just how much could it have hurt?

I know I'm one of the publishers, and so it may not be quite proper for me to sing the praises of the online arts magazine Barry and I introduced late last summer, but I'm going to risk it anyway.

Although so much else of IDIOM is just as good or even better, because of its particular timeliness and its unexpected format I wanted the conversation between some of the publication's writers, "On the passing of J.D. Salinger", which we published yesterday, to get more attention than it might otherwise attract.

So consider this a flag.

The spirited short piece is nothing like the fulsome academic discourse available almost everywhere this week, and you'll feel like you're sitting in the room with the three young participants - even contributing to the conversation. The voices you'll hear are those of Alice Gregory, Editor Stephen Squibb and Jessica Loudis.

While you're at the site, take a look at the latest posting, which is equally timely, "Art and Culture in Haiti after the Quake", by Hong-An Truong, and browse through the still-modest-size archives.

My own two cents about Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" is the thought which came to me almost immediately after hearing about Salinger's death: I don't mean to minimize the importance of what he accomplished back in 1951, but, as a gay boy the year it was written, and a gay young man when I finally read it, "Catcher" never quite resonated with me in the same way it did with others. It seems to have attached itself to the psyche of many of my approximate contemporaries, or at least the straight, male, white, middle to upper class types.

Today I'm no longer gay; I think of myself as totally queer instead, but I can remember what it was like when being gay meant dissemblance, invisibility, powerlessness, desperation and, for "practicing" Catholics, eternal damnation. I'm now more than cool with my orientation, in fact I consider it a strength in almost every way, and I'm definitely no longer totally alone with it. So maybe I should try once again to make Holden Caulfield's acquaintance: His own much-analyzed disconnect looked pretty trifling to me at a time when the the whole world despised my, literally, unspeakable differentness and when I would have been crushed in an instant had I revealed myself.

This last thought can only serve as a footnote, and I don't want to make too much of a purely personal irony, but I can't help noting that, at roughly the same time I began emerging from a closet to which I had been condemned by others, J.D. Salinger shut himself up in one of his own construction. It's his odyssey that still baffles everyone.

[image from the Telegraph via IDIOM]

Beuys's cane continuously raps on the surface of Ustvolskaya's percussion box, one corner of which rests on a copy of Castaneda's "Don Juan"

the hugely-outsize Boli, constructed of sacrificial materials, including one of Evo Morales's acrylic sweaters, contemplates Malinowska's replica of Malevich's "Black Square"

a group of slightly-scruffy habitués of McCarren Park "performing the Solar System model falling apart", accompanied by toy piano, in a video using Messiaen's "Visions de l'amen" as sound

Joanna Malinowska has installed her own aggressively-idiosyncratic diagram of the universe, "Time of Guerilla Metaphysics", inside the two gallery spaces of CANADA, on the Lower East Side.

It's not a simple walk-through show. A certain amount of attention has to be paid when the universe is being re-imagined. Its appeal may only develop slowly, at least partly because it's surfaces are largely brown and gray, and because its pieces echo the diversity of Malinowska's model, the universe itself, but ultimately the installations, both separately and together, register as powerful, tantalizing, and, ultimately, deliciously enigmatic. Their mysteries mirror the artist's sources themselves, which include traditional West African totems, Joseph Beuys, Copernicus, Mammoths, Galina Ustvolskaya, Oglala Sioux dance, Spinoza, Kazimir Malevich, Evo Morales, and Brooklyn’s McCarren Park.

I left the gallery thinking that visitors to this, her second New York show could only be scratching the surface of this artist's creative imagination.

William Blake Hecate or the Three Fates 1795

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
[Cassius, in "Julius Caesar", Act I, Scene II]

The stars, the fates, Hecate, Parcae, Fata, the norns, the three sisters, they're us, and we should start acting like we know it.

The Transportation Safety Administration can't give us security; it's in our hands. All of the grotesque, costly, and invasive measures the TSA has already introduced, or might still introduce, are only reactive, and cannot match the efficacy of the initiatives which a look at the broader geopolitical picture would demand. We should also remember that all the current fuss is about passenger air travel, which is only a tiny portion of our national security responsibilities.

The only comprehensive security measure that makes any sense, and which incidentally would be acceptable to, if not applauded by, the entire world (including air travelers everywhere) would be an elimination of the cause, not a continual search for the effect of the intense resentment and hatred behind suicidal and other terrorist acts.

We should begin by looking at ourselves as others see us. We should end all of our current, totally optional wars, close the U.S. military bases and operations currently located within well over 130 countries, and begin to show a decent respect for the cultures of other peoples. 

Of course it would also be helpful if we could actually bring ourselves to extend real foreign aid, not military hardware, and only where it can be constructive, not where we believe we can buy love or increase our own wealth. 

[image from poor old dirt farmer]

minaret and church tower in Wangen bei Olten, in the northern Swiss canton of Solothurn

Tell me again: Why is this a problem?

