Some Refreshing Thoughts amidst the Clamour of Hate

Well, I am a non-theist but I think that people should be able to believe in a god if they must. And when I lived in New York and had to walk home amidst the rubble of my city 9 years ago to my 'hood in Brooklyn near Atlantic Ave., I can only say that there was an outpouring of community support for our Muslim falafel vendors. And I really resent the stupid comments of New Gingrich et al, about an Islamic Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan that will help serve all of the people of New York like the Jewish Cultural Center (which it's kinda modeled on, I hear) does.
Extremists who cloak themselves in religion and call for the deaths of my friend are complete fucking assholes who brain wash and isolate "followers" so that they commit evil, evil acts. And so it is refreshing to see this petition that defends the right to live and to speak of my friend Molly Norris who has been put on an Al Queda "hit list" because some people want to spread their evil so they can gain power.
And this is also an example of what I keep on saying about this country and the West and the Enlightenment ideas that founded this country. "We Win By Being Better Than Them." Better means more tolerant, more educated, more rule of law, more transparent in our democracy and less torture, less corruption, with better senses of humor. And this petition is a wonderful example of Being Better.

Fauna - Mega and Micro

I was walking the dogs at the park at the La Brea Tar Pits and I was stunned to notice a sign saying that it was "Megafauna Awareness Day" Actually I had MISSED MEGAFAUNA awareness day.

Who doesn't like a day devoted to animals like the giant sloth, the Megatherium, the Diprotodon, a hippopotumus sized marsupial and my favorite the largest carnivorous marsupial, the Thylacine, which became extinct in the 1920s, unlike the Sloth which became extinct in the Pleistocene era. Most of the really good megafaunas died out in the Pleistocene but we have some elephants and whales still around that are classified as megafauna.

Megafauna means big animal and in general they are classified as bigger than humans. Hmmmm. Anyway, someone mentioned that I hadn't been posting any photos of the dogs lately, so I decided to take some snaps of them as MegaPBGV's. Here the towering Lechus MegaPBGVus is passively sitting. And below the Gigantorus Besosus is wondering what the heck I put on his pillow.

The dogs have definite seasons, like Fig Season (squirrels in fig tree), Feioja Season (squirrels in Feioja tree) and Avocado Season (squirrels in avocado season) which in a dog bred to hunt squirrels and vocalize about it is always a pleasant thing for the neighbors. Lately it has been little feral kitten jungle gym in the front garden season, which has kept the dogs in an aroused frenzy for several weeks now. They howl, run from front window to front gate, howl, bark and in general pull me off my feet when I try to take them for a walk. Often I end up in the shrubbery.

The other thing about feral kitten season is that all the neighbors walk around in the front yard looking at the kittens, feeding the kittens, trying to catch the kittens (ha!) which also arouses the dogs. It also means that I have to be a little more careful about being clothed.

A couple of nights ago the feral kitten coalition was wandering around the front yard. I was alarmed at first, who are these people in my front yard? But they had traps and were able to trap two of the kittens (out of six!) immediately. They were working on the whole gaggle of feral cats and kittens in the hood, and they baited some traps in our front yard and left to see what was going on down the block. I went back inside and both dogs rushed out screaming like banshees. Luckily the dogs were concentrated on the area in our front yard known as kitten jungle gym so the beloved C was able to grab Beso. Leche on the other hand, the little food hound, was actually in a trap eating the bait. She was so happy, eating! Unauthorized Eating! Yea!

And then she calmed down and went uh-oh. She had dived into the trap, couldn't back out, couldn't stand, couldn't go forward. Poor dear, she was trapped!

The Possibility of Disaster

You know, one of the things that amazes me to no end is how often people in cars just cut in front of you, leaving precious little space and causing you to have to brake hard and hopefully not have the asshole tailgating you rear end you.

And it's a whole bunch of things about this that amazes me. Did they not go to physics class and learn about MASS and INERTIA?

But what it really is is that they can't imagine disaster.

Well, I can. But humans seem to be resistant to imagining the worst. The real actual worst.

For example, even though some people at British Petroleum were very open about how difficult it is to drill deep water wells, other people at BP were making decisions to use cheaper, weaker, pipes that they had seen blow before and that violated BP's safety standards. (See this article in the NYTimes "Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig") So even though people were aware that things could go wrong, they didn't imagine that it could actually go so spectacularly wrong and couldn't think strategically about what would happen if it did. Because they were expecting everything to be fine.

Just like, how did Condi Rice put it?, no one could know that terrorists would strike the U.S., even though there was a security memo saying exactly that.

Or just like everyone knew that housing prices were totally askew and that there was a bubble but we continued to act like housing prices could never fall, that buying mortgage based assets that were based on sub-prime loans that were rated A by Moodys or S&P because they were being paid by the issuer was not Damocles's Sword about to fall on our little heads. The occasional nay sayers of this scheme were ignored as no fun, and of course the mortgage crisis unraveled a whole lot more, no one was expecting total economic collapse.

I keep on hearing about "Strategic Thinking" and how the best and the brightest of the business world are strategic thinkers. And I think not. If strategy, as defined by my Oxford English Dictionary is "a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of opposing or competing participants." then strategy needs to incorporate the possibility of disaster. The worst case scenario can happen. And it can happen suddenly and blow you out of the water.

