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Clarence Thomas hit a new high in Supreme Court decision writing:

Thomas’ case in point: Warrick Dunn, the author of the 2008 memoir Running for My Life: My Journey in the Game of Football and Beyond. Dunn, formerly a star NFL running back, is a minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons. Brumfield murdered Dunn’s mother when Dunn was 18. Here’s how Thomas sets up the case:

This case is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, we have Kevan Brumfield, a man who murdered Louisiana police officer Betty Smothers and who has spent the last 20 years claiming that his actions were the product of circumstances beyond his control. On the other hand, we have Warrick Dunn, the eldest son of Corporal Smothers, who responded to circumstances beyond his control by caring for his family, building a professional football career, and turning his success on the field into charitable work off the field.

Thomas spends several pages in his 27-page dissent contrasting Brumfield with Dunn. In case his meaning isn’t clear enough, Thomas adds a footnote, saying, “Like Brumfield, Warrick’s father was not a part of his life. But, unlike Brumfield, Warrick did not use the absence of a father figure as a justification for murder.” Thomas goes on to spend another few paragraphs detailing all of Dunn’s charitable contributions and activism, before taking a dig at Brumfield for filing too many appeals. Thomas accuses the majority justices of being insensitive to the horrific nature of the crime and for ignoring the victims in this case. To drive the point home, he attached a photo of Dunn’s mother (copied from Dunn’s memoir) to his dissent.

Several pages! Photos!

Can this please start a trend of citing NFL players’ lives in Supreme Court cases? A few possible examples:

1) How about Alito citing Kurt Warner’s autobiography about how turning to Jesus and hard work to support your dream is constitutionally superior to relying on government programs if you are poor? Seems like a great cite for eliminating the Fair Labor Standards Act!

2) Or perhaps Anthony Kennedy citing Brett Favre’s brilliant autobiography on why drug sentences should be reduced. For certain people anyway.

3) And maybe, just maybe, Scalia will cite the life of OJ Simpson to show how poor African-Americans rise to have successful careers and therefore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional.

Really the possibilities are endless.

Republicans like South Dakota Sen. John Thune have declared war on the National Weather Service over climate change and are looking to slide in a back door cut, consolidating the country's 122 weather service offices down to just six for the entire United States. The National Weather Service Improvement Act would order the NWS to come up with a plan for establishing regional forecasting centers

Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini.

The New Yorker profiles Elizabeth Taylor (the famed novelist, not the famed actress) and explores her lasting influence.

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For three weeks in the fall of 2013, a 25-acre heritage village in Ontario was transformed by over 30 artists into a small city of installations questioning lines between rural and urban, past and future. Since much of the world likely didn’t make it up to the Markham Museum for Landslide: Possible Futures during its brief life, a new catalogue published last month with Public Books revisits this intriguing intervention in one of North America’s fastest-growing cities.

Markham only upgraded from town to city status in 2012, establishing itself as more than just a suburb of Toronto. The change followed a 2010 vote to open development on 1,000 hectares of land rather than keep them agricultural. For Landslide, curator Janine Marchessault concentrated on local and international artists who have an ecological bent to their work, with each of them creating their own experience in the Markham Museum heritage village. Marchessault writes in the catalogue that the exhibition asked “how we can address some of the most pressing tensions facing us today: the balance between ecology and economy, agriculture and development, and diversity and history.”

The old houses in the heritage village date to between 1850 and 1930, covering 25 acres with the remains of Markham’s previous self. Julie Nagam’s “singing our bones home,” installed in a wagon shed, was a tribute to the forgotten indigenous remains beneath the city, with a small white tent for contemplation erected among the old wooden wagon parts. Glynis Logue’s “The River” featured a winding, planted tributary of sunflowers, revitalizing some of the place’s agricultural spirit while considering its sustainable future. In one of the more elaborate installations, Frank Havermans connected the pulley system of a historic barn to a kinetic metal sculpture that creeped over the worn wood, the contemporary work merging with the retro tech.

In 2014, Marchessault and media scholar Aleksandra Kaminska wrote an essay on the exhibition in Transformations Journal, where they explained the value of the oft-overlooked heritage village:

Unlike those places that can boast being authentic sites of history, the heritage village exists in an in-between space, a referent to history but also characterized by its modern design. It is where history is curated into heritage, a manipulation of the past into something that can be shared and made common. Rarely however do these family-friendly sites showcase anything more than a caricaturization of the past, often with employees dressed in period costumes recreating the predictable scenes we have come to associate with pioneer living.

Urban environments often have these heritage village remains; for example, New York has the 17th-century Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island and Weeksville in Brooklyn, an African-American freedmen village dating to the 19th century. Too often the sites are static places separate from contemporary life, visited on childhood field trips and then forgotten. As Landslides argues, they can be valuable grounds for conversation about how we incorporate that past into a city’s future.

Landslide: Possible Futures took place September 21 to October 14, 2013, at the Markham Museum (9350 48 HWY, Markham, Ontario). The catalogue is out now from Public Books.

Everything From Above

Music video for track by Temple Invisible by Julius Horsthuis is made using high definition fractals to create alien landscapes:

Link

By Philip Cohen. Originally posted at Family Inequality (here). The piece is cross-posted with permission.

Four years ago I wrote about the gender composition of sociology and the internal segregation of the discipline. Not much has changed, at least on the old measures. Here’s an update including some new measures (with some passages copied from the old post).

People may (or may not) want to be sociologists, they may or may not be accepted to graduate schools, thrive there (with good mentoring or bad), freely choose specializations, complete PhDs, publish, get jobs, rise to positions of leadership, and so on.  As in workplaces, gender segregation in academic sociology represents the cumulative intentions and actions of people in different institutional settings and social locations. It’s also the outcome of gender politics and power struggles. So, very interesting!

