The Lost Art of Listening

The Lost Art of Listening (1999)

You seem uninterested. I probably need to focus. Better get to the point. Ask me a question. Can you read my non-verbals?

Supermodel

Supermodel (2003)

A postmodernist Kate Moss? Or a quasi-retro Dovima?

Mocha

Mocha (1999)

Make mine an iced, decaf, triple, grande, sugar-free vanilla, skinny, no-whip, latte.

Crab Disco

Crab Disco (2006)

For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Something new for you to raise one pincher high and shake your crustacean booty...

Probe This!!

Neptune Probe (1998)

Ganymede Probe (1998)

These heavenly bodies are still in good standing after astronomers recently convened to decide who would be voted off the cosmic island.

Everyone held its slot in space, and even Xena kicked some Van Allen Butt Belt -- everyone except poor elliptical Pluto. Alas, we hardly knew ye. From National Geographic:

The distant, ice-covered world is no longer a true planet, according to a new definition of the term voted on by scientists today [8-24-06].

"Whoa! Pluto's dead," said astronomer Mike Brown, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as he watched a Webcast of the vote. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system."

In a move that's already generating controversy and will force textbooks to be rewritten, Pluto will now be dubbed a dwarf planet.

But it's no longer part of an exclusive club, since there are more than 40 of these dwarfs, including the large asteroid Ceres and 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena -- a distant object slightly larger than Pluto discovered by Brown last year.

[...]

Pluto has been demoted because it does not dominate its neighborhood. Charon, its large "moon," is only about half the size of Pluto, while all the true planets are far larger than their moons.

In addition, bodies that dominate their neighborhoods, "sweep up" asteroids, comets, and other debris, clearing a path along their orbits. By contrast, Pluto's orbit is somewhat untidy.

Yeah. Nothing's worse than an untidy wannabe planet. Somebody get an industrial Dustbuster and sweep this galactic imposter under the heliosheath.

But more than science textbooks will have to be recalled faster than those spontaneous combustion laptop batteries. Popular culture itself will need to be reconstituted. Consider this tragic case:

Disneyologists argue that the Gang already includes a male dog, Goofy, who, like the other members, can walk and talk. Including a non-speaking quadrupedal character like Pluto would necessitate the inclusion of other insufficiently anthropomorphized animals such as background cats, birds, and humorous bees.

[Image seen on Jetting Through Life. Text from Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling.]

Pluto's downsizing will likely leave some astronomers scurrying to pawn their telescopes as their employment orbit decays faster than Hubble's. One victim will be 93-year-old Patricia Tombaugh, widow of Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer. Her reaction, according to MSNBC's Cosmic Log:

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she told AP from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there.'"

There, huh. Now beat it. Half lights out, pal. We don't want any. Sign up your planetary has-been behind for the no-flyby no-call (us-we-call-you) list.

Meanwhile, in an Blog with a View exclusive, yr blogger -- through my unnamed source I'll call "Cosmic Dustball" -- was able to obtain this exclusive webcam footage of some Plutonian freedom fighters reacting to the news of their planet's solar system washout:

Mutiny on Pluto (2003)

We want to be a world and we want it now!!

After the Contraceptive Fails

After the Contraceptive Fails (2002)

Uh-oh. BushCo doesn't feel your pain. I guess you shouldn't have dropped that abstinence course -- especially if you're under eighteen.

Mantis Kept Man

Mantis Kept Man (1999)

And you thought Frodo had it bad being web-tied by Shelob.

~/~

Work and other projects have kept me from regular blogging -- and will probably keep me tied up for a while.

Still, I'll try to at least put up some images for you to look at and then write as time allows.

The New Wetlands

The New Wetlands (2006)

From Bob Marshall in Field and Stream:

The Bush Administration announced last week that the nation is no longer losing wetlands -- as long as you consider golf course water hazards to be wetlands.

Really.

Thursday [March 30, 2004], Interior Secretary Gale Norton called a press conference to claim our long nightmare of wetlands loss had finally come to an end due to unprecedented gains since 1997. However, she then admitted much of that gain has been in artificially created ponds, such as golf course water hazards and farm impoundments.

The sporting community -- from Ducks Unlimited to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership -- reacted quickly, and not favorably. Researchers long ago established that natural wetlands such as marshes, swamps and prairie potholes are far more productive than even the best-designed artificial wetlands. And sharp-edged water bodies like water hazards, farm ponds, and even reservoirs offer very little for wildlife. Putting man-made ponds in the same class as natural wetlands is like ranking pen-raised quail with wild coveys.

