W.

We love W so much here at the University of Wisconsin that we plant a giant W every spring. (Click to enlarge.)



Later in the summer, it will be filled in quite lushly.

The iPod and the art museum.

I love these new iPod museum guides, which rival those pompous, official museum audio-tours.

[David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College wants] to teach his students to stop being passive information consumers - whether through television, radio or an official audio guide - and to take more control, using as his model the guru of so-called remix culture, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School.

"It's not incumbent on us to, you know, praise the art necessarily," Dr. Gilbert said recently at the museum, wearing neon-green sunglasses and leading a group of students through the underground tour. "That's part of the playfulness and fun of this project. If we want to say something irreverent or something scathing about the art, that can come out." ...

So far, the unofficial guides cover only a few of the [Museum of Modern Art's] works - by artists like Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Picasso, Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall, whose well-known "I and the Village" comes in for a critical pummeling by Jason Rosenfeld, a Marymount professor of art history, who calls it "the worst, most reductive kind of art" and blames Chagall for all the "ugly menorahs" and tacky stained-glass windows in modern synagogues.

"It's the worst style that ever developed in the history of art," he declares.

Art museums can be so stuffy, so entombed. I love the idea of walking around with some brilliant, witty character talking in your ear. I don't even necessarily want someone knowledgable talking to me. Just say something interesting that goes with the experience of seeing the picture. It can even be counterpoint. Talk about life or talk about art. Riff on the images or gossip about some person you happen to see while you're there.

Next time I go to a museum, I expect to see people with white "earbuds" laughing inappropriately in front of serious masterpieces. Those who want to experience the art museum as a religious pilgrimmage are going to be disturbed, but let them buy a tiny iPod Shuffle and load it with Gregorian chants or Bach and they won't have to hear any of the irreverence that would spoil the spiritual ambience.

UPDATE: The Times article gives two websites to download these podcasts. I went to the Wooster Collective site and listened to a little of the Basquiat commentary mentioned in the article. This commentary had the same kind of problems that those Adam Curry soundseeing podcasts have: the people don't have much to say and aren't articulate. If the "uhs" don't drive you away, maybe you'll stay around long enough to notice that these people seem to have a vocabulary with only one adjective: "interesting." This was like having people near me in a museum who would cause me to look at paintings in a different order to avoid hearing them. I was imagining much better speakers!

Uh, here we are, uh, on our, uh, way, over to the, uh, show, which is really interesting, uh...

Let's try the other site mentioned in the Times article, Art Mobs. I'm listening to the Chagall one, the one that the Times singled out as sharp and witty:

That was the problem with Russia, is that it was full of orthodox religiosity and Christianity. That's why, you know, Lenin (a great Jew), Marx (a great Jew), had it right... Or was Lenin Jewish? ... I don't think he was, but we'll claim him, because he was a good egg... is because they wanted to get rid of religion, you know, religion was the opiate of the masses to Marx, who was a self-hating Jew, I guess, essentially. But my point about this painting is ...

You may find us screaming or groaning in front of those paintings and not laughing, I'm thinking.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Podcasts undoubtedly have their share of idiotic and contemptible statements. But you can't Google for them or see them in Technorati or link to them and critique them. I happened to transcribe one just now, but that's not much different from transcribing something I heard someone say down at the coffeeshop.

Thus, podcasting is not like blogging. It lacks the inherent structural safeguards that make the blogosphere work in service to the truth.

"What Lincoln Believed."

Michiko Kakutani writes about writing about Abraham Lincoln:

He has been feted as a noble visionary who liberated America's slaves and assailed as a die-hard racist and hypocrite. He has been hailed as the folksy embodiment of the Common Man, and both denounced and praised as a man of cold, calculating reason. He has been psychoanalyzed as a womanizer, a homosexual and a depressive. He has been accused of being passive and indecisive, canny and opportunistic, blasphemous and bigoted. In short, he has been deified, debunked, demonized and deconstructed: Honest Abe has become Abe of a Thousand Faces.

