Does this thread actually exist?
I want to read people making fun of den Beste, and I'm being denied.
Ogged, why hast thou forsaken us?
We had server badness. It appears that everything is working again.
And den Beste is still a pathetic little man.
It wasn't extra tricksiness on the part of SdB?
It's moments like these when I'm proud to be a Kansan. We may be total assholes, but at least we're whimsical.
zimzim ziazim zimzalla zam.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
Let's put Dennis Highberger into a cage match with Phill Kline.
Cala, keepin it real with the Green Eggs and Ham references.
Oh, servers. I thought it was such a novel bug, but it wasn't.
My favorite part from B's link:
"Is a 15-year-old girl engaging in oral sex on a 15-year-old boy, is that a crime?"
Kline: "If there's penetration, yes."
Jones: "What would be the penetration?"
Kline: "I'm not certain."
I'm so for a cage match.
Kline also tried to require all women's health clinics in Kansas to violate patient confidentiality by providing medical records for minor girls who had come in for abortions. On the grounds, of course, that he was protecting them because obviously, being underaged, they were victims of statuatory rape.
He's a real charmer, I tell you.
Highberger: "Call me Dada."
Kline: "Ew."
For those of you in D.C., a big exhibition on Dada just opened up at the National Gallery of Art. I went to it last weekend and it was very interesting - it's probably just my art history ignorance, but I didn't realize the movement was a direct rebuke to WWI. I thought it was a crafty way of the Smithsonian challenging the current administration (but I could have just been projecting). It really left you wondering where the collective artist response is to the war in the Gulf. Perhaps we'll find out when the Whitney Biennial opens at the end of the week.
Oh, and I'll warn y'all - I wouldn't call an "all clear" on the server problems quite yet. I don't trust it. But issues are being investigated.
Huh, I thought 11 was about den Beste.
Becks, have you seen the sculpture thingumabob outside the Whitney? It seems to be some hundred square wooden panels each painted by a different artist. I'd say over half of them are explicitly political. (My favorite was agit-proppish: "Eat What You Kill.") From what I've seen casually about town there's a fair amount of political art--but the issues seem to be difficult to address well.
With all of the server problems and the day I went through at work, I have no energy left for a blog feud. Shit, I don't even have the energy to watch The Amazing Race. Which the rest of you should all be watching, BTW, because there will be a quiz when I finally do work up the energy to watch it.
Becks, Francis Alÿs, who admittedly is not American, had an explicit reference to Abu Ghraib in his exhibit in the last Carnegie International. But I thought it was the worst part of the exhibit. The Serra piece that got linked in this thread seems more effective to me, though I don't know if I'd say "That's great art" -- it just seems to me that if you're going to help yourself to that symbol you may as well come right out with your message.
JM - I haven't been to the Whitney in a couple of months but will look for it when I go to the Biennial. Yeah, there's political art out there - I went gallery-hopping a few weeks ago and saw a lot of mediocre stuff and, of course, that completely over the top Thomas Hirschhorn installation at the Gladstone gallery. But I guess the Dada exhibition made me think about how fragmented the anti-war message is today, compared to how unified it seemed to be under that movement. I don't know how much of that is because the message really was more unified and how much of that was because history is always "neater" than the messy present, though. But it's interesting - a lot of the articles leading up to the Biennial talk about how artists are forming collectives with a common message and mission again.
This was also in this month's Harper's, which is interesting. Did you know that HIV doesn't actually cause AIDS?
The Swiss are actually very stodgy, and Kenneth Rexroth described Switzerland as "Kansas stacked vertically". So the exhibition is very appropriate. (Most of the Dadaists were not Swiss, but expats.)
Yeah, the National Gallery of Art exhibition is actually organized geographically, with different rooms for each of the major cities where it was represented: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, and Paris.
The Swiss are actually very stodgy
I blame my Swiss host-sister for prematuring turning me off the internet. She was a regular on some 90s chatsites, and her exhortations that I participate in her webcam sexcapades for the benefit of people who communicated solely in stupid witticisms and acronyms made me pretty damned angry in ways I couldn't easily communicate. Later, I ended up letting her use my room to hook up with someone she met on the net.
Of course, I used to say to myself, "If Switzerland weren't so goddamned boring, then an oversexed young woman like V. would find something better to do," but then I find myself here, now, so...
Come now, JM, you know the only place more boring than Switzerland is New York City.
Wow JM, you were roommates with V.? The V.?
Q. How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. The fish.
Hey, are things slow again for you all, too?
If it turned out that Jeremy boinked my Swiss host-sister in my apartment, well, I'd make fun of both of you.
Hm. I guess surrealist jokes aren't your cup of fur.
Hey, are things slow again for you all, too?
Deathly. Greater than half the time I can't even open a comments page.
Slow for me too.
(Tia, I like the punchline that goes "two, one to fill the bathtub with orange machine tools and one to set fire to the giraffe.")
I thought we agreed that you were going to bed, young lady.
Don't bother with him, Becks. He'll just get bored with you. I never will.
No way. Becksicans are way more interesting than Mexicans.
I thought that there was silent agreement that, some years hence, Becks and Joe D would get married and lots of little Becks Drymalas. Obviously, we're all e-vited to the webcast of the wedding.
Becks and Joe D would get married and [VERB?] lots of little Becks Drymalas [or … "would" VERB?].
"would have," obviously. But it's actually nice to see you getting back into fighting trim, w-lfs-n. I was getting worried.
I thought that there was silent agreement that
I recall no such agreement.
was the R. Mutt fountain on display in DC?
we had the Dada exhibit here at the Centre pompidou for quite some time, but they had to remove the urinal because a 75 year old man attacked it - which he does periodically. He says it's very dada of him, and he's right - it's so strange to put dada in a museum. anyway. i was curious if the curators trust the audience enought to take it out again?
The surrealists and the Dadaists were enemies. The surrealists began by attacking Dada (along with a lot of other stuff, of course). Breton's surrealists, at least, engaged in leftwing Communist politics. Breton also had a thing of writing manifestos and denouncing people that makes him seem not to have been much fun.
European culture those days was fast-moving, and the Surrealists wanted to be the Next Big Thing. The narcissism of small differences, if you ask me.
Erik Satie affiliated with the Dadaists, more or less, but he did his best stuff on his own, as early as 1890.
A lot of surrealist poetry, especially Breton's, seems like mechanical linguistic transformations. You take a boring statement ("The white horse gallops on the prairie") and switch words: "the green horse flies through the cathedral". Sticking in images of violence and kinky sex was the second part of the formula.
I recall no such agreement.
Yeah I thought we had fixed up JD with JM? I don't think the menàge a trois is going to fly.
Marie Osmond reciting Hugo Ball's Karawane.
Hey! I'm the one who fixes Becks up!
Sorry, Weiner, -gg-d (pbuh) is no longer among us. Your matchmaking days are over.
