The Royal Shakespeare Company in staging the whole of the History Cycle, 8 plays in 72 hours.  Colin Murphy on the performance in Le Monde Diplomatique:

I couldn’t sleep last night. They kept on coming. Kings, rebels, ghosts, traitors. In my mind’s eye, at 3am, they marched again, spoke, warned. Richard the Second, vainglorious, doomed. Henry the Fourth, stout and fierce, his purchase on the throne tenuous. Falstaff, hale and hearty, but cut through with self-deception. Warwick, twin sword blades slicing the air. Henry the Fifth, the hero king. And Henry the Sixth, almost mystical, his eyes suffused with the loneliness of absolute power.

For twenty-four hours I sat in their company, through eight of the History plays of William Shakespeare, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) back to back across a weekend in Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon (1). The feat was unprecedented: the same company of 34 actors performed 264 roles across 72 hours, in eight three-hour plays.

Over breakfast in my B&B, we wondered whether there was any possibility of redemption or sympathy for the hunchback Richard the Third. At lunchtime I strode into Stratford in search of a quick sandwich, and saw one of the cast breeze by on her bicycle, presumably doing the same thing. During an interval, a man leaned deeply into a stretch against a tree outside. At night, we retreated to the local pub, The Dirty Duck, attempting to quiet the voices in our heads with pints of ale, found the Duke of Exeter and Earl of Warwick there ahead of us, and fell into conversation with them about their roles and the plays.

From The Washington Post:

IDA: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

Ida B. Wells was in England in 1894 when she heard that white Southerners had put a black woman in San Antonio, Tex., into a barrel with “nails driven through the sides and then rolled [it] down a hill until she was dead.” The 31-year-old Wells, a black Southerner, was seasoned to the widespread phenomenon of mob torture and murder that went by the shorthand “lynching”; in fact, she was abroad on a speaking tour denouncing it. Nonetheless, she shed tears over the latest “outrage upon my people.”

Her call to speak out against lynching had come just two years earlier, when a Memphis mob murdered her close friend and neighbor Thomas Moss. The incident started as a dispute among white and black boys playing marbles, but it quickly evolved into an excuse to murder Moss, a successful businessman who was drawing patrons away from a nearby white grocer. White Southerners explained to Northerners that they lynched only when they had to: when black men threatened, assaulted and raped white women. Wells was determined to expose that lie.

Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time. ·

More here.

From The Guardian:

A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones.
It was Dostoevsky who first espoused the notion that if God is dead, everything is permissible. It became one of the founding tenets of existentialist philosophy, but until reading Carole Seymour-Jones’s excellent new biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I hadn’t quite realised the diabolic glee with which this pair applied the belief to their daily lives. Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He ‘ceased to exist’ at secondary school; for Sartre, God ‘vanished without explanation’ when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew.

For five decades, they pursued an open partnership that allowed them to engage in ‘contingent’ relationships with others. It was their radical answer to the outworn convention of marriage: in achieving total transparency with each other, they hoped to experience the true freedom of essential love. ‘To have such freedom, we had to suppress or overcome any possessiveness, any tendency to be jealous,’ said Sartre. ‘In other words, passion. To be free, you cannot be passionate.’ They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences for those who found themselves towed under by the viscous currents of the Sartrean ‘family’.

De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins. One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room, telling her that the chambermaid would be surprised as he had already taken another girl’s virginity the same day.

More here.

…

At the Un-national Monument Along the Canadian Border
William Stafford

…………………………………………………………………………………
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………..
………………………………………………….
Painting by Richard Herman

…

In the early 90s our own Morgan Meis founded the brilliantly innovative arts collective, Flux Factory. He remains its uninterrupted president. (When I told Morgan recently that I wish I were president of something, he advised me to declare myself president of 3 Quarks. 🙂 Anyhow, here is a nice article about Flux:

Ben Davis in Artnet:

When people ask me what my favorite gallery is, I always answer Flux Factory. This has been the case at least since I first reviewed a show at the energetic Long Island City nonprofit-cum-artist collective, a solo exhibition by the very-cool sculptor Paul Burn, back when I wrote the culture page for the Queens Courier.

