Cowboy Who?

1. Uses the term “mother” interchangeably with female parent and romantic partner.

2. Tasked with ending a plague.

3. Not particularly good at ending said plague.

4. Pretty much responsible for the outbreak of at least one plague.

5. Claim to office is marred by illegitimacy.

6. Has had a chorus bewail his decisions during a play.

7. Does not acknowledge that cigarettes cause cancer.

8. Crafts policies based on questionable religious interpretations.

9. Preoccupied with questions of marriage despite many actual issues that still need addressing.

10. Shows an adversarial stance toward people with disabilities.

11. Purports to understand the cryptic sayings that the unwelcome hellbeast tormenting the citizenry issues from time to time.

12. Many more people would be alive had he died on a mountain in his infancy.

Oedipus Rex: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Mike Pence: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Tonight's comic is about personal brandwiches.

Dear Bryan,

Congratulations! We are so pleased to offer you admission to our class of 2024. We cannot express how excited we are to have you on campus this fall.

We certainly hope you and your family are safe in these uncertain times, and that there’s still a little bit of stimmy money to be put towards your enrollment deposit. You will enroll, won’t you, Bryan? In retrospect, wait-listing you at all was a huge mistake. Of course you deserve to be here.

But the truth is, Bry, you weren’t our first pick.

Did this young man really write his personal essay about his grandfather? I chortled to the VP of admissions, Susan, as we discussed your application. Can you imagine being so obtuse as to believe we haven’t received fifty other “grandpa” essays this cycle?

Then Susan passed your paper over to Gary, our assistant director, who almost spit out his crudité when he noticed that you had scored a 4 on AP Human Geography. Who is this naïf? Gary exclaimed. Doesn’t he know that Human Geography is the easiest AP? Who is that supposed to impress?

Then the topic of discussion turned to your personal statement, which we tried to read aloud, but couldn’t continue without bursting into laughter. “I really admire the College’s commitment to a robust, participatory learning environment…” Gary couldn’t contain his laughter. I mean, really, Bryan. You ripped that right from our mission statement. I wiped a tear from my eye and turned to your CV.

But, I regret to admit, in the hurry to pass your hilariously un-indented résumé to Susan, a bit of raclette spilled onto the part of your oeuvre where you described founding a nonprofit to bring endangered animals to childhood cancer wards. Those were headier times, and it was fondue night, but I know that’s no excuse. Saving the pandas is an auto-admit, and we realize that now.

You belong here, Bryan. Forget what happened before, and simply love us unconditionally, without regard for how we’ve treated you. Yes, our admissions team was impossible to get a hold of when you had questions. Yes, we failed to fix the application portal for a few weeks in November. Yes, we forgot to find a current student to pair you up with for your visit, thus forcing you to wait with your mother in the Emily Dickinson Museum for three hours while we begged our hungover tour guides to pick up an extra shift.

But what matters is that we care about you now. It may have taken a global pandemic, a nationwide recession, and a tidal wave of deferments, but we realized what we should have known all along: you are good enough, and your $54,426 is just as good as anyone else’s. Your student ID is br5tp, and your temporary password is waitlistmistake345.

Yours,
Admissions

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Hovertext:
See, computer science DOES have philosophical implications.

The Western Experience to 1715
Chambers, Grew, Herlihy, Rabb, Woloch
1974

Another Swedish Death Cleaning Find…

This time we have a college history textbook. The only reason I know it was a textbook from college was the used book price from IUB also known as the Illini Union Bookstore. (Both my husband and I graduated from Illinois way back in 1982.) My husband recognized this book as his text from his Intro to Classical Civilization class. Professor Richard Scanlan’s class was arguably the most popular class at the university during our tenure. My husband, an engineering student and a guy who would take math classes for fun, absolutely loved this class. I am quite sure that is why this book is still sitting on our shelf. Scanlan died in 2009.

The book itself is nothing particularly special. The content probably can be found in many more current published books. Although we get to make our own rules with a personal library, this sentimental feeling about particular titles or even editions, can also plague librarians trying to weed a collection. It is easy to get caught up in what the book means to us personally. No one is immune to this.

