fog of white house wars

Best Headline about former White House ball-boy Scott McCellan's pulpy memoir regarding his complicity in Bush Administration malfeasance comes from the blog Wonkette: “Bush Propagandist Complains Of Bush Propaganda.”

One is left to wonder if there's a terminal illness, a deep hatred of Karl Rove, or just the love of money involved. The former brought Defense Secretary and architect of cost-effective (?) bombing campaigns, Robert McNamara, to come to Jesus and beg the forgiveness of previously napalmed innocent civilians and the American public.

The best apology that the Bush Administration cronies could give to the American public about 7+ years of lying would be to plead nolo contendre to high crimes and misdemeanors.

wonkette slaps the weasel

opening at a theater near you

The summer blockbuster season has descended. What will it be? Reluctant superhero?Romantic comedy? Cops and robbers?

Iron Man, which some have described as a young John McCain with a couple of good arms and a jet pack (sense of humor still intact), didn't quite do the early numbers that had been expected. Who knows, late-summer DVD sales may yet rescue this aging superhero who in reality is lot more like Indiana Jones in a rocking chair. He just can't do the stunts any more so any kind of superhero analogy with McGruff the Crime Dog is always going to be a stretch. McGruff's more like Walter Matthua near the end - all grousing and boyhood hi-jinks but little panache and policy.

Wacky romantic comedies, the ones where the two main characters don't really like each and spend most of the first 3 reels sniping and undermining each other, sometimes play big at the summer drive-ins, but it's unlikely that Clinton-Obama will turn Hepburn-Tracy in the near future.

This just might be the summer of the reluctant anti-hero, the underestimated homeless person who turns out to be Chauncey Gardener, or even the Dark Knight with a quiet posse of determined followers. The big picture where the main character, despite his flaws and hem-haws, ultimately decides to pick up the mantle and run headlong toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with everyone chasing him down the street and throwing junk in his way.

Salt the popcorn and pass the Dots. I'm ready for the show.

marcie miller gross @ review studio

Imagine being tasked with pulling something, something common and everyday, pulling this thing completely apart until there was nothing left. Nothing left at all. Except art. How would you do this? If this sounds daunting, and I believe it to be, then this is largely the task that many of us face every day. We must pull apart our day to make something out it. We want to think that art is different, that it comes from some magical place, deep inside, but really it comes from the painstaking process of pulling things apart until there is nothing left. And then putting them back together. If there's any magic beyond the everyday, it's in the putting back.

Marcie Miller Gross's new work, a part, at Review Studios, offers a glimpse of the difficulty in putting things back together. Coherently. Miller, who has long worked to elevate the everyday object above the pedestrian object, this time takes on the second-hand store sweater. You know the ones. There are racks and racks of them at the your local thrift. Always a gem there if you can find it, the perfect wool sweater, gotten for few dollars when a new one would set you back near a hundred note these days. But how many do you have? Even if you mine the second-hand stores on a weekly basis, the gems are hard to find. Miller takes wool sweaters and then felts them. Not a few, but several hundred. As one who has combed the thrifts stores in search of the thrift store for wool sweaters to felt, I know finding a hundred or so of them isn't easy. Not when color and texture matter, and to Gross, color and texture always matter. Miller said the work evolved as a response to accumulating the materials. This is true of many works, and many art practices, but for her marks an attempt to be more fluid and abstract in her approach to making.

It shows in the work. The earliest piece, ginned from a show several years back, is a small cube of cut and stacked felted pieces. Several hundred small strips come together to make this small cube and it sits atop a stool, much like one might imagine the artist herself has done in the studio, sat on the stool and contemplated, "OK. Now what? Where do we go from here."

Moving forward is never easy for in repetition there is comfort, but repetition can bind us to point of injury if not careful. Gross's first step forward seems somewhat tenuous, a linear abstraction of the cube approximately 20 feet in length, that barring one slight cut, lines an entire wall of the gallery. Patience has always been a strong foundation of Gross's work, it's true in this show, and that structural underpinning continues to be a virtue in the work.

Space has also been one of the foundations of her work and here Miller takes ample exception to this one. The Review gallery space is best thought of as only half a space. The remainder seems unconnected. Gross makes a valiant effort to pull in the steel pillars and make them part of a more serene and contemplative space that Gross's work evokes.

One might best think of these colors, these thousand colors, as a mediation on the whole, rather than on a part of the whole. They attempt to establish a relationship between what they once were and what they are now. And in the process, they lose every part of what they once were, and define something new. This is were the subtly of art lies, in creating that new space, between those spaces that existed before, but which you never noticed. The post war movement mono-ha in Japan also worked on these edges and Miller Gross references them in her artist statement.

