Looking for a leader.

Bush may have said what we needed to hear following 9/11, but in the aftermath of Katrina, a hurricane that some say might push us over the top into a recesssion, he delivered "one of the worst speeches of his life," states a New York Times editorial:

Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

The flyover president.

Arianna Huffington:

The president's 35-minute Air Force One flyover of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was the perfect metaphor for his entire presidency: detached, disconnected, and disengaged. Preferring to take in America's suffering -- whether caused by the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina -- from a distance. In this case, 2,500 feet.

Apparently, the president "sat somberly on a couch on the left hand side of the presidential jumbo jet peering out the window" at the catastrophe below, joined at different times by White House staffers including Karl Rove and Scott McClellan.
McClellan later quoted the president as saying, "It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." Ya think?? Hey, here's an idea, Mr. President: maybe you should, y'know, get off the plane and see for yourself?

Instead, he jetted on to Washington for a brisk 9-minute Rose Garden speech designed to let us know that his administration was doing everything in its power to mitigate the looming PR disaster the flooding of New Orleans could create for the White House... Uh, I mean, everything in its power to aid the recovery.

The speech contained the usual Bush bonhomie (he's "confident" New Orleans "will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it"). But the most telling moment came when the president discussed the ways his administration was moving to help ease the suffering of profit-soaked oil companies impacted by the storm, pointing out that he had instructed Energy Secretary Sam Bodman to work with refineries to "alleviate any shortage through loans" and that the EPA had waived clean air standards for gasoline and diesel fuels in all 50 states. You could almost see him getting misty...

Read more.

New Orleans drowns, Bush strums.

A hurricane hit the Gulf Coast on Monday. I'm sure you heard, but judging by the president's actions, perhaps he hadn't: he was strumming his guitar on a naval base on Tuesday, and only today has he packed up and headed back to Washington to address the problem. To his credit, Bush did cut his five-week vacation two days short (after giving a speech linking Iraq with 9/11 and World War II).

But long before that, he did the real disservice to the people of hurricane-stuck Louisiana: for fiscal 2006, Bush and the GOP cut $71.2 million in federal funding to the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, funds earmarked for hurricane and flood protection projects. At the time, Sen. Mary Landrieu said, "I think it's extremely shortsighted. When the Corps of Engineers' budget is cut, Louisiana bleeds. These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are (of) vital economic interest to the entire nation." With New Orleans 80% under water, untold dead, and damage estimates soaring past $25 billion, we'll soon see how right Landrieu, unfortunately, was.

Race and reporting: How come white people find, but black people loot?

The new science.

First the US Postal Service came out with postage stamps honoring scientists like physicist Richard Feynman and mathematician John von Neumann. Then, in this age of "intelligent design" hucksterism, the spoofers got ahold of 'em. The new version features the likes of Rick Santorum, George W. Bush, and William Jennings Bryan.

Earlier: Science trading cards! And, via WiFi Art, Sci-Philately.

In the grid, off the grid.

A 35-square-block section of Portland, Oregon, may become the country's most sustainable urban neighborhood. While building mid-rise towers for office and retail and creating 8 million square feet of floor space, the Lloyd Crossing development will also reduce net energy and water consumption "to levels nearly equivalent to a patch of native Northwest forest," writes Metropolis. The seven steps the plan calls for:
1. Carve out bioswales to collect street runoff.
2. Treat wastewater in the neighborhood and reuse gray water.
3. Build according to stringent LEED silver standards.
4. Deploy photovoltaics to supplement power.
5. Turn to wind turbines for energy.
6. Store and share heat in an underground thermal loop.
7. Design new buildings to leverage natural forces. (i.e. windows to maximize solar gain, etc.)

(Via Treehugger.)

And: Where does oil money go? USAToday looks into where your ~$3/gallon at the pump goes, from luxury hotels in Dubai to food programs for Venezuela's poor.

(Thanks, Dad.)

Hero.

A Japanese teacher, after 34 years of service, may lose her job because, as a pacifist, she refuses to stand and sing the national anthem, which calls for the "eternal reign" of the emperor. Kimiko Nezu has been transferred 4 or 5 times in the past few years, has had her salary temporarily cut, and was suspended for a month for violating a Tokyo school board rule that the anthem (the World War II hymn "Kimigayo") must be respected. "They are trying to weed us out of society," Nezu said. "The pacifists, the people who oppose nationalism in Japan. We are gradually being silenced." But she remains adamant: whatever the punishement, even if it's being transferred to a school two hours from home, "I will never stand for that song, the same one that played when [the Imperial Army was] invading Asia. Never."

Hurricane aid.

Here's a list of resources that can help direct your donation to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, from the New York Times:

Relief Organizations:
Charity Navigator: charitynavigator.org

Red Cross: 1-800-HELP-NOW or https://www.redcross.org

AmeriCares:americares.org

Episcopal Relief & Development: 1-800-334-7626 or http://www.er-d.org/

United Methodist Committee on Relief: 1-800-554-8583 or http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/emergency/hurricanes/2005/

Salvation Army: 1-800-SAL-ARMY or http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/

Catholic Charities: 1-800-919-9338 or http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/

FEMA Charity tips: http://www.fema.gov/rrr/help2.shtm

National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster: http://www.nvoad.org/

Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: http://www.la-spca.org/

[Image: Canal Street, New Orleans. By Rick Wilking/Reuters]

Bare honesty.

At first glance, Frank Cordelle may seem like just another male artist who loves capturing images of nude women. But see his photos and read the testimonials of the women he photographs—and the responses from women who see them—and you'll get the sense his work actually is about loving women, not creating some one-dimensional, sexualized caricature. In The Century Project, Cordelle has been photographing women from birth to age 100. Average women, exceptional women, fat, wrinkly, beautiful, innocent, scarred women.

He says the project is about "art being able to bridge educational and therapeutic gaps, and perhaps most importantly, to be able to stimulate thought and discussion about subjects that are often taboo in our society: namely nudity and sexuality, violence, health issues, aging, our attitudes toward women in general, and their portrayal in the media in particular." The therapy part is about women who've survived disease or violence or crippling self-doubt, yet find themselves bared in front of his camera in an act some of the women describe as liberating.


The excelllent daily videoblog Minnesota Stories, did a piece on St. Paul filmmaker Elizabeth Hoodecheck who is working on a documentary inspired by the project, called Bare Honesty, and my favorite part of it is when one 21-year old woman looks at a photo of a nude women, age 44, and says, "I see me.. . She has this rage and self-hate inside. The same thing I feel: the binging and the purging."

But not all the images are about healing. As one reviewer described in 1995:

There’s 82 year-old Sibby, smiling and walking in the rain outside her Francestown home, dressed only in a brightly colored umbrella.

"You’d think an older generation of women would feel more of a sense of shame," Sibby says. "But I felt perfectly at ease - we had a very good time."

1900 US dead in Iraq,

and no Constitution.

Journalist death toll exceeds Vietnam.

In 2-1/2 years, the Iraq war has already killed more journalists than died in the entire 20-year Vietnam conflict. Between 1955 and 1975, 63 journalists were killed in Vietnam; so far, 66 reporters or media professionals have died in Iraq, the most recent being a Reuters soundman shot yesterday. According to reports Waleed Khaled was downed by five shots fired by a US sniper. The shooter was detained, then released without charge.

The invention of the century?

This is kind of old news by blog standards, but today's New York Times report on the cholera epidemic in Africa reminds me how timely the LifeStraw invention is. The Times writes that the number of recorded cholera cases in West Africa this year is "24,621, with at least 401 deaths in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal." The problem with cholera and other diorrhoeal diseases from bacteria like typhoid, cholera, e. coli, and salmonella is that they'd be nearly eradicated if only we all had clean drinking water. Instead, they're the world's biggest killer.

Enter: the LifeStraw, a 25mm pipe with a filter in it. With no moving parts or power plug, the straw, when sucked, filters out sediment, toxins, and--most important of all--bacteria. And for two bucks, it'll provide clean water for one person for a year. Amazing. As Gil Friend puts it:

Got that folks? Clean water for a year for two bucks! Clean water for the four billion of us at the bottom of the pyramid for $8b a year. (Or just the billion or so of us without access to safe water supplies.) Peanuts, in the scheme of things. Less than 1% of the 2002 (pre-Iraq War) global military budget. (Other stats from our Sense of Proportion Department, courtesy the World Bank: Gross National Income, globally, 2002: $31.7 trillion US (31.5 x 10^12); high income counties, $25.6 T, middle income, $5.06 T, low income countries, $1.07 T)

No wonder Gil is wondering if it's the "invention of the century."

Prosthetic iPod.

Planning a trip to Europe, I started a list of items to pack. The first handful is digital in nature:
• A digital camera (which comes with an extra battery pack and memory chip and a plug-in charger),
• An iBook (with its cord, plug, USB mouse, and protective case),
• An iPod (with its cord, earbuds, docking plug, and cute knit sock),
• A cellphone (with two forms of charger), and
• A minidisk recorder (with a microphone, extra MDs, cord, plug, VoIP adaptor, iMic adaptor, and headphones), plus
• European power adaptors for 'em all.

I picture myself, like a new father, tottering toward the departure gate with my luggage and a baby bag in tow filled with all the accessories I'll need should I wish to call/charge/upload/email or otherwise put a layer of interface between me and the world I'm experiencing.

