Category Archives: Art

Portrait of America on the 10th anniversary

OK, so I shot this on the day before 9/11/11, and I’m posting in on the day after, but I think it still works. I’m thinking this view of Charleston was pretty similar on Sunday.

This was something I shot spontaneously while waiting for traffic to move, coming out of a side street onto King Street in the Holy City on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t think much about it at the time. The image just seemed worth grabbing.

Not until late last night did I happen to see it on my phone, and really like it. I tried to post it then, while it was still 9/11, but I had trouble with my Internet connection. Eventually I went to bed.

But here it is now. How does it strike you? (Try clicking on it to blow it up and get the full effect of the blue and the gleaming buildings and the flag setting them off.)

Bill Day’s 9/11 cartoon

There’s a lot of stuff coming at us about the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I’ve read some of it, meant to read more — but haven’t had time.

But I did have time to enjoy this cartoon from back then that Bill Day shared with me today. You’ll recall that my compadre Robert Ariail did some really strong cartoons at that time. But I can’t seem to find those online at the moment, and I thought you might enjoy seeing one you hadn’t seen before.

Here is some of Bill’s commentary on it:

We sold the prints for only $3.00 each, the newspaper supplies the envelopes and postage, and volunteers did all the work. We pulled in $30,000! I still get requests from firemen all over the country and never charge them. We gave checks to the families at a beautiful awards ceremony with the Fire Chief  presiding with all the brass, Detroit Mayor, City Council members, and my newspaper publisher, editor, and editorial page editor there…

This is cool, but the real thing’s better

Mad Men Opening Titles Re-Design from Paul Rogers on Vimeo.

Kathryn brought this video to my attention. Here’s some info about it:

Going an entire summer without Mad Men is frustrating. Thanks to illustrator Paul Rogers, you can get your fix of the stylish era right now. Rogers created a version of the opening credits taking a cue from “classic film and television titles from the early 1960s.” The clip might not be enough to hold you over until January (when the new season of Mad Men begins), but it will make you crave an ice cold martini.

I like it; I think it’s cool. It makes me eager to see the next season.

But I prefer the real credits, with the silhouette guy falling down the side of the building. It suggests the strange darkness of Don Draper’s journey, his alienation, his insecurity. It’s way existential.

These alternative credits just reflect the fun.

Much better video, of Phillip on piano

Just to make up for noisy, unedited video on the preceding news event, I thought I’d post this video that some of you have been asking for.

OK, Kathryn’s been asking for it. And her husband. And somebody else, just yesterday (SusanG, it was).

Anyway, this was a piece that Phillip Bush — yes, our Phillip, blog regular — played for the camera right after the clip I posted earlier of Kathryn playing the National Anthem under his professorial gaze.

Phillip’s way good. I think the piece is Brahms. It’s called “Intermezzo,” but then a lot of stuff is called that, right?

Anyway, it shows his considerable talent to good effect.

I don’t know what it’s saying, but I think I agree

You’ll never guess why I was looking at the above picture.

No, really.

Remember when I mentioned communitarianism back here? Well, I was looking for a link in connection with that, and I ran across Amitai Etzioni’s Twitter profile, and Twitter told me about some other guys who Tweet about similar topics. So I thought I’d check them out.

This guy’s profile led me to this magazine website, and I found this picture at the bottom of the page. I don’t know why it was there. It seemed to be a stand-alone, rather than illustrating some article. I don’t know what it was saying about the nation and the world and geopolitics, but I think it was very profound. Something about strength, combined with balance. Symmetry comes into it somewhere. Warm sunshine also. Water. Um, other stuff…

Nothing like esoteric, academic treatments of foreign policy, I always say….

Well said, Murray Kimber. See more of his stuff here. Buy something from him.

Apparently, the piano lessons are working

Our friend Steven is really going to love this one. Yesterday, he wrote this in response to Bud’s good news:

Great, now this blog is becoming the birth announcement blog.

What next, ” Doug Ross motored over to Kathryn Fenner’s residence Wednesday afternoon where they ate peach cobbler and discussed Brad’s blog.”

That REALLY cracked me up (although I didn’t approve it, because I don’t approve his stuff that is intended to belittle and bring people down), was that as he was typing it, I actually was dropping by Kathryn’s house — for the first time ever — because she had told me that our own Phillip Bush was giving her a piano lesson.

Phillip, in case you don’t know it, is a gifted classical pianist. No, I don’t just mean he tickles the ivories; I mean that’s what he does, and he’s really good at it. Here’s his blog, and for more, here’s the Wikipedia page about him.