A report from the research folks at the American Sociological Association (ASA) got me thinking about this in 2011. The conversation revived the other day when someone asked ASA Vice President Elect Barbara Risman (a friend and colleague of mine), “What do you make of the fact that increasingly the majority of ASA election candidates tend to be women?” As we’ll see, the premise may be wrong, but the gender dynamics of ASA are interesting anyway.

#1: ASA leadership

The last four people elected president of ASA have been women (Ruth Milkman, Paula England, Annette Lareau, and Cecilia Ridgeway), and the the next winner will be either Michele Lamont or Min Zhou, both women. That’s an unprecedented run for women, and the greatest stretch of gender domination since the early 1990s, when men won six times in row. Here is the trend, by decade, starting with the decades before a woman president, 1906 through the 1940s:

Clearly, women have surpassed parity at the top echelons of the association’s academic leadership. ASA elections are a complicated affair, with candidates nominated by a committee at something like two per position. For president, there are two candidates. In the last nine presidential elections, six have featured a man running against a woman, and the women won four of those contests. So women are more than half the candidates, and they’ve been more likely to win against men. That pattern is general across elected offices since 2007 (as far back as I looked): more than half the candidates are women, but even more women win (most elections have about 36 candidates for various positions):

The nominating committees pick (or convince) more women than men to run, and then the electorate favors the women candidates, for reasons we can’t tell from these data.

These elections are run in an association that became majority female in its membership only in 2005, reaching only 53% female in 2010. That trend is likely to continue as older members retire and the PhD pool continues to shift toward women.

#2: Phds

Since the mid-1990s, according to data from the National Science Foundation, women have outnumbered men as new sociology PhDs, and we are now approaching two-thirds female. (The data I used in the old post showed a drop in women after 2007, but with the update, which now comes from here, that’s gone.)

Producing mostly-female PhDs for a quarter of a century is getting to be long enough to start achieving a critical mass of women at the top of the discipline.

#3: Specialization

These numbers haven’t been updated by ASA since 2010. The pattern of section belonging at that time showed a marked level of gender segregation. On a scale of 1 to 100, I calculate the sections are segregated at a level of .25.

#4: Editors and editorial boards

Finally, prestigious academic journals have one or more editors, often some associate editors, and then an editorial board. In sociology, this is mostly the people who are called upon to review articles more often. Because journal publication is a key hurdle for jobs and promotions, these sociologists serve as gatekeepers for the discipline. In return they get some prestige, the occasional reception, and they might be on the way to being an editor themselves someday.

Journal leadership is dragging behind the trends in PhDs, ASA members, and ASA leadership. I selected the top 20 journals in the Sociology category from the Journal Citation Reports (excluding a few misplaced titles), plus Social Problems and Social Forces, because these are considered to be leading journals despite low impact factors. The editors of these journals are 41% female (or 40% if you use journals as the unit of analysis instead of editors). Here is the list in two parts — general journals and specialty journals — with each sorted by impact factor. For multiple editors I either list the gender if they’re all the same, or show the breakdown if they differ:

It looks like the gender gap is partly attributable to the difference between journals run by associations and those run as department fiefdoms or by for-profit publishers.

For editorial boards, I didn’t do a systematic review, but I looked at the two leading research journals — American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology, as well as two prestigious specialized journals — Sociological Methods and Research, and Gender and Society (which is run by its own association,Sociologists for Women in Society, whose membership includes both women and men). Here’s the update to my 2011 numbers:

I removed a couple board members I know to have died in the last year, so these lists might not be that up to date.

Note on the journals that SMR and AJS are fiefdoms with no accountability to anyone outside their cliques, so it’s not surprising they are decades behind. ASR and G&S, on the other hand, are run by associations with majority-female memberships and hierarchies, in the case of G&S with a feminist mission. (ASA demands reports on gender and race/ethnicity composition from its editors.) AJS has no excuse and should suffer opprobrium for this. SMR might argue they can’t recruit women for this job (but someone should ask them to at least make this case).

Filed under: Education, Gender & Class, Inequality

The Comparative Government AP Reading moved to Salt Lake City this year, after five years in Kansas City. KC was lovely, but five years was enough, especially as our group was stuck in the Hotel of Death every year. It felt like folks could go either way on Salt Lake; it was a different place, but doesn’t exactly have a reputation for catering to the industrial-age drinkers of AP.

I wasn’t that worried, because I knew that the city had changed a lot during the last decade and a half. “Don’t you have to be part of a club to buy a drink?” was something that I heard a lot, but could safely dismiss. What I didn’t anticipate, however, was how bohemian (for lack of better terminology) downtown Salt Lake had become. There were plenty of bars, including good beer bars, restaurants, shops, attractions, and whatever else you might need. Temple Square is cool to visit, any reservations about LDS notwithstanding, and good hiking is available in easy walking distance. The crowd for the USA-Sweden match was, in a word, the most “Portland” group that I think I ever hung out with. Salt Lake even has the angry, assertive homeless community that’s characteristic of every city on the West Coast, but apparently is surprising to people east of the Rockies.

Two caveats; first, I suspect that leaving the 12 square blocks at the heart of the city would offer a much different picture of the area. Second, Utah state laws mandate that no liquor pour amount to more than 1.5 ounces, which effectively hamstrings the cocktail culture. I didn’t have a decent cocktail at any point during our ten day stay, unless I made it myself.

Art Movements is a weekly collection of news, developments, and stirrings in the art world.

The British Library uploaded every issue of the feminist zine Spare Rib (1972–93) online. Marsha Rowe, the co-founder of the magazine, told the Guardian that the British Library’s digitization project had given Spare Rib “a new lease of life.” “By making the magazine freely available over the internet, it can encourage women round the world to act together to change and be a resource in support of their struggle for rights and freedoms.”

