of acrylic colors and when I discovered an acrylic medium that created a texture and shine similar to the stand oil I most often combined with oil paint I was pretty much committed to continuing with acrylics, at least for a while,” she adds.

Her, “Keeping Faith”, acrylic on canvas, is a departure from her normal, typical brush strokes. There is controlled chaos in this work. That ‘language of color’ steps up, speaking loud and clear. The work is illuminating. The freshness of the brush stroke and sense of spontaneity on the surface is essential to the directness of this language. “I love the immediacy of painting”, Nehrling shares. “Probably most painters would admit to this on some. I use acrylic paint to be specific. I love the buttery texture and elemental odors of painting with oils but I switched from oils to acrylic paint to more expediently pour and combine different consistencies of paint.”
The art of Molly Briggs, Ben Butler, Amy Casey, Bill Frederick, Dan Gamble, Gregory Jacobsen, Mark Murphy, Martina Nehrling, and Jackie Tileston also hold even keel in the exhibition. As does the calming, “Still”, auto paint on Plexiglas, of Steve Hough.

Justin Henry Miller emerges more curio vs. ornament. These pieces develop, “out of conglomerating the leftovers or detritus”, Miller holds of his contributions to the show. “Like these byproducts, the vintage photos I collect have been forgotten or discarded. I seek to resurrect these commemorations and give them new life.” Miller also appears intrigued in changing the narratives in these photos with his addition of paint elements. Figures in these images have the potential to operate as armatures for stories that extend beyond their original context.

“My paintings on vintage photographs begin with a search for images that interest me in some way. I am drawn to personalities with intriguing poses, facial expressions, and attire”, he says. In his, "War Changes a Man", oil on photograph, the artist plays off the central figure's uniform and his relationship to his proud parents. “In my mind he could be a soldier who has returned from a war, now altered by the effects of that endeavor, but still loved by his family”, Miller adds. There are traces of Man Ray beneath the fold(s).

The show is more than an accumulation of the art of painters having visited upon the ZG in the past. There appears an innate desire in these works, a common effort and intelligent attitude to touch upon the now, the day-to-day. Group shows of this size hold the risk of being unforgiving. This exhibition sidesteps all of that.

MAUVAIS GARCONS

2010-04-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

MAÇON de NOELLE - mauvais garçons Galerie de Thomas Robertello 9 avril-5 juin 2010 - jeffery mcnary Dans, les « mauvais garçons, » une exposition soloe de son travail, maçon de Noelle fournit une fin vers le haut, un regard aux notions « de la masculinité hysterique ». Les « mauvais garçons », elle écrit, « est au sujet de la représentation de la masculinité, ou du drag de `de la masculinité, et comment ce drag de `est ouvré par des vêtements, accessoires, ou dans l'esthétique du regard fixe cinématographique de `. ' » Mais l'exposition, actuellement à la galerie de Thomas Robertello, est environ, et fait, la manière davantage que cela. Ici l'artiste, au lieu de fournir les toiles de table propres artistiques, remet à zéro le secteur dinant entier avec une complexité critique et, prend la visionneuse sur un tour sauvage dans un monde de l'ultra-violence et des images terrifiantes souvent anesthésiées sur l'Evening News. Il cliquette les thèmes souvent vagues, d'utilisé d'un monde d'art développé accoutumé juste à l'embrouillement à travers, et roule, de mode synchronisée, par des événements et des communautés où vous ne voulez pas débarquer ou baiser en passant autour. On peut entendre le tir, juste au sujet de l'odeur la cordite. N'est aucune abstraction. Plutôt elle sonne de la trompette un paiement des droits artistiques et plonge profondément dans les pores de la poteau-modernité et de l'écoulement d'enveloppement d'un monde de plus en plus rugueux et dangereux accompagnant la période. « Je suis intéressé par l'idée du masculinity hysterique de `dans la référence à cette exposition, » des parts de maçon. « L'hysterique de mot étant dérivé de l'anatomie femelle mais est tourné sur sa tête comme comportement distinctement irrationnel des hommes et des garçons que dans la crainte de reconnaître leurs propres faiblesses cherchez à effacer des faiblesses de `par la violence et accessorizing. » Dans, le `rien beaucoup s'est produit aujourd'hui (pour Eric et Dylan) », 12pt. le coton a compté le X-point 32 x 40, l'artiste combine un travail croix-piqué, une image pixelated de Columbine haut School' ; vidéo surveillance de cafétéria de s prise pendant le massacre du 20 avril 1999. Son effort de cinq ans saisit l'image iconique représentant 1/30 d'une seconde de l'événement. Il est préparé comme « tissu ou évidence de deuil », et sert de taon à rouvrir de vieilles blessures. Il y a un doux, shadowiness au morceau. « J'ai commencé par le milieu du croix-point, et ai été dessiné au croix-point pour son tactility, la connaissance et le rapport avec le Pixel, » indique l'artiste. « La déformation de l'image une fois transformée en stitchery a semblé se rapporter bien à la qualité à basse résolution de la longueur de surveillance. » La continuation, « quant au sujet, Columbine s'est juste sentie exacte. Elle s'est sentie défaite, comme si elle a eu besoin de plus d'attention qu'elle a été eue les moyens, j'a dû la traiter d'une manière quelconque. » « Il y a une exploration de temps dans le travail. L'image iconique représente 1/30 d'une seconde de l'événement chez Columbine », elle continue. « Ce 1/30 d'une seconde est devenu quelque chose un genre beaucoup plus grand d'évidence. Chaque couleur de soie de broderie correspond à un Pixel sur mon écran d'ordinateur. Ce morceau est prévu pour rouvrir des blessures. La fois passée nous les avons fermées vers le haut que nous n'avons pas obtenu tout le poison dehors. J'essaye de découvrir quelque chose. Les meurtres de Columbine ont irrité la conscience publique pour demander pourquoi. Je ne pense pas qu'elle était assez. La plupart des personnes ont trouvé une réponse à cette question qui s'est insérée bien dans leur worldview et a alors cessé de demander. « Rien ne s'est beaucoup produit aujourd'hui » est prévu pour la faire irritant encore. » Un dilemme horrible, clairement. Avec, les « lettres d'amour », 39 mouchoirs brodés blancs, maçon revisite le mafia de manteau de fossé du `de Columbine par l'intermédiaire des écritures d'Eric Harris de membre. L'artiste pique soigneusement les mots et colère avec le fil noir, capturant la fureur et la crainte en termes comme, « aucun je ne suis pas fou. fou est juste un mot. à moi il n'a aucune signification. chacun est différent. mais la plupart d'entre vous des fuckheads dehors là dans la société, allant à vos travaux foutus journaliers et faisant vos choses shitty courantes journalières, je dis la baise vous et meurs. Si vous obteniez un problème avec mes pensées, venues dites moi et à mise à mort malade vous, parce que ......... le goddammit, les personnes mortes ne discutent pas ! ! Pour l'artiste, la surveillance implicite dans le travail, « rien s'est beaucoup produite aujourd'hui » est confrontée encore dedans, « partie de LAN », une instillation. Ces morceaux, l'artiste se reflète, « critique « le fetishization » de la surveillance esthétique dans la culture populaire. » La « partie de LAN », enregistrement vidéo de présents de l'armée américaine Force à bord des Irakiens d'un massacre d'hélicoptère d'Apache à travers par l'intermédiaire de la portée d'un modèle de menacer, fusil noir de tireur isolé de Remington M-700. Les écouteurs fournissent le bruit pour l'épisode, et par ceci, le téléspectateur devient participante. Combinés, ces morceaux, prises de maçon, « exposent le désir pour l'approbation publique par le drag'" hyper-masculin de `. « Je viens à mon travail d'un endroit de la crainte et de l'anéantissement. La sensation est proche de l'anéantissement sexuel ou de ne pas pouvoir trouver le bon mot, l'incapacité au temps d'arrêt ou comprendre la mort » le phénomène d'incliner-de-le-langue, » indique le maçon. « Plus spécifiquement je suis intéressé par la façon dont nous projetons nos craintes et désirs dans les objets culturels et alternativement comment ces technologies forment la construction de l'identité. » La « sonate », laser coupé sur le vélin, provient d'une vidéo d'Al-Qaeda décapitant. Ici l'artiste enlève le contenu visuel et réinterprète à la place l'horreur comme musique de feuille, et finalement le bruit. « Dans la sonate je remediated l'enregistrement vidéo des beheadings exécuté par Al-Qaeda pendant la dernière décennie. Les vidéos de décapitation qui sont prévues pour terroriser par la puissance de la vidéo ont été dépouillées de leur contenu visuel, » elle dit. « La sonate de mot signifie littéralement le sounded de `et est l'opposé de la cantate ou du `chanté. 'Cette transposition est apparentée à la traduction des images vidéo ou de la langue écrite dans l'objet de métier. Et met en référence thématique l'imagination de l'exécution masculine de la puissance dans la tentative de dominer par l'exposition explicite de la violence brutale. » Thomas Robertello, conservateur de l'exposition, et un flautist accompli est son propre droit, trouve les lancements et les rythmes du travail semblable à un raga indien du nord, avec l'energy mauvais de `à l'extrémité… dans elle est repos. L'exposition a des aspects de refroidissement, tout en uniformément contribuant à l'qui pique les actes agressifs esthétiques s'associaient souvent à la puissance masculine contre le doux, le fait main, le beau, le domestique. Elle des sooths, jure, précise et prêche. « Je suis principalement intéressé par la façon dont nous sommes manoeuvrés par non seulement le contenu du spectacle de médias mais par également le milieu des écrans d'ordinateur/télévision. En changeant la forme de contenu et du rapport spatial du spectateur avec le contenu », dit le maçon. « Je De-exprime les pensées de l'éditeur les images que j'emploie. Ceci ONU-qui empaquette fournit un espace alternatif pour la contemplation des événements spécifiques et a déstabilisé les médias tournent. » Quel prochain ? « J'ai actuellement commencé un nouveau corps de travail qui regarde le formalisme en tant que des moyens de comprendre l'esthétique représentative de la puissance. J'ai eu une pratique nomade pendant approximativement 5 années maintenant et ai récemment acquis un studio que j'attends avec intérêt une période d'expérimentation avec la forme et le milieu. » Bonne chance avec cela. Sûrement, si nous continuons à regarder des choses comme cet artiste la présente, nous sommes presque sûrs de s'ajuster d'une manière quelconque ou des autres.

justyna adamczyk : travaux recents

2010-01-25T14:11:00.000-08:00

Justyna Adamczyk : Travaux récents

à la galerie de l'EC Par le magasin d'art de Chicago

le 25 janvier 2010 dans comporté,

revues Par : jeffery mcnary

« Je ne veux pas communiquer directement avec les pensées des personnes voyant mon art. Je voudrais fournir une exposition de route qui tient compte de la réflexion personnelle », notes Justyna Adamczyk. Son exposition courante, de nouvelles peintures à la galerie de l'EC est une rangée provocante vers cette ambition. « Dans mon travail, pendant beaucoup d'années, j'ai essayé beaucoup de médias, mais avec le temps je me suis rendu compte que je parle sincèrement dans les médias qui peint. La peinture me donne l'occasion de présenter ses observations sur ma réalité subjective. Les liés au travail avec les problèmes insignifiants mais inévitables de fatigue de vie quotidienne. » Théoriquement, au moins, elle tient cela dans un monde fortement structuré, là est le besoin de connaître la croissance spirituelle. La « peinture est ma valve, qui permet l'évasion et les transforme en images dociles. » Le « cannibale », acrylique sur la toile, comme dans ses autres morceaux, semble spontané, avec l'artiste étant là, pas simplement la copiant. Ici ses roses et orange sont staggering, comme si les cheveux d'une silhouette ont été embrasés. La toile de brun non traité et grisâtre remet la peinture plus d'à la visionneuse. C'est un nouveau romantisme. D'une façon déterminante, ses nuances et tache sur le tissu, le rose en pastel, les bruns, jaunes des tonalités variables, ont lu à haute voix du tissu, comme si après avoir été environ pour des âges. C'a pu être sang desséché. C'a pu être des gouttes cancéreuses. « J'ai été toujours attiré aux travaux des artistes qui se passent et leur vue subjective de punk », elle dit. On interroge, a l'artiste retourné à l'adolescence dedans, « gamme des saveurs », acrylique sur la toile. N'énonçant pas son inspiration directement, plutôt il joue avec la couleur, avec des formes, et parfois les brosses au sujet de la présence esthétique avec les figures épineuses, plues au moment par des rêves et des complexes Jungian sous forme d'expérience de laboratoire courent sauvage sur le travail. Il y a un genre spécial et différent d'authenticité dans cette expérience. Dans ces images le téléspectateur trouve des associations d'autonomie et de couleur, des visions et des insinuations. Certains semblent salis, et errent au loin, mais à peine dans le mondain. Là les cycles sont courts, mais dans là des récits de forme de brièveté. Adamczyk espionne Frida, marque Ryden, prise de bec de Matthew, et Kim Sooja en tant qu'influences sur elle travail. « Ce sont des caractères dont j'ai appris beaucoup. Ils sont complètement différents, dans les vues de la réalité », elle dit. « En plus de ceci elles diffèrent personnellement et intimement. Une question importante pour moi est l'impact sur la visionneuse. Je recherche la langue qui permet au téléspectateur de sentir mon idée. » Il est difficile de trouver l'excès dans les peintures. Elles sont presque involontaires. La provocation d'Adamczyk est au coeur de l'exhibitionnisme artistique. « N'importe quelle idée semble être parfaite quand je l'ai obtenue dans mon esprit ou sur un croquis », elle dit, « mais la bataille commence à l'heure du transfert… le mouvement à la vraie image. J'essaye d'être aussi étroitement que possible à ce qui résulte de la première pensée ou impression. » Que, elle maintient, est l'impulsion à la création de l'image. Avec elle, des travaux sont créés et conduits par une inspiration très personnelle. Ils sont des offres… à nous… et au quel reste dans chacun de nous individuellement. Ceci devrait être apprécié. Les travaux de l'artiste a été exhibés dans une foule de lieu de rendez-vous comprenant Biennale de la peinture « Bielska Jesien 2009, Pologne ; 9 concours Gepperta, BWA Awangarda Wrocław, Pologne ; Peintres I-XII, galerie de Bestregarts - Francfort sur Main, Allemagne de polisch de Joung ; 30 Premio Internacional de Pintura De Caja De Estrémadure ; Plus ou moins, Musemu DA Ciencia e DA Industria - Porto, Portugal et Aula de Cultura De Plasencia. Elle a reçu son AMF la de l'académie des beaux-arts en Pologne, Wroclaw en 2007. C'est sa première exposition des États-Unis. Justyna Adamczyk : Les travaux récents seront sur l'affichage à la galerie de l'EC du 15 janvier au 13 février. La galerie de l'EC est située à la rue Chicago, IL 60607 d'Aberdeen du nord 215.

REVUE d'art - JUDITH MULLEN

2010-01-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

Revue d'art - Judith Mullen :
Aire par Jeffery McNary :

Aire Galerie de Linda Warren (l'espace principal) 22 janvier-27 février 2010 Chicago

Lors d'entrer dans la galerie de Linda Warren pour l'exposition courante de Judith Mullen, la « aire », la visionneuse réalise immédiatement que quelque chose l'excitation va se produire. C'est le pays des merveilles, un de captiver, bel art. C'est un cotillon de couleur, de sculpture, de la peinture de l'instillation. Ici l'artiste a le dramaturge devenu, captivant, avec une abondance de travaux dans des médias variables, et avec la générosité incroyable. « Toutes les peintures sont faites dans la technique de fresque et j'ai choisi cette méthode pour une série de raisons », des parts de Mullen. « Au commencement j'étais très tiré « à la blancheur organique » du plâtre, et car j'ai travaillé avec le temps j'ai commencé à apprécier pleinement les matières employées pour créer un panneau de fresque. » Les influences principales de Lee Bontecous et de Kandinsky sont trouvées dans ces travaux. Le « hommage à Bonteque III », des médias mélangés, est une peinture « pebbly » sur une surface mélangée du mastic de sable et de pierre à chaux. Ses nuances riches de la terre tiennent l'aura des schémas de caverne du prehistorics. L'artiste a importé le mastic de pierre à chaux et a trouvé le sable de fleuve, mélangeant une formule employée pour créer une base. Elle a alors travaillé le plâtre humide avec le colorant et le charbon de bois. « De cette manière je suis tout d'abord relié à l'histoire de la peinture pour inclure les peintres de caverne il y a de 30.000 ans », elle s'ajoute. « J'ai eu une occasion de visiter ces travaux remarquables en France (deNaiux de Grotte) et ils sont vraiment inspirés. » « Dans l'emplacement IV », des médias mélangés du colorant, charbon de bois, cire, encre, thé, de même que d'autres morceaux de cette série, inspirée par les présences des oiseaux, comme peuvent être vus dans le colorant d'ocre jaune du travail. « Image de oiseau a toujours apparu dans mon travail, toutefois de cette série, » dit l'artiste, « j'ai voulu la rendre avant et centrale, le point focal plutôt que le coup-de-pied latéral. L'oiseau semble dans ce morceau négocier avec succès sa manière autour d'un environnement compliqué utilisant lui doit posséder l'élan pour accomplir ce but. » Elle continue, « les idées du courage et le courage avec l'adaptabilité, l'acceptation et l'action si tout va bien sont produits par cette image. Peut-être c'était le chantier de nouvelle construction trouvé à travers la rue de mon studio dans la ville ou le téléphone/poteaux électriques qui pointillent le chemin de prarie en dehors de ma maison dans la banlieue qui a déplacé l'oiseau et son nid… dans l'un ou l'autre cas, la tâche de la reconstruction et de l'adaptation a été joué dehors. À un certain niveau je pense que nous pouvons tout identifier avec l'oiseau dans ce scénario. » Sa vision, les raccordements, que l'application et le détail trafiquent entre le conceptuel, de processus et endgame est exécutée parfaitement dans ce travail. Venez maintenant, « dans l'installation de médias mélangés de l'emplacement XIII », cette épopée l'audace dans le travail de balance lors derrière duquel les pivots d'exposition et à ce que la visionneuse est dessinée quant à un feu sur une colline éloignée. Centré au milieu du mur est un morceau énorme de papier très travaillé avec des barres obliques dans lui. Ce morceau de papier de traçage, Mullen enfonçait le charbon de bois dans un nouveau morceau de fresque. « J'ai été économiser ces gauche au-dessus des morceaux de papier de traçage pendant des années, jouant avec elles sur le mur, essayant de faire une certaine sorte du morceau sculptural à trois dimensions, » elle dit. « J'ai essayé d'ajouter la cire, ai employé toutes les sortes de renforts, vous l'appelle pour faire le papier affermir. En conclusion, j'ai décidé d'employer le fil sous le morceau et le ta-DA… que je n'étais pas en ligne et courant. » Il y a les roches bleues, « une idée que j'ai eu la natation autour dans ma tête d'un livre j'ai lu sur Thomas Merton et ses idées sur la spiritualité et les roches. » Ceux-ci sont au pied de l'installation, découpé et formé de la mousse de styrol. « Je me suis trouvé employer tous les matériaux que j'emploie dans les sculptures en arbre mais d'une manière différente… sur le mur. Mon interprétation du morceau est qu'elle est légèrement d'un combat entre la nature et l'homme fait monde, ying et yang de la vie, quelque chose le long de ces lignes. » Le travail effraye. C'est art ayant jeté sa peau, danse et enchantement comme si menant la visionneuse environ par la lanterne. Il y a la rue… les choses tombées de branches de cônes de rue de détruire-boule………, attrapées dans le chaos. Les sculptures en arbre de Mullen sont de nouvelles additions à son paquet. Elle continue l'utilisation des choses normales et… les branches, le papier de riz, le fil, le plâtre, la peinture, la mousse de styrol, les chiffons de studio, etc., etc. cassés artificiels et naturellement, des oiseaux. Voici plus de ses intérieur-pensées, sa chasse de luciole. « Les sculptures ont évolué hors du procédé de peinture, il y a environ 2 ans. J'ai toujours été tiré à la poésie du winter'" nu de `qu'elle dit, les « branches d'arbre et ont commencé à rassembler cassé trouvés comme je marche. Ainsi, chaque morceau commence par une branche qui alors est parfois attachée à une base ou est accrochée d'en haut. » Judith Mullen a reçu son BFA de l'école de l'institut d'art de Chicago. Elle a exhibé dans l'ensemble du Midwest, y compris des expositions au centre culturel de Chicago, le centre d'art d'Evanston, une exposition soloe récente à l'atelier d'art contemporain Chicago et a actuellement une exposition soloe de concurrent à Los Angeles à la galerie de JK. Elle également aura une exposition soloe cette année au centre d'art de Krasl au Michigan. Elle était le destinataire de nombreuses concessions et récompenses, y compris une camaraderie du Conseil d'arts de l'Illinois. Son travail est également dessus affichage au centre de schéma de l'enregistrement de l'artiste de New York. « Avec mes inspirations indiquées, je trouve toute mon inspiration des routines, des rythmes et des voyages de ma propre vie pendant qu'il intersecte avec ceux autour de moi. Je vis dans une banlieue entourée par la conserve de forêt et voyage à la ville chaque jour où mon studio est localisé », elle note. « Cela fonctionne pour moi. Il est où la nature et l'homme ont fait le monde intersecter et les diverses manières ceci des jeux dehors que je me trouve tiré dedans pour errer autour. » Il n'y a aucune couleur dominante dans l'exposition. Cela tout fonctionne ensemble, pourtant il est presque hors de commande, comme un spectacular, affichage contemporain de feux d'artifice, être bientôt fabuleux. Il extorque dehors chaque sens de l'imagination. Est-ce que « où je me vois me suis dirigé entends ? Pour moi, c'est toujours été au sujet du processus tellement si tout va bien que continuera à être le cas. Je suis ouvert là où de cette volonté me mène. » www.lindawarrengallery.com

MLK REVISITED

2010-01-17T11:51:00.001-08:00

PIECES OF THE DREAM
re print ABDN PRESS
-jeffery mcnary
(Washington, D.C.) Almost forty years to the day of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a crowd of a few thousand gathered in the nation's capitol to recall, reflect, and attempt the resuscitation of a coalition of activists with diverse causes...some now on life support. On that afternoon, forty years ago, a youthful southern Black Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped to the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and began his remarks with, AI am happy to join you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. By the time the blazing sun began its descent, casting late afternoon shadows through the stone garden resting places of Arlington and Northern Virginia, King's I have a Dream oration had red-lettered the day.
Bob Dylan was there. Lena Horne was there, as was Paul Newman, Heston, Brando, Josephine Baker, and many more ,Afresh from narrow jail cells. Julian Bond, a former Georgia state legislator and now Chair of the NAACP was there and shared with ABDN Journal that he Ahad the best job of the day...serving cold soft drinks to the celebrities. AI got to keep my arms, up to the elbows, in ice cold water for the better part of the day, a graceful Bond said.
Forty years in some genres can be a long time. Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison never saw 40. Neither did the vast majority of those whose birth names are etched into the black marble slabs of the Viet Nam War Memorial abutting the site of the demonstrations. Yet the enthusiasm and sense of determination of those recently gathered in renewal, provided a delicious bite of promise and piece of the dream.
The August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom came on the heels of bloody engagements through out the south...as well as economic violence in northern cities. There were calls for passage of the then pending Civil Rights Bill, desegregation of schools and housing, job training and elimination of racial discrimination in hiring, among other issues. The March had been initiated by A. Phillip Randolph, a labor leader and vice-president of the AFL-CIO. Randolph was joined in his effort by the leadership of five major civil rights organizations in the United States. Whitney Young, National Urban League; Roy Wilkins, National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); James Farmer, Congress of Racial Equality(CORE); John Lewis, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and King, Southern Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC). This was the so-called Abig-six@.
The 40th Anniversary found a loose knit coalition somewhere in the area of 100 groups, with Dr. Kings son, Martin Luther King, III, front and center...to the point of being almost apologetic, if not determined. He is sincere...in more than a Promethean fashion. African American males coming of age can rarely afford the Holden Caufield experience, even when those with middle-class parents find that preferable to the fraternities of Crips or Bloods. Those around King, III couched the 40th Anniversary as an event bringing together the ASit-in Generation and the AHip-Hop Generation, a kind of Baez meets Grand Master somebody. Those with years in the trenches eerily attempted to balance the need for increased voter registration with its established rich legacy. Jesse Jackson, in comments to a gathering of SNCC veterans said, A I'd rather have an old Thurgood Marshall than a young Clarence Thomas.
A transference of Athe movement was not the order of the day as much as a welcome aboard theme with most. Not long ago the young King had faced a challenge to his leadership and was rescued by the old guard, including Jackson.
While the SCLC held the Anniversary primarily to symbolism, the unveiling of a plaque honoring MLK, Jr...prayer vigils...a poetry jam, a more aggressive group, By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) took to the streets of Washington demanding the defeat of anti-affirmative action initiatives and a national boycott of Coors Beer, which, they claim, is a major financial contributor to the attack on affirmative action and civil rights. In early Spring, BAMN was instrumental in turning out over 50,000 demonstrators near the Supreme Court calling for support of affirmative action.
Shanta Driver, BAMN's fiery spokesperson, addressed a gathering of student and labor activists at the gates of Howard University prior to a five mile march to the Lincoln Memorial. AWe are the leadership of the new civil rights movement. You are the builders of the nations future. There are still people in this society@, Driver continued stacatto like, Athat are going to fight to realize the dream...not just commemorate what Martin Luther King stood for, but also make clear that there=s a movement in place, a new civil rights movement, to realize the dream. Across town, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, former SNCC activists came together to review their expectations in 1963 and compare the struggles of 2003. John Lewis, now a Congressman from Georgia, and the sole survivor of the big six, was joined by Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a former delegate from the District of Columbia, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the current delegate from the District and others. ABearing Witness to a Dream Deferred, the forum was titled. Cong. Lewis (D-Ga.) now serves on the Democratic Steering Committee and as a young student participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides and endured savage beatings from racist mobs. Lewis is the real deal. AYoung Black men and women, young people, young children 7 and 8...9, 10, 11 and 12 years old were being arrested, jailed. Bull Connor, the police commissioner used the dogs and fire hoses on people, a visibly moved Lewis spoke. AMedgar Evers was assassinated...and then you had President Kennedy speaking to the nation...when he said the issue of race is a moral issue. On June 14, 1963 I was elected chair of ...SNCC. Eight days later I was invited to a meeting here in Washington at the White House....and it was in that meeting A. Phillip Randolph...spoke up and said. 'Mr. President, the Black masses are restless and we're going to march on Washington. And you could tell by the very body language of President that he didn't like what he heard. He started moving in his chair, one side to the other side, and he said >Mr. Randolph, if you bring all of these Negroes to Washington, and all of these Negroes in the streets, we will never be able to get a Civil Rights Bill from the congress. Mr. Randolph responded, AMr. President, Negroes are already in the streets."
Forty years later there was no such meeting. There was not even a message or messenger from the un-elected current occupant of the White House...something which should be unsettling, at best, to the thoughtful.
In a brief walk with this reporter, Cong. Lewis shared his concerns over the current state of affairs. AForty years later we need to pick up where Dr. King left off, and that is to humanize the American economy to meet basic human needs of our people. People need a little better of an income, people need jobs. Too many people are losing jobs. A large segment of the population is under paid, some receiving starvation wages, they're not receiving a livable wage. That's what we need to take care of. Lewis responded to a query on the recent California re-call initiative with, AIf that trend picks up and grows, it will make people much more cynical and less interested in the political process. We must find a way to put an end to what is happening in California, it must not be allowed to spread.
Political Science Professor Ron Walters of the University of Maryland expounded on this subject. It's probably a new trend because its a way that the Republican Party has of trying to seize power at the local level. They have done a good job, the radical right, seizing power of the national government. They now control the Supreme Court, the White House and both the House and the Senate, and that's a very formidable victory for them, said Walters.
Rev. Jesse Jackson echoed this perspective. Briskly heading up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, while pausing for photos with and signing autographs for, Jackson said, AThis is another attempt by the right-wing to de-stabilize government. They lost the election and this is an act to sabotage democracy. He was joined by former Ambassador and U.S. Senator Carol Mosely Braun, now a Democratic candidate for President., who referred to the re-call as a, Ahideous attempt to take power and create political chaos and to dis-enfranchise California voters, and I hope that it's rejected resoundingly by California votes. It=s not a matter of personality, it's whether or not an election will be allowed to stand or a coup de etat be allowed to happen.
The romantic tradition which tends to surround and enfold revolutions and movements appears to have taken a pass in the ameri-politic where issues of race are concerned. But most of the pieces of Dr. King's dream lay in jangled heaps across the lay of the land. Perhaps it is because of the close configuration of class and promise. The current Secretary of State is a Black man. The National Security Advisor to the President is a Black woman. The head of Time-Warner is African American as are a host of corporate directors and so-called Apublic intellectuals. Yet King's dream remains in pieces...much of it unfulfilled, in spite of Carter, his grits and grins and our collective collision with the Clintons. Perhaps a celebration is in order...one which shares a common vision, common goals, and time lines that transcend age and gender. After all...it's America...40 years late...peace out.

ART SHAY'S TRUE COLORS

2010-01-13T16:40:00.000-08:00

Thomas Masters Gallery
January 15 – February 15, 2010
jeffery mcnary- NEOTERICART

Art Shay’s photography is brilliant. And should one be in search of art as solely objects of, and for, aesthetic enjoyment, the exhibition, “Art Shay’s True Colors”, opening Friday, January 15 at the Thomas Masters Gallery, is not that experience. It is not an imagined dream life. It is a collection, an exhibition of the works of a photographer who has managed to crystallize defining moments in the American experience in bright colors, without a bypass, on archive rag paper with digital print.

For the artist, simply telling a story is too easy. Shay’s photos appear to tell a story behind a story. There is a pattern of capturing his subject sans posing. There are athletes, and movie stars. There is Khrushchev in Iowa, and Johnny Cash, Daleys and Jordan. There is Warhol and Jack Nicholas, Vince Lombardi and Bart Star and other luminaries out of their usual. There are protestors and police faced-off tango style in Grant Park in ‘68…the viewer can practically whiff the tear gas and refer and hear the chants. There’s the Nixon, amped up with arms in that ‘v’ before the looming, “Goddess of Grain” in the background.

Some entrances and exits flow in this exhibition. In 1964, two years prior to returning to participate in an open housing campaign, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Chicago and spoke at a rally for racial justice at Soldier Field. Shay was there, and captured a youthful civil rights leader being greeted by both police and the assembled masses, “King at Soldier Field”. Moving deeper into the exhibition there are more King photographs, King smiling, King speaking, King dead…in an open casket with his followers appearing stunned and in tears. Shay captured the riots following the assassination and the drama of the police search for the killer in Memphis with a dramatic and searing intensity.

“Photography has been my love since I was 12 and my Dad lent me his folding Kodak. I immediately began to shoot but also develop other peoples' rolls of Verichrome in the coal bin that made up part of the modest Bronx four family home we lived in,” says Shay. “I built my first enlarger out of a Maxwell House coffee can that slid up and down on the sandwiched 2 x4's I found in a junk heap. The sliding wood pieces came from the bottom of a long abandoned dining room table.”

The exhibition brings the viewer shots of Nelson Algren, (a friend of Shay and god father to one of his children) on the gritty side streets and back alleys of Chicago. Shay had followed Algren with a camera, shooting photos for a piece he was pitching to Life. It’s been written that they were, “masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools.”

Back to his early days, Shay continued in his ribald fashion, “When I was 16 an ancient divorcee of 35, professing interest in my work, professed wanting to learn enlarging, and in the process enlarged me sufficiently in 5 seconds to capture my virginity. This influenced me greatly as to the value of photography.”

Sharing more of his history, “I took a Leica into WWII and used it during combat flying of 52 missions. Just after the war, when I was thinking of becoming a professional writer… I was an English major in my only nine months of college before enlisting at age 20 in 1942…and the Washington Post took to printing Sunday features I wrote.”

Shay was soon hired as a staff reporter for Life Magazine. “It was my job at one time or another to schlep camera equipment around for perhaps 20 of Life's fotogs. Life reporters were verboten from using a camera under pain of firing, but in my three years as a staffer I must have had 20 pages in print under other (real) photographers' bylines- while carrying their spare cameras” It was at this point Shay opted to leave Life, going freelance, shooting mostly his own ideas and crafting his own stories, as well as shooting them in Chicago for Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and other outlets.

The photographer holds the camera is an extension of the eye, but also the humor and world experience behind that eye as well.

There is an emotional heart to the exhibition. The iconic photos of JFK and Nixon prior to there now famous televised debate. King’s casket being unloaded from a plane from Memphis. Inner-city Chicago children playing in run-down playgrounds. There’s Jack Kennedy appearing in conference with a Native American chief, “Two Chiefs”. And there’s Jimmy Hoffa, in a suit, behind bars. “It’s called, ‘Hoffa in Jail’. I knew Hoffa,” Shay says, “We used to play handball in Detroit. Hell of a handball player. It’s in Lewisberg Prison, and he’s holding the coat to hide the handcuffs.”