[image from AFP, via Spiegel]

Anti-war protesters demonstrate in Times Square October 7, 2001 in New York City. Thousands of marchers participated in the rally on the same day that the US and Britain commenced air strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. [Huffington Post caption]

It could have gone much differently.

I was in the streets eight years ago today, but with a characteristic mid-western idealism continually renewed without any justification, I didn't believe we were actually going to war. It was just so stupid and wrong, so eighteenth century.

Today some of us mourn the eight years (and still counting) of the wars without end begun by George W. Bush and embraced by Barack Hussein Obama.

They are all Obama's wars.

Woodrow Wilson's war, announced as the "war to end all wars", lasted 19 months. Our participation in the Second World War lasted a little over three years and eight months. Our current series of insane, counter-intuitive, self-destructive, illegitimate, racist, imperial, immoral, and finally perpetually self-propagating wars, waged under the rubric, "Operation Enduring Freedom", have been programmed from the very beginning to go on forever.

[image, otherwise uncredited, from Huffington Post]

some of the hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters marching in silence today in central Tehran (green was the signature color of the opposition's campaign)

I think they're going to make it. There will be more demonstrations tomorrow, and the protests are likely to be more broadly-based and increasingly countrywide. A general strike has been called for the same day.

Iran's twentieth-century political history is a complex story, and the second half especially includes a far-from-innocent involvement on the part of the U.S. [fed first by our lust for oil and Cold War hysteria - okay, it was actually pretty disgusting], but today it suddenly appears that the people who created and maintained one of the greatest civilizations in human history just may be about to emerge from the tyranny of a crude religious fanaticism which had briefly hijacked both their own best hopes and the world's admiration for their magnificent culture.

I'd like to add that I wish that ordinary U.S. citizens had the kind of political courage being displayed on the streets of Iran today; We could certainly use it. Beginning last November I've been expressing my doubts about whether we were going to get what we had voted for. I should be writing more about my increasing fear and disgust, but I'll wait for another occasion.

ADDENDUM: I just saw this Ted Rall cartoon. Although I said I wouldn't go into Obama's failures now, I couldn't resist the adding this note. I do this even though Rall doesn't address our hope-and-change President's equally disturbing failure to address the economic meltdown (instead handing over the government to Wall Street), and his cynical reversals on gay rights issues.

[image, from the Guardian, by Abedin Taherkenareh/European Press Photo]

the fire this time: the towers are are forever collapsing up above 116th Street

Each time I head uptown for something going on at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, almost always with friends who haven't been there before, I look for this capital above one of the massed columns surrounding one of the formal entrances on the West Front. I had come to assume that almost everyone had probably heard about this treasure, and its various companions, but after a look around Google-land just now, I found that they may not be as well known or photographed as I had thought.

Barry and I went up to Harlem once again last week with friends from the East Bay area on the other side of the country. They were former New Yorkers, visiting the city for the first time after an absence of seven years. We had decided we were all interested in a concert of ancient and modern Spanish choral music being offered that afternoon inside the cathedral's crossing.

Naturally while we were there I showed them one of my favorite things, this stone capital, which had been completed well before September 11, 2001. It and several others were carved by workers who were a part of an apprenticeship program proposed in 1978 to serve urban youth but also intended to preserve the stone mason's craft. During its existence one of St. John's own twin towers managed to grow fifty feet (still 100 feet short of the height intended for both). The money ran out in the early 1990's, and both structural and decorative work on the Cathedral was once more discontinued, for the third time in that last, very messy century of ours.

For more images of the stones, and more on the church and its Close, see Tom Fletcher's New York architecture site, or that of the church itself.

I hope this image doesn't look too sentimental, especially coming after my last post (a picture of some yellow spring flowers in front of a blue wall), but today, or some other day close to it, is a big holiday for a lot of people - for many different reasons, some of them even related.

Easter was one of my favorite holidays growing up. We were observing Catholics, but my obsession with the holiday was more about the return, finally, after another interminable Lent, of lots of smells and bells: colorful church vestments (including pink!), fresh flowers everywhere, lots of music, and candy of course (even before church).

The ancient Germans, who seem to be behind all of our biggest holidays, revered a fertility goddess called Ôstarâ, who was associated with the rising sun and spring, but who was also a friend to all children. She had a pet bird which for some reason she had to change into a rabbit to produce brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the children as gifts.

None of this makes sense to me now, and I'm referring to the yarns spun by both Catholic and pagan cults, so the fact that once every year at this time I pull out of the cupboard an opaque nineteenth-century glass egg (made for darning socks?) which has sat forever on some dry grasses inside a two-inch-round antique splint basket from the same era would seem to represent as much nonsense as its inspirations. Maybe it's my way of freely rendering an astronomical calendar, but I do know it makes me feel good.

We have another very old basket which I also set out early this morning, this one in the living room. It's a bit larger. Inside its ancient woven splints rest three hollowed-out and brightly-decorated real eggs. The eggs have grown old themselves since the day they were purchased at a Ukrainian holiday fair decades ago, although they don't look like they've changed a bit. Although These curios are real, and they definitely have color, I think I've always preferred their glass replica, and it's the one I'm looking at now as I type these lines.