Anyway, I was going to snap a picture or two and leave, but then I decided to give Kathryn a test. Occasionally, she is asked at the last minute to play the National Anthem at the start of Rotary meetings. She has been known to hit a false note. Whenever this happens, being the well-bred Southern gentleman that I am, I kid her about it unmercifully. (Guess I’ve been exposed to Steven too long.)

Well, with her teacher watching, she did a lot better. To my ear, anyway.

I thought y’all (well, everyone but Steven) might enjoy seeing a couple of our regular contributors at the keyboard.

Anybody besides me remember this?

Yeah, I’m still here. Been really busy with ADCO work. Maybe that’s a good sign for the economy. I don’t know; too soon to tell.

Anyway, we’re working on a couple of thing with environmental themes, and today I was brainstorming with our Creative Director (speaking of creative directors, I’m trying to carve out a niche in the ad game where all I do is what Don Draper does, which is look briefly at the product of someone else’s hard work and say, “That doesn’t work” — kind of like I used to do at the newspaper — then I’d have a drink and take a nap in my office), and… where was I before that parenthetical?

Oh, yeah. So suddenly it hit me. There’s no widely-understood symbol for environmental concerns. Not a single one, that could suggest everything — clean air and water, recycling, concern about climate change, conservation, carbon footprint, etc. Oh, you can do a stylized picture of a tree. Or the whole Earth, as seen from space (satisfied now, Stewart Brand?). But those could mean different things. And the recycling arrows are too specific. There’s the word, “green,” and you can do various visual things with that, but… there’s no one, shorthand symbol.

Then suddenly I thought of the theta symbol. But then I remembered it had been something like 40 years since I had seen that one used. But when it was used, it was used to express the whole shooting match. It was to environmentalism (which was a word we did NOT yet use, as I recall) what the peace symbol was to the antiwar movement.

I’m guessing people were turned off by the symbol’s association with death — which was, as I recall, one reason why it was used as a symbol for the movement. It was a warning that we were poisoning the Earth.

In any case, I once had a T-shirt with the above “Ecology Flag” on it. (Which the Web teaches me was created by artist Ron Cobb — not to be confused with the notorious SC lobbyist — in 1969.) At about the same time, I had a Kent State-themed one that was plain white in the front, with a big target on the back, with the word “Student” under it. I wore that around the USC campus in the fall of 1971 — my one semester as a Gamecock. Other kids wore garnet and black; I preferred to be different.

But I digress. Do any of y’all remember the theta being used to express ecological sensibilities, or am I alone here?

The Perpetual Adoration of the Dysfunctional

I’m at Barnes & Noble, engaged in my favorite leisure activity of getting a cup of coffee and wandering among the books and maybe blogging a bit. And moments ago I got a text from my wife. She is out of town, has been for several days. She’s somewhere in the Ozarks having a reunion with her high school friends from St. Agnes Academy in Memphis (37 in the graduating class, all girls). Here’s what she texted:

Who directed & starred in easy rider & supported andy warhol?

This is my function in the world. Perhaps it is why she married me. Anyway, I quickly responded, “Dennis Hopper. Why?” That was an easy one. We just saw him in that Warhol thing last week.

It was at Spoleto. There was this show that was very, um, Warhol. It was called, “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.” We went with my artist daughter and a friend of hers. It was enjoyable, even artistically impressive. But if you thought about it too much, it was disturbing. And I tend to do that. That’s the other thing I do. I keep trivia in my head, and I think about stuff until I ruin it.

Warhol did these things he called “screen tests” in which he had various people in his orbit sit in front of a camera loaded with a short piece of film — I want to say about 100 feet; in any case, it would last exactly four minutes. In this way, the artist fulfilled his own prophecy to a certain extent — immortalizing these people for at least four minutes of their allotted 15. He shot people he thought were beautiful in one way or another. Some were quite conventionally beautiful the way I would use the word, such as this one (who bizarrely kept her eyes open the whole time, causing tears to flow). But all were interesting.

You had Dennis Hopper doing his thing. Jane Holzer brushing her teeth. Lou Reed drinking a Coke. Edie Sedgwick being big-eyed and lovely. The live, original music performed on the stage below the screen was very engaging. The hall was pretty full, and the crowd seemed engrossed. On the row in front of me I thought I recognized Allison Skipper from the Ports Authority. And sure enough, after we exchanged Tweets about it, she was to share this account with me:

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL…SONGS FOR ANDY WARHOL’S SCREEN TESTS

Call Andy Warhol what you will – genius, whack job, or some combination of the two – the man certainly had an eye for pretty people.

