Have you ever found yourself falling for Ms/Mr Wrong, but you know you're going to do it anyway? You just know it's going to turn out all wrong for you. That's a tell-tail sign: envisioning an end. When you fall for Mr/Ms Right, you don't envision an end.
It looks to me like we are collectively falling for Black Friday and it isn't going to be easy to break it off. It's going to end badly, but we seem to want it so much. Why? Possibly because every media hack in the country, and there are a lot of them, are working us into a frenzy. These might be the same folks who told us about those great mortgages with near-zero interest, no down payments and no silly job requirement.
Have you asked yourselves how Black Friday got here? We awoke one morning still feeling full from a Thanksgiving dinner and with a mild headache to find Black Friday hanging in the sky like one of those huge Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons in the form of a vulture. " This is not my holiday!" the Talking Heads might have sung.
Suddenly, whenever you turn on a TV (usually a mistake anyway) and the car radio, some nitwit is ranting about bargains all over town. In Seattle,which I visited this past Thanksgiving, there was a radio show devoted to Black Friday shopping tips and a Shopping Parade downtown. Disclosure: yes, I did shop. I bought a Christmas present for my wife at Revival, Leah Steen's fine shop in the Capitol Hill district, $109, and I would do it all over again.
Black Friday. Does that sound like a day on which something really good is going to happen? What is this thing about colors all of a sudden, like Red and Blue states. I still can't remember which ones are Democratic and which Republican, although TV Talking /heads and newspapers take it for granted that we all know. Who thinks up these things?
Black Friday. How could we be so stupid?
Retailers and their media agents seem to think that spending money we have and don't have is great for the economy. Maybe that's why retailing and media stocks are not such great buys: talk about dumb. An American spending $500 in a discount or department store is probably borrowing at least half of that and perhaps paying as much as 29.9% interest. This is the newest rate banks have invented for us after borrowing untold billions from us in order to "survive." Even these ingrates can't bring themselves to charge 30% interest. Yet.
That $500 bucks may go to protecting some $15 per hour jobs with few or no "benefits." Some of it may even go to places where the retailers are HQ'd, and some more may indeed find its way into the media itself in the form of advertising. But, let's get serious, if you're buying a lot of stuff, much of this dough is going to find its way to China. China is then going to lend it to our "government," so that they can spend way more than $500. Everyday is Black Friday for Congress and State Legislatures.
China. A person making $20 a day in China probably saves $10. A person making $20 an hour in the US, spends $28 per hour. Congress' new universal national healthcare is mostly made in China, since they will lend us the dough. I'm beginning to think that Black Friday is a Chinese idea. I'm going to check my Little Red Book.
Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday. We don't need to get in a frenzy about buying a book our aunt won't read or having to return another tie your sister gave you. We don't feel compelled to become interior horticulturalists or exterior expert electricians. We gather together to share a meal and accomplish the near impossible task of making a turkey taste delicious instead of like moistened copy-paper. Thanksgiving comes with a bonus for many of us: a Friday off to do anything we want. Why would we want to ruin such a good thing in favor of Black Friday?
If we have to have back-to-back national holidays in November, why can't we have Savings Day. Americans would be much better off if they saved that $500 or the $250 of it that they actually have. That is the only way to improve the economy, Pilgrims: the only way to cut debt, invest in decent schools, in other words, keep having something to celebrate on Thanksgiving.
Black Friday looks a lot to me like ThanksTaking and we should break off the relationship right now.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Mulligan
A few years ago, I became somewhat befuddled about what to do with my life. Okay, I was completely befuddled. The cause, as I put it at the time, was being downsized from my job, displaced, severanced and bridged to an early retirement. My fifteen-year-old daughter put it this way: fired, broke, preparing to sell the house and move away. Bim, Bam, Boom. Don't you hate it when your kids get it exactly right?
Anyway, befuddled, betwixt and between, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation, I created two new holidays. One, which I called CentJours, was a celebration of the year's first 100 days on April 10 (4/9 in leap years), on which you spent $100 any way you chose as long as it was fun. The other holiday was Arrival Day, any day in the week before Thanksgiving. On this day, the celebrant takes a roundtrip on the Staten Island Ferry, across New York Harbor going out, and, more importantly, coming back. Coming back past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, you imagine yourself as an actual immigrant, with all of your belongings in a bag and your life savings, maybe $50 or $1,000, in your pocket. You have no job, no office, no place to live, no relatives, only a dream. You alight from the ferry in lower Manhattan. What do you do?
