Madison Avenue

Madison Avenue hacks have been ripping off talented artists since the early days of advertising, but the rip offs seem to get worse every year.

The people producing ads these days don't have the art historical references to understand the work they're ripping off. Their knock offs aren't just unoriginal. They're bad.

The latest example is an AT&T rip off of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The producer probably saw an article about Christo and Jeanne-Claude somewhere -- though I doubt he or she ever actually saw a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project -- and figured it would be a good idea to make a visual pun on the word "cover" by showing buildings and other landmarks being draped in colored cloth.


This pretentious commercial, the latest in AT&T's ongoing "coverage" war with Verizon, is a good example of how mangled art turns up in advertising, and it could have some unintended consequences for AT&T. That's what they get. As every school child knows, you're not supposed to "touch the art." If AT&T rethinks anything, they should rethink this ad, before Verizon jumps on it with an ad that takes the wraps off.

I see people working in an office with big windows and a fantastic view. Some of them are talking on their cell phones. Suddenly, their windows are covered by falling drapes, the room gets dark and the cell phones stop working. We see AT&T covering buildings, cities, a beach. Everything stops until Verizon starts tearing down the drapes, uncovering buildings, rolling up the fabric covering the beach. The cell phones start working again.

Here's a real Christo and Jeanne-Claude project from the Sixties. A study for a wrapped beach in Australia.



If the ad person who produced the AT&T ad had actually experienced a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project, he or she might have realized that wrapping an object confines it, hides it, interferes with it, shuts it up and closes it in. Something wrapped is limited by the wrapping. It's the unwrapping that's the significant event.



Christo's Valley Curtain at Rifle Gap, Colorado. The size and shape of the "waves" are based on Coast Guard research and designed to evoke feelings of dread.

AT&T has had to remake their commercial and add a disclaimer, saying that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have nothing to do with AT&T. One more obnoxious commercial like this one and I'll join them.

Are We There Yet?

What are those ants doing?  I never get tired of looking at them.

When I was making art, I was fascinated by metonymy, a figure of speech that substitutes one word for another word that it's closely associated with.  Over time, the crown comes to stand for the king.

It is metonymy that gives documentary film and other forms of sympathetic magic their power over us.  And it is metonymy that connects the unseen and unseeable theoretical concepts of science to their manifestations in the realm of the senses.

In the physical world, films and photographs are instantly metonymic.  The weaver ants in the header stand for actual ants in a completely realistic and convincing way.  The ants in the header may be suspended in time and space, immutable, undying, but, to our minds, they are real.  And they are doing a real ant thing, a thing they were caught in the act of doing by the biologist who snapped their picture and generously gave us permission to use it here.  They will continue to do that one ant thing and nothing else as long as the photograph lasts.  They will not sting us to move us off their trail, they will not turn around and head in the opposite direction, and the major worker will not put the minor worker down.  They will move forward together, always tending toward some place outside the frame of the photograph, but never getting there. 

Now the scientist who took the picture of these weaver ants, Bert Hölldobler, knows as much about ants as anyone alive, and he tells us that what is literally going on in that picture is an example of the division of labor.  What Professor Hölldobler's photograph shows is a major worker carrying a minor worker "to a place where the minor worker is needed for special work, such as attending honeydew-secreting homoopterans or nursing small larvae."

That's the observable fact of the picture.  The denotative meaning of it.  But we do not live by metonymy alone.

Beyond metonymy, there is metaphor, a figure of speech in which a word that literally denotes one thing or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness.  As metaphor, the picture of our ants points to something beyond itself.  It refers to other things that it is like.  And, as a picture that is a metaphor for something else, the more things it refers to, the better it is.

As metaphor, Professor Hölldobler's weaver ants are amazingly polyreferential.

Trust

I just got home from the experience of 5 hours of small-town American healthcare, watching my wife work her way through nurse practitioners, X-ray techs, X-rays and cat scans after her car was hit from the rear by an uninsured driver.

When we first moved to this little town, a neighbor recommended the clinic we go to. It's run by a religious organization. All of the doctors are missionaries who base here but travel to the underdeveloped world to heal the sick and spread the word of the Lord.

In the waiting rooms I sat in yesterday, I saw loops of Doctor Gupta explaining lung cancer, Wolf Blitzer reporting on the Iranian riots, and a painting of Jesus, guiding the hand of a surgeon. I thought the painting was the most interesting. I couldn't help imagining different versions of it and variations on its theme.