In 13 Most Beautiful, indie rock/pop musicians Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips pair hypnotic musical compositions against a backdrop of black and white projections of some of Warhol’s famous (or infamous) screen subjects. The footage itself is grainy and subjects range from the familiar (Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Nico) to the obscure. You can imagine Warhol himself off-screen, directing the subject to spontaneously cry, drink a Coca-Cola, look melancholy, or choreographing a slow curl of cigarette smoke or light reflected from the lens of sunglasses. Wareham and Phillips give an understated performance, demonstrating a conscious effort to take a backseat to the screen stars. The music serves to connect the audience with the subjects, in doing so achieving what they wanted all along. We love them, we adore them, we are fascinated by them. They are all famous, for at least 13 songs.

Our arty barometer says: It’s Warhol. It’s weird. Embrace it – with or without some mind-altering substance.

While the screen is dark for the show’s run at Spoleto, a recorded version is available to Watch Instantly on Netflix. Happy viewing.

–Allison Skipper

I pretty much agree with that. But at first, I didn’t think I would be able to sit through it. The very first “test” consisted of the totally impassive, androgynous Richard Rheem doing nothing but staring at the camera for the full four minutes. The band had not yet come out, so I didn’t have them to watch (of course, when they did come out, the stage was dark enough that all you could see really clearly was the whiteness of Britta Phillips’ shapely legs below her very short black dress as she played guitar and sang, but that was quite enough to make up for anything lacking on the screen), and this period was extremely tedious.

But it got better. Lots better. We weren’t bored again. And the experience was greatly enhanced by Dean Wareham’s narration, telling us a bit about the subject we were to see or had just seen.

And we watched, and were fascinated, as master showman Warhol had intended us to be.

But as for the disturbing part… well, look no further than “Ingrid Superstar’s” obsessive fingering of her face (and giving us the finger, but we don’t mind, the poor girl) throughout the four minutes, in which we see her with her hair cut to look like Edie Sedgwick. Right after we were told she was a junkie. And a sometime prostitute and temp (I liked the way he added “temp” anticlimactically). She was to go out for cigarettes years later and not come back — presumed dead, but her body never found. Her dysfunction is on display on the screen, we stare at it almost as unblinking as Ann Sheridan. Her being so obviously f___ed up is a source of entertainment for us, or of aesthetic edification if we choose to dignify it that way.

Then there was the guy who that same summer, deep in his own problems, was taking a bath at a friend’s house when he heard his favorite piece of music playing in the next room, upon which he leapt from the bath, ran into the room and danced about naked to the music, then jumped out a window to his death.

And here we were, staring at him making self-conscious faces for the camera. And I thought about this. Eventually, I was struck that what we were doing, sitting there so patiently, was a form of worship. Modern-day secular worship of celebrity, of hipness, of the various forms physical beauty can take, and of tragedy and dysfunction. I got to thinking of the Catholic practice of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This is a practice I’ve never been able to get into — not that I’ve ever tried. As a post Vatican II convert, it is alien to me, and smacks of idolatry. I recently heard that Pope Benedict wants it to make a comeback, which does not surprise me. But hey, I didn’t vote for him.

But while Perpetual Adoration to me seems strange and even vaguely wrong, here we were staring, for a period lasting longer than a Mass, at all these seriously messed up, self-involved people. And I found it fascinating, even enjoyable. What does that say about me, about us? I decry Reality TV, but I got into this.

It suggests that my priorities are seriously out of whack.

But at least it helps me keep the part of my brain devoted to cultural trivia sharp and active. My wife relies on me for that.

Regarding the end of film

Saw the oddest thing the other day in a TV show. I was watching an episode, from last season, of “The Good Wife.” There was a scene in which a man who has just committed a murder grabs a camera — a nice-looking SLR — and strips the film out, to destroy evidence.

Wow. Who uses film anymore? No one on-screen explained it. (The character was wealthy and quirky, and perhaps that was supposed to imply an explanation; I don’t know.) Anyway, today Roger Ebert brings our attention to this:

At the turn of the 21st century, American shutterbugs were buying close to a billion rolls of film a year. This year, they might buy a mere 20 million, plus 31 million single-use cameras – the beach-resort staple vacationers turn to in a pinch, according to the Photo Marketing Association.

Eastman Kodak Co. marketed the world’s first flexible roll film in 1888. By 1999, more than 800 million rolls were sold in the United States alone. The next year marked the apex for combined U.S. sales of rolls of film (upward of 786 million) and single-use cameras (162 million).

Equally startling has been the plunge in film camera sales over the last decade. Domestic purchases have tumbled from 19.7 million cameras in 2000 to 280,000 in 2009 and might dip below 100,000 this year, says Yukihiko Matsumoto, the Jackson, Mich.-based association’s chief researcher.

For InfoTrends imaging analyst Ed Lee, film’s fade-out is moving sharply into focus: “If I extrapolate the trend for film sales and retirements of film cameras, it looks like film will be mostly gone in the U.S. by the end of the decade.”