That was the object of the holiday or exercise, if you will. You wanted to put yourself in the immigrant's shoes, not for politically correct feel-good reasons, but as if to say: okay, here I am, where do I go, what do I do, where do I stay? How do I build a life? A good thing to do on Arrival Day, as I did earlier this week, might be to walk for a while, up past the WTC site, where you notice thousands of busy people walking, but there is not a sound. Eight years have passed since the buildings came roaring down and our world as we knew it also came tumbling down, but we still treat this site with a reverence that is so profound it goes almost unnoticed. Some people want to build it up, but I would simply leave it as a grassy shrine, an outdoor secular cathedral.
When you lose your job and income at fifty-eight and a half in our culture, even if you are relatively wealthy, you have a problem. At least you have a problem if you've been paying attention to your life and realize that what we generally call "retirement" should be an accounting term, not a life term. You never want your life to become a noun; you always want it to be a verb. This is why I like celebrating Arrival Day. In my case I can keep walking north past the place where my grandfather, Adam Welstead, was born at the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets in what we now call the West Village.
This was a guy, who got through the eighth grade, got a Tammany Hall job in the tax office and commuted from Matawan, NJ to Long Island City. Eventually, Mayor LaGuardia appointed him Tax Commissioner in Queens, he bought a house in Forest Hills, thrived during the Depression and entered the upper-middle class. But that's someone else's story and the object of the exercise is to ask,what's my or your story going to be?
Arrival Day. A good way to clear your head of all the ideas, schemes, plans, dead-ends, worries of the year gone past. Arrival Day: a big do-ever, a Life Mulligan.
But, you might ask, who cares? Why bring this up, when most of us have jobs, look forward to retiring and haven't had many dead ends this past year? Good points.
I bring it up because this year, when I asked myself what I would do in order to forge a new living in this new world I imagined for myself and family, writing a blog did NOT jump to the top of the list, at least not this one. And so, this is my long way of saying that thirdgarage is going on hiatus, while I focus creative attention on more promising ventures for the next year.
From time to time I may be tempted to update you or to entertain you, and there's always the chance that this blog will morph into another one. But I doubt it. The world will progress very nicely without my two-cents worth of opinion. We already have too many opinions. I'm going to use my Mulligan to be quiet for a while, then I'm going to work on something longer, more meaningful, more helpful.
Happy Arrival Day. Happy Thanksgiving.
Yours,
Mulligan
Anyway, befuddled, betwixt and between, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation, I created two new holidays. One, which I called CentJours, was a celebration of the year's first 100 days on April 10 (4/9 in leap years), on which you spent $100 any way you chose as long as it was fun. The other holiday was Arrival Day, any day in the week before Thanksgiving. On this day, the celebrant takes a roundtrip on the Staten Island Ferry, across New York Harbor going out, and, more importantly, coming back. Coming back past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, you imagine yourself as an actual immigrant, with all of your belongings in a bag and your life savings, maybe $50 or $1,000, in your pocket. You have no job, no office, no place to live, no relatives, only a dream. You alight from the ferry in lower Manhattan. What do you do?
That was the object of the holiday or exercise, if you will. You wanted to put yourself in the immigrant's shoes, not for politically correct feel-good reasons, but as if to say: okay, here I am, where do I go, what do I do, where do I stay? How do I build a life? A good thing to do on Arrival Day, as I did earlier this week, might be to walk for a while, up past the WTC site, where you notice thousands of busy people walking, but there is not a sound. Eight years have passed since the buildings came roaring down and our world as we knew it also came tumbling down, but we still treat this site with a reverence that is so profound it goes almost unnoticed. Some people want to build it up, but I would simply leave it as a grassy shrine, an outdoor secular cathedral.
When you lose your job and income at fifty-eight and a half in our culture, even if you are relatively wealthy, you have a problem. At least you have a problem if you've been paying attention to your life and realize that what we generally call "retirement" should be an accounting term, not a life term. You never want your life to become a noun; you always want it to be a verb. This is why I like celebrating Arrival Day. In my case I can keep walking north past the place where my grandfather, Adam Welstead, was born at the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets in what we now call the West Village.