Given the excessiveness of it all, maybe there's one more device I need: a piiPod. Designed by the Dutch sculptor Pii, the piiPod is the size, shape, and feel of Apple's famous mp3 player, only it's constructed of hardwood and is "specially designed to be unable to play music and sound files." The piece is on view September 1–17, along with Pii's installation of 12 bronze laptops filled with genetically modified rice and corn, at London's Spectrum Fine Art.

While the wood iPod might be a symbol of my willing (and blissful) enslavement to mediating technologies, Pii has another message, it seems. He says:

I am trying to make people think about what they are missing out on by spending their free lives and transportation periods—travel—locked into their own musical worlds. People do become addicted and dependent—whether there are really health problems or not. It is a basic part of treatment for any serious addiction to attempt to provide a substitute of some kind.

And his grain-filled notebook computers critique the position many westerners take on genetically modified grains: putting grain inside a symbol of our luxury "reminds people of our good fortune to be able to make judgments and have debate on a full tummy"—while we type away on our laptops, pondering the long-term safety of GMOs, people are starving.

To digress a bit: I find his argument simplistic. We already produce enough grain to feed the world without the yield-enhancing boost of genetic engineering; transport is the problem. Further, as a recent report by Third World Network-Africa found, "The answer to Africa’s poverty and food shortage problems does not lie in biotechnology. GM crops do not offer any answers to soil fertility, resistance to genes by pests among other problems faced by the farmers of the three crops. It also clear that biotechnology is not the answer to corruption, declining commodity prices, inequality in land distribution and ownership, income disparities, and armed conflicts which are some of the major cause of poverty/hunger in Africa." (And don't get me started on who really benefits from GMOs.)

But Pii seems to admit that the point of his sculptures is to spark dialogue on these issues, and that's something I can agree with. He says:

I admire the Apple design, but I also find it wonderful that we have a piece of technology here that is also named after a source of physical sustenance and food—while we use Apple computers in the west, people elsewhere have no fruit to survive. This is not the fault of Apple Computers, but should certainly encourage people to think.

[Cross-posted at Off-Center.]

American Apparel spoof

At last American Apparel—a good idea (sweatshop-free US-made t-shirts) made bad by the porny marketing and pervy exploits of its founder—gets its own spoof ad. Stay Free! has more. (Click image for larger version.)

The wrath of Google.

Is Google the new Microsoft? I just Googled that phrase, having remembered an article with that name from a few days ago. Such is the case with the ubiquitous Google; it's so engrained in our lives that where else would I go to find information critical of Google?

But when CNET's Eleanor Mills did a not-so-critical and innocuously titled story, "Google balances privacy, reach," Google's CEO wasn't so pleased. Mills spent a half hour seeing what the search engine would churn up on CEO Eric Schmidt and then published it in a balanced piece on the technolgy news site. Nothing earthshattering: Schmidt's loaded, lives in a posh community, gets off on Burning Man and amateur flying. But in response to the article, Schmidt--the guy whose very loadedness comes from putting this type of personal information about you and me out there for the world to see--had a cow. Reacting "in a way better suited to a 16th-century monarchy than a 21st-century democracy with an independent press," Schmidt had his PR director put in a complaint to CNET and banned them from any interviews for a year. So maybe Google is becoming as weird and secretive and dominant as Microsoft...

Microcosm in the mundane.

A quirky zen-in-the-everyday observation from The Treehouse + The Cave:

On Friday morning, on the way to work a little later than usual, still kinda asleep and pretty hazy, I sat across from two men speaking Spanish. One was leaning over, his index finger to the floor, pointing out constellations in the linoleum to the other.

Thus spake Woody...

Looks like it's time to break out some Woody Guthrie:

I took a bath this morning in six war speeches, and a sprinkle of peace. Looks like ever body is declaring war against the forces of force. That's what you get for building up a big war machine. It scares your neighbors into jumping on you, and then of course they them selves have to use force, so you are against their force, and they're aginst yours. Look like the ring has been drawed and the marbles are all in. The millionaires has throwed their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring. The fuse is lit and the cannon is set, and somebody is in for a frailin. I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns.

(Via Sivacracy.)

Bush goes ballistic.

According to Capitol Hill Blue, the president, frustrated over slipping support over the war in Iraq, has sent his aides scrambling "frantically behind the scenes to hide the dark mood of an increasingly angry leader who unleashes obscenity-filled outbursts at anyone who dares disagree with him." He reportedly calls peace activists "motherfucking traitors"; was so incensed at VFW members who wore "bullshit protectors" at his recent speech that he told aides to “tell those VFW assholes that I’ll never speak to them again is they can’t keep their members under control"; and screamed at a recent strategy meeting, "Who gives a flying fuck what the polls say. I’m the President and I’ll do whatever I goddamned please. They don’t know shit.” Perhaps at last, even Bush is sensing how badly he's bungled, well, everything.

Pat defense.

John Stewart has a great segment from last week on the religious right's spin on Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez [video]. One brilliant section features Rev. Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who explains Robertson's words away. "I think you have to understand the context of it," he says. "You know his program has a section that's a Christian exhortation and another section where he's a politcal pundit."

Stewart's response:

See, what you don't understand is: Robertson didn't make his comment during the time of day in which he's a Christian. By the way, very understandable. Have you ever really tried to live your life by what this guy says? After an hour or so, you need some me-time.

While some are chagrined that this man of God bore false witness after calling for murder—saying he never directly called for assassination (which he did, directly)—but they shouldn't be. Robertson says he was "misinterpreted," then that his words were "adlibbed" and didn't represent his real feelings, but history shows, the 700 Club honcho has a long track record of less-than-Christlike spoutings. Just a few of the many compiled at Quotable Pat:

• "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist." (The 700 Club, January 14, 1991)

• "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." (Fundraising letter, 1992)

• "I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period." (Newsletter as quoted by Federal News Service, Sept 11, 1992)

• "If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it'll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn't necessarily something we ought to open our arms to." (The 700 Club, June 8, 1998)

• "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal- based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." (1993 interview with Molly Ivins)

Moss graffiti.

With little more than a can of beer, sugar, garden moss, a blender and a paintbrush, you too can create moss graffiti. Just one of the many curious public-art projects of Ladybird (interviewed here).

Below, one of her "hideaways," hidden oases tucked into cracks in brick walls.


(Via mefi.)

Radiohead has a blog.

And that's the news.

Airbag my Eyeteeth.

I love the clean, relatively timeless design of Airbag Industries' blog. Any tech-savvy design geeks out there want to take a stab at an Eyeteeth redesign? I've got Eyeteeth.org reserved, and I'm itchin' for a new, defy-the-Blogger-template look. But, alas, my design and site-migration tech skills are lacking. Will reciprocate with linked text credit or a writin' project of comparable worth.

Two from Off-Center:

Blogging at my art-centered day job always yields some nifty oddities. Today, it's a Minneapolitan transplanted to North Carolina who misses the Motherland so much she writes a poem, posted on Craigslist, to accompany her Minnesota-themed Spoonbridge and Cherry tattoo. And a review of the new Walker Art Center bathrooms by RestroomRatings.com hails their "Apple-meets-World Dryer Corp" aesthetic (hence the "iPotty" title).

The unseen war.

Beginning with an account of how 6-year old Lamiamh Ali was killed in Iraq on April 23, 2003 from an illegal American cluster bomb, Salon editor Gary Kamiya writes on the unseen war in Iraq:

"War is hell," said Gen. Sherman, and everyone dutifully agrees. Yet the hell in Iraq is almost never shown. The few exceptions -- the charred bodies of American contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah, the blood-spattered little girl wailing after her parents were killed next to her -- only prove the rule.

To allow citizens to see war's hideous reality -- the shattered bodies, the wounded children, the incomprehensible mayhem -- is to risk eroding popular support for it.

Yet how are we served as taxpayers and "defenders of freedom" when we're clueless about the carnage involved in our support or opposition to war? Few American papers show the destruction of war; even fewer show the toll in American lives. It puts a photographer in a tough spot, as Stephanie Sinclair, who took the photo above, says: "God, it's relentless. It's hard to look at. People have no idea what's happening in Iraq. You wonder, even as a photographer, if you're being gratuitous by photographing some of this. At the same time, as horrific as it is to see, people should know how horrific it is to live it every day. We should feel some sort of responsibility to make sure we have the best possible grasp of what's happening there."

To give people a better ideas, Salon is running a troubling series of photos of the horror over there. Admitting that it's run more columns against the war than for, Salon prefaces the documentation this way: "A picture of a dead child represents only a fragment of the truth about Iraq -- but it is one that we do not have the right to ignore. We believe we all have an ethical responsibility to those who have been killed or wounded, whether Iraqis, Americans or those of other nationalities, not to simply pretend that their fate never happened." [Viewer beware.]

(Thanks, John K.)

Walker Visual Arts blog is online.

At long last, the Walker Art Center's Visual Arts blog has launched. The first post, by assistant curator Doryun Chong, recounts an extraordinary trek into the Mojave Desert in search of an airplane fuselage. In preparation for an October retrospective by Paris-based, Chinese-born artist Huang Yong Ping, Chong and Huang wanted to find an EP-3 spy plane, the kind involved in the infamous 2001 collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet, for the first installation of Bat Project IV. Read all about it.

And, while I'm at it, here's the URL for the Walker's monsterfeed (an RSS feed for all Walker blogs): http://feedshake.com/nfeeds/l6gf19cjtr.xml.

I'll trade you a Neils Bohr for a Marie Curie.