To those librarians that struggle with weeding personal favorites for whatever reason. Weed them and throw some money in the used book sale and take them home. I will keep the Swedish death cleaning police and Marie Kondo off your back.

Carpe Diem Everyone,

Mary

The post College Memories appeared first on Awful Library Books.

New comic!

I will not stand for such hostility on our streets.

Spirit of the Confederacy, which will be related from Sam Houston Park downtown Houston on Junteenth, 2020.

Note: For a story by Glasstire’s Neil Fauerso on the removal of Confederate statues from public view, please read his 2017 essay How to Erase the Flood.

Houston’s Mayor Sylvester Turner announced yesterday that the City of Houston will relocate two sculptures currently in Houston city parks. The Dowling Sculpture and The Spirit of Confederacy will be removed by Friday, June 19, to commemorate  Juneteenth, 2020. The  holiday memorializes the day slaves in Texas learned the Emancipation Proclamation granted them freedom from slavery.

In August 2017, Mayor Turner appointed a task force of historians, community leaders, and department directors to review Houston’s inventory of items related to the Confederacy, and recommend appropriate action.

In tandem with partner organizations, the removal and relocation of the statues will take place with a grant from Houston Endowment, at no expense to the public. The Spirit of The Confederacy, currently in Sam Houston Park downtown, will be moved and displayed at the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) in the city’s Museum District, while the statue of Richard W. “Dick” Dowling in Hermann Park will be moved to the Sabine Pass Battleground State Historic Site in Port Arthur, with a vote by the full commission of the Executive Committee of the Texas Historical Commission. The commission will consider the item at its quarterly meeting on June 17. Both relocation moves are expected to be permanent, with the hope that the new locations will provide better context for the sculptures.

Richard W. “Dick” Dowling sculpture in Hermann Park will be moved to the Sabine Pass Battleground State Historic Site in Port Arthur, TX.

“While we have been working on a plan for some time, I have decided to move forward now considering the events of the past several weeks,” states Mayor Turner. “Our plan for relocating confederate statues from public parks to locations more relevant to modern times preserves history and provides an opportunity for our city to heal.”

“Houston Endowment is proud to support the relocation of the Spirit of the Confederacy to the Houston Museum of African American Culture, where it can be interpreted in a way that promotes an inclusive and anti-racist community,” says Ann Stern, President and CEO of Houston Endowment.

States John Guess, HMACC CEO Emeritus: “This is a huge step forward in the Museum’s history of hosting difficult conversations, underscoring our multicultural conversation on race geared toward a common future. We have an opportunity to learn from our history, the good and the bad, to truly forge one nation.”

The City of Houston’s General Services Department (GSD) will begin relocation next week and store the sculptures until the partner organizations take delivery. “I’m grateful for the City of Houston Confederate Items Task Force’s guidance and the generosity of the Houston Endowment for their crucial roles in the plan,” Mayor Turner says. “And I’m proud of how this plan formed with input from many sectors of the city and deep consideration of all sensitive factors involved.”

The post Houston Confederate Sculptures To Be Moved By Juneteenth, Next Friday appeared first on Glasstire.

“The message after 50 years is still unresolved,” remarks Samuel Egerton, who donated the poster to the Smithsonian after carrying it in protest during the 1963 March on Washington”(Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of Samuel Y. Edgerton).

Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis late last month, there have been global and national protests against police brutality. The catalog of protest art about police brutality and other issues is not short on content, and has been the subject of more than a few exhibitions over at least the past 50 years.

As we commemorate Juneteenth, the day that marked The Emancipation Proclamation’s arrival to Texas a full two and a half years after the January 1, 1863 decree, these works emphasize how long the road has been, and how far still we have to go.

My most recent conversation with artists Danielle Demetria East, Robert L. Hodge, David Jeremiah, and Vicki Meek led me to consider some of the works of art I’ve seen over the past few years that deal with the subject of protest and police brutality. Concentrated over the period between 1963 and 2020, and in no sense comprehensive, the following selection is somewhat representative of the spectrum of art created around the subject of police brutality.

Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, 1973, mixed-media assemblage, 12 x 18 in.