This was a guy, who got through the eighth grade, got a Tammany Hall job in the tax office and commuted from Matawan, NJ to Long Island City. Eventually, Mayor LaGuardia appointed him Tax Commissioner in Queens, he bought a house in Forest Hills, thrived during the Depression and entered the upper-middle class. But that's someone else's story and the object of the exercise is to ask,what's my or your story going to be?
Arrival Day. A good way to clear your head of all the ideas, schemes, plans, dead-ends, worries of the year gone past. Arrival Day: a big do-ever, a Life Mulligan.
But, you might ask, who cares? Why bring this up, when most of us have jobs, look forward to retiring and haven't had many dead ends this past year? Good points.
I bring it up because this year, when I asked myself what I would do in order to forge a new living in this new world I imagined for myself and family, writing a blog did NOT jump to the top of the list, at least not this one. And so, this is my long way of saying that thirdgarage is going on hiatus, while I focus creative attention on more promising ventures for the next year.
From time to time I may be tempted to update you or to entertain you, and there's always the chance that this blog will morph into another one. But I doubt it. The world will progress very nicely without my two-cents worth of opinion. We already have too many opinions. I'm going to use my Mulligan to be quiet for a while, then I'm going to work on something longer, more meaningful, more helpful.
Happy Arrival Day. Happy Thanksgiving.
Yours,
Mulligan
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Veteran's Day: Being A Professional
As most of you know, the closest I ever came to soldiering may have been marching in formation in various armories around NYC and holding an M1 at arm's length during "jug" (detention) on the roof overlooking 15th St at Xavier High School. This was probably a good thing for the country, but left a gap in my resume and a debt owed to so many who served.
I was thinking today about my friend's son, who is in Afghanistan under daily attack. I was also thinking about another friend's son, who had recently returned from Afghanistan, when, out of the blue, I received the following email:
I was thinking today about my friend's son, who is in Afghanistan under daily attack. I was also thinking about another friend's son, who had recently returned from Afghanistan, when, out of the blue, I received the following email:
Friends and Family
Yesterday my command asked me to leave this Thursday for Afghanistan to support an investigation into the combat deaths of four Marines.
I will be gone for less than a month, possibly much less, but I wanted to let you know. Some of you may not even know I'm back from the first trip ... whether you knew or not, I look forward to celebrating my second homecoming of the year in December, I've enjoyed seeing so many of you during the first.
Semper Fi,
Kurt
Kurt Sanger, Jr.is the son of my best and closest friend, Kurt Sr., who died tragically in 1989. Kurt Jr. attended Poly Prep, Holy Cross, and became a Marine and a lawyer along the way. After serving in the Adjutant Corps in what we used to call Yugoslavia, he returned to the States, wrote a pretty decent novel about his war experience and tried to integrate himself back into civilian life.
As it turned out, that didn't go so smoothly. I was lucky enough to spend some time with him, talking to him about the "old days" in Forest Hills Gardens that he remembered from tales his father had told him. It became a wonderful way for both of us to connect with something and someone we had lost. Eventually, Kurt re-enlisted and shipped to Afghanistan for the first time last year, from where he would send me messages from time to time.
The great basketball artist and soldier of the courts, Dr. J. (Julius Erving), said once that, "Being a professional means doing the things we love to do on the days that we don't want to do them." Amen. I keep that quote close-by every day, and today I shared that thought with Kurt Sanger, Jr., Marine, Lawyer, Loving Son, Loyal Friend, one of thousands of true professionals at home and around the world like him.
Today is a day to take off our Red or Blue political uniforms, to refrain from our nearly incessant blather about what are, in the Big Picture, silly things. Today is a day we don't give a hoot about the size of bonuses, the Dow's finish or, or how many games the Knicks will lose. Today we simply salute Kurt and the other real professionals and say: Be Safe, Hurry Home.
To all of you Veterans, Thank You. Enjoy Your Day.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Proust, Harry Potter, And The House Of Health Horrors
Today, I share a little family secret: my Proust Project. Merely mentioning the name Proust in our household will cause eyeballs to roll, smirks to form and heads to shake. Many humbling events may occur in our lives, particularly in the current tenuous era, but none of those can approach Proust's particular way of highlighting my shortcomings as a literary Pilgrim.