The boldness of Norton's claim was particularly galling given the Bush Administration's record on wetlands. President Bush, like other presidents before him, promised a policy of “no net loss” of wetlands, but his administration has consistently supported rollbacks of the Clean Water Act to satisfy industry and development.

In fact, at the same press conference, the Fish and Wildlife Service reported a continued loss of 523,500 acres of natural wetlands during the same time period. So how could the nation have come out ahead if it lost more than half a million acres? Norton didn't try to hide the truth: The 715,300-acre “gain” was mainly artificial ponds.

[...]

Norton's announcement was likely an act of setting the table for more administration assaults on wetlands protections. It was probably no coincidence that three days earlier, the Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency proposed new regulations that encourage development of companies that build artificial wetlands used by industries that destroy the vital natural habitats. It's part of the wetlands mitigation banking concept -- which gives companies permits to drain wetlands, as long as they produce “new” wetlands somewhere else.

Ah, yes. The new wetlands. Talk about your water hazards. In BushCoLand, the only ducks you'll see will be people dodging stray golf balls.

Now watch this dive drive...

Fractal Politics

Portrait of George W. Bush (2004)

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
--Theodor Adorno

A poem that calls us from the other side of a situation of extremity cannot be judged by simplistic notions of "accuracy" or "truth to life." It will have to be judged, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said of confession, by its consequences, not by our ability to verify its truth. In fact, the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence.
--Carolyn Forche, "The Poetry of Witness"

Artists do not create in a vacuum; they are indisputably coupled to the society and times in which they work. It may well be that an artist can realize aesthetic triumphs while ignoring society, but willful unconcern regarding social matters is also a political position.
--Mark Vallen, "Why All Art Is Political"

The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything -- and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?
--Phillip Guston, Writing in the mid-1960s

The common wisdom is that people should not talk about two things. This is one of them.

I don't think your everyday entry-level fast food French fryer and one-day-in-the-future museum patron thinks much about the possibilities of incorporating political statements into fractal art. A fractal, to those blessed enough to recognize one, is likely more akin to eye candy -- saturated swirls seen on a calendar in Barnes and Noble. Or something vaguely tied to mathematics -- more like a theorem than a painting -- or a pretty picture intersecting with irrational numbers but never with social, economic, or political concerns. Fractals can be visually stunning -- but can they stun others into epiphanies -- or just say anything to anyone about his or her life? Should they be used to comment on world affairs, social concerns, or even popular culture?

There are some, both proletariat and bourgeoisie, and convinced that fractals have no grounding in the world, who would find such questions absurd. I remember a day last winter when I dropped by to pick up some Giclees from the photographer who handles prints for me. His wife, a painter, studied the fresh prints briefly before laughing. "Well, there's certainly nothing like this in nature," she said confidently. "Don't be so sure," I replied, pointing to one of the studio's windows. Outside, the bare branches of an oak tree were reaching skyward to obscure a bank of self-similar clouds.

A hypothesis then. If fractals are of this world, then they can also be utilized -- politically activated, as it were -- to comment upon what happens in it.

The Enron Board Meets for the Last Time (2002)

If one accepts the premise that fractals can be art -- and I do -- then all the historical/philosophical paradigms and puzzles about the nature of art apply to fractal art as well. Artists, fractal or otherwise, who dabble in and dab on politics to their renders walk some fine lines and climb some slippery slopes. Is one's art serving as a cry for social reform while still displaying elements of Keats' Siamese twins of truth and beauty -- still providing a gesture that calls the soul upward? Or does such art become reductive, didactic, polemical -- a blunt instrument to bludgeon the viewer into accepting the artist's point of view?

Dyske Suematsu, in "The Paradox of Political Art," leans to the latter position:

The most apparent problem I see with today’s political art is its deterministic nature. Art often raises salient questions, but when a political artwork is morally motivated, its questions become moral directives disguised as questions. That is, they are rhetorical questions. As such, there is a right way and a wrong way to look at it. A correct answer is always already provided for you by the artist. The questions and the discussions it provokes either support the answer or refute it. And, the value of the work is contingent on its dialectical outcome. From the point of view of the audience, the experience of such political art resembles that of reading an op-ed column in a newspaper.

Point well taken. Why are you reading Blog with a View? Presumably to see and read about fractal art, yes? If you wanted political discussion, you would have pointed your surfboard to Salon or Slate or Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs? Hippie jerk blogger. Bring on more spirals.