Happy spring!

Federico Solmi's "crucifix" [my punctuation], related to his 2008 hand-drawn animation video, "The Evil Empire", a satirical look at the outrageous exploits of a fictive pope, and a part of his "ongoing desire to satirize tyrants" [as quoted in both ARTINFO and ArtNet].

I suppose this artist's work may look to some like heady stuff, but only if you're Catholic, unwholesomely deferential toward superstition, or just dysfunctionally prudish.

The object shown at the top is a little provocative, but it's also very beautiful, and I think his red knob is cute. Still, Solmi's crucifix, while being shown at Bologna's Arte Fiera this past January, so aroused local judge Bruno Giangiacomo (Judge for the Preliminary Investigation (Giudice per le Indagini Preliminari or G.I.P) who appears to have only heard about it second hand, that he had the Carabinieri seize it from the booth occupied by Naples' Not Gallery and the artist charged with, essentially, blasphemy ("il vilipendio di cose destinate al culto"/"contempt for an article of worship") and obscenity ("l’esposizione di oggetti osceni"/"the display of obscene objects"). The crucifix had already been sold to a collector, and Solmi first heard about the charges after he had returned to his home in New York. The blasphemy count was later dropped, when someone realized that the statute had been rendered null by a constitutional court in 2000.

No, sadly, this wasn't a publicity stunt, but when I was first told about the confiscation and the charges I did think that someone was pulling my leg. Actually I was almost stupefied, since the great city where this occurred has the reputation here of being Italy's most politically and socially radical. The artist's own home town and the capital of Emilia-Romagna, Bologna led the country’s socialist movement early in the twentieth century, was extremely active in the revolt against the fascists in 1944, and after the war, until the last decade, the city consistently voted for communist governments. I had assumed its fiery, secular, non-conformist political history would have supported an artist's right to his creation, however provocative. Now it's up to the lawyers to decide how much liberty is too much liberty.

drawing used in Solmi's "Evil Empire" video

Our own art fairs last week didn't produce anything like this kind of excitement. It almost makes me nostalgic for Rudy Giuliani's imbecilic tantrum over the Brooklyn Museum show, "Sensation", ten years ago. Just kidding; maybe we should think of censoring little boys and she-goats as more than enough excitement.

For more information see these ArtNet and ARTINFO articles.

[image at the top from the artist's New York gallery, LMAK Projects, via ArtNet]

1917 poster* by J.C. Leyendecker, successful, closeted [homo] designed to sell war bonds

Although I took huge delight yesterday in Rev. Joseph Lowery's contribution, because of his own history and the fact that its grace transcended religion, my experience of the joy of yesterday's inauguration of Barack Obama was marred by the number of genuine sour notes, all related, that piled up all day long and even into the night at the inaugural balls: Watching the glorious events of the day being soaked in all that god talk made me very, very uncomfortable. You probably know what I'm taking about.

By the way, after all the uproar over Obama giving the nod to Rick Warren's to deliver that, whatyamacallit, "invocation", I thought it was some "revelation" to hear the fat gentleman finally speak yesterday. As he rambled on like a Sunday school teenager in "church-speak" mode, Barry and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. Just then Barry saw on his feed that at 11:49 EST justinph had tweeted:

Wow, Rick Warren prays like shit.

I say, amen.

And I want to interrupt myself here with a point of information: In spite of what we have been led to believe, and contrary to the [Justice Roberts-flubbed] administration of the oath of office we witnessed yesterday, the Constitution includes a precisely-worded, prescribed text which absolutely does not include the phrase, "so help me god". Also, our founders made it very clear that you don't have to swear an oath, but merely affirm. [Article II, Section 1.]

As a part of all mankind I share the joy of people of every color in the triumph of Barack Husein Obama, but, as an American who knows and serves no god, today I probably feel more excluded than ever before. A black man can become President; we had already discovered that we can have and probably soon will have a woman as President; we can expect some day to find that it isn't necessary to be a Christian to become President; if absolutely nobody else shows up at the hustings, we might eventually elect a queer; The office is now open to every citizen [if natural-born, at least 35 years of age, and 14 years a resident in the U.S.], yet from where I'm standing it looks pretty certain that, if faking belief isn't an option, an atheist can never become President of these United States. She or he is more likely to be stoned in the public square.

When I look at the historic talent pool represented by that distinguished class of skeptics, I find that truth to be quite tragic, and I'm very sad for all of us.

*
When I first saw this image, on the About.com site, the medallion at the bottom had been altered to read "For a Christian America", and the sword was edited to bear the inscription, "Bigotry, Discrimination". I put at the top of this post before I realized that as originally published and as shown here the picture doesn't have anything overtly connected to a deity, but I've decided to keep it at the top, for the Boy Scouts of America's connection to god, country and straight-acting-boys - and men.

[image, in which the artist's male lover {they were to live together 48 years} modeled for "Liberty", from Library of Congress]