Our saga begins in 1983 on Surfside Beach in Nantucket, a good place, one would think, to start an eight part continuous novel, Remembrance Of things Past (ROTP). After all,the great work itself begins at a family summer retreat called Combray. My beach book was Volume I of the 1981 Random House Terence Kilmartin update of the classic C.K.Scott Moncrieff original translation from the French. It stands before me now with its warped, weatherbeaten cover and 1018 text pages filled with sea air, humidity and a few grains of sand. The bookmark is the same slice of Pierre Deux ribbon borrowed in 1983. I'd like to report that I actually did finished this volume.... in 2006 with a little help from a new Penguin translation overseen by Christopher Prendergast. That's right; it took me 23years to read two novels.
I should probably tell you at this point, if you have not actually read Proust in its entirety, that it may be described as a Seinfeldian work in that nothing much happens. That is, life happens, but it is the birds tweeting, the leaves being leaves, music playing, parties being parties. Some have referred to it as a Zen novel. To draw a one last, political, analogy, ROTP is the Albany of literature. It progresses at its own slow pace, day after day, character after character, word by word by word, and not too much is accomplished, except that, since its about people with loads of dough, they find a million ways to spend it.
Where were we? 2006, thirteen years after starting the first volume, I finish it. So, I am pumped, energized. Also, I have an enormous amount of time on my hands due to a sudden disruption in life. I acquired a rare 1927 Moncrieff Cities Of The Plain (IV)published by Albert & Charles Boni, also their 1929 The Captive (VI) . Additionally, I begin keeping Vintage paperback editions handy and continue trying the contemporary Penguin translations.
But I do not finish. In fact, I become deeply discouraged when my brother-in-law, a French scholar and international educator, visits and tells me that the entire work must be read in sequence and all at the same time in order to enjoy its true depth and beauty. And so, my friends, I must begin again, from the beginning, and I am valiantly trying to find the strength to so so.
But, you may ask, why should we care? Why, Reader and Fellow Pilgrim, in this topsy-turvey world of ours should you give a souffle' about my Proust travails?
I was reminded today of my Proust Project by a little piece in the Times, which as you know, is a favorite whipping boy of mine and such a willing victim at that. A Mr. John Schwartz writes a small piece about how the healthcare naysayers harp about the size of the House bill, 1990 pages, as evidence of its worthlessness. He actually finds an expert, Katz, a "fellow in empirical legal studies" at U of Mich. Katz and his colleague brilliantly point out that although the bill contains 363,000 words, only about 234,000 of them " have an impact on substantive law and that "234,000 words do not present a barrier to reading."
I'll bet that will ease any doubts you may have had! They go on together to say that, at this length, the bill is comparable to J.K. Rowling's longest book in the Harry Potter series. I'm not making this up.
Mr. Schwartz, Katz, Times editors (if there are any left who can think and read), thank you all once again for pointing out the obvious to us all: the House bill can only be seen as a work of pure fiction, containing fantastic tales of medical delivery and dark mathematical wizardry. This work would earn Drs. Pelosi and Baucus an unprecedented Triple Nobel Prize for Medicine, Mathematics and Literature, if it ever passed. With friends like Schwartz, and more bad luck, it probably won't.
And newspapers wonder why they are going out of business.
If this is the best that the bill's supporters, like the Times can do, then there is every reason to hope that I will be able to finish reading Proust's entire Remembrance of Things Past before Congress' monumental work of fiction ever becomes a real law.
"For a long time I used to go to bed early...."
_____________________________________________________________
Please Note: thirdgarage editors would like to remind loyal and even disloyal readers that the staff is currently showing a series of collages at Wine At Five, Rye's premier wineshop and (temporary) art gallery. Having sold one piece last week, staff discovered that reducing prices had a positive influence on buyers. Therefore, prices are currently $95-150 for these unique and, admittedly, slightly odd original works.
Our saga begins in 1983 on Surfside Beach in Nantucket, a good place, one would think, to start an eight part continuous novel, Remembrance Of things Past (ROTP). After all,the great work itself begins at a family summer retreat called Combray. My beach book was Volume I of the 1981 Random House Terence Kilmartin update of the classic C.K.Scott Moncrieff original translation from the French. It stands before me now with its warped, weatherbeaten cover and 1018 text pages filled with sea air, humidity and a few grains of sand. The bookmark is the same slice of Pierre Deux ribbon borrowed in 1983. I'd like to report that I actually did finished this volume.... in 2006 with a little help from a new Penguin translation overseen by Christopher Prendergast. That's right; it took me 23years to read two novels.