Ed Miranda, a retired school bus company manager, vented his frustration on Facebook after reading a New York Times article about the Frick Collection’s display of Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June” (1895). Miranda recalled seeing the painting at the Brooklyn Museum in the late 1970s, despite the fact that both the article and the Frick itself stated that the painting was on display in New York for the first time ever. Miranda’s recollection was subsequently verified by officials at the Museo de Arte de Ponce who confirmed that the painting was loaned to the Brooklyn Museum in 1979.

Workers at the Museum of Modern Art who are members of the United Autoworkers Local 2110 will vote on a new contract Monday.

Over 2,000 Israeli artists signed a petition condemning the Israeli government’s “anti-democratic” treatment of artists.

Israel’s first museum dedicated to Arab contemporary art opened on Wednesday. The Arab Museum of Contemporary Art’s first exhibition is entitled Hiwar (Arabic for dialogue).

A fire destroyed portions of the basilica of Saint-Donatien (built between 1872 and 1889) in Nantes, France.

Nepal’s government reopened several heritage sites despite the concerns of UN officials that the sites aren’t ready to accommodate visitors following the April 25 earthquake in which over 8,700 people died.

Fight4Aylesbury and Architects for Social Housing staged a protest outside the AJ120 Awards in London.

Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was detained by Russian authorities following a protest in Bolotnaya Square, Moscow. Tolokonnikova will write about her experience for Vice, where she was recently hired as an online columnist.

Archaeologists discovered artifacts from La Juliana, a Spanish Armada vessel that sank off the coast of County Sligo, Ireland, in 1588.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a mural by Andrew Kuo for the museum’s Woodward Avenue façade.

Kent Twitchell announced that he will create a new version of his 1987 mural “Ed Ruscha Monument,” which was accidentally whitewashed in 2006. Meanwhile, part of a ten-story Michael Jackson mural Twitchell created in the early 1990s went on view today at the Museum of the San Fernando Valley.

The founding director of the Broad, Joanne Heyler, told the Wall Street Journal that the Broad Art Foundation is collecting work at the rate of almost one piece per week in anticipation of the Los Angeles museum’s grand opening in September. Recent acquisitions include Julie Mehretu’s “Invisible Sun (algorithm 8, fable form)” (2015) and Takashi Murakami’s 82 ft-long painting “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” (2014).

The Louvre denied accusations that it discriminated against a group of Israeli students whose professor was denied a request for a group reservation.

Residents of Jean Nouvel’s 53W53 (aka the MoMA Tower) will be entitled to a number of MoMA-related perks including a benefactor membership worth $3,000. “You’d think people paying upwards of $3 million for an apartment could afford to buy their own $3,000 memberships if they wanted them,” writes Curbed’s Jeremiah Burdin, “but whatever.”

The authenticity of a painting believed to be by Peter Paul Rubens is in doubt after Christie’s apparently rejected the work. The piece, titled “The Monk,” is one of three Rubens paintings from the Alfred Beit collection at Russborough House that were controversially consigned to the auction house.

“Straight” (2008–12), a 90-ton steel installation by Ai Weiwei, will soon become the heaviest sculpture ever displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The Guardian published a photo essay documenting the current locations of the Serpentine Gallery’s annual summer pavilions.

Marlene Dumas was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St. Anne’s Church in Dresden.

The non-profit Accabonac House transformed Willem de Kooning’s former East Hampton studio into a site for an artist-in-residency program.

The former London home of Indian politician and social activist Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar will be turned into a museum.

Anita Thompson, the widow of Hunter S. Thompson, told The Cannabist that she intends to turn their home into a museum dedicated to the journalist and author.

A new bespoke font named “San Francisco” will replace Helvetica Neue as Apple’s default font.

The 25-year association between Kenwood House and the Hampstead Heath Decorative and Fine Arts Society was terminated following a row between Society members and Kenwood House employees. “But what began as a genteel gathering of art lovers,” Anita Singh reported in the Telegraph, “ended with the society being kicked out of Kenwood after a row about cold coffee, parking arrangements and a lack of seats in the restaurant.”

Transactions

The Getty Museum acquired a bust of Pope Paul V by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Governor Jerry Brown and state legislators authorized a budget of $8.3 million from California’s general fund to the California Arts Council.

The William G. and Marie Selby Foundation provided $250,000 to support a new center dedicated to Asian art at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

The Milwaukee Art Museum acquired Niki Johnson’s portrait of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, “Eggs Benedict.” The portrait is made from 17,000 condoms.

According to a study by the Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, American’s donations to arts and culture rose 9.2% in 2014.

The Smithsonian Institutions’s Archives of American Art acquired the records of the OK Harris Gallery (1969–2014)

Transitions

The New York State Museum will undergo a four-year renovation of its galleries.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music plans to start a new public art program to visually unify its four separate sites in Fort Greene.

The Hessel Museum of Art and the CCS Bard Library and Archives will temporally close as part of a major facilities expansion.

William J. Chiego will retire as the director of the McNay Art Museum on September 30, 2016.

The San Diego Museum of Art eliminated five senior positions as part of a restructuring of its staff.

Elaine Wynn and Antony Ressler were elected the new board co-chairs of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Paula Bacon Williams was appointed executive director of the Albany Museum.

Michelle Grabner will curate the Portland2016 Biennial of Contemporary Art.

The gallery Gavin Brown’s enterprise will relocate from Manhattan’s West Village to a former brewery in Harlem.

Accolades

A floor stone dedicated to Philip Larkin will be installed in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.

Poet and journalist James Fenton will be awarded the Pen Pinter Prize on October 6.

The Walentas Family Foundation awarded the residents of the 2015–2016 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage announced the recipients of its 2015 grants.

Oliver Beer was awarded the 2015 Daiwa Foundation Art Prize.

Obituaries

Richard E.W. Adams (1931–2015), archaeologist.

Nek Chand (1924–2015), artist. Creator of the Rock Garden of Chandigarh in Chandigarh, India.

Charles Correa, architect (1930–2015).

