The Secret Museum

Progressive Reframing

Michael has started up a new blog, WonkNOT!, to collaborate on learning how to express the big, positive social ideas that support progressive beliefs, and define our own terms for political and social debate in America. WonkNOT means: not wonking out on the granular details of policy when asked to say what we believe in.

I posted my first screed there today: The Great Republican Giveaway.

The Perfect Roast Chicken

Today's Times lets the world in on a classic aspect of life in New York City: the search for the perfect roast chicken:

A reliable place to buy a good roast chicken has become an important quality-of-life matter for those too busy to cook. "I buy a chicken here every Sunday, and I eat it all week," Paul Griscom said at the Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circle. "I used to live close to Fairway, and I was nervous about moving away from those chickens. But the ones here are even better." At Whole Foods and elsewhere, the price of a whole roasted organic chicken is almost the same as a raw one.

Those Whole Foods chickens are pretty good; I've lugged one or two home from the 7th Ave. WF. But near my home, the only reliably organic roast chicken is about $15 for a whole bird, which is just a bit too rich for my blood.

So, I've been ordering whole organic birds from Fresh Direct (they seem a bit tastier than the Murray's organics one typically finds around town, but they run smaller, also), and working on my own perfect roast chicken recipe. Here's my favorite so far, for a 4-5 lb chicken:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
2. Cut two lemons in half and pierce the sides with a knife.
3. Break several sprigs of fresh rosemary into 4 inch lengths.
4. Stuff the cavity of the chicken with the lemons and about half the rosemary.
5. Coat the chicken with a light layer of olive oil, and then with a mix of sea salt and fresh ground black pepper.
6. Tuck sprigs of rosemary under each wing and leg.
7. Truss up the chicken.
8. Cover with foil and roast for about an hour.
9. Remove foil after the first hour.
10. Continue to roast until the poultry thermometer hits the right temperature; basting the chicken every 10 minutes or so with its own juices.

The Gal from The Green E-Magazines

Last week I went to Verdopolis: The Future Green City with a comix-worthy dual identity: reporting for both Grist Magazine and WorldChanging. Seems to be working out, as I got sprightly dispatches off to Grist, and have luxurious time to think things through a bit more for WC.

Grist Dispatch One: Chillin' Verde

Grist Dispatch Two: Next and the City

Grist Dispatch Three: The Three Marketeers

WorldChanging Report One: To Feed the Future Green City, Invite the Earth to Dinner

WorldChanging Report Two (forthcoming): Having Your Heirloom Free Range Turkey and Eating It at Your Sustainable Table in Your Couture Green Jeans, Too

Froogling for a God

So okay, I get gps watch, flannel sheets, and even cactus.

But ganesh?

new doves

Hurrah: e-mail from the doves mailing list yesterday. A new single about to be released, and--finally--their third album, early next year, along with a tour.

The brand new single from Doves gets an exclusive first airing on Steve Lamacq's Radio 1 show [that's BBC Radio 1] this coming Monday, December 13th. Tune in between 9pm and 1am (GMT) to hear Black And White Town in full.

If you can't listen in on Monday, Black And White Town will also be available as an exclusive stream on nme.com from Tuesday (14th) and you can buy it as a digital download from the following Monday, December 20th from doves.net.

Jez, Jimi and Andy have now finished work on their new album Some Cities, the genuinely long-awaited follow up to 2002's The Last Broadcast.

Black And White Town gets a full release on February 7th, 2005 followed by Some Cities on February 21st.

According to Billboard, March 1 in the U.S.

Are the new sounds on the web site--formerly sourced from the intro on the last broadcast--a teaser of things to come? Hopefully. Evocative, swirling, shimmering pop.

Street TV in Tribeca

Seen on Sunday, December 7, 2004.

Lost Laptop on the F

Seen at Ft. Hamilton Parkway stop this weekend. I hope he finds it.