I should probably tell you at this point, if you have not actually read Proust in its entirety, that it may be described as a Seinfeldian work in that nothing much happens. That is, life happens, but it is the birds tweeting, the leaves being leaves, music playing, parties being parties. Some have referred to it as a Zen novel. To draw a one last, political, analogy, ROTP is the Albany of literature. It progresses at its own slow pace, day after day, character after character, word by word by word, and not too much is accomplished, except that, since its about people with loads of dough, they find a million ways to spend it.
Where were we? 2006, thirteen years after starting the first volume, I finish it. So, I am pumped, energized. Also, I have an enormous amount of time on my hands due to a sudden disruption in life. I acquired a rare 1927 Moncrieff Cities Of The Plain (IV)published by Albert & Charles Boni, also their 1929 The Captive (VI) . Additionally, I begin keeping Vintage paperback editions handy and continue trying the contemporary Penguin translations.
But I do not finish. In fact, I become deeply discouraged when my brother-in-law, a French scholar and international educator, visits and tells me that the entire work must be read in sequence and all at the same time in order to enjoy its true depth and beauty. And so, my friends, I must begin again, from the beginning, and I am valiantly trying to find the strength to so so.
But, you may ask, why should we care? Why, Reader and Fellow Pilgrim, in this topsy-turvey world of ours should you give a souffle' about my Proust travails?
I was reminded today of my Proust Project by a little piece in the Times, which as you know, is a favorite whipping boy of mine and such a willing victim at that. A Mr. John Schwartz writes a small piece about how the healthcare naysayers harp about the size of the House bill, 1990 pages, as evidence of its worthlessness. He actually finds an expert, Katz, a "fellow in empirical legal studies" at U of Mich. Katz and his colleague brilliantly point out that although the bill contains 363,000 words, only about 234,000 of them " have an impact on substantive law and that "234,000 words do not present a barrier to reading."
I'll bet that will ease any doubts you may have had! They go on together to say that, at this length, the bill is comparable to J.K. Rowling's longest book in the Harry Potter series. I'm not making this up.
Mr. Schwartz, Katz, Times editors (if there are any left who can think and read), thank you all once again for pointing out the obvious to us all: the House bill can only be seen as a work of pure fiction, containing fantastic tales of medical delivery and dark mathematical wizardry. This work would earn Drs. Pelosi and Baucus an unprecedented Triple Nobel Prize for Medicine, Mathematics and Literature, if it ever passed. With friends like Schwartz, and more bad luck, it probably won't.
And newspapers wonder why they are going out of business.
If this is the best that the bill's supporters, like the Times can do, then there is every reason to hope that I will be able to finish reading Proust's entire Remembrance of Things Past before Congress' monumental work of fiction ever becomes a real law.
"For a long time I used to go to bed early...."
_____________________________________________________________
Please Note: thirdgarage editors would like to remind loyal and even disloyal readers that the staff is currently showing a series of collages at Wine At Five, Rye's premier wineshop and (temporary) art gallery. Having sold one piece last week, staff discovered that reducing prices had a positive influence on buyers. Therefore, prices are currently $95-150 for these unique and, admittedly, slightly odd original works.
Monday, November 9, 2009
$1,100,000,000,000 SUV
Over the weekend, you may have been astounded to discover that the Congressional Health Reform Bill had passed by a couple of votes. This, after an election day on which Americans seemed united in saying "We Hate All Of You" to every politician in the land. You may also have been surprised to see that Congress, with a little assistance from their enabling press friends, was doing fuzzy math again. The paper of Wreckord, the Times, suddenly claimed that the "reform" would cost $1.1 Trillion over ten years. They always write numbers like that, so that they look small. Let's look at the real thing: $1,100,000,000,000. That's better. Or, is it?
But, you may have wondered, as I did, how could this be? During this long saga about healthcare reform, we had been speaking of adding about $800 Billion to the deficit: $800,000,000,000. Now, actually, we all knew that number was fuzzy and its only significance was that it was it was not $1.1 Trillion or more added to the deficit. Now, we find that this is the ten year "cost of reform."