On a road trip from Texas to New York in the summer of 2017, I stumbled onto the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, and this work by Betye Saar titled Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, 1973. This was one of a few works by Saar in the show.

Dana C. Chandler, Fred Hampton’s Door II (1974). Acrylic paint on wood, 80 x 30.25 inches (door), .75 x 48 x 23.25 inches (base).

On a similar trip in the opposite direction last summer, I saw Dana Chandler’s Fred Hampton’s Door at The Broad in Los Angeles in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which incidentally comes to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston next month. The door, with its red and green paint and bullet holes, references the Chicago police raid which killed Hampton, the then-leader of the Black Panthers.

“After the raid, police used the door, filled with bullet holes, as evidence that Hampton shot first. However, it was eventually proved that all the gunshots came from the police officers. Chandler created a bullet-riddled door to pay homage for Hampton and highlight police brutality.” –A.R. Shaw

Danny Lyon, The Arrest of Taylor Washington, Leb’s Restaurant, Atlanta,1963 -printed 1967.

The above is The Arrest of Taylor Washington, Leb’s Restaurant, Atlanta,1963, printed 1967, by Danny Lyon.

Via The Minneapolis Museum of  Art:

“The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was a widespread effort to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans. News coverage of sit-ins and freedom rides dominated the cultural and political landscape of the United States. At this time Danny Lyon was in his early 20s and an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. After meeting John Lewis, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC’s) in Cairo, Illinois, Lyon then traveled to Mississippi, to cover voter registrations, and soon he was present at almost all of the major SNCC events during the movement. Lyon served as SNCC’s photographer from 1962 to 1964 and later documented his experiences in his book Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 1983. ©The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, New York 2016.

The story of the above work by Jean-Michel Basquiat is recounted in a Guggenheim Museum’s online resource from Basquiat’s“Defacement”: The Untold Story, the museum’s exhibition of Basquiat’s work which closed last November:

“The work commemorates the fate of the young, black artist Michael Stewart at the hands of New York City Transit Police after allegedly tagging a wall in an East Village subway station. Originally painted on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio within a week of Stewart’s death, Basquiat’s painting was a deeply personal lamentation that has rarely been exhibited in a public context.” Stewart died on September 28, after 13 days in a coma. He was 25.

Chris Burden, in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. L.A.P.D. Uniform, 1993. Photo Credit: Christopher Blay.

Another work that I was fortunate to see in person is Chris Burden’s L.A.P.D. Uniform, which was part of the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston’s show Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System, in the fall of 2018.

Uniform, from 1993, was made by Burden in response to the Rodney King beating in 1991, Los Angeles, which was followed by riots and protests. The uniforms, in an edition of 30, were made oversized to fit someone 7 feet 4 inches tall, signifying an authoritative dominance.

Detail of “Untitled” (2006) by Nick Cave. This is one of several soundsuits Cave made out of twigs.

Excerpt from online art magazine Adobe Airstream:

“During an October 13 conversation with Cave at the University of New Mexico’s Rodey Theatre, Kymberly Pinder said that Cave’s twig soundsuit helped her conceive of the exhibition Necessary Force: Art in the Police State, which she co-curated with Karen Fiss at the UNM Art Museum. Cave said the original impulse to create the twig suit evolved out of the artist’s heightened awareness of what it meant to be a black man in the United States following the Rodney King beating in 1991. The brutal police violence against King, along with Cave’s own experience of being a black student at the mostly white Cranbrook Academy of Art, motivated him to shift the course of his artistic practice.”

Glenn Ligon,“blues,” “bruise,” and “blood.” The work by Glenn Ligon was inspired by a description of police brutality and wrongful conviction.

My road trip to Ferguson, Mo. in July 2017 coincided with Glen Ligon’s Blue Black, a show the artist curated for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (June 9- October 7, 2017). The show featured works that are blue and black, emphasizing color and form. His own work for the show references a quote from Daniel Hamm, imprisoned as part of the famed “Harlem Six” or “Blood Brothers,” a group of young black men wrongly accused of murder in 1965.