The talent and skill of the artist appears through the passion, humor, and history of the show. In, “Masai Spear Thrower”, the photographer catches the hunter’s spear in flight, on it’s arc, the second it leaves his hand in Nairobi. All of the work at the exhibition is done ‘in-camera’.

“I am not an agonizer. I work in the equivalent of bolts of controlled lighting, getting ideas and varying the themes that make them publishable.” Shay explains. “In covering JFK addressing 100,000 farmers live in North Dakota, I didn't like the composition of Kennedy at one side---so I had the sponsors move a flagpole with flying pennants of different colors on it so it composed well across from Kennedy. I had just purchased the then new Widelux camera- 140 degrees- and my first picture of JFK with it ran in Time across two pages.”

For Art Shay, a chance to show "Art's True Colors”, “is an important segment of my life's work- at last.” And for others, this show provides lessons, and yet for others still, remembrance.

DANIEL KIM AND MICHAEL PARKER: STRUCTURE AND SPACE

2010-01-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

Daniel Kim and Michael Parker: Structure and Space,

David Weinberg Gallery,Chicago

January 8th – February 20th, 2010
jeffery mcnary - NEOTERICART

Poise appears conscientiously injected into the current exhibition at the David Weinberg Gallery. The abstract paintings of Daniel Kim, combined with the photography of Michael Parker make for a very impressive introduction to the new year, stepping from the holiday vestibule into a pantheon of sometimes sharp-edge, yet eloquent art. It’s a fine gathering of work.

“In my work, monochrome paintings deal with very important aspect of painting”, says Kim. “In order for a painting to be successful I believe 3 things have to work together, and that’s color, image and the paint application. If the 3 work, it’s like flicking a switch and activating a painting to make it come alive. I do this to speculate what beauty might look like.” His work is not shy. Early on in the show the viewer catches his erudite use of basic grays, of fundamentals, of shadow and of space.

In speaking to his own work, Parker holds, “Architecture begins on paper. Photography is the method by which it returns”… my official slogan. I honestly believe the relationship between photography and architecture is a unique one. Architecture, being such a detailed medium is best recorded with photography for most purposes. Be it for commercial use, fine art, or historical record, photography is really the only way to put an immense physical structure into your briefcase or on the wall.”

Curator Aaron Ott has consciously ‘zig-zagged’ the works early on in the exhibition. Ott appreciates mixing mediums in joint shows, and in this instance pieces settle, more than dominate in such fashion.

In many of Kim’s paintings the viewer is introduced to cloud shapes, to explosions of chaos and areas of the larger works appearing to be paintings on their own. “Oil paint for me has enough range that I almost feel its part of who I am, and the paint becomes a tool to complete my other half,” he says. “The decision I make with the paint is personal and very much reflects who I am as person.”

Moving deeper into the exhibition, one comes upon large color works of Kim’s. Here the dialogue continues with traces of pastel whispering on the canvases of brilliant color. “Color paintings which are bit more challenging to make is also driven by my speculation of beauty, using the formal elements I know and composing them to become a interesting visual stimulation. In a simple term I try to make interesting paintings, because that is what visual artist do.”

Many of Parker’s works approach the mystical. The stark, geometrical designs freeze in camera. His, ‘Disney Concert Hall, LA, CA’, Pigment print, sweeps and slashes and swoons with the titanium of the structure itself. “When I step back from my work,” he says, “I realize that I am working with three elements that everybody loves…photography, architecture, and travel. The questions of “where? how? and what?” are easily answered… so the work is very user friendly. I purposely shoot with traditional B&W film in order to commit the images to a life of fine art. I considered shooting digital photos in order to maximize the value for various stock photo purposes but abandon the idea in order to preserve the integrity of the black and white.

Both artists share the trials of their work. “I wrestle with my work there are times in my studio where I spend more time starring and thinking about the paintings then executing” says Kim. “I actually enjoy the times when I am wrestling with my work, I feel that’s when I use my brain the most and try to squeeze out all the knowledge I have about painting and apply it on to my paintings.”

Parker adds, “Life is a constant struggle. Photography is no different. There are photos I love and there are photos that sell. Its pretty obvious, when you see the show you’ll see a few images of trees that are stretching the theme of the show, we sell so much of this work for its aesthetic appeal. The only problem I have with these images are that they overlap a bit with other photographer’s work, as an artist I really want to create something new and distinct.” He concludes, “The good news is that my abstract architectural work does well. I really believe that I’m on to something new.”

What now? Parker says, “I’m sticking with the plan. I’ve have standardized sizes, frames standardized sizes, frames, and printing methods, which has helped to make a recognizable a piece in such a crowded genre.” Sharing, “I simply intend to continually travel and expand my archive. I had a wonderful installation in Atlanta composed of fifteen wall size murals, all in black and white. Since I shot everything on medium and large format film the images were very sharp in the grand scale.”

“I use to be very inpatient after graduating from school, thinking I have to show in New York or LA”, says Kim, “but now I realize patience isn’t such a bad thing. All I can do is try to make good art and hope people will notice, so my answer is I am not really sure where my art is headed in the future, but I am very ambitious.” With many of his works, ‘untitled’, the show calls for revisits and imagination to roam and name them.

FIGUARATIVELY THEMED WORKS

2009-12-30T08:32:00.000-08:00

West Loop Trilogy – Part 1 Contemporary Figuratively Themed Works EC Gallery ChicagoDecember 11, 2009 – January 9, 2010

jeffery mcnary NEOTERICART
It’s as if couriers have arrived, delivering storms of color and skillfully engineered works to the EC Gallery. With the current exhibition, “Contemporary Figurative Themed Works”, curator Ewa Czeremuszkin, has re-collected and filled full her right-size gallery with the art of both Tadeusz Bilecki and Agata Czeremuszkin-Chrut. There’s a bright lawlessness in these handful of paintings, stimulating the senses, and suddenly enabling the visitor to exhale, and to glide from the everyday.
“The paintings, currently exhibited, belong to the ‘Pisz litery’ (‘Write letters’) series. The leading subjects are letters, which I sometimes see in advertisement photography or on billboards”, says Czeremuszkin-Chrut. “My work is very intuitive. I quickly draw specific lines which are my first concept, and which later on I change hundreds of times.”
“Fall Back”, acrylic and oil on canvas’, brings the viewer broad brush strokes blending color, grays and blues forced into purple. There are deep scratches topside through the layered paint. There’s washed pink near its heart with dark, questioning droplets directing toward the deep, the regal purple, the wondering, before shouting loudly, ‘where are you going?’, spreading its fever.
“The, ‘Fall’, series touches upon the topic of two people coexisting and the resulting psychological supremacy of one of them over the other”, the artist shares. “From these, risky combinations and contrasts of colours arise, which only seemingly do not go together.” These works do not wait around for the viewer to catch up. They’re off and fluid and one need leap in front of them.
Her, “Fell Down”, mixed media, brings more purple, and scraping on a broad swath of brown. There are written letters between two figures in this work. “I am often inspired by press, photography and lettering. However, I am not interested in the messages they carry. I dissect them, strip them of their meaning while giving them a new one,” explains. “The elements of lettering included in my works have no communicative value whatsoever, but only a visual one. In a way, they are a manifestation of the modern world. Images just fall into my head and evolve into new ideas.”
The ineluctable works of Tadeusz Belecki are both bold, powerful and have visited upon the gallery in the past. There’s an intriguing texture and immense dimension to his works. They embrace back and kick high. “There are influences, on every moment. They sometimes change the whole artistic searching process. Sometimes even in a drastic way. The influences come from art history or every day life,” he says. His stirring pieces are washed and dreamlike.
“The choice of colours is the result of an evolution, a research process which is always changing, sometimes in an unexpected way. More and more often, there are violent combinations of colours, sometimes accidental,” he continued. “Before, there were more thoughtful, calm, esthetic combinations of colours. Before, I was in search of harmony and balance. Nowadays, the colours I am using are more nervous, stressful, more chaotic.”
Czeremuszkin-Chrut meets that with a game changing, “The limitation of colours? I want my paintings to become sterile, monochrome and very economical. I am also planning to go back to mural painting of large format – contact with a wall arouses very different emotions in a spectator as well as in the artist…texture and scale of a wall are a huge challenge.”
Bilecki’s phenomenal, “The Apparition of the Geisha –suite”, acrylic on paper strayed early on from ready made shades in grid and forethought. The works are pastel like. They are comfortable in the conviction and flavor.
He does not fight for change or evolution in these works. “It is not useful”, he shares. “The need to create, artistic searching is much stronger of me. I am doing it during my whole life, and it is a long time since I stop from thinking about the use of creating, if the creation act is helping me or the other way round.”
Czeremuszkin-Chrut convictions sway differently. “Fighting is involved in each of my paintings because most of them are created through multiple changes of decisions regarding the way of painting (which leads to over painting as a consequence). When matter resists, rivalry and competition are born. The painting resists and demands; it does not allow me to ‘break’ it and shape it.”
Giving thought to future works she sees,”… evolution, and I carry out this process on purpose. I am interested in endless synthesis of human form, in making its personality traits disappear completely, “she says. “I aspire to create a new and individual human form – my own human form. Apart from anonymity, also biology characterized by hidden sexuality, is important to me. I would like to make my work deeper in a psychological sense: a human being as an anonymous entity and at the same time as embodiment of the crowd.”
“I like it very much to observe the evolution of my work, but only when observing the work already done (as if this was already historic)”, says Bilecki. “I never think about it when creating or when preparing my future art works. I have no idea! I leave it, the theoretic art, to redactors and great philosophers, as for instance you,” he shares in jest, “You always have a global look. I don’t.”
http://www.ec-gallery.com/

DRAGGING THE LEASH, LINDA WARREN GALLERY

2009-12-30T08:28:00.000-08:00

West Loop Trilogy – Part 2 Juan Angel Chavez: Dragging the LeashLinda Warren GalleryChicagoDecember 11 – January 16, 2010

jeffery mcnary - NEOTERICART

Juan Angel Chavez’s solo exhibition, “Dragging the Leash”, now at the Linda Warren Gallery, lays out a sermon. It presents an emblematic voyagers tale told in pressed wood and street found jagged things tidied up and made to rejoice. It leads the viewer off the curb like an intruder, into circles of the semi-starved and discarded and the opera which runs aside such cultures. It bites, while not drawing blood. It’s way past that. “My work has always had a consistent theme that relates to the notion of being free while being tied to the responsibilities of civilization”, he says. “This is what I call feral work. Thematically speaking, it’s about the ingenuity of survival.” It’s the central activity of this show.
Upon entering the exhibition, “Otherside”, a 3-D collage, beckons the viewer to bend or squat, to take a look inside of the orange, battered construction barrel on its side, back lit, encouraging a peep. “On this particular body of work I’m focusing on the idea of being homeless, the consumption of decay and transient ways of life”, Chavez says. This piece, more or less, kicks off his tour, saddled upon cut waves of wood. Social demanding art has fascinated Shakespeare and many the philosopher – Aristotle, Plato, mac-man Machiavelli to name a few, and a posse or two of rappers. There’s rough shit in that landscape. Mouths move and words don’t come out.
But then…comes now, “Last Breath”, mixed media, with its near overwhelming narrative quality. “Last Breath” is about watching someone die in front of my eyes”, the artist rises. “It’s the contradiction…of life and death and the tranquility in the eyes as he went. I began working on layers until I achieved the feeling of that moment. That is my ultimate goal in the work. I want them to be felt while they are looked at.” Antlers reach from the work, along with tufts of fur, burned wood and a melted plastic letter. And it dictates sadly and clearly, in long hand, the story of another pilgrim’s engagement with concrete and cold.
The circular emerges in many of the artist’s works. Segments of “Deep Scars”, produce a star filled sky effect. Another side of the same work carries a wooden log, back-lit to portray a fire, camp or barrel, providing sympathy and warmth for the resident. The homeless often decorate their spaces and Chavez captures that with a small banner of a male and female figure hanging from the work. Each piece holds its own history. “Shine”, sneers out the memory of a deer, or man, or woman frozen in the headlights of a vehicle where they’d best not be.
Mr. Chavez’s career making art rolled out with his murals around Chicago’s neighborhoods. He has been a prolific figure on that scene with a major work, a mural on the city’s major transit line. “My grand mother drew me to art and the influences have been vast”, the artist shares, continuing, “My influence draws from Rushenberg, Chuck Close, Gordon Matta Clark and others. But, I’m also inspired by outsider art. I’m inspired by what I consider the battle against permanence, which includes daily displays of overcoming what we build and what we forget.” There are other works here one just must spend time with.
The step into the Linda Warren Gallery is a bold, and can be seen as a ‘breakout’ move for the artist. It’s charming. Such ether is a gear shift from the non-for-profit board driven options having housed much of his works and messages in the past and have provided limited choices, and visibility. Will such a move call for a new direction for the artist? Will the pieces fight back as they sometime do? “I wrestle with all of them but they all have a different fight”, he shares. “Some start out huge and end up small. Others are simple and complicated at the same time. When they get overwhelming I usually go for a walk until clarity appears.”
No one can predict the fate of Chavez’s subjects, or the terms and direction of his brilliant, conscious art. “I’m wanting to continue this same path. I have several projects I want to develop regarding this direction. So, it’s hard for me to say what’s the direction. I’m going with this work. I guess you are going to have to wait and see.” And that we will, sir, eager and anxious.
http://www.lindawarrengallery.com/

GO CRIMSON! YALE SUCKS!!

2009-11-20T08:12:00.000-08:00

SCRATCH A YALE MAN WITH BOTH HANDS AND YOU'LL BE LUCK TO FIND A COAST-GUARD. USUALLY YOU FIND NOTHING AT ALL!

BRIGITTE RIESEBRODT : METAMORPHOSE

2009-11-13T10:37:00.000-08:00

jeffery mcnary

CHICAGO ART REVIEW . NET

GALERIE DE ROY BOYD Rue de 739 puits de N. 30 octobre-5 janvier L'exposition courante à la galerie de Roy Boyd, Brigitte Riesebrodt métamorphose, tient le récit, la perception, et les traces de la foi. Ici l'artiste répand la peinture, littéralement et figuratif avec ses mains sur la toile, et distinctif sur les barres cirées du chêne incurvé et superficiel par les agents des barils une fois remplis du vin italien qu'elle a choisi d'employer. Il n'y a aucun aspect aléatoire dans son utilisation de couleur, beaucoup mettent à la terre des nuances des verts et du cuivre. Elle utilise une fluidité des médias. L'artiste a dépensé presque une peinture de décennie en Toscane, et a utilisé les fresques tôt de cette région et autour à d'Arezzo, en particulier ceux de de Giavanni et Pieve, les deux artistes de la Renaissance de XVème siècle de la région. Parfois les contradictions apparaissent, et le travail peut sembler aigu. Après tout, les fresques commissionnés du mid-1400 ont été daignés pour refléter les triomphes du christianisme. Les travaux de Mme Risesebrodt's sont des résumés, non représentatifs, avec les deux raccordements et interprétations exigeant une large portée. Dans la comparaison, ils sont près de bruit. Elle, « dîner de Leonardo le dernier », le pétrole et la cire sur le bois, sont apparus dans l'institut d'art de l'exposition récente de Chicago, « une caisse pour le vin », mais n'ont pas été tenus en tant que constante. La « rue d'ATF Angelico John », pétrole et cire sur le bois présente une autre série de barres de baril, encore en terre attrayante modifie la tonalité. L'artiste tient une appréciation pour le travail de Twombly et de celui de l'expressioniste danois, par Kirkeby, et exprime la facilité avec laquelle la genèse de son travail dévoile pour elle « Les seuls travaux que j'ai luttés avec sont les collages », les parts d'artiste. Ces travaux, sur la toile, prend le téléspectateur en variant les couleurs pastel, avec d'autres nuances piaulant à travers. Parfois le téléspectateur se demande où l'exposition va, autre que son mouvement vertical. « Ce, » des parts l'artiste, « est parce que la majeure partie de mes travaux précédents a été horizontale » Le travail de Riesebrodt saute avec élégance elle dans une arène des peintres techniquement habiles, et les notices de visionneuse qu'elle est clairement au-dessus de cette barre dès l'abord. Mais il y a peu d'autre pour expliquer, seulement pour comprendre et espérer seulement plus dans une exécution différente.

SEMPER FIDELIS

2009-11-09T15:31:00.001-08:00

On November 10, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved to raise two battalions of "American Marines." Congress commissioned 31-year-old Samuel Nicholas, a well-known Philadelphian, as captain of the fledgling force of Continental Marines. Nicholas raised two battalions of Marines and began the long history of g...reen amphibious monsters, made of blood and guts, who arose from the sea, feasting on anti-Americans throughout the globe,doing or dying, rompin', stompin' United States Marines. Happy birthday! Huuraah!

LOVE, LINDA

2009-11-08T10:02:00.000-08:00

Hitching a Star to the Stardom of Cole Porter
By DANIEL M. GOLD
Published: November 4, 2009, NYT
Forty-five years after his death, Cole Porter has never truly left town. His songs are a staple of Manhattan’s cabaret scene: one performer finished a tribute at the Algonquin last month, while two others just opened shows that prominently feature his work.
Stevie Holland in her one-woman musical show, "Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter."
None are as ambitious as Stevie Holland, a jazz singer who has tried to steer into somewhat more daring precincts. Apparently drawing on sources like William McBrien’s fine Porter biography and the 2004 film “De-Lovely,” Ms. Holland and her husband, the composer Gary William Friedman, have written “Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter.”
It’s billed as a one-woman play, directed by Ben West. Really, though, it’s cabaret. Ms. Holland takes the nightclub stage of the Triad Theater as Linda Lee Porter, the dazzling divorced socialite from Kentucky who wed Porter, eight years her junior, in 1919 when both were expatriates in Paris. Despite her husband’s homosexuality — Ms. Holland has Linda saying she “accepted his romantic appetite for men because I had his love” — the couple stayed married for 35 years, until Linda’s death from emphysema in 1954.
With a trio playing smoothly behind her, Ms. Holland runs through truncated versions of some of Porter’s best-known songs — “In the Still of the Night,” “I Love Paris,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” — as well as a handful of comparative rarities. Instead of conventional patter, she ladles out bits of the Porter chronology in a Southern-tinged lilt.
There’s a lot of ground to cover, even for a more polished actress than Ms. Holland: the couple’s time in Europe; the return to the States and Porter’s first great Broadway successes; the move to Hollywood; the horse-riding accident that disabled him; Linda’s failing health. As a result, the piece, which clocks in at just about an hour, feels rushed. Not only does it make great demands of Ms. Holland, who between her singing and narration barely has time to pause, but it also shortchanges the audience, which for the most part gets only bits and pieces of songs that cry out for full, lustrous renditions.
This is a shame because Ms. Holland, tall and stately, has a graceful, silken voice that glides easily through her material. “Love for Sale,” which she sang after discussing the Porters’ growing estrangement in Hollywood, carried emotional weight, and she gave the closing number, “When a Woman’s in Love,” a real sense of triumph.
“Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter” runs through Nov. 21 at the Triad Theater, 158 West 72nd Street, Manhattan; (212) 352-3101, lovelindathemusical.com.

JOHN AND SHAWN SLAVIK, COMMON LAYERS

2009-11-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

jeffery mcnary

Chicago Art Review

There is a rich body of knowledge in the exhibition of John and Shawn Slavik currently at the Ogilvie/Pertl Gallery. The kinship and comparative approaches of these artists, “represent something or some point” in time which transcends the matter of fact. The exhibition, works of father and son, reaches through layers of wood and paint and material and returns with art, without filter. They make book, charmingly, passionately.

The exhibition, “Common Layers”, shares two disciplines, taking the viewer upstream in ways which explore the natural world and how we interpret and behave, possibly, beyond it.

“When things happen to me, I put it in my back pocket”, shares the senior, John, “And I say, ‘someday I’m gonna do something with that.’” And that he has and does, with his installations and flair and veneration of things natural. With his, ‘Indicator”, a wood carved bird, with protective lead covering its head, bares statements, ‘Sing with me’, ‘Why is there bigotry?’, ‘What goes around comes around’, ‘Pay attention’, and other comments. The sculpture is a social statement providing a stylistic luster to the artist’s manifesto. “An indicator gives a warning”, he says, “like that canary in a coal mine story. We, people”, he continues, “have this attitude that we’re the only things on the planet that feel, that think. This bird’s saying, ‘wait a minute, what about us. Since you’re the guardian of the planet, do something.’”

He works in both representative and abstract styles. “They’re both significant he says. I’m the story teller, and here’s a story,” he says pointing to, ‘Good and Evil,’ a stainless sculpture. The piece is in perfect balance when moving and connected when viewed from different perspectives. “Good and evil meet from time to time in life,” he shares.

Shawn’s work, ‘Don’t take Advice from Someone You Wouldn’t Trade Places With’, is an esoteric mixed media, skillfully employing wood and metal, color pigment and oil. “Choosing materials is most important”, he says. ‘It’s a very physical thing. I put on layers of paints, oil, pigments, they build up and I sand them down and carve into them.” The naked tree shapes are influences of the modernist architectural photographer, Julius Shuman, whom Shawn holds in high esteem. He adds that since Shuman’s death, he starts, “I’m throwing down trees”, hesitating, “I think I’ll stop….”, and trails off.

‘You Were Right About the stairs, Each One is a Setting Sun’, a mixed media on wood, steel and hydrosol, whistles, then smiles with its yellow ochre, to the viewer upon entering the show. It makes its presence known. The work, also Shawn’s, carries a host of black circles burned into the wood, further heightening the experience. “This holds a story of a conversation I had once. It was about planets and stars and galaxies and sun rises and sunsets. If we’re experiencing a sunset here, imagine how many other sunrises and sunsets there must be out there.”

Shawn mixes loose pigments with oil to arrive at his colors, and as a result they are seasonal, impacted by the temperature. “Not every thing makes it out of the workshop. Some fight back.”

The passion of the exhibition is uplifting. It’s no token affair and the relationship between the two artists is anything but common. “We’re our biggest critics”, says Shawn, “and he’s my best friend.”

The exhibition teaches and side steps strict adherence, and in the end is both stirring and stimulating. (Jeffery..McNary)

MADAM N'DIAYE, OUI?

2009-11-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Marie NDiaye a déclaré à la presse, en arrivant devant le restaurant Drouant où le prestigieux prix venait de lui être attribué :"Je suis très contente pour le livre et pour l'éditeur. Je suis très contente d'être une femme qui reçoit le prix Goncourt." "Une sorte de miracle s'était déjà produit avec le succès du livre", a-t-elle dit, ajoutant : "Ce prix est inattendu. C'est aussi le couronnement et la récompense de vingt-cinq ans d'écriture et de cette opiniâtreté." Ce livre "est le portrait de trois femmes fortes, chacune à sa manière. Ce qui les unit, c'est une force profonde, une croyance en qui elles sont, une façon de ne jamais douter de leur propre humanité. Ce sont des femmes tranquillement puissantes".
Marie NDiaye a dit espérer que cette récompense permette de mieux faire connaître l'histoire des femmes africaines. "L'histoire des migrants est une histoire déjà souvent relatée, mais si le sort de ces gens peut être encore mieux su et compris, j'en serai très contente."

FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER A "UNE PENSÉE" POUR LE PROCUREUR DE PARIS
L'écrivain Frédéric Beigbeder, qui a obtenu le prix Renaudot, a déclaré : "Le Renaudot est la meilleure des drogues, vraiment je le conseille, c'est extrêmement agréable."
"J'ai une pensée pour le procureur de Paris, à qui je dois beaucoup. Je n'aurais pas écrit ce livre si je n'avais pas été mis en garde à vue. Je remercie également les policiers du huitième arrondissement", a ironisé l'écrivain.

Dans Un roman français (Grasset), Frédéric Beigbeder raconte son interpellation le 29 janvier 2008 en plein Paris alors qu'il consommait de la cocaïne sur le capot d'une voiture. Il avait été alors mis en garde à vue puis transféré au "dépôt". Dans la première version du livre, l'auteur s'en prenait brutalement au procureur Jean-Claude Marin, qu'il accusait d'avoir prolongé sa garde à vue.

Les éditions Grasset ont caviardé, avec le consentement de l'auteur, quatre pages de cette première mouture. Dans la version édulcorée, certaines attaques ont disparu. "Je ne peux pas écrire ici tout le bien que je pense de 'Jicé'. Jean-Claude Marin est procureur de Paris : il faut faire super gaffe quand on écrit sur lui", écrit-il.

Revenant sur cette polémique avec le haut magistrat, Frédéric Beigbeder a évoqué "un mini-scandale complètement absurde et oublié aujourd'hui. Tant mieux". "Le Renaudot efface tout, il remet j'espère mon travail là où il doit être, c'est-à-dire humble et sincère", a estimé le romancier.

JEFFERY IN THE HOUSE

2009-10-30T08:49:00.001-07:00

“One Question” with Jeffery McNary

NORBERT MARSZALEK

neoteric ART

10/29/09

Jeffery McNary came of age in Chicago, Illinois. After a career in public service, including service as an Economic Development advisor to then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, turned to journalism and writing. His work can be found in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Vineyard Gazette, the Boston Phoenix, Transition Magazine, and other outlets including Chicago Art Review. His poetry has been published in Iconoclast Magazine. Mr. McNary is currently crafting a screenplay, “Ro”, in which he captures the volatility and passion of socio-political in the 60’s and 70’. He is also currently composing a volume of poetry, “Simple Epistles”. Mr. McNary currently divides his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Paris, France.

Neoteric Art: How did you get involved with Chicago Art Review (chicagoartreview.net)?

Jeffery McNary: The opportunity to engage visual artists while exploring and learning about their art and various techniques is both challenging and exhilarating. For me, writing for Chicago Art Review. Net has provided a vehicle for such a very rich and uncommon opportunity.

I hardly see myself an “art critic”. I’m a working writer fortunate enough to have wandered into this genre and found a fit which works for both me and Chicago Art Review. A large portion of my time has been spent crafting a work for stage which explores the relationship between two literary giants, James Baldwin and William Styron. Baldwin lived in Styron’s Connecticut guest house while he was writing, “Another Country”. Styron was beginning, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” It’s a fascinating story, and the project, it’s off the charts. I’m enthralled by writers who meld different avenues as the subject and times demand and expand and contract….Didion, Mailer, a dose of Sartre on occasion.

Born in Chicago, I’ve spent most of my adult life in New England, a tour of the meta-spiritual with the Jesuits, Harvard, then government and campaigns and campaigns and government and back to academia. Such tides can grow rough. A significant amount of my writing had been politically geared journalism, teamed from time to time with the occasional mandatory poetry, that queen of blood sports.

As the air in the room of political writing grew thin, I sought out other options. To my surprise my first art review found a home in Harvard’s, Transition Magazine, about a year ago. High-cotton. Not at all bad company.

I met Chicago Art Review through a gallery owner who holds some respect for my work. I wanted the kind of space and mobility the outlet has provided. The deadlines bring about a smile, and the interaction with artists calls for sensitivities to the individual’s magnetic-north, influences, and media. There’s a trust factor at play when translating the visual into the written. It shouts at the writer to neither drop nor add. It’s a marvelous banquet of sorts. It’s self defining. Perspectives cannot be un-addressed.

The objective trust factor also blends over into the editor-writer relationship, a new and enriching thing for me. It’s also helpful in rounding up the stray comma. As of yet, there’s been no “Wylie Coyote” moment. I haven’t run off a cliff, yet. To quote Baldwin, “I want to be an honest man, and a good writer.”

http://www.chicagoartreview.net/

http://www.jefferymcnary.blogspot.com/

IGOR AND MARINA at THOMAS MASTERS GALLERY

2009-10-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

jeffery mcnary

CHICAGO ART REVIEW.NET

In a unique and quite amazing partnership, Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova, are artists who paint together, on the same works that is. They are husband and wife, and painting collaboratively and approaching the canvas from different directions with an expanded sense of each others style and talents.

Their current exhibition, at the Thomas Masters Gallery, provides a glimpse of the constant supply of delectable compositions produced by this duo. Igor’s sense for color and, “appreciation for the tactile nature of pain, canvas, and wood” compliments Marina’s realistic drawings in poetic fashion. “We divide the duties”, shared Marina. “Igor does backgrounds…color, the dramatic.”

Still, on occasion they appear to venture and stand on their own. ‘Legend of the Spring’, a graphite on paper, is Marina in full flight with crisply articulated and precise stokes. Here the female figure emerges appearing to wear a bird nest-esque hat, arms folded, with bird perched upon her thumb. In ‘Night of the Carnival’, Igor leads the dance with his bold, Pollock style background of bold strokes and splash. He smiles, “Pollock was my favorite. What I took from him was passion. We were trained classically. Pollock was radical. I was attracted to him. De Kooning is another favorite.”

“Wyeth is my favorite”, Marina adds. “You know, the different weather conditions. Sometimes you want something different. Sometimes you just want to try something new.” That they have done in charting and cutting from whole cloth their, ‘Walkers’ series. Here the works reflect the artists’ influence by wall paintings of ancient Egypt and the murals of Pompeii.

‘Apples for Helena’ takes the viewer for a wonderful ride. The early sketch reflects the continued development, dents, and quality of Marina’s calisthenics. Igor’s adopted coloring livens the theatre with skin tones and glow.

Such exhibitions rarely pop-up and embrace about the place. Viewers should feel really bad only if they’re not enlightened.