It is good that see that Gross didn't stop at the edges though, but ventured over them. And these forays carried her, and the viewer, first into a chasm of wool slashes pinned to the wall like insect specimens, then into the more elemental components of the wool itself. If a sweater carries forth a color field within its fibers, then what does the wearer carry forward? The memory of the fabric, the knowledge of the maker, the experiences of the owner? The intersection of them all? These are the questions her work evokes and to pass them by is to pass by a rack full of gems. Try one on for size. That's a fine color on you. And it fits you nicely in the shoulders. There now. Make a turn. Such a nice look for you.

sketching reality

The Phoenix probe, which successfully landed in the Martian artic yesterday on a mission to confirm the presence of water and (the building blocks of life?), looks eerily like a sketch of a UFO done by a British citizen in the early 60's - sans the skis. This continues to fuel speculation that our government has routinely been visiting Mars, and long ago colonized the Red Planet as part of a Top Secret secret mission.

OK. Not Really.

But there are plenty of folks who apparently believe so. You can find them in the same place on the internet where 911-truther's and Ron Paul conspiracy theorists hang out. They post videos on youtube with an interesting mixture of German and English and what purports to be a manned Martian landing that took place in 1962. It looks surprising like it was shot from the passenger window of a Ford Fairlane which for me makes it all the more interesting. It's never clear in these videos why "The Government" would be keep such triumphs from us, why the Martian atmosphere would be blue, and why in the midst of the cold war we are collaborating with our arch enemies. But when viewed as an experimental art film, they are pretty compelling.

Anyway. In the coming months, NASA's martian probe will attempt to make mud pies and snowcones for the space-exploration obsessed.

Regardless. I think everyone would agree that things would be a lot more interesting and our space program would ramp up like never before if one of the first images sent back to the Jet Propulsion Lab from terra igcognito were of an angry creature rising out of the Martian dust. And if the dusty blob then proceeded to pummel our little bitty science station on another planet into smithereens we'd be fixing that broken-down space station in a hurry. And stop complaining about $4 a gallon gasoline.
Image: Sketch from National Archives, Mars artic landscape from NASA/JPL

one angry white man

wow! this dude is angry with Hillary Rodham Clinton

in a perfect world

former hollywood animators apply their skills at nasa

green and gray and black and white

Kansas City is set to finally confront the largest infrastructure project in its history - the repair of its sewers and storm sewers. The repairs are being required so that the City can meet Clean Water Act guidelines, the ones that state, in vastly over-simplified terms, that you can't pollute the rivers, lakes, and waterbodies of the United States. It's a little more complicated than that, but essentially that's what it comes down to. And shitting in the creek would be polluting it. I've been known to say that only pigs and humans shit in their own water, and while not completely true, when your sewers overflow into the local stream, well...that's pretty shitty for the environment.

One of the things the city did several years ago was to put together a Community Panel to deal with a number of issues related to Wet Weather - termed the Wet Weather Solutions panel - and overflows of sewers would be one of those items. The panel has been meeting monthly for almost 5 years. The idea is to develop an integrated plan for dealing with wet-weather related issues and to use this approach to help inform and guide the approach on how to solve the overflow of sewage into streams in older parts of the city. Some sewers in Kansas City are as old as the Civil War.

Now that the infrastructure plan is moving toward something concrete (in more ways than one) the city has been going to neighborhood association and community meetings to discuss the plan. Pretty much anyone who like to hear about the plan, the city will come and talk to them. As a panel member, I've been asked to help with these talks and to date I've helped with a couple. They've turned out to be interesting for a couple of reasons.

One of the most interesting thing about the meetings has been how similar the community responses have been to the plan. People are really interested to learn about this plan, what's it going to do, how much is it going to cost, and how can my voice be heard? These are some of the first questions. Cost is always a consideration, but people are willing to pay what they consider to be a fair share. Since the cost of the plan is projected to run into the billions and the only thing for certain right now is that the cost of water, wastewater, and stormwater is going to go up for Kansas City customers, citizens want to know how the city is going to pay for it. And what it will mean for them. Some citizens will not be able to afford the increases and will need help. They are also very interested in green solutions. No matter what part of the city you are in, the are intrigued by the idea of green solutions and how these might help the city become more livable.

The other interesting thing about these meetings has been seeing firsthand just how racially segregated many areas of our city still remain. In one meeting, everyone homeowner was a member of a minority and in the other, every member was a Caucasian. The Caucasians were vistors in the first meeting and the minorities were working as servers in the second meeting. But everyone has the same interests in mind. How to make the city a more livable place? How can I keep my neighborhood vital and intact? Everyone wants the same things for their city.

There also remains, among many residents, a high level of distrust of the city government to use our tax dollars wisely. And many residents distrust the city to be open and frank about the true costs and true benefits of the project. And the only way they are going to insure that the money is spent wisely is to stay informed and to hold public officials accountable for the outcome. This takes time and energy and many families appear to be stretched to near their limits.

The city is asking for public comments to the plan, but these are being held in meetings just after work. Attendance has not been high, in part because people either aren't aware of the meetings, or because they either won't, or can't, take the time to attend these meetings. Seems like we need an online public forum for comments that would allow more public participation. This could be moderated in a number of different ways, but it would allow more folks to provide comments. And a city that listens to its citizens is a city where folks want to live.