Sadly, I might have to make a new choice. Flux Factory has just opened what looks to be its final show in its current space, aptly titled “Everything Must Go.” The MTA has announced the eminent domain takeover of the block to make way for a rail link to Grand Central Terminal.

“Shitty,” is the answer Flux Factory’s Stefany Anne Golberg gives when asked how the group feels about this state of affairs. “The MTA has made this about as difficult as they could.” Information has been impossible to get, she says. “We’ve known about the possibility for two years, and then it’s just like, you’ve got 90 days to clear out.”

Golberg, one of the Flux Factory’s core members along with Jean Barbaris, Morgan Meis and Chen Tamir, says the organization is looking for a new building. It is likely, however, that after “Everything Must Go” closes, the 18-odd artists who currently live and collaborate in the space will disperse.

More here.  [Photo, taken by me at a Flux party, shows Morgan with his wife Stefany.]

Also check out this video from the New York Post about Flux:

ON JANUARY 29, 2008, an e-mail began making the rounds of the art world. Originally sent by artist Nancy Holt to a small group of friends and colleagues, and rapidly forwarded on, the message contained an urgent appeal: Holt had been alerted, just the day before, to the existence of plans to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and she was asking people to contact the Utah state government to express their opposition before a rapidly approaching deadline for public comment. The drilling in question (a “wildcat,” or speculative, operation) calls for a series of exploratory wells to be sunk, using equipment on floating barges, some 3,000 feet into the lake bed of an area called the West Rozel Field Prospect—a parcel in the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake leased in 2003 from the state of Utah by Pearl Montana Exploration and Production, a Canadian oil and gas company. The site lies approximately five miles southwest of Rozel Point—roughly halfway between Gunnison Island, a wildlife sanctuary that is home to one of the world’s largest breeding populations of American white pelicans, and Spiral Jetty, the 1,500-foot-long coil of basalt and earth that is Smithson’s most famous, and Land art’s most celebrated, artwork.

more from artforum here.

In 1988, Princeton University accepted an orphan with an eye-catching résumé. Seventeen-year-old Alexi Santana hadn’t been to school but had picked up his education while working in Utah as a cattle herder, a construction worker and a racehorse exerciser. He had read Plato while sleeping under the stars. He could be reached only by post office box, he said, because his home address was the Utah-Arizona line. It all sounded very romantic, very Huck Finn. He also had outstanding SAT scores. What clinched the deal, though, was that Santana could run like the wind, and the Princeton track coach saw him as an invaluable addition to the team…

Then the roof caved in. In February 1991, Santana was spotted at a Harvard-Yale-Princeton track meet by somebody who knew him from, literally, another life. The truth came out: Alexi Santana was more than 10 years older than he claimed to be and wasn’t even Alexi Santana. His real name was James Hogue, a serial impostor who had been born in Kansas and delayed his entry to Princeton because he’d been in jail for theft.

more from the LA Times here.

Nothing about the founders seems as interesting or as timely to us, 200 years and more farther on, as their religious views — who, if Anyone, they worshiped, how they marked the boundaries of church and state. As a Washington biographer, I have been assured, during the Q. and A. periods after talks, that George Washington saw the Virgin Mary at Valley Forge and converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed (why wait, if he had seen the Virgin 21 years earlier?). I was also once asked if he was an “illuminated Freemason”; I sped away from that question as fast as possible. Whether in legal briefs or op-ed articles, we are as passionate about religion as the founders were. Unfortunately, our passions make for a lot of sloppy and willful historical thinking and writing. In “Founding Faith,” Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious Web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Louis P. Masur in Slate:

In his recent speech on race, Barack Obama spoke about the legacy of racial hatred and resentment in America. One of the events he probably had in mind was the controversy over busing that erupted in Boston in the mid-1970s. A single photograph epitomized for Americans the meaning and horror of the crisis. On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston’s Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The image shattered the illusion that racial segregation and hatred were strictly a Southern phenomenon. For many, Boston now seemed little different than Birmingham.