MARIE N'DIAYE, TROIS FEMMES PUISSANTES, ed. GALLIMARD

2009-10-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

Marie N’Diaye a 42 ans et elle écrit depuis 30 ans. Elle est née à Pithiviers en 1967, d’un père d’origine sénégalaise, absent, et d’une mère française, professeur de sciences naturelles. A 17 ans, la même année, elle passe son baccalauréat et publie son premier livre, Quand au riche avenir, chez Minuit. Elle rencontre alors un autre écrivain, Jean-Yves Cendrey, avec qui elle vit depuis, loin des grandes villes et de leur tumulte médiatique. Elle continue à écrire, pour le théâtre, elle est actuellement la seule femme vivante à figurer au répertoire de la Comédie Française, pour le cinéma, co-rédigeant le scénario de White Material de Claire Denis, pour les enfants aussi. De ses origines africaines, elle n’a jamais parlé dans ses onze romans publiés. Il faut sans doute qu’elle s’installe à Berlin, qu’elle échappe à la langue française et qu’elle y écrive un douzième roman, Trois femmes puissantes, pour que naissent ces trois personnages. Trois portraits et destins de femmes, entre le Sénégal et la France, qui se dispersent ou se croisent, dans ce « non » qu’elles partagent. Trois femmes puissantes est présentes dans les premières sélections du prix Goncourt.Dans la deuxième sélection Goncourt

M. WEST DE RASSEMBLEMENT

2009-10-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

M. WEST DE RASSEMBLEMENT
Issue/Publication: THE ROOT
Web Links
Mots de l'autre M. (Cornel) occidental Avec un nouveau mémoire sur des étagères (et des e-lecteurs), le disciple de Princeton parle le prix Nobel d'Obama, le futur de la politique noire et ce qui Jésus fait (s'il étaient président). Par : Dayo Olopade Signalé : 20 octobre 2009 à 4:22 P.M. Avec un nouveau mémoire sur des étagères (et des e-lecteurs), le disciple de Princeton parle le prix Nobel d'Obama, le futur de la politique noire et ce qui Jésus fait (s'il étaient président). Cornel occidental, professeur distingué au centre de Princeton pour des études d'Afro-américain, et à l'auteur des best-sellers tels que la course importe (Vintage, 1994) des sujets de démocratie : Gagnant le combat contre l'impérialisme (pingouin, 2004) et gardant la foi : La philosophie et la foi en Amérique (Routledge, 1994), a un nouveau mémoire, ouest de frère : Vivant et aimant dehors fort (livres souriants) dans les magasins maintenant. Dans lui, l'ouest décrit son voyage du « enfant de la maman et de l'enfant du papa » à être l'un des sociologues prépondérants travaillant aujourd'hui. La racine s'est assise avec l'ouest récemment pour parler l'art, la politique et le premier président noir. Dans la partie de cette entrevue en deux parties, plats de Dr. West 40 ans d'études afro-américaines, Obama' ; prix de s Nobel et entretien d'offres vrai sur Barack, Bill Clinton et ce qui se produit quand Jésus met ses pieds vers le haut sur Pontius Pilate' ; bureau de s. Lisez la partie ici. La racine : Cette année marque 40 ans d'études afro-américaines. Que pensez-vous à des études afro-américaines, dans et hors du canon, l'idée des études noires ? Dr. Cornel West : Pour moi, les deux sont inséparables, mais non identiques. Pour le commencement même vous ne pouvez pas être bien informé au sujet des études afro-américaines sans être bien informé des études américaines, sans être bien informé au sujet de la modernité. Ce qui inclut l'éclaircissement, le romantisme et les langues très européennes que la plupart des nègres parlent de toute façon. La notion entière de eux étant séparés de n'importe quelle manière analytique ou intellectuelle est vide. En termes d'où on leur enseigne, c'est une question différente. Cela doit faire avec les divisions disciplinaires de la connaissance dans l'académie. Vous pourriez finir vers le haut avec une partie du meilleur travail étant fait sur les sciences humaines sur ce que signifie il pour être moderne et Américain dans le département d'études d'Afro-Américain, s'il est fait convenablement. Mais vous devez cross-fertilize et cross-pollinate… TR : Quel est votre sentiment au sujet de HBCUs, leur importance aujourd'hui, et comment l'éducation fournie se rapporte à une université comme Princeton ? On est qu'on ne peut pas mais avoir le grand respect pour la tradition de ces établissements, parce qu'il a produit une partie du plus de haute qualité des penseurs noirs. Toni que Morrison-vous pouvez s'arrêter bien là. Nous pouvons nous arrêter bien là, nous ne parlons pas de Brown sterling, Amiri Baraka et ainsi de suite, Phylicia Rashad et ainsi de suite. Mais dans la situation contemporaine, ce n'est pas simplement que les masses des étudiants noirs vont aux Instituts de Formation Supérieure et aux universités d'état, mais que les établissements blancs d'élite embrassent les étudiants supérieurs de noir d'entaille en 40 dernières années. Vous devez être très créateur maintenant chez le Howards et Morehouses et nous dire ce qui font offrons, ce qui est distinctif ou unique par opposition à quelle offre de Swarthmore ou de Haverford ou de Harvard. TR : Parlons Obama. Vous l'avez critiqué pour ne pas mentionner Martin Luther King Jr. dans son discours de convention, et dans le livre, êtes encore vous ce que j'appellerais prudent au sujet de sa victoire. Pensez-vous des personnes de couleur devriez-vous être plus circonspect au sujet d'un président noir ? Onde entretenue : Nous devons être honnêtes, nous devons vérité-dire, mais nous devons également comprendre. Après que la célébration de célébration-un qui a été justifiée parce qu'elle était historiquement une sans précédent élection-il doive être protégée. C'est vrai ; protection de lui et de son famille précieux. En second lieu, il doit être respecté. Les gens le traitant sans respect de certaines manières sont quelque chose que nous devons combattre, il semblent à moi. Et troisièmement, il doit être critiqué a basé selon le principe. Ma lecture de frère Barack est comme suit. Il est brillant ; il est charismatique ; il est très stratégique. Il est rapidement devenu hypnotisé par le braininess de certaines de ceux attachés à Wall Street. Et il a voulu rassurer l'établissement afin d'obtenir sa pose parce qu'il est un venu. Les venus sont toujours très inquiétude montés vis-à-vis d'un établissement qui est été autour pour des centaines d'années… Le Président Clinton était un venu. Dès qu'il est entré, il s'est tenu en arrière sur la facture d'investissement, est allé avec Wall Street, apporté dans Greenspan. C'est un genre semblable de chose parallèle. Vous obtenez ces gens qui sont sur le feu parlant de la démocratie, personnes journalières, travailleurs. Et quand vous êtes présenté dans les halls de la puissance, ils entrent vous dans le bureau ovale ; ils disent que « c'est le bouton pour la bombe atomique… » Voyez, il sait le tout que la substance maintenant-il est tête d'un empire. Elle est plus profonde que l'assimilation, et ce n'est pas corruption ; c'est juste la vie au dessus. Si vous mettez Jésus dans le bureau de Pontius Pilate, comment va-t-il se comporter ? TR : Que pensez-vous du prix Nobel ? Onde entretenue : Je souhaite juste que ses parents aient été autour de le voir. Je pense que ces prix sont, car la pierre astucieuse indique, une affaire de famille. Ils sont pour les gens qui vous aiment. Je pense que ceci le met dans une situation très difficile parce qu'avoir un prix de paix Nobel et puis s'avérer être un président de guerre va être très durs. …. Puisqu'ils ont donné basé sur la technologie de l'information sur la promesse et le fait que, et ils sont absolument exacts, ce frère Barack Obama a produit autrement de plus d'un sens d'espoir et de possibilité que n'importe qui sur la planète. C'est un fait qui doit être reconnu, et si c'est les critères pour le prix, il obtient le prix que la manière James Brown l'obtient pour dégonfler-incontesté. Incontesté. Mais c'est au niveau de la promesse symbolique. Le Now sont vous allant avoir un prix de paix et envoyer encore 68.000 troupes en Afghanistan ? Vous avez toujours des gens marcher autour de qui a torturé les personnes, qui sont complètement inexplicables. Vous avez des avocats qui ont autorisé des crimes contre l'humanité et vous dites que vous voulez tourner à partir de cela. Mais quand Jamal se fait attraper avec la fente sur le coin, vous ne tournez pas à partir de celui que vous étudiez et poursuivez ce frère il obtient envoyé à un complexe industriel de prison. Et c'est hypocrisie au niveau le plus profond quand il vient à la règle du droit. Mais elle est maintenant sous Obama. Ce n'est plus Bush. TR : Que faites-vous de ce qu'Obama appelle la « génération de Joshua » des agents élus ? Je veux dire Artur souvent-mentionné Davis, agent de réservations de Cory, Deval Patrick, Adrian Fenty et semblable. Que le récit de la politique noire fait-il avancer ? Onde entretenue : Un que je pense qu'il y a beaucoup de confusion. Une partie de elle doit faire avec l'effondrement relatif des bases organiser-en dépit d'Obama. Je n'irais pas jusqu'ici dire qu'Obama était des bases ; Je l'appellerais Astroturf. Il doit faire avec l'utilisation de la technologie de mobiliser rapidement, mais il est toujours à partir du dessus. Il a attaché au bureau du candidat…. Mais mobiliser pour une campagne est différente de la mobilisation pour une cause. Fannie Lou Hamer et Baker d'Ella n'ont été attachés à aucune élection à court terme. Ils essayaient de réveiller la conscience des personnes pour être les coureurs long-éloignés pour la justice. Et nous avons très peu de cela aujourd'hui. Les formes dominantes de conduite sont attachées au bureau électoral, attaché à la nation état-qui va être le prochain gouverneur noir, maire noir, le président noir. Et je pense par certains côtés qui est l'une des conséquences plus limiteuses d'Obama comme président. Dayo Olopade est journaliste de Washington pour la racine.

ROSILENE LUDUVICO, PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

2009-10-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

jeffery mcnary

Chicago Art Review.NET

An exhibition of primarily small-scale, interrelated works of German-based artist Rosilene Luduvicao currently hangs gracefully in the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center. The works are soft and sparse and subtle, and they beacon a close-up look.

The show, co-curated by the City’s outgoing Deputy Commissioner for Visual Arts, Gregory Knight, is titled simply ‘Paintings and Drawings’, rather than the artist’s early suggestion of, ‘Lindomar’ or ‘Beautiful Sea’. There is actually little ‘sea’ to be seen.

Luduvico’s paintings and figures are poetical and lyrical, light and airy. They employ soft shades as exemplified in her ‘Ele’ (He), oil on chalk grounded canvas, depicting a lone figure on a seascape. ‘Lotus’ and ‘A New Kind of Water’, both oil on ground canvas, carry an air of mystery, with their pink tints and bird forms in naked trees. They convey a sense of winter, of quiet. The observer can almost hear the crunching snow. At points, some of her figures are playful, and her manner in applying oil to canvass casually mimics watercolor and produces the effect of “blurring the distinction between painting and drawing.”

Born in Brazil, Ms. Ludvico currently lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany. She studied at Espirito Santo University as well as Dusseldorf Acadamie of Art. She has shown primarily in Europe. This being her first U.S. exhibition, Luduvico’s work has been more spoken of, more than viewed, by many.

Nine of the, ‘Untitled’ works are inter-changeable, all oil on chalked canvas. One can move rapidly amongst or past them.

She goes on to present, ‘Chicago Boy’, color pencil and graphite on paper an entertaining, happy piece with few strokes. Here an elfin, curly haired figure appears napping. There is glitter strategically placed along the drawings bottom.

Although Luduvico has not clearly identified with any art movement, her work is said to reflect that of Caspar David Friedrich and the Romantic Period of German/Northern European painting. Her, ‘Dream Traveler’, it is worth noting, harkens similarities to the work of Peter Doig. So far, however, there is no singular spirit which comes across fully in this show. That will take a little more time, and the viewer should eagerly await that announcement. (Jeffery McNary) October 18, 2009

JOSUE PELLO: NEW WORK

2009-10-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

jeffery mcnary

CHICAGO ART REVIEW . NET

Central to the art of Josue Pellot is, “Questioning cultural structures would be overall. Then, focusing on political and familial experiences,” he says. This is confidently rolled out in his exhibition of “New Works”, currently in the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center. Here, the artist utilizes an array of mediums and formats, establishing a kind of ‘ethnic modernism’ and delineating linkages often overlooked. A Chicago artist with Puerto Rican roots, he has clearly found ways, through these works, to connect figuratively and creatively his heritage and the American experience, with both pop culture and consumerism.

Pellot’s installation, “Detail of 1493”, uses neon and argon lights to present a three panel historical tale. It begins with a Taino Indian, an indigenous figure, standing on the shore viewing the arrival of three sailing vessels, and concludes in the third panel with a conquistador thrusting his sword into a prostrate Taino figure. “The neon pieces were fully realized and produced after I re-encountered the facade of a Liquor store (styled like a Spanish fortress)”, he explains. “Each sign hung on its own window at the store next to big orange signs that read things like 'Milk 2.99', RC cola .99, eggs, etc.” One sees more than the obvious in what he refers to as an, “index to a story”. Why the neon? “I thought neon would be a great medium to talk about a consumed history, and when the liquor store came in to play it was a must,” he shares.

Another such “index” emerges in,‘Temporary Allegiance’, an amalgamation of U.S. and Puerto Rican flags almost creeping from a large plastic garbage bag. “The floor piece is the end result of a site specific installation project. The 15x25 foot flag was hung on 70 feet high on a light post that divided the highway in Puerto Rico. It lasted about 12 hours before city officials castrated the seam of the flag and put a few extra holes in it for me,” says Pellot. “I waited every day at city officials offices till I finally got the flag back, cut up and stuffed into a black trash bag. And the castrated seam now wraps around that post to this date.” Both installations secrete the artist’s aesthetic argument inviting the viewer to digest the connections of colonialism and consumerism as being more than just inconsequential. A story is being told here.

Pellot’s oeuvre has been influenced by that of Felix Gonzalez Torres, David Hammons and Tom Friedman. “These would be 3 artists who have had an impacted on me. A mixture of humor, politics and unquestionable creativity,” he says.

In his large photograph, ‘Dama a Caballo’, the artist demonstrates his broad range of skills and technique. Here he builds upon a classical work of another Puerto Rican artist, Jose Campeche. Yet true to his internal coherence, Pellot updates his work via a Puerto Rican background rather than the European landscape of the original.

How then, does an artist with such deep political convictions brace for the difficulty of rendering art which does more than lecture? Does the ‘work’ fight back? “More often than not I run with a 'bad' piece to the end. I've spent hours on pieces that will decorate my studio”, he says. Concluding, “The end result can either surprise me or lead to work that does feel right.”

JANE FULTON ALT : AFTER THE STORM

2009-10-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

At the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center
-jeffery mcnary

With “After the Storm”, Jane Fulton Alt’s dramatic, powerful exhibition recounts the aftermath of hurricane Katrina’s impact upon the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Her 30 photographs and accompanying commentary posted aside capture much of the devastation of the unprecedented disaster. The artist use of light and shadow reflect elegance and grit and draws the viewer into an emotional skirmish of irony and frankness. Now at Chicago’s Cultural Center, the photos recall. The shots are carefully composed. The photography is brutally exact.

“I never went thinking I was going to "seriously" photograph the aftermath of Katrina,” said Alt, also a clinical social worker who traveled to New Orleans via a program, “Look and Leave.” “Up until my trip there, I always shot black and white film, had my own darkroom and never done color. I brought a new digital Canon rebel camera along. Had I thought I was going to photograph, I would have brought other equipment. It wasn't until the 3rd day, when I felt I had reached my end physically and emotionally, that I realized photographing would be helpful to me and the larger community.”

In ‘Blue Cup’, Alt takes the viewer through a dense grey fog, down a street where leaning power poles come through like invading monsters. There is a collapsed structure of brown wood and rusted pipe in a heap, as a thing with wings and shanks stemming from it. Catching the eye is a teal blue paper cup, on its side as if a wounded survivor. The photo appears black and white with tint, yet, “They were all color images. There was just no color in the landscape”, says Alt. “Everything was covered with mud and dust and the air was rancid. Never in my life have I seen such destruction.”

Exploring the inherent strains and duality of roles of social worker/artist during Alt responds, “The stories were too much to contain. I asked my team leader if I could leave the "Look and Leave" site early as I thought I was going to have a "meltdown," she says. “I returned to my room and within an hour, I realized I had to photograph what I was seeing. It was like an epiphany...knowing the work would be strong and seen widely, and titled, "Look and Leave." She adds, “I actually had a change of clothes in my car for my different roles.”

Differences are cutting in ‘Mardi Gras Storage House’, its roof gone, skeletal arches and timber appear to hold up a clear sky. On the floor lay’s a silver ‘Tin man’ character from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ while across the way stands the Scarecrow sans broken neck. The vivid colors of the characters stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the picture.

“Superdome”, holds its breath, a grey, alien structure, a threatening presence at nightmares edge. “This picture was difficult...how to get the menacing feel into the photograph. I have to say that for the first time in my photographic career,” she recalls. “I knew when photographing that I was 'getting it.' It was like the pictures found me. It felt effortless, right. There was no struggle. My analytic mind took a back seat and I was responding to the landscape.”

These photographs are not entertainment. The artist captures the community in its fear and despair and searches to do so in its optimism and hope.

AMY CASEY - UNCERTAIN TIMES: NEW WORKS

2009-10-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

JEFFERY MCNARY

CHICAGO ART REVIEW
When it comes to the art of Amy Casey, ‘House Casey’ is probably not a brand the artist wants for her themed work. Nonetheless she had to know what she was getting into and how viewers would react. She stems from a new, noisy generation of painters full of journal entries. She breaks from that crowd with exercised, vivid authority, hardly detached from events, the show is a cautionary tale.

“Uncertain Times”, Casey’s current exhibition at the Zg Gallery consist of works driven by her recurring dreams of a world calamity. Here the artist captures bad dreams, recurring sessions of buildings collapsing, ecological catastrophes, reflections of the current nervous state of affairs of society.

“Composition is something very intuitive for me, and I usually lightly sketch out a piece with that first plan and keep it around to look at in my studio while I am forming the painting in my mind, then I block forms in very lightly and work the composition out-usually over a few days or even weeks, by taping bits of paper to the painting and trying different shapes and movements,” she says.

There is amazing detail and sensitivity in Casey’s work. With shades of rust, browns and deep reds and precision, the artist lays out an almost surreal landscape of urban landscapes in decay. Casey applies acrylic to paper, a technique allowing for exacting detail. With her “BigCity, Small Town”, a large work, she exhaust every house used in previous works. She references houses and buildings from her native Cleveland. Structures appear strapped together in absurd attempts to save themselves. “I focused on something that has bothered me for some time about my little communities and networks- that no matter how many group together it must be impossible to get from building to building and actually interact in some real way, which seems absurd since connection seems an important part of the idea,” Casey shares.

In other works stilts are used as a survival strategy for the houses and in others lines have snapped leaving the structures in a state of collapse. In her, “Stragglers” some structures are washed, producing an effect of dust rising, a fog.

There is no debate in Casey’s work. Here is a non-negotiable exhibit of failed fixers and engineers. Her environmentalist aesthetic is translated in a distinctly dramatic fashion. “My biggest struggle with individual pieces is wanting to make every tiny bit of the painting detailed and real to the best degree I can,” she concludes, “but being up against the reality of time and also not overworking something to death. Probably my next biggest struggle when working with a piece is dealing with accidents and having to rethink something that I felt I knew so well.”
(Jeffery McNary) October 5, 2009

WHO WROTE DREAMS FROM MY FATHER

2009-10-12T16:12:00.000-07:00

October 09, 2008
Jack Cashill

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called -- with a straight face -- "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.
And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.
Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.
The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.
In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams. I have also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the point of complicity, Edward Said's and Rigoberta Menchu's prominent among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers. Obama's ascent seems to follow a century-old pattern.
Tracing Obama's literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com calls a "scant paper trail." That trail begins at Occidental College whose literary magazine published two of Obama's poems -- "Pop" and "Underground" -- in 1981. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that "the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review --more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as Harvard's first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the "ruthlessness" of Obama's literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.
To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire ghostwriters -- John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his memoir, Faith of My Fathers -- but it is highly unusual for unknown young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.
I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success. It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly did not. If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama's sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.
I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." Without question, he contributed much of the book's raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.
Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since. Just as Obama resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at least tried to.
"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son "Malik" after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son "Zayd" after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.
Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described "community organizer," Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams' author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."
Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.
In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava." Indeed, the Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in 1969 Chicago.
As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar, "audacity!" Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior rising up inside of me -- audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.
The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship, at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing. In the book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened. I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe the same conventions. Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls, in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, "our constructed reality."
"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
"That whole first year seemed like one long lie," Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in "Dreams," a figure nearly matched in "Fugitive Days."
The reader knows that Ayers -- with some justification -- has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why. This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.
"I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War," writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.
Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.
One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence. In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the nation's seemingly ineradicable racism.
In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."
In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment. "There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."
Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.
In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with "Bud," the driver of a "brand-new Peterbilt truck." The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes -- at least two of them retold word for word -- before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his "N****r neutralizer."
"White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy," Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as though he were not a member of this benighted race.
These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:
"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."
The second from Dreams:
"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."
These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.
The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.
A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."
"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.
Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.
The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how this came to be. According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama's much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years after its modest release. After winning the election, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.
Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully reliable authorship analysis. As expert in the field Patrick Juola of Duquesne University observed, “The accuracy simply isn't there.” He cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).” That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along. Gold saw the complementary value, however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me “to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.”Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers's stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.
"I'd thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, "but I didn't have it in me."
The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."
Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea." More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."
Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."
Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."
In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."
In Obama's defense, he did grow up in Hawaii. Still, the short Hawaii stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island's natural appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:
"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did. One more item of interest. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama. In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.
None of this, of course, proves Ayers' authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.
The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.
Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.

TURQUE DE FRANCINE

2009-10-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

Dans le dialogue de la Turque de Francine, l'observateur trouve des secrets, et des traces de la tradition romantique le long de la modernité latérale. Le corps Language', de `actuellement à la source d'art de Chicago entoure la visionneuse avec l'esprit et passion. « Mes travaux sont les portraits émotifs. I don' ; de t l'aspiration toujours de mes propres expériences, » l'artiste indique. « Mes dernières séries de travaux sont des réponses directes à un désir de dessiner un rapport entre la fabrication de marque, la figure, et la langue. » La place et l'atmosphère de l'exposition est dominée par la nudité, principalement médias mélangés sur le papier, reflétant le confort tôt d'utiliser-et d'artiste avec le charbon de bois. « Je peux obtenir rattrapé en cours de fabrication, et finis tuer vers le haut la chose. Je ne suis pas grand à exprimer un bon nombre de sang-froid quand elle vient à celle ; la figure plus linéaire schémas dans la montr sont plus dure pour moi dans ce sens, » elle partage. Alors il y a son voyage subjectif dans des choses françaises. « Mon impulsion à voler à Paris et pour frotter les tombes au cimetière de Pere LaChaise était un que je ne peux pas entièrement expliquer, il était une impulsion d'intestin avec laquelle j'ai suivi à travers. » Ce sont des frottages avec les bords approximatifs, noms en peinture d'or, émail noir avec l'écriture française un-decipherable sur des nuances de texture de fourniture blue-black. Plus le notable est « Proust ». Le triomphe apprête dedans, C une Femme de Pas de nid de lui d'e non » plus » et « de CE ». Avec leur fond fauve, l'artiste revisite l'écriture de sa série de petit de `, lavée au-dessus des notes en français, avec la nudité trouvant un endroit vers l'avant. Les travaux de compagnon fournissent une avenue Montaigne de stroll vers le bas. « Je pense qui est pourquoi les gens peuvent rapporter à mon travail, ils voient qu'un raccordement entre quelque chose ils ont le feutre. Je la crois que nous fonctionnons hors d'un état de guérison, travaillant vers devenir une meilleure personne plus entière, » conclut.

DRAWING FROM HISTORY

2009-09-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

NEWCITY
-jeffery mcnary
Illustration is one of the last great art forms to be recognized by the art establishment. Perhaps because it exists in service to reportage, illustration has yet to ‘come up,’ as it were. It is, however, a well-developed style with major players. At 88 years old, Franklin McMahon looms large, his legacy bundled with some of Chicago’s biggest news stories. McMahon’s realist art captures, on an epic scale, many of the significant events and figures of the past sixty years. It’s a symphony of extensive notes. In graphite, charcoal and acrylic the illustrator substantiates history, providing crisp insight into a moment’s look and feel: politicos, popes, campaigns, cardinals, courtrooms and conventions.

A selection of the artist’s drawings and paintings are currently on exhibition at the Loyola University Museum of Art, with a focus on his religious and civic contributions. Jonathan Canning, the Martin D’Arcy Curator of Art, says of McMahon’s works, “This is a lost art he’s called to. The camera is so ubiquitous we forget that such persons did such work for so very long.” McMahon has written, “The artist who draws directly on the site can see around corners, adding dimension to viewpoint, getting ideas, heightening reality.” He captures bishops in white miters entering St. Peter’s Basilica, the magnificent Baroque dome, impressive marble pillars and statues of saints about the rooftop share a harmony, as if the artist is lifted mid-way up the obelisk and the piazza’s center for a privileged glimpse of it all.

A native Chicagoan, McMahon spent a portion of his childhood in California, and there began drawing posters for school plays. Returning home, he completed studies at Fenwick Catholic High School where he began drawing cartoons, selling one to Collier’s Weekly a week before graduation. Entering the Army Air Corps during WWII, McMahon was shot down over Germany and spent four months as a POW. War’s end found him in evening studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while continuing to draw freelance. There’s small wonder that sensitive mix of church and politics placed its brand upon his psyche and his creative passions. His love of the city comes through in his engaging book of drawings and paintings, “Chicago Impressions.” “My work has been half assignment, half self-initiated,” says the artist-reporter. “It’s helped that my wife is a travel writer.”

McMahon’s voluminous portfolio contains significant amounts of politically driven material. “I’m interested in capturing the atmospherics of the campaigns, rather than the candidates themselves,” he once shared relative to political coverage. “I’m in hopes those who see the drawings will get a feeling of what a guy has to go through to run for president.” He accomplishes this with in images of a thoughtful Robert Kennedy, charcoal on paper, and his ‘sainted’ brother, the President with his classic hands in the suit side pockets, thumbs out. Soft circular strokes connect that President with those nearby. There’s the young “Edward Kennedy in Chicago,” acrylic watercolor, caught from off-stage. There’s Carters, Reagans, Nixons, wannabes and posses. He presents Eleanor Roosevelt, a thin-lined charcoal on paper, with hands raised as if coaxing one to, well, chill.

McMahon has also captured the darker tambour of American culture and its occasional ugly act-out. In 1955 he was contacted by Life magazine to cover the trial of those who’d brutally disfigured and murdered fifteen year-old black Emmett Till, summering in Mississippi. “Moses Wright Pointing at Defendants” hits a high point in the trial as Till’s uncle’s elongated, darkened hand points out the murderers as he speaks, “Thar he.” McMahon’s “Byron De La Beckwith Holding Gun That Shot Medgar Evers,” from 1964, details the twisted lips of the unapologetic Klansman holding a rifle in the witness chair before a Confederate flag and shadowed wall.

The artist does not hold any single project as being the most profound, adding, “They’ve all been. I’m just an innocent bystander, in the corner drawing.” Poet Robert Pinsky speaks of the Republic being “a great nation, still engaged in becoming a great people.” Should complications of karma hold that true, Franklin McMahon’s drawings provide huge doses of these ‘becomings,’ alluring us to them and holding us there.

Franklin McMahon shows at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan, through October 18.

MATT HALLINAN'S ROLL

2009-08-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

NEWCITY

Staying true to its charge of working primarily with emerging artists, Around the Coyote’s 1st Annual Painting Competition and Exhibition convincingly expands those efforts for painters. In the past, the gallery played host to open-call shows for works on paper and photography. In lending its resources to those striving for footholds in the paint medium, Matthew Hallinan’s “Energumeno,” a large, vibrant oil on canvas with surrealist leanings emerged as the premier piece of this exhibition. There are figures partying and one waving a Sandinista flag from the rooftop.
“The purpose of these types of shows are really to just give artists more exhibition opportunities, so they can show their work, meet other artists in the same discipline, meet art patrons, collectors, curators, etcetera,” says Anne Mills, Around the Coyote’s executive director.
This show’s curator, Sara Schnadt of the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs office, selected the ten finalists for the exhibition based upon images of their work, artist statements and biographical information relative to their work and personal styles. Artists paid an application fee of fifteen-dollars, and the financial award for the winner is yet to be determined. Schnadt selected Hallinan’s work based upon her perception of his “vision, technique and how that technique had been developed.”
Elizabeth Kauffman’s work, “Page 249.” a technically sophisticated watercolor and graphite on paper, noted that juried shows wrestle with “institutionalized” points of view and expectations. Nonetheless, she, as does John Mosher, whose open-ended pieces of loose color and hard black lines resemble those of illustrator Ralph Steadman, concur that showing in this forum is exciting, a “breakout thing.”
Hearing his work held the “strongest images,” Hallinan explains his process: “I have in my mind a mental sketch. I manipulate pieces which otherwise wouldn’t exist. I use poetic devices. There are only a few tubes of color put into this,” he says, “I’m thrilled.” (Jeffery McNary)

THE BLACK WALNUT GALLERY

2009-08-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary
NEWCITY

“Can nature and technology co-exist?” asked Robert Wayner in his staccato-speak. “It’s critical that we continue to explore how wild nature and technology can exist together.” With this as his magnetic north, the geologist turned musician, turned painter and sculptor, now gallery owner, has pinned his hopes on his Black Walnut Gallery where he showcases Chicago artists and his own wood sculptures. Relocated from Wicker Park to the West Loop-Fulton Market area, Wayner’s current offering is a group show titled “Closure.”
Growing up in Southern Illinois farm country in a Mennonite household, Wayner’s imagination drew him to woodworking, which “filled me with amazement,” he recalls. “The Mennonites have been in the forefront of the green movement for a while,” Wayner shares, “as well as being big in third-world relief and agrarian stewardship.” Although he admits, “I don’t think that brought me to where I’m at,” those early groundings are reflected in the flow of the two-story gallery, with its domestic, natural feel and its bundled fasces hanging by twine at points in the long throw of the place. Earlier this year Wayner presented a group show of Mennonite artists.
Wayner’s sculpture, “Nature Cradling Technology,” embodies Black Walnut Gallery’s core values. Aluminum balls perch atop sculpted wood, signifying a balance among progress and tradition, in both art and in life. Alongside naturally felled wood sculptures are some of Wayner’s colorful paintings, many dedicated to Tolstoy, whose “Confession,” said Wayner, “encapsulates the notion that we never choose who we are.”
“Closure” is an exhibition dotted with like thinkers. Painter Rex Sexton haunting “Kaddish” presents a deep blue shadowed, ghostly figure under a full, yellow moon overlooking tombstones bearing semi-faces. “I learned how to paint from a Holocaust Jew,” says Sexton. Growing up in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, Sexton “saw hardship with no let up.” He paints “expressions of humanity with the hope that I capture its dreams in the midst of adversity.” Romanticism emerges in his stunning “Edith” oil painting. This semi-cubist portrait of Edith Piaf seduces with thick, deep layers of tans and blacks, doe eyes and arched eyebrows. It’s more Seine than stockyard.
Wayner coolly accepts the challenges of running a gallery. “I’m an artist, I had to do this,” says Wayner. “I search for truth. I didn’t have a choice,” he says with barely a shrug of the shoulders.

END OF THE 80'S

2009-08-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary
NEWCITY

Twenty-two artists, all alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from the mid-late eighties, have come together for “End of the 80s,” a ‘reunion’ show, at the Avram Eisen Gallery. The exhibition is primarily curated by Laura Olear and Bruce Linn, both class of ‘88, with the group collectively dedicating the show to Ray Yoshida, a recently deceased professor and mentor to many participating artists.
A co-mingling of diverse styles can be expected in group shows of this proportion, and “End of the 80s” holds to that. There is unusual grace and also chatter. No obvious Yoshida ‘style’ is identifiable in the exhibition. “It was more a thing of his teaching, his demanding, his aggressiveness,” said Olear of his pedagogical approach. “Few of his students didn’t feel he’d a profound impact on them,” added Linn.
Approaching Lindsay Obermeyer’s “Red Blood,” a cranberry red bead embroidery, connections among the exhibition’s layout emerge. Nearby is Olear’s “Tracheal Diverticulum,” a dark mixed media on arches with the a medical tone, and Linn’s blood-red and black layered oil on canvas, “Sacred Heart with Bullit & Band-aid,” an intensely political statement the artist lays at the feet of the Bush-Cheney administration.
One corner holds Steven L. Jones’ penetrating “Mothman Took My Baby Away,” a two-piece of acrylic and ink on dyed red paper in conjoined wooden frames, “colored by grief and filtered through a mood disorder,” according to the artist.
The exhibition highlights, in sharp relief, vast differences of artists schooled in close time and space. Complicity courts sedition. “People still tell stories about Ray and feel, ‘I’ve got an idea of what Ray would say,’” Linn reflected. Perhaps so, and perhaps he would concur there are works here containing commentary and polish, while others appear swept and bruised and requiring a viable alternative to just muddling through. (Jeffery McNary)

ANNA JOELSDOTTIR

2009-08-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary
NEWCITY

There’s a gee-whiz element in the art of Anna Joelsdottir. Her current exhibition, “The Dandelions Are Over,” takes a step beyond previous works, which have evolved in series and often develop around negative space. Now, here, we find explosions of color, activated and covering entire canvases with mystical landscapes and abstractions.
Joelsdottir’s centerpiece, a quasi-sculpture installation, “Flood,” is a lurching, plunging avalanche of mixed media on joined pieces of mylar. Its intense splashes of yellows, tangerines and grays are unpredictable, and the work, with its stained-glass effect, refuses to lie at ease. Twenty-four-by-eleven feet from ceiling to floor, it drapes, gathers at points, and rolls across the upper wall, living dragon-like on the edge of chaos, while another disconnected, daring nine-foot work leaps and hangs across the room.
“When I came to Zg to install, I had decided to use the mylar in the front gallery and somehow work from the windows and ceiling making use of the changing light,” Joelsdottir recalls. Alone to fit mood and space into her system she “pushed a pin into the first sheet between the two windows. As the piece grew and began to take shape, I began to understand what it was I was trying to get at, and the title became ‘Flood.’”
A fairytale appears at work here among four canvases, each medium-sized in acrylic, ink and pencil. An additional six small mylar pieces borrow from “Flood,” capturing its translucent effect and color. Those works meet Joelsdottir’s ambitious efforts at transcending language and cultures via her paints, yet they are best served by their copious notes of the complex main piece.

EWA'S EC

2009-07-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

jeffery mcnary

NEWCITY

Nestled in the trendy West Loop-Fulton Market District is one of the city’s newest delights, Ewa Czeremuszkin’s EC Gallery. Here, where the cool mesh with the seasonal; here, where Oprah works and hosts her tent show, Ms. Czeremuszkin grows her dream. In less than a year she has presented one group and four solo exhibitions of new and mid-career abstract painters. Most happen to be either Polish, like her, or trained at academies in Poland.
Czeremuszkin, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, holds a masters degree in painting. The simple elegance of the petite EC Gallery, approximately eighteen-feet square, adjoins her studio, and is “a dream of mine being fulfilled,” she says. “This is my life. As an artist I wanted to promote other artists, given the difficulty of placing in galleries. I have selected those who, in my view, merit an exhibition.” She continues, “I have connections and knowledge of European artists who’ve shown in Europe, but not here. So it’s an opportunity both for them to show in the U.S. and for a U.S. audience to see their work.”
One painter to whom the EC has given voice is the prolific Swiss artist Tadeusz Bilecki. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland, his bold colors and large format paintings illuminated the intimate space with just six works. “The Apparition of a Geisha Suite,” with its visibly over-painted, layered compositions of acrylics on translucent polyester and paper, filled and enlivened the walls of the ‘gallery box’ with its vaulted ceiling. “I saw his work as something that was fresh, different. I’d never seen something like that. It is close to my vision for the place,” Czeremuszkin commented.