She's reviewing Michael Lind's new book, "What Lincoln Believed," which she calls "a not terribly original book" with "a rather glib and unsatisfying conclusion." Lind's Lincoln is a big racist:

Mr. Lind describes Lincoln as "a lifelong segregationist and opponent of black social equality," and a "white supremacist" with a "low opinion of black intellectual abilities." Mr. Lind rejects the notion of Lincoln's capacity for growth promoted by other historians, who have argued that this quality enabled the 16th president to transcend the racist environment of his youth. Instead, he writes that Lincoln "seems to have gone to his grave without imagining any amendments to the Constitution beyond the abolition of slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment eradicated Black Laws by preventing the restriction of black migration by individual states. However, Lincoln apparently did not envision a constitutional amendment like the Fourteenth that would create national citizenship." If Lincoln had lived, Mr. Lind goes on, "slavery would have been abolished in every state, but the states would have retained their discretion to deny citizenship to blacks. Lincoln was willing to let the states deny the suffrage to black citizens; at most, he would 'suggest' that black citizens be subject to literacy tests and property qualifications."... As Mr. Lind tells it, Lincoln drew a sharp distinction between abstract natural rights and practical civil rights: the first, Lincoln believed, were possessed by all human beings, while the second, in Mr. Lind's words, "were and should be limited to whites only." "While Lincoln, like most of his white contemporaries, believed that blacks were inferior to whites," Mr. Lind writes, "he passionately rejected the idea that whites had the right to rule blacks - either as slaves or as the subjects of white colonial empires. Lincoln wanted a white-only American republic...."

The "glib and unsatisfying conclusion" is that, despite all this racism, Lincoln believed in democracy and -- in Lind's words -- "was sincere and consistent in hoping that Latin Americans, Africans and Asians, as well as Europeans, would one day live under republican governments of their own."

"These people don't even know they are pagans."

So says a woman in a position to organize the Earth Day celebrations in her town and including "events with ritual content," according to this NYT article about the fast growth of pagan religion in the United States.

[This growth may be attributed] to several factors, including the rise of the women's movement, which was attracted to the notion that the divine includes feminine forms, and to environmentalism, which is prompting the search for religious expressions that see spirituality as being a part of nature rather than above it.

But about those Earth Day celebrations... If you're working for the city, you shouldn't be staging religious rituals. That's basic Establishment Clause law. But even if you're not working for the government, it's still not right to trick people into performing religious rituals. But some religions are treated as if they are just a sort of playful folklore. A little Paganism for Earth Day, a little exercise in Hinduism or Native American religion for the kids.

Is that a problem?

Maybe not. Most of us play around with religion on Halloween. Don't we often engage with the folkloric aspects of religions we don't believe in? Or maybe we engage in folkloric aspects of our own religion that we don't believe in. I suppose it is a matter for each individual to decides how purely religious or nonreligious he wants to be.

Strange things.

Things keep looking like other things today. (Click image to enlarge.)

A dying bat fluttering on the lawn?



A strawberry on the ground?



A bush growing shredded Parmesan?

The ethnicity of pain.

From the Journal of Pain.

At the café with an old notebook, trying to remember "Dog Day Afternoon."

I've got my New York Times, my large latte -- yes, large, not venti, this is not Starbucks -- my pen and little notebook. No computer today. I'm traveling light. Just reading the Times and taking some notes, so I can blog the NYT when I get home. I'm waiting for them to toast my bagel, so I take this picture:



Instead of reading the Times right away, I start reading that little magenta notebook, which begins with some pages of notes, written nearly illegibly in the dark while watching "Dog Day Afternoon" in a theater about ten years ago. I suppose I thought of writing an essay. I can see the nascent thread here. If only I'd had a blog, I'd have written this up into a nice post back then. Now, I can only imagine what the ideas were. Here are the notes, word for word, with the original lack of punctuation and capitalization:

I'm a catholic/watch your mouth we've got young girls here/black hostage released/head teller's anger = anti-cop/They're all my girls I'm going back in there/Girls I was interviewed on television/We're entertainment/(obscene call)/cameras media/"Make your vacation dreams a reality --> Plan to ask for a jet --/Sal --> suicide/after S calls wife hear bank tellers reading dear abby: "sexual repression"/obcene caller --> give to "sexual repression" women who do heavy breathing/A-C goes off (hot-sex --> sal afraid of airplane (repression theme)/[illegible] in "the back"/shot fired/women's legs/pizza/guy -- likes S/jumps up/"I'm a f'g star"/"Your body is the temple of the Lord"/(don't smoke)/Leon faints like Jesus/Leon can't call the police/in barbershop -- men's space -- Leon tells of being a man in a woman's body/is a little sepia picture of a woman against the mirror behind the cop/Leon in bride dress -- priest was "defrocked"/Sal upset to be referred to as homo. "that's going out on the TV"/"I can't control what goes out on television ... it's just a freak show."/Maria gives Sal a rosary just before he dies

Religion. Sex. Media. Too late to sort all that out.