See the whole photo-essay here.

[Thanks to Manas Sheikh.]

Andy F. Bryan in McSweeney’s (via Mind Hacks):

Me know. Me have problem.

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn’t really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?

Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?

More here.

///

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill
Hayden Carruth

You may think it strange, Sam, that I’m writing
a letter in these circumstances. I thought
it strange too–the first time. But there’s
a misconception I was laboring under, and you
are too, viz. that the imagination in your
vicinity is free and powerful. After all,
you say, you’ve been creating yourself all
along imaginatively. You imagine yourself
playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or
writing a poem and then it becomes true.
But you still have to do it, you have to exert
yourself, will, courage, whatever you’ve got, you’re
mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter
and it’s written. Takes about two-fifths of a
second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man.
I can deluge Congress with letters telling
every one of those mendacious sons of bitches
exactly what he or she is, in maybe about
half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist
proclivities, when you imagine bliss
you still must struggle to get there. By the way
the Buddha has his place across town on
Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He’s lost weight
and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a
lot better than he used to. He always carries
a jumping jack with him everywhere just
for contemplation, but he doesn’t make it
jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney
and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
over by Sylvester’s Grot making the sweetest,
cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree.
Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any
fucking thing I want. Speaking of which
there’s this dazzling young Naomi who
wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee
last winter, and I think this is the moment
for me to go and pay her my respects.
Don’t go way. I’ll be right back.

///

From lensculture.com:

Emerging more than twenty years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, Deborah Oropallo (b. Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954) has moved from traditional painting and printmaking to incorporating digital media and imagery into her work, creating printed canvas paintings and related editions of pigment prints.

Oropallo has always regarded her artwork as based in photography. In her early work she painted imagery from found photographs. Later, she placed objects on a stat camera, capturing a shadow or silhouette from which she made silkscreens and stencils that transformed images of mundane objects into visual abstractions. Recently, Oropallo has been using her own photography, and digital work as a natural evolution. She says:

“I use the computer as the tool, but painting is the language of deliberation that is running through my head. I do not want to just repaint an illustration of what the computer can do, but to push the pixels themselves as paint, and to layer imagery and veils to create depth and volume. Like painting, this process can engage nuance and subtlety. It also has the ability to alter an image in a way that no other medium can deliver or predict.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson,

Beauty is truth, Keats declared, and truth beauty. Many prominent scientists have wished a version of this famous equation described their own work. The British quantum theorist Paul Dirac, for one, called his career “a search for pretty mathematics.” Most scientific aesthetes gaze fondly upon equations or arrangements of facts. A few, like the science writer George Johnson, also see beauty in the act of research. Johnson’s new book, “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments,” is an appealing account of important scientific discoveries to which a variation of Keats applies: occasionally, beauty yields truth.

Johnson’s list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. “Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” he states, with experiments “carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” By contrast, Johnson (a longtime contributor to The New York Times) favors artisans of the laboratory, chronicling “those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied.”

His selections include the canonical and the overlooked. The first chapter describes Galileo’s studying motion by rolling balls down an incline, often considered the founding experiment of modern science. Another chapter recounts Isaac Newton’s using prisms to grasp the nature of color. But Johnson also brings to life less familiar figures like Luigi Galvani, who illuminated the nature of electricity; Albert Michelson, who (with Edward Morley) determined the constant speed of light; and — a particularly inspired choice — Ivan Pavlov, whose famous dog experiments advanced physiology and neurology.

More here.

In bookforum, J. Hoberman on Jack Kirby:

Though he lacks Will Eisner’s urbane, insouciant spirit and Jack Cole’s sensuous, ever-surprising plasticity, comic-book artist Jack Kirby (1917–94) more than deserves the royal sobriquet with which he’s been crowned. King Kirby embodies the drama of his medium as well as the drama of its history—how, starting on the eve of World War II, a bunch of mainly working-class, first-generation Jewish kids created a garish, subliterary mythology of fantastic supermen. Kirby’s first such creature, created with Joe Simon, was Captain America: The premiere issue, which appeared nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, has the masked and star-spangled hero using his shield to deflect Nazi bullets even as he knocks Hitler off his feet with an explosive right hook to the kisser.