Stop that pigeon...urm, that lorem ipsum

This text generator creates fun alternatives for dummy text, such as:

Mutley, you snickering, floppy eared hound. When courage is needed, you're never around. Those medals you wear on your moth-eaten chest should be there for bungling at which you are best. So, stop that pigeon, stop that pigeon, stop that pigeon, stop that pigeon, stop that pigeon, stop that pigeon, stop that pigeon. Howwww! Nab him, jab him, tab him, grab him, stop that pigeon now.

Not Everyone in New York City is a Happy Democrat

Monday Night at the Russian Vodka Room

Andrew

Emily

Judge

Patrick

Betsy

Iraq's Civilian Death Toll

A group of UK researchers and geeks have put up Iraq Body Count, to keep track of the civilian deaths in Iraq:

This is a human security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military action by the USA and its allies in 2003. In the current occupation phase this database includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation

The U.S. military has refused to provide such counts. Don't know the position of the British military.

Friday June 11, 2004: National Day of Mourning for Those Who Died Thanks to the Policies of President Reagan

It would be macabre to celebrate the death of Ronald Reagan, but I can't join in this national orgy of sentimental remembrance, either.

Let us instead take time this coming Friday, a day decreed a "National Day of Mourning" in honor of Reagan by George W. Bush, to remember the 60,000 who died of AIDS during the Reagan administration. The President was silent on AIDS for the first six years of his administration.

Or, on Friday, let us mourn the tens of thousands who died in Central America in the 1980s as a result of Reagan administration anti-Communist policies that entailed supporting brutal dictatorial regimes in the region, including the arming and training of Contra forces to unseat the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Abu Ghraib apologists: Just shut up!

As I am more or less inarticulate with dismay on the Iraq war disaster, the video horror, the photos (well, you could get me going on issues involving representation of the Other, the weird tourist-photo, trophy-wielding iconography of the images, but that is all intellectual distancing, isn't it), it is fortunate that more expressive, more practiced, and much better known writers are saying things I'd like to say.

Such as Neal Pollack in The Stranger:

Now, my friends, I give you the elected vice president of the United States, Joseph Lieberman:

"Those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized. And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Falluja a while ago never received an apology from anybody."

Oh, Senator Lieberman. How do I tell thee to shut up? Let me count the ways. First, not a single person currently in Iraq, despite what the orangutan masses might think, had anything to do with 9/11, with the possible exception of Ahmad Chalabi. Second, do soldiers on either side of an armed conflict have to apologize for killing one another? If that's the case, then we've got a lot of condolence notes to send out. The third point you made is a nonsense verse, so we'll let it pass. But overall, Senator, you've lost your Joementum, and with it your public-speaking privileges.

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, shut up!

(With thanks to marjorie)

Eco Disaster Porn: Let's Go!

Although I enjoy the curmudgeonly rants of environmentalists like Bill McKibben, I'm still pleased with the green crowd's creative response to The Day After Tomorrow.

In case you're not caught up on the pop culture media press, TDAT is an upcoming disaster film. Rapid climate change, indeed! In TDAT, during a few short epic Hollywood weeks, tornados destroy Los Angeles (the Hollywood sign is turned into toothpicks, natch), a tidal wave engulfs New York, the temperature drops, and then a hell of a lot of snow falls, leading to scenes like this one:

Our heros exploring what I presume to be the 42nd Street Library, which is done up like the dacha in Dr. Zhivago.

I was resistant at first. I had to set aside my irritation at New York getting destroyed, AGAIN, in the movies. This is a Roland Emmerich film, and he took entirely too much glee in populating New York City with nebbishy stereotypes in Independence Day, and then let aliens destroy The Big Apple.

I got over it. New York City always gets it in the movies. And, despite 9/11, we almost never get it in real life, compared to London, Baghdad, Sarjevo, Moscow, or Dublin.

The destruction of New York City is THE universal cinema cliche for "death of The Cosmopolis by mega-event." May the Statue of Liberty live on for decades more as our time's Ozymandian symbol of the folly of human endeavor.