From the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:

“Hamm and four other members of the group — Wallace Baker, William Craig, Ronald Felder, and Walter Thomas — were eventually exonerated. Robert Rice however remains incarcerated, serving a life sentence. In a statement shared a few days following his release from police custody, Hamm spoke publicly about the brutality he experienced at the hands of prison guards.

“Hamm’s quote is particularly poignant against the current social landscape in which incidents of police violence against and wrongful incarcerations of young African American men have continued to rise.”

“‘I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the blues . . . bruise blood come out to show them.’ —Daniel Hamm”

New Yorker cover art by Art Spiegelman, 1999

Art Spiegelman’s March 8, 1999 cover art for The New Yorker references the killing of Amadou Diallo. An American Journalism Review article about the cover reads in part:

“The March 8 cartoon cover, drawn by Art Spiegelman, elicited outrage from New York police and a protest by about 200 off-duty police officers in front of the magazine’s headquarters… . The cover, which pictures an NYPD officer aiming at human cut-outs at a carnival shooting gallery, was prompted by the February 4 killing of Amadou Diallo in his apartment building by four officers. They fired 41 shots, hitting Diallo with 19 of them.”

Mark Bradford, Scorched Earth, 2006. Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, bleach, and additional mixed media on canvas 95 1/4 x 118 1/4 x 2 1/4 in.

Also seen at The Broad on a Los Angeles road trip was Mark Bradford’s Scorched Earth. Writing about the work, which references Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” burned down during the Tulsa Massacre, The Broad’s accompanying text reads:

“The layers in Scorched Earth create a topography that represents the deep psychological and physical ruins of a disappeared people and another time and place. In this work, Mark Bradford depicts an aerial map of an area that has been blacked out. The blackness of this land mass resonates on many levels: black as in the demographics of this neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at one time called ‘Negro Wall Street,’ where many black-owned businesses thrived, until a race riot erupted in 1921 and the violence obliterated this unique area and its history; black, as the title suggests, meaning burnt or scorched; black as in redacted; and black as in nothingness.”

lauren woods, American MONUMENT, 2019

Above is American Monument, by artist lauren woods. A Hyperallergic story describes the work:

“American MONUMENT [is] a multi-media installation addressing police brutality and the killing of African Americans by police officers. The centerpiece of the monument (woods is adamant that it not be referred to as an exhibition) consists of a grid of 25 record players, each holding a record related to one of these deaths: Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Mike Brown, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, and several others. The audio on these records is gathered from police reports, court transcripts, and bystander recordings. Flanking this central piece are 25 boxes of documents related to the cases, as well as blown-up transcripts of testimony by George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, and Darren Wilson, the police officer responsible for Brown’s death.”

woods shut down the monument after the museum director Kimberli Meyer was fired from her position just as the show was scheduled to open. Read the full story here.

Shaun Leonardo: Eric Garner, 2015. Drawings 1-6.

In a similar situation earlier this month, artist Shaun Leonardo’s exhibition The Breath of Empty Space was canceled by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Leonardo’s piece Eric Garner from 2015 (drawings 1-6) was to be part of the exhibition.

Nina Chanel Abney, What, 2015. Unique ultrachrome pigmented print, acrylic and spray paint on canvas 96 × 112 in.

I saw this work by Nina Chanel Abney at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Focus exhibition of her work in the spring of 2018. The work, titled What, 2015 is described in an excerpt from the Modern’s text:

“In the Always a Winner series, which addresses the Black Lives Matter movement, police batons are phallic symbols and clown makeup suggests racial distinctions. The series reflects the absurdity and information overload of the internet era and questions the ways in which people are affected by abuses of power.”

Hank Willis Thomas, Raise Up, 2016. Bronze, approx. 25 feet long. View of work installed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, 2018. Photo: © Hank Willis Thomas, Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

This final piece, the work of Hank Willis Thomas, is Raise Up, from 2016. Bronze.

The post A Baker’s+ Dozen: 14 Works of Art About Protest and Police Brutality [1963 – 2018] appeared first on Glasstire.

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Hovertext:
This works best if you only take headlines from hack partisan websites.