I’m a traditionalist, and was slow to give up film myself. But eventually — in the middle of this past decade — affordable digital got good enough. And since about 2005, my excellent Nikon 8008 has sat abandoned in a drawer. Which is sad. It is SUCH a better camera than I use today (in fact, I seldom use my actual “camera” any more, because the iPhone is so good for most purposes), enabling me to control the image so much better. But who can deal with the hassle and expense of buying the film, paying to have it processed (or paying even MORE in chemicals and such to do it at home, which I used to do), and then store the film safely, etc. And now you can see whether you got the shot immediately — and take unlimited exposures…

But it’s still sad…

There are diehard holdouts, connoisseurs who insist that there’s a quality to film that is lost without it, but to my philistine eye, the difference has disappeared. Same thing with vinyl records: But since I got a USB turntable and started digitizing my vinyl a couple of years back, I’m become pretty acutely aware that sound files that started out digital sound better than ones that came from my records. To me. Which probably also indicates I’m a philistine.

Ah, progress…

Standing up for civilization, harrumph

Ever since the WSJ added a third daily opinion page (when they followed the rest of the industry and went to narrower pages to save newsprint), at about the same time we were cutting back on pages at The State in my desperate bid to get through bad times without cutting people (see how well that worked out?), I have…

Wait. I got lost in the multiple parentheticals… oh, yeah… ever since then, I’ve been hooked on the daily book review that runs all the way down the right-hand side of that page, Mondays through Fridays. For the first time in I don’t know when, I go into Barnes & Noble and am well familiar with pretty much everything on the “new arrival” shelves. And I’ve always got a list of books I want when Father’s Day, my birthday and Christmas roll around. To the point that I’m backed up on reading, and so intimidated by the stack of new books that I avoid the issue by rereading the Aubrey/Maturin series instead (I’m now on my fifth time through The Fortune of War).

But here’s another one I might have to request and add to the shelf, reviewed in today’s paper:

Among academics, the word “civilization” has long had a sinister ring to it, carrying associations of elitism and luxury. Worse, it is linked to imperialism, having provided Europeans with the justification for their far-flung conquests in centuries past—and, these days, for endless self-flagellation.

With “In Search of Civilization,” John Armstrong, the resident philosopher at the Melbourne Business School in Australia, sets out to restore the reputation of a word that, to him, represents something infinitely precious and life-sustaining, a source of strength and inspiration. The great civilizations, he says, provide “a community of maturity in which across the ages individuals try to help each other cope with the demands of mortality.”

As he makes clear, his purpose is not to provide a history of various civilizations or to update Samuel Huntington’s seminal 1996 book on the post-Cold War world, “The Clash of Civilizations,” though he cites Huntington’s conclusion that today’s real conflict is between civilization and barbarism. Mr. Armstrong wishes to convey what the idea means to him personally…

Indeed. Too bloody right. The real conflict — at home and abroad, is between civilization and barbarism. And it so often seems that civilization is losing, especially on the domestic front. And most especially in our politics, increasingly defined by mutually exclusive factions screaming pointlessly at each other.

I mean, what’s the world coming to when a guy who is supposedly all dedicated to having a civil blog starts using modifiers like “bloody?” I ask you…

Anyway, the book sounds interesting, and possibly edifying. I like the ending. After lamenting the state of the humanities in academia, the review concludes:

Our artists, too, have failed: The author sees Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and their ilk as representatives of a decadent cultural elite that insists on provocation and newness as the only criteria for judging art. “Mockery, irony and archness,” Mr. Armstrong says, “is not what we need.” What is needed is hope and confidence. The treasures are all there to be rediscovered, if only we would bother.

Indeed, again. And harrumph, say I.

Caricaturing Qaddafi. Or Qaricaturing Chaddafi… (how DO you spell “caricature,” anyway?)

Thought this was interesting over on the NYT site:

Before the Libyan opposition began retreatingbefore forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Finbarr O’Reilly of Reuters took account of the wealth of anti-Qaddafi graffiti and other graphic expressions of popular anger, which include some anti-Semitic sentiments. He wrote to Lens:

Like many dictators, Qaddafi carefully controlled how his image was used, often portraying himself as a deity or beloved leader. With the rebellion, however, freedom of expression in rebel-controlled areas means that ridicule has become a key weapon in the fight against the climate of fear that has long gripped the country. Anti-Qaddafi caricatures and graffiti have sprung up across cities like Benghazi, most of them portraying him in an unflattering light.

Those first few words give me pause… Before the Libyan opposition began retreating…

I wonder, was this little eruption of irreverence toward the Libyan dictator destined to be short-lived? If so, view the images while you can…

The images themselves, in some cases, betray an elaborate complexity one doesn’t often see in political caricature, at least not in this country. Listen to me, like I’m an art critic. They’re actually sort of hard to characterize. Sort of Ralph Steadman without the drugs, or something… or maybe with different drugs… See what you think.