WiFi Art points out a Celenderesque set of scientist-themed trading cards. Einstein, Jane Goodall, the late quantum electrodynamics researcher Richard Feynman, Watson and Crick, Bill Nye: collect all 26!

[Cross-posted at Off Center.]

BS-B-GONE.

BoingBoing points out a way to make your own bullshit deflector.

Lemme get this straight:

• An artist at a dinky Chicago college makes fake postage stamps showing a gun pointed at Bush's head and gets a visit from the Secret Service,
• A celebrated documentary filmmaker gets in hot water with Homeland Security for shooting footage out a train window, and
• A Nepali man gets arrested, confined without charge, and deported for shooting tourist-style videotape of a building he didn't know was an FBI office, and all Rumsfeld can say about Pat Robertson's call for assassination of President Hugo Chavez is: "He's a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time"?

Chainless bikes...

Shaft-drive bicycles have apparently been around since the early 1900s, but... who knew? Dynamic Bicycles offers a line of chainless mountain bikes that, while a pound or two heavier than chain bikes, don't come with the risk of greasy fingers, derailed chains or chomped pant legs. Plus, without a traditional derailleur, their 7- and 8-speed bikes offer a "gear range comparable to 20 gears on a 24-gear chain bike, including multiple climbing gears for exhilarating off-road performance." And the price, the $550-850 range, isn't so bad either. (I think I paid that much for a tank of gast this morning.)

Listening to George W. BuSh

Bill Moyer, 73, wears a "Bullshit Protector" flap over his ear while President George W. Bush addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

(Via Atrios.)

Radical cleric calls for assassination of president.

Thou shalt kill, says Christian preacherman Pat Robertson. (Sort of.) Speaking of Venezuela's democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez, Robertson says, "[I]f he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war."

(Via Atrios.)

How are you going to kick it?

Root down, perchance? If so, check out this bit of open-source goodness: The Beastie Boys just released the a cappella tracks of some of their songs for remixers and mashup artists to have their way with. Post what you come up with at their message board.

Traincasting in Siberia.

Last year, artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla used micro-radio transmitters to create a re-volt. That is, by helping community members build nearly 500 micro-radio transmitters, they initiated a process by which power was redirected from the corporations who most profit from the publicly owned airwaves to individuals who can express a diversity of commercial-free viewpoints. Their project Radio Re-volt , created during a residency at the Walker Art Center, culminated in October with a narrowcast the length of University Avenue in Minneapolis. More than 50 micro-radio stations aired from homes and businesses along the route for the benefit of their neighbors or anyone driving the avenue with their radio on.

Now the idea is making its way to Siberia. Trans-Siberian Radio—a.k.a. The Train Station—is a low-power FM station that'll operate on the train that runs from Moscow through Novosibirsk to Beijing, during the conference Capturing the Moving Mind: Management and Movement in the Age of Temporary War, September 11–20. Spearheaded by Natilee Harren, independent curator and grad student in art history at UCLA, the station will be a mobile lab for on-air experimentation, featuring music and ideas created collaboratively by passengers on the train and accessible to everyone along the Trans-Siberian route. As Harren writes, the ever-moving symbol of the train fits the conference's theme: "The spirit of the conference is to cross fixed boundaries and to create an environment that is open to the 'contaminating influences' of the communities through which the train will pass. In fact, the point of having the conference on a train is to escape any restrictions relating to a particular time or place." Visit the project's site when the train is rolling to hear—and manipulate—audio clips from the ride.

More on Radio Re-volt at WiredNews. Click here to read an interview I did with Allora and Calzadilla last spring.

(Via Off-Center.)

Plastic Man.

Thirty plastic surgery procedures and more than $250,000 later, Steve Erhardt seems to have cut away the self-consciousness that comes with physical imperfection. After being the world's first bicep implant recipient, getting a nose job, facelift, eyelid work, a cleft chin, implanted pecs, and even butt implants, he now beams, "I'm content with myself now because I've done everything that bothered me."

Yay!

While Entertainment Tonight says he looks like a "real-life 'Ken' doll," I'm thinking something along the lines of the animatronic monkeys at Chuck E. Cheese. Or a girl budding into womanhood.

Clear Channel strikes again.

A Clear Channel-owned TV station in Salt Lake City has refused to air an ad featuring Cindy Sheehan. Their rationale: "Why allow the publicly owned airwaves to be used to express viewpoints contrary to that of the president of the United States—and the management of our parent company?"

I made that up.

What KTVX really said was that local managers felt the ad "could very well be offensive to our community in Utah, which has contributed more than its fair share of fighting soldiers and suffered significant loss of life in this Iraq war." KTVX's station manager says that Clear Channel had nothing to do with the decision.

Meanwhile, across town, Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson called for "the biggest demonstration this state has ever seen" against Bush's visit a national veterans convention. Said the mayor:

I don't understand people simply blindly going along with the sort of deceit and utter cruelty of this administration. It's not just we have the right to speak out, but we have the obligation to speak out when we see misconduct on the part of the government. The most patriotic thing we can do is stand up against the misuse of governmental power.

Book-smart image management.

The story about Bush's vacation reading list—which is so goshdarn newsworthy, it's being reported by most major papers—really irks me. One version begins:

George Bush has never had a reputation as a bookworm, but for a man derided by his critics as an intellectual lightweight the president's holiday reading list packs a punch.

The president will allegedly be reading Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, Alexander II: the Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky and The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M Barry.

But before we get all impressed, let's step outside the mainstream media's echo chamber for a second and consider: why is it that the media knows about this list? By glancing at W's bedside table, or through an orchestrated media campaign by the White House? Anyone think this is really the reading list the president would choose? Maybe so. Or maybe Bush's handlers knew that any story, especially one that makes him look more intelligent than his handling of the war or Cindy Sheehan down the road would suggest, would be picked up by a media in the news-parched days of summer.

Skinhead rap

Import the mysogynistic and violent allure of 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg to a country where there are no ghettos and social welfare programs are well-funded, but neo-Nazis are on the rise, and what do you get: German gangsta rap that's embraced by the radical right. Thanks to Berlin-based rapper Bushido (left), and others like him, far-right rap is going mainstream in Germany. Some say nationalist, racist and mysogynist lyrics are just a nod to successful American music and a ploy to sell albums, but some German gangsta rap lyrics seem a little too edgy to be dismissed that easily. In one song, Bushido raps, "Salutiert, steht stramm, Ich bin der Leader wie A" ("Salute, stand to attention, I am the leader like 'A'"—with A standing for Adolf), and the rap collective called Mor once rapped that " Wack MCs" were sent to the "gas showers" and "children to the concentration camps." No wonder white, neo-Nazis are German rap's more ardent fans.

Earlier: How to spot a neo-Nazi.

Something less heavy.

Eyebeam's reBlog points us to a beautiful series of photos of mammatus clouds over Hastings, Nebraska.

A failed swiftboating.

Frank Rich writes that attempts by the Bushies to "Swift Boat" Cindy Sheehan—a tactic that worked well on everyone from John Kerry, Max Cleland, and Richard Clarke to "the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December"—have failed miserably. An excerpt:

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by actually meeting with her.

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.

Like Perry Jeffries letter below, Sheehan isn't protesting something abstract, she's railing against the unjustified death of real people, with names.

Read The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan.

An Iraq vet writes to Larry Northern

The following was written by First Sergeant Perry Jefferies (retired):

Mr. Northern:
I am a Veteran of the Iraq war, having served with the 4th Infantry Division on the initial invasion with Force Package One. While I was in Iraq, a very good friend of mine, Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an unarmored HMMWV outside of Baghdad. He was a cavalry scout serving with the 3d ID. Once he had declined the award of a medal because Soldiers assigned to him did not receive similar awards that he had recommended. He left two sons and a wonderful wife. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers in Iraq was Roger Turner. We gave him a hard time because he always wore all of his protective equipment, including three pairs of glasses or goggles. He did this because he wanted to make sure that he returned home to his family. He rode a bicycle to work every day to make sure that he was able to save enough money on his Army salary to send his son to college. At Camp Anaconda, where the squadron briefly stayed, a rocket landed inside a tent, sending a piece of debris or fragment into him and killed him. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers was Henry Bacon. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He was in perfect shape for a man over forty, working hard at night. He told me that he did that because he didn't have much money to buy nice things for his wife, who he loved so much, so he had to be in good shape for her. He was like a father to many young men in his section of maintenance mechanics. They fixed our vehicles with almost no support and fabricated parts and made repairs that kept our squadron rolling on the longest, fastest armor advance ever made under fire. He was so very proud of his son-in-law that married the beautiful daughter so well raised by Henry. His son-in-law was a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division, who died last year. Henry stopped to rescue a vehicle belonging to another unit on what was to be his last day in Iraq. He could have kept rolling - he was headed to Kuwait after a year's tour. But he stopped. He could have sent others to do the work, but he was on the ground, leading by example, when he was killed. On Monday night, August 16, you took it upon yourself to go out in the country, where a peaceful group was exercising their constitutional rights, and harming no one, and you ran down the memorial cross erected for Henry and for his son-in-law by Arlington West.

Mr. Northern - I know little about Cindy Sheehan except that she is a grieving mother, a gentle soul, and wants to bring harm to no one. I know little about you except that you found your way to Crawford on Monday night in August with chains and a pipe attached to your truck for the sole purpose of dishonoring a memorial erected for my friends and lost Soldiers and hundreds of others that served this nation when they were called. I find it disheartening that good men like these have died so that people like you can threaten a mother who lost a child with your actions. I hope that you are ashamed of yourself.