Ezra Levin (1910–2015), architect. Designed the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square, London. Built the hut used by Sir Edmund Hillary on his climb up Mount Everest.

Jesús Moroles (1950–2015), sculptor.

Carl Nesjar (1920–2015), artist. Collaborated on a number of concrete sculptures with Pablo Picasso.

Patrick Lennox Tierney (1914–2015), monuments man and Japanologist.

Frank Zachary (1914–2015), magazine editor and art director.

When searching for a book to give his five-year-old son in 1945, Italian artist Bruno Munari was frustrated by the standard fairytale narratives and structured plots available. He thought books should encourage children to think creatively and develop their own stories, and connect to their daily lives. “When you talk to somebody — either a child or an adult — you have to start with the world they know,” he explained to Notiziario Arte Contemporanea in 1971. “Then you can take them somewhere else using their imagination.”

Seven books he subsequently made with his graphic arts experience for his son were later published; in them, an elephant dreams of being different animals like a light, singing bird, paper components fold out to reveal the interiors of household furniture, and a man in a top hat walks a flamingo on a leash. The children’s books were just part of his seven-decade art career, where in addition to being part of the Futurism movement he worked in sculpture, painting, industrial design, and photography. Munari’s Books by art historian Giorgio Maffei, out this month from Princeton Architectural Press, is a bibliography of over 60 publications from 1929 to 1999, printed posthumously after his death in 1997.

“His main concern, the ethical imperative throughout his work, was to explain himself properly, clarify his thoughts, and make his work intelligible, usable, adaptable, and even suitable for copying,” Maffei writes in Munari’s Books. The book is basically an index of his work, but with the detailed photographs showing the interiors and moveable parts, alongside quotes from Munari, who was always intent on relaying the ideas behind his work, it’s a valuable insight into this aspect of his art.

A quote from Munari’s 1980 Commento ai Prelibri introduces Munari’s Books:

A: What is the purpose of a book?

B: To pass on knowledge or pleasure or in any case to increase our knowledge of the world.

A: So, if I understand rightly, to help us live better.

B: Yes, that is often the case.

His Libri illeggibili (illegible books) were ongoing experiments with materials and design, read with shapes and interaction rather than words. A 1953 book folded out in a complicated origami, while another in 1966 had transparent pages and lines that intersected in different signs as the pages flipped, and in 1993 he created a book of cushions that “can be detached and used however you want.” Other works played with this idea of the unexpected, such as his 1942 La Macchine di Munari of useless machines he drew while a student to amuse his friends, like devices to wag a lazy dog’s tail or turn hiccups to music, or his 1958 Supplemento al Dizionario Italiano (Supplement to the Italian Dictionary) that compiled photographs and meanings of Italian hand gestures.

Munari’s Books emphasizes how he was incredibly involved in the industry of publishing, even suggesting ways to advertise his books in shop windows. “Munari had an all-encompassing idea of book production; he was not just the author but he also continued to give advice and keep tabs on every stage in its manufacture and distribution,” Maffei writes. Throughout is the potential for reading to be a creative rather than a passive act, whether following a thread sewn through the pages of his 1967 Libro Illeggibile for the Museum of Modern Art, or a kid learning the alphabet with curiosity-provoking visuals like “a sack of stars and snow for Santa Claus.”

Munari’s Books by Giorgio Maffei is out now from Princeton Architectural Press. 

The first reaction most people had was, "it's bigger than I expected." 575 pages to be exact. But that obfuscates the actual format of Videogames for Humans: 27 different close readings / commentaries on short stories.

What those most people actually meant was that they had no idea that 575 pages of thought on Twine was possible, that they're surprised Twine is this big or that it is worth preserving on a tree carcass.

Preserving! In order to preserve something, it has to be more or less "over", and Merritt Kopas has a lot of feelings and anxiety about how Twine will be remembered. In the introduction, she confesses, "late 2012 and early 2013 was an extraordinarily exciting period for me [...] the 'queer games scene' covered by videogame outlets might not have been as cohesive as some accounts supposed, but for a little under a year, it definitely felt real,"

... then later she argues, "but I don't want Videogames for Humans to be seen as the capstone of the 'Twine revolution,' a kind of historical record of some interesting work done in the early 2010s."

So then, this book is partly an attempt to correct or amend a prior history... but not with more history. It wants to break a cycle.

This book is a collection of annotated transcripts from Twine playthroughs, one of the few video game engines that adapts well to printed text... provided that you're pretty familiar with Twines already. This is where the lack of history hurts this book, in a certain sense -- there's no explained context for all this (strong) work.

When I'm reading Lana Polansky's commentary on Nina Freeman's "Mangia" and Polansky exclaims, "Holy shit, am I actually dating Emmett?" -- I laugh because I know who Nina and Emmett are, and I can even imagine Emmett's reaction to a literary debate about whether he's a good boyfriend. It provokes questions about how we can study such "personal games" if they rely on notions of personalities, even though so many personalities are routinely exhausted by a public that feels entitled to access to them. How do you preserve a personality, or would you even want to? How do you set boundaries when your life is part of the art? (Basically: GG has seriously harmed the exploration of craft and new genres in video games.)

Or when Cat Fitzpatrick plays Anna Anthropy's "And The Robot Horse You Rode In On" (merely one of TWO lesbian westerns featured in this book!) and Fitzpatrick does not know, or does not care, that this is probably a remake of Andrew Plotkin's "Spider and Web" except with sexy lady fighting instead of overly intricate Cold War futurism. (EDIT: Anna says this isn't the case. Sorry for assuming... but the structural similarities / differences are really uncanny.) With that background, you can read Anthropy's changes and simplifications to the original plot device as an admonishment of the hardline parser-based interactive fiction establishment and their historic ambivalence about accepting Twine as interactive fiction. It's as if she's saying, "look, Twine can do what the canon parser IF does, and with less bullshit and more style."

