major league art news

Some of the most important work of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, better known to us today as Picasso, is coming to the Seattle Art Museum.

Picasso's is the most famous name in 20th-century art, and whether one celebrates or bemoans his influence on modern painting, there's no denying either his importance as an innovator nor his universal influence.

He first visited Paris, appropriately enough, in 1900, and under the Parisian influence his painting began to take on the pictorial characteristics most associated with the name Picasso. The general public often didn't know what to make of him at first, but nobody familiar with his abilities questioned his right to make portraits in which both a woman's eyes and both her nostrils were on the same side of her face, for Picasso had already demonstrated a mastery of conventional representational painting, during his youthful "blue" and "rose" periods in the late 19th century.

This 1941 portrait enshrines of one of his many lovers and is entitled "Dora Maar au chat." The cat is on the back of the chair, by the way, not in her lap as you might get fooled into thinking at first. Picasso was like that.

This exhibit is a very big deal. It might be the most important one-man show since the ground-breaking Van Gogh traveling exhibit of forty years ago. That one set attendance records wherever it went, and this one might do the same.

The Seattle Times announced today that ""Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris," an exhibit of more than 150 works of art, from paintings and sculptures to prints, drawings and photographs, opens at SAM on Oct. 8 and will be on display through Jan. 9, 2011."

The works will be drawn from nearly every phase of the artist's long career, and are sampled from every decade of the 20th century up until the early 70's when Picasso died.

"SAM director Derrick Cartwright calls this 'a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a large public to view these important objects in Seattle.'"

The Musée National will close for renovations in August. It has room to show only a limited number of its 5,000 or so Picasso works at any one time. The show slated for Seattle in October is already circulating through European museums, and is currently in Helsinki. It will visit Moscow next, then, after leaving Seattle will probably visit two additional American cities.

earnest bulls

Joe Blough, age 43, lives in Virginia.

There is no Mr. Early Bulls, disappointingly. However there are a couple of Earnest Bulls, one in Pennsylvania and another in El Cajon, California.

Abraham Goo, age 77, lives in Kent, WA, and is somewhat famous around here. He graduated from a local high school and went on to become president of Boeing Advanced Systems. His career at the airplane manufacturer spanned 38 years.

Joseph Stalin, age unknown, lives in Elmhurst, Illinois.

Bolivar Shagnasty, now in his sixties, has lived in California, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Washington state. He gets around.

There are several gentlemen named Charles Horse and they're spread all over the map.

Lovely Forest is in her forties and lives in Chicago.

There is no such person as Gregory Ass. I checked. However a young man named Gregory Van Ass resides in Belgium.

Last of all, there are 10 people living in the U.S. who share the name Fannie Sweat.

god guts

I first saw this slogan or one very similar to it on a bumper sticker in the mid-70's. So it's got some staying power.

Assuming that the omission of punctuation is intentional (and it's always omitted), the assertion is that there are two things which made America great:

1) God guts, and

2) Guns.

The guns I can understand; the God guts, not so much. I didn't even know that God has guts, and if she does, whether they're similar to human guts -- you know, small intestine, large intestine, etc.

I generally leave these cosmic matters up to Dr. Jung.

hope

Hope is the Thing with Feathers
--Emily Dickinson

I know a young individual who has decided to spend the rest of his life building earthen houses -- cob houses as they're called. These beautiful, sculptural dwellings, which are outlets for artistic expression as much as places to live in, are remarkably energy efficient. When combined with an energy source such as solar panels, they can provide a self-sustaining and endlessly renewable mode of living.

The Uncompromising Ecological Architecture movement is a completely independent development, made from the ground up by committed individuals, and unaffiliated with any government program or large-scale private enterprise. Like the buildings they produce, this movement of independent and self-actualized individuals sprang from the earth itself.

I also know a person who owns a piece of land in one of the Southwestern states and has learned over the years how to produce prodigious amounts of organic food and herbs in raised beds, which are easier to keep free of weeds and pests than a ground-level garden plot. Her objective is to "get off the grid," and like the young architect she has acquired her skills without any help at all from "the system." What's most significant about both these individuals is that they have bypassed the larger political, economic, and cultural realities of American society, and now look for both sustenance and meaning through a return to the earth itself.

There is an inherent wisdom in this approach, for revolution, as one of these people recently said to me, "is within," and the emphasis here is on each individual. For with the collapse of any possibility of political remedies to address the country's problems, we have of late become an "every person for himself" type of society. Each of us must save himself or herself, since neither the political system, nor "the company," nor the union is able to help us. And maybe out of this movement of individuals to salvage their lives, a larger social movement may grow.

The moribund political system and how it got that way are analyzed masterfully today by Alexander Cockburn in a remarkably comprehensive post at his blog Counterpunch. Cockburn says:

(T)he Bush years saw near extinction of the left’s capacity for realistic political analysis. Hysteria about the consummate evil of Bush and Cheney led to a vehement insistence that any Democrat would be qualitatively better, whether it be Hillary Clinton, carrying all the neoliberal baggage of the Nineties, or Barack Obama, whose prime money source was Wall Street. Of course black America – historically the most radical of all the Democratic Party’s constituencies, was almost unanimously behind Obama and will remain loyal to the end. Having easily beguiled the left in the important primary campaigns of 2008, essentially by dint of skin tone and uplift, Obama stepped into the Oval Office confident that the left would present no danger as he methodically pursues roughly the same agenda as Bush, catering to the requirements of the banks, the arms companies and the national security establishment in Washington, most notably the Israel lobby.