Then, a few folks, such as my Worldchanging editor Alex Steffen, raised a call to actively use the film to raise consciousness about climate change.

I was skeptical at first. Not because of the bad science, but because it's a Roland Emmerich film. The guy made bombastic hash of one of the best all time science fiction novels, and classic sf films, War of the Worlds.

However, finally, I come down on the side of TDAT. Why?

Because it is tiring to be so earnest that one can't simply enjoy pop culture. Roland Emmerich hacked H.G. Wells to pieces artistically, and all I got was this aesthetic headache.

While I worked at Greenpeace in DC, in '89-90, The Hunt For Red October came out. Most of the office went to see it opening night, organized by the Nuclear Free Seas campaign staff. Why? Because it was FUN. We laughed, a few of us groaned over Sean Connery's Scottish Russian accent, we had drinks afterwards.

One of our more wonky campaign issues made it to the big screen, in a completely glossy, over-the-top, Hollywood extravaganza, with handsome actors and high technology. Life was good.

So, now, activists have the same opportunity to see themselves moved from the fringe to the center on a complex issue, thanks to American big-budget movie excess. In their dead serious ways, NRDC gets it, Rainforest Action Network gets it, Worldwatch gets it.

Greenpeace, unsurprisingly, takes an especially media-rich approach.

And in delicious irony, this movie is financed by Fox, the Official Vertically Integrated Transnational Media Empire of the Bush Administration. Apparently Fox was not prepared for the uses that enviros would make of this movie in the face of Bush's stolid, anti-science, ideologically-driven refusal to act on climate change.

It comes out May 28. Let's go to the movies!

And now a message from our sponsors

Well, not exactly.

I've updated my Current Cultural Intake on my arts and publications vita. Yep, little ol' Amazon Associates links. So click on thorough and check 'em out.

If you buy anything from Amazon while looking around the store with my associate's id in the URL, I'll get credit. Once 26 things have been bought with my id attached, apparently I'll then start to earn a percentage on sales.

This is sort of an experiment. After working on e-commerce projects on and off for years, I thought I'd see what it was like to set up one of my own. Eventually I'll try expanding it, and maybe switching the books links to Powells for the indie bookstore cred.

Anyone else have luck with this sort of thing?

Art and Intelligence

Sorting papers preparatory to doing taxes, I have come across a clipping I took from the New York Times last last spring. The feature was a compilation of excerpts from 2003 graduation speeches. Here are the two I saved:

Renée Fleming
Opera singer
The Juilliard School, New York City

  While you're standing in the grocery line holding Spam instead of foie gras for a few years ponder the following: Those of you who perform — musicians and dancers — will have by now practiced perhaps 3,000 hours a year, times 15 years, which equals 45,000 hours. Which means colletively that you as a group will have practiced 11 million hours. Challenge the idea that the arts are for a select few — teach make more people love what you love, and help them to understand why you dedicated those 11 million hours in the first place.

George J. Tenet
C.I.A. director
University of Oklahoma, Norman

  Today, the United States is the lone superpower, with global interests and worldwide reach — part of everyone's problem and everyone's solution. And by this I mean more than Afghanistan and Iraq, where crises called forth from us a military response. There is another, underlying story that must be told: the story of societies and peoples who are left behind, excluded from the benefits of an expanding global economy, whose lives of hunger, disease, and displacement may become wellsprings of disaffection and extremism.

(Note: Credit where credit it due to writer Sam Dillon, who excerpted and juxtaposed these speeches.)

Illegal content violation

...or so reads the subject line of a couple spams that have appeared in my email.

One is Message 9885, the other, Message 4235.

Oh, a new one just appeared: Extreme Content Violation Message 13014.

Although spam is not intrinsically interesting, I do find myself kind of interested in how these subject lines appropriate the language and syntax of trouble tickets (when a problem is reported to a tech support department, it gets logged in the tracking database as a "trouble ticket"), complete with the number meant to signify some sort of unique identity within the system.