This is context, and it will be forgotten.

Perhaps the most crucial super subtext that will be lost on many readers is Merritt's introduction and allusion to a queer games scene. First year doe-eyed gender studies students will be assigned this book and perhaps a link to a Polygon "queer games scene" article which leads with a photo that hilariously crops me out of the 4 person panel at Different Games 2013. (I was sitting to the right of Anna, but I guess I didn't look queer enough!) They'll have no idea that many of the people in that article mocked the idea of a "queer games scene", and this is part of the subtext that Merritt is talking about and why she cordons off the term in scare quotes.

No one will remember any of this.

Ultimately, maybe that's why this book is called "Videogames for Humans." It's for humans.

Polansky relating to in-game boyfriend troubles, or Fitzpatrick admiring literary craft, or Imogen Binnie applauding Eva Problem's imagery of demonic vaginas spontaneously giving birth to a pack of fully grown wolves, or Austin Walker relating to Jeremy Penner's experience of life after semi-divorce, or Anna Anthropy expressing sympathy for Michael Brough's tribute to a lost scarf, or Auriea Harvey commiserating with Mary Hamilton's moving stories and falling for those "wrong blond boys."

That's what matters. That's what's worth preserving.

So again, this isn't really a history of the "circa 2013 personal queer confessional Twine scene movement revolution" because it doesn't really care about history in the way that history books care about history.

It can't even claim to cover the "Twine scene", with its omission of Merritt's own work, Porpentine's work, Mastaba Snooby, Solarium, Fear of Twine, and countless other Twines... and Merritt agrees, emphasizing at the end of her introduction, "This is a book about Twine. But let's not let it be the book, yeah?"

Videogames for Humans is about tone, attitude, and embodying an approach.

It seeks to structurally re-imagine and model this radically-unradical way to experience games, to think about the aesthetics of games in grounded experiential ways instead of faffing about the framerate or weapon stats or strategy. (Although the book even covers that base with Naomi Clark's excellent dissection of the mathematical alchemy in Tom McHenry's cybernetic horse mutant farming simulator.)

Ok, yeah, numbers are fun... but, like, so are feelings?

DISCLOSURE: I bought this book with my own money.

…I thought I’d point out that Lindsey Graham just gave up the game on CNN this afternoon. I’d say something like, “I don’t know what he could’ve been thinking,” but I think it’s pretty clear that he simply just wasn’t.

Why the GOP Hates Talking About Hate: Conservatives Can’t Confront Racism in Charleston Shooting

...

No, the problem here is not that GOP politicians blame the victims. It’s that these days they desperately need to believe that they are also victims.

Depicting Roof as just another one of the foot soldiers in the war on Christmas steals unearned legitimacy from black Americans’ struggle on a scale that should give critics of Rachel Dolezal pause. It’s a theft of the Emanuel AME victims’ martyrdom that’s as capricious and as unaccountable as any Iggy Azalea appropriation.

Cynics might see the emphasis on faith as Republicans’ most current version of the “Southern Strategy.” They argue that comments such as Graham’s and Santorum’s are intentional spin, “whitewashing” Roof’s victims—they’re Christians just like us!—in order to opt out of the otherwise unavoidable conversation about race that Roof himself intended to end.

Or, even more deviously, the anti-Christian narrative is designed to gin up fear among base voters already nervous about same-sex marriage and Caitlyn Jenner. First they came for Memories Pizza, now the godless horde may be armed!

You may find that jaded interpretation a gloomy verdict on the state of our politics, but I actually hope it’s the case. Because if these people are refusing to engage in a discussion about the stain of slavery, at least they’re implicitly acknowledging the stain exists.

If they are intentionally perverting racial violence into base-stoking paranoia, at least that validates someone’s paranoia. (On Thursday, Marco Rubio posted to Twitter an image stating, “The world has become a more dangerous place,” turning Patriot Act propaganda into an accidental endorsement of what blacks all over America are feeling today.)

But what’s far more troubling is the idea that these GOP politicians truly believe Roof was on a Christian-killing mission. What if they are genuinely ignorant of the historical and cultural context of his actions? What if they earnestly believe themselves to be under equal threat? That would mean they live in a delusion so complete that not even nine dead black bodies can interrupt it. Do we dare ask how many bodies could?

...

That is the key:  Deny!Deny!Deny!

Many American towns have the grave-stones of Confederate and Union boys who slaughtered each other in their hundreds of thousands fighting for what each side firmly believed was the will of God:

...
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

How then was that not a holy war?

 In fact, since before Fort Sumter and the Cornerstone Speech -- 

...

This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. ...

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

...

--  through Wallace 

and the Dixiecrats --

 

 -- and right on past Loving v. Virginia --

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix...

-- the problem of race in America has always been about white male supremacy.

And white supremacy in America has always been about Jefferson Davis' Almighty God locked in mortal combat with Reverend Martin Luther King's Almighty God.

And it continues to astonish me the number of times we on the Left are called upon to drum this basic fact of American history into the skulls of America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectuals. 

Maybe they'll listen to Sorkin:

In the wake of the massacre at Charleston's historic Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night, Ta-Nehisi Coates says it's well past time for the state to rid itself of the Confederate battle flag flying over the statehouse in Columbia. The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the

Brazil-based artist duo Janaina Mello and Daniel Landini of Mello + Landini create tree-like installations with untwisted ropes fastened to the walls of galleries. Titled Ciclotramas, the artworks have gone through 17 different iterations since 2010, each involving some form of ropes that seem to branch through the air and splay onto surfaces like fractals or a network of neurons. The artists say they are interested in creating metaphors surrounding organic structures composed of both interrelated and independent parts, as well as the passage of time, and the “choreography of intertwining lines.” You can follow more of their work here. (via Artsy, My Modern Met)

calebdwood:

Escher, Verbum in motion

When you think that maybe the hearts of Republican leaders aren’t actually that closed to compassion, you are always proven wrong:

Kasich’s temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP’s wealthy benefactors. Last year, he traveled to Southern California to appear on a panel at a conference sponsored by the Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch. At one point, according to accounts provided by two sources present, Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d expressed the view it was what God wanted.

