Wailing Wall

Glad I'm far away from all the 9/11 commemorations, as reported in the Times last week. If they commemorated every dead Iraqi or Afghan like they do every American, the world would become one big version of the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. No one hears them over there but everything is connected.

Airport Security: A Modest Proposal

In light of increasing complaints on airport security measures (click here for example), we offer a modest suggestion: A special optional flight plan available to all travelers: pay less for your ticket in airport taxes, sign a waiver against suing the government if the plane blows up mid-flight, and you can skip the airport shakedown.

It's win-win for everyone. The only trick is to make sure terrorists buy the more expensive tickets with the pat-down included. Maybe something sacriligious to Islamic faith, like a pork-only menu on budget flights.

It makes about as much sense as the current system.

For more interesting observations on this issue, click here for Amazon customer reviews on the Playmobil  TSA Security Checkpoint pictured above.

Middle Brow Gourmandie

From our ongoing anthology Why I Hate The New York Times, in a book review about Americans in Paris in the 19th century:

"This is history to be savored rather than sprinted through, like a Parisian meal. It amounts to a meaty collection of short stories, expertly and flavorfully assembled, free of gristly theory."

The review  includes a good example of confusing diction and a curious way of seeing history from a Westchester perspective. The presumed dead and resurrected Washburne referred to was the US ambassador in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Fortunately everything was back to picture-postcard-perfect in a jiffy despite that  nasty little revolution: 

By the time German troops marched down the Champs-Élysées, on March 1, l871, more than 65,000 Parisians had died. The only prominent diplomat to do so, Washburne valiantly refused to budge even through the months of the Commune, one of the bloodiest chapters in French history. His was no paradisiacal Paris; as the atrocities mounted, the distraught Washburne noted that the city was “a hell upon this earth.” At one point the Seine ran red with blood. A team of 60,000 masons would be required to put Paris back together again. On Mary Cassatt’s arrival shortly afterward, the Hôtel de Ville looked like a Roman ruin.

And the review closes with this immortal line, after reporting on how Saint-Gaudens wrote of Paris, “Coming here has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am”:

Paris is the city to which good Americans go to learn that they really do love peanut butter.

And bad Americans? Is this is what passes for lively prose writing these days?

The Patent Office is Open

Some ideas just keep popping up in our head, time to unload. Interested developers, leave a comment and our lawyers will be in touch shortly. Reasonable rates:

• The Pedal-Powered Computer Desk. Remember those Singer sewing machine tables with the cast iron foot pedals? From Sweat Shop to Ye Olde Cafe. Hook one up to a dynamo and a lithium battery, and you can cruise the internet off the grid! Work off that flab too!! And help Save the Planet, so help me God. This should be under every Christmas tree by 2012.

• Chinese European Bus Tour: The Musical. The new Chinese middle class, 200 million strong, is hoofing it to Europe to take in the sights. There are laughs galore for all as they shoot photos of Karl Marx's birthplace in a lost town in western Germany, do the Printemps department store big time (dance number) and wonder over Western decadence. With hit songs like Louis Vuitton Loves Me, No Smoking Blues and Which Way to the Nearest Chinese Restaurant. Based on an article in the April 18th New Yorker.

• Sick and tired of the Same Old TV News, day-in, day-out? Download the Instant Laugh Track®, compatible with all major brands. Simply push the Instant Laugh Track® button on your remote and chuckle your way through floods, wars, bombings and boring Presidential addresses. 
• Works on Fox News commentators, Bloomburg market reports and commercials too!
• Extra option  for BlowTime™ subscribers: every time you push the Instant Laugh Track® button, BlowTIme™ bills you one red cent for relief work in Haiti with only minor handling  costs included. Ease that Guilty Conscience for a Worthy Cause! 
• Sixteen hundred completely unique and different laugh tracks, delivered by new digital lie detector technology that captures your every mood through the intensity of your hand grip on the remote. Results sent to your broadcaster for free opportunities to win Big Cash Prizes. 
• And don't forget Laugh Track MeToobe® and Laugh Track Faceshock® for your browsing pleasure. No batteries required.
  

A Nero from New York

If you had to chose between Donald Trump and Sarah Palin as President, who would it be? (He's looking pretty Presidential for sure).

