Internet Stuff and Scraps

My friend HSW said something profound in reference to our political disaster of a government today. He said, "We're all just sitting here talking about how crazy the country has gotten but it's OUR country. We're doing it - we're allowing them to define torture and rendition and allowing this to happen."

Here are two people who didn't allow it...

Heroe: Sugihara

Heroine: Andrée Geulen-Herscovici

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To my chagrin, and with no prior notice, I am on Youtube at the same time that a really bad piece of my art is being sold on ebay. I donated the Ebay piece to the American Cancer Society auction during the very early '80's. It is bad art coming back to bite me. But it originally went for $250 so that's good.

Fall is here and Chief Illiniwek is gone! I actually worked on this logo as an undergraduate. Oren Johnson produced this and he was/is a brilliant artist. I helped cut the large films that were turned into the smaller version (this was before Photoshop or any major computer design). He had a studio in a farmhouse beyond Champaign. I would ride ten miles every morning to get there. I'm sure it's all condo's now but his serigraphy studio in the basement was extraordinary. I was a little concerned with the Chief then but we were more intensely fighting South African apartheid on campus.


Then, I remember talking to a really talented American Indian woman who started the great fight to get rid of this crazy Chief dingbat. She was recruited to the department of art and design - to diversify the program. She said, "I arrived and the head of the painting department invited me and my children to a basketball game. We got there and this guy - this "Chief" comes out and does this dance and I looked over at my kids and their mouths are wide open. I said to the faculty member, 'This is not good.' and he says, laughing, 'Come on - are you kidding? You know your culture is dead'." She said she had spent a lot of time trying to get her kids to see the authentic spirit of her people. This was not good. She sat out in front of the stadium with cardboard signs for months until others joined her. She had death threats. She did a great thing.
I would call her a warrior.

Graceland Cemetery was closed because of a microburst storm in August that tore down Irving Park Road toward the lake. The weather is becoming more extreme. No doubt Versace helmets will be available for spring.

Jake's birthday cake. Oh for a mom like that that bakes the cake and knows what's important.

The worst could be over. This is not a staged photo but a moment of Rick Santorum's life and I kind of feel bad about putting it up. On the other hand, he had no problem with trading in his "family values".

Bring the boys home. These are family values. Bring them home.

Damien Hirst's Memento Mori

Damian Hirst unveiled an extremely thought provoking artwork last week and the world shrugged. The piece which reportedly cost 20 million dollars to produce is comprised of the skull of a 19th century adult male that has been set with hundreds of high quality diamonds including a rare and fine light pink stone over fifty carats. The mandible was removed and recast in platinum and the teeth were inserted into the new precious grill. The asking price is $100 million dollars and supposedly there have already been several serious inquiries. I think it will sell - if the project isn't a hoax. Damian may want to be catchin' up with the Banksys.

Can the size difference be attributed to nutrition?

I hesitate to start a rant about values, culture, the decline of all civilization. It would only lead to a profound sadness about Lindsay Lohan and the Salton Sea. I predict there will be limited general interest in Hirst's latest work and I don't want to feed any scrap of gawking.

If his intention is reflexive of the grotesque consumerist culture, then well-done son.

Unfortunately, he has a tendency toward that Michael Jackson morbid acquisitiveness as witnessed by his offer to purchase the Walter Potter collection of Victorian Taxidermy for a million or so. Potter preserved dozens of freshly drowned kittens and bunnies in decidedly anthropromorphic settings like schoolrooms and tea parties.

So Mr. Hirst courts controversy with a clear eye toward the iconographic. I'm sure that the critical sensibility includes historic references like Hamlet, the crystal skulls, the Mayan cult of skulls, the Capuchin monasteries, memento mori, etc. etc.

But in this day and age with absolute environmental disaster and starvation detailed instantaneously from wide geographies I wonder if it isn't unwise - even for a renowned artist -to cater to self-indulgent and adolescent necrophilia.

We'll see how this plays out. I really hope these are Swarovski crystals.

More about Potter's Taxidynamic compulsions in this 'kids friendly' and really scary didactic piece.

And afterthought, full disclosure, relational - my Lover's Discourse project contains a deer skull (a natural death in the wilds of West Virginia, I hope). It illustrates Barthe's chapter titled "Ecorche (to be flayed)". Also present -- a silkscreen of a silkscreen of a silkscreen of Andy Warhol's skull and 19th and early 20th century engravings of ecorche. The difference? I would spend my 20 million on aid to the planet and fish my skulls from the back water of Salt Lick creek. I hate my self-righteousness at this moment. Maybe that's Hirst's point? It's still too expensive.