Illustrated Color Guide to Healthful Yoga
Donat
1974

Submitter: In cleaning up a collection, we found this Awful Library gem… Illustrated Color Guide to Healthful Yoga. I think the pictures speak for themselves – who does yoga in their underwear? Found in an academic library. The cover really doesn’t do the book justice – it’s what’s inside.

Holly: Dear readers, feast your eyes on this!

The post No Pants Yoga appeared first on Awful Library Books.

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Hovertext:
Best alteration of panel 3 will be awarded 10 internet points.

"My Neck, My Mii" specifically is stuck in my head.

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Hovertext:
The optimal form of hedonism is just to select whatever philosophical posture will get you through the week.

A reader writes:

I’m a college senior majoring in Public Relations. I’m still not exactly sure what I want to do yet but I know what industry I’d like to work in.

I have a medical condition that requires me to get a series of injections once per month. My doctor only works regular 9-5 hours so I would need a job that would be ok with me leaving early once a month. It would be best if it were a Friday because the injections make me very sick and that way I’d have the weekend to recover and wouldn’t miss any more work. I have to get these injections for the rest of my life.

I recently had a virtual meeting with my college career counselor to talk about job options. I mentioned that I would need to leave early one day a month and my career counselor told me that no boss would ever be okay with that, especially with me leaving early on a Friday and that my coworkers would just get jealous and resent me. She said I should just apply for disability instead of working.

Is it reasonable to ask for one half day per month? If so, when should I tell a future employer (during the interview or after I get the job)? If not, do I have any other options besides living on SSI and not working?

Your college career counselor told you to give up on working and apply for disability because you’ll need to leave work early once a month?

I have heard about a lot of ridiculous, misguided advice from college career centers, but this  is by far the most absurd and disturbing. Derailing someone’s future career over a monthly medical appointment that most managers and coworkers won’t care about one bit, and which the law requires them to accommodate?! Telling you to go on disability instead, when there’s no way these circumstances would make you eligible for disability?

What is wrong with this person?

This “advisor” is utterly out of touch with how workplaces work, clearly has no qualifications to do this work (which isn’t uncommon with college career centers), should not be giving her incredibly wrong-headed and discouraging job advice to students, and someone needs to stop her. I hope you will report what she told you to her boss — or if her boss seems inexperienced and out of touch too (again, not uncommon with college career centers), then to whoever this entire department reports to. If you give me their contact info, I’d be happy to make the report myself, because this is disgusting.

Lots and lots of people need medical accommodations like this. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to keep you from having a career. You wait until you have a job offer, then you explain that you have a standing medical appointment once a month, ideally on a Friday so you have the weekend to recover, and you negotiate the accommodations you’ll need. Employers are required by law to work with you to accommodate disabilities as long as it won’t cause them undue hardship, which this won’t.

I’d love to know what this “career counselor” tells other people with chronic but manageable medical conditions. Should they give up on working too? How about observant Jews who need to leave early every Friday in the fall and winter to observe the Sabbath? Does she tell them no boss will ever be okay with that and coworkers will be jealous and resent them, and therefore they shouldn’t bother to work at all?

As a student, you should be highly pissed off that the person your college told you to take guidance from has no idea what she’s doing and is giving out advice that, if followed, could have seriously derailed you professionally. What if you believed her and stopped doing things to position yourself well for the job market? What other nonsense is she spreading to students, who will assume she knows what she’s talking about because of her job?

I am enraged over here, and one of us needs to report this person and stop her from continuing to advise students.

my career counselor says I won’t be able to work because of my monthly medical appointments was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

1. Beautiful old building sucks you in.

2. Why don’t these lights work?

3. Oh yeah, it’s a trap.

4. One by one, everyone is picked off.

5. The vulnerable go first.

6. Suspects generated through deflection and red herrings.

7. Culprit revealed in a sudden climax!

8. The rich white guy did it.

Murder Mystery: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Career in Academia: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8

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Hovertext:
Sounds like someone's gonna need the Emotional Trauma Snakes!

Hey, Red Robot! What's better: kittens or baby goats?

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Hovertext:
It's pretty obvious if you don't think about it very long.