Renewable Enegy

I've seen the future -- a radio/flashlight with a lthium battery and a hand crank. Soon we will be all running in circles like gerbels to power our computers, heat our houses and move our cars -- back to the Flintstones. WILMAAAA!

My Man Kimmelman

Here's man after my own heart. Michael Kimmelman in the NYT (December 16th, selected excerpts):

"Notwithstanding the recession, art-worlders insist smart people still pay good money for great art. (Really? Smart? Hirst?)

The current art world, in the form of art fairs like Frieze, as well as the ubiquitous biennials and other festivals, is without debate succeeding at something now. It's succeeding at providing relatively cheap forms of mild distraction for ever-larger masses of fashion-conscious people whose budgets cover dinner at PizzaExpress, but not works of art.

...the art world, having become almost entirely an extension of the fashion and entertainment industries, offers its own version of bygone Hollywood's outlandish riches and loopy entertainment. Instead of Esther Williams, it's Jeff Koons. Instead of Tarzan, there's Olafur Eliasson.

If this were all that art produced, the era's legacy would look dire. But it would also be grim to contemplate the arts being serious and important all the time." 

He hems and haws a bit there, but he's got a dozen editors and Sulzberger Jr. looking over his shoulder.

"Culture of Recession? Or Vice Versa?"
by Michael Kimmelman
The New York Times, December 16, 2010

Ireland

The shell game continues. Countries hike debt to rescue banks, which then threaten their rescuers with bankruptcy by shorting their bonds. Blackmail: countries in okay shape but with a plunging bond rate must accept to be rescued in exchange for ditching the Welfare State and imposing Libertarian Capitalism, i.e. every man for himself. Unemployment jumps, real wages drop, everyone is screwed, and the rich get richer. After Ireland comes Portugal, Spain and all the rest of the little duckies. The US too: this is like Brecht: when they come for you there will be no one left to object.

Everything, absolutely everything in the financial markets is a scheme to rob the working wage earner and create the conditions for Third World bliss: 1% of the population with 99% of the wealth. Check out how far along the US is on this road, and you have the country's history of the last 30 years in a nutshell.

The little man revolts but he hasn't a clue: there is a grass-roots movement by Spaniards to withdraw all their savings from banks on December 18th. Good luck. But if this goes on, the little man could get really angry and start thinking. Let's hope so.


Photo: Favela Morumbi, Sao Paulo
From Treehugger

Campaign Lessons from Catalonia

Note to the wary: the links on this post are not for minors, even if they are in Catalan. And they are not for your Aunt Minnie either.

American politicos can learn something from the election campaign in Catalonia, the autonomous region whose capital is Barcelona. Videos by different parties have added some spice to the process, always welcome in bringing out the vote.

First the youth division of the Socialists came out with a video in which an attractive young female voter gets a little heated up on entering the polling station, and then has a rather sublime time of it introducing her ballot into the ballot box. See it here (sorry about the ad).

Then a fringe party (Alternativa de Govern) did a video with its leader, Montse Nebrera, appearing on camera wrapped in a towel after sounds of sex, and saying something like, "I could go further but...."  The video is a little long, tracking through a disheveled bedroom and some political messages in Catalan while the soundtrack plays out to its conclusion, but Montse is worth the wait, even if she must be some kind of political kook (she is backed by the Opus Dei, altho I'm not sure if they previewed her campaign material). Judge for yourself here.

This was all very fun, but then the conservative Popular Party's youth brigade sent out a video game where their candidate avatar gets points for shooting down illegal immigrants and symbols of Catalan identity such as paellas and butifarra sausages  (stand-ins for those pesky Catalan indepentistas). But there was a fuss and  they had to withdraw the game and come up with some plausible excuse. Here's a couple of screen shots someone got before they pulled it, where you can appreciated the campaign's graphic skills:

There she is, up in the left hand corner on the back (or neck) of a seagull, a party symbol, whacking away at immigrants and butiffaras with her light bulb missiles (get it? -- bright ideas). Note the apocalyptically silhouetted homeland, with Calatravian doodles in ruins, a beseiged cross, and a burning glow on the horizon....

With only 40% of the electorate expected to turn out, anything is worth a try.

Tea, Anyone?