Have some fun in the Sistine Chapel

The guy who did the ceiling.

Before I forget about it totally — go check out this cool interactive Vatican site that Burl brought our attention to in a comment the other day. You can spin it around 360 degrees in three dimensions, and do so all sorts of different ways by changing the mouse

setting down in the left-hand corner (where you’ll also find the buttons that let you zoom in and out).

Very cool. And much cheaper than a trip to Rome. I enjoyed it, anyway.

Michelangelo did a pretty awesome job. I wonder what he would have charged, say, to do my TV room?

Green Zone: good flick, if you take it for what it is

Just in case I haven’t provoked my anti-war friends on the blog enough lately…

I saw”Green Zone” over the weekend, and it was a corking good thriller. Just as long as you don’t take the premise seriously.

No, wait — I need to refine that: As long as you don’t take too seriously the one spectacular conceit that does the most to drive the action, which is this… There’s this Iraqi general who is sort of the movie’s Great White Whale, only there’s no one Ahab — EVERY character is frantically pursuing him, with each character having a different motive for doing so. Matt Damon’s character wants him because he thinks he knows where the WMD are, and it’s his (Damon’s) job to find them  (he plays a chief warrant officer named Miller). An idealistic one-legged Iraqi (his other leg is in Iran) wants to find him because of what the general and his ilk have done to his country. A CIA officer wants to find him because he believes the Army is the key to preventing the insurgency. A Wall Street Journal reporter wants to find him because he is the mysterious source Magellan that a Pentagon official has told her has provided intel on where the WMD are — reports that she has passed on uncritically in the paper. The Pentagon official, played by Greg Kinnear, want to find him and kill him before he tells everybody the truth.

What truth? This “truth” (SPOILER ALERT!): We eventually learn that before the war, Poundstone (Kinnear’s character) had secretly met the general in Jordan, where the general told him there WERE no WMD. And Poundstone returned to Washington and told everyone that the general had told him the exact opposite, even telling him where to find the weapons. So we invade Iraq, and Miller’s unit risks their lives going to these supposed WMD sites and coming up empty.

This makes Poundstone the Great White Whale of all those antiwar folks who believe “Bush lied” — the perfect representation of the supposed great misrepresentation. He, Poundstone, KNEW the truth and deliberately lied. No mere wishful thinking. No making a mistake (the mistake made by pretty much the whole world — the debate about the invasion wasn’t over whether the WMD existed, but about the best way to get them out of Saddam’s hands). A big, fat, montrous lie.

Which, of course, didn’t happen. If something like that had happened, someone of the millions of people who would love to find out such a thing and tell the world — from the antiwar Democrats who now control our government and have access to all its secrets, to Julian Assange, to the director of this movie — would have let us know by now.

So…  the bad news is that people will see Green Zone and think that such a thing happened. And that’s bad even if you are deeply opposed to the war and want to avoid such conflicts in the future, because it keeps you from confronting whatever REALLY happened and realistically assessing how to keep it from happening again. Politically attractive fantasies are just dangerous all around — as the antiwar folks would no doubt say about the delusion that there were WMD.

The good news, though, is that it’s a great action flick. And the other questions the movie raises — including some serious ones that deserve answers — are intelligently, provocatively and even realistically portrayed. Where the movie falls down is wherever it touches upon the Poundstone character. And I mean this in an artistic, esthetic sense as well as political: Kinnear’s character is cartoonish, the portayal more suited to low farce than to serious drama. When he’s on screen, the quality drops. NO ONE would believe this guy; if he told you your mother loved you, you’d say “What’s his angle?” He’s just ridiculous. He might as well be wearing a black cape, stovepipe hat and Snidely Whiplash mustache.

Everybody else is credible; everybody else feels real. While comparisons to the Bourne movies are inevitable (with Damon and the director of the second and third films in that trilogy on board), this film is far more believable, in that there are no superheroes like Bourne in it. (The flaw that it shares with those films is the aforementioned fantasy plotline about a vicious government conspiracy — a great plot device, as long as you don’t start thinking stuff like that really happens.) In fact, the closest thing to Jason Bourne is the Special Forces guy who promptly beats the stuffing out of Damon’s character when he fails to give him what he’s after. And that violence is realistic, not balletic.

Other things that are good, and deserve more explication, are such things as the issue of whether we should have worked with the Iraqi army rather than banishing it into insurgency. If the director wanted a political point, that would have been an excellent one to stick with.

