Saying hello

Been noticing some folks coming at me from a couple different sites, and thought I’d return the favor.  (Although probably to a far lesser degree.)

I know Dr. Benjamin from the old days at the Try-Works, and if you ain’t reading his blog, The Mahatma X Files, well, you sure as hell should be.

And here’s to Moue Magazine, which I have the feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time reading when I should be, y’know, producing. 

And Contra James Woods, in a big way.  I’m very, very fucking glad to see somebody keeping that little prick honest.  (Or at least putting him on notice.)

I spent the day at the Tanner Gun Show shopping, and will be there again tomorrow, sitting around with some anarchists who are doing reach out work to the libertarian set.  I’ll post an update soon, as there’s a lot of interesting dynamics at play.

And I got that 1911 I was looking for, by God.  More on that later, but I’ll be spending this evening field stripping and lubricating.

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Hell hath no fury like a punk shiteater spurned

Little elfin freak (and former Colorado governor), Bill Owens, tries to shake Ward Churchill’s hand, and is told to get fucked.  Crying and whining ensues.

From the Rocky Mountain News.

Former Gov. Bill Owens on Friday compared one-time University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill to a famous moviemaker – and it wasn’t a compliment.

“In retirement, he’s starting to look a lot like Michael Moore,” Owens said, referring to the frumpy director of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.

Churchill, fired by CU in 2007, is suing to get his job back.

Owens and others, including University of Colorado regents, are being deposed as part of the trial, scheduled to start March 9 in Denver District Court.

Owens declined to discuss in detail what kinds of questions he was asked and what answers he gave, but Owens wasn’t shy about expressing his opinion of Churchill.

“Ward Churchill is a plagiarist and a fraud, and, regrettably, we continue to pay for his deception.”

Churchill could not be reached for comment.

The deposition took place in the office of Churchill’s attorney, David Lane. Owens, who left office in January 2007 and now is a businessman, was represented by the attorney general’s office.

For his part Friday, Churchill refused to shake Owens’ hand.

So Owens took a verbal jab. “I said, ‘Come on, you’re a big guy.’ ”

Lane said later: “I hope the governor’s feelings weren’t too hurt.”

Nice comeback, Mr. Owens.  A third-grade fat joke.  

Well, I guess we can’t all look like a pedophile Hobbit, can we?

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Never go full retard

The still’s from Nathalie Djurberg’s “Secret Handshake”, pilfered from a great New York Magazine article.

I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste. It’s art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn’t about progress, and wants to—as Walt Whitman put it— “contain multitudes.” I am not talking about messiness, schlock, theatricality, or ambition. I am thinking of Paul McCarthy’s excremental installations, Peter Saul’s twisted painted figures penetrating one another, Kara Walker’s race wars of sex and violence, and the Nazis in hell of Jake and Dinos Chapman, art that almost seems too much to take or even to look at, that resists aesthetic metabolism, that exudes a sort of poetics of apotheosis. It’s the way Andrea Fraser slept with a collector on camera, calling it art, and somehow the work escaped being silly academic nonsense or brainy porn. Many artists work with bad taste, but they do so in such conventional ways that their art ends up being predictable and gratuitous but little else. As for pornography, if it isn’t made in a particular way, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do; in this way porn is almost like Egyptian art, in that it hardly ever changes. What shocked the art world about Jeff Koons’s porn work was that he so fully and bizarrely crawled into its conventions that it seemed to sprout new conventions.

The name I came with for this stylistic tic came up in a conversation with two artists who sometimes fall into the category, Carroll Dunham and Carl D’Alvia. Talking about the rollicking mockumentary Tropic Thunder, we were stupefied by the observation Robert Downey Jr., performing in blackface—already off the charts in terms of bad taste, but somehow perfect—made to the Ben Stiller character. When acting, he said, “never go full retard.” He meant that an actor should never go too far when portraying anyone mentally disabled lest he lose any chance at claiming an Oscar, citing Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks for their holding back. In other words, Hollywood needs some sort of decorum, tradition, or halfway measures to hang on to. (The movie caught a lot of flack for that scene.) Thankfully, the art world isn’t much like Hollywood, because I like art that isn’t afraid to go full retard.

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Happy way-fucking-late Robert Burns day

Since we’re doing poetry.

Nine Inch Will Please a Lady — Robert Burns

Come rede me dame, come tell me dame,
My dame come tell me truly,
What length o’ graith when weel ca’d hame
Will sair a woman duly?”
The carlin clew her wanton tail,
Her wanton tail sae ready,
“l learn’d a sang in Annandale,
Nine inch will please a lady.”

But for a koontrie cunt like mine,
In sooth we’re not sae gentle;
We’ll tak tway thumb-bread to the nine,
And that is a sonsy pintle.
Oh, Leeze me on, my Charlie lad,
I’ll ne’er forget my Charlie,
Tway roaring handfuls and a daud
He nidged it in fu’ rarely.”

But wear fa’ the laithron doup
And may it ne’er be thriving,
it’s not the length that makes me loup
But it’s the double drivin.
Come nidge me Tom, come nidge me Tom
Come nidge me, o’er the nyvel
Come lowse an lug your battering ram
And thrash him at my gyvel!

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As good as any

From the New York Times.

Requiem — John Updike

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say, 
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know, 
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

Also, there was a spectacular interview from 1997 replayed on yesterday’s Fresh Air.  It’s the kind of witty, wholly generous back-and-forth that Updike was known for.

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