Maybe it is best to be careful before one gets all socially aware. Suematsu has other complaints with political artists. They assume a ethical superiority but are not required to show that their own expressions are ethically pure. After all, why did I do the piece above about Enron? Was it because I was outraged by the scandal and appalled that the company's employees were cheated out of their pensions? Or was it because I figured seizing a hot button political topic could help further my career as an artist? And if I lampoon Enron's directors, don't I have a reciprocal obligation to show that my motives are not just as crass?

And what form would such proof take? How can political artists demonstrate that their intentions are sincere? Testify before a Congressional committee? Undergo short-of-organ-failure questioning while being waterboarded at Guantanamo? Donate all the money made from their fractal art (haaaa!!!) to Feed the Children? Will such philanthropy in turn make my intentions for lashing out at Enron execs as selfless as those of Mother Teresa in your eyes?

Dream of Napalm (2006)

But can any artist or artwork completely wash its Pontius Pilate hands clean from the stink of politics. After all, George Orwell, in Why I Write, asserts that all art is political and notes: "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." So, since art cannot be apolitical, should artists serve as "witnesses" for the times they live in -- especially if other information agencies (Fox News, cough cough) increasingly editorialize and are openly biased to particular political viewpoints. Should the studio, or the fractal generator, be an ostrich hole? Or does the artist have an obligation to record injustices and atrocities and document corruption and cultural insanity? If not the artist, who? Will governmental records accurately portray a regime or does such a historical record run a greater risk of being sanitized? Moreover, will any state-sanctioned archives be told more convincingly than the visual language art can speak? Take, for example, this:

A child's drawing of arriving at Terezin Concentration Camp where 15,000 children died.

[Image seen on Children's Art of the Holocaust]

Some artists sense the pull of history deeply and feel self-expression through art can be constructive towards spurring social change. Art Hazelwood, speaking earlier this year at a panel discussion on "Political Art -- Timely and Timeless" said:

Over the last several years I’ve talked to lots of people about political art and there has been a gradual shift. Before the Iraq War there seemed to be an attitude that political art was out of date or people had a general hostility towards it. But recently I’ve noticed a shift in people’s attitudes. People I have talked to are changing their minds. There are still the purists who believe that any concession will debase the temple of art, but their voice, once supreme in the art world, is now growing weaker. And it is obvious why. Political art might always have a place but in a time of war, and in a time of a rising police state political art becomes a necessity.

[...]

Some people say that political art has no effect in changing people’s minds, that it is preaching to the converted. To which I would answer...no one ever measured the value of a painting of the crucifixion by how many converts it made. Political art is cumulative in its effect. Its not merely one political print that changes the world. It is a part of a cultural movement.

Others, like Jed Perl writing in the New Republic, observe that art cannot always be expediently insulated from life.

The artists who find it difficult to turn from the horrors of the morning news to the specialized problems that confront them in their studios are confronting an authentic dilemma, for even ivory towers have doors and windows. While dropping the day's headlines into the middle of a canvas may never be a way of making a painting, an artist's far-flung experience must be allowed to seep into the studio, if only in a dialectical way -- as a tumult of feelings to which the orderly spirit of a still life or a geometric abstraction offers a much-needed riposte.

Legacy of Exxon (2000)

Am I wrong to show President Bush as a faceless blank slate -- as an empty vessel to be filled up with NeoCon nonsense by those shielding him in his no-bad-news bubble? Have I degraded my art or pummeled your temples because I suggest the Enron board is a pack of dogs and that Exxon's legacy is a horrific oil spill in Alaska. Maybe.

Not all of my art is political. I can (try to be) funny. I sometimes wander into nature. But some days the news of the world intrudes into my generator. Maybe I'm poisoning a percentage of my audience -- and foolish to hope for cultural awareness and progressive social change -- and admit that my ethics and morals could probably use a thorough questioning. But there is one thing I can say for certain about those days when politics creeps in to my fractals...

I sleep better on those nights.

~/~

Bush: Generated in QuaSZ. Minimally post-processed.

Enron: Generated in Fractal Zplot. Heavily post-processed.

Napalm: Generated in Sterling-ware. Heavily post-processed.

Exxon: Generated in Dofo-Zon Elite. Heavily post-processed.

~/~

Cross-posted to Orbit Trap

Lumberyard

Lumberyard (2001)

Blog with a View, at heart, is a digital art photoblog. Each Wednesday, I present an image without asking you idiotic questions like: Got wood?