This sounds suspiciously like adding the entire cost of this reform to the deficit. In other words we are going to borrow every cent from our Asian "friends."This despite the Congressional bill's raising of more new taxes on the wealthy, whom everyone hates just for breathing, where does that go?
Whether you consider yourself to be Red, Blue or Purple, it doesn't take a genius to know that this all stinks to low heaven. This is Iraq dressed up in a surgical gown. This plan is also exactly the kind of plan that GM loved to adopt: let's build a cost structure so high and so out of control and let's make sure that we own that cost structure forever, then let's make silly looking but huge cars. Le's pretend these sales numbers are also real forever and ....on and on. We'll lose a few teeth, but put our heads down on our Grosse Point pillows and in the morning there will be the money we need to borrow under our pillows.
Having just looked at my "open enrollment" information and seen the increases in premiums and the decreases in coverage, I confess to wanting real reform in this area. But, I cannot help thinking that we are about to build the world's biggest SUV factory, just at the moment when oil prices go through the roof, unemployment becomes pandemic, banks 'fess up to stealing everyone blind and all credit markets dry up. I would say that, if Congress was a company, it would be GM. But, it already IS GM.
That's not good. I don't want healthcare reform by GM. I want healthcare as if Google or Apple made it. People who know what they're doing.
But, you may have wondered, as I did, how could this be? During this long saga about healthcare reform, we had been speaking of adding about $800 Billion to the deficit: $800,000,000,000. Now, actually, we all knew that number was fuzzy and its only significance was that it was it was not $1.1 Trillion or more added to the deficit. Now, we find that this is the ten year "cost of reform."
This sounds suspiciously like adding the entire cost of this reform to the deficit. In other words we are going to borrow every cent from our Asian "friends."This despite the Congressional bill's raising of more new taxes on the wealthy, whom everyone hates just for breathing, where does that go?
Whether you consider yourself to be Red, Blue or Purple, it doesn't take a genius to know that this all stinks to low heaven. This is Iraq dressed up in a surgical gown. This plan is also exactly the kind of plan that GM loved to adopt: let's build a cost structure so high and so out of control and let's make sure that we own that cost structure forever, then let's make silly looking but huge cars. Le's pretend these sales numbers are also real forever and ....on and on. We'll lose a few teeth, but put our heads down on our Grosse Point pillows and in the morning there will be the money we need to borrow under our pillows.
Having just looked at my "open enrollment" information and seen the increases in premiums and the decreases in coverage, I confess to wanting real reform in this area. But, I cannot help thinking that we are about to build the world's biggest SUV factory, just at the moment when oil prices go through the roof, unemployment becomes pandemic, banks 'fess up to stealing everyone blind and all credit markets dry up. I would say that, if Congress was a company, it would be GM. But, it already IS GM.
That's not good. I don't want healthcare reform by GM. I want healthcare as if Google or Apple made it. People who know what they're doing.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Random Thoughts
It's Friday, a day for random thoughts and rest after dodging dozens of calls from eager HR recruiters and prospective clients all week:
Bold Idea: Was Hillary raised near an airport? She's logging more miles than a Delta/NW pilot as she plays nice everywhere. On the home front, there's Rahm alienating everybody in sight, which is, of course, his job. But with Max and Nancy pretty much ignoring Rahm on HealthScare no matter how many loud profanities he hurls at their 1900 page "reform" bill, isn't it time for a change? What could be more sensible than to ground Hill, bringing her home as top Assistant To The Pres. in the White House, where she can make nice with Nancy, Max, Charlie, etc? Then, send Rahm to State, where he can fly around insulting every idiot that we support out there and people we don't; they only understand people named Rahm screaming and getting spittle all over their faces. The Old Switcheroo.
Just a helpful thought.
Kandinsky: After seeing his work at Guggie, it's hard to see why I might want to continue making my little collages and constructions. After all, they've been showing at Wine @ Five in town for weeks with no sales, although much "interest."
Viewing K., especially my favorites from 1910-1912, one sees that every good painting is a portrait of both the painter and the viewer. One also sees that every realistic work is also abstract in a way, and that each good abstract creates its own reality.
Well, that's what I saw; I knew you'd want to know.
Urs Fischer: Is Urs the Swiss-German for Ugh?