MOCA Collection; Matisse: Radical Invention

I was walking the dogs one morning and thinking about Mark Rothko's paintings and how one needed to see them physically to understand them. Just seeing a reproduction wouldn't give you a sense of the scale or the subtlety of the surface as shades move into one another, how things glow. You get a sense that they are people when you stand in front of them because you have your physical body in front of the physical painting.

So I popped off to MOCA to see the collection which everyone is rightly excited about. It is a nice collection of modernism. And there, right in front was an entire room of Rothko's. Man that guy could push paint. It was like seeing the room of Monet's waterlillies at MOMA where you need a recovery room. I felt like maybe I should just waver in my physicality. And then it was off to another room of Franz Klines - those winter landscapes of gesture. So beautiful.
Anyway there were some spectacular paintings from the 50's and early 60's and then you wandered into some great Louise Nevelson sculptures and then on into the Rauschenberg combines and Johns - great messy paintings with the kitchen sink thrown in - very exuberant.
The show was arranged roughly chronologically for a large part. The photographic collection was incredible. In the 50's and 60's you have all these beautifully observed black and white prints from Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Then the 70's happen and painting sort of stops. People paint paintings of stripes. Stripe paintings are kind of boring, especially walking through entire galleries of them. Painting was just not happening. Other things were like performance, conceptual art and photography. For example there was a hilarious Bruce Nauman where you walked through a square box hallway, there was a small black and white tv monitor on the floor in each corner and a small camera pointed at each corner which fed a one monitor back, so you were constantly chasing yourself, seeing just a hint of your back turning the corner on the far monitor you were approaching. It's like you were chasing your ghost. Another thing that starts happening is more color photography, the curators made a Nan Goldin room that is totally devastating.
Leaving the exhibit you pass a series of photographs documenting performances or earth works by the artist Ana Mendieta which are so evocative of loss. The human figure making a mark on the earth and leaving, graves - the metaphors are so rich when you look at the work, it is such a shame she died so tragically.
Then I popped off to Chicago and while there I did a brief run through of the Matisse show there. It's late work for him (and as opposed to the LACMA exhibit of Renoir late work which is go awful) it has some gorgeous important work in it. Matisse understood the 9000 shades of blue in the world. He understood green. He understood shapes. In the painting the Moroccans, he uses the shape of a turban to echo the shape of the mosque domes.

Review: Steve Horowitz at Redcat

Francesca came to visit because there was a performance at RedCat which included one of her collaborations with Randy. Steve Horowitz is an advocate of my old friend Randy Hostetler's (1963 - 1996) compositions and so in addition to Steve's compositions Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Retaking of Pelham 123 there were two pieces for string quartet of Randy's being played including Palm Quart which he did with Francesca.

So I ended up having a rather flash back week-end. RedCat is such a CalArts experience anyway, but at the party after the performance there were all these people who I HADN'T gone to school with, since Randy was getting his graduate degree two years after I had graduated. But the vibe was the same, and I couldn't help feeling that I had met some of these people, glancingly, since a lot of them were involved with Randy and Francesca and the cacophony of the Living Room Series. I guess the Living Room Series is now an archetypal art event - like being at some of the original happenings by Alan Kaprow or with John Cage at Black Mountain College or watching Marcel Duchamp play chess with a naked woman in a gallery. But I remember the ones I went to as fun and chaotic, the Tuba Trio in the kitchen, actually seeing Randy and his friends play the Living Room performing John Cage's Living Room Music. The shower singing. Camden and I did a piece with Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau. The Bowling Hypnosis tape that put everyone to sleep. L.H. wore a neoprene tutu and performed whale songs in a plastic kiddie pool with all of these electric wires criss-crossing in our old tri-plex with substandard electricity. (Which is funny come to think of it, since years later L.H. and I took a class at Machine Project, where we had to be in the basement with our computers and vats of water boiling away on old hot plates and sub-standard electrical wires criss-crossing the basement as we made felt and circuits. So maybe L.H. is much more of an electrical risk taker than I knew.)
Anyway, Randy's two pieces were interesting. First that he would write for string quartets - who knew CalArts even HAD string quartets. Aren't string quartets helplessly old fashioned even with Kronos??? (Randy never forgave me for being low-brow enough to like the Kronos Quartet). Second that he would write both specifically and abstractly with a completely new kind of musical notation that was both visual and metronomic. So the performers had to learn the new notation to play. And the notation was screened so that the audience could start to learn the notational rules at the same time. Floaters had a visual notation that was little boxes or circles of different colors appearing and moving on the screen. It was written on some sort of program that ran on MAC OS Sub 0.1 beta. I mean that was some OLD operating system we got a look at . In Palm Quart palm trees in a video created the musical notation. Both pieces were witty and brilliant and were so Randy.
Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Re-Taking of Pelham 123 were both large scale pieces with actors and singers and a video by Zig Gron for Chicken and a film by Jane Brill for Pelham. These were the kind of smoking hot post-minimalist, rock-influenced compositions with a whole bunch of stuff that you get used to seeing at RedCat. Very fun, very enjoyable and with the ease of maturity. You know when you are young and serious you can't ease up and everything has to point out your knowledge. Later you add generosity and heart. It made me sad that Randy had never got to live long enough to have a mature body of work. You can look here to see a video Zig made of Randy doing 8 ball which I think starts to point to how his mature work would have gone.