The New Yorker has been doing a quick intensive course on the new right wing and its been a lot of fun. About how Wm F Buckley worked to keep the John Birch nutcases from taking over the GOP, to keep the party in the center of the road, from Goldwater to Reagan. About the Koch Bros, descendants of John Birchers with reasons of their own to be rabid libertarians and anti-regulators (oil and gas pipelines), secretly financing the tea takers to the tune of millions. On the origins of the Fox news guy Beck's rants and raves (John Birch again and worse, and all based on fictionalizing history, the Constitution and so on). 

My new theory: Yes to a weak federal govt, yes to states rights. If the east coast and the west coast want health care, pass it state by state. If all the rest of the middle of the country wants to prohibit abortion, jail homosexuals, throg immigrants and worse, let'em go back to the Stone Age on their own. And while Idaho, Texas and Colorado are busy with these pressing social issues, who cares about foreign affairs? That will be the beginning of the end of the military-industrial dictatorship (I admit, a rather remote possibility) and give the rest of the world a rest from American foreign policy. I mean, Iraq, where's that? What we have to worry about now is Massachusetts!!

Now that the cat catches mice...

A new quote for the new China: Xi Jinping, Chinese leader-designate, cited in El País from a speech in Mexico in 2009:

"Some foreigners, with their stomachs full and nothing better to do, dedicate their time to pointing the finger at us. In the first place, China doesn't export revolution. Secondly, it doesn't export hunger and poverty. And thirdly, it doesn't go around looking for trouble. What more is there to say?"

 Translated from the Spanish by JS

Photo from Chinesehour Blog

Xi's wife is a popular singer

Madrid is Bankrupt

Zap is putting the screws on municipalities so they can't keep increasing their debts. He's been especially hard on Madrid (PP), with the biggest debt, and the Mayor was seen literally begging the Pres for a break at the Spain Day parade on October 12th.

He owes trash collection and street cleaning companies over 250 m euros, hasn't paid them in 9 months, and they are threatening to cut services (total debt owed by Spanish municipalities to the big trash haulers (spin-offs of once-rich construction firms) are over 2 bn euros).

The Mayor (Alberto Ruiz Gallardón) owes money to everyone. He put Madrid thru two Olympic bids (2012 and 2016), buried a highway under the Manzanares River, a 10 km underground six-lane salaam course with countless interchanges and extensions, that cost about 6 bn (the best work of interactive installation art I've ever seen, I must admit), built a Dominque Perrault tennis stadium that cost 300 m (double the budget) and that really sucks (The roofs slide up and down but so what? Its a big Kemedy-Center box (Ed Du Stone, Washington DC) finished in galvanized steel and concrete), and uselessly moved city hall into the old post office at Cibeles for a cost of over 100 m, not to mention a lot of other things. When he was Pres of the Madrid regional govt. he sunk another big chunk in a regional subway, underground, that connects all the southern suburbs. A total waste.

It would be great if Madrid forecloses. Its the only thing that might hurt this idiot's popularity -- he is by far the most popular politician in Spain, altho his own party hates him -- they think he's a socialist, because he's not exactly a Francoist. The PP puts up with him because he's unbeatable. And municipal elections are coming up next May -- let's see if he can hold his load until then.

Above, M-30 underground salaam. photo from Wikimedia Commons by FDV; used with permission.

Koons the Collector

Don't miss the New York Times piece on Jeff Koons and his art collection, hidden in his bedroom in his Upper East Side apartment. A portrait, as true as any, of the present moment. History is made by the new rich, and so the most successful striver in American art of my generation, an aw-shucks kid from York, Pennsylvania,  has staked his claim on the Upper East Side -- Park Avenue, surely-- and any Old Masters within reach (he started off on Lichtenstein but now he's on to harder stuff). Does this betray his contemporaneity? Hardly. He just puts himself up there in the best company he can find.

Koons on his own work: "With an ever-present warm smile and the comforting tones of a guidance counselor, he has spoken about how art 'lets you kind of control physiology and the secretions that take place within the body,' how his art operates in 'a morality theater trying to help the underdog,' how his balloon-based sculptures, at least sexually speaking, 'really try to address whatever your interests are.' "

This guy is money in the bank.