Perhaps the most provocative questions raised surround the frantically earnest one-legged Iraqi, “Freddy.” He tries to approach harried soldiers to give them critical information, and gets knocked around for his trouble. He is forced into suicidally dangerous (for a guy who has to live there) situations in order to help the Americans. In the end, (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT) he raises the film’s most provocative question when he takes matters into his own hands with deadly force. Damon’s character, persuaded by the CIA that the general must be found so we can work with him to prevent the insurgency (I REALLY MEAN IT — MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!), manages to get to him before the Special Forces guys who have been sent to kill him. You think Damon has won the day. Then out of nowhere comes Freddy with a pistol and blows the general away. Freddy then says to Damon — and I don’t have it in front of me, so this might not be verbatim — “YOU don’t get to decide what happens here.”

If you want a good antiwar message, one you can chew over productively, that would be it. But the whole Poundstone thing is offensively ridiculous. You want to talk about a Big Lie, suggesting that anything that clearly duplicitous happened qualifies.

That’s particularly insidious since we are told this story is based in nonfiction. Oh, and if you don’t want to believe me, believe Richard “Monty” Gonzales, upon whom Damon’s character Miller was based, and who acted as technical adviser on the film:

“Green Zone” contains several messages, an unavoidable consequence of making a film of this genre. Critical blunders preceding the invasion, chiefly the bad intelligence that led us to war, made certain that no quick victory would be achieved and certainly undermined U.S. credibility around the world. Later, the U.S. directed a de-Bathification policy which disenfranchised a massive section of the population and helped fuel an insurgency. Consequently, any hope of victory in Iraq was made vastly more complicated and costly — as the last 7 years have proven. I believe this is true.
.
However, “Green Zone” also suggests that we were lied into the war in Iraq; a subtext that is unfortunately being twisted by some in order to give credence to a bumper sticker I deplore, the mantra which has become the left’s version of the war — which is well on its way to becoming the Iraq conflict’s official history — “They lied; people died.” As intriguing as that idea may be, it’s simply not true.

A graphic blast or two from the past

Something that Phillip said with regard to his candidates having been shut out Tuesday…

Oh well, life as a liberal in the south. Well, to modify the bumper sticker popular in the mid 2000’s…”H: Still the President.”

… reminded me of a fun little piece of art I created for my old blog, way back when. Remember this?

OK, so maybe you preferred to forget. Sorry.

Oh, and for you Democrats who prefer a different look on your car windows, there was this as well:

This reminds me… I really need to get some merchandising going — sometime after I get around to selling some ads.

Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty

Wordle: Brad Warthen

Like a captain desperately busy clawing his ship away from th’ impervious horrors of a lee shore, I am busy today.

Later, I’ll try to post about last night’s debate.

In the meantime, I share this fun ditty that Doug Ross shared with me. It’s a graphic representation of this recent post, I think. Bet you didn’t know I was so artistic, huh?

And no, I can’t run it bigger here without it getting all blurry. You just have to click on it to see it full-size.

War and Peace in the hymnal on Sunday

Remembering “War is Hell” Sherman reminded me of our processional hymn at Mass yesterday. For the first time since I was a kid, I think, I found myself singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

It sort of snuck up on me. I had been scheduled as “alternate reader” — in English this time, so I hadn’t studied in advance (I always have to practice, to warm up the right muscles, before reading in Spanish) — but when I arrived, all the slots were filled on the sign-up sheet, so I went to take a seat with my wife for a change. Then, just as the processional hymn was starting up, Judy leaned in to our pew to hurriedly whisper that I was needed, after all. Apparently, someone had messed up and signed in on the wrong spaces at a previous mass.

So I moved quickly to line up for the procession, Debra handed me a hymnal/lectionary, I asked “Which reading?,” was told it was the first (Good! I love doing the first; not so much the second), and was flipping through the book to check it out when I was asked if I could “double up” and serve as a Eucharistic minister, too, and I said sure, just as we stepped off to start the procession.

So it was not until then, as the congregation was starting the second verse, that I realized we were singing “The Battle Hymn.” Not knowing that verse, I wisely suppressed the urge to sing the first lyrics that came to mind:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers; we have broken ev’ry rule…
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

Finding the right page, I then sang with the others as we walked up the aisle:

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

And the thought occurred to me, This is what it feels like to be a Yankee, self-righteously celebrating victory over us Southerners… (And no, we didn’t sing it in a medley with “Dixie,” Elvis-style.)

You may have noticed, church gives me a lot to think about on Sundays, but it’s not always what I should be thinking about. But I try.