(Via TruthOut.)

iGuv?

Steve Jobs as the next governor of California? Sensing the weakness of Schwarzennegar, state Democrats have included the Apple CEO among a list of possible challengers. Also on the list: Robin Williams, Rob Reiner, Leon Panetta, and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome.

Make your own magazine cover.

Here. (Via here.)

Bush to defend war in 5-day blitz

The president has begun a five-day media blitz to re-sell the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, Cindy Sheehan observes that, while pro-peace activists are turning out in droves, both in Crawford and at vigils and demonstrations nationwide, the pro-war side hasn't grown. She writes:

Everyday at Camp Casey we have a couple of anti-peace people on the other side of the road holding up signs that remind me that "Freedom isn't Free" but I don't see them putting their money where their mouths are. I don't think they are willing to pay even a small down payment for freedom by sacrificing their own blood or the flesh of their children. I still challenge them to go to Iraq and let another soldier come home. Perhaps a soldier that is on his/her third tour of duty, or one that has been stop-lossed after serving his/her country nobly and selflessly, only to be held hostage in Iraq by power mad hypocrites who have a long history of avoiding putting their own skin in the game.

Ministry of Propaganda: In addition to Bush's on-air efforts, the White House has just hired Karen Hughes as Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy, who will be charged with setting up "rapid response" teams to counter bad news and defend administration policies around the globe.

Is Bush...

...overcompensating?

Michael Naimark at Siggraph

New Media curator Steve Dietz, reflecting on his visit to Siggraph2005 earlier this month, highlights the "interactive and immersive film environments" of Michael Naimark. The piece Displacements sounds fascinating:

Displacements layers the perhaps ur "no place" of a white on white living room with a palimpsest of memories as the computer-controlled projection revolves around the room, illuminating the generic with ersatz fidelity of a family Super 8 movie. The "cheap tricks" - as Naimark refers to them - of someone in the projected film playing the guitair and then hanging it up exactly where it's platonic form rests on the wall signify that this is another show in a long history of spectacular shows. It's magic. At the same time, the quotidian scenes of bringing home groceries, working at the computer, vegging out in the armchair are a cultural memory that does tug, regardless of what you know.

Online fatwa.

With more than 650 available, FatwaIslam.com is the "most comprehensive online fatwa guide."

Democracy Now! from Camp Casey

As Bush officially makes presidential vacation history today, Amy Goodman does a truly moving show from Camp Casey outside Crawford vacationland. Anyone calling these grieving moms and Iraq vets "shrill" needs to listen to this. Along with the courageous and straightforward Cindy Sheehan, an amazing group of cogent, smart, passionate voices has assembled. And as a Minnesotan, I'm so proud to share a state with Becky Lourey, a state senator whose 41-year old son was killed in his second tour in Iraq, and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley.

The program also featured Navy officer Charlie Anderson, who was there when the Iraq invasion began in 2003 had some choice words for his commander in chief:

Right now, the Veterans Administration needs $1 billion just to provide services for the veterans that are going to be entering the system next year. We need $4 billion in the Veterans Administration to be able to provide care for all veterans for a reasonable amount of time, for the veterans that are going to enter from this conflict, as well as those that are seeking treatment from previous conflicts, previous service. And this president seems to be more interested in taking care of a system, the Social Security system, that will not be in crisis for 40 years. The V.A. is in crisis now. We don't need yellow ribbons, we need help, we need jobs. We need health care, we need education. We need the promises that were made to us when we signed our enlistment contract fulfilled.

Truly great radio: listen here.

The Living Library

In hopes of "enabl[ing] people to come face-to-face with their prejudices in the hopes of altering their preconceived notions," a library in Stockholm is launching a borrow-a-person program:

This weekend, nine people, including a homosexual, an imam, a journalist, a Muslim woman and a gypsy, will be available at the Malmoe Library for members of the public to "borrow" for a 45 minute conversation in the library's outdoor cafe.

"Maybe not all journalists are know-it-all and sensationalist, just unafraid and curious. Maybe not all animal rights activists are angry and intolerant, but intelligent and committed," said [library head Ulla Brohed.]

Hopefully it'll catch on here: I'd like to check out a rightwinger.

Vend-a-Book

Maybe it's the 24-hour access to 25 book titles or the bizarrely cheap price, but I'm sold on French publisher Maxi-Livres' book vending machines. For an across-the-board $2.45 per book fee, get titles ranging from Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) and Alice in Wonderland to verb-conjugation dictionaries and a couscous cookbook.

"We knew that French bibliophiles would be horrified to see their books falling into a trough like candy or soda," says the publishing house's president, Xavier Chambon. "So we installed a mechanical arm that grabs the book and delivers it safely."

(Thanks, Giselle.)

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life

"Nothing can give the [artist] of today the essential feeling of the modern era's dynamic and subversive elements more than the photographic document," wrote Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Now e-flux and the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros have worked to put many of Siqueiros' 11,000 personal photographs online for use by "fellow artists as a means of inspiration and a source of found imagery." Organized using Siqueiros' own categories—from "People and Historical Figures" to "Objects" to "Misery"—the archive has an amazing range of images, including Pablo Neruda pondering sculpture, Frida Kahlo in her casket, some particularly vicious-looking dogs, anti-Fascist protests in NYC, and an assortment of Mexican political figures, models, and locals. Dig into the archive here.

José Clemente Orozco, c. 1947-48; Unnamed woman, c. 1950; Ernesto "Che" Guevara, c. 1959

(Via Future Feeder.)

The bright side.

Gas in Iraq is the world's cheapest, at five cents a gallon, thanks to "generous pre-war government subsidies on petroleum products that remain in place today." Now, get out there and drive!

Kidder's legit.

Superman's girlfriend, Canadian actor Margot Kidder, became a US citizen yesterday for one reason only: so she, a 34-year US resident who lives in Montana, won't be deported when she begins protesting the war in Iraq.

Bathroom bling?

According to a 2002 survey by American Demographics, 61 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds want a “lifestyle of luxury” and care less about quality than the ineffable “feeling” of entry-level lavishness.

Enter: luxury toilet paper.

(Via Agenda.)

Where you at?

Don't forget to sign my guest map. Click here or see the sidebar at right. Thanks.

Thy name is commerce.

Target used to advertise in the New Yorker, but now they own the entire issue. Sort of. The magazine has agreed to sell one whole issue to a single advertiser for the first time in its 80-year history, an "unnerving" trend in the eyes of Design Observer's Michael Bierut:

I counted over 200 Target logos in the first 19 pages alone, and there were still eleven ads left to go when I gave up. The illustrators acquit themselves well: Robert Risko turns in a funny image of a substantial construction worker perched on a typically un-ergonomic modern cafe stool with a single logo on his back-pocket handkerchief; Yoko Shimizu turns in a spirited biker chick crossing the Brooklyn Bridge with the logo rising before her. Best of all is Me Company's vertiginous computer-generated cityscape, the last ad inside the magazine, which surely pushes the logo count well into four figures, if not five.

Although the publisher has publicly stated that the decision to go with a single advertiser had no effect on the magazine's editorial content — as editor David Remnick put it in the New York Times, "Ads are ads" — the inescapable world of Target creates a disorienting context. Every non-Target illustration in the issue looks a little...funny. Indeed, when I saw the large woodcut that Milton Glaser's former partner Seymour Chwast produced to illustrate Gina Ochsner's short story "Thicker Than Water" (two blackbirds with round eyes that sort of reminded me of...never mind), my first thought was: didn't Seymour get the memo? No, and he no doubt didn't get the paycheck, either. Even the cover drawing by Ian Falconer gives one pause: two boys, playing with a beach ball, a round beach ball, a round red and white beach ball...

I suppose it's what Hallmark and Ford have long done with family TV specials. And, heck, Stephen King, Amy Tan and a dozen or so other others just agreed to auction off naming rights for characters in their novels. The difference? The proceeds go to the First Amendment Project.

Roadworthy.

For his roadline-altering critiques of car culture, Roadworth faces 51 counts of "mischief" in Montreal. See more by Roadworth here.

The sides.

Maybe we can't assess a situation simply by sussing out the players—the opponents and proponents, the major actors and those who comment on the action. But in Crawford, Texas, history will look at the two assembled sides, not the silent purple of the rest of America that—for now—is keeping its mouth shut. Which are you on?

The side of Larry Northern, arrested for destroying war memorials at Cindy Sheehan's protest camp with his pickup truck, or sheep farmer Larry Mattlage, who fired his shotgun into the air in anger over the continued presence of peace activists? The side of Rush Limbaugh, who, seeming to ignore the reality of Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq last April, claims that Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real"? The side of the many who berate Sheehan, including one person who, as Sheehan says, has been spreading the lie I had said that Casey died for Israel"? The side of David Horowitz, who calls Sheehan "hateful" and says that she "exploits the death of her own son and doesn't respect her own son's life" and "portrays him as an idiot"? The side of Bush, who can't take five minutes out of his biking-and-brushclearing vacation to wander to the end of the driveway and see what the fuss is about? Who can't suck it up, take a well-deserved, 5-minute beating from a bereaved war mom, and do his job as an able commander-in-chief?