Free Association a la FBI

Spain got an official apology from the American Embassy in Madrid after a newspaper revealed that an FBI "most wanted" photo of a digitally-aged Bin Ladin used parts of the face of Gaspar Llamazares, former leader of the Izquierda Unida Party -- a coalition of Communists and left-of-the-Socialists leftists. Some hack at the FBI admitted he had picked Llamazares' face from a campaign poster. Nice to know the FBI is still keeping track of dangerous leftists, and puts the information to good use.

Update 10/20/10:  Not long ago the target of the FBI hunt --not Bin Laden after all, it seems-- was blown to bits by a missile from an unmanned Predator. Don't know if this helps Llamazares sleep better at night or not.

Ever Higher

Did you catch the fireworks show at the inauguration of the Burj Dubai? Pretty close approximation to what a controlled demolition might look like, or a crippling orgasm.

Performance Art by the Hyper-Rich

First I caught up with a "food installation" by Jennifer Rubell, of the real estate family, for New York's Performa, a three-week performance-art festival, reviewed last fall in the Talk of the Town section of an old New Yorker. It featured a dessert course consisting of "three large apple trees, which will be chopped down, brought to the gallery, and laid out on the floor, so that guests can eat fruit from the branches." (October 26, 2009)

Now I find another Talk of the Town piece from the November 30 issue, on a benefit for MOCA in LA featuring Lady Gaga in a Frank Gehry hat, a Steinway decorated with butterflies by Damien Hirst (auctioned and sold to Hirst's dealer, Larry Gagosian, for $450,000), and three heiresses "in matching gold diadems" doing a "visual art act." “We’re a cross between the Spice Girls and Burning Man,” [Margherita] Missoni said, dissolving in giggles." Etc. All presided over by the Russian art promoter and billionaire's daughter Dasha Zhukova.

It's about time real idiots got in on the scene. Maybe now art can move on to something else.

The Las Vegas - Dubai Express

David Littlejohn in the Wall Street Journal on CityCenter Las Vegas:

"The second highly-touted good work of CityCenter is its achievement of "LEED Gold" status for six of its buildings, a high mark of distinction for environmental responsibility never before achieved in a project of this scale. ... The center has its own power regeneration plant, energy-saving glass walls, and automatic means of limiting the use of electricity and water. Smoke is pulled upward from the casino floor (all hotels except the Aria are nonsmoking), and slot machine bases house air conditioners. The Aria's fleet of stretch limos to ferry high rollers runs on compressed natural gas."

I'd like to think Littlejohn is choking up on the irony here, but I rather suspect he is simply clueless.

Also clueless: I didn't know that Dubai World is the major outside investor. If you're ever looking for a big-time sucker, go East, man, go Middle East.

Sorry, no pictures -- can't find any that look real.

Modern Potlach: From Axe Heads to Medicine Cabinets

Don't miss this hilarious philistine take on Damien Hirst as a conceptual artist and a bad investment in the ever-earnest New York Times: New Zealand Professor of Art History Denis Dutton weighs in.

Condoms at the Thyssen

For its upcoming Tears of Eros show opening October 20th, El País reports, the Thyssen Museum in Madrid will offer condoms in its gift shop, packaged in some of the show's 120+ artworks of "high erotic content" such as Courbet's The Woman of the Waves, Ribera's San Sebastián or Sam Taylor-Woood's video portrait of a sleeping David Beckham.

With her characteristic false innocence and charm, the Baroness Thyssen, Vice President of the Thyssen Foundation, told El País, "I don't think anyone will be scandalized. ... It seemed like a good idea to me because it means security for the young, more than the day-after pill." Click here for the full story (in Spanish). Photo, Rachel Weisz by James White, one of the works in the show.

NOUVEL TOWER CUT

The New York Planning Commission cuts the Jean Nouvel tower by 200 feet, Nicolai Ourousoff reports.

Paraphrasing Diana Vreeland, in Manhattan a tower can never be too tall or too thin. And you can never have too many of them. As for tops, anything goes, the wackier the better, given the context (wouldn't say the same for Shanghai). Where would the Chrysler have got to if a bunch of middle-aged socialite bureaucrats had to approve it? No one's come up ever with anything wackier, not even Libeskind.