I focused a little better when I went to the pulpit to do the first reading, which began:

The LORD said to Moses,
“Go down at once to your people,
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt,
for they have become depraved.
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them,
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it,
sacrificing to it and crying out,
‘This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’
“I see how stiff-necked this people is, ” continued the LORD to Moses.
Let me alone, then,
that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.
Then I will make of you a great nation.”…

You see why I like the first reading? Unlike all that theological abstraction you get with Paul’s letters (which is what you get on the second reading most of the year), there’s drama in the Old Testament. The readings we use from it are never boring or tedious. Lots of Sturm und Drang. You can really get into it reading it aloud. I especially like the flair in “Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them,” like the Lord’s just beside himself, indulging in such a Shakespearean rhetorical flourish (as in, “Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.“)

I found myself thinking how like a divine editorial writer the Lord sounded there. I could imagine him haranguing SC voters for being a depraved, stiff-necked people for electing Mark Sanford twice, or nominating Alvin Greene. As I walked back to my pew, I started imagining how I could rewrite that as a political satire on the blog, but decided that would be just a little too sacrilegious.

So did I ever set aside idle digression and get into a proper, worshipful state of mind during that hour?

Actually, I did. I found myself blessed by one of those rare moments of transcendence that you always hope for, whatever church or other house of worship you attend.

I don’t know if it was the way our music director had arranged it, or the voices of the choir (only about five people at that Mass) lifting above the congregation’s, or the brilliance of Jean Sibelius, or the coffee I had for breakfast kicking in. But as we sang it yesterday, Finlandia sounded like the most beautiful hymn I had ever heard. It may sound trite, like something an envious Salieri would say about Mozart’s work, but it was as though the voice of God himself were leading us.

And as we sang, I realized the lyrics were every bit as strikingly beautiful as the music. Particularly the second verse, which was the most poetic evocation of the universal longing for peace that I have ever heard:

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, oh God of all the nations;
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

Best line of all: But other lands have sunlight too and clover…

After Mass, I said something about it, and my wife said the same. Of course, she’s not a war-monger like me — quite the opposite, in fact. So it’s not as surprising that she liked it. But it’s a testament to the beauty of the moment that I did, too. Very much.

The original Finnish lyrics, by the way, are more run-of-the-mill nationalistic stuff. Whoever wrote the English version above (and there are many songs sung to this tune), was, I believe, divinely inspired.

Burl’s tribute to Harvey Pekar

Burl Burlingame posted this over on his blog. It’s something he did about Harvey Pekar and “American Splendor” at about the time the movie with Paul Giamatti came out. Way back

Bet you didn’t know Burl was this multi-talented. Well, he always has been. Back in high school, he published his own underground newspaper which included his own cartoons. And you should hear him play harmonica.

Anyway, I dug the Pekar piece, and thought y’all might, too.

Where’s Leighton? There he is!

Did you ever see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”? If you haven’t, you should — it’s a classic. It’s also wonderfully goofy after all these years to see the ’60s notion of a hip young professional photographer in swingin’ mod London. See him drive around in his convertible sports car while talking on his extremely cumbersome car phone! Oooohhh. (David Hemmings’ character was one of the influences on Mike Myers in his creation of Austin Powers.)

Anyway, to summarize the plot (spoiler alert!), basically it’s about a photographer who takes some perfectly innocent pictures in the park, but when he processes the film and makes a print, he notices something odd in the background, in the bushes about 50 years behind his subject. So he blows it up. Then he shoots the print, processes that film, then blows it up again. And again. (Thereby severely straining the capabilities of 35 mm film, but hey, he’s a professional.) I won’t tell you what he saw, because I don’t want to spoil the plot entirely.

To my point: I often have that experience of finding unexpected things going on in my photos. It happened when I used film because film is a big mystery until it’s processed. Shoot a crowd or action when there’s too little time for your brain to take it all in, and the film will reveal secrets to you after it’s processed. For instance, take a look at the photo at right, which I shot on film at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. (This was a time of technological transition. I was shooting rolls of film at the convention, then taking the rolls to a Duane Reade to be processed and put on a CD for me.) I had just asked Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog to pose for a portrait (there I go name-dropping again), but only later did I notice Larry King in the background. At least, I think it’s Larry King. The grain and focus are such that I can’t be entirely sure, just as the character in “Blow-Up” had trouble being certain about what he was seeing.

Today, this happens with digital photography for a different reason. Sure, you can immediately look at what you just shot. But you can’t see detail unless you zoom in, and besides, who has time to stop and look at individual exposures? I certainly don’t, because I am shooting so many. I used to go through a roll of film in minutes, but that’s nothing to the  number I shoot now. Film at least imposed some fire discipline; there was always a sense that your film was finite. But with an 8-gig card in my camera, discipline is gone entirely.

So it could be hours, days, or longer before I go through the images on my laptop and see what I have. And I find little surprises.

For instance, at the Gamecocks’ victory parade Friday, I happened to turn and take a picture of the two ADCO interns standing behind me in the crowd. I needed a picture of them to post on ADCO’s site, and this was an opportunity.