This exhibit at the New Museum seems designed solely to poke fun at Capitalists dumb enough to plunk down six figures for one of the "artist's" works and at museum "curators" too spineless to ever say no.
Once upon a time, curator was used as a noun and was a title. Now, we have "curating," in which the museum employee becomes an active participant not only in the exhibiting, but in the art itself, which consist partly of the event.
Upon leaving the New, after 20 minutes, I watched another "event" unfolding on the ground floor. The artist was high on a ladder in his underpants painting grey swirls in a nice pattern on the wall. Around the floor he and someone had "curated" a number of vignettes.
After seeing Kandinsly, one wonders why people like myself continue making collages and constructions, despite having a relatively small gift. After seeing Urs and Underpants Man we know that there are many with an even smaller gift who thrive. So, we proceed, encouraged.
Elections: Have you heard the one about Sarah Palin stumping the country extolling the wonders of Viagra to Republicans, because she's found out it will help them get "elected?"
What is there left to say? Emperor Mike had 15 seconds worth of humility and that was plenty. One wonders which city the Times reporters actually report on, since they believe Mike will now be mending fences. Right. And those classified numbers, they're going to be through the roof soon, Boys. Oi, where do they get these dumbos.
The White House is pointing out that there are actually two Obamas: "Obama" and Obama. It was really "Obama" who went to New Jersey a gazzillion times to stump for Corzine and to avoid Manhattan until "he" absolutely had to say very quietly how much "he" truly loved "his friend" (wink, wink) Billy Thompson. Obama, on the other hand, never left DC, wasn't there, didn't say it, can't be blamed.
Friends, I have been around NYC politics for over 50 years, weaned on the stuff by my Tammany-trained and Fiorello-appointed grandfather. When "Billy" Thompson almost beats you, with 1/10 the money and after being embarrassed and dissed by a President in his own Party, who just happens to also be an African-American, that means people viscerally, truthfully, painfully and wholeheartedly dislike you, your banking dough, your arrogance and your smarm. This is like the butterfly KO-ing Ali in the First. All the money in the world cannot erase this humiliation. The Emperor won, but still came up....short.
Bold Idea: Was Hillary raised near an airport? She's logging more miles than a Delta/NW pilot as she plays nice everywhere. On the home front, there's Rahm alienating everybody in sight, which is, of course, his job. But with Max and Nancy pretty much ignoring Rahm on HealthScare no matter how many loud profanities he hurls at their 1900 page "reform" bill, isn't it time for a change? What could be more sensible than to ground Hill, bringing her home as top Assistant To The Pres. in the White House, where she can make nice with Nancy, Max, Charlie, etc? Then, send Rahm to State, where he can fly around insulting every idiot that we support out there and people we don't; they only understand people named Rahm screaming and getting spittle all over their faces. The Old Switcheroo.
Just a helpful thought.
Kandinsky: After seeing his work at Guggie, it's hard to see why I might want to continue making my little collages and constructions. After all, they've been showing at Wine @ Five in town for weeks with no sales, although much "interest."
Viewing K., especially my favorites from 1910-1912, one sees that every good painting is a portrait of both the painter and the viewer. One also sees that every realistic work is also abstract in a way, and that each good abstract creates its own reality.
Well, that's what I saw; I knew you'd want to know.
Urs Fischer: Is Urs the Swiss-German for Ugh?
This exhibit at the New Museum seems designed solely to poke fun at Capitalists dumb enough to plunk down six figures for one of the "artist's" works and at museum "curators" too spineless to ever say no.
Once upon a time, curator was used as a noun and was a title. Now, we have "curating," in which the museum employee becomes an active participant not only in the exhibiting, but in the art itself, which consist partly of the event.
Upon leaving the New, after 20 minutes, I watched another "event" unfolding on the ground floor. The artist was high on a ladder in his underpants painting grey swirls in a nice pattern on the wall. Around the floor he and someone had "curated" a number of vignettes.
After seeing Kandinsly, one wonders why people like myself continue making collages and constructions, despite having a relatively small gift. After seeing Urs and Underpants Man we know that there are many with an even smaller gift who thrive. So, we proceed, encouraged.
Elections: Have you heard the one about Sarah Palin stumping the country extolling the wonders of Viagra to Republicans, because she's found out it will help them get "elected?"