The governor’s response was fiery. “I don’t know about you, lady,” he said as he pointed at Kendrick, his voice rising. “But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”

The exchange left many stunned. About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar — opportunities for presidential aspirants to mingle with the party’s rich and powerful — in the months since.

A Kasich spokesman, Chris Schrimpf, declined to comment on the episode.

Like in the first Gilded Age, the poor are seen with total contempt and hostility, as is even the mildest suggestion that we should do something for them. This is the open position of the Republican Party, a position they are able to take with a combination with appeals to racism and a well-funded propaganda machine about the values of the free market and self-reliance.

While Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits were a significant part of his painting career, no confirmed photographs of the artist as an adult are known to exist. However, an 1887 melanotype that recently came to light reportedly shows van Gogh smoking a pipe while having a drink with friends.

Serge Plantureux wrote for L’Oeil de la Photographie that the photograph was identified through discovering the names of the other figures in the picture (who include artists Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, no small discovery in themselves), fixing it in a place and time, and analyzing the photographic process. He writes that the shot came to him through a couple who stopped by his Paris pop-up gallery:

The photograph they had brought to show me was small, dark, and rather difficult to see. Six characters were around a table. The light was pale, perhaps it was a winter afternoon.

They told me, still hesitant, that they thought they recognized the people in it, artists in whom they had long been interested. They were collectors and liked the painters of the late 19th century, in particular the neo-impressionists. They also said it was possible that one of the figures around the table was someone whose true face had never been seen.

Michael Zhang at PetaPixel points out that there are confirmed photos of van Gogh at 13 and 19. There are also other unconfirmed photographs of van Gogh, such as this portrait found in the 1990s. The 1887 photograph went to auction today at the Romantic Agony in Brussels, which is quite the appropriately named auction house for the troubled 19th-century artist whose true face — beyond his own, pensive self-portraits — remains mysterious. That said, now that he’s turning up in NYC subway trains and the odd 19th-century photograph, who knows where we’ll see van Gogh next?

UPDATE: According to DutchNews.nl, the photograph expert at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is not convinced that it is of the painter.

Photographer Stephen McMennamy merges his original photography in humorous ways to create what he calls #ComboPhotos: two photos paired to create unexpected situations, usually involving huge constrasts in scale. Tractors and heavy machinery are turned into giant mechanisms for food delivery, while an ice cream cone becomes an actual snowy mountain top. McMennamy is also a creative director at BBDO Atlanta and you can see more of his work here. (via Colossal Submissions)

The Federal Communications Commission has just made it clear that customers can ask carriers to block illegal robocalls and spam messages for them -- and that telcos can legally do so. In a 3-2 vote, the commission has passed a proposal that makes it...

bloglikeanegyptian:

a jurassic park game where you “build your own park” and you think the game is about building the best park with the most amount of dinosaurs and everything is running well and it goes from cloning the dinosaur all the way to putting them in the right paddock

then when you’ve finished and the credits roll the screen goes black and it starts blaring an alarm and all the dinosaurs escape and now you’re playing a first person POV-game escaping from all the dinosaurs you helped create which means the better you were at the first half the more trouble you’re in for the second 

Cuba's making it easier and cheaper for its citizens to get online by building out an island-wide network of WiFi hotspots. According to local paper Juventud Rebelde, the nation's state-run telecommunications company will open up internet access in 3...

hydrogeneportfolio:

Women Of Color Who Changed Science. And The World. 

Part 1 • Part 2 • Purchase

The late 18th century was a golden age of satire in Britain. Etched cartoons and caricatures abounded, poking fun at kings, noblemen, society ladies, French revolutionaries, the institution of marriage, and countless other people and things. “The absence of absolutism in Britain carried with it a relative freedom of the press,” writes Stephen J. Bury in Oxford Art Online, by way of explaining the cartoon combustion of the time. “Technological developments encouraged a switch from verbal to visual satire, and the era witnessed the development of a social context for debate, whether in the coffee-house, club, or on the street.” Other factors cited by Bury include relatively easy means of production and distribution, new publishers, and “the appearance of a number of great artists on the scene.”

Three of those great artists were James Gillray (1756/7–1815), Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), and George Cruikshank (1792–1878), all of whom are represented in an upcoming sale at Bloomsbury Auctions of Napoleonic and Georgian social and political satire. The sale features over 200 works, split between the collections of one Lord Baker of Dorking and an unnamed “gentleman.” Lord Baker’s collection features images of Napoleon, including the earliest known representations of the general in English caricature, by Isaac Cruikshank (George’s father) in 1797 and 1798. As the press release for the sale notes, Cruikshank “had clearly never actually seen his subject”; his Napoleon is a tall, skinny, curly-lipped man with a vengeful look in the eyes as he kicks the papal tiara off the Pope’s head.

Later Napoleon cartoons include an amazingly astute one by James Gillray from 1805, which shows then Prime Minister William Pitt and Napoleon greedily carving up the globe with forks and knives (title: “The Plumb-pudding in danger, _ or _ State Epicures taking un Petit Souper”). Two by Rowlandson, in 1810, satirize Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise of Austria, who alternately screams her hatred for him and taunts him with promise of a “flag of truce” while calling him “Boney.” That cartoon pretty well drips with sexual innuendo (its title is “The Dunghill Cock and Game Pullet or Boney Beat out of the Pitt”) — gossip that arose because Napoleon had failed to produce an heir with his first wife, Josephine. Another cartoon from the same auction set, by an anonymous creator (also 1810), shows Napoleon and Marie Louise at the breakfast table, both red-faced and arguing over the fact that Boney has “done NOTHING” to her.