Only later did I spot our erstwhile candidate for attorney general, Leighton Lord, behind them. At right you can see what the picture would have looked like when Hemmings’ got through blowing it up (and yes, I created the blur, grain, and b/w effect in PhotoShop — the original was much sharper, even blown up).

And when I saw him, the irony struck me: Alan Wilson was much in evidence at the center of attention. He and his Dad had a regular convoy of vehicles in the parade — at least three, with kids passing out campaign stickers left and right. (I didn’t get a picture of Alan — I was too busy shooting the cars, especially the beautiful red T-bird — but here’s one of him from another parade over the weekend. Those Wilsons love a parade.)

But there is Leighton Lord, standing alone, looking away. Ironic. Poignant, one might say. Except that the camera doesn’t tell all. Actually, he was talking to his father-in-law Gayle Averyt, whom I spotted next to him in yet another exposure.

I’ve got so many thousands of exposures like this of crowds, sometimes with famous people here and there in them. Maybe I should do a “children’s” book for grownups, only instead of “Where’s Waldo?” it would be “Where’s Rudy Giuliani? Where’s George Bush? Where’s Bill Clinton?” and so forth. Think it would sell?

Rep. Smith: Democrats WILL vote to override all 107 Sanford vetoes

Not as a bloc, mind you, because as you know, Democrats don’t do blocs. But according to Rep. James Smith, who called me a few minutes ago to set me straight (thereby saving me a call to him or Minority Leader Harry Ott), it will be the official House Democratic leadership position that ALL of Gov. Sanford’s 107 vetoes should be overridden. And he hopes they will be — but of course that will depend on the Republicans doing their duty by South Carolina — which James suggests the Tea Party has made GOP lawmakers scared to do.

James called me because a lot of y’all were calling him, egged on to do so by this blog (in the absence of really helpful coverage of the

Rep. James Smith

budget vetoes by the MSM). I urge y’all to keep on calling your lawmakers, Democrats and especially Republicans (since there’s more of them) to tell them what you think. And if you’ve forgotten who your lawmakers are, or how to contact them, here are instructions on enabling yourself.

If you’ll recall, House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham told me over the weekend (“Lawmakers will uphold most of Sanford’s vetoes“), the governor is likely to prevail on most of his vetoes of funding for such things as public libraries, the State Museum, technical colleges, SC ETV, the Arts Commission and the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in part because Democrats can’t be relied upon to vote to override. He based this on the lack of support he got from Democrats on some key votes on the budget.

James says that was then, this is now.

Indeed Democrats were divided on some things such as court fees. But that has nothing to do with these budget vetoes. If the Legislature fails to override, says the former Minority Leader, it won’t be because of lack of Democratic votes. And of the governor’s 107 vetoes, “I have yet to find one that we would not override.”

And while Kenny is worried, James still hopes “to be successful in overriding them.”

If the Democrats can indeed stick together tomorrow, that means the fate of these vetoes will lie in the bitter rivalry between regular mainstream Republicans and the Sanford fringe — a fringe that was emboldened by Nikki Haley’s near victory in the primary last Tuesday. All Sanford and Haley and their allies need is to drum up a third of either the House or the Senate for Mark Sanford to have his biggest victory in his eight sorry years in office.

So once again, folks, rather than merely refer you to a link, here are the instructions on how to contact your legislator, as we used to say at the bottoms of editorials:

To find out who your legislators are and how to contact them, go to www.scstatehouse.net and select “Find your legislator” on the left. Or call Project Vote Smart at 1-888-VOTE-SMART.

Ya want food pictures? Here ya go…

food1

OK, I can do food pictures, if you want them.

Actually, truth be told, I frequently take pictures of my food in restaurants when I’m alone and the light hits things in an interesting way. Not that they’re nice enough for commercial work, but it passes the time. And not just food — interesting architecture, a plaque I didn’t want to bother copying, the lady at the next table talking about her colonoscopy, the person of indeterminate gender in the mullet. I just don’t often post them here.

Maybe I should.

Anyway, above you see my first helping yesterday.

And below, you see something that gives the lie to what I said a day or two back. Remember I said I had baked myself a special cake because I wouldn’t be able to have any of the other desserts? Well, I was wrong. Here’s my dessert plate, with a piece of my cake, a slice each of the special banana and pumpkin breads my sister-in-law made specially for me, and the apple-cranberry crunch we always have, with a dollop of Tofutti.

I couldn’t finish it. All my life, I’ve seen people do dessert plates like that. I don’t see how they handle that much sugar.

But I must say thanks again to my sister-in-law. The breads were delicious. Especially the pumpkin.

food2