Belle

I grew up on the far south side of Chicago. My neighbor lady was a woman named Belle Haims. She took care of me and really adopted me, in a way.

My mother said, "I brought you home from the hospital and Belle immediately scooped you up. She fed you for the first couple months of your life."

That always seemed strange to people but my mother suffered profound depression during her pregnancy with me and was probably grateful for the help.

And so Belle became a loving, constant and nurturing presence until she moved away when I was twelve years old.

It was an unusual relationship. I was culturally Irish and went to Roman Catholic grammar school and Belle was a Jewish mother of extraordinarily pure yenta-ness. I had Catholic guilt in the morning and Jewish guilt in the afternoon, with the fabulous, zaftig, over-the-top Belle.

Probably in her late forties when I was born, she was a very, very curvy woman who wore a sturdy girdle every single day. She had her hair done weekly - and the style was always a varnished variation of a helmet or a swoopy-do like Marlo Thomas on "That Girl". And it was always a monochromatic, unnatural color - most often blue-black but sometimes platinum blond or red-orange.

Belle dressed in the height of 1960's style. Her devoted husband Hyam "Hy" Haims was a "shoe guy" - a wholesale shoe salesman whose customers ranged from cheap stores on Milwaukee Avenue to couture houses on Michigan Avenue. Belle had dozens of pairs of the best, most outrageous shoes to match tight, sequined dresses in electric blue or embroidered shantung shifts in emerald green. Between Hy's business and Belle's family every week brought another big party - a bar mitzvah, wedding or anniversary to dress for.

She was the daughter of the head of the Rabbis that certified Kosher butchers so Belle really was a Jewish princess. She was a smart and big woman and she would rock me so tightly between her gigantic reinforced torpedo breasts and rock me singing "ahh-ah, ahh-ah, bay-bu-lah".

Belle treated me like a person and we had long wonderful conversations about the neighborhood or who was on the Mike Douglas Show that day ("It looks like Totie Fields gained some weight").

When I was twelve she and her husband moved away. There was a flight of jews from Chicago's south side to the near north suburb of Skokie in 1976. The neo-nazi's had moved into Marquette Park (where ten years earlier, Reverend King was hit with a brick). It was a hateful time and things were uncomfortable. We pretended like it wasn't because of those crazies. Belle would say, "We're moving to our retirement home."

I missed her but she would come visit occasionally and we would talk on the phone. She came to graduations - always shiny and with strangulating hugs.

Belle died suddenly during gall bladder surgery, when I was away at college. I went to sit shiva and the funeral home but not to the graveside service. I've missed her.

This is a true story. Thirty years later - yesterday to be exact - I was riding my bike through Forest Park - a suburb adjacent to mine. One tree lined street led to the next and I soon ran into a fence surrounding a cemetery.

As I circled around to the front, along a busy highway I got a strange feeling. I suddenly remembered when I was nine or ten years old Belle took me on a long car ride. We went to a graveside and placed rocks on tombstones.

Now, I had this strange deja vu feeling that this was the cemetery. The entrance appeared and the sign for "Jewish Waldheim". I pulled my bike up alongside the office. I went inside and there was a very nice woman. I told her that I thought that someone I knew had family buried there. I gave her Belle's family name. The nice cemetery lady's computer was already turned off but she called out to a colleague. After they spent a couple minutes searching through files I was getting ready to leave. I was unlocking my bike outside when the office people called out, "Oh yes. Here's your lady friend."

It was amazing standing there with the autumn light and decades floating like flecks of dust in the air. The caretaker gave me a map of the funeral plots with Belle's "address" written in ball point and an "x" and I took off on my bike.

Finding her grave was a surreal experience. It took around forty minutes of walking through rows, pushing overgrown weeds aside. The late autumn sun was coming directly from the west, leaving long shadows from the monuments. When I found Belle and Hy I felt such a sense of warmth. My eyes burned but I didn't cry.

The wonderful thing about Jewish tombstones is the use of small porcelain transfer photographs, often with protective bronze covers. I lifted the cover and there was Belle, exactly as I remember her (see above). I cleared off her tombstone and that of her husband, Hyman Haims ("My daily greeting in the driveway between our houses was, "Hi, Hy!").

I found some pebbles which is the custom - you leave pebbles so that the deceased or other family members will know someone was there. I lined them up above her picture. Then I heard a voice in my head - as clear as a bell echoing across the cemetery, "You call those nice pebbles? That one looks like tile grout."

I chuckled to myself. She had a great sense of humor. I miss her. The effect she had on my life is impossible to measure.

Postscript:

http://www.loggerheadsmovie.com/