In a general sense, Kirby’s is the saga that Michael Chabon mythologized and made literary with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). In his author’s note, Chabon acknowledges his “deep debt” to Kirby, not just in this novel but in “everything else I’ve ever written.” Most likely, Chabon was thinking less of Kirby’s wartime comics than of the pop deities the artist drew and/or invented twenty years later for Marvel Comics—the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the uncanny X-Men, the Mighty Thor, and the Silver Surfer—or the even crazier characters that he would develop for Marvel’s rival DC in the early ’70s.

These hallucinations flowed from an unlikely source. A feisty five-foot-two-inch fireplug, the artist was born Jacob Kurtzberg in a Lower East Side tenement.

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance.

Second: the game does not give unusua1 preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.

Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc. And there are all kinds of strategies.

more from Boston Review here.

From Outlook India:

“With young children,” as Jhumpa Lahiri puts it in her elegant, understated way, “the days can be rather mercurial.” That hasn’t stopped her from finding the time to write a third book. In an interview with Sheela Reddy on the launch of Unaccustomed Earth, the Pulitzer winner talks about the two great loves of her life: her children and her writing. You once remarked that winning the Pulitzer was like being a kid and winning a senior citizen’s award. Do you feel more comfortable as a Pulitzer winner now that you have written your third book? Not really. It (Pulitzer) will always remain a very strange and in some senses very early, one may say premature, period for the writer I was at that time. But it must help in terms of confidence levels? Writing is so humbling, there’s no confidence involved. It helps to have some experience, a greater degree of familiarity with the process of writing. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before.  More here. (Note: I just read this magnificent collection of short stories and highly recommend it).

Fabrizio Plessi is one of the pioneers of video art, but, just as importantly, he is a master of water — the mythical stream of water Heracleitus said one could not step in twice, the water that is one of the four primary elements, the wetness that tradition thought the melancholiac lacked, the water that poured forth from a desert stone when Moses struck it — the water without which there is no universe and life. Like a dolphin, or the boy who was rescued by one in Greek mythology, and was triumphantly carried on its back as it swam the seven seas, Plessi is astonishingly at ease with water. He never surrenders to its treachery, never submits to the siren song of its surface beauty, inviting one to plunge into its depths. Water, which hides death in its depths, and is traditionally a seductive feminine element — tempting but deceptive — has a certain masculine potency for Plessi. Waterfall (1976) suggests as much: one need not be overwhelmed by water to identify with its rushing power.

more from artnet here.

Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his. Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party’s nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation—Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk’s Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush’s Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

more from the NYRB here.

….

from [Statue of Liberty]
Ann Killough

So now what if the Statue of Liberty has found out that she can move
and is only waiting for the right moment?

What if there are beginning to be words in her book, more and
more words on the coppery pages, the ones that do not turn, or not
yet?

What if she is beginning to feel the horror of her position, the way
she has no peers or even anyone who understands that she is in the
tradition of the enormous destroyer?

What is it she is becoming convinced she must destroy?

…………………………………..

So now picture what you think the Statue of Liberty might destroy
and realize that you are not right.

That whatever you thought of is not it, or at least not quite it and
certainly not all of it.

That you have no idea what she is thinking, or at least not a complete
idea.

That the very nature of her body renders her susceptible not only to
alien transmissions but to all the other transmissions of the earth.

That she is a kind of Pole along with the North and South ones and
draws the magnetic fields of the earth toward herself like shiploads
of huddled immigrants and reads them like ticker tape inside her
spiky head.

That she feels what you feel but much more of it.

That she sees what you see but the backside of it as well, the side
you will never see.

That she has already begun to change something even in you, even
in me.

That we already know what it is.

…