Or the side made up of those who've lost sons and daughters in Iraq—including MN State Sen. Becky Lourey, Bill Mitchell, and Celeste Zappala—and the side of the soldiers at nearby Fort Hood who are donating supplies to Camp Casey? The side of people across the country who are holding vigils for the Crawford peace activists tonight (constantly updated Flickr photostream here)? The side of the people on this video, who—thanks to the power of citizen media and the internet—we can see for ourselves, without having to trust the filters of media, are thoughtful and credible, not "hateful" or manipulative?

Behind the 8-ball: Don Celender

One of the questions I asked Rirkrit Tiravanija in last month's 8-ball Q&A, a feature in the Walker Art Center magazine, was both a rip-off of and an homage to the late conceptual artist Don Celender. An art professor at Macalester College in St. Paul for four decades, Celender (like Rirkrit, only perhaps moreso) had a pronounced trickster streak: he created Artball trading cards that featured pre-Photoshop photocollages of Picasso, Dubuffet, Jasper Johns, and others in baseball-star poses; surveyed artists, military officers, and soap opera actors on art-related issues; made snowglobes with tiny artwork replicas inside and art-shaped animal crackers; and proposed to General Motors that they make a line of cars using the dimensions of Ralph "Unsafe at Any Speed" Nader's body.

Celender died in March at age 73, and as Macalester painting professor Christine Willcox later told me, colleagues read from his book Mortal Remains (published by Intermedia Arts) at his memorial service. He'd asked some 400 artists and writers what they wished to have done with their earthly remains when they died, what possessions should accompany them into the next world, and how they want their grave to be marked. John Coplans said he wanted his ashed reduced to powder and packed "somewhat like drug dealers do with grams of coke," and Mike Kelley said he wanted his ashes either distributed in Bryce Canyon to the blaring of the MC5 or his body left somewhere "so the state is stuck with the cost of dealing with it." Most memorable was New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, who said she wanted her body compacted into the shape and volume of a bouillion cube (if you have trouble with the how-to part, check with the military, she suggests) then buried in the ground beneath a small tombstone marked with a Minnesota-appropriate epitaph, "Don't mind me." Rirkrit's reply is less overt, suggesting perhaps a spectacular death or a quiet fading away: "I hope there is nothing left behind."

[Cross-post from the Walker Art Center's Off-Center blog.]

Perspectives on petrol.

Record-setting gas prices got you down? Well, at least you don't live in Amsterdam or Olso. See how American prices—now averaging $2.53/gallon—compare to prices elsewhere in the world:

Netherlands Amsterdam $6.48
Norway Oslo $6.27
Italy Milan $5.96
Denmark Copenhagen $5.93
Belgium Brussels $5.91
Sweden Stockholm $5.80
UK London $5.79
Germany Frankfurt $5.57
France Paris $5.54
Portugal Lisbon $5.35
Hungary Budapest $4.94
Luxembourg $4.82
Croatia Zagreb $4.81
Ireland Dublin $4.78
Switzerland Geneva $4.74
Spain Madrid $4.55
Japan Tokyo $4.24
Czech Republic Prague $4.19
Romania Bucharest $4.09
Andorra $4.08
Estonia Tallinn $3.62
Bulgaria Sofia $3.52
Brazil Brasilia $3.12
Cuba Havana $3.03
Taiwan Taipei $2.84
Lebanon Beirut $2.63
South Africa Johannesburg $2.62
Nicaragua Managua $2.61
Panama Panama City $2.19
Russia Moscow $2.10
Puerto Rico San Juan $1.74
Saudi Arabia Riyadh $0.91
Kuwait Kuwait City $0.78
Egypt Cairo $0.65
Nigeria Lagos $0.38
Venezuela Caracas $0.12

There's an upside, wrote David Ignatius last year: in response to higher gas prices Europeans have demanded better fuel-efficiency and have, as a result, used less. Not a bad lesson during war in one of the world's most oil-rich regions.

Art-centered blog.

A new Walker blog has launched. Dubbed Off-center, it'll be a place where we non-curatorial types can post our not-so-institutional musings. I'll refrain from doing that tedious cross-posting I so enjoy, and instead I'll direct you to this fabulous new entry, an eight-item questionnaire I did recently with Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. It includes a selection of answers that didn't make the cut for his official 8-Ball Q&A that ran in the Walker magazine's July/August isse.

More on Crawford monster truck.

The attack on the soldiers memorial at Camp Casey was planned: the pickup truck that wiped out 500 crosses, destroying 100, used chains attached to the undercarriage to add to the damage. Antiwar.com reports that the truck had a blow-out and its driver is in custody.

Sheehan to be evicted?

CampusProgress' Todd Hill reports from Crawford that the Mclennan County Commissioners Court will be entertaining an action item on their agenda that calls for "considering the prohibition of public demonstrations along Prairie Chapel Rd." That means, as soon as tomorrow, Cindy Sheehan and the demonstrators who've supported and opposed her will have to clear out.

Of course, maybe the real disturbance isn't caused by Sheehan, but by the pickup-truck patriots, one of whom mowed down a row of white crosses erected to honor the 1800+ military dead in Iraq.

The Washington Toast

Update: WaPo has pulled out as sponsor of the "Freedom Walk," the paper announced late last night.

I think it could mean bad things for the Washington Post to sponsor a Department of Defense–organized "Freedom Walk" on 9/11—you know, in the journalistic integrity department. And apparently I'm not alone. A resolution signed by the Newspaper Guild, which represents 1400 Post employees, and sent to management reads, in part:

Post news employees are subject to disciplinary action for participating in political activities that may be perceived as revelatory of personal opinions or bias. The Washington Post itself should be held to the same high standard. Moreover, arguments that the Freedom Walk is anything other than a political activity -- and indeed, a political activity in support of the war in Iraq -- should be put to rest by the prominent participation of country music star Clint Black, best known of late for his war-glorifying song 'Iraq and I Roll.'

The Guild supports The Post's stated intention of honoring the nation's veterans, including those who have served in Iraq. But the Post undermines this goal by lending its support to a political event that links the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to the war in Iraq -- a link that The Post, in its reporting, has shown to be false.

If The Post wants to encourage greater respect for veterans among its employees, it should consider giving those employees something that the Guild has repeatedly sought in bargaining: A day off on November 11, Veterans Day, to honor the patriots who have served our nation.

Gee...whiz?

If the medical use proposed for this technology could take off, we could pee our way to a sustainable future:

The first urine-powered paper battery has been created by physicists in Singapore. The credit-card sized unit could be a useful power source for cheap healthcare test kits for diseases like diabetes, and could even be used in emergency situations to power a cellphone, they say.

Testing urine can reveal the identity of illnesses, and the new paper battery could allow the sample being tested to also power the diagnostic device.

“We are striving to develop cheap, disposable credit-card sized biochips for disease detection,” says Ki Bang Lee, at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore. “Our battery can be easily integrated into such devices, supplying electricity on contact with biofluids such as urine or blood.”

(Via Linkfilter.)

And, speaking of liquid solutions: the Aquapub!

Can art change the world?

Sam Durant, We Are All Outlaws in the Eyes of Amerika

The current issue of Adbusters continues a long-running investigation on the role of art in social movements. If art can bring change for the common good, how does it work—as a slow burn or an explosive agent? As art editor of the issue, I asked curators and artists from around the world some deceptively simple questions about the social function of art and its potential for catalyzing change. My favorite interview was with Chinese-born, Paris-based curator Hou Hanru, who suggested that directly oppositional art—the in-your-face anti-Bush poster, for instance—may have less lasting power than works that engage the events of the day from a greater distance. Of-the-moment language only lasts as long as it's relevant, he seemed to be saying, but the more metaphysical works of, say, Joseph Beuys or David Hammons continue to intrigue and spin off meaning beyond their immediate context. (Which is not to suggest Hou meant that the art of resistance can't be just as powerful as any other kind of art. Just different roles in terms of immediacy and effect.)

In the spirit of resource-sharing, here are a few of the quotations, some of which don't appear in the print issue:

Robert Storr, critic, curator, artist, Rosalie Solow Professorship of Modern Art at NYU:

I don't think art can change the world. There are moments in history—in the 1930s and the 1920s and since—where very direct address of general social problems by artists has had something of an effect. It's hard to say what it was or how to quantify it, but it's undeniable they spoke for the times and people knew it. There are other times when merely the presence of a voice of dissent or a kind of questioning in public for which art is also a vehicle can do a lot.

I'm also of the view that sometimes people who should be socially active take refuge in art and make art as an alternative to being involved in the sort of nuts and bolts and oftentimes boring business of organizing and voting and demonstrating. I think we've been through a period where a lot of people have very sophisticated political ideas based on a whole series of postmodern thinkers but actually they do almost nothing, and they have avoided the full implications of having a political understanding of the world by having such a good rap. I don't know how many students I've spoken to, taught, and dealt with who can tell you all about the crisis of late capitalism but in fact have never done anything political in their lives, or very little, and who can tell you all about what's wrong with other people's political practice but haven't made any mistakes yet… There's a dimension in which a lot of political postmodernism is a kind of shadowboxing, and I think that that is something really to be questioned.

Jennifer González, Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California - Santa Cruz:

I think we desperately need the term art, because it's incredibly useful. Art is a conceptual category that allows for something that's not already defined. So, unlike the notion of the commodity, art allows people to do a lot of different kinds of things that in other parts of culture they wouldn’t be allowed to do: experiments, investigations, formal innovations, mixings of materials, etc. I would say the category art has an incredibly important social function to play...