Hey, man. That's my priapism line.

[Image seen on iFlipFlop]

Crash Dummy Rehab

Crash Dummy Rehab (2002)

So you think crash test dummies constantly crash because it's their job or something? Dude...

Hi, babe. Yeah, I'll be there soon -- unless, you know, I, like, accidentally have an accident -- again...

[Image by John Shakespeare]

Shape up, guys. Or you'll be spending more time at Republican photo ops than unbuckled behind the wheel...

Hey, neighbor. Were you pre-screened by Bush staffers to not ask any embarrassing questions at this town hall shindig, too?

[Photograph seen on Feministing]

Not Smooth Sailing

Not Smooth Sailing (2006)

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
--William Gladstone

The thing that's partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. And when we see the Democratic Party reject one of its own, a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago, it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today if that's becoming the dominant view of the Democratic Party, the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won't -- we can't be. So we have to be actively engaged not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but on a global basis if we're going to succeed in prevailing in this long-term conflict.
--Dick Cheney, 8-9-2006

When the sailing isn't smooth, it's time to re-fuel the fear outboards -- and power up the Swift Boats.

Russ Feingold said yesterday that poor Joe Lieberman "doesn't get it." Neither does Cheney -- or, more accurately, Cheney hopes you don't get it.

I don't know a single Democrat who wants to "retreat behind our oceans." Name someone with any sense who believes that. Such thinking has worked so well in the past, hasn't it? Like for the Native Americans when the colonists arrived, and later for the colonists when the British showed up? Like Pearl Harbor? And Democrats aren't arguing we should not engage terrorists. Can Cheney name someone who actually said such a thing? Who are these shadowy boogeymen?

I'll tell you the Democrats are saying. Or, maybe, I'll let Joe from Americablog lay it out:

Terrorists have benefitted immensely from the Bush/Cheney regime. Bush/Cheney have bogged us down in an unwinnable war. They've made us look weak to the world. They've created a breeding ground for terrorists in Iraq. They've undermined American values -- and destroyed our stature in the world. It's laughable to think that Joe Lieberman's loss is even registering with the terrorists.

Or, perhaps, I'll allow Ariana Huffington to spill the beans:

Here's the bottom line: Ned Lamont ran against the war in Iraq, a war that Joe Lieberman vehemently supported -- and still supports. A war that 60 percent of Americans are against. A war that is the defining foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration -- an initiative that has been an abject failure on every level. A war that has put the GOP's back against the electoral wall. So it's firing back with it's favorite weapon -- fear -- trying to make the case that being against the war somehow makes Lamont soft on national security or, as RNC chair Ken Mehlman put it, "a leading proponent of the isolationist, defeatist, blame-America-first philosophy."

Talk about desperate. So do Cheney/Rove/Mehlman really believe that 60 percent of the public are blame-America-firsters? Or that because 60 percent of us agree that Iraq is a disaster, we somehow don't have "the will" to, in Cheney's words, "stay in the fight and complete the task" of taking on the terrorists -- and thus are encouraging al Qaeda types?

Of course not. They know being against the war in Iraq doesn't mean you are against fighting the war on terror. It means you are against a failed policy that has created more terrorists than it has killed, that has cost America 2,591 lives and $305 billion dollars, that has thrown Iraq into a bloody sectarian civil war, and that has so lessened our standing abroad that we are unable to be a real power broker in an exploding Middle East.

You want to know what really emboldens our enemies? It's not Ned Lamont beating Joe Lieberman; it's the idea of an impotent United States so over-extended and bogged down in Iraq that it has been pushed to the diplomatic sidelines.

Or how about even Tom Ridge, former Department of Homeland Security chief, coming forward on MSNBC to fire across the Swift Boaters' bow:

As Americans stood in newly long lines at airports, wondering if they would ever again be able to carry a tube of toothpaste or hair gel in their carry-on bags, there was a feeling of helplessness, a return of the persistent low-grade anxiety that had lingered for months and years after 9/11. Bush tried to reassure Americans that they are safer than they were before the attacks. At the same time, his vice president, Dick Cheney, darkly warned that the Connecticut primary victory of antiwar candidate Ned Lamont over Sen. Joseph Lieberman would only encourage "Al Qaeda types." (Interviewed by Newsweek, former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge bridled at his former colleague's remark: "That may be the way the vice president sees it," he said, "but I don't see it that way, and I don't think most Americans see it that way.")