Currently works by Jola Jastrzab, another Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow alumni, decorate the exposed brick walls of the gallery. Her minimalist-abstracts hold few lines and singular color. They strive to electrify a style of hieroglyphs and allegorical concepts minus the parables that may well define such pieces. Her brush strokes tend to bash the canvas and paper, with such works fitting well, in both style and substance in this hip, up-close engagement.
In its brief tenure on the scene, EC has presented the work of Alina Ignatowsky, photographer Paul Kowalow, and a group show including the work of Beata Garanty, Agata Czeremuszkin (Ewa’s sister), and Czeremuszkin herself, whose ethereal work has clear influences of Rothko and Cy Twombly.

All art Polish, however, is not her mantra. The artist/dealer backs away from the works of radical artist Artur Zmijewski and his current movement in Poland. “When I look at something, as an aesthetic person, I enjoy looking at the latest stuff, but I don’t like sad art, tragedy. Art,” she says, is for people to enjoy. Life is sometimes so sad, people should have something to enjoy.”
Big plans for future exhibits are in the works. “I’m always looking for something new, something international, something not shown in other places,” she added. “And this location is just great for art. It’s close to home,” she laughs. (Jeffery McNary)
EC Gallery

lions, and tigers, and alex, oh boy!

2009-07-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

for NEWCITY

Arriving at the Linda Warren Gallery for the exhibit of Alex O’Neal’s Recent Works, one meets the startling, ‘Modern Day Tarzans’, acrylic & collage on canvas. Here are day-glo greens, yellows, and reds on a burnished rust background. There is a lion, a tiger, a large, long, green snake. There are androgynous figures with large breasts and moustaches with wide open mouths taunting, yelling, sticking out their tongues, pledging and promising more just ahead. It’s an outright eschatological festival.

“My work is formally rooted in several years of abstract painting done in the American Southwest”, Mr. O’Neal shares. “Thematically, the dysfunctional community of Mississippi I moved within in the sixties, early seventies, made a deep impression on me.” Going about the exhibition, dense, dusty reds with vivid blues and yellows and occasional twists of glitter thrust those themes outward. One can feel the heat, smell the hot sauce.

‘Superstars of the Delta’, acrylic and collage on canvas, lays out the humor and irony intended. Here an Elizabeth Taylor ‘Cleopatra’ cut out accompanies another chorus of howling faces, ‘militant hippies’, both crying and laughing with tiny black and white cut outs of celebrities of the period spewing from their mouths. There are plenty of wild animals, dead and alive. There are military chevrons with signage encouraging one to ‘Eat more Possum’, warnings that ‘The art world is not our friend’, noting bars to frequent and advertisement of ‘Dirt for Sale.’ The theme is uninterrupted in his ‘Superheroes of the Delta’, an oil pastel on paper, a similar work, as well as in the other twenty one pieces comprising the exhibit.

The vague sharpens in Mr. O’Neal’s ‘Pop Art-izing’. Although inspired by works of Swiss painter, Corbaz, this exhibition finds the artist fast forwarding Bruegle into the 21st century, downshifting and throwing on the brakes in a time before ‘awesome’ and ‘whatever’. The show chastises, mocks, curses, threatens. It is a protestant ‘de profoundis’, which follows you around the room and out of the door and down the street for a long, long time.

oh tadeusz!

2009-07-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

i met tadeusz bilecki at the EC Gallery in chicago's trendy, vibrant, west loop/fulton market district. here the cool mesh with the seasonal. here oprah goes to work and host her tent show. here the narative continues to seek it's tale.
here tadeusz, or 't' as i've grown to call him, hung his 'appariation of a geisha', one of the more dynamic, explosive works i've seen to date.
a prolific artist born in switzerland, 't' prefers large formats, working with metal, paper, ceramics, and fabrics. "The final choice often depends on the means (financial) available", 't' shared. "As most artist, I have dreams of monumental formats, however these dreams are unfulfilled. I like deformation of paper, which under the influence of water gains relief, becomes alive", he added.
needless to say, i was humbled to come upon to come upon tadeusz's notes and his suite of painting's tagged for this writer. as an author, i've grown acustomed to crafting about rather than crafting upon. ergo 'jeffery's ecstasy', is a thrilling, exhilarating ride.
"Oh, Jeffery! He stopped in front of the painting and produced an ecstatic shout. A big: "waouhhhhh" with his lips wide open. Ewa scared a little, not used to so enthusiastic guests. She was rather used to an audience that treat previews as an occasion to eat something and have a drink. Jeffery's enchantment was very special. Extrovert and long-lasting. Lasting for a long a moment. Today, I still see those wide open lips and eyes. I feel like painting this enchantment, but I quickly realised that it has already been> done. Jean-Paul Goud did it with Grace Jones's wide open lips. A few days later, I saw in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a serie of pops' and cardinals' wide open lips by Bacon. No, I can not do it. Everybody would shout that it is a plagiarism. But who knows... who knows, maybe one day I will paint this enchantment on a big sheet of paper (Ewa says, maximum 250 centimeters height) by throwing a great quantity of acrylic painting, superimposed, untrammeled. Untrammeled until this enchantment will seem far, far beyond Aberdeen Street... Oh! Aberdeen! A beautiful street, a beautiful neighbourhood. You only have to pronouce its name to smell the Scottish whisky. I have less and less strength to explain my work. I have less and less pedagogic motivation. I feel less and less invested with a mission as a prophet. But at the same time, nowadays, there are a lot of painters> who write more than they paint. Write more than the critics. A moment after, another one entered. This one stopped shocked. He also had his lips wide open, but his eyes seemed lost. He walked as a lion in its cage from painting to painting. He was amazed. He saw a lot of analogy between the anatomical plates and my paintings, he was a doctor. His enchantment lasts a bit too long and Ewa thought it was a kind of epidemia. Not a Mexican one but Chicago's one. A few days before, I didn't know much about Chicago. Not even that it was as flat as a table. Not even that it is preparing for hosting the Olympic games. Not even that the Art Institute of Chicago is getting bigger with a new wing. Today, I know a lot more. I know that this is a city of “countless amazed persons“. A city where Joan Michell created her work. > -A few days later-> During two and a half days, I stepped in every gallery in Chelsea, New York. Lack of enchantment. A thousands of works, hundreds of artists, but a lack of enchantment. There was only one Picasso (in Gagossian Gallery) and a totally unknown artist to me named Sati Zech. Except those, rather monotony. This was also the opinion of the "local persons" during> previews in New York. Totally lack of open wide lips. Oh! Chicago!> - A few days later again - > I know that in a fews days of stepping, there will be as every year the biggest contemporary art mass in the world:> Art 40 Basel 10-14, June 09. I hope that I will open my lips> wide with enchantment a lot of times. As wide open lips as Jeffery's. Art, art..."

what initially appears overwhelming in t's art soon educates and fascinates with its passion. the EC Gallery, founded by artist curator ewa czeremuszkin, focuses upon the introduction of emerging and mid-career artists. It is characterised by a desire to promote the "most contemporary artists of our time." with the bilecki exhibition, ewa has clearly done so, and perhaps bleached out the flickering sideshows of neighboring galleries with color and thunder.

easy, with reason to picasso

2009-05-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

arriving single-edged in satin shoes and all her forms, walking amid the swirling mist, un-veiled, gentle, treasured and high minded like the rain-goddess, with her un-swept hair as something from a fairy tale, deliberate and dressed for the occasion, tipped sideward she smiled…and waved. she behaved in that way.

those paintings are not mine to keep yet, still just canvas reminders of a bad storm system back talking, still impalpable, though our eyes sharpened together for a while on their surfaces. something else enlisted her, her good strange form of clarity best held for reinforcement.

i remember her standing brilliant among contrasting colors and depictions, among monsters turned to flora and recognizable things. i said ‘i love you’ aloud then, beneath the sylvette david and waved my arms toward the flicks of gray, soft, confounding brush strokes.

i’d requested a motto, a message, a thing stitched together i could fix if need be. there was the faint noise of her kiss as i traced her shoulders. there, delicate and convincing, was the shaking of her head and the tone of a bell long ago rusted which now breaks inside of me.

‘i love you’, i said to our silence darker than i recall, on the street side, between the lions, as she and chicago wrapped around me. i did not look back,
nor gird,
nor feel the release.

i will continue for a time, like the foam and waves cast out… and drawn back in.

great wall

2009-05-14T15:41:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

i felt ill
then i did not hear from you, again.

thank you,
this is what it will be without you.

here is the sadly ‘so right’,
where is the curse i want to design.

you would not recognize me today,
you would not understand,
you would wilt in the confusion of my name
which does not mean that much to you.

the tightly drawn dock lines snapped
as our sadly mixed vessel slipped,
then jerked, from its harbor
for the sea.

there are shadows now, upon the water,
remnant of my penchant for ship building.

there is ash and glow from the flame
which consumed them,
and pieces of the complex wall from the east

upon which you cling
and float along the current line
for the voyage home.

saturday

2009-05-14T08:21:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

saturday's octave holds long notes, wearing its tasteful

simple boa and brocade to market place and square

alarmless and crisply fashionable…

and lunch as well it suggest

its chimes are playful as if not to hesitate nor stay

its glances freshly painted, its new smiles launched

by seamed legged scented women with aria eyes

come to charm and sue for lead singers with beauty with bounce

darting and teasing the diverse tribes
there sparkling and eager to begin with

like sketched images reaching for the tasteful
exploring the vogue of it all

the undaunted down in the village wear jeans today
while sipping coffee like ghosts searching for the psychic,
highlighting typos while looking for luck
or some muse or the other in whose wake to swim

saturday, a sweetness of things not yet invented
a sweetheart gently tugging secrets and whispers from babel
aloud, with store bought goods and glimpses of the festive

shades of the day have a way of pardoning both
careless and remarkable
soul-quenching and straightening out feelings

we’ll hear it’s song again
with its jingling dreams held in our arms like our own
and its promise of what that means

it's a good thing

2009-05-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

Dance Review New York City Ballet
Balanchine Sandwich, Electronica Filling
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
Thematic or not, there is a certain art to designing mixed repertory programs. Some sort of arc, or juxtaposition, should be present to indicate that intelligent life is guiding the choices. Or give us such crashingly good ballets that it doesn’t matter if there is any rhyme or reason to their being lumped together. We viewers aren’t difficult. All we want, to riff on a Frank O’Hara line, is boundless art.
Tuesday night’s New York City Ballet program at the David H. Koch Theater did not quite achieve boundlessness. The middle work, Angelin Preljocaj’s “Stravaganza,” was the chief culprit here, though the ratio of dance (95 minutes) to intermission (40 minutes) didn’t help matters. Vivaldi meets electronica, classical phrases vie with sharply angled gestures, and dancers from two worlds confront one another.
Mark Stanley’s lighting is dark without being dramatic, Herve-Pierre’s old-world costumes make the men look like Pilgrims, and Mr. Preljocaj’s ideas aren’t nearly so strange as they should be. It’s the ballet equivalent of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and not one of his good ones.
What interest there was came primarily from the dancers’ strong performances. Benjamin Millepied and Tiler Peck elevated an earthy, violence-tinged duet through their shared intensity. Tyler Angle’s clarity and intelligence of intent made phrases seem more legible than they were.
“La Stravaganza” (1997) is a product of the Diamond Project, City Ballet’s continuing effort to add new blood to its repertory. On Tuesday it was sandwiched between two Balanchine classics, “The Four Temperaments” (1946) and “Chaconne” (1976). It is unkind to compare Mr. Preljocaj’s ballet to either of these works. Yet both, despite showing him up, prove why new commissions are vital: a company cannot live on museum pieces alone, no matter their quality.
With their grand finales, like ornate frames, and their sweeping sense of order — although wonderfully complicated and undermined in “The Four Temperaments,” a modernist tour de force set to a terrifically severe Hindemith score — both works feel of another age.
The ideas in them still captivate: the female dancers slinking about “Temperaments” like a minimalist Greek chorus not particularly interested in commenting on anything other than their own angular designs; the kaleidoscopic ripples of movement to start “Chaconne,” on a stage full of women with wild, unbound hair. And there are performances of heft and authority in both: Jared Angle’s calm ownership of the Sanguinic variation anchors “Temperaments,” while the sensual play of wits between Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal, and their nuanced attention to the crystalline Gluck score, illuminate their central duet in “Chaconne.”
But neither of these works feels rooted in the particulars of life in the early 21st century, the life lived by these dancers and their audiences. For all their mysteries and great value, they are known entities, and the dancers treat them as such, only fitfully taking full ownership.
One could say, with good reason, that this is a fault of the company, not the ballets — but it’s not entirely. Time plays a role too. To end with an actual quotation, this one by Clement Greenberg: “Where there is novelty there is hope.” All indications are that Balanchine, a man who created more than 400 works, knew this well.
New York City Ballet performs through June 21 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 870-5570, nycballet.com.

something of value

2009-04-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Richard Hunt and the Politics of Bronze
-jeffery mcnary

For the most part, his representationalist sculpture captures and sets forth a message with the force of a sudden wind storm. And in a city held together by threads of promise, the sculpture of the artist Richard Hunt breaks free from formality and brings one quickly into a realm of light, text, and shadow which only folded, hammered, heated and burnished bronzes and steels can do. His work directs, without speaking.

A native Chicagoan, Hunt’s interest in the visual arts can be traced to his early youth on the city’s south side. In 1955, while a student at the venerable Art Institute of Chicago, he began exhibiting his sculpture around Chicago’s small galleries, art fairs and local centers. “During the twelve years that followed,” he says in an artist statement, “my sculptural development grew as a private, independent, studio-based, self-generated activity that responded to the stimuli I supplied and the skills I could master.”

And he has, indeed, mastered the fine art of the ancients. Come April 29, 2009, the International Sculpture Center will honor Mr. Hunt with its 18th Annual Life Time Achievement Award at a gala in the Chicago Cultural Center. Previous recipients include Sir. Anthony Caro, Elizabeth Catlett, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Nam June Paik.

“The ISC is delighted to honor this most deserving artist,” said Johannah Hutchison, Executive Director of the International Sculpture Center in a release, “We look forward to celebrating the career of this well-loved artist. It will be wonderful to honor Richard Hunt in his hometown where his work graces the city and where he has touched so many in the local community.”

It’s Chicago, who’s first non-indigenous settler was, as is Hunt, a man of African descent. It’s Chicago; Al Capone; the Daleys; ‘Harold’; Algren, and Bellow, and Sandburg, and Terkle; it’s Jesse, and Jordan, and that ‘skinny kid with a funny sounding name”, and it’s more architectural wonders than…well anywhere. Now firmly entrenched into this rich, and sometimes tasteful, tradition is cemented Richard Hunt of Englewood, sculptor.

Hunt and his friend of 30 years, retired surgeon and renowned art collector Walter Evans and I recently took a ride through an April hail storm to the David Weinberg Gallery in the city’s River North Art District. An exhibition of his work currently stands there. When questioned as to whether the un-familiar, un-trained eye could properly interpret and appreciate his work, Hunt was quick to retort, “Don’t put your notions of eighteenth century education and art on the American people. If you’re asking, ‘do fifty percent of people know about this or that artist’, the answer is probably no. But people do know what they like, and what appeals to them, yes. And that’s sophisticated enough.”

His commitment to public art is clearly exemplified with ‘Why’, a cast bronze at The University of Chicago; ‘Slabs of the Sunburnt West’, a welded bronze at the Memorial to Carl Sandburg, University of Illinois at Chicago; ‘Illinois River Landscape’, welded steel at the State of Illinois Building, Chicago; ‘Man’s Way, Nature’s Way’, welded stainless steel, California EPA Building, Sacramento, and many more works in locales around the globe.

‘Play’, a work began in 1967, was a commissioned sculpture which, Hunt says, “…my studio could not accommodate.” He writes in his early notes, “’Play’, as I look back on it, began what has been a second career for me, that of a public sculptor. The dimensions of this second career, which remains inextricably linked with the first, were not clear in that beginning, and have only become apparent to me with time and reflection on its course.”
The work, of welded corten steel, now stands at the John J. Madden Mental Health Center in Hines, Illinois. By then however, Hunt had exhibited at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair (the youngest artist to date to have done so), and at present has more public work on display than any other sculptor.

“Any of these pieces could be ‘public art’ even though they were not necessarily conceived as such”, he says of the works current in the Weinberg, “Artists are empathetic. You feel what other people feel.”

The sure realization one reaches when entering a gallery of Richard Hunt sculptures, irrespective of the point from which one views them, is the depth and angles of the work. They reach and stretch upward, from floors, from walls. They appear to search and ultimately find dramatic completions. Some appear preparing to launch, to move fluidly up and through the air.

Walking among his creations Richard enlightens me, “The reason for art being part of our lives, is because people make it part of our lives. It’s always been, but since the enlightenment, skill was applied to matters of taste, and you could say now it’s been democratized”.

Aaron Ott, curator of the Weinberg Gallery shared, “His work has a signature, Richard’s work. You know instantly it’s his. There’s no confusing it with something else. There’s lots of flight. So much of it has to do with flight.” A welded stainless steel work, ‘Low Flight’, rises in a heavy spiral from the floor at the entrance of the exhibit. To its left, ‘Family Tree’, a welded bronze rises in a swerved bow with a realization of limbs ultimately flowing outward in various directions. There are no doldrums in this space, nothing venal.

“I find Richard’s work to be iconic’, said Evans, who happens to own four of the sculptor’s works and has recently designated the Savannah College of Art and Design as the recipient of 70 pieces from his extensive personal collection. “He’s a master of this art form, and when I first saw his work, it just spoke to me. As a surgeon”, he continued, “ (the works) were like organic matter. These pieces are so life like.” “Pegasus”, Hunt reminds him, “’Pegasus’, it was the first piece,” turning to make sure I get it, “the winged horse.”

Asked what he found out about himself through his work, Mr. Hunt was quick to laugh, “I found out what I like to do. It’s not like a lightening bolt came down from the sky.” And what he likes to do was influenced by the work of both the Spanish-born, French sculptor Julio Gonzales and his friend, Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Piccasso. Those two had met in Paris and formed a lasting friendship. And by the time Picasso’s ‘Head of a Woman’ was placed on Chicago’s Daley Plaza and initially scorned as ‘unintelligible modern art’, Richard Hunt had thrice been awarded The Logan Prize, from The Art Institute of Chicago, a Palmer Prize, a Campana Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2), an Artist Residency at Yale, exhibited solo in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cleveland, for starters. ‘Figurehead’, welded aluminum was standing at Ridgewwod High School in Norridge, Illinois, as was
‘Play’, in Hines, Illinois. Hunt’s sculpture is now part of permanent museum collections at The Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Israel, Jerusalem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, the Museum of the Twentieth Century, Vienna, Austria, and on , and on.

In a 1989 statement, Hunt said, “Outside of the studio, the sculptor’s internal dialogue gives way to the dialogue that a sculpture sets up with the environment the sculpture is created for.” This, of course, calls to whether the sculptor accepts visual art as a central factor in human in existence? Hunt has done several ‘faith’ related pieces, e.g. ‘Cross’, a welded bronze, St. Matthew’s Church, Chicago; ‘The Bush Was Not Consumed’, welded brass and bronze, and ‘Eternal Life’, welded bronze, both of Temple B’nai Israel, Kankakee, IL; ‘Altar, Lectern, Tabernacle, Crucifix’, stone, steel, stainless steel, Holy Angels Church, Chicago; ‘St. Procopius’, welded bronze, St. Procopius Abbey, Lisle, Illinois; ‘Three Crosses’, welded stainless steel and bronze, University Park Baptist Church, Charlotte, North Carolina; and ‘Memorial Cross’, welded bronze, Immanuel Lutheran Church, Charlotte, North Carolina. At what point does art become, life?
“I have a religious background”, Hunt said. “I’m not particularly practicing a religion, but as I said, I have a religious background, and I call on that when I am doing religious work. Like I said earlier, no lightening bolt came down from on high when it comes to my work.”

Standing between his ‘Jupiter’, welded bronze, a wild-like piece, like a lion or dragon hung from the wall of the Weinberg Gallery, and ‘Sea Change’, welded bronze with it’s winged waves and deep folds, its caverns, one can see the shimmering up close. Gouges share space with the brushed and textured. “He goes back and forth, back and forth”, Ott explains. “He never stops. He’s never done. Bronze comes raw. He loves the material. The shine, the gouging is unique.” And now, it is nothing short of illuminating.

The crew at the Weinberg appears very upbeat about the exhibit. Its opening produced one of the largest turnouts in the gallery’s history. “The folks were just full of goodwill. There were people here from (Richard’s) high school days”, Ott said. Then there’s the Achievement Award. “It’s the first time a show is here when the Award comes around.”

I wondered if there had been a particular piece, a mass of steel or bronze which Hunt wrestled with as Abraham with the angel. Was it ‘Instrument of Change’, a 30 inch bronze tribute to Nelson Mandela which Evans had commissioned following Mandela’s visit to Detroit? What about, ‘I Have Been to the Mountain’, welded corten steel, now at the Martin Luther King Memorial, Memphis, Tennessee?

“You get into a dialogue with a piece”, Hunt relates. “You add to the process. There’s nuance and change over time. There are equivalents in music. Some flow, some staccato, some movements should be subtle. There’s no last word though. There are cessations of dialogue”. “For how long?”, I asked. “It could be minutes, it could be days”, he said. “Twenty-minutes?”. “Twenty-years”, he responded.

Richard Hunt remains laid back with his achievements and talent. After years of climbing up and down scaffolds and commitment and fascinations, of steel and stone which sometimes resist redemption, of his elegant passion, the sculptor looks forward to his next project. “That’s always the best one, the current on going one”, he smiles. Is he pleased with his most recent recognition? “Of course. Awards are what they are. It’s an assessment of an artist work. I’d rather have it than not.”

We should say the same of this kind, creative, valuable man.

things that go 'wow' in the night (or day)!

2009-03-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

-jeffery mcnary

A fascination with French and Spanish painters shouldn't lead to a shove off of American artists. Lately I've come into a phenomenal cadre of new and appealing talent, musical, visual, and of stage, screen and the written word. For fun, I'll start a listing of those who defintely merit attention. Lets start with Abigail, as in absolutely... terrific!! Bach surely had her in mind when crafting, "Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen', and, and, and.....

ABIGAIL HAYNES LENNOX (soprano)

Acclaimed as angelic and stylish in her interpretations of Bach and Mozart, is equally at home with genres ranging from early plainchant to 19th-century mélodie to improvised avant-garde. Originally from Bartlett, Tennessee, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where, after finishing her bachelor’s degree in vocal performance at the University of Michigan, she served as music director for the Wesley Foundation of First Methodist, performed with the Michigan Opera Theater under Stephen Lord, and was a frequent soloist appearing on premier recordings of contemporary works. In May 2007, Abigail completed her master’s degree in voice at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music where she studied under James Taylor, Ted Taylor, and Judith Malafronte. In addition to participating in master classes with Martin Katz, Stephen Layton, and David Daniels, she has performed as soloist in Bach’s St. John Passion and Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri under Simon Carrington, Mozart Vespers with Sir David Willcocks and again with Sir Neville Marriner, Bach’s Magnificat in E-flat Major with Helmuth Rilling, Beethoven’s Mass in C and multiple Bach cantatas with Yale ensembles, and a program of French Baroque music with the Ensemble Européen William Byrd. Inspired by such ensemble experiences, Lennox enjoys teaching young musicians in the DC area, where she now lives, and engaging in collaborative projects with fellow artists in addition to pursuing a solo career. She made her debut with American Bach Soloists as a soloist in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in January 2007.

take a listen....

http://www.americanbach.org/player/index.htm

(courtesy of American Bach Soloists)

west side stories

2009-03-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

Rekindling Robbins, a Step at a Time
By JULIE BLOOM
ONCE asked about the impetus for “Fancy Free” (1944), the first ballet he choreographed, Jerome Robbins said he felt compelled to create something different. “I thought, ‘Why can’t we dance about American subjects?’ ” he said. “Why can’t we talk about the way we dance today, and how we are?”
Now, a new generation of dancers is applying Robbins’s question to some of his own work. “West Side Story,” the 1957 musical that changed the way we think about how dance can tell a story, is reopening on March 19 at the Palace Theater. The show is directed by Arthur Laurents, the author of its original book, and Joey McKneely has been charged with the difficult task of recreating Robbins’s choreography for a new American generation.
Unlike other musicals, in which the dancing is, however entertaining, most often a flashy, kick-filled break from the rest of the show, in “West Side Story” it is as essential to the story as the music and the words. “If you remove Jerome Robbins’s choreography, you lose significant plot, storytelling moments, and you lose characterization elements that are set in the dance,” Mr. McKneely said in an interview. “It’s rare that shows have dance as that kind of signature. It’s the emotional glue.”
Mr. McKneely’s task is as hard as it sounds. Like balletomanes devoted to Balanchine many Robbins disciples and fans see every step in “West Side Story” as sacred. But, as Mr. McKneely pointedly asked, “What is the original choreography?”
Sitting in the back of the Palace Theater after a recent rehearsal, he ticked through the many iterations of the show: “There’s 1957, then there’s the ’61 movie,” he said, adding, “then there’s the ’80 revival, then there’s ‘Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,’ then there’s New York City Ballet. So, O.K., all of that is ‘West Side Story’ and Jerome Robbins was around, and he did all of those versions.”
Mr. McKneely, 42, who has worked on Broadway — he made his choreographic debut in 1995 with “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” — and abroad, has a long relationship with Robbins and his work. He worked directly with the choreographer as a dancer in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” in 1989 before directing his first production of “West Side Story” at La Scala in Milan in 2000. More recently he directed a European tour of the show on its 50th anniversary in 2007 and an English production in 2008.
Still, to keep the movement as true as possible to Robbins’s original intentions, Mr. McKneely drew not only from his own experience dancing numbers like “Cool” and “Dance at the Gym,” but from the film, a video of the 1980 production and a choreographic manual for the show written by Alan Johnson, a cast member of the original production. The Jerome Robbins Trust and Foundation, which licenses Robbins’s work and safeguards its legacy, was also involved in the process to ensure that the show remains true to Robbins’s spirit.
But for all the efforts to adhere to the original choreography, this “West Side Story” has also been re-envisioned for today’s audience. Many of the lyrics are now in Spanish, and parts of the dances have changed as well to make what the creators hope is a more realistic show.
“You can’t worry about the past,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview. “Jerry was very concerned with why they dance. Why they dance in this version is not the same as why they danced in the others. The theater has changed. You have to reflect that in the dancing and it does.”
Some adjustments were slight (a fist was added to an originally balletic arm movement in the prologue) and some more significant, like those made to the second act ballet, which Mr. Laurents said could look “like a dance concert unless you pull it into the story.”
To make that dance more organic to the stage Mr. McKneely decided not to include the nightmare scene, which retells the deaths of Bernardo and Riff, and to make Maria and Tony front and center in the dance featuring the Sharks and the Jets. “They are generating the ballet,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen around them.”
Adjustments were also made to “America,” as well as to the scene in which the Jets attack Anita, played by Karen Olivo. That moment, which the cast members now refer to explicitly as a rape, has become more violent. “We don’t treat them as lovable little thugs.” Mr. Laurents said of the characters. “We treat them as what they were then and what they are now.”
“Cool,” one of the show’s most technically demanding pieces, is another place where this fresh focus is seen. “The steps are the same,” Mr. Laurents said, “but what is different is the emotional anger that is under it.”
At the second technical rehearsal in early February, Mr. McKneely worked with the dancers on “Cool.” Laptops lay scattered across makeshift tables in the theater, while Mr. Laurents watched and Mr. McKneely gathered the Jets onstage around him. The movements are so familiar: the snaps, the hunched shoulders, the fist pounding into the palm, a pirouette to the ground, and the straight jump up, one leg sideways, both arms reaching up, toward the sky: “Pow.”
Communicating the tension that simmers just underneath the surface in these movements is one of this production’s most difficult challenges. “Build, build, release,” Mr. McKneely coaxed them, demonstrating a jump in front of the cast. “Robbins would do these steps, and you could see the character emerge out of him,” he said later. “Just watching him, he would become each character. So when I teach it, I do it. I do it full out.”
Young dancers were sought to make the production seem more contemporary. More than 2,500 people from around the world were auditioned, and some primary cast members, like Ryan Steele, who plays Baby John, are as young as 18. “When you’re in your early 20s, you still have your hormones flaring, you’re still partying out at night, you’re getting in trouble,” Mr. McKneely said. “The closer you get to that age group, the more in touch in a natural real way they are to those emotions, so you believe them.”
Even with the direction to let go of past interpretations, the pressure to get Robbins right is immense, not just for the choreographer but also for the stars. “A lot of people come here with an idea of what they want to see,” Ms. Olivo said before a rehearsal. “I don’t have the short hair. I’m not in the lilac dress.”
But for all the adjustments, it’s still Robbins’s movements that remain so powerful after all these years. Ms. Olivo added: “I always tell my husband, when I do it right, when I do the choreography right, I feel like I’m flying. That’s Robbins. When you get it in your body and you do it right, or you see someone doing it right, it’s an exhilarating experience.”

through the doors again

2009-03-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

Huxley Archive Goes to U.C.L.A.
Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF
In an honor nearly as estimable as achieving Alpha-Plus status, the U.C.L.A. Library announced that it has acquired the literary archive of Aldous Huxley, the author of “Brave New World.” Among the materials in the collection are manuscripts and working papers for 12 of his books, as well as 35 essays, articles and speeches; recordings of Huxley reading from his lectures and his 1944 novel, “Time Must Have a Stop”; and love letters he exchanged with his wife, Laura, who died in 2007. The archive also includes personal items like a magnifying glass and wallet used by Huxley, as well as his British passport. Though Huxley was born and raised in England, he lived in California from 1937 until his death in 1963. The U.C.L.A. Library’s special collections department is already home to the manuscripts for “Time Must Have a Stop” and another Huxley novel, “The Devils of Loudon.”

arts uprise!