The sale’s second collection focuses on broader social satire from the Georgian period, including George Cruikshank’s hilarious Monstrosities of Fashion series (1816–26), which simultaneously captures and lampoons the styles of the day by grossly exaggerating shapes and proportions. A boxing broadside illustrated by Gillray in 1790 features one of the earliest examples of sports journalism, whose headline begins, “A SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT of the concluding battle between those Champions of the Fist…” And one of my personal favorites is a c. 1823 hand-colored lithograph by Edme-Jean Pigal — from a collection studying “Parisian Manners” — which shows an anguished young artist kicking his stool, clutching a sharp tool in one hand (maybe a palette knife) and a painting in the other (if you look closely, you can see gashes), and yelling, “Chien de métier!” (literally “dog business”).

Nothing’s changed! Painting is still a dog business, suspenders are still in, and as yesterday proved, we still need political cartoons as much as ever.

Bloomsbury Auctions’ Caricatures: Napoleonic and Georgian Social & Political Satire sale will take place on June 25.

I do love truth in advertising.

From 1962

A special gigantic comic for Father’s Day!

Here’s more quality parenting for the occasion.

Liberals like the late Steve Gilliard were writing about this many years ago and, I suspect, we will be writing about it many years from now.  Because while Steve is gone now (and I have no idea where Grand Moff Texan has got to) this remains America's terrible, open wound.

And it will never go away until we make it go away:

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 

The American Swastika

This is not the Confederate Flag.
*******

[Image Missing]
This is the Confederate Flag.


Grand Moff Texan came up with this and I do love it so.

If you google "Confederate Flag," you will not find a single, real Confederate Flag on the first page, and few examples after that.

Not only has"Confederate Flag" changed to mean something it should not, the phony "Confederate Flag" has changed in significance over time, too. It began as a battle flag, a way to tell Confederate from Union forces on the field, since their two flags weren't that different, and units' uniforms and individual banners were anything but standardized. The phonyConfederate Flag seems to have borrowed the Cross of St. Andrew, seen on the Scottish flag, or maybe St.Patrick's cross, incorporated into the Union Jack, but that's just me guessing.

For longer than the Confederacy lasted, and for more than a century after the American Civil War, the phony Confederate Flag has stood for the defiance of the South, for America's own, premodern apartheid. It has become, simply, The American Swastika.

The comparison isn't inflammatory, it's deliberate and appropriate. This wouldn't be the first time an old symbol changed meaning due to its abuse by the sick and twisted.



One Bad Apple From Germany Killed Millions. Hitler didn't just leave behind a mnemonic for all students of astronomy in the English language. He took an ancient good luck symbol, a nearly universal one, and turned it into a universally recognized symbol of evil.

It can happen. And it did happen here. Don't give me that bullshit about slavery not being relevant to most of Southern society, or not being a factor in the Civil War, or not being the monopoly of the South. This is a Southerner you're talking to, and I've heard it all before and I know better. I know my region's history, and it is unique within my country. Something different happened here. The South cannibalized their entire culture, even their supposed religion, to justify the racism that justified first slavery and later (and for much longer) the political subjection of African Americans. The truly sad thing is that even those who never owned slaves (and ante-bellum middle class Southerners were more likely to buy a slave and rent him out than they were to buy their own land) were part of this conspiracy of justification. After the American Civil War an even wider portion of Southern society was directly involved in the subjection of African Americans. The Civil War didn't sweep away a civilization based on slavery, it merely displaced its ruling class and began the South's long, slow march away from its top-heavy, agrarian, aristocratic society. American apartheid had been democratized, and with it, the Confederate Flag became its egalitarian symbol against the Civil Rights movement and all other aspects of integration for generations.

The Confederate Flag resonates, as a symbol, throughout Southern culture.

People all over the world know what they're looking at when they see the Confederate Flag. Regardless of what those who display the Confederate Flag may say it means, the Confederate Flag is never far from the Klan and like groups, and the Confederate Flag is never displayed by their historical victims. Showing the Confederate Flag doesn't just leave the displayer with a burden of proof, to show that for them it's something other than what the Confederate Flag has stood for, now, for generations. Rather, the Confederate Flag's history, both long and recent in this country, are such that theConfederate Flag cannot be displayed in good faith. The meaning of the Confederate Flag is utterly unambiguous. At best, venerators of the Confederate Flag can plead ignorance, not innocence.

I grew up with the Confederate Flagand there was never any question what it meant. The South would rise again, that's what the Confederate Flag meant. We flew the Confederate Flag at my high school. the Confederate Flag appeared on bumpers, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia. "Dixie gonna do it again!" and similar slogans accompanied Confederate Flag.

There was simply no question. The Confederate Flag is not a symbol of heritage. That should have been obvious enough in Mississippi, where more people fought for the Union than the Confederacy, and yet the Confederate Flag's defenders insist it is part of that state's "heritage." No. It's part of the "heritage" of that minority of Mississippians whose "heritage" involved the subjection of the rest. That's their "heritage." Hey, if the pointy hat fits, wear it.

So, if you're going to attack a people, demonize and destroy their language and religion, hold them up as a threat to civilization and "your" womanhood, destroy their families, rape, murder, mutilate, crush them in labor camps and then, when someone justifiably smacks your racists ass, take the whole murderous shame underground, don't be surprised when your precious symbol, the sign of all you hold holy and all the world recognizes as the sigil of your sickness, becomes, quite simply, your Swastika. That's all the Confederate Flag which is not the real Confederate Flag will ever be, now.

It's The American Swastika

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough,” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter. This is something I keep in mind when looking at visual art: there is usually a story for the eye to find, some detail to latch onto. But when in the company of Maira and Alex Kalman, I am reminded that this truly does extend to most “anything.”