...Art is about as dangerous as literature. But you could also say: it's about as dangerous as philosophy, which means it’s about as dangerous as Marxism… It’s dangerous in the way literature is dangerous: it raises ideas, it changes minds. ...You can never predict in what ways it will change minds or change culture, which is one of its strengths. Neither can you predict
whether a political philosophy will change cultures. What did Adam Smith know when he was writing? Did Marx know what would happen with his writings?

Tim Griffin, Editor-in-chief, Artforum:

For the past 10 years or more, the experience economy—the idea that there is an intangible source of wealth that rotates on notions of branding, of appealing to emotions, of actually making the consumer your product and thereby obtaining some purchase on consciousness itself—creates a situation where art, since emotion and thoughtful interaction have comprised its traditional terrain, is ever more enmeshed in commerce. That means commerce has moved toward art and art has moved toward commerce, or they're overlapping in a fashion that perhaps is still not so familiar to us. Certainly this is one of the reasons why branding becomes a subject of art: that is, one more way the commercial sphere in inscripted in art, which is a trope of the historic avant-garde. But whereas at one point you could have, as an avant-garde position, an outsider status, now the question that is so often hitting artists and writers is: what happens when there is no longer an outside? How do you end up creating some meaningful antagonisms or distances or modes of self-consciousness within this sphere where it no longer makes sense to say that there's an exterior alternative?

Artist Thomas Hirschhorn:

The trap for an artist is not the market, not the business and not commerce, the danger is to lose the mission!

Art does matter today because : with art I can fight resentment, hate and cynicism, as an artist I am a WARRIOR! I have no time to cultivate doubts, I do not want be self-critical, I do know I will be injured, I will be killed but I want to work, I want to give! I want to do this in rush, I do not want complain! What is more important then my doubts is my EMERGENCY, my URGENCY and my NECESSITY and my WILL to give form to them!

Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija:

I say, yes, art can change the world, but I don't know how. (Laughs) It used to be much more clear, what impact the statements and visions and images that artists have made have some impact on the world around it. But I also think it's always working at a different speed than other things. It's a different speed than politics. Even Beuys' Frei University and things like that, they have an impact, and still do, but in a very different speed. The idea that the Green Party is a coalition in the German government has a lot to do with that. I think it does, but I think you have to see it in the long term. We're actually in the space of possibility, so in that sense we have to try to work hard at using it and making it so that it's possible, whether it happens now or not, so it's possible to always have a way to use it.

...I've always thought art was kind of a space for possibilities. With that condition, I see it more as a place for making models, or modeling the possibilities… Art for me is the kind of space where differences can exist. It's a place where we can discuss and show and deal with our ideas. This is a place where it can happen where we can put it up, look at it, discuss it, and have our views on it."

Tiravanija on art activism:

I think I take direct response in relationship to myself. I'm always active alone. I have to do it myself, and if people want to do it, that's good. It’s not like I would say, let's go together and then do it. There are certain things that I would have to do directly myself, and there are certain things that are more of a group thing. But I think I understand that they have different speeds. The one that you directly act on is faster, and ones where you have to work with other people are slower. But I think that they are the kinds of modulations that one needs to have in response to what's going on around you.

Curator-critic Hou Hanru:

Take an example like Joseph Beuys. Of course he was very crazy claiming that he's going to change the world through his art, but I think his way of trying to change things is more metaphysical somehow. It’s not only through manipulating some popular find. In today's context, very often people who are interested in real change somehow have more distance from the popular signs of the social communication. Sometimes there are some very strong artists who use a very simple, very abstract kind of gesture to evoke this kind of agenda of social change, rather than simply appropriating the existing signs.

...It always comes back to me that one very strong image is David Hammons. He did this very beautiful action which is very simple: he was selling snowballs. He was selling snowballs in Brooklyn on the street in the winter. He made different snowballs of different sizes, and he was selling them at different prices. This was such a strong critique about the logic of consumption society, and behind it, of course, was the whole notion between white and black and all these social issues. A simple gesture like this can, because the complexity being expressed through a very simple action, the tension between this simplicity and complexity, make a very strong social statement.

The global gaze.

How does the "first world" view the rest of the globe? Apparently not much at all. Vanishing Point is a database-driven map system that translates top news stories in key papers in G7 countries into a visibility map—the most visible get the most news coverage. "The goal of this project is to decipher the world that news media reconfigures and to observe if media coverage, or lack thereof, is creating a new cartography."

(Via Information Aesthetics.)

Quote.

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security—out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

—John Steinbeck

Bush's defeat.

As the Washington Post quotes a senior official who says the administration is lowering its expectations of success in Iraq—after downgrading the "global war on terror" to "a global struggle against violent extremism"—and "shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning." Considering the overblown chest-thumping of Bush and Rumsfeld when they started the war, this is huge. So huge that, as Frank Rich says, someone oughta tell Bush the war is over:

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

Sheehan: Best protest sign.

As Bush drove past Cindy Sheehan in his limo to a barbecue where he hoped to raise $2 million for the GOP, Sheehan held up a sign that read: "Why do you make time for donors and not for me?"

And: Just read this: a wonderfully incisive take on the case of Cindy Sheehan by a "lifelong conservative with a strong independent streak."

Cindy Sheehan: The High Road.

If the hatred directed at Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan is any indicator, she's fighting the good fight. Her work—and authenticity as a mom who gave the ultimate sacrifice, her son, for the country—has sent the Republican smear machine into high gear: rightwinger Phil Hendry called her an "ignorant cow," Bill O'Reilly says "this kind of behavior borders on treasonous," a post at redstate.org called her "a left wing media whore in the form of a grieving mother," and a group of 50 Bush supporters gathered for a counter-protest, rallying with a telling chant: "We don't care, we don't care!" (You can bet there were more than a handful of "Support Our Troops" magnets on the back of their cars while they did it.)

Regularly blogging at The Huffiington Post, Sheehan wrote this morning:

But you know what, the people who have come out from all over the country to give me a hug and support the cause of peace, overwhelms me so much, I don't have time to worry about the negativity and the hatred. The people who are slamming me have no idea about what it feels like to unjustly have a child killed in an insane war. Plus, they have no truth to fight truth with, so they fight truth with more lies and hate.

This is an important woman, one who didn't ask to be thrust onto center stage but someone a movement is coalescing around. And, movingly, she's not shrinking from the call. Want to help her? MeetwithCindy.org can hook you up with media contacts, ways to support the Crawford Peace House, or directions on how to join her in Texas.

(Thanks, Jeff.)

Red city, blue city.

The nonpartisan Bay Area Center for Voting Research has released its ranking of 237 American cities based on how liberal or conservative they are. The most liberal and the least suggest a trend: "Detroit and Provo epitomize America’s political, economic and racial polarization,” said Jason Alderman a BACVR director. “As the most conservative city in America, Provo is overwhelmingly white and solidly middle class. This is in stark contrast to Detroit, which is impoverished, black and the most liberal.”

I was surprised that legendary Madison, Wisconsin, failed to represent, coming in at 34, just two earlier than St. Paul.

The top 25 in each category:

Liberal:

1 Detroit Michigan
2 Gary Indiana
3 Berkeley California
4 Washington, D.C. Dist. of Columbia
5 Oakland California
6 Inglewood California
7 Newark New Jersey
8 Cambridge Massachusetts
9 San Francisco California
10 Flint Michigan
11 Cleveland Ohio
12 Hartford Connecticut
13 Paterson New Jersey
14 Baltimore Maryland
15 New Haven Connecticut
16 Seattle Washington
17 Chicago Illinois
18 Philadelphia Pennsylvania
19 Birmingham Alabama
20 St. Louis Missouri
21 New York New York
22 Providence Rhode Island
23 Minneapolis Minnesota
24 Boston Massachusetts
25 Buffalo New York

Conservative:
1 Provo Utah
2 Lubbock Texas
3 Abilene Texas
4 Hialeah Florida
5 Plano Texas
6 Colorado Springs Colorado
7 Gilbert Arizona
8 Bakersfield California
9 Lafayette Louisiana
10 Orange California
11 Escondido California
12 Allentown Pennsylvania
13 Mesa Arizona
14 Arlington Texas
15 Peoria Arizona
16 Cape Coral Florida
17 Garden Grove California
18 Simi Valley California
19 Corona California
20 Clearwater Florida
21 West Valley City Utah
22 Oklahoma City Oklahoma
23 Overland Park Kansas
24 Anchorage Alaska
25 Huntington Beach California

(Via Norwegianity.)

Facing death.

Want a funerary urn that'll remind you of your loved one every time you look at it: check out Turn Your Head, a lathe-turned urn that creates the facial profile of your loved one in black walnut, cherry or maple, "hand polished to a natural luster."

(Via Core77.)

Bumvertising...

Benjamin Rogovy thought he had an idea so brilliant—getting panhandlers to hold advertising signs—that he trademarked it: Bumvertising. Not an original idea, but could it be effective? As Regine asks, "aren't we looking away whenever we see a homeless?"

More Venom.

My earlier post on the faux Specialized bike line Venom has generated some curious comments. Marc writes in to say that the bikes are "shopped versions of a conceptual artist's tutorial"—that is, a demontration of digital rendering (the second photo is a draft sketch from the site Marc mentions, the first from the original post). And "Verdra Ciretop" makes this claim:

I wrote the article as an April Fool's prank, after finding the pictures on the web. If you look closely, you'll see that most of the bikes are impossible (eg no steering). But it is rather entertaining to send people to the article and have them drool over the pictures until they clue in that it's a joke!