2009-03-08T10:17:00.000-07:00

Israeli Dance Troupe May Draw Protest
By DANIEL J. WAKIN; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF
The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bracing for protests of the Batsheva Dance Company, an Israeli troupe, this week. In recent weeks during a North American tour, Batsheva, which was to begin a run of performances on Wednesday night, has been dogged by small demonstrations and calls for a boycott over Israel’s actions in Gaza. Fatima Kafele, a spokeswoman for the Brooklyn Academy, said a “small group” had asked the police for a permit to demonstrate on Thursday. She said she did not know the group’s identity. Batsheva and its artistic director, Ohad Naharin, are prominent in the modern dance world and are respected by many critics. Mr. Naharin, through Ms. Kafele, declined to be interviewed but issued a statement on Wednesday saying he forgives and understands “the frustration” and people who “want to fight for human rights.” But he said that boycotting a dance company could not make a difference, and that such energy should be channeled “into getting moderate powers and people on both sides to talk to each other.”

as leaders go, so go their statues

2009-03-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

By THOMAS CATAN
MADRID -- Every Nov. 20, for the past dozen years, Sinforiano Bezanilla has visited a pigeon-covered statue of Gen. Francisco Franco to pay homage to Europe's longest-serving fascist dictator.
This year, the sculpture won't be there. Acting on a law passed by Spain's Socialist government, authorities uprooted the statue of the Generalísimo in December from the city square of Santander in northern Spain and banished it to the local museum.
"The left is attempting to rewrite our country's history. They base it on a series of half-lies, half-truths and outright lies," says Mr. Bezanilla. The 44-year-old municipal worker was just 11 when Franco died. But he has read volumes on the former dictator's ideas and is nostalgic for his regime.
More than three decades after Franco died and 72 years after he seized power, Spain is on a controversial mission to expunge the many emblems of its painful past that are still on public display.
While monuments to Franco have lingered long in Spain, other leaders' statues have been toppled soon after their regimes fall -- and each time, the monuments become battlegrounds of history.
The Socialist government says the assorted icons of the Franco regime still on view -- fascist-style eagles, yokes and arrows -- have no place in modern Spain. A year ago, it passed a law to eliminate them.
But the drive -- part of a broader law aimed at redressing Franco-era injustices -- has raised hackles among conservatives who say Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is reopening wounds they say were healed after the dictator's death.
"The question is whether Spain should be looking at what happened 70 years ago, or whether the government needs to start looking to the future," says Jaime García-Legaz, congressman for the opposition Popular Party.
Nazi symbols are illegal in Germany. No statues of former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini are on display in Italian streets. But in Spain -- today a modern democracy at the heart of the European Union -- monuments to Franco have remained to this day.
"This is the only fascist regime that has seen its symbols survive into the 21st century," says Alejandro Quiroga, a Spanish history professor at Britain's University of Newcastle.
The emblems have lasted so long partly because Spain's dictatorship, which began in 1936 after Franco's forces won a bloody civil war in which 500,000 were killed, lasted far longer than similar authoritarian states. Spain stayed out of World War II, which toppled Hitler and Mussolini, and Franco managed to rule until he died in 1975.
After a new constitution in 1978, Spain's new leaders decided to bury the hatchet in order to preserve the country's fragile new democracy.
No generals ever went on trial, as generals did in Latin America. There were no Truth and Reconciliation Commissions like those held in South Africa. An abortive coup in 1981 reminded Spain's first post-Franco democratic governments of the danger in trying to hold Franco's regime to account.
"There were other priorities than getting rid of the symbols of the Franco regime," says Jesús de Andrés Sanz, a professor at UNED University who has studied the issue. "The new leaders didn't want to make enemies of the extreme right. There was always the threat of a military coup."
The decision not to look back has had curious effects. Politicians ditched the words to the national anthem used during Franco's rule ("Raise your arms, sons of the Spanish people") but couldn't agree on any replacements. Now, when the anthem is played, Spaniards hum awkwardly or invent their own lyrics.
Despite attempts to sweep history under the rug, the deep and bitter ideological divisions that gripped Spain during its three-year civil war have never dissipated and are evident today.
People whose families fought Franco tell stories of repression, torture and killings. After the war, Franco's Nationalist troops rounded up suspected Republicans and killed tens of thousands. The vanquished were sent to labor camps, where an untold number perished. Their children were often given to families that were supportive of the regime.
Descendants of Franco's side say he saved the country from communism and restored the Catholic Church to its rightful place. In today's Spain, where gay marriage, divorce and abortion are all legal, some conservative Spaniards look back fondly on the dictatorship and say they don't want to be persecuted for doing so. "A lot of people are afraid to express themselves," complains Mr. Bezanilla.
The Socialist government's edict is being followed far and wide. The Spanish enclave of Melilla, in northern Africa, has promised to remove the last remaining statue of Franco on public display on Spanish territory, though it hasn't yet set a date.
Some are dragging their feet. In the southern city of Granada, artists are trying to get City Hall to remove a monument to fascism showing five disembodied limbs in stiff-armed salute. "It is very bothersome that it should still be there 30 years on," says Luis García Montero, a local poet. "It recalls a dark period in this country's history. The time has come to get rid of it."
Campaigners want the government to go further and force town halls to rename the hundreds of streets that still commemorate Franco, his generals or his victories.
Even as Franco's statues are banished to basements or museums, the government has a thorn in its side: What to do with the fascist-style mausoleum Franco built for himself and an estimated 40,000 civil-war fighters?
Bored into the side of a mountain near Madrid and topped with a 500-foot cross, Franco's "Valley of the Fallen" cannot be removed or ignored. At the moment, visitors find no mention of the 14,000 laborers who built the complex in the 1940s and '50s, most of them drawn from the ranks of losing fighters from the civil war. The church there remains an active place of worship.
Mr. Zapatero's government toyed with the idea of turning the site into a museum dedicated to Franco's victims but ultimately ducked the issue entirely in its so-called Law of Historical Memory, passed in December 2007.
Since last year, the government has banned neo-fascist groups from commemorating Franco's death there each Nov. 20. Yet fresh wreaths are still laid on his grave there daily, courtesy of the Spanish state.
For some, the Valley of the Fallen is much more than just a symbol from the past. It's the place where their missing fathers ended up. In a bizarre effort to demonstrate Spain's national reconciliation, Franco opened the mass graves of his opponents at the end of the 1950s and had their remains transferred to the site. Some Spaniards have grown up knowing that their relatives, shot by Franco's firing squads and dumped in mass graves, now lie just feet away from the dictator.
"It's a sick joke, an absolute affront, that they are still in there," says Fausto Canales, a 74-year-old man who has spent the decade since he retired trying to retrieve the remains of his father.
Others want Franco's bones taken out. "We can't forget it is the mausoleum of a 20th-century dictator," says 83-year-old Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, who himself worked for five months at the site when it was being constructed before finally escaping. "No other European country has a state-financed mausoleum of, say, Hitler or Mussolini."

the art of nothing

2009-03-04T11:55:00.000-08:00

Pompidou Centre celebrates half a century of minimalism
By John Lichfield in Paris
Roman Ondak's 'installation' More Silent Than Ever is on show

at the decidedly uncluttered Paris gallery this week
Art exhibitions without exhibits are nothing new. Nothing has been a recognised art form for half a century. But the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris can claim a cultural first this week: a retrospective exhibition of 51 years of exhibitions without exhibits by nine different artists. How can a museum retrospectively exhibit nothing? With great care. The 500-page catalogue costs €39 (£34).
The exhibition, Voids, a Retrospective, fills, or fails to fill, five rooms in the French national museum of modern art on the fourth floor of the Pompidou building. All the rooms are entirely empty. The walls are white. The floors are bare. The lighting has been arranged just as carefully as for any other temporary exhibition. The gardiens (guards) watch suspiciously to make sure that the visitors do not touch anything, or in this case that they do not touch nothing.
The aim of the retrospective exhibition – refused by several other leading museums in other countries – is to celebrate and explore a movement begun in Paris by the minimalist artist, Yves Klein. Klein, influenced by Zen Buddhism, was the first artist to present an exhibition of blank walls at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958.
Related articles
Gormley on his plinth: 'I would be very upset if nobody took their clothes off'
Klein's exhibition of nothing has been revived for the Pompidou show (which can be seen, or rather not seen, until 23 March). In theory, the Pompidou is not presenting the same nothing because these are not actually the same blank walls. There are, explanatory panels with the same explanations.
Klein's blank walls are a "specialisation of sensibility to raw materials through stabilised pictorial sensibility". In other words, by seeing nothing, you are encouraged to see everything more clearly.
The Pompidou retrospective also revives the celebrated (briefly) Air Conditioning Show assembled (or rather not assembled) in 1967 by Art and Language, a British artists' collective. The show exhibits air-conditioned air in an empty gallery with white walls. Five curators have worked on the Pompidou's retrospective of nothing art, which includes works – or non-works – by seven other artists: Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws, Robert Irwin, Roman Ondak and Laurie Parsons.
One curator, Mathieu Copeland, says the exhibition is partly an exploration of art as the rejection of art: a refusal to add to a world already too cluttered with images. "But it is not just a kind of radical, conceptual art. You are also invited to explore, in a very physical way, each different space, all of which have a different texture. It is a true experience."
One of the five spaces is devoted to a work by Roman Ondak, More Silent Than Ever, first shown in Paris three years ago. The room is empty, just like all the others, but a panel tells the visitor that, somewhere in the room, there may be a concealed listening device. The aim seems to be to encourage visitors to examine nothingness very carefully.
A group of 20 teenagers were being shown around the Pompidou retrospective yesterday by their teacher. All, or almost all of them, including the teacher, were dressed in black. Against the white walls, they resembled pieces from a chess set. The teacher, rather convincingly, praised the exhibition while the teenagers tried to stand on one another's feet or trip each other up.
Tom Lubbock: A critic's view
Empty? It depends what you mean. The earliest case was not a room but a piece of music – John Cage's 4'33", where the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a key. Many say there's plenty to hear in the silence.
The winner of the 2001 Turner Prize, Martin Creed, exhibited an empty room at Tate Britain. Or was it? The lights switched on and off every five seconds. That made it a pretty full, eventful room, no?
These works follow a typical trajectory of modern art. Step by step, from reduction to reduction, we make a clean sweep, from figuration to abstraction, to a uniform canvas, to a blank canvas, and then to a blank wall.
Having arrived at emptiness, fill her up again – with meanings. Sometimes the emphasis is on absence, on contemplating nothingness. Sometimes it's on noticing what you might have overlooked.
Perhaps you should notice all the gallery background noises you ignore. Perhaps you should see that art has its environment, which crucially conditions our experience of it. Or perhaps you should be looking at the only exhibits that remain in your empty gallery – yourselves.
The empties are always going to be full of something. The art consists of working out what.

pinsky, as in sat-guru

2009-02-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

-jeffery mcnary

“In the presence of the sat guru; knowledge flourishes; sorrow diminishes; joy wells up without any reason; abundance dawns; all talents manifest.”
-The Upanishads

Before a rapt audience, Robert Pinsky recently stepped to the podium in the Fullerton Room of the venerable Art Institute of Chicago. He acknowledged the richness of the place and the works therein. He acknowledged the art itself 21st century Chicago has become as an architectural Mecca. And with his understated grace and his usual dignity, the former Poet Laureate of the United States pauses, looks around the filled to capacity auditorium, and checks in,

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath

Then silence. Captive in my seat by the crashes of his verse, I heard Pinsky say, “ ‘Antique’, from Gulf Music. It’s the second to last poem in the book.” Almost whimsically he continued, “I was angry at the time I wrote it. I was angry with, with Bush, and Cheney, and Gonzales, and our foreign policy. Then it just became something else. It evolved into something else.” More silence. And from what I could tell, no one exhaled.

Robert Pinsky is a poet, a professor, a writer who shares communion with those absent, those seen and unseen. He writes for the dead. He writes of the maimed, and of fools who sit with their anger, and of celebrations, and of those unable to put crayons down, and of those poised in their wretched existence, and of course, if that is not enough, he forces you, against your wishes to hang there between righteousness and revenge. Those familiar with his work, can only sit, or stand and mouth the words. Robert Pinsky is a gem…who has fallen into American hands.

In his, Poem of Disconnected Parts, also from 'Gulf Music', he even asks:

Who do you write for? I write for dead people:
For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.

I met the laureate almost two years to the day of the Chicago session. At that time he’d stopped by the Bartos Theatre at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a snowy night to join a cadre of friends and associates knocking about poetry, democracy and his collaboration with Tod Machover, a composer and professor of media arts and sciences at the Institute. The synergy, ‘Death and the Powers’, Dr. Pinsky said at that time, is the tale of a man who “creates a kind of immortality by converting himself into software. He decides to have his consciousness ported into a computer. This creates complications with his family, as well as the international economy.” It was a broad reach, and it remains so. I seek an update each time I see the poet.

“The character in ‘Death and the Powers’ doesn’t see himself as becoming a robot, but becoming pure spirit. He’s seeking to escape the machine of the flesh”, Pinsky had said. “‘Robot’” comes from a Czech word meaning “worker”, and in that sense, we all aspire to be robots. I’m interested in artificial intelligence, and wanted the story to have some complexity. I didn’t just want to write another Frankenstein story about technological hubris.

The ‘opera’ remains under development and production at the MIT Media Lab and is scheduled for a premier in Monte-Carlo, under the patronage of Prince Albert of Monaco, come September, 2009. It’s rumored, however, the production may open in Cambridge’s American Reparatory Theatre. “If it does open in Monte Carlo”, Pinsky said with a chuckle, “I’ll tell you to get your tux and head over.” I am anxious with this work. I am convinced this will be his close-up for those still compressed and unacquainted.

Time, it appears, is significant to ‘the laureate’ in thought and writing, and he pulls us through it with his craft. “Deciding to remember, and what to remember is how we decide who we are,” he’s written. He often refers to Homer, and he speaks of the Zulu in South Africa. “The Sangomo”, he repeated to the Fullerton Hall gathered, “says in our Zulu culture we do not worship our ancestors, we consult them.” And as if by nature, rather than design, Pinsky reflects on his father, of whom he’s written, and provided an unshaven portrait of his hometown, Long Branch, New Jersey. “Six presidents visited Long Branch”, he’s fond of saying. “My father was a famous athlete there, at Long Branch High School. He played football, basketball, hard-ball. His father, my grandfather, owned a bar, across from City Hall and the police station, so all the cops would drink there. In the 20’s, during prohibition”, he continued, “he was a bootlegger, and my grandmother used to say, ‘Oh Robert, he was in the liquor business, and it happened to be prohibition.’ In school, I had the same homeroom as my dad. I had the same homeroom teacher as my dad, Ms. Scott.” The place is not quite frozen in time and place, Mr. Pinsky revealed. “Change is gradual. In a place like that are stories, and the stories are alive.”

Paying visit to his father some years ago, the two got lost while looking to visit nearby Pleasure Bay. Stopping and asking for directions, one of the locals asked him, “What do you wanna go there for?” Then, Pinsky said laughing, “He says, ‘What’s your name’?” “Why?”, the poet said, “Because it was New Jersey. It was like in the Odyssey.” At Pleasure Bay, from his Pulitzer nominated, ‘The Figured Wheel’, nails a snapshot of the haunts of his coming of age:

In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings
And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick
In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom
Where the landing was for Price’s Hotel and Theater.
And here’s where boats blew two blasts for the keeper
To shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gears
Like a skipper in the hut that housed the works
And the bridge moaned and turned on its middle pier
To let them through. In the middle of the summer
Two or three cars might wait for the iron trusswork
Winching aside, with maybe a child to notice
A name on the stern in black-and-gold on white,
Sandpiper, Patsy Ann, Do Not Disturb,
The Idler. If a boat was running whisky,
The bridge clanged shut behind it as it passed
And opened up again for the Coast Guard cutter
Slowly as a sundial, and always jammed halfway.
The roadbed whole, but opened like a switch,
The river pulling and coursing between the piers.
Never the same phrase twice, the catbird filing
The humid August evening near the inlet
With borrowed music that he melds and changes.
Dragonflies and sandflies, frogs in the rushes, two bodies
Not moving in the open car among the pines,
A sliver of story. The tenor at Price’s Hotel,
In clown costume, unfurls the sorrow gathered
In ruffles at his throat and cuffs, high quavers
That hold like splashes of light on the dark water,
The aria’s closing phrases, changed and fading.
And after a gap of quiet, cheers and applause
Audible in the houses across the river,
Some in the audience weeping as if they had melted
Inside the music. Never the same. In Berlin
The daughter of an English lord, in love
With Adolph Hitler, whom she has met. She is taking
Possession of the apartment of a couple,
Elderly well-off Jews. They survived the war
To settle herein the Bay, the old lady
Teaches piano, but the whole world swivels
And gapes at their feet as the girl and a high-up Nazi
Examine the furniture, the glass, the pictures,
The elegant story that was theirs and now
Is part of hers. A few months later the English
Enter the war and she shoots herself in a park,
An addled, upper-class girl, in her life that passes
Into the lives of others or into a place.
The taking of lives—the Chief and Mrs. W.
Took theirs to stay together, as local ghosts.
Last flurries of kisses, the revolver’s barrel,
Shivers of a story that a child might hear
And half remember, voices in the rushes
A singing in the willows. From across the river,
Faint quavers of music, the same phrase twice and again,
Ranging and building. Over the high new bridge
The flashing of traffic homeward from the racetrack
With one boat chugging under the arches, outward
Unnoticed through Pleasure Bay to the open sea.
Here’s where the people stood to watch the theater
Burn on the water. All that night the fireboats
Kept playing their spouts of water into the blaze.
In the morning, smoking pilasters and beams.
Black smell of char for weeks, the ruin already
Soaking back into the river. After you die
You hover near the ceiling above your body
And watch the mourners awhile. A few days more
You float above the heads of the ones you knew
And watch them through a twilight. As it grows darker
You wander off and find your way to the river
And wade across. On the other side, night air,
Willows, the smell of the river, and a mass
Of sleeping bodies all along the bank,
A kind of singing from among the rushes
Calling you further forward in the dark.
You lie down and embrace one body, the limbs
Heavy with sleep reach eagerly up around you
And you make love until your soul brims up
And burns free out of you and shifts and spills
Down over into that other body, and you
Forget the life you had and begin again
On the same crossing—maybe as a child who passes
Through the same place. But never the same way twice.
Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,
The new café, with a terrace and a landing,
Frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was--
Here’s where you might have slipped across the water
When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.

“The medium for poetry is one person’s voice”, Pinsky has said. “It’s the human body. Breath.” He jests about never being good enough at anything else, and ergo became a poet, resulting from an attraction to rhythms and was obsessed with the sound of words dating to his early childhood, sharing “I gave myself to poetry when I began to talk”.
At some point it rooted deeper. “I’m discussed by complacent writing”, he confesses, “The works I like the best are jagged, Old English. I like Raleigh, Shakespeare, Yeats.”

That belief appears to have followed Prof. Pinsky, as is clearly reflected in his recitations, with their breathtaking sweeps into exhortations. This can best be found in his gripping, 'Gulf Music', from the book of the same title, is perhaps his most political to this point. Here, with its brilliant, bizarre, buddhist-esque cover of dancing skeletons, he guides us through the Persian gulf, through Katrina , through the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and bits of our personal ‘gulfs’…

Mallah walla tellabella. Trahmah trah-la, la-la-la,
Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bella, wella-wah.

The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated
Galveston, Texas. Some 8,000 people died.

The PearlCity almost obliterated. Still the worst natural
Calamity in American history, Who mallah-walla.

Eight years later Morris Eisenberg sailing from Lubeck
Entered the States through the still-wounded port of Galveston.

1908, eeloo hotesy, hotesy-ahnoo, hotsey ahnoo mi-Mizriam
Or you could say “Morris” was his name. A Moshe.

Ippa fano wanna bella who. The New Orleans musician called
Professor Longhair was named Henry Roeland Byrd.

Not heroic not nostalgic not learned. Made-up names:
Hum a few bars and we’ll home-la-la. Who ohma-dallah.

Longhair or Henry and his wife Alice joined the Civil Defense
Special Forces 714. Alice was a Colonel, he a Lieutenant.

Here they are in uniforms and caps, pistols in holsters.
Hotesy anno, Ippa Fano trah ma dollah, tra la la.

Morris took the name “Eisenberg” after the rich man from
His shtetl who in 1908 owned a town in Arkansas.

Most of this is made up, but the immigration papers did
Require him to renounce all loyalty to Czar Nicholas.

As he signed to that, he must have thought to himself
The Yiddish equivalent of NO PROBLEM, Mah la belle.

Hotsey hotsey-ahno. Wella-mallah widda dallah,
Mah fanna-well. A townful of people named Eisenberg.

The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious.
The man was correct when he said it’s not even past.

Look up at the waters from the causeway where you stand:
Lime causeway made of grunts and halfway-forgettings

On a foundation of crushed oyster shells. Roadbed
Paved with abandonments, shored up by haunts.

Becky was a teenager married to an older man. After she
Met Morris, in 1910 or so, she swapped Eisenbergs.

They rode out of Arkansas on his motorcycle, well-ah-way.
Wed-away. “Mizaim” is Egypt, I remember that much.

The storm bulldozed Galveston with a great rake of debris.
In the September heat the smell of the dead was unbearable.

Hotesy hotsey ahnoo. “Professor”the New Orleans title
For any piano player. He had a Caribbean left hand,

A boogie-woogie right. Civil Defense Special Forces 714
Organized for disasters, mainly hurricanes. Floods.

New Orleans style borrowing this and that, ah wail-ah-way la-la,
They probably got “714” from Joe Friday’s badge number

On Dragnet. Jack Webb chose the number in memory
Of Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs, the old record.

As living memory of the great hurricanes of the thirties
And the fifties dissolved, Civil Defense Forces 714

Also dissolved, washed away for well or ill – yet nothing
Ever entirely abandoned through generations forget, and ah

Well the partial forgetting embellishes everything all the more:
Alla-malla, mi-Mizraim, try my try-la, hotesy-totesy.

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.
Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his
Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised end?
All music haunted by all the music of dead forever.

Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned
For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.

The Chicago reading took on the form of many of the poet’s readings. It held many layers through which one is required to navigate like a drift dive. There’s a buoy out there in that ocean waiting to meet you, somewhere. In route the playful meets the electro-intense. There the political converges with the personal. There the subplots, fraught with both social and aesthetic matter, require repeating, re-listening, re-hearing. There is an absence of ambiguity in Professor Pinsky’s crafting. There are bridges, linkages, colliding worlds, and it is far from safe and predictable to observe as the poet consistently pulls fragments together, while operating on the meta-level transition.

With Ginza Samba, from ‘The Figured Wheel’, Prof. Pinsky involves the audience with this labyrinthine work through an object dear to him, the saxophone. Early in life, Pinsky played the sax and is known to joke that he’d become a poet because of his failure as a musician. The work also expresses his “patriotisim”. He’s patriotic about how the nation’s people cohere, “the pluralistic quality of our country. We are not one people via race or religion. The saxophone is an important symbol of our culture,” he says. “It was invented in Paris in the 19th century by a Belgian guy named Sax. Therefore one would say it is a European instrument. It isn’t. It’s an American instrument. An African-American, a black American instrument, because it was made so by geniuses. Geniuses named Johnny Hodges, Sonny Rollins, and Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, and Dexter Gordon. They made it their instrument.”

A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinetely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In sax’s Belgian imagination

And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming into the cells of the body
Or cupped in the resonating grail
Of memory changed and exchanged
As in the trading of brasses,
Pearls, and ivory, calicos and slaves,
Laborers and girls, two

Cousins in a royal family
Of Niger known as the Birds or Hawks.
In Christendom one cousin’s child
Becomes a “favorite negro” ennobled
By decree of the Czar and fonds
A great family, a line of generals,
Dandies and courtiers including the poet
Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning
His wife’s honor, while the other cousin sails

In the belly of a slaveship to the port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing

His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths—the Ginza
Samba of breath and brass, the reed
Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable
Wires and circuits of an ingenious box
Here in my room in this house built
A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:

It is like falling in love, the atavistic
Imperative of some one
Voice or face—the skill, the copper filament,
The golden bellyful of notes twirling through
Their invisible element from
Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering
Speed in the variations as they tunnel
The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup
And anvil echoing here in the hearkening
Instrument of my skull.

His prose book, ‘The Life of David’, takes on David, the “one who is beloved”, the shepherd boy who took over the kingship of Israel, who pushed back the Philistines and established the capital in Jerusalem. “He’s partially imagined. But we’re all imagined in the minds of those we know,” says Pinsky. “He was both horrible and beautiful. Artist, leader, killer. He was of mixed blood, and he could have been a warrior chieftain, a big shot.” He continues, “I was gonna concentrate on the story, not his poems. Some are part of the story. I opted to tell the story. There might have even been more than one David. There are historical explanations for them. A lot of Samuel was written a few generations after David.” He views David as a ‘magnet’ of history, pulling thing into, like the six pointed star which emerged out of the late middle ages, and like the book itself, peering back through 3,000 years.

Pinsky also visited, Samurai Song, from ‘Jersey Rain’ , a piece which, “In my mind, doesn’t seem to fit my social, cultural past. It’s said like a tough guy”, he adds. He fades back and forth to his elegy, Poem of Disconnected Parts;

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto EACH ONE TEACH ONE.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”

It is as though he holds a teachable moment,

The first year at Guantanamo, Abdul Rahim Dost
Incised his Pashto poems into Styrofoam cups.

And then,

Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving
Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.

There were other works including ABC from ‘Jersey Rain’ and The Shirt, with its;

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

“It’s hard to write a good poem.” Pinsky has said. You never know if you did it right. Unlike a pilot or surgeon. There you have objective measures of success. Poetry is vulnerable.”

One would think Prof. Pinsky would be comfortable with his craft. Over the years he’s cracked open an unprecedented three terms as Poet Laureate, a Pulitzer nomination, the Roethke, the Saginaw, the William Carlos Williams Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, The Academy of American Poets Translation Award, and other things. Of his Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, Harvard’s Orlando Patterson has written, “This is perhaps the most important discourse on cultural analysis by a major poet since Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.”

Despite his general acclaim, Pinsky holds, “When applauded it’s part of art you’ll never know. When critics say nice things about you it doesn’t insure it. It’s not measured in money. God can’t give you an ‘A’. It’s done, and one try’s to do it well.” Continuing, “You write with your voice, not a pen and paper. Your mind’s voice, and ears. It’s a bodily art. You’re trying to make something. And there are those who do this that are both exalted and tormented.”

Long before there were musical instruments, there was the human voice. There were sounds, poetry. I’ve listened to Pinsky’s electrified and inspiring work for sometime now, and found it writ large as if on canvas. These are structures we would find in the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan, in the Washington National Opera, or in Ghana’s Elmira Castle, or any remote Himalayan monastery. And with his crafts kindly glow, we would do well to dig deeper, and like the ancients, foist our helmets and stare into his parables.

take a peek at Death and the Powers
http://labcast.media.mit.edu/?p=22

DO IT LIKE A DOG

2009-02-15T15:45:00.000-08:00

A Gentleman Does Something Ugly, Again
By GIA KOURLAS
PAUL TAYLOR gets peevish about interviews. He knows they are “part of the job,” as he puts it, but until he gets into the groove, he tends to rely on a tactic he also employs in his dances: a mixture of the dark and the light.
“I see you have your pen,” he said, twinkling his blue eyes in a kindly manner, his tone mocking.
Mr. Taylor, at 78, is a Southern gentleman, a sarcastic New Yorker, a playful conversationalist, a vivid writer and, most of all, a revered choreographer who for more than half a century has rigorously explored the light and dark sides of human nature. As part of the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s annual New York City Center season beginning on Feb. 25, one of his oldest, most haunting gems, “Scudorama,” will be revived through an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” he said with a wicked laugh in the parlor floor of his SoHo town house. “The reason we’re doing it is money. We get a grant to revive real oldies. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. But it turned out O.K. I like watching the present cast, and I’m particularly pleased with Sean” — Sean Mahoney, a company member — “who’s doing my part. I like his energy. His presence. And his height. That helps.”
Created in 1963 and not performed since 1973, “Scudorama” reveals Mr. Taylor in a bleak mood. The dance was choreographed a year after “Aureole,” his acclaimed lyrical work set to Handel that left experimental dancegoers reeling but cemented his reputation as a bold choreographer not scared of beauty for its own sake. While some criticized “Aureole” as being easy, it was actually a daring move that challenged the trends of the dance world. “Scudorama” was even more audacious. “ ‘Aureole’ was so pretty,” Mr. Taylor said. “I wanted to do something ugly.”
At the time Mr. Taylor resented the popular success of “Aureole” and wanted to create its opposite, in terms of movement and temperament. “I wanted the steps to be very different,” he said. “As I remember, we worked very quickly on ‘Aureole.’ After that there were other dances that I really slaved over and didn’t get the attention that ‘Aureole’ did.”
In his 1987 autobiography, “Private Domain,” Mr. Taylor recalled, while on tour with his company, passing a trapped dog on a highway median. The mongrel, he wrote, was “rearing, spinning and pawing the air.” His attempt to choreograph the anarchy and chaos that defines “Scudorama” stemmed partly from that image.
In “Scudorama” eight dancers, wearing street clothes and bright leotards and using beach towels as shrouds (with sets and costumes designed by the artist Alex Katz), disintegrate into ravaged forms. Like shifting shadows they crawl across the floor in jagged bursts of bewilderment, emptiness and rage. The dance’s accompanying program note, from Dante, begins with “What souls are these who run through this black haze?” For Mr. Taylor, those words refer to the “lost souls in purgatory, because they hadn’t done anything good and they hadn’t done anything bad.”
Mr. Taylor named the work in two parts. “Scud,” he said, refers to fast-moving clouds. “And ‘-orama’ because I thought it was sort of unpleasantly tacky,” Mr. Taylor added. “In those days everything was ‘-orama’ this and ‘-orama’ that. And the ‘scud’ is a reference, perhaps, to the people in the dance. They’re like scuds — just wisps of humanity.”
Dan Wagoner, a former company member who had injured his calf a few days before the work’s premiere at Connecticut College, split his role with Mr. Taylor. “Twyla Tharp was in the company then, and I remember I had to teach her how to get out of the wings,” Mr. Wagoner said in an interview. “She was standing blatantly ready for her entrance, and I said, ‘Can you see the audience?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Then they can see you, so back up.’ ”
To bring the dance back to life, the cast and the rehearsal director, Bettie de Jong, watched an archival video of the piece, which had been performed in silence. (The music, by Clarence Jackson, didn’t arrive on time.)
“Well, you make do,” Mr. Taylor said. “I couldn’t cancel. I was younger then, you know, but it was a killer.”
For the revival the dancers relied on an audio recording that was matched, as closely as possible, to the original performance. “We had two blueprints to work on that sometimes contradicted each other,” Mr. Mahoney said. “It seemed like ‘The Da Vinci Code’ on crack.”
Once the dance was reconstructed, three former members of Mr. Taylor’s company — Mr. Wagoner, Sharon Kinney and Elizabeth Walton — assisted in coaching. “It is movement that’s kind of pushed to a distortion or contortion that they don’t do as much today,” Mr. Wagoner said. “It seemed soft and rounded to me when I first saw it, so we worked first on some of the mechanics, and then I talked to them about what was going on in New York at the time. Now I really feel like I’m seeing the dance that I remember being in.”
Mr. Taylor’s City Center season also includes two New York premieres: “Changes,” a 1960s-flavored piece featuring music by the Mamas and the Papas, and “Beloved Renegade,” inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman, who is quoted in the program notes: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Before choreographing the work, which is set to Francis Poulenc’s “Gloria,” Mr. Taylor immersed himself in writings by and about Whitman. “The thing that made me know that I really wanted to make a dance about Whitman was that he believed the body and the soul were the absolutely same thing,” Mr. Taylor said. “You know, he talks about himself a lot, but he is really talking about mankind. He wasn’t egotistical.”
Mr. Taylor is working on a new dance, though he is reticent to reveal much about it. “It’s opera ballet music, and I picked it because of the challenge it presents,” he said. “There are 15 very short pieces, which” — he paused for an anguished laugh — “is a structural problem. None of them last very long. You never know if anything’s going to turn out well. Not everything does.”
As someone who has led a dance company since 1954, Mr. Taylor would know. But the opposite was true of his company’s recent space problems. After rent increases forced the group to vacate its lower Broadway studio, the East River Housing Corporation stepped in to offer the company a 20-year lease at 551 Grand Street. As soon as construction is completed next fall on what is now the Ralph Lippman Auditorium, the company will move to its new home. (It is currently renting space from American Ballet Theater.) Mr. Taylor plans to move as well, to an apartment closer to the studio.
“I like to walk to work, and I like to be near where I work,” he said. “It’s a big luxury, I know. In the early days I lived in my studios, and then I got this house. I love this old house. But there’s no point in keeping this place if I’m going to work somewhere else. It’s too big for me, really. I’ll find something, hopefully with a view of the East River. See the sun come up.”
Mr. Taylor’s reluctance to leave Manhattan fueled the decision to relocate to the Lower East Side. “There are nice places in Brooklyn, but there’s something about Manhattan,” he said. “All of these dancers that come from everywhere come to New York, and New York is Manhattan. Of course now they all live in Brooklyn and Queens, because they can’t afford Manhattan, but it’s where we’ve always performed, and it’s home. I’ve lived here longer than anyplace. But I’ve never felt like a New Yorker. It’s true. I always feel a little like an outsider. My background is Virginia. And my mother raised her children to be Virginians.”
His dances, he said, still stem from those childhood memories and impressions, especially his connection to the natural world. “As a little boy I spent summers at Edgewater Beach — a saltwater river — and I remember wading and looking at all the minnows and soft-shell crabs under the water, and how the water seemed to magnify them when looking from above,” he said. “Also watching insects and birds: animals have always interested me. Early on they were like playmates because there weren’t other children around.”
He has retained that fascination with observation. “I watch people,” he said. “You can tell a lot about people from the way they move and the things they do, especially when they don’t know they’re being watched.” He smiled broadly, a secret smile full of pleasure, and added, “I always dreamed of being a spy.”

never too much pablo

2009-02-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

The many faces of Pablo Picasso
Picasso was the first rock-star artist, whose wild visions gripped the public imagination and changed 20th-century art for ever. But his flamboyant personality divided opinion. Was he a playful genius, as some suggest, or a capricious and cruel misanthrope who left battered lives in his wake? On the eve of a new show in London, we speak to his closest friends and family in a bid to unravel the enigma