Maira Kalman is a New York–based illustrator, while Alex, her son, is the co-founder of Mmuseumm, a former elevator shaft in Tribeca that he and two friends transformed into an exhibition space. This month, Mmuseumm launched its fourth season with a second space, Mmuseumm 2, a storefront window nearby where Maira has re-created the closet of her mother, Sara Berman.

Kalman, an author and illustrator for The New Yorker, New York Times, and Departures Magazine, is known for picking up on the unnoticed, overlooked particulars of daily existence — in her telling of the life of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, we learn that the author of the Declaration of Independence “slept slightly sitting up” and that his favorite vegetable was peas. There is a rambling quality to her stories; we feel we are with her while she freely discovers her subjects, which vary from fashion shows to yoga retreats to artist studios.

“For me, the digressive moment is the moment,” she once told the interviewer Paul Holdengräber. It’s why Kalman loves walking — because you can stop thinking and just look and be. Walking, for her, is an exercise in keeping an open mind, in letting her surroundings catch her by surprise.

It’s only suitable, then, that one stumbles upon Kalman’s installation of her mother’s closet by walking down a quiet alley. Behind a pane of glass, neatly folded white linens and shirts and stacks of rosy underwear sit on white shelves — “Sara, who came from Belarus, only wore white,” says the British voice of the audio guide. “I always say she was emulating the empress Josephine,” Kalman said to me of her mother’s fashion choices. “But that is not true. We never talked about it … In some instinctual way she was clarifying the world.”

There’s a glass jar filled with identical gray buttons, a bottle of Chanel No. 19, a box of recipes (for roasts, blintzes, schnitzel, and “some unfortunate forays into Americana,” Maira confessed), and a cheese grater for making potato pancakes. The chain for the light dangles playfully from the ceiling with a fluffy red ball of yarn to pull on. While growing up, “the closet was a masterpiece of modern art in our eyes,” said Alex. The closet has been reproduced almost identically, though on a slightly smaller scale, and with a few substitutes — “it’s like the vertebrae at the Natural History Museum, only here we have a bra and a pair of socks,” he explained. Indeed, ever since Sara Berman died, Maira has envisioned her mother’s closet as a kind of museum, hoping that one day it would become “a big attraction for people worldwide.”

Sara Berman’s luminous closet gives us pause. There is a sense of calm and purpose in those sheets and sweaters that were daily and meticulously folded. (“Some families go bowling together. We ironed and folded and sorted and stacked with joy,” said Maira.) Everything, from the pair of reading glasses to the stray piece of checkered ribbon, takes on an anthropomorphic quality; the shoes themselves become portraits: there are six pairs of them, lined up neatly, all with pointed ends and some with their laces undone. Varying in grays, browns, and creams, the shoes are sharp and delicate, playful and smart — much as I imagine Sara Berman to have been.

“Everyone grows up with a language in their home. Ours was looking,” said Alex. Just as Maira asks us to contemplate a closet, usually thought of as a repository behind closed doors, Alex draws our attention to objects that would’ve generally escaped us, like coffee cup lids, vomit bags, gas masks, and eggs (that will, in fact, hatch). He describes the objects in Mmuseumm, on display behind glass vitrines like scientific specimens, as “meaningless and potentially meaningful.” Some come from Mmuseumm’s permanent collection, like a gold $100 bill and a rubber chicken wing, but the majority traveled from collections around the world. For instance, the cornflake index — a personal collection of cornflakes organized by shape, color, and texture — arrived from England “packaged like the queen’s jewels.” The way Alex sees it, these objects should be cared for like artworks. And yet, when Mmuseumm runs its call for submissions each season, it welcomes proposals from anyone around the world on one condition: that it not include “art.”

The winning collections, Alex explains, are those whose contents are “not obvious” — you wouldn’t think to stop to look at a rusty nail (one of many in a doctor’s collection of objects he has removed from people’s bodies) in the same way you would stop before a painting. “It is never ironic,” he made clear. “It’s sincere.” Like Maira, Alex is drawn to “the vernacular” because it communicates something “incredibly intimate and human.”

In other museums, the assumption is that you won’t fully appreciate an object unless you have the historical background. Here, there is no background necessary, except perhaps a sense of humor and some compassion. It was from “my beautiful mother,” an oft-repeated phrase, that Maira learned that knowledge isn’t really what matters. “What you have to have is curiosity.” Growing up, Maira was never “tested” on her knowledge or asked to “perform.” In fact, she says with some pride, “facts were banished from our home.”

In following their curiosity, the Kalmans have observed their surroundings indiscriminately, capturing pieces of our lives that we generally don’t think are worth our time or contemplation. The Kalman language of “looking” requires patience and dedication — as does looking at visual art. Responding to art, really engaging with it, involves actively journeying through it with no purpose. It is a rare moment when I give myself that wandering freedom and time. The Kalmans, in seemingly assuming this attitude wherever they look, remind me of what the artist Paulo Bruscky once said in an interview:

For me, art is a form of seeing and not of doing. It might seem utopian, but the day will arrive when the artist will no longer be necessary. The artist makes things only because people don’t know how to see for themselves. Someday … people will begin learning how to see art in everything …. because art is present everywhere — the artist merely captures and displays it.

I don’t totally buy Bruscky’s conclusion, but he has a point when he suggests that the artist’s sources of inspiration surround us all. Though Alex doesn’t acquire art for Mmuseumm, the works in his museum are just as artful. In some ways, what Mmuseumm is encouraging us to do — to look for the art around us — is a greater task than that of your regular one.

Mmuseumm 1 and 2 (4 Cortlandt Alley, Tribeca, Manhattan) will be specially open to the public on Friday, June 19, from 6 to 9pm. Regular hours are on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 6pm. 

On Monday, Bill Murray led a parade of poets across the Brooklyn Bridge in honor of Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” at the 20th annual Poets House Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk. At the end of the walk, the poets recite the nine-stanza poem:

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

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