When in fact, gajillions of identical messages have probably just clogged gajillions of inboxes like mine.

Given what is commonly considered acceptable content in mainstream America, I aspire to extreme content violations.

Art making and world events

How do we make art in the face of overwhelming world events? Since 9/11, at least three ideas for photo-based installations have come and gone while I sat and did nothing to realize them. Thinking too long brought on doubt.

In a recent issue of Orion Magazine, composer John Luther Adams wrote,

What is the value of art in a world on the verge of melting? An Orkney Island fiddler once observed: "Art must be of use." By counterpoint, John Cage said: "Only what one person understands helps all of us." Can they both be right?

Three decades ago I came to Alaska to help save the wilderness, and I was an environmental activist for years. When I left that work, I did so with the feeling that someone else could carry on my part in it, but that no one else could make my music. In recent years I'm wondering again about the meaning of my life's work...[H]ow can I make art that doesn't speak directly to world events?

I am able to decode how to respond to world events as an activist. Finding myself in direct, desperate opposition to the Bush administration, I write my articles, I register voters.

But as an artist, I am mute on the big issues. I can only observe small things: individual lives and deaths, the map of human nostalgia, loss, sadness, regret and depression. Perhaps a bittersweetness over the mixed blessing of memory.

I made this bowl (and burned the candle) the day after Spalding Gray's body was identified:

Billionaires for Bush!

Buried, buried in the New York Times this week was a story about protests during Karl Rove's recent visit to town.

Now In Previews: Political Theatre in the Street:

At one point, as hundreds of guests with invitations waited to pass through velvet barriers to enter the club, a small group of men in bowler hats and women in gowns marched up, chanting, "Four more wars" and "Re-elect Rove."

As the group approached, a man who appeared to be a security agent of some type, was overheard whispering into a microphone: "We've got two groups. One for and one against."

Actually, it was two against. The person was confused by a group that calls itself Billionaires for Bush, a collection of activists who use satire to make a political point. Indeed, members of the Sierra Club, who were protesting on the other side of the street were also confused and began shouting at what they thought was a pro-Bush contingent.

"We want the truth and we want it now!" the Sierra protesters shouted.

The billionaires shouted back, "Buy your own president!"

The NYT couched it as kind of a natural history piece: look what this
fascinating species, politicus activista, is doing in its native habitat.
How might this affect those of us leading normal human lives?

The Blog of Death

If you, like me, often find that the most interesting articles in the paper are the obituaries, you will want to start reading The Blog of Death.

Remember: Bush Didn't Win The Election

On Saturday, riding the train home from Mitsu and Sue's loft event with Margaret, I said, "I can't even imagine waking up the day after the election in November, and looking at four more years of Bush. How will we even get out of bed on that day?"

Margaret reminded me that Bush didn't actually win the first time. Thus, we may be in better shape than we think in terms of electing a different president this year. This cheers me up, and it's worth remembering.

Recent cracks in the unified stone facade of the Administration are also terribly uplifting. While Bush tries (in his self-satisfied way) to excuse patently incorrect intelligence about WMD in Iraq--this is the information that he used to justify the whole invasion, remember--Dick Cheney refuses to back down.

Meanwhile, I am thrilled to say that I'll be doing something direct to help remove these criminals from power. I will be writing freelance for BushGreenwatch, a great web site that tracks this admistration's all-out assault on our environment and public health. Read it, subscribe to it, forward it to your friends (and senators, and congresspeople).

When my first assignment goes live, you can bet I'll post a link here!

Oscar Fantasy

I am giddily obsessed with the Oscar race this year. Will a fantasy film--The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, natch--actually win Best Director or Best Picture?

Most of the sf/fantasy folks I know--editors, a copy reader, a writer or two, some very dedicated readers of the stuff--could care less about this, and I don't count any truly obsessed LoTR trilogy fans in my circle of friends. Why does it fascinate me?

Maybe it's the standard underdog pov of the sf/fantasy fan. Vindication, at last!