Peter Conrad
The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009
"Picasso," the surrealist poet Paul Eluard said, "paints like God or the devil." Picasso favoured the first option. "I am God," he was once heard telling himself. He muttered the mantra three times, boasting of his power to animate and enliven the visible world. Any line drawn by his hand pulsed with vitality; when he looked at it, a bicycle seat and its handlebar could suddenly turn into the horned head of a bull. But he also took a diabolical pleasure in warping appearances, deforming faces and twisting bodies, subjecting reality to a tormenting inquisition.
Picasso's behaviour was equally dualistic. In my recent conversations with people who knew him, I heard him compared to a saint, and was startled when a former model took him at his word and equated him with God. His biographer John Richardson, who lived near him in Provence during the 1950s, told me about the warmth and rollicking conviviality of the man: the genius was also genial. Others described a predator who gobbled up visual stimuli and wolfed down friends, employees and lovers.
The Swiss dealer and collector Angela Rosengart, whose own Picassos are on display at her museum in Lucerne, remembered presenting him with some handmade drawing paper. He licked his lips as he appraised its possibilities: "I'm a paper-eater, you know!" he said. "People were happy to be consumed by him," his daughter, Paloma, remarked. "They thought it was a privilege. If you get too close to the Sun, it burns you. But the Sun can't help being the Sun."
"Reality must be torn apart," Picasso told Françoise Gilot, the young painter who met him in 1943 and, obeying his brusque instruction to prove her fertility, bore him two children, Paloma and her brother, Claude. After 10 years with him, Gilot wondered whether she, too, had been torn apart. As a painter and a sculptor, Picasso magically metamorphosed the things he saw; Gilot, in her book about their vexed partnership, felt that he had forced "a metamorphosis in my nature". He remade her to suit himself, then looked elsewhere when she had served her purpose, which was to fuel his creativity and cosset his ego.
Unlike the rest of the many women in Picasso's life, Gilot took the initiative by leaving him. She survived; others, less lucky, were, as Richardson says in his biography, "incinerated in the furnace of Picasso's psyche". His neurotically jangled mistress Dora Maar, the weeping woman in the paintings of the late 1930s, was skewered by his cruelty. At lunch, Richardson recalled, Picasso might praise a painting by Maar and liken it to Cézanne, giddily elating her; at dinner, he would casually remark that Cézanne was shit and drop her back into self-doubt.
Even after being replaced by Gilot, Maar was expected to remain available, forbidden to accept evening invitations in case Picasso whimsically decided to dine with her. She was not allowed to get over Picasso; his second wife, Jacqueline, a submissive helpmate but also a jealously protective guardian, could not forgive herself for surviving him. After his death in 1973, Jacqueline lapsed into an alcoholic fog, woozily communing with the spirit of the lord and master she addressed as "Monseigneur". Richardson remembered her in the mid-1980s stubbornly asserting: "Pablo is not dead." A year later, she shot herself.
The suffering has persisted into the second and third generations, as the miserable end of Picasso's grandson Pablito demonstrates. The young man's father, Paulo, was born during Picasso's marriage to a Russian ballerina; emasculated and shiftless, Paulo served for a while as Picasso's chauffeur. Pablito, whose name marked him as a further diminutive of the glowering paterfamilias, tried to pay homage to Picasso the day after his death; the monopolistic Jacqueline had him expelled from the villa and decreed that he and the rest of Picasso's motley brood could not attend the funeral. Heartbroken by this rejection, Pablito downed a bottle of bleach. His sister, Marina, who has published a memoir denouncing their distant, coldly manipulative grandfather, found Pablito haemorrhaging his corroded intestines: talk about reality being torn apart!
Jacqueline nudged Richardson to begin a biography, counting on him, as he said when we met in New York, to be "discreet". The undertaking has been a devotional act. Richardson began to worship Picasso when he first saw reproductions of his work in art magazines during his schooldays in the late 1930s. "From the age of 13 to 15, I was obsessed by Picasso - and 10 years later I became his friend!"
They met while Richardson was living with collector Douglas Cooper in a chateau they elaborately restored; the two men belonged to what Richardson calls Picasso's "tertulia". "That's the word Spaniards use to describe a group of guys who meet in the cafe to discuss politics, women, sport. We didn't exactly do that. Most often, Douglas and I cooked dinners for Picasso and his entourage on their way home from the bullfights in Arles. Picasso often repaid our hospitality by bringing us drawings, though later he gave us caviar instead; he joked that now the prices for his art had risen so high, caviar was cheaper!"
What Picasso demanded from his gang of companions was, as Richardson put it, "fealty". It is a revealingly antiquated word, remembering the vassal's obligation of fidelity to his feudal overlord. But can a biographer be so subservient?
"I'm sure Picasso would have hated my books about him," said Richardson. "He was secretive, he didn't want everything to be known. His affairs were the source for his work. Once, when he was showing me some portraits, he said, 'It must be awful for a woman to look at the way I paint her and see that she's about to be replaced.'
"He did everything in his power to block the publication of Gilot's book in 1964 and when he failed he banished Paloma and Claude as revenge on their mother. Sometimes, the truth is unpleasant, but I don't hold with the way he's been demonised by feminist academics - denounced as a wife-beater and all the rest." It was only too easy for Merchant and Ivory to cast Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso, their slushy film about his relationship with Gilot; they relied on Hopkins to bring to the character the gloating, carnivorous guile he found in Hannibal Lecter.
"Picasso could be ferocious," said Richardson, "but he was also gentle, sweet, child-like. Dora Maar used to talk about his persecution of her, but when she had a breakdown and got religion, she took to calling him the apostle who regenerated art. After all, she'd been the mistress of Georges Bataille, the most way-out of the surrealists, a real satanist, in love with evil and erotic pain. So life with Picasso must have been a bed of roses after the bed of thistles she shared with Bataille!"
Richardson has likened Picasso to Frankenstein, who, defying God's creative primacy, soldered corpses together; his portrait of Gertrude Stein, for instance, grafts on to her mask-like head the face of a nonagenarian smuggler Picasso met during a Spanish holiday. "He had a Dracula side as well," Richardson told me. "He fed on those around him, like a vampire sucking life out of his victims. He once said something very telling about the fans, stalkers, autograph-seekers, dealers, collectors and paparazzi: 'These people cut me up like a chicken on the dinner table. I nourish them, but who nourishes me?'
"We all donated our energy, if not our blood. If there were six or eight people for lunch, he'd get every single one - he'd seize control of you, turn you inside out. The pretty girls he'd flatter and flirt with. If there were kids present, he'd make toys for them or do drawings. Even animals weren't immune - he'd entice them to come to him. Everyone had to be seduced. You ended the day completely drained. But he'd imbibe all that stolen energy and stride off into the studio and work all night. I can't imagine the hell of being married to him!"
Douglas Cooper fell from grace after he presumed to plead the cause of the excommunicated Paloma and her brother. "That was absurd," said Richardson, who re-enacted the scene for me with a satirical glee. "Nothing could have infuriated Picasso more than trying to get him to recognise his illegitimate children as heirs - not for financial reasons, but because any mention of a will reminded him of death, which his art was so determined to deny. Douglas was thrown out, but wouldn't give up. There was a steep flight of stairs leading down from Picasso's villa to the front gate and poor Douglas paused on every step, kneeling and weeping and grovelling and begging to be forgiven! It did him no good at all."
Richardson felt Picasso's muffled annoyance only indirectly. "It was because of something I wrote for the Observer, which he read in the French equivalent of the Reader's Digest. It was about his friendship with Braque and I mentioned that Picasso had offered him studio space at his place in Cannes, which Braque refused. Trivial enough, but it made him cross because he didn't want it known that anyone could say no to him! He never referred to it; Jacqueline ticked me off on his behalf. I did once see him being mean, when he turned up with Cocteau and all the hangers-on for dinner after a bullfight. Jacqueline looked ill, collapsed and I carried her upstairs. Picasso just shrugged and said, 'I seem to have a corpse on my hands.' She told me that she needed an operation - a hysterectomy, I suppose, though she was too ashamed to use the word - but couldn't have it because, 'Pablo doesn't want to live with a eunuch'."
The remark poignantly acknowledged Jacqueline's sense of her duty (and of her failure to fulfil it, since she did not add to Picasso's eclectic crop of children). He was a creator; his women had a lowlier responsibility, serving as reproductive vehicles. "Of course," Richardson added, "it was just the idea of having offspring that appealed to him. In practice, he expected the current woman in his life to be at his beck and call, so he begrudged time spent on maternal chores. He could be a doting father. He loved devising games, teaching them to draw, romping on the beach. But his work had priority and then he didn't want to be bothered."
The purpose of women was clearly defined. What, I wondered, was the role of male admirers like Richardson? Did the master expect his companions to be slaves or, at least, feudal vassals? I asked about Picasso's assertion that "to like my paintings, people really have to be masochists". "He probably said that for effect," Richardson retaliated. "A day later he'd have been saying the opposite." But another anecdote made me wonder about the psychodynamics of their association. Picasso often showed the young man sets of drawings, asking him to choose the best - significantly "le plus fort", never "le plus beau" - and always accepting his judgment.
"I was so amazed by his interest in what I felt that I got teary-eyed! When it happened more than once, I began to suspect he was playing a trick on me, so I asked, 'Hey, Pablo, what's up?' He said, 'There was only one other person I could make cry like that.' I badgered him to tell me who it was and then he changed the subject because he'd given away too much."
The other lachrymose acolyte was Georges Bemberg, the unstable son of a brewing tycoon, who claimed to be Picasso's protegé. When he went mad, his family covered its embarrassment by pretending that he was dead. Almost 50 years later, Picasso was asked to sign some drawings that Bemberg had owned. He reacted to the imitative doodles with horror and superstitious alarm, yelling: "Don't touch them, they're the drawings of a madman!" Picasso enjoyed adoration, but reviled followers who drew too close to the sacred fire.
Richardson has so far survived Picasso, but the race is not yet over. He has spent almost 40 years on the biography, though the three volumes published so far have only reached the middle of Picasso's life. "I'm 85 and I don't have all that much time. The biography grew at its own pace, which is why it has taken so long. There has to be a fourth volume, maybe a fifth - who knows? I suffer from wet macular degeneration and I need an injection in my eyeball once a month. I'm fine in front of paintings, but I have a problem with print, so research is hard."
The contrast with Picasso's ebullient, often riotously obscene, old age is clear enough. Angela Rosengart told me, with some genteel euphemisms, about a conversation she overheard between Picasso and the equally ancient pianist Artur Rubinstein. She at first described the talk as "boyish"; when I pressed her for details, she said: "Oh dear, they were telling their dreams and they were so indecent!"
Genius, for Picasso, was lecherous adolescence recovered at will. Richardson is less frisky, but keeps going with a gallant, generous stoicism. He is currently preparing a New York exhibition of Picasso's last works - paintings of a muddled rabble of musketeers, whores, thieves and beggars, with faces scavenged from Rembrandt, Velázquez and Goya. "By the end of his life, he knew he couldn't compete with the avant-garde. Americans had taken over, bringing back the abstraction that he always despised. But he turned the studio in his last house into a microcosm, projected slides sent from the Louvre on the walls, and shut himself away to cannibalise the entire history of art. It was a triumphant end to his career, not a falling-off."
I couldn't help comparing the clutter of Picasso's working space, strewn with relics, fetishes, props for his dressing-up games and the dung of his pet goat, with the gilded trophies and pedestalled neoclassical busts in Richardson's princely pad at the bottom end of Fifth Avenue. The artist, working like a cyclone, throve in chaos; his biographer, with a tidier mind, is slowly imposing order on Picasso's rackety life and refuses to rush to judgment before his knowledge of the subject is complete. I hope the tortoise catches up with the hare at the finishing line.
When we met in Lausanne, Paloma Picasso told me about being present, as a quiet and unobtrusive child, during sessions of almost frenetic creativity in the studio. "He was 67 when I was born, but I never thought of him as old. He was so vital, so playful. Perhaps he thought of me as a contemporary, even though I was only four when my mother took my brother and me away to live in Paris in 1953. He was proud to draw like a child, not someone with an academic training.
"One day, I got a pair of white espadrilles. I was so happy, they looked so cute, I'd wanted them so much. And the moment my father saw them he covered the canvas with red and blue designs. They looked fabulous, they'd become an art object, but it was a little sad too; I realised I'd never ever be able to have white espadrilles like the other girls!"
Even when taking a rest or pausing to entertain his daughter, Picasso could not help littering the world with more art. "All day long while he worked, he smoked - first Gauloises, then Gitanes. The cigarettes came in little cardboard cartons and whenever he finished a packet, which was three or four times a day, he'd cut it up to make me a doll or a finger puppet or scribble a pencil drawing on it. He couldn't stop himself."
Angela Rosengart remembers a similar overflow of inventiveness. Arranging for her to visit him next day with her father, Picasso drew them two tickets of admission, decorated with a sketch of Rembrandt and a scribbled signature. They gained entry to Picasso's presence by showing these little Picassos (which they were allowed to keep).
Jean Cocteau thought that Picasso had "terrible eyes that pierced like gimlets"; Richardson thinks of him as a witch doctor with the gift of x-ray vision that Andalusians call the mirada fuerte - a strong gaze that penetrates objects. The black eyes inherited by Paloma are less baleful and they shone with delight as she remembered a world in which daily reality consisted of dreams and games.
"We had a menagerie in the house. My father was like St Francis of Assisi - animals couldn't resist his aura. A goat called Esmeralda had the run of the villa, it lived upstairs with us. My mother gave away an earlier Esmeralda to some gypsies because she hated its smell and the mess it made; my father was outraged and said he loved the goat like a child. He even sculpted it, with cardboard ears, a basket for its belly, udders made of terracotta milk jugs and a metal pipe sticking out for its anus. This one was the second Esmeralda and it was lonely. It cried at night and I'd go and goat-sit to comfort it. Often, I fell asleep beside it.
"One summer, a frog hopped out of the pond and came and sat with us on the steps in the evening when it was cool. My father constructed a little ladder so it could climb up and get into the house. We gave it a bowl to live in, but it couldn't feed itself in there. My father collected flies for it; he had a way of gently sweeping the air with his open hand and then closing it on the insects. Even the flies weren't afraid of him!"
Paloma illustrated the gesture for me, but the clatter of her gold-bangled wrist and the flash of her jewel-studded fingers would have scared off any swarms. Even so, I saw what trust her father must have had in the strength and stealth of his hand, which he relied on to make instantaneous decisions about marking canvas or modelling clay.
During the 1950s, Paloma and Claude travelled down from Paris to the Midi to spend their holidays with Picasso. "He played the role of father when he met the train and asked us about school. But he really didn't care and admitted that he'd been a bad student himself. His father was a colombophile who allowed him to take his doves to school and you can imagine how that disrupted lessons! By the end of the day, our games would resume."
The idyll ended with the publication of Gilot's Life With Picasso in 1964. Rosengart remembered his reaction when he read the French translation. "He gripped my shoulder and said, 'How could a woman do such a thing?' That shows, you see, what respect he had for women!"
I begged to differ; the remark called Gilot a disgrace to her gender because of her independence. When Picasso first met Gilot, he'd proposed keeping her captive in an attic, swaddled like a Muslim woman, until he was ready to unwrap her for delectation; early in his friendship with Rosengart, he said that he fancied detaining her on the premises as a perpetually available model.
"The book was not harmful," Paloma insisted. "The art world deified my father and my mother wrote about him as a human being - about his little quirks and superstitions, but also about his attempts to control her. Anyway, Jacqueline used the book as the excuse for a breach with us. From now on, we officially didn't exist, we couldn't be mentioned, we were bad. But how evil can you be when you're only 14? Maybe Jacqueline resented us because she gave him no children.
"Once, during the time we were banned, I saw my father in Cannes. I rushed up to him, we embraced as if nothing had ever happened. Should I have told him that I'd been to the house every day that week, but was not allowed in? I didn't want to ruin the moment with accusations. Then Jacqueline bustled up and bundled him into the car. She must have been very insecure, which is maybe why she couldn't survive him."
Picasso died intestate, forcing Paloma and Claude to apply to the French courts for recognition as his descendants and heirs; eventually, a legal ruling allowed them to adopt the surname Ruíz-Picasso. The hyphen ironically disinterred the conflicts of previous generations. Ruíz was their father's patronymic, which he spurned as a means of separation from his own father, a tamely realistic painter; he called himself Picasso after his mother's family.
But the famous name that Paloma coveted carried its own burden. "Both my parents were artists, so what else could I be? When the estate was settled, each of us - me, my brother and the step-siblings from other relationships - was allowed to choose a group of his works, within certain financial limits. And then we were involved in setting up the Musée Picasso in the Marais, which took care of the death duties. After you've been looking at Picassos all day, you don't want to come home and pick up a pen or a brush! Although I started to design jewellery before he passed away, for a long while I felt inhibited. How could I measure up?"
She soon found an independent way to merchandise the family brand, and, following the example of the ceramics her father turned out in multiple editions in the 1950s, supplied the market with her own relatively affordable Picassos: jewellery, cosmetics, leather goods, sunglasses, china, tiles, furniture covers and wallpaper. Her father, to keep from being idle, sometimes manufactured such accessories. A couple of years before his death, he spotted a brass pendant dangling from Angela Rosengart's belt. He asked to borrow it and kept it for months. Long after she'd resolved to forget about it, he returned it gilded and engraved with the head of a baroque cavalier and personally dedicated to Rosengart.
Paloma's cheekiest allusion to Picasso's legacy is the men's fragrance she called Minotaure, launched in 1992. The randy bull was one of his self-images and he often drew the horned Minotaur trampling sacrificial virgins beneath its hooves. Paloma's imaginary beast is sweeter-smelling, less rapacious: "I was thinking of the Mediterranean and of that scented darkness when I chose the name. It's an indirect allusion to my father, but it shows how inescapable he is!" Richardson's biography argues that the purpose of Picasso's art is exorcism, the casting-out of evil, achieved by the black magic of his deformations. Paloma's perfume manages a milder exorcism of her father's influence, transforming the musky odour of rut into a gentler, more fetching olfactory aura.
Psychologically, Paloma also learnt from his example. Paparazzi besieged the hospital in which she was born and dispatched nurses to bribe her mother; her infancy and childhood were remorselessly documented, since Picasso, as Richardson said, was "as famous as a rock star".
Richardson regretted Picasso's antics for the camera. "He played the fool, dressed up, performed little mimes, though often it was his only way of communicating with people. After the war, it was compulsory for Americans visiting Paris to call on him. They spoke no French, he spoke no English, so he had to put on these foolish dumb shows with silly hats or Indian head-dresses, like the one Gary Cooper gave him."
Paloma took a different, wilier view. "My father didn't deny his celebrity. He treated the press the way you would do a dog - if you run away, it will chase you and bite you, but if you play with it, it may lick your hand." Paloma developed her own sly version of this tactic and, like her friend Andy Warhol, she became socially and commercially ubiquitous while remaining unknowable.
"I was so timid," she sighed. "That's why I played the part of that lustful lesbian Hungarian countess in the film Immoral Tales; I thought that would cure my shyness! When I began designing, I diverted attention to my persona, to the extravagant way I dressed or the fire-engine-red lipstick I wore. The look was a mask like those my father collected and I hid behind it."
Her current disguise is an immaculate anonymity. Sitting opposite me on a sofa in the Lausanne hotel, she could have been any prosperous, well-tended Swiss matron, except when the gold hoops rattled on her wrists and her father's eyes scorched me like a pair of black suns. More than 50 years after she first posed for Picasso, Angela Rosengart recalled with an excited shudder the raking scrutiny of those eyes. "They burned," she said. "He ate me with his eyes; you could feel him swallowing whatever he looked at. It was terrifying, exhausting, to sit there for two hours being looked at in that way, as if he were shooting arrows into me. I only really understood it much later when I read in John Richardson's book about the mirada fuerte."
Richardson, I noted, calls that unblinking gaze "an ocular rape". "No, I never felt threatened," said Rosengart. "Picasso was always so kind to me, so tender. And my father took photographs throughout the sessions, though he had to do so from the next room. First, Picasso made a pencil drawing, then next time a linocut, later a lithograph and aquatint - the same face, but always in a different medium, which shows how he liked to change people as he worked on them.
"I would never have asked him for a portrait. Helena Rubinstein did that. She annoyed him so much that finally he gave in and did a whole series of drawings. They made her look so horrible that he never showed them to her."
Rubinstein, the magnate who invented anti-wrinkle creams, appears in Picasso's sketches as a cadaverous crone with gnarled, bejewelled knuckles; Angela Rosengart, so deferential and undemanding, looks wide-eyed with joy and gratitude in his portraits of her. "A Spanish art critic told me that Picasso's first little girlfriend was called Angela and I remember once when he introduced me to someone he said, 'Elle s'appelle Angela' and repeated the name as if he was caressing me. Perhaps I was a souvenir of that first love - an innocent one, I hope! Anyway, that's how I crept into immortality through the back door."
Another young woman inadvertently immortalised by her brief contact with Picasso was 19-year-old Sylvette David, who posed for him in the summer of 1953. She caught his eye when her boyfriend tried to sell him some shakily assembled cubist chairs; soon she was visiting the studio every day.
David - today called Lydia Corbett after a failed second marriage to an Englishman and a rebaptism following her religious conversion - lives in rural Devon. Stark trees in mucky fields creaked as gales lashed them, ragged clouds hurtled across the sky and rooks screeched imprecations. "Provence is nicer, non?" said the erstwhile Sylvette as she surveyed the unmeridional weather.
Picasso fancied Sylvette because she had a ponytail. "He was fascinated by that. It was my father's idea; he liked the way ballerinas pulled their hair back. And no one ever had such a high ponytail as mine! Even Brigitte Bardot decided to copy my hair when she saw me on the Croisette in Cannes. Of course, she wasn't naturally blonde, like me!"
Sylvette's fetishistic handful of hair has gone, replaced by Lydia's long yellow bangs. As a remembrance of the ponytail, however, she had twined a few strands into braids, with red wisps of ribbon knotted around them. "It is the colour of the passion of Christ," she told me, fingering the ribbon. Then, less mystically solemn, she added: "My grand-daughter likes to pull my braids." Was this, I wondered, a dare?
Françoise Gilot, preparing to walk out on Picasso in 1953, thought he was using Sylvette to make her jealous and scoffed at his claim that the girl had "very pictorial features". My view is that the ponytail lifted her face, pulled the skin taut and revealed sculptural planes.
Picasso began with delicately accurate sketches of her, then in the next few months experimentally racked and twisted her body, finally remaking her in folded metal or casting her in bronze as his Woman With a Key, a statue originally pieced together from fire-clay bricks and other implements from a potter's kiln.
A monolithic Sylvette, with her adamantine ponytail set in concrete, stands in the grounds of New York University, inflated from Picasso's original by Norwegian sculptor Carl Nesjar. "Ah," said Lydia, showing me a dogeared photo album, "I have never seen it, no one invites me to New York! Could you write that I would like to go?" If my hair had been braided, I'm sure I would have felt a persuasive tweak.
Lydia looked back with a teasing grin on the erotic imbroglio that surrounded Sylvette. "I was in the middle of two women - Françoise and Jacqueline - and they didn't like me being there. Oh là là, it was difficult! Picasso often painted me in a rocking chair. You see it again in his portraits of Jacqueline, but I sat in it first! After a while, she made sure I wasn't welcome. Finally, she presented me with a book about his art, which he inscribed to me. That was her way of saying, 'It's over, go.' She had no need to worry; I was very pudique, not like the girls today.
"Later I heard that the statue of me as the woman with the key was called The Brothel-Keeper and I was so offended. Who would say that about me? Maybe Jacqueline! Once he did offer me money to pose, but I refused. I thought, what if he wants me to be nude? He was 73 then, he wore slippers. But he was clean, he had no whiskers and he smelled nice, not of wine and garlic! He went back to his youth through me. He gave me a cuddle sometimes, like a good old dad."
I was not so sure, listening to Lydia's account of Sylvette's induction, that Picasso's intentions were paternal. He took her to his bedroom and bounced encouragingly on the bed. Instead of following his example, she marvelled at the agility of his ageing limbs. Then he led her to the stables, where his favourite Hispano-Suiza limousine was housed.
"He opened the back door of the car and said, 'Come in.' I thought, 'That's a bit funny', but all we did was sit there, with an imaginary chauffeur in the front. We just talked." About what? I asked. "Oh, he told me that creativity was happiness, other things like that. His Spanish accent was so strong, often I couldn't understand what he was saying!"
Despite Jacqueline's rebuff, Sylvette survived Picasso. Indeed he subsidised her after-life by presenting her with one of his 40 paintings of her, which she sold to buy an apartment in Paris.
An illustrated children's book by her friend Laurence Anholt narrates her story as a fable of rebirth: Sylvette, surveying the Eiffel Tower from an eyrie paid for with a Picasso, embarks on an artistic career with the old master's encouragement and also manages, thanks to his avuncular ministrations, to overcome the trauma of abuse in childhood by her mother's bullying lover.
Divine intervention also did its bit. "After my first husband betrayed me, I was so hurt, so destroyed. But suddenly I was surrounded by a light, I felt happy, and I started singing in Latin about the pure in heart. That was God's gift to me!" Another exorcism had occurred, this time with the aid of celestial grace, not Picasso's demonic conjuring.
It is fitting that Picasso's place in Sylvette's life was taken by the only creative force he viewed as an equal. "Ah oui," said Lydia, fingering the ribbon that was her memento of Christ's blood, "perhaps God sent me to Picasso to cheer him up and sent him to me to heal my hurt. God is in everybody. Those dark eyes Picasso had - that was God looking at me!"
She showed me one of her recent watercolours, influenced more by Chagall than by Picasso. Against a gold background like that of a religious icon, Sylvette floats among a collection of Picasso's props - owls, masks, statuettes - with a cowled monk representing his better self; the painter's round face is lunar and those omniscient eyes keep protective watch on the world. "He's so big he envelops us all," said Lydia, as if he were about to materialise in the room.
I wondered, however, why she had given Picasso three arms, which reach out to pinion the airborne Sylvette. His extra, exploratory hand seemed bent on mischief. Was Picasso a deity or a randy old devil? Or perhaps, as Eluard suggested, both at once? According to John Richardson: "The man was a paradox. Whatever you say about him, the reverse is also true." His lovers, friends, models and children know that he metamorphosed them. Whether they were recreated or destroyed, even they can't be sure.
• Picasso: Challenging the Past is at the National Gallery, London, 25 February-7 June, sponsored by Credit Suisse.
• John Richardson's A Life of Picasso, Volume III: The Triumphant Years 1917-1932 was published in paperback last week.
The master's circleThe family and friends we spoke to
Paloma PIcassoFashion designer, businesswoman and the youngest of Picasso's four children, born in 1949 to the artist/writer Françoise Gilot when Picasso was 67 years old. Paloma means "dove" in Spanish and her name refers to the dove symbol designed by Picasso for the International Peace Conference in Paris the year she was born. Has been depicted in many of her father's works including Paloma with an Orange and Paloma in Blue. In 2001, Paloma Picasso moved to Switzerland and founded the Lausanne-based Paloma Picasso Foundation to promote the work of her parents.
John RichardsonBiographer and friend to Picasso, born in 1924. Richardson was obsessed with the artist as a teenager and a decade later, when he began restoring a chateau in Provence in the 1950s with the collector Douglas Cooper, he became a member of Picasso's inner circle. Over the course of their long friendship Richardson kept a diary of their meetings and, when Picasso died, his widow, Jacqueline Roque, gave him access to the artist's studio and papers. In 1992 he published the first volume of A Life of Picasso, his critically acclaimed biography of the artist. He now lives in New York where he is working on the fourth volume of the biography.
Lydia Corbett (nee Sylvette David)Artist and Picasso's muse, born in Paris, 1934. The shy young woman first visited Picasso's French studio in Vallauris with her boyfriend in the summer of 1953. Picasso, attracted by her ponytail and pretty features, created 40 paintings and drawings of her. One of them Girl with a Ponytail became one of his most famous paintings. Sylvette David first came to live in England in 1968, changing her name when she married an Englishman. She now lives and paints in Devon, believing Picasso to have inspired her own artistic career, which began when she was in her forties.
Angela RosengartSwiss art dealer, collector and friend, born in 1932. First met Picasso when she was 17 in Paris with her father, Siegfried, one of the 20th century's most important art dealers with whom she worked for more than 40 years. By the age of 25, she was part-owner of her father's gallery which held eight Picasso shows between 1956 and 1971. For her, meeting Picasso was "the event of my life"; he in turn made five portraits of the young woman, which he gave to her. She now runs a gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland, the Rosengart Collection, which houses 50 Picasso paintings and many other modernist works.Imogen Carter
Anything they can do ...How Picasso took on the old masters
Christopher Riopelle is co-curator of the National Gallery's exhibition Picasso: Challenging the Past.
From infancy Picasso was exposed to traditional European art; it was like his mother's milk. Because he was so revolutionary as a painter we tend to forget that he had a very academic art education but he spent a long time looking at the old masters, taking their juice out of them, and developing his encyclopaedic knowledge of painting. He also had extraordinary self-confidence and started taking on these artists from a very early age, in an almost arrogant way, saying to Goya or Velazquez "I can do what you can do". This exhibition offers a chance to see Picasso's interpretations of the old masters and then visit many of the originals in the National Gallery's permanent collection. We're used to thinking of Picasso as someone who broke with the past but, as this exhibition shows, he used his knowledge of the past to push his own art forward.
With his 1969 Reclining Nude , for example, Picasso addresses one of the constant themes of European painting. He has this great repository of Reclining Nudes from art history in his mind - Goya, Manet and of course Velazquez's Rokeby Venus - but he throws the reticence and prudery of the older tradition out of the window and brings the form into the 20th century. His nude is no beauty, with her huge nose and come-hither look, but she still manages to be voluptuous. Equally, when he created Seated Woman in 1920, he had a range of artists who worked in the classical style in his mind, including Ingres (for example, Madame Moitessier, 1856) but he took the symbol of the hand raised to the brow, which dates back to antiquity to signify someone who is lost in thought, to create something which is almost a female version of Rodin's Thinker. With its solid enlarged features, it's like a classical sculpture. Picasso's take on the old masters can also be comic. Man With a Straw Hat and an Ice Cream Cone (1938) is a hoot. With his irrepressible wit he deliberately took on the sober tradition of portraiture, exemplified by artists such as Van Eyck (see his Portrait of a Man, 1433), to push its possibilities further. Here with the addition of a tongue he adds an extra dimension, a sense of taste. He was always reinventing, it's like no subject for him ever died.
A life of women and work
1881 Born on 25 October in Málaga, Spain, the first child of Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and professor at the city's School of Crafts, and María Picasso López. They later have two daughters, Lola (1884) and Conchita (1887). Recieves formal artistic training from his father aged seven.1895 Conchita dies of diphtheria. The family moves to Barcelona. Picasso studies at its School of Fine Arts.1897 Attends Madrid's Royal Academy. Regularly visits the Prado Museum.1900 Opens a studio in Paris. Gets his first art contract. 1901 An artist friend's suicide marks the start of his Blue Period.1904 First long-term mistress, artists' model Fernande Olivier. Start of Rose Period.1907 Paints Les demoiselles d'Avignon, a seminal cubist work. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler becomes his dealer.1918 Marries ballerina Olga Khokhlova. Their son, Paulo, is born in 1921.1927 Affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter who bears him a daughter, Maya, in 1935. 1937 Creates Guernica, which depicts the Basque town's bombing in the civil war. 1944 Leaves his lover Dora Maar for art student Françoise Gilot. Two children, Claude (1947) and Paloma (1949).1957 Creates a series of 58 interpretations of Velazquez's Las Meninas1953 Gilot leaves Picasso because of his adultery and abuse.1961 Marries Jacqueline Roque. 1973 Dies intestate on 8 April in Mougins in France, during a dinner party. Jacqueline prevents Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.2004 Boy With a Pipe (1905) sells for £58m, making it the world's most expensive painting at the time. Imogen Carter

dearest

2009-02-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

jeffery mcnary

ah, there you are

i’ve been
hoping
you’d come soon

superstition, after all, held tricks
in its need to fumble
in processions and powers and pretense
and purposes and so forth…now you

courting comes slow for me
its rituals and grandly imperfect episodes

dearest you…scolding my being surprised
give me a minute…i’ll come around
i’ve waited
i’ve earned this rare payoff

like foreign films
full of smile and giggle
there’s you wrapped in elegant simplicity
from delhi to here…skipping along
in shining scenes all your own

it was out of my hands for a moment
me, caught in the corners
nervously afraid of all the straight lines
till i learned your ballads and kissed your nose
new and permitting

ah, there you are,
uncommon season
with my love all about you as a saffron metaphor
on sunlit autumn days

fresh and permanent…you and me…accompanied,
refined and marked
and as comprehensible and as
fragile and as gentle
…as naked trees in a warm rain

poster boy lives!