And, finally, Joe Conason has a few rounds left for Deadeye Dick to jam his chamber:

The neoconservatives are not only factually wrong in their domestic politics but conceptually wrong in their geopolitics. To be “strong on national security” does not mean supporting the misconceived and incompetently executed policies of the Bush administration. American security in years to come will depend, in fact, on undoing this government’s grave mistakes, which have weakened this country’s military posture and undermined support for us around the world. Terrorism experts across the spectrum, from conservative Republican to liberal Democrat, agree that the “struggle against violent extremism” has suffered from the foolish decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

Evidently, the neocons hope to escape responsibility for their debacle by complaining that the rest of us lack sufficient zeal. So they now pretend that Democrats and progressives, who overwhelmingly supported the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban and still do, want to abandon that effort. This is another partisan lie invented by the likes of William Kristol, who will answer to history for his own role in promoting the Iraq war.

There have been times in recent years when war was unavoidable, in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. For the neoconservatives, however, the answer to every international conflict is shock and awe, so long as they remain safely distant from the carnage. The American people are turning away from that mindless and dangerous attitude, which is leading us toward disaster. Politicians of both parties should do likewise.

That's what the Democrats are saying, Mr. Vice-President -- while you and the President (who were tipped off in advance) are exploiting news to make political hay and (of course) are lying by claiming liquid explosives are a new threat while simultaneously slashing funding for developing new explosives detection technology.

Remind me again who wants to aid the al Queda types?

Cheny predictably proves that he's always ready to clear the beach by hauling out the mechancial shark-- when, in fact, the wake from his own Swift Boating is what churns the waters making them too choppy for smooth sailing. The British terror plot is like a fresh coat of paint for the BushCo yachts ship of state. But the Lieberman loss? Somewhere the Veep Boy Who Says Cries Go Fuck Yourself Wolf is shouting Mayday Mayday Mayday...

Triffid

Triffid (2002)

From this could all be written by trees Wikipedia:

The Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1951 by the English science fiction author John Wyndham. The novel is written in the first-person, and describes in elegant detail what happens after civilisation collapses. It was later made into a radio series, a motion picture, and a television serial.

Triffids are very strange fictional plants, capable of rudimentary animal-like behaviour: they are able to uproot themselves and walk, possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting, and may even have the ability to communicate with each other. Wyndham capably describes the triffid by breaking its appearance down into several more familiar elements: in fact he later suggests that the plant might be concocted of various different plants.

[...]

The story proper opens with the narrator Bill Masen in the hospital, with his eyes bandaged after having been stung by a triffid. He discovers that while he has been blindfolded, an unusual meteor shower has blinded most people on Earth (the sharp-eyed will notice close parallels in more recent apocalyptic sci-fi [like 28 Days Later --Yr. Blogger]). Bill later muses that the shower may have been some sort of space-based weapons system which misfired, though the true cause is never revealed (this intriguing technique of withholding ostensibly-critical background to the plot is a key Wyndham characteristic also present in that author's The Midwich Cuckoos and The Kraken Wakes). The protagonist finds people in London struggling to stay alive in the face of their sudden blindness, some cooperating, some fighting. After just a few days society is collapsing.

Meanwhile, in a "double-whammy" situation characteristic of the Wyndham style, triffids are quickly regrowing their stings and eager to take full Darwinian advantage of the new "edge" over humankind that chance events have given them. Undocked specimens in captivity break free. The handful of sighted survivors escape the general collapse, to be faced by the growing numbers of free, undocked triffids, which grow bolder and more aggressive every day. They are also forced into some far-from-cosy realisations about just how many of his/her blinded fellow men and women each remaining sighted person can possibly help, without being exploited into an early grave.

Sticks and stones may break my bones...

[Photographic still from The Day of the Triffids (1962)]

I still remember reading this book as a kid and being disturbed by Wyndham's story. Maybe it was because of how quickly the triffids were able to capitalize on the survival of the fittest angle. Some of the movie scenes stuck with me, too -- especially shots of what seemed to be hundreds of triffids -- swaying as they lined electric fences -- turning on their stalks to "face" the slightest sound.

Wikipedia also notes this fun fact:

In Mormon missionary culture, as well as among many foreign exchange students, a "triffid" is a young Japanese schoolgirl, so named because of their giggle which sounds eerily like the sounds the plants made in the movie, and because groups of them seem to appear at random intervals.