Maybe it will just be fun to have a film involving wizards, magic, halflings, ents, and elves win an Oscar, and to watch hobbitty New Zealander Peter Jackson triumph amidst all the botox'd, siliconed, glazed-to-perfection Hollywood royalty.

Maybe I just need something fun to think about.

Italo Calvino

Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
-Italo Calvino

Why the Iraq war was wrong, and where it may get us

Mitsu recently posted (reposted, he said), his reasons against the Iraq war. He is so cogent on these points that all I can say is, what he said.

I can hardly articulate my own political thoughts these days. Painful position for this once-upon-a-time activist. Used to think I had all the answers.

With friends who agree, it's little comfort to just nod our heads at each other and look tense. And with folks who agree with the war, or Bush or American's current direction overall, there is no talking.

Since being laid off from my last steady job in March 2003, I encounter such folks a lot less in my daily life . Mainstream office culture was a messy melting pot of opinion.

Macy's Day Parade

No holding forth on art, photography (as distinct from art?), or anything else today. Except, well, I'm happy to see the wretched Bush energy bill foundering in Congress.

Childhood dream realized! Tomorrow I will have a seat in the bleachers for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Or as many NYC natives call it, the Macy's Day Parade.

My brother won the tickets in some sort of silent auction, in L.A. of all places. He'll be there with his wife Angie, and Dad and I will represent the local contingent.

The irony of being back

The irony of being back in New York City, after my week in the Pacific Northwest, is that I live in one of the world's art capitals, but only found time to go look at or think about art while I was in a supposed backwater (note: not my opinion).

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher have created Learning To Love You More, a combination of web site and non-web presentations that engage participants from the public in the worlds of the artists. Learned about this at that Baja to Vancouver show in Seattle, last week. It's fascinating.

The Universe Folds Back On

The Universe Folds Back On Itself

My friend Matt Barton holds the Salon of Surface Noise every weekend, dj'ing 78's (that's 78 revolutions-per-minute record albums, just in case someone under 25 ever reads this) every weekend at The Living Room, in the East Village. Today's edition of The Next Big Thing (a great radio show produced here in New York City) presents a sound sampler of the tunes Matt devotes his life to exploring, preserving and popularizing. Not merely a weekend platter maestro, he's an American roots music expert at The Smithsonian.

Dean Olsher, The Next Big Thing's creator and host, describes Matt's gig spinning 78s as "one more example of the universe folding back on itself."

After yesterday's open house at the School of Visual Arts, I am thinking about the onset of digital media in photography. Is the emphasis of SVU's graduate program about art, or commerce? Is it ridiculously 20th century of me to persist in thinking they're different?

This kind of technological upheaval is intrinsic to photography. The daguerreotype, (the first true photographic process) was announced by the French government in 1839, inaugurating daguerreotype mania in France, England and the United States. It was outclassed 12 years later by the wet collodion process (which really is wet), and in 1871, a more convenient dry process was created that tossed wet collodion into the commercial dustbin.

And this leaves out all kinds of other processess that were trying to make it on the market at the same time: ambrotype, talbotype, albumen printing...daguerreotype -> wet collodion -> dry plate process is simply the progression annointed by art historians as the main current in the history of photography.

Each brought a particular look to photographs.

The aesthetics and physicality of these old processes continue to engage. Sally Mann makes collodion photographs using an ancient 8x10 camera and old lenses. Photorealist painter Chuck Close makes daguerreotypes.

There's a commercial photographer doing wet collodion, in the Tribeca building where I rent a darkroom. He's also got a high-speed Internet connection in there. The universe folds in on itself.

Digital's main contribution to photography is not the technology--monitors instead of glass plates, computer processors instead of chemical processes. (There's certainly no ecological advantage in digital over chemical.) In the end, most photographers are still trying to get their work output onto paper, no matter how they created it.

Digital will really come into its' own when a new, accomplished artistic aesthetic emerges, actively advancing the history of photography.