2009-02-04T10:56:00.000-08:00

Poster Boy Is Caught,

or Is It a Stand-In?
By RANDY KENNEDY
If you’ve been half-awake in the subway sometime in the last year or so and thought you noticed two guys drowning in a glass of beer in a Michelob ad, or saw an ad for a television program about the Drug Enforcement Administration altered to say, “Iran: Every Deal Can Turn Deadly,” or that familiar subway door sign reworded to read, “Do Not Lean on Poor,” you have most likely seen the work of Poster Boy.
While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads.
But his stealth campaign, which has entertained thousands of normally glassy-eyed commuters and infuriated the police and the companies whose costly ads he has chopped up and scrambled, will probably get a lot harder now. At an art event in SoHo on Saturday, a group of plainclothes New York City police officers finally caught up to and unmasked, at least metaphorically, the man they say is Poster Boy.
He is Henry Matyjewicz, a 27-year-old who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and he was found after a tip from someone who saw the name Poster Boy on a flier for the event, the police said.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that Mr. Matyjewicz (pronounced Mat-ee-YAY-veetch), who was also being sought on a warrant for a petty larceny charge from last year, was arrested in the art space, at Broadway and Howard Street in SoHo, and charged with two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief.
“The officers had information that he was, in fact, going to be at that gallery that night,” Mr. Browne said, adding that he believed that the department had evidence of Mr. Matyjewicz at work scrambling parts of subway posters. (Although his face is obscured, there is also plentiful video of Poster Boy doing his thing at friendswelove.com and on YouTube.)
But a man identifying himself as “Henry,” who called The New York Times on Tuesday in response to messages for Poster Boy sent through friends, cast some existential doubt on whether Mr. Matyjewicz was, in fact, the man the police were after.
“Henry is one of many individuals who believe in the Poster Boy ‘movement,’ ” the man wrote later on Tuesday in an e-mail message, referring to Mr. Matyjewicz in the third person. “Henry’s part is to do legal artwork while propagating the ideas behind Poster Boy. That’s why it was O.K. for him to take the fall the other night.”
He added, “Henry Matyjewicz is innocent.”
Moni Pineda, a co-creator and producer for Friends We Love, a New York documentary video series that profiles young artists, said that she and the series’s other creator, Mike Vargas, had just begun a benefit event in the SoHo space on Saturday evening when they noticed a commotion involving a person Ms. Pineda would identify only as “a friend,” adding, “Poster Boy could be anybody.”
“The police came into a private event,” Ms. Pineda said. “They didn’t show a warrant to me or anybody. And the next thing we know, our friend is walking out with a bunch of guys we didn’t know.”
Ms. Pineda said she and others came up with bail for their friend, but not before he had been transferred to Rikers Island, where he stayed before being released in the wee hours of Monday morning.
In one of his YouTube videos, Poster Boy says that he started rearranging subway ads because he wanted to make art but could not afford materials. “I mean, a razor pretty much anybody can afford,” he says.
His work grows out of a wave of remix culture that has inspired many young artists and musicians over the last decade, though in Poster Boy’s case it is decidedly analog. And he would like to see the idea spread, he wrote on Tuesday in a series of answers to e-mailed questions.
“Socially, I’d like people to understand that there is a difference between what is right and what is just,” he said. “If there is a law that is outdated, impractical, and/or immoral, people should have the right to challenge it. Remember, slavery was considered legal at one point. I consider the world’s current modus operandi a modern slave system. I intend to challenge it in any way I can.”
In a recent interview with Gothamist.com, Poster Boy bragged that the police vandal squad officers had been “hounding” him for his autograph. He added that he had begun moving on to more ambitious — and, legally, probably riskier — projects involving whole billboards and, mysteriously, “something planned that, if successful, will make the poster and billboard stuff look trivial.”
On Tuesday Poster Boy said that Mr. Matyjewicz’s arrest meant only good things for Poster Boy. “More awareness,” he wrote in the e-mail interview . “More support. Outdoor advertising, a blight that can’t be ignored, will become illegal.”
Yet Ms. Pineda, who said she had seen her friend on Monday after his release from jail, said he might have to reassess his plans in light of his looming legal problems.
“He believes in what he’s doing,” she said. “He still has a lot to say. But I don’t think even he knows how things are going to shape up.”
“And again,” she made a point to add, “Poster Boy can be anybody.”

not long at all

2009-02-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

MAUREEN DOWD,

'Well, That Certainly Didn't Take Long': 'It took Daschle's resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn't have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years. ... The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying - and failing - to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks. Betrayed by their bankers and leaders, Americans were desperate to trust someone when they made Barack Obama president. His debut has left them skeptical about his willingness to smack down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money.'

picasso's parisian party

2009-02-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

"Picasso fever keeps Parisians up all night"
Art fans queue in freezing temperatures as museum stays open to satisfy demand
By John Lichfield in ParisMonday, 2 February 2009
Parisians, who are legendarily allergic to queuing, waited patiently into the early hours over the weekend to see the final, all-night sessions of a triumphantly successful exhibition of Picasso paintings.
Despite sub-zero temperatures, crowds besieged the Grand Palais, just off the Champs Elysées, until 3am on Friday and Saturday nights – part of a recessionary boom in demand for cultural activities which is puzzling, and delighting, the French arts industry.
There has been a similar surge in ticket sales for musical events, ranging from a high-brow Bach festival in Nantes to a low-brow, all-singing and dancing pop musical based on the life of Cleopatra.
Sociologists explain the cultural boom as partly a search for distraction from the miseries of the headlines, and partly a tribute to the fact that art exhibitions and concerts are cheaper than eating out.
The French political guru and writer Jacques Attali offered a more existential explanation. "Periods of crisis encourage people to consider the meaning of life," he told the Journal du Dimanche. "We are torn, at present, between despair, anguish and rebellion but we also yearn for the beauty which comes only from works of art."
By the time it closes at 8pm tonight, over 750,000 people will have seen Picasso et les Maîtres at the Grand Palais. The show, which opened four months ago, is the first to exhibit a large number of Picasso paintings alongside canvasses by painters who influenced him, from Velasquez and Poussin to the Impressionists.
The show has become one of the most fashionable events, not just in Paris, but in the world. Visitors who managed to book tickets in the final weeks have included Nicole Kidman, Woody Allen and – on the same day – Mick Jagger and Jacques Chirac.
To satisfy those who failed to buy the limited number of reserved places, the French national museum service extended the show and opened the Grand Palais all night for the last three nights. Queues were expected to form once again for last night's final all-night session. "We didn't want to miss out," said Eric Bonsergent, who queued into the early hours of Sunday. "They say people don't go to museums, but for a wonderful exhibition like this there is huge demand. It was a brilliant idea to open all night."
Others admitted that they were there against their will. "We booked for 2.30am, thinking that they meant 2.30pm," Gerard Sainton, a 59-year-old computer expert, said ruefully.
The runaway triumph of the Picasso exhibition has been mirrored by the success of other cultural events in France in recent months. A new Cleopatra musical, which began last Thursday, is already a sellout and has been extended for two weeks. An exhibition on the life of the pop musician Serge Gainsbourg, due to end last month, has also been prolonged until 15 March.
The Folle Journée de Nantes, a music festival which has run for the past 15 years and is devoted to Bach this year, has sold 96 per cent of its tickets.

book 'em

2009-01-29T11:09:00.000-08:00

Presidential Crimes
Moving on is not an option
Elaine Scarry (sept./oct. 2008)
We have at the present time two government leaders, a president and a vice president, who, according to all available evidence, have carried out grave crimes. Will these two men leave office and live out their lives without being subjected to legal proceedings? Such proceedings will surely release new documents and provide additional testimony important in resolving their guilt or innocence. But the public record is now so elaborate, so detailed, and validated from so many directions that a weight is on the population’s shoulders: does our already existing knowledge of what they have done obligate us to press for legal redress?
The question is painful even to ask, so painful that we may all yield to an easy temptation not to pursue it at all.
A major seduction away from prosecution is the euphoria that has surrounded the 2008 election campaign, even as the contest sharpens. “America at its Best” reads the front cover of the June 5, 2008 issue of The Economist, with a photograph of Barack Obama and John McCain pictured there. The elated sense that we might be restored to dignity in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world has rightly been credited first and foremost to Barack Obama, to his spiritual carriage, his open cadences, his refusal to degrade opponents or adversaries. But John McCain, too, is responsible for the atmosphere of well-being. Despite the large areas of overlap between his beliefs and those of George Bush, he has come before the electorate with a voice free of greed and cruelty. On countless occasions, he has spoken clearly about torture at a time when many other people have spoken confusedly.
This confidence in the power of the presidential nominees to restore us to ourselves is based above all on one attribute—not charisma, not eloquence, not heroism, but another quality that they share: their commitment to the rule of law. Since November will almost surely bring a return to the rule of law, why not devote our energies and full attention to the electoral process? To keep our eyes on the nominees is to be filled with renewed self-belief; to turn back to the current administration is to feel heartsick and ashamed. Why willingly look in one direction when one can look in the other?
First, because November will only “almost surely,” not surely, bring a return to the rule of law. Between now and November, any one of us could be taken ill, and so could one of the candidates. If John McCain suddenly became ill, for example, the Republican commitment to the rule of law would instantly cease to exist with clarion certainty. Anyone who doubts that a return to confusion is possible should be reminded that as late as this spring—when Bush vetoed a bill that outlawed the use of torture by the CIA—the Congress failed to achieve the two-thirds affirmative vote that would override the veto. The vote, like other congressional votes on torture, split along party lines. The pool of candidates committed to the rule of law is not deep: there are no back-up Republican candidates who have spoken out decisively against torture or the need to close Guantánamo. Moreover, McCain or Obama might lapse from law. Indeed, McCain—whose aggressive insistence on war with Iraq began within days of 9/11—voted with his party and President Bush on the CIA bill. McCain has consistently opposed making the federal courts available to detainees, and he condemned the recent Supreme Court decision ensuring habeas corpus protections for Guantánamo detainees as “one of the worst” in the country’s history.
Still, and this is a second reason to address the wrongdoing of the current administration, let us suppose what is fair to suppose, that Barack Obama and John McCain continue in good health, are as wedded to the law as they appear, that one of the two is elected fairly and honestly, and that the country begins its mighty pivot back to its gravitational center in the rule of law. It will be almost like a miracle cure, an overnight release from our eight-year-long affliction.
Or will it? What will this shift over to the rule of law mean? It will mean that when we are led by a person who does not believe in the rule of law, we will not as a country follow the rule of law; and when we are led by a person who does believe in the rule of law, we will follow the rule of law. If that is the case, the United States will continue to be what it has been during the last eight years: a country governed by the rule of men (their beliefs, their preferences, their choices), not by the rule of law (where beliefs, preferences, and choices are constrained by invariable and nonnegotiable prohibitions on cruelty and fraud). Just as one might in the past have said, “this president was short whereas the next president was tall” or “this president was isolationist whereas as the next president was internationalist,” so now one might shrug and say, “this president believed it was his prerogative to torture whereas the next president believed it was not.” The incalculable damage left by Bush and Cheney’s day-in-and-day-out contempt for national and international law includes the power to sweep forward in time and trivialize into a matter of personal preference any future president’s adherence to the law. Will we become a country in which the rule of law is just another policy preference? Do we really think that the rule of law is to be left in the hands of our leaders?
In deciding about legal redress, we need to be clear about the large stakes in our decision. The very multiplicity of the apparent crimes, the sheer array of arguably broken laws, is dizzying. But that multiplicity must be faced, for in it we will see that what got in President Bush’s way was not any one law but the rule of law itself. It is the rule of law that has been put in jeopardy by a project of executive domination; it is the rule of law that will continue to be in peril; and it is only, therefore, by addressing the crimes through legal instruments—through a formal, legal arena, and not simply through the electoral repudiation of bad policy—that the grave and widespread damage stands a chance of being repaired.
* * *
On March 4, 2008, the citizens of Brattleboro, Vermont went to the polls and voted by a count of 2,012 to 1,795 to endorse the recommendation that if President Bush or Vice President Cheney came to that town, they should be “arrested and detained” for “crimes against our Constitution.” The citywide vote on Brattleboro’s non-binding resolution was the third step in a many-months-long process that scrupulously followed the procedures laid out in a section of the Brattleboro Town Charter entitled “Powers of the People.” In winter 2007 a petition (written and circulated by town resident Kurt Daims) was signed by the required 5 percent of the population. Then in January the Board of Selectman, by a three to two vote, forwarded the issue to the town-wide ballot scheduled for early spring.
How likely is it that President Bush or Vice President Cheney will visit Vermont, the single state in the country that George Bush has not entered in his first seven-and-a-half-years in office? Less likely, even, than it was before March 4. This still leaves a large geography in which the pair are at liberty.
Or does it? In the recent history of U.S. cities, one city often acts as the catalyst for hundreds of others: in January 2002, Ann Arbor, Michigan passed a resolution voicing its noncompliance with the Patriot Act; there are now 406 towns (and eight states) that have passed similar resolutions.1 So, too, the governing councils of ninety-two towns have, by a formal vote, called upon the U.S. Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney.2 Perhaps not surprisingly, thirty-nine of those towns are in Vermont, twenty-one in Massachusetts; but the roll call of states represented includes California, Oregon, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Colorado, North Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, New Hampshire, and New York.
So far, only one other city has reenacted the Brattleboro arrest resolution. In a town meeting this past spring, Marlboro, Vermont voted 43 to 25 to draft and publish indictments of the country’s president and vice president, and “to arrest and detain” them should they arrive in town. But what if over the next two years the number of towns that formally vote to indict and arrest President Bush and Vice President Cheney steadily grows and eventually—as in the case of the town resolutions in favor of presidential impeachment or the resolutions against the Patriot Act—reaches the number 92 or 402? Cross-country travel will then become more restrictive for the former president and vice president. The felt-duty of the population to uphold the rule of law will be encoded in the geography of the country. These efforts provide a powerful historical record whether or not they result in a forcible assertion of the rule of law.
Can the harm done by Bush and Cheney be addressed through a more direct application of law? Vincent Bugliosi—who has successfully prosecuted twenty-one murder cases (most famously, Charles Manson) and eighty-four other felonies (losing only one case)—argues that Bush’s fabrications about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, connection to al Qaeda, and status as an imminent threat to the United States provide the legal basis for charging him with murder3 and trying him in any state that meets one condition: that it is the former residence of a soldier who has died in Iraq. All fifty states meet that condition. (A state-by-state list of the dead can be found on the Washington Post Web site, http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen.) Early this summer, Bugliosi published a book outlining the argument for prosecution, forwarded a copy of the book to every state’s attorney general, and offered his assistance to any office that takes on the case.
Some of Bugliosi’s early chapters have the lurching rage of a grieving parent. (Most of us have a more anemic form of citizenship and can watch with poise as 4000 twenty-year olds die believing they are fighting the country that struck us on 9/11.) But the central chapters—on evidence, case law, jurisdiction, court arguments, and the lack of any exonerating defense—display a dispassionate, master prosecutor at work. Convinced that the defendant is guilty of mass murder and conspiracy to commit murder, this citizen means to win this case. Though each of the fifty states provides an appropriate venue, Bugliosi argues that a federal district court (the country has ninety-three) would be an even more appropriate site: Washington, D. C. heads the list. Prosecution can begin at any time after President Bush leaves office (he is immune while in office), and there is no statute of limitations.
As Bugliosi’s preference for a federal rather than a state venue suggests, the main domestic arena for addressing the administration’s aggressive dismantling of the rule of law is not individual citizen, town, or state, but the federal government: the Congress and the Supreme Court. The Senate’s recently released Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information points in the same direction. While it does not make a case for murder prosecutions, it is nonetheless a devastating document, meticulous and relentless, that substantiates Bugliosi’s argument about culpable deceptions.
The Report takes five major policy statements about Iraq between late August 2002 and early February 2003—three speeches by President Bush, one by Vice President Cheney, one by Secretary of State Powell—and juxtaposes the information contained in specific sentences to the information available at the time from the intelligence community. It then draws on an array of other sentences spoken by top officials, including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Rice, and assesses their accuracy. This same sentence-by-sentence procedure is followed across eight categories: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction in general, weapons delivery systems, connections to terrorism, regime intent, and forecasts of post-war Iraq.
Two discrepancies are striking: between what the leaders of our country said about Iraq’s nuclear weapons and what the intelligence community believed at the time, and between what the leaders of our country said about Iraq’s connections to al Qaeda, before and after September 11, and what the intelligence community believed at the time.
The two subjects have a crucial effect on one another in creating the impression that Iraq poses an imminent nuclear threat to the United States. If Iraq has or is close to having a nuclear weapon but has no will to attack us, we remain in a safety zone: many countries have nuclear weapons; some of them, such as the United States, have thousands. If, conversely, Iraq is collaborating with al Qaeda but has no nuclear weapon (or other weapons of mass destruction), we once more remain in relative safety. Only if the two features are simultaneously present do we enter a high-alarm zone.
The two lies together proved to be much more potent than either one alone in building an alternative, extra-legal universe. The escalating use of the commander-in-chief clause to amplify presidential power is magnified once the country is fighting not a metaphorical war (a war on terror) but a literal war against another state, armed with weapons of mass destruction and ready to use them, perhaps by making them available to a proxy.
The virtuoso sentence-by-sentence Senate Report shows that the Bush administration starkly lied on the subject of Iraq’s collaboration with al Qaeda. The intelligence community repeatedly stated that they could find no reliable evidence of such a partnership: “Intelligence assessments, including multiple CIA reports and the November 2002 National Intelligence Estimate dismissed the claim that Iraq and al Qaeda were cooperating partners.”4 President Bush, in contrast, repeatedly announced that they worked together. “Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn’t, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world. . . . [Y]ou can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.”5
The intelligence community had noted a single source, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who spoke of Saddam Hussein providing al Qaeda with biological and chemical weapons training. But the intelligence reports on this information always stipulate that the man appears to be a fabricator.6 Once the war was underway, al-Libi—who had been renditioned to Egypt—acknowledged that he fabricated the information because he was threatened with (and was possibly subjected to) torture; only by giving the information his interrogators appeared to want, he alleges, could he stop the interrogation.7 According to Colin Powell’s chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, this misinformation played a decisive role in Powell’s willingness to make his UN speech, though he had no idea the information was elicited under coercion.8
The National Intelligence Estimate had noted that there was no intelligence indicating Iraq’s intention of supplying al Qaeda with any weapons of mass destruction. But this claim was repeatedly made by President Bush (“Iraq has longstanding ties to terrorist groups which are capable of, and willing to, deliver weapons of mass destruction”), Vice President Cheney (“[T]he war on terror will not be won ’till Iraq is completely and verifiably deprived of weapons of mass destruction”), and others such as Secretary of Defense Powell and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.9 This constant assertion that al Qaeda and Iraq worked hand-in-hand made it possible for President Bush to announce in his March 17, 2003 “Address to the Nation” that “with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”10
The Senate Report shows that on the subject of Iraq’s nuclear weapon’s program President Bush and Vice President Cheney again fabricated, but this time not as starkly. Rather than issuing announcements that had no basis whatsoever in existing intelligence, they revised the intelligence community’s picture by exaggeration and omission.
One way to describe Iraq’s level of nuclear readiness is on a scale that goes from 1, where that country has no program at all for producing nuclear weapons, to 4, where it has an actual weapon in hand. Postwar intelligence would eventually certify that Iraq, in the months and years before the war began, was at level one, with no attempt underway to develop nuclear weapons, nor any programs to develop chemical or biological weapons. But prior to the war the intelligence reports were divided between level 1 and level 2. For example, in the fall of 2002 the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research stated its view that Iraq had no program for reconstituting nuclear weapons; the National Intelligence Estimate, in contrast, stated its belief that one was underway. No divided judgment, however, is registered in White House statements that instead used adrenalized constructions such as Dick Cheney’s “irrefutable evidence” and “absolutely devoted”: “We now have irrefutable evidence that he has . . . set up and reconstituted his program,” and “[w]e know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”11
A similar instance of division within the intelligence community that was translated into univocal certainty by the administration was over the subject of aluminum tubes. The CIA and the Department of Energy disagreed about whether aluminum tubes procured by Iraq were destined for nuclear weapons or instead the more benign purpose of rocket construction.12 President Bush and National Security Advisor Rice repeatedly cited the aluminum tubes, while never mentioning the disagreement.13
If the intelligence community said “no,” the administration said “maybe”; if the intelligence community said “maybe,” the administration said “certainly.” If the intelligence community said “long time,” the administration said “tomorrow.” For example, the intelligence community had repeatedly stated that even if Saddam Hussein had a weapons program, it would take 5 to 7 years to complete (with a caveat that if Iraq could acquire weapons parts from another country, the final product could be ready in 1 year). With the exception of Secretary of State Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations, the 5-to-7 year window is simply never mentioned by anyone in the administration.14
The intelligence community assessments on nuclear weapons never strayed beyond level two. The Bush Administration, in contrast, started at level two and allowed them to slide up toward the highest zone of alarm. Insofar as the Bush administration acknowledged any uncertainty, they repositioned the site of it. Rather than locating the question mark (as the intelligence community had) at the boundary between “no interest in weapons development” and “attempts now underway at developing weapons,” they shifted the question mark to the line between “having the weapon” and “using the weapon.” “The first time we may be completely certain he has a—nuclear weapon is when, God forbids, he uses one,” President Bush announced in September of 2002.15 In the months that followed, President Bush would repeatedly sound the alarm: “Facing clear evidence of peril we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”16
The Senate Report contains a critical minority report from some Republican members of the Select Committee on Intelligence that, on close inspection, does nothing to weaken the majority report. For example, the minority report is at pains to show that members of Congress are themselves on record as having echoed the reckless statements about Iraq’s nuclear weapons.17 But far from exonerating President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Powell, the record of these statements by senators helps us comprehend why having leaders lie about highly classified information is devastating. A president’s words have, and should have, transmissible authority.18 It ought to be the case that a congressman or senator or citizen hearing the president’s statements can rely on the leader’s scrupulous accuracy and therefore repeat those words. A president’s words—that the country was conceived in liberty, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, that we should guard against unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex, that we should ask what we can do for our country—will, through repetition, eventually become part of the population’s own words; they will be dispersed throughout the verbal fabric of the country.19 The office of the presidency is a site of widespread emulation; that is why the act of violating that office by lying to Congress and the country about national security should be regarded as a high crime, thus meeting the Constitution’s standard for impeachment and removal. Perhaps the offense should be called not “Lying” but “Lying-While-Holding-an-Office-that-Will-Inspire-Millions-of-Repetitions-of-the-Lies and-Tens-of-Thousands-of-Deaths.”
Finally, the majority report, which is almost wholly dedicated to juxtaposing sentences spoken by the administration with sentences issued by the intelligence community, briefly notes two additional avenues of fabrication that appear to have been in play. First, various sectors of the intelligence community themselves were under White House pressure to come up with suitable answers. The question, then, is not just, did the White House exaggerate minimal information given by intelligence, but did the White House exaggerate minimal information that had itself been produced under pressure from the White House?20 Second, the White House has the power to declassify intelligence information selectively: President Bush released information that he wanted a wider readership to see and kept other intelligence (that presented an alternative or dissenting view) classified.21 The Senate Report directs attention to, but does not provide a sustained study of, the two problems.22
The President and his highest officers together erected a vast structure of lies about Iraq’s phantom nuclear partnership with al Qaeda. But is this latticework of lies itself a prosecutable crime? What is the crime? “Murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and aiding and assisting murder,” says Vincent Bugliosi, triable in either state or federal court. Others might say that the deceptions leading to war are “crimes against humanity” and “crimes against peace.” Still others think that impeachment and removal are the place to start.
* * *
On June 10, 2008 Congressmen Dennis Kucinich from Ohio and Robert Wexler from Florida cosponsored thirty-five articles of impeachment outlining the grounds for indicting George Bush. Included in the list of impeachable offenses are the President’s exaggerated fabrications about Iraq’s nuclear weapons; his direct lies about Iraq’s connections to al Qaeda; his retaliation against those who tried to tell the truth about the lack of nuclear weapons in Iraq, specifically his felonious disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s clandestine CIA identity; his authorization and encouragement of torture as official policy; his direct responsibility for rendition; his illegal detention of “U.S. citizens and foreign captives” (including the “imprisonment of children”); his warrantless wiretapping; his failure to protect the United States by heeding pre-9/11 warnings; his failure to protect soldiers in Iraq with proper armor; his failure to protect the residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; his acts instructing subordinates to disregard congressional subpoenas; and his 1,100 signing statements releasing him from carrying out even those laws passed during his own administration. The House voted to forward the articles of impeachment to the Judiciary Committee. The articles of impeachment against George Bush are now side by side in the Judiciary Committee with articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, first presented to the House of Representatives by Congressman Kucinich in the fall of 2007.
While the grounds of impeachment are appropriately numerous, and lying in the run-up to the Iraq War is one essential ground, it is crucial for the country to recognize that there is one crime with a legal profile so singular that it can—even standing alone—convey the wholesale contempt for the rule of law displayed by the Bush administration. That crime is the act of torture. The absolute prohibition on torture in national and international law, as Jeremy Waldron has argued in a recent article in Columbia Law Review, “epitomizes” the “spirit and genius of our law,” the prohibition “draw[s] a line between law and savagery,” it requires a “respect for human dignity” even when “law is at its most forceful and its subjects at their most vulnerable.” The absolute rule against torture is foundational and minimal: it is the bedrock on which the whole structure of law is erected. It is only “our clear grip on [this] well-known prohibition” that acts as a “crucial point of reference for sustaining . . . other less confident beliefs” about other prohibitions.23
The congressional articles of impeachment include “Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture.” Congress has begun to address the crime along other avenues of action that may remain independent from, or instead contribute to, the impeachment effort. Crucial to these efforts has been the research carried out by British barrister Philippe Sands and published in his 2008 book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Sands’s essential point is that the pressure for torture originated in the White House, not—as the White House has tried to portray—among military interrogators at Guantánamo. Top attorneys—Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (then legal counsel for Bush), David Addington (legal counsel for Cheney), and William Haynes (legal counsel for Rumsfeld)—together visited Guantánamo with almost no other discernible purpose than to make clear to the military interrogators there how keenly the White House was awaiting whatever new information they could elicit.24
Sands’s Torture Team is not only a riveting book but a brilliantly designed and executed legal case with a series of witnesses for the prosecution taking the stand and together providing a set of damning revelations. Focused on the fifty-four consecutive days of torture inflicted on one particular prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani (a prisoner against whom all legal charges have recently been dropped), the case, by the very pressure of its single-mindedness, successfully shows that President Bush’s team was in direct contact with the room in which the physical injury was taking place. Sands shows not only that White House attorneys personally visited Guantánamo to convey the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense’s personal interest in “information” produced by the interrogations, but that between January 12 and January 15, 2003, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who was under steady pressure from Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora to rescind the list of fifteen torture techniques that he, Rumsfeld, had personally authorized, was buying time. Rumsfeld hoped that in those additional seventy-two hours the continuing torture of al-Qahtani would at last yield the hoped-for information before he issued the order that the torture cease.
Did those interrogating al-Qahtani have a direct telephone line into Rumsfeld’s office during that last seventy-two hours? During the 1,296 hours of the full fifty-four days? That question and others will inevitably be asked during formal legal inquiries into White House torture either in Congress or in a courtroom.
Though focused on one prison and one prisoner, Sands’s book sets up an echo chamber in which years of revelations suddenly gather cumulative force. His book obligates us to remember all the instances of direct White House pressure that other investigatory reports have shown. For example, just as attorneys Gonzales, Addington, and Haynes personally visited Guantánamo, so a “senior member of the National Security Council” made a parallel visit to Abu Ghraib in November 2003.
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski described the visit to the authors of the 2004 Schlesinger Report, who summarized her words. The visit led “some personnel at the facility to conclude, perhaps incorrectly, that even the White House was interested in the intelligence gleaned from their interrogation reports.”25 In Brigadier General Karpinski’s August 3, 2005 interview with Jefferson Law School professor Marjorie Cohn, Karpinski revealed that posted on a pole at Abu Ghraib was a short list of interrogation techniques (including the use of dogs, stress positions, and lack of food) signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld with a handwritten postscript, “Make sure this happens!!”26 Top administration pressure for more “information” has also been described by former Pentagon lawyer Richard Schiffrin. Schiffrin, speaking to the New York Times on the eve of his June 2008 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s lawyer William Haynes and others repeatedly “expressed ‘great frustration’ that the military was not effectively obtaining information from prisoners,” and complained that “the intelligence being obtained from detainees” was “insufficient.”27 These reports all indicate that the White House not only suspended the Geneva Conventions and signed the list of torture techniques, but personally leaned on the torturers to get ‘answers.’
In response to a report issued by the Inspector General in the Justice Department describing open debate at the White House about torture techniques, fifty-nine members of Congress have written a letter to the Justice Department urging the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether President Bush and other high executive officers are guilty of crimes of torture.28 The Senate Armed Services Committee also requested that former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s counsel, William Haynes (along with others) testify on the issue of interrogation practices in June 2008.29 And retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who authored one of the early studies of the abuse carried out by soldiers and military police at Abu Ghraib, has made public his assessment of the part played by the White House inner circle in formulating and promulgating a government policy of torture: “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”30
* * *
Some hope for legal redress of the kind that Taguba calls for comes from the willingness of courts to resist presidential authority, as the very names of the leading Supreme Court cases indicate: Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Boumediene v. Bush.
In Rasul v. Bush the court ruled 6 to 3 that detainees held at Guantánamo can challenge the legality of their detention in U.S. courts. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens stressed that historically the writ of habeas corpus is, at its very core, “a means of reviewing the legality of Executive detention.”31 The fulcrum of the opinion is a passage in which he points out that the writ of habeas corpus “does not act upon the prisoner who seeks relief, but upon the person who holds him in what is alleged to be unlawful custody.”32 In other words, the question is not ‘Is Rasul within reach of the US courts?’ but ‘Is President Bush within reach of the United States courts?’ The answer to that question is yes. Justice Stevens closes the opinion by again stating that the issue is not whether foreign nationals and the zone of Guantánamo stand within the penumbra of the law but whether President Bush does: “What is presently at stake is only whether the federal courts have jurisdiction to determine the legality of the Executive’s potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing.”33 The answer, again: yes.
Two years later the Supreme Court examined the legitimacy of the military tribunals President Bush designed for Guantánamo, tribunals in which—as petitioner Salim Ahmed Hamdan complained—the accused is “excluded from his own trial.”34 The Court agreed: the tribunals violate what Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, identified as “the right to be present”—“one of the most fundamental protections.”35 A “glaring” feature of the tribunal design was its provision that the accused and his civilian counsel could be prohibited from hearing the evidence against him; a second feature was its inclusion of forms of evidence normally excluded—hearsay, information extracted by coercion, and testimony that was not sworn.36
The President’s tribunals, the Court ruled, are illegal. Their design lacks any legislative authorization and violates both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In the earlier case, Rasul v. Bush, the Geneva accords had been repeatedly mentioned in the oral arguments (and twice referred to as “the supreme law of the land”) but had not been part of the decision itself.37 Now in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Common Article 3 provided the foundation for the Court’s ruling. Among Common Article 3’s provisions is the requirement that a defendant be tried “by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” The requirement of a regularly constituted court is quoted 8 times by Justice Stevens and 13 times by Justice Kennedy in his concurring opinion.38
Responding to the President’s longstanding complaint that Geneva rules are vague, Justice Stevens observed that in order to accommodate many different legal systems, the Geneva Conventions are broad and flexible in their requirements. “But requirements they are nonetheless”.39 Justice Kennedy similarly stressed the meaning of the word “requirement.” When the United States ratified the Geneva Conventions, he noted, they became “binding law” in this country; moreover, he continued, as a result of Congress’s 1996 War Crimes Act, a violation of Common Article 3 is “a war crime.”40
In explaining what a “regularly constituted court” is, Justice Stevens and Justice Kennedy both invoked the definition given by the International Red Cross: a court “established and organized in accordance with the laws and procedures already in force in a country.”41 For detainees at Guantánamo, that would mean the court martial procedures established by the 1950 Uniform Code of Military Justice, or some other legislative base not yet provided by Congress.42 The executive branch contention that it would be “hamstrung” by the procedures of a military court martial is dismissed as insupportable by Justice Stevens who repeatedly faults the government for its “wholesale jettisoning of procedural protections.”43 Hamdan may (as the government argues) be extremely dangerous, concludes Justice Stevens, “but in undertaking to try Hamdan . . . the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law.”44
Justice Kennedy comments on the odd necessity, apparently felt by Justice Stevens and him, to announce basic principles of international and national law (as though they were addressing a visitor from outer space), such as the fact just noted that following the rule of law is obligatory and that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches cannot act beyond the powers conferred on them by the Constitution.45 But the main rebuke to the executive is the stark invocation of the Geneva rules and the reminder that their violation constitutes a “war crime.” In January 2002 President Bush decided that Guantánamo detainees were not eligible for Geneva-rules protection; he later announced that he had the power to suspend them in Afghanistan but for the time being would not do so. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Court reminded the President and the American people that the Geneva rules had never ceased to be in effect, and that their violation is a war crime.
As the President’s mock-judicial schemes have been addressed and corrected in Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (as well as in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush), it is to be hoped that the U.S. courts will eventually try President Bush for direct acts of licensing torture. A remarkable step in this direction took place on August 14, 2008, when a federal appeals court in New York agreed sua sponte (on their own initiative, without a request from either party) to rehear the rendition and torture case Arar v. Ashcroft. The court, presided over by 3 of its 12 judges, had earlier dismissed the case on national security grounds. Maher Arar—a Canadian citizen arrested at JFK airport without charge, held in solitary confinement for two weeks, flown to Syria where he was tortured, and imprisoned in a 3’ x 6’ x 7’ underground cell for a year—will have his case reheard by all twelve judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on December 9, 2008.
Some of the evidence for other torture cases may well come from the executive branch itself. Beginning in spring 2002, FBI agents in Afghanistan, who witnessed the torture of Abu Zubaydah by the military and the CIA, expressed alarm to their headquarters; by fall 2002 (a year before the worst abuses in Abu Ghraib, and a year and a half before those abuses were made public) FBI agents’ continuing distress regarding military interrogation practices at Guantánamo had reached the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft.46 The conflict between the FBI and the military became most intense over the interrogation of al-Qahtani and Mohamedou Ould Slahi.47 In both cases, the aversive interrogation procedures were directly approved by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, through fingerprints and timing, had discovered al-Qahtani’s role in the events of 9/11, but at Guantánamo the military was subjecting al-Qahtani to forms of questioning that were not only absolutely prohibited by the FBI on moral and legal grounds (it allows only “rapport based” techniques), but would surely ruin any chance of getting actual information.48
Although a formal system of reporting within the FBI only began after the Abu Ghraib revelations, an elaborate survey of one thousand FBI agents carried out by the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Justice in 2005 has documented the agents’ early and ongoing alarm, as well as their largely ineffective attempts to address it. The roughly 400-page A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq is important for its record of cruelties, both inside and outside the interrogation room.49
What the study chronicles, however, is not only cruelty but also a kind of widespread cognitive anarchy across the three geographies of Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. FBI agents were completely clear about what kind of deeds had to be reported if carried out by an FBI agent: criminal acts, misconduct, or any act that might be perceived by someone else, and later reported, as misconduct. They also understood their “obligation to report” the actions of non-FBI government employees if the act was criminal (an obligation all government employees have under federal law).50 Following the Abu Ghraib revelations, they were instructed that if they saw a person exceeding not the FBI interrogation rules, as in the past, but the rules governing the body to which that person belonged—whether military or the CIA—they were obliged to report that as well.51
But what were the rules governing those other bodies? The FBI agents did not know, and constantly emailed headquarters to ask what constituted “abuse.”52 The soldiers posted at U.S. foreign detention centers—perhaps because the Secretary of Defense had issued six different sets of rules—also did not know, though they cheerfully thought they did and repeatedly assured FBI agents that the events underway were legal: an FBI agent walking through a corridor at Abu Ghraib and seeing men in cells wearing only underwear (a violation of Geneva rules) was assured by a sergeant escorting him that their nudity was authorized; forty-seven separate FBI agents either saw or were told about sleep deprivation yet were informed that this was standard, approved military procedure; FBI agents present at Abu Zubaydah’s initial CIA interrogations were entrusted with the information that the procedures being used had been approved “at the highest levels.”53
The cognitive anarchy documented in the FBI Review again underscores the important phenomenon of transmissible authority. We saw earlier that a president’s lying about another country is far more criminal in its consequence than the lying of an ordinary citizen because it is a lie that will be transmitted across millions of people and because it authorizes the widespread infliction of injury and death. So, too, the White House’s decision to lift the prohibition on torture was transmitted to tens of thousands of soldiers who repeated false sentences about the suspendability of the Geneva Conventions and believed themselves authorized to practice once-forbidden acts. Even the one thousand FBI agents who would in the past have had the means to stop torture, lost their bearings and did not know what to report.54
* * *
President Bush’s assault on the rule of law has thus been devastatingly effective. But it is challengeable, and those challenges may come from a range of Americans and domestic offices. It is also challengeable in international arenas. An array of international legal challenges have already been issued against members of the executive branch who carried out President Bush’s program of “extraordinary rendition,” a process in which individuals were seized and flown to countries (often those with a history of practicing torture) to be detained and interrogated. In January 2007 German prosecutors in Munich issued arrest warrants for thirteen CIA agents who allegedly participated in the kidnapping and imprisonment of German citizen Khaled al-Masri.55 The following month, an Italian judge ordered the arrest and trial of twenty-five CIA agents who allegedly kidnapped Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr on a Milan street and flew him to Egypt to be interrogated.56 Several studies carried out by the European Parliament—one completed in November 2006 and another in February 2007—have documented the 1,245 CIA flights that traveled through European airspace or made stopovers at European airports in the period between October 2001 and November 2006. In February 2007 the parliament voted to condemn extraordinary rendition and urged the twenty-seven member states of the European Union to continue their investigations and documentation of all flights.57
According to Sands, who has participated in international cases against government officials who torture, a case against President Bush or other members of his administration may be brought in an international forum. Citing Spain’s demand that England extradite former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet for crimes he had committed twenty-two years earlier, Sands suggests how probable such a scenario is if the United States itself fails to confront the grave crimes carried out by the administration, and if Bush or Cheney travel to, or through, other countries in the near or even distant future.58
* * *
The Bush administration has dedicated itself to creating an alternative universe, an offshore world with no legal constraints on the American executive. Creating this universe has required fabricating stories and details, like the made-up account of nuclear weapons and the made-up account of Iraq’s connection to al Qaeda, and the made-up sources and dossiers for this made-up information. Ever effective at generating false information, torture has also been used to produce these fictions. Sometimes the interrogators wore fake uniforms and flew a false national flag. The administration has also falsified body counts and accounts of injury and suppressed genuine accounts.59 This fabricated universe also requires fabricating rules about habeas corpus to ensure that this made-up universe lies beyond the reach of real-world courts.
What has not been fabricated, however, are the actual injuries and deaths. The New England Journal of Medicine counts the number of dead Iraqi civilians at 151,000; in October of 2006 Great Britain’s medical journal Lancet placed the number at more than 650,000. The number, though uncertain, is real and large. The number of U.S. soldiers who have fallen as of August 18, 2008 is 4,145. The number of U.S. soldiers sent home with grave injuries is 13,453; another 17,056 less severely injured have remained on foreign soil.60 The number of people tortured is not at present known, but, again, the number is real. It may seem surprising that a fabricated universe can bring about devastating injury, but, of course, it is exactly the purpose of the real world system of laws to prohibit such injuries, so it is not surprising that fabricated worlds lead to widespread bodily harm.
The avenues of address that have been outlined above may seem inadequate to the harm done. Will the Congressional articles of impeachment remain stuck in the Judiciary Committee? Will the Justice Department appoint a special counsel to investigate the White House authorization of torture? Will any state’s Attorney General now answer Bugliosi’s call to prosecute President Bush for the deaths of U.S. soldiers? Will other towns join Brattleboro and Marlboro by drafting and publishing their own indictments and arrest warrants, thus transforming the Brattleboro-Marlboro symbols into profound safeguards against future executive wrongdoing? Will the Second Circuit Court of Appeals hear Arar v. Ashcroft without this time allowing national security claims to silence the case? Will the United States extradite the thirteen who have been indicted in Germany for their part in the rendition of a German citizen? Will Belgium reinstate the “universal jurisdiction” statute that they repealed when former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld threatened to have NATO headquarters moved because a Belgium court had agreed to hear a war crimes case brought by a group of injured and bereaved Iraqi civilians?
“How long won’t you stand for injustice?” asks Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. If you’re going to get tired after half an hour, she advises, or after a week, or after a month, you might as well leave right now. Mother Courage storms into a military headquarters to lodge a complaint, and, finding a young lieutenant there who is waiting to make his own complaint, she launches into her disquisition on the impossible fortitude and stamina required, and does this so effectively that she persuades herself. She promptly leaves without lodging any complaint. The event takes place shortly after the military execution, without trial, of her soldier son.
Part of what makes the thought of prosecuting Bush so aversive is that it would be utterly exhausting. President Bush has repeatedly short circuited protest against one outrageous illegality by quickly carrying out a second, third, fourth, and fifth, so that the citizenry is kept in a permanent state of astonishment and cannot recover its own ground long enough to do more than cry out. Now, at the end of his administration, the sheer number of accumulated wrongful acts disempowers the collective will to act, and tempts us to elect our way back into a legal order, and simply close the door on the revolting spectacle of the last eight years.
But is closing the door actually an option? If the country is to renew its commitment to the rule of law, that outcome will require reeducating ourselves about what the law is. The law aspires to symmetry across cases. Among the more than two million Americans in prison and jail in 2006 was a young woman, Lynndie England, whose smiling face was photographed at Abu Ghraib as she held a dog leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner. Yet at Guantánamo, where direct White House agency has been elaborately documented, the long list of acts actually practiced includes: “Tying a dog leash to detainee’s chain, walking him around the room and leading him through a series of dog tricks.”61 How long won’t you stand for injustice?
The legal memos to and from the White House have no power to alter the national and international rules against torture. Geneva rules state that they cannot be suspended in wartime, and a country can only withdraw from the accords in peacetime with a one year lead time. Though the definition of torture in the Convention Against Torture is 118 words long, it has only “two key elements” that must be present: “that the act intentionally cause severe suffering and that it have official sanction.”62 The legal memos back and forth among the White House, the Secretary of Defense, and the Office of Legal Counsel, far from minimizing the crime of torture, fulfill its definitional requirements by verifying that it was done with “official sanction.”
Finally—and for us, most important—the international rules against war crimes and torture do not allow prosecution to be thought of as discretionary; they do not allow an escape provision based on electoral euphoria or on one’s doubts about one’s own stamina in fighting injustice. Very distant from a mere disinclination to prosecute is a country’s act of granting an amnesty. The international laws about some criminal acts do, in fact, allow for amnesty if required to establish peace. But torture is not one of those crimes. As Michael Scharf writes, the Commentary to the Geneva Conventions (the “official history” of their adoption) “confirms that the obligation to prosecute is ‘absolute,’ meaning . . . that states parties can under no circumstances grant perpetrators immunity or amnesty from prosecution for grave breaches.”63 So, too, the Convention against Torture requires that states “submit” cases to the “competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”64 This means, writes Scharf, that “where persons under color of law commit acts of torture in a country that is a party to the Torture Convention, the Convention requires Prosecution.”65
The United States is a party to these agreements. The duty to prosecute means that the failure of a government to do so violates international law and that the country reneges on its treaty obligations.66 It also increases the pressure of other countries to bring cases against President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former Secretary of State Rumsfeld based on the principle of “universal jurisdiction” that permits all parties to a treaty to prosecute grave war crimes that originated in another country.
It is odd that the designers of the Brattleboro resolution used “universal jurisdiction” as one of its legal bases, since that doctrine exists to enable countries distinct from the wrongdoer’s home ground to indict and arrest them. It is also odd that New York City’s Center for Constitutional Rights ,which in 2004 successfully argued for Guantánamo detainees to be heard in federal court, a year later chose to file a torture case by Iraqi prisoners against Donald Rumsfeld in Germany rather than in the United States. Their choice of venue was based on the fact that Germany has an explicit statute permitting them to try war crimes carried out anywhere in the world if the home country neglects to do so. The logic both in Vermont and New York seems to be: if the doctrine of universal jurisdiction allows citizens of a different country to try a case, surely it authorizes citizens of the home country to do so. Perhaps the valiant Brattleboro citizens and the stern fighters at the Center for Constitutional Rights doubt whether the ground they stand on is still in the United States. Can the ground be put back under their feet? How long?