Let's see what's in the news today.

UPDATE: I just reread that and noticed "Leon tells of being a man in a woman's body," which really is what it says in my ancient notes. If you're at all familiar with the movie, you know it should be "Leon tells of being a woman in a man's body." Sorry for the confusion!

ADDED: Closed up the line-breaks in the notes -- just fiddling with the aesthetics.

My holiday weekend.

Blogging, Site Meter-checking, you can see that people go off and do things on holidays. For me, it's that period between semesters, and the holiday weekend merges with many other days, where I have work that I can either do or not do. Today is an especially lovely day. Maybe I'll treat it as a nonworking day. Maybe, on the other hand, the pile of exams will call out to me, and I can make my way through one question. Most likely, I'll do some combination: half downtime and grade one question on half of the exams.

I have two exams to grade. One class has 28 students and 4 questions. The other has 48 students and 3 questions. Ideally, I would grade one question per day and finish in seven days. More reasonably, I'd grade the smaller class in four days, and the larger class in six days. Soon enough, my summer Conlaw class begins. In fact, it begins on the day the Spring Semester grades are due, June 13th. You can see why, with a time line like that, I choose the days to regard as holidays. Maybe today.

What about just a day of devoted blogging? That's nearly always appealing, but I can see that far fewer people are reading when it's a weekend and a holiday. It's more of a day to go out, with my camera. Maybe drive into the countryside. I haven't had many pictures in a while, for some reason. No reason, really.

Holding out, until the very end.

The last hold-out Japanese soldiers from WWII, Yoshio Yamakawa, 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 85.

The graceful Condoleezza.

Condoleezza Rice did a nice job of responding to protesters:

[A]bout five minutes into the secretary's 30-minute speech [at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco], three audience members donned black hooded robes and stood with their arms outstretched, referencing the infamous photos of detainees abused by U.S. military police at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Chanting "Stop the torture, stop the killing, U.S. out of Iraq," they were quickly ushered out by a police SWAT team, as the audience cheered and applauded.

"It's a wonderful thing that people are able to speak their minds in our democracy," Rice responded. "In Baghdad, Kabul and soon in Beirut, they, too, will be able to speak their minds."

From then on, it was smooth sailing for the secretary of state...

I happened to catch that on C-Span last night, and there was never an instant where she looked confused, worried, rattled, or angry. The protesters' noise interrupted a sentence, she waited a short moment for a break in the noise, then delivered her perfect line.

Those who think Rice isn't ready to run for President: take this incident into account.

UPDATE: There's some interesting back and forth in the comments, with one person saying Rice is not a good candidate because she's never run for elective office before and she's unmarried. I participate in the comments and say, among other things, that if polling shows people prefer a married candidate, maybe we could see a nice White House wedding.

About a girl.

Leave Courtney Love alone. She looks happy, and Frances Bean is utterly adorable. Oh! They were in the audience at the "American Idol" finale. How strange to think of Kurt Cobain's daughter as an "American Idol" fan. Wonder if she was for Bo or Carrie. Here's another picture. Aw!

Quadrupling Shuffle memory.

Great! I love my 1GB iPod Shuffle -- the way it looks, its near weightlessness -- but more memory is always nice.

When bloggers travelblog.

They blog about internet access: here, here, and here. And that's just one blogger.

This blogger does occasionally have something on another topic, like "Is it just me, or is Darth Vader a lot more sinister in German?" And the reason you don't want to take a train in Poland: "the robbers spray chloroform through the grating or the keyhole in the door and put people to sleep that way, then break in, then slash pockets, straps etc."

Look what's happening at the Mr. Snuff trial!

Oh, noooo!

People keep telling me to leave Blogger...

After my recent problems. They say they're not having problems where they are. But their place is much smaller than Blogger. How do I know it will stay around, as I feel sure Blogger will? And if it does stay around, won't that be because it gets bigger? If so, won't it encounter the kind of problems Blogger has had to manage?

I'm not Anne Elk.

And my body, in fact, does not resemble that of John Cleese.