See, Lord Vader. We are neither animal or mineral...

[Photograph seen on games.net]

Friar

Friar (2000)

Blog with a View, at heart, is a digital art photoblog. Each Wednesday, I present an image without formerly being a Bush DINO mouthpiece who -- due to current events -- makes himself over as an Independent Rove-funded self-megaphone.

Domestic

Domestic 1 (1999)

Nature is nothing if
not a mess. The best spring
cleaning brings new blankets
to warm the mold and mites.
The maid said you’d never
learn to mop properly
or dust the sills
with style. Your cutting
edge vacuum attachments
blow dust back out
and for every soap
wand or feather duster
stirring patterns in silt
another white mote flits,
settles like a leech sun-
bathing on hardwood floors,
scorching blotches
on a waxy skin sheen
and the screens are open
and the power plant leaks
and a passing car backfires
and the toxins are diced
by wire mesh and stick
to shoes and cuffs and lungs
tinted deep sea blue like
your toilet bowl water.

Domestic 2 (1999)

and the kids could
care less about picking
up clues as to how you
feel this mess is personal
and Dad’s no Superman
either. He’s tan and buff
in dreamland only with his feet
up and snoring. He paced
the hall half the night with
colic crying, drool down his back,
and the baby’s still restless in
the big chair, creamed
carrots smeared over her
mouth like a birth-
mark. She wants more
to life than sucking food
or being changed. Just once
she needs to reach
that too happy clown twirling
over her crib and pull
him down
to break the amulet’s
trance and parents’
habit of always placing her
to sleep on her stomach.

Domestic 3 (1999)

and with each day
you fall further behind.
The ticking bomb minutes
beat out what time you got
left in rhythmic headache pulses
and the morning is a collage
of dustbusters and diapers,
of daycare and road rage,
of romance novels and cartoon
balloons where praise cuts like
a serrated blade, bleeds
out bad grammar and mis-
behavior and your therapist,
a hair stylist, swears
it’s all bizarre but not
dysfunctional. Make a better
looking mess for prying neighbors,
your picture window a painting,
a still life of posed bliss
without drips or a loud enough
laughtrack. The show’s over.
No one saw you suffer
since the curtains were closed
and the daily carnage was off-
stage, mopped spotless
and wrung like dishpan hands.

The Last Egg Hunt

The Last Egg Hunt (2006)

~/~

"Nope. No weapons over there."

Nope. No discretion or dignity here.

Nope. No tact or diplomacy there.

Nope. No poise or stateliness here either.

Nope. No elegance or grace there either.

Nope. No leadership anywhere.

Self-Conscious Witch

Self-Conscious Witch (1999)

Remember the infamous no-win test for witches? Here's what c'mon down anyone can play Wikipedia says:

One of the common tests was to tie the hands and feet of the person (and sometimes enclose the person in a bag) and throw him or her into a river or pool. It was held that if the person managed to float, this was due to the Devil's help. Such a person was thus found guilty of witchcraft. If the person could not float then he or she was considered innocent, but this acquittal came too late because the accused had by then drowned.

Such a false choice seems cruelly absurd. Surely, as enlightened, 21st Century Americans we've evolved (or is it been intelligent designed?) past the hysterical mindset and gotcha kangaroo courts of the Salem witch trials...

If the policies toward the detainees is legal, why does the Bush administration keep circumventing court challenges that will test the legality of those policies?
--[A comment by john horse on TalkLeft]

[Cartoon by Jimmy Marguilies]

Hold on there, Torquemada. Not in the United States of Torture Bush. The only difference is that Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Addington and Company aren't the least bit self-conscious. They're pumped with ducking stools and patriotic Puritanism. They feel much more entitled than Dimsdale.

From The NewYorker -- "The Hidden Power" by Jane Mayer:

Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield -- according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ” Richard A. Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor at the University of Chicago, said, “The President doesn’t have the power of a king, or even that of state governors. He’s subject to the laws of Congress! The Administration’s lawyers are nuts on this issue.” He warned of an impending “constitutional crisis,” because “their talk of the inherent power of the Presidency seems to be saying that the courts can’t stop them, and neither can Congress.”

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

[Image seen on The Internet Weekly Report]

White Rabbit Meth Lab

White Rabbit Meth Lab (2002)

Blog with a View, at heart, is a digital art photoblog. Each Wednesday, I present an image without driving home drunk afterward and in despair because the Mel Gibson Holocaust Miniseries, well, never happened.