1) The town resolutions against the Patriot Act can be read on the Web site of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee: http://www.bordc.org/.
2) The town resolutions urging impeachment can be read at http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/.
3) Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (Vanguard Press, 2008). Bugliosi is not unmindful of the horror of the Iraqi dead; the U.S. laws under which the case he outlines would be tried do not, however, accommodate foreign soldiers and civilians.
4) Senate Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information, p. 71.
5) Senate Report, p. 80.
6) Senate Report, pp. 55, 56.
7) Senate Report, p. 72.
8) Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday, 2008), p. 137.
9) Senate Report, p. 81.
10) Senate Report, p. 82.
11) Senate Report, pp. 14, 15 quoting Dick Cheney, speech made in Casper Wyoming and distributed by Associated Press, September 20, 2002; and Meet the Press, March 16, 2003. Emphasis added. In an interview, Cheney retracted his statement that Saddam Hussein “has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons,” but many more people saw Meet the Press than saw the interview.
12) Senate Report, p. 7 notes 11 and 13, citing CIA and Department of Energy reports.
13) Senate Report, pp. 4, 5, 14.
14) In general, Colin Powell is much more careful to cite ambiguities and equivocations than are George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Condoleezza Rice. However, Powell will sometimes build from that position of acknowledged uncertainty to a climactic certainty that (precisely because of his willingness to be detailed and nuanced) ends up being dangerously compelling. In his UN speech in February 2003, he alludes to the uncertainty surrounding the aluminum tubes, then goes on to make their use in nuclear weapons sound certain (Senate Report, p. 5). Again, with regard to the 5-7 year time window: in his September 26, 2002 testimony before the Senate he includes a sentence that acknowledges the possibility that the completion of a weapon of mass destruction may be 7 years away, but also includes what is nowhere present in the intelligence, that it may be 1 day away: “They have not lost the intent to develop these weapons of mass destruction, whether they are one day, five days, one year or seven years away from any particular weapon” (Senate Report, p. 45).
15) Senate Report, p. 4.
16) Senate Report, p. 5.
17) Senate Report, “Minority Views of Vice Chairman Bond and Senators Chambliss, Hatch, and Burr” pp. 102, 103.
18) This is not say that the speakers repeating the president’s words—a list that includes former presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry as well as John Rockefeller, the chair of the committee authoring the Senate Report—are wholly without fault. Some senators, hundreds of thousands of citizens, and many citizens of many other countries went on record as saying no evidence warranting invasion had yet been given.
19) Thus Vincent Bugliosi reminds us that in September 2001 a national poll showed that only 3 percent of the population mentioned Iraq as a possible participant in the events of 9/11; by August 2002, 70 percent of the population attributed responsibility to Iraq. So often was the lie repeated by the White House that even after President Bush eventually acknowledged that there was no evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, 43 percent of the population continued to believe Iraq was responsible; among troops in Iraq, the figure is 90 percent (Prosecution of George W. Bush, pp. 137, 138).
20) For example, a report issued by the Inspector General at the Department of Defense (February 2007) states that the Pentagon “inappropriately disseminated” an analysis linking Iraq and the al Qaeda 9/11 terrorists that intelligence had been “unable to substantiate.” The 2004 Senate Report examining the accuracy of the pre-war intelligence noted, “the DoD policy office attempted to shape the CIA’s terrorism analysis in late 2002 and, when it failed, prepared an alternative intelligence analysis denigrating the CIA for not embracing a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2008 Senate Report, pp. 89, 90, 92, citing 2004 Senate Report). As later sections of this essay will indicate, the pressure to produce information about an al Qaeda–Iraq partnership appears to have involved the White House licensing of torture. This possibility is not included in the Senate Report, except in its account of al-Libi as described above.
21) Senate Report, p. 92.
22) Bugliosi pursues both these matters in Prosecution of George W. Bush.
23) Jeremy Waldron, “Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House,” 105 Columbia Law Review 6 (October 2005), pp. 1749, 1727, 1735.
24) Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 63, 64.
25) Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations [The Schlesinger Report], in ed. Mark Danner, Torture and Truth (New York: 2004 ), p. 365. In her interview with Major General Taguba, Karpinski had cited the repeated visits of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to Abu Ghraib, without indicating whether he was the official who conveyed the White House’s keen interest in the interrogation results (Interview Transcript included in "The Taguba Report: Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade" in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib, [Cambridge University Press, 2005]).
26) Cited by Jordon J. Paust, “Above the Law: Unlawful, Executive Authorizations Regarding Detainee Treatment, Secret Renditions, Domestic Spying, and Claims to Unchecked Executive Power,” Utah Law Review (2007), no. 2, p. 348.
27) Mark Mazzetti, “Ex-Pentagon Lawyers Face Inquiry on Interrogation Role,” New York Times, June 17, 2008.
28) Joby Warrick, “Justice Dept. Urged to Examine Authorization of Harsh Interrogation Tactics,” Washington Post, June 7, 2008.
29) Scott Shane, “Elusive Starting Point on Harsh Interrogations,” New York Times, June 11, 2008.
30) Major General Antonio Taguba, preface to “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” http://brokenlives.info/.
31) Justice Stevens, quoting INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 301 (2001) in Shafiq Rasul, et al., Petitioners v. George W. Bush, President of the United States et al., June 28, 2004, p. 5.
32) Justice Stevens, quoting Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court of Ky., 421 U.S. 484, 495 (1973) in Rasul v. Bush, p. 10.
33) Justice Stevens, Rasul v. Bush, p. 17.
34) Justice Stevens, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Petitioner v. Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, et al. June 29, 2006, p. 53.
35) Stevens, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, p. 61.
36) Stevens, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, pp. 50, 51.
37) Oral Arguments, Rasul v. Bush, April 20, 2004, pp. 3, 8, 15.
38) Stevens, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, pp. 25, 69 (four times), 70 (twice); Kennedy, Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, pp. 2 (twice), 6, 8 (four times), 9, 10 (twice), 16, 19, 20.
39) Stevens, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, p. 72. Emphasis in original.
40) Kennedy, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, p. 7.
41) Stevens, Hamdan p. 69; Kennedy, Hamdan p. 8.
42) One might argue that all three legal grounds—the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the absent Congressional legislation—provide equal foundations for Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. But as Justice Kennedy notes in his concurring opinion, the requirement to follow the court martial procedures of the UCMJ or to have Congress provide a legislative base are both themselves derived from the Geneva requirement for a “regularly constituted court“ (Kennedy, p. 2).
43) Stevens, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, pp. 58, 61 (drawing on W. Winthrop, Military Law and Precedents [re. 2d ed. 1920], p. 831).
44) Stevens, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, p. 72.
45) Kennedy, Hamdan p. 2; Stevens, Hamdan p. 27.
46) Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (2008), pp. ix, xi, xxii.
47) Review of the FBI’s Involvement, pp. 122, 123.
48) Review of the FBI's Involvement, p. 78. From 2002 onward an important voice in maintaining the FBI’s adherence to its exclusive reliance on rapport-building techniques was Assistant Director Pasquale D’Amuro, who stressed in high-level meetings that force techniques, even though apparently approved by the White House Office of Legal Counsel, would produce false information, would make any testimony received from the detainee inadmissible in court, and would in the long run be the subject—he predicted—of a Congressional hearing (Review of the FBI's Involvement, pp. 71, 72).
49) The Review of the FBI's Involvement acknowledges that the FBI reports understate what took place: the FBI officers had access only to military interrogation centers, not to the CIA black holes; of those military centers, FBI agents at Abu Ghraib never saw the inside of the building where the events that later became notorious took place; and they were never on the ground at night when most abusive acts occurred. FBI rules required that the agent leave the room if any act incompatible with the FBI’s own procedures began. Therefore they were able to report only what they witnessed at the opening of the session. Only the classified version of the Review of the FBI's Involvement contains the full description of what FBI agents witnessed in the interrogations of “high value” detainees such as Abu Zubaydah (see p. x, note 5; and blacked-out passages throughout the report).
50) 28 U.S.C. sec 535.
51) Review of the FBI's Involvement, p. 52.
52) Review of the FBI's Involvement, passim. One agent in Afghanistan contacted headquarters to ask how much time had to elapse between the abusive non-FBI interrogation and his own in order for the information he received not to be contaminated by that other interrogation (xv). The Justice Department Report concludes that the FBI still has not answered this critically important question (xvii).
53) Review of the FBI's Involvement, pp. 252, 255, 69.
54) Review of the FBI's Involvement, p. 1.
55) Hugh Williamson, “Germany Seeks Arrest of 13 ‘CIA Agents,’” Financial Times, January 31, 2007.
56) Tony Barber, “Americans to Stand Trial in Rendition Case,” Financial Times, February 16, 2007. The former head of the Italian intelligence service was also charged by Judge Caterina Interlandi for the assistance he allegedly gave to the American agents.
57) Tom Burgis, “Poland, Italy ‘Colluded on CIA Detentions,’” Financial Times, November 28, 2006; and Andrew Bounds, “MEPs Condemn Rendition Flights,” Financial Times, February 14, 2007.
58) Sands, Torture Team, p. 204. Britain’s handling of Spain’s request for Pinochet’s extradition is described at length in Sands's earlier book, Lawless World (Penguin, 2005), pp. 23-45.
59) See Articles of Impeachment, article 10. See also E. Scarry, “Rules of Engagement: Why Military Honor Matters,” Boston Review, November/December 2006, pp. 23-30 (http://bostonreview.net/BR31.6/scarry.php).
60) Department of Defense, “Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) U.S. Casualty Status Fatalities as of: August 18, 2008, 10 a.m. EDT (http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf, accessed August 18, 2008).
61) Review of the FBI's Involvement, p.102. See also Philippe Sands, “Interrogation Log of Detainee 063, Day 28, December 20, 2002,” Torture Team, p.106. Sands ends each chapter by including a passage from the interrogation log of detainee al-Qahtani, a deeply effective way of alerting the reader to the concrete discrepancy between one's freedom to read and what happened to this prisoner in fifty-four days of consecutive torture. One inevitably feels, after one turns the page to start a new chapter, and enters into the fascinating details of life in Washington D.C., that one has left the torture itself behind, only to be reminded at this new chapter's end, that the torture continues. Though the time it takes to read the book is half a day, al-Qahtani was tortured for fifty-four days. Interrupting the reading act with the record of his torture acquaints the reader with the sense of unending time.
62) Roman Boed, “The Effect of a Domestic Amnesty on the Ability of Foreign States to Prosecute Alleged Perpetrators of Serious Human Rights Violations,” 33 Cornell International Law Journal, 297 (2000), p. 311.
63) Grave breaches include “willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment, including . . . willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity, willfully depriving a civilian of the rights of a fair and regular trial, and unlawful confinement of a civilian.” Michael Scharf, “Accountability for International Crime and Serious Violations of Fundamental Human Rights: the Letter of the Law: the Scope of the International Legal Obligation to Prosecute Human Rights Crimes,” 59 Law & Contemporary Problems 41 (1997), pp. 43, 44.
64) Conventions Against Torture, quoted in Scharf, p. 46. Because the wording requires “submitting the case” to prosecution rather than requiring “prosecution,” some analysts have seen the Convention as less than absolute; but Scharf compellingly argues that the “submit for prosecution” language is there to allow for the possibility that the person’s innocence or the lack of evidence then leads to a release from prosecution. On this point, see Scharf, p. 46 and Boed, p. 321.

About the Author
Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. She is the author of On Beauty and Being Just and a series of articles on war and social contract.
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che, with fries

2009-01-29T06:33:00.000-08:00

Che: The Ronald McDonald of Revolution
As a new Che biopic hits theaters, Rolf Potts examines the clichés of the revolutionary's admirers and detractors
REUTERS/AIN/Justo Gonzalez Ortega
Visit the Museo de la Revolución in central Havana, and two things about the museum’s photo displays will immediately capture your attention. First, it’s clear that the battle to control Cuba in the late 1950s was ultimately won by the cool guys. Young, bearded and ruggedly handsome, the rebel warriors of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement look like Beat hipsters and rock stars—Fidel tall and imposing in his fatigues; Camillo Cienfuegos grinning under his broad-brimmed cowboy hat; Ernesto “Che” Guevara looking smolderingly photogenic in his black beret. By contrast, the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and his cronies look bloated, balding and unquestionably corrupt in their stubby neckties and damp armpits and oversized paunches. Even without reading the captions, it’s easy to discern the heroes from the villains.
Look closer, however, and you’ll notice that the triumphant photos of Fidel and Che are faded and mildewed, their corners curled by age and humidity. The photo captions are spelled out in a clunky die-cast typeset that hasn’t been used in a generation, and contain glowing present-tense references to the magnanimity of the Soviet Union—a country that hasn’t existed since 1991. Despite the grungy glamour of the young men who toppled a tyrant all those years ago, the anachronism and decay of the museum’s exhibits reveal just how tired and toothless Cuba’s revolutionary myths have become in Havana. In many ways, the building is a museum of a museum—a yellowing relic of how the communist regime chose to portray itself in the 1970s.
Step outside the Museo de la Revolución into the humid Havana air, and the glamorous sheen of the bygone Cuban revolution seems to have been distilled into a single image—Alberto Korda’s famous 1960 photo of a bearded Che Guevara looking steely and determined in his beret. In a city where few buildings outside the restored Habana Vieja district have seen a new coat of paint in half a century, freshly retouched renderings of Che’s mug adorn countless walls and billboards. Moreover, in a country largely devoid of public advertising and religious iconography, Guevara’s ubiquitous image appears to fill the role of both Jesus Christ and Ronald McDonald—a sainted martyr of unwavering purity who also happens to promote a meticulously standardized (if not particularly nutritious) political menu.
Study the life of Che Guevara and a complicated portrait emerges. Raised by old-money bohemian parents in Argentina, young Ernesto struggled with asthma, read voraciously, studied medicine and became inspired to help the world’s poor after vagabonding through the Americas in his early 20s. Falling in with Fidel and Raul Castro in Mexico, he played a heroic role in the Cuban insurgency that eventually brought down one of the most spectacularly corrupt regimes in the history of Latin America. As he worked with Fidel to consolidate the revolution, Che displayed incredible physical and intellectual energy, an unyielding (if rather creepy and totalitarian) idealism and a consistent inability to see any project through to a successful completion. Guevara’s stint as minister of industry and president of the national bank crippled the Cuban economy and resulted in food rationing; his rigid Marxist-Leninist fantasies helped derail the revolution’s original democratic-socialist inclinations and led to Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union; his inability to recruit and organize the very peasants he meant to liberate led to a series of disastrous guerrilla adventures in Africa and Latin America, ultimately resulting in his capture and execution in Bolivia. Fortunately for his legacy, he left a beautiful corpse (quite literally, as photographed by his killers), and he’s been an icon of revolutionary romanticism ever since.
Interestingly, Che’s legacy inspires some of the least street-level romanticism within the country he influenced the most. I recently spent a month in Cuba, and—despite the surplus of government-issued Che images along the avenues of Havana—I rarely met Cubans under the age of 40 who regarded Guevara with anything other than ambivalence. Whereas outsiders see Guevara as a symbol of rebellion, two generations of Cuban children have been required to bleat “Seremos como el Che!” (“We will be like Che!”) at the outset of each school day. Most people I spoke with were proud to be Cuban and could intellectualize the historical merits of the revolution (and Guevara’s role in it), but they were less concerned with emulating Che than navigating the absurd challenges of day-to-day life in a repressive, dysfunctional gerontocracy.
Indeed, to get a sense for what it’s like to be 18 and Cuban these days, imagine going to a high school that won a miraculous and inspiring football championship in 1959. The guy that quarterbacked the team some 50 years ago is still wearing the same damned uniform—only now he’s the school principal, and he’s decreed that all academic subjects must be studied within the context of that bygone championship game. Everyone at your school is now an honorary member of the football team—though the stadium is condemned from years of neglect, no actual games have been played in decades and anyone with the temerity to point out this discrepancy is summarily sent to detention. On most school days you’re required to study your principal’s old pass-routes and blocking schemes and tell him how ingenious he was to have devised them. All of which would seem insane were it not for the fact that tourists from wealthier schools—schools with actual, functioning football teams—are constantly visiting your class to marvel over how wonderful it was that your team triumphed 50 years ago, and gush about how proud you must be to have such innovative role models. In this context, it’s easy to understand why young Cubans are underwhelmed by the idea of Che: To them, he’s just another sepia portrait in the trophy case—handsome and intriguing, perhaps, but hardly relevant or revolutionary.
Granted, it’s not hard to find Che Guevara aficionados in Cuba—just keep an eye out for anyone who has the option to leave the country at their leisure. During my month in Havana, I met half a dozen Europeans with Che tattoos on various body parts, no less than two Uruguayan medical students who unironically wore black berets, and a woman from Oregon who sported a homemade “Guerrillero Heroico” tank top and insisted that the blame for contemporary Cuban misery could be traced to the small-minded prejudices of red-state America. Whenever I mentioned the more troubling aspects of Che’s biography to these folks, none of them seemed all that phased. Sure, Che might have promoted his ideals through force and violence, they said, but unwavering conviction and action are the only forces that can change a complacent world. Sure, Che shrugged off torture and executions on his watch, but he was at heart an inspiring humanitarian who ultimately hoped to improve the lives of millions. Sure, Che tried to impose a one-size-fits-all political vision on faraway cultures—but at least that vision was just, and might well have worked had it been given a chance to take hold.
This kind of rationalization sounded vaguely familiar at the time, and it wasn’t until I returned to the United States that I realized neo-conservative apologists were using the exact same language and reasoning to defend the foreign policy decisions of George W. Bush.
While it’s doubtful that any filmmaker would endeavor to dramatize Bush through the unvarnished lens of his political ideals, that’s more or less the treatment Guevara gets in “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour, two-part film biopic, screening in select theaters nationwide. Soderbergh’s project, which stars Academy Award-winner Benicio del Toro, depicts Che’s military accomplishments in Cuba as well as his failed guerrilla insurgency in Bolivia. Though both installments of the film are too grungy and impressionistic to spin Guevara as a typecast Hollywood hero, the continual portrayal of Che sacrificing and suffering for his ideals makes him come off like something more fanciful—a warrior-humanist martyr, as comfortable tending to the sick and illiterate as he is brandishing his rifle or facing certain death. Guevara’s less-than-saintly real-life exploits between his Cuba and Bolivia campaigns (including but not limited to his role in executing political prisoners in Havana, his callous mismanagement of the Cuban economy and his military blunderings in the Congo) are conveniently glossed over.
Omission or embellishment of context is, in fact, a central pillar of the Che Guevara movie sub-genre (which goes all the way back to 1969’s “Che!”—which starred Omar Sharif and was directed by the same guy who made “Soylent Green” and “Mandingo”). In the climactic scene of Walter Salles’ 2004 film “The Motorcycle Diaries,” for instance, a young Che played by Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal swims across a swollen Amazon tributary as a display of solidarity with a group of dispossessed Peruvian lepers. Read the actual diary on which the movie was based, however, and it’s apparent that Guevara’s river-swim was an apolitical test of his own aquatic skills—and, on saying goodbye to the lepers, he glibly noted that they looked “like a scene from a horror movie.” Moreover, Guevara’s unnerving sense of entitlement in the pages of “The Motorcycle Diaries” (at one point young Ernesto throws a sullen tantrum when a local shipping deputy won’t comp his riverboat fare) never makes the transition onto Salles’ big-screen version.
Tempting as it may be to attribute Che’s popular appeal to the reductionist tropes of photography and cinema, however, I’d wager his enduring potency goes beyond mere imagery. Of the many books that have been released or reprinted to coincide with the release of Soderbergh’s movie, Humberto Fontova’s “Exposing the Real Che Guevara” is perhaps the most telling. Published by Penguin’s politically conservative Sentinel imprint, “Exposing the Real Che Guevara” is meant to be a polemic against Guevara’s T-shirt-certified mythology—but in function it does a lot to show how Che’s reputation actually benefits from the myopic fury (and misguided political influence) of those who hate him the most.
Taken in selective doses, Fontova’s book does punch some well-placed holes in Che’s presumed humanism and military competence. The problem is that each argument invariably meanders off into subject matter that has little to do with the book’s premise. A chapter that starts out as an indictment of Guevara’s battlefield acumen ultimately turns into a tribute to the Cuban-exile fighters who stormed the Bay of Pigs in 1961; a chapter meant to debunk Che’s intellectual proclivities wanders off into a jeremiad on behalf of the Cuban-exiles who lost their art collections after the revolution. In places, Fontova’s books seems less an indictment of Guevara than the New York Times (which gave positive coverage to Che and Fidel in the months before they toppled Batista) or John F. Kennedy (who scuttled U.S. military support when the Bay of Pigs invasion went sour).
Ultimately, “Exposing the Real Che Guevara” is less about Che Guevara than the “King Lear”-style resentments of the Cuban-Americans who hate him—and the effectiveness of its argument suffers as a result. In two lengthy chapters detailing Guevara’s bloodthirsty stint as commander of Havana’s La Cabaña Fortress prison, Fontova veers into abstraction by continually comparing Che and Fidel’s tyranny to that of Hitler and Stalin instead of contemporary Latin American dictators like Somoza or Trujillo. The most damning comparison might well have been to draw parallels to the brutal repression of Batista himself—the very tyrant Che helped depose—but this would have been too awkward a juxtaposition for the Cuban exiles the author seems anxious to venerate. This gives the book a slightly schizophrenic tone, from which it never fully departs. At one point, Fontova convincingly argues that Guevara wanted the all-encompassing U.S. economic embargo that strains Cuban-American relations to this day. So why not ruin Che’s master plan by lifting the embargo and flooding Cuba with American investment, trade and tourism? Fontova’s answer is incoherent: “Libertarian-free-market ideologues got it wrong,” he writes. “They insisted that with the lifting of the embargo, capitalists would sneak in and eventually blindside Castro. All the proof was to the contrary. Capitalism didn’t sweep Castro away or even co-opt him. He swept it away.”
Such an inane suspension of logic and chronology would be easier to dismiss if it didn’t mirror 50 years of American foreign policy toward Cuba. There is no doubt that Cuban exiles suffered when Fidel and Che took power all those years ago, but basing present-day policy decisions on 1959-vintage revenge fantasies is not only ineffective (as Castro’s lengthy reign has illustrated)—it’s bad for the image and national interests of a country that already has a less-than-honorable track record in Latin America. Che Guevara’s radicalization is famously tied to America’s moral hypocrisy in the region (specifically the CIA-sponsored 1954 coup in Guatemala, when Eisenhower chose the corporate interests of United Fruit Company over the authority of a democratically elected government)—and his revolutionary legacy will likely remain strong so long as the U.S. government flouts international law with the Helms-Burton Act, permits prisoner abuse in Guantánamo and punishes Cuba for the same set of political circumstances it tolerates in China and Vietnam.
In recent years many people have pointed out how Che Guevara may someday be remembered as a capitalist brand as much as a communist firebrand. Those affronted by the intolerant extremes of Che’s Marxism can take comfort in the fact that his visage is now used to sell T-shirts, belt buckles, Taco Bell gorditas, bikinis and “Cherry Guevara” ice cream sandwiches (“the revolutionary struggle of the cherries ... trapped between two layers of chocolate”).
This in itself is a telling contradiction. But so long as U.S.-Cuba policy remains as warped and dated as the photos in Havana’s Museo de la Revolución, Che Guevara will continue to thrive as a catchall symbol of the American government’s own tendency to contradict itself.
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