As Obama ramps up troop presence in Afghanistan, there is still no anti war movement, such as there was in 2002-4 during Bush’s attack on Iraq. The labor unions have been shrinking relentlessly in numbers and clout. Labor’s last major victory was the UPS strike in 1997. Its footsoldiers and its money are still vital for Democratic candidates – but corporate America holds the decisive purse-strings, from which a U.S. Supreme Court decision on January 21 has now removed almost all restraints.

Almost needless to say, such an incompetently administered, corrupted, and corporatized system would be helpless to solve any of our real problems, even if any of its functionaries had an interest in doing so. And unless we forget what our real problems are, Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times this morning conveniently reminds us:

We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good. The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.

We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.

Speaking at a conference here on Wednesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said that if we don’t act quickly in developing long-term solutions to these and other problems, the United States will be a second-rate economic power by the end of this decade. A failure to act boldly, he said, will result in the U.S. becoming “a cooked goose.”

(snip)

The conference was titled, “The Next American Economy: Transforming Energy and Infrastructure Investment.” It was put together by the Brookings Institution and Lazard, the investment banking advisory firm.

When Governor Rendell addressed the conference on Wednesday, he used words like “stunning” and “unbelievable” to describe what has happened to the nation’s infrastructure. His words echoed the warnings we’ve been hearing for years from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which tells us: “The broken water mains, gridlocked streets, crumbling dams and levees, and delayed flights that come from failing infrastructure have a negative impact on the checkbook and on the quality of life of each and every American.”

Herbert also mentions a remark by one of the conference's participants that the U.S. might have to get used to having an economy "that's not number one," and would be "More like Germany's." But I've been to Germany, and life there is pretty good, if somewhat overcrowded. I foresee the U.S. economy in just a short time becoming more like Mexico's.

I suppose that's not all bad. Some individuals in Mexico live very well, although most don't, and I'm convinced anyone can live well who lives within his or her means, learns to shepherd whatever resources come to hand, and relies on the earth as the source of all things of fundamental value. There is hope for some of us. For the rest there's CNN, Barack Obama, and frozen pizza.

time out

This blog is taking a time out until such time as there is at least a little bit of news that isn't depressing, or disgusting, or annoying, or baffling in its stupidity.

I've been looking all over for a topic, and I've got nothing.

We may be gone for a while.

On the other hand, we may be back tomorrow.

Who am I kidding? There's only one of me.

--Dave

turtles of mass destruction from outer space

Iran has launched a rocket into space carrying a cargo of living creatures -- a rat, two turtles, and some worms.

The Iranian Aerospace Organization said live video transmission from the latest launching would “enable further studies on the biological capsule” that was carrying the rat, turtles and worms, Press TV reported.

The White House believes Ahmedinejad is out to provoke us with his space turtles.

"A launch like that is obviously a provocative act," White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters.

"But the president believes that it is not too late for Iran to do the right thing -- come to the table with the international community and live up to its international obligations."

Iran has an international obligation not to threaten the U.S. and Israel with turtles of mass destruction (TMD).

In the meantime, some of the more colorfully insane American yahoos, such as Prof. Daniel Pipes of the Harvard University history dept., are pushing for us to start bombing Iran right now. James Wolcott reports:

In a desperate attempt to draw attention to himself and re-energize his enfeebled persona, Daniel Pipes, whose Mephistophelean beard burns with the zeal of a thousand evil suns, proposes that Obama perk up his presidency by bombing Iran (h/t wonkette). Sure, people would die and a military strike would set off convulsions in the region, but it would "make the netroots squeal...and conservatives swoon," and that's really what it's all about, from the beard's perspective.

No wonder Harvard's endowments have dropped off the past few years.

Space Turtle painting by Ali Spagnola.

kickin' the gong around

This past October I had occasion to mention one of Cab Calloway's doper songs from the 30's on this space, and recently I ran across another one quite by accident, a totally off-the-hook virtuoso performance which showcases an omnivorously talented young man at the zenith of his creative powers.

Cab did a number of drug songs, and was doing them in the days before there was a Drug Enforcement Administration, and before most local police departments had separate narcotics divisions. The titles included "The Funny Reefer Man," "Viper's Drag," and this one, "Kickin' the Gong Around," during which Cab daintily pantomimes a cokehead sniffing a line off his wrist.

It's more or less what you'd expect from a guy who called his orchestra "The Harlemaniacs."

Besides being a very bad man, Calloway was enormously talented. He wrote the music, sang the songs, scatted and jived, danced, and did it all extremely well. He must have cut his performer's teeth during the vaudeville days, when musicians and hoofers learned to do as many different kinds of stage routines as they could, as a survival tactic. Blacks had their own, segregated version of vaudeville -- the "chitlin' circuit."

As a performer, I find that Calloway has no equal today. His singing is characterized by an unerring sense of intonation -- he hit every note squarely on its head -- combined with flawless enunciation, so the listener easily understands every word. He moved and danced like a rubbery acrobat, and combined all these elements in a casual and offhand way that makes his performance look easy and natural. In addition, there is a subversive element to this music which makes it attractively dangerous.

And it wasn't easy. Doing what he did has to have taken many hours of rehearsal and practice, and a lot of dedication.

My appreciation of antique music goes way beyond nostalgia; nearly all the greatest American performances originated in a time before I was born. Today's performers are not capable of such feats, not because they're less talented than their cultural ancestors, but because the culture itself has become impoverished.