Update: Um, missed this. Verdra's site says the bike was announced during a November 31st press conference in Tokyo. The 31st, eh?

Where in the world?

Sign my guestmap and let me know where in the world you are. Just click here, then point your cursor to your town on the map (zoom in if you need to), and fill in the details (including the selection of a little icon) in the pop-up window. Thanks.

(Via SeeHere.)

New from Green Day...

Green Day, whose concept-album/rock-opera CD American Idiot is turning out to be a surprise favorite, has come out with a 7-minute music video that turns a relatively cheesy rock anthem into a relatively cutting anti-war message. Ballsy for Warner to host it. Movie links here.

ABC's big-box bias?

A quiz: which website screengrab is from Wal-Mart and which is from ABC's Wal-Mart–sponsored "Person of the Week" segment? Befitting these times when sponsors get more play than the content they're sponsoring, the one with the three Wal-Mart logos and three employee photos is ABC's page.

Now consider FAIR's allegation of one-sided reporting by ABC on a million-person class-action suit filed against Wal-Mart:

This week, the largest class action suit in U.S. history goes to court in California, as plaintiffs representing over 1 million workers accuse Wal-Mart of sex discrimination.

In addition to being the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart also spends considerable money advertising on mainstream media outlets--including regular spots on network newscasts like ABC's World News Tonight, where the discount giant sponsors the show's regular "Person of the Week" segment. Plastered with huge Wal-Mart ads, it's easy to confuse that feature's web page with a visit to the Wal-Mart website. Wal-Mart regularly airs commercials during the newscasts, and underwrites ABC's daily email preview of the evening newscast (a plug for the company's "Wal-Mart Facts" website).

The company also sponsors the "Only in America" series on ABC's Good Morning America, an arrangement that was criticized by the United Food & Commercial Workers union (UFCW). And ABC and Wal-Mart have other commercial ties as well, including a perfume line that was featured on an ABC soap opera and sold at Wal-Mart stores (Broadcasting & Cable, 2/14/05).

So how will ABC's nightly newscast handle the news of Wal-Mart's day in court? In an August 7 preview, reporter Geoff Morrell called the lawsuit the "biggest civil rights case ever," and quoted plaintiff Chris Kwapnoski. But then ABC lined up three sources to criticize the case, starting with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. His comments were echoed by Steve Bokat from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who called the suit "fundamentally unfair."

Morrell then mentioned that "economists say that could have a chilling effect on big retailers, forcing them to raise prices and implement stricter policies for promotion." To back up that point, the broadcast quoted Tim Kane of the right-wing Heritage Foundation--hardly representative of all "economists": "It will make the management risk-averse, that adds cost to you and I."

No experts or advocates in the segment spoke on behalf of the plaintiffs, aside from Kwapnoski herself, whose credibility was undercut by ABC's Morrell: "Ironically, Chris Kwapnoski was promoted three days after filing her suit." The idea that this timely promotion was not irony but strategy on the part of Wal-Mart was not considered.

Giving its lucrative relationship with Wal-Mart, ABC's news reporting on its sponsor should take care not to leave viewers with the impression that the company gets an easy ride. But segments like the August 7 report only contribute to a suspicion that Wal-Mart's sponsorship of the news comes at a steep price--for ABC viewers who want to know more about the company than what the company's PR campaign tells them.

ACTION:
Tell ABC's World News Tonight that its reporting on Wal-Mart--a major sponsor--should be more balanced.

CONTACT:
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
netaudr@abc.com

Revenge of the translator...

From Parenthetically:

A blogger (of a now-defunct blog) buys a pirated DVD of Revenge of the Sith and finds the subtitles were interpreted in Chinese, then translated back into English--to hilarious effect. I can't explain it: just go see.

Mixed-up morals.

It must take a lot for a 4-star general to be relieved from duties, right? What did Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes do to earn the distinction of being the first general of that status to be removed in modern times? Was he overseeing the deplorable treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Did he urinate on copies of the Qu'ran?

Nope. He had an extra-marital affair.

(Via TalkLeft.)

Hell, Vol. 2.

The other Hell Pizza billboard featuring George.

Chair fetish.

I haven't a lot to say this evening. So here's this:

iPod jam.

As culturejamming goes, this is toooo easy. Plus, I'm still a fan of the more clever iPod/iRaq jam. [Via the MIT brand lab.]

And: Yesterday, WorldChanging muses on whether culturejamming works at "solving problems."

Copyright criminals.

Browsing the site of University of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod, best known for trademarking the phrase "freedom of expression" (and then sending out cease-and-desist letters to those who infringe upon it), I came upon a documentary he made in February with Ben Franzen. Called Copyright Criminals, it's an excellent primer on intellectual property and the perils of sampling music. Filled with friends and heroes—Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, DJ Spooky, Greg Tate (of the Village Voice and Burnt Sugar), Saul Williams, Carrie McLaren (of StayFree!), Miho Hatori from Cibbo Matto, the TC's own Eyedea and Abilities, Public Enemy's Harry Allen, Scanner, and others—it looks at the history, law, and potential future for the use of copyrighted music in hip-hop and pop. I especiallly like when Shock G of Digital Underground says, "How many comedians tell the same joke? Nobody says, 'Hey, that's my knock-knock joke. That's my mama joke. That's my political joke.' Jokes are free."

For now, they are.

[Go straight to the movie file.]

Yeah, you...

A project.

Culture on the cheap.

Tyler Green points out that Costco's in the art biz! For the Costco-esque price of $129,999.99 (bring your change!), you can buy Picasso's "Atelier De Cannes." But don't put away your checkbook yet: in addition to this 1958 crayon drawing by the Spanish master, authenticated by his daughter ("the world's utmost authority"), Costco sells works by the likes of Chagall, Dufy, and Miro.

Iraq deaths "are on you."

A Miami Herald editorial blames a complacent populace for the mounting military death toll in Iraq. Arguing that armoring GIs and the vehicles they drive is a nonpartisan problem, and as such, we "can't seem to get excited about an issue unless it pits them against a known political enemy." Why didn't we "raise hell when 14 young Marines perished in an amphibious landing craft in the middle of the damn desert"?

...You allowed the Pentagon and Rumsfeld to pretend armor was no big deal. ''You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want,'' Rumsfeld responded. If you had been paying attention, such a flip answer would have sent Rummy packing.

You allowed the president to remain oblivious. You didn't protest when your congressmen, from both parties, snatched money out of the military budget to pay for pork-barrel projects. You let them protect well-connected contractors even after it was obvious that they weren't up to fixing the problem.

Of course, Rummy, when he visited Iraq, didn't run the 10-mile terror gantlet from the airport to Baghdad in a tinny Humvee. Nope. He was snug inside a Rhino Runner, a reinforced steel bus manufactured by Weston-based Labock Technologies. The Pentagon VIPs and private contractors in Iraq know the Rhino, as opposed to the Humvee, will ward off bombs. The Pentagon brass may ride Rhinos. But they won't certify them. Not for our soldiers.

The military moves No. 1 prisoner Saddam Hussein around in a Rhino. Our soldiers get something far inferior...

The man who lived in trees.

At 61, having just retired from a job as a social worker, Des Moines resident Jack Barnhart decided to build his retirement home—40 feet in the air:

An accomplished woodworker, Barnhart dreamed of building a treehouse - but not one of the scrapped-together versions the word conjures up in most people's minds.

The cozy little cottage he was envisioning would put the Swiss Family Robinson to shame, with two staircases, built-in closets and cabinets, a wet bar, high-quality insulated windows, water and electricity, cable TV and a rooftop patio - not to mention table service for six.

And instead of climbing a ladder from the ground, his treehouse would be accessible by a soaring footbridge, connected to the deck of his home some 65 feet away across a ravine.

It was a level of difficulty that would keep Barnhart grappling with his tree through five years of labor, some $12,000 to $15,000 in materials and many harrowing moments on ladders.

"It would have been difficult to build this thing on the ground, let alone in a tree," he said with obvious relish. "There were times I was nearly hanging by my toenails trying to get the right angle to drive a nail."

Full story here.

A hell of an ad.

The Hell Pizza billboards have been erected around Auckland and Wellington. Half of the poster is taken up with a photo of the president and the other half has the phrase 'Hell: Too Good For Some Evil Bastards.' Outdoor Advertising New Zealand is reviewing who is behind the boards and whether the Advertising Standards Authority needs to become involved.

Hell's media manager, Matthew Blomfield, says they expected to cause a bit of a stir. He says it is meant to provoke discussion and be a little edgy, instead of bland, boring advertising.

Mr Blomfield is hoping reaction will be balanced between those who find it funny and those who are upset by it.

CIA field commander: US let Osama get away.

Surprise, surprise: Bush was wrong, Kerry was right. From Newsweek:

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."

(Via Americablog.)

Osama Clock: As of this posting, 1426 days, 3 hours, 1 min, and 35 seconds have passed since George W. Bush said he'd catch bin Laden "dead or alive."

RIP Ibrahim Ferrer.

The charismatic frontman of Cuba's Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club has died at age 78.

[image]

The war at home.