What is there left to say? Emperor Mike had 15 seconds worth of humility and that was plenty. One wonders which city the Times reporters actually report on, since they believe Mike will now be mending fences. Right. And those classified numbers, they're going to be through the roof soon, Boys. Oi, where do they get these dumbos.
The White House is pointing out that there are actually two Obamas: "Obama" and Obama. It was really "Obama" who went to New Jersey a gazzillion times to stump for Corzine and to avoid Manhattan until "he" absolutely had to say very quietly how much "he" truly loved "his friend" (wink, wink) Billy Thompson. Obama, on the other hand, never left DC, wasn't there, didn't say it, can't be blamed.
Friends, I have been around NYC politics for over 50 years, weaned on the stuff by my Tammany-trained and Fiorello-appointed grandfather. When "Billy" Thompson almost beats you, with 1/10 the money and after being embarrassed and dissed by a President in his own Party, who just happens to also be an African-American, that means people viscerally, truthfully, painfully and wholeheartedly dislike you, your banking dough, your arrogance and your smarm. This is like the butterfly KO-ing Ali in the First. All the money in the world cannot erase this humiliation. The Emperor won, but still came up....short.
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Fifty-First State
Election Day Eve: In New Jersey, President O has been unintentionally stumping for the Republican guvernatorial candidate; nursing homes are frantically readying voter vans to deliver aroused citizens who still remember being Republicans to vote against the Dem candidate. Upstate, a Republican congressional candidate, forced out by the rising the Rush/Newt Republican Right, has endorsed her former Democratic opponent. And here at home, in the state's smallest city, the current Dem Mayor is feeling a deep Republican venom not seen in these parts since women asked to play golf on the weekends!
A Bold Proposal: In September 2001, we proposed adding a fifty-first star to our national flag, a star that would represent our highest aspirations as a nation and demonstrate to our twisted, narrow-minded and determined enemies, at home and abroad, that we would hold firm in our beliefs. It seems like this would be a good time to revive the proposal in the form of a Fifty-First State. Purists please note that Mr. Robert Heft designed the new flag, when he designed our current flag. Also, please note that the new state is a spiritual/aspirational one, not territorial, with the following advantages:
A Bold Proposal: In September 2001, we proposed adding a fifty-first star to our national flag, a star that would represent our highest aspirations as a nation and demonstrate to our twisted, narrow-minded and determined enemies, at home and abroad, that we would hold firm in our beliefs. It seems like this would be a good time to revive the proposal in the form of a Fifty-First State. Purists please note that Mr. Robert Heft designed the new flag, when he designed our current flag. Also, please note that the new state is a spiritual/aspirational one, not territorial, with the following advantages:
- No new state capitol. No Soviet -style buildings rising in agricultural land, far from population centers and voters' eyes.
- Hence, no additional upper/lower Houses, no staff payroll padding with relatives, no awarding of lucrative contracts to House colleagues, no innovative tax schemes that exempt representatives from payment, and no free extensive healthcare for state employees.
- No new governor. Enough said.
- No new State educational "curriculum." No state tests designed to guarantee improved scores for all grades. No failure to encourage intensive science and math study in favor of fluffy "civics" classes. No selection of literature based on political content vs. artistic merit.
- No additional central gathering point for fourth-rate lawyers with time and money on their hands.
- No banking or insurance regulation. Oh, sorry, even real states don't have this.
- Etc. & etc.
Seriously folks, it's time for us to have a visible symbol of what we hope to become, a symbol of all the things that still draw people from Africa, Asia, Central & South America, Mexico and Europe to our shores. Funny thing, but these people do not come here driven to earn the median income, have their children get C's in mediocre schools, or to learn to hate prosperous people; they want to be prosperous people. Have you ever met anyone driven to emigrate to China? Russia? India? France? Well, okay, some of us would love to have a place in France, but you get our point, Fellow Pilgrims, I'm sure. People come here to reach their highest aspirations, not average ones. Let's adopt that extra star as a symbol of our newfound energy, wisdom and cohesion that will continue pointing the way.
You can view the fifty-one star flag here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_51_Star_possible_Flag.svg
and read about Robert Heft here:
http://www.usflag.org/flagdesigner.html
and read about Robert Heft here:
http://www.usflag.org/flagdesigner.html
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