At a Kentucky flea market, two "really nice guys" (both firearms dealers) drew guns on each other during an argument about the war in Iraq, resulting in one death. Douglas Moore, not suprisingly of the pro-war side, was released without charge after killing Harold Wayne Smith. Police said it appeared he was acting in self-defense. The case is likely the first time a dispute over the war has ended in death (domestically, that is). Ironically, Kentucky's motto is "United we stand, divided we fall."

(Via Atrios, who has more on the topic.)

Celestial self-portrait.

While on his spacewalk to repair the space shuttle the other day, astronaut Steve Robinson snapped this self-portrait. Click on the image to see the enormous, hi-res original.

(Via Metafilter.)

Amen to that.

In a controversial move, a Presbyterian committee "accused five companies Friday of contributing to 'ongoing violence that plagues Israel and Palestine' and pledged to use the church's multimillion-dollar stock holdings in the businesses to pressure them to stop." The companies, who sell night vision goggles, helicopters used by the Israeli army, and telecommunications equipement, are: Caterpillar.; Citigroup; ITT Industries; Motorola; and United Technologies. The committee says it hopes to pressure the companies to change their practices in the Middle East, but insists that divestment will be a last resort.

Seeing red.

Ann at Sivacracy points out this startling animated map. Click here, then click on the red button, then maybe say a little prayer, remembering that for each red dot—a coalition soldier killed in Iraq—approximately 10 Iraqi civilians also lost their lives.

Lies (and bodies) piling up.

Minutes from a 2003 British war cabinet meeting leaked to the London Sunday Times reveal that "the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime,” directly contradicting earlier claims that ramped up attacks were in response to Iraqi attempts to shoot down allied aircraft. In other news about lying warmongers: more Americans believe George W. Bush to be dishonest than those who believe the opposite (50% to 48%). "The honesty dip is partly caused by a loss of faith in his credibility on Iraq," says Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas, referring to the war that's killed 2022 coalition troops to date (including 48 American soldiers in the past 12 days) at a cost of $185.5 billion and rising.

Also rising: The number of days since Congress requested an investigation into the Downing Street Memos, leaked earlier, is now at 92.

[image via]

West Banksy.

The Guardian, reporting on Banksy's trip to the occupied territories, shows this poignant piece painted on the security barrier that separates Israel and Palestine. A statement from Banksy: "The Israeli government is building a wall surrounding the occupied Palestinian territories. It stands three times the height of the Berlin Wall and will eventually run for over 700km - the distance from London to Zurich. The wall is illegal under international law and essentially turns Palestine into the world's largest open prison... It also makes it the ultimate activity holiday destination for graffiti writers."

Update: Visual Resistance writes: "Man, just when Banksy had you feeling free, the New York Times has a report on the city’s new Citywide Vandals Task Force, the merger of the NYPD and transit cops’ anti-graffiti units started by Bloomberg’s crackdown on graffiti."

Manly-men motivations.

Cornell researcher Rob Willer on his new survey of college undergraduates:

I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle. There were no increases [in desire] for other types of cars.

Fault their logic, admire their chutzpah.

"The US military, struggling to fill its voluntary ranks, is offering to allow recruits to meet part of their military obligations by serving in the Peace Corps, which has resisted any ties to the Defense Department or US intelligence agencies since its founding in 1961."

Banksy's treasure hunt.

Another contest from the famed UK guerrilla artist, but this one's not in the British Isles. Try Palestine/Israel:

Somewhere along the route of the segregation wall you’ll find this rat. At the foot of his shovel is a flat rock with a word written on the underside.

The first person to email that word into this site wins a hacked off piece of wall adorned with an original Banksy painting
worth quite possibly tens of pounds.

For a photo album of Banksy's Palestinian travels, visit Wooster.

So meta: A museum blogger on museum blogs...

Cross-posted at Off-center, the new Walker Art Center blog.

Do a Technorati search for "museum blog" and you won't find much. There's the Beer Can Museum blog, the Army's Airborne & Special Operations Museum blog, and even one for the Museum of Leftwing Lunacy. But aside from Ron Kavanaugh's Bronx Mus(eum)ings, and a few others, there's not much precedent, especially in the arts. So the Walker's blogging initiative may be leading the pack, especially in contemporary art, but where we're leading it is anybody's guess. My hope is that staff from various departments--curators in all disciplines, library and archives staff, education people, designers and editors--will use it as a place to do two things: stockpile and share research (interesting links, ideas we're noodling, interview snippets that didn't make it into the catalogue or Walker magazine, etc.), and offer both personal insights into our work and behind-the-scenes glimpses of our processes.

But, what do you want to see? I asked a few art bloggers their wishes for the Walker blog or museum blogs in general. Tyler Green, a Bloomberg critic and the author of Modern Art Notes at ArtsJournal.com, says "museo-blogs are a clear trend," citing the fact that Kriston Capps from Grammar.police will be blogging for the Smithsonian, and pointing out good institutional blogs like Eyebeam's reBlog and the Pulitemporary. "I don't think anyone knows what'll work," he says. "But I think a lot of people will have fun figuring it out. I think museums like the Walker (which is different from the Pulitemporary) need to involve their curators."

Caryn Coleman, who blogs at Art.Blogging.LA, says she doesn't read museum blogs because they tend to regurgitate (my word, not hers) promotional copy and plug events. She'd like to see:

...something more personal, something that's not going be on the official website. Perhaps press/reviews regarding exhibitions from publications, reviews of staff, of programming and/or performance, curatorial insights, anecdotes about installation, execution, general thoughts, images, artist interviews that are included in current exhibitions, etc. Anything that supplements and rounds out the programming and, perhaps, includes the viewer. Blogs can make the possibilities of what an institution can do endless and with ease.

Some of those changes will be coming soon: assistant curator Doryun Chong and installation technician Phil Docken will begin blogging in a few weeks on the complex installation and the wide-ranging concepts (from Chinese medicine to post-colonial theory to astrology) related to our upcoming Huang Yong Ping retrospective. Beyond that, what would you like to see here? Leave a comment. I can't say we'll deliver, but it'll certainly get us thinking...

Ghost bench.

In the direct sunlight, you almost miss this subtle street art, seen on a bus bench on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. It's hard to tell if it's stencil art or some kind of photoreactive paper that recorded an imprint of bench users. Any ideas?

Cloning Snuppy.

Snuppy (short for Seoul National University puppy) is the world's first cloned dog. Started as a cell taken from a three-year-old Afghan hound and then transferred to a surrogate mother, the dog is one of two attempts at cloning. The first died at birth, but Snuppy's been around for 16 weeks.

Design oddities.

While you'd never guess it based on the site's design, Cyberheritage is a goldmine of graphic design oddities from the UK: fireworks labels for British, Indian and American markets; model rocketry diagrams; a nuclear bomb effects calculator; and, my favorite, Royal Navy ship badges.

214 corporate commands.

Think different. Steal this album. Eat fresh. Just do it. Have it your way. Obey your thirst.

OK, already. Back off fer a second. All these corporate commands seem to say, as this sign for Blockbuster does: "Buy crap." The International Database of Corporate Commands catalogues the 214 (and counting) directives from companies who want your dough. Nice idea, and a resounding note (if we're lucky) to Madison Avenue marketers that the imperative tagline has to die.

(Via the MIT Laboratory for Branding Cultures, a fine organization that needs a shorter name.)

Monsanto to patent pigs.

Patents aren't just for widgets: they're for life! Monsanto, long in the business of patenting seeds, is now moving to patent not just breeding processes for pigs, but the actual herd of pigs. "If these patents are granted, Monsanto can legally prevent breeders and farmers from breeding pigs whose characteristics are described in the patent claims, or force them to pay royalties," says Greenpeace's Christoph Then. "It's a first step toward the same kind of corporate control of an animal line that Monsanto is aggressively pursuing with various grain and vegetable lines." The patent application include these claims:

Claim 16 asks for a patent on: "A pig offspring produced by a method ..."
Claim 17 asks for a patent on: "A pig herd having an increased frequency of a specific ...gene..."
Claim 23 asks for a patent on: "A pig population produced by the method..."
Claim 30 asks for a patent on: "A swine herd produced by a method..."

Earlier: The art and politics of genetic chimera.
And: Millions Against Monsanto.

[via]

Stark raving naked.

OK, then:

Isolationism, vulnerability, cold steel, human flesh, and latent violence seethe in “Homeland Security” -- no, it isn’t a film or video, it’s the latest provocative series of photographs from the veteran Charlotte multi-media creator. Sporting an M16 and nothing else, [John] Douglas appears in this series of images as a literal “one-man army” -- duplicated photographically and armed to the teeth in a procession of tableaus that confront the power and impotence of firepower.

[via]

Training tampons?

As a guy, I often wondered what training bras were training girls for. But now, a weirder question arises: what is Proctor & Gamble thinking coming out with a line of premenstrual tampons? Money, no doubt. Get this:

Almost is a pre-menstrual tampon designed just for you, to help you get ready for what you know is coming. Because it is coming, and you've waited long enough.

Almost™ Premenstrual Tampons come in four fun "flavors"-- so you can be yourself, no matter what.

Almost™ Premenstrual Tampons. Because you're almost there. Period.

Those fun flavors? "Red menace." "Green party." "Blue note." "Orange county." Yeesh.

Massive marionettes.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of native son Jules Vernes' Around the World in Eighty Days, the French city of Nantes held the Royal de Luxe parade in May, complete with a giant marionette girl and water-spewing elephant. As the videos show, the girl is strong enough to carry children on her arms and her expressions (mostly eyelid batting) are remarkable.



(Via MeFi.)