Maybe we could add Moses and Mohammed to the painting. Show Jesus and the other prophets -- peace be unto them -- jostling one another and arguing about how to guide the doctor's hand.

Or, we could show them guiding other hands. The bombadier's hand as he drops bombs on Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima or Dresden. Or the executioner's hand as he tightens a noose, lights a fire or slits a throat. How about a guiding hand at the gas chambers and ovens?

It must be comforting to believe that every slip of the knife is God's will.

Annals Of The Waterboard (An Opera) February 13, 2010

2:00 AM. Bush meets Cheney in the hallway of a cell block. Bush is carrying a surfboard. Marine guards snap to attention as Bush approaches.

Cheney: What the hell is that?

Bush: My surfboard.

Cheney: What an asshole. I said we were waterboarding tonight.

Bush: Whoa! You can't call POTUS an asshole. (To the Marines in the hall.) Grab hold of him. (Bush throws the surfboard on the floor.) Hold him down on that!

Cheney: Goddam it, George, stop fucking around.

Bush: Somebody get me some water and a rag.

Tutti cantano insieme:

The Marines: Sir! Aye, Aye! Sir!

Cheney: Don't board me, George!

Bush: Tube City! Damn! Turn him over now!

Sacrifice I The Sugar

When I knew him, it was Michael Tracy's intention to make the vestiges of ancient signs visible in the modern world.

Gabriel

Sacrifice I Burning

Maundy Thursday Circa 1975

Good Friday Circa 1975

Easter Sunday Circa 1975

Le Monde Circa 1975

Michael (Crossed Out)

The Girl 2008

Sacrifice I

Michael Out Of Egypt June 21, 2008

Zyema's Garden June 3, 2007

Hello Kitty Admires The Baby Jesus March 8, 2005

My daughter hasn't quite got the hang of religion yet.  She wanted a nativity scene, and we got her one from Saint Vincent DePaul. She called it her Jesus set, and mixed in Hello Kitty and farm and jungle animals. I figure the Mary I grew up with wouldn't mind that much.

Jasmine March 14, 2005

My Night Blooming Jasmine has started to bloom already. I have two big plants in pots in my sun room. I bring them inside in the Fall and put them back out on the porch in the Summer. They've never bloomed this early before. It's amazing to sit in my sun room in the evening, look out at the moonlit snow and smell Jasmine. I just have one little cluster of about 10 flowers on one plant, which is lucky, since my wife hates the smell. But I grew up with it. One whiff transports me back to hot summer nights in Galveston, Texas, reminds me of the warm waters of the Gulf Of Mexico, brings back the heavy scent of the perfume on the necks of the Mexican girls I held in the back seat of my old man's Pontiac. I worry about what kinds of smells my young daughter is going to remember from her childhood, growing up in Wisconsin. Wood fires maybe. Other Winter smells. But Jasmine, too, come to think of it. She loves it. She tears off one flower every night and takes it to her room.

Deformed Monarch Butterfly March 9, 2005

Princess Zyema January 3, 2005

Princes Zyema Velvet Kitten sits on my lap, purring, and kneads my stomach while I consider this post. She slips behind me on the chair, rubbing her face against my back. This is my daughter's cat, rescued from the Humane Society. She's too young to hunt anything except her little, rabbit-fur mice. She leaps into the air, back arched, tail curved, and comes down on them with all four feet. For some reason, she likes to drop them in her water bowl. There are no mice in the garden now. Everything is under 6 inches of snow.  Where are the mice?  I picture them in their little burrows, sitting in rocking chairs, knitting, sipping tea or smoking pipes. They have no idea what awful deaths await them in the spring.

Coney Islands

One of the greatest disappointments of my life was the first time I ate a chili cheese dog at Nathan's on Coney Island.
I expected the archtype of the Coney Islands I ate at Keith's Drive-in on Seawall Boulevard in Galveston, Texas, when I was a kid. I had my mouth set for a hot dog with mustard, relish and onions, covered with chili and topped by a thick layer of melted American cheese. Instead, I got a chili dog with processed cheese squirted on the top.
Here's how you make the real thing.
Use whatever kind of buns, hot dogs and chili you like best. (My wife has even used smart dogs and vegetarian chili on whole wheat buns, but I don't vouch for that.) What I do vouch for is all beef hot dogs, regular hot dog buns, American cheese and this fast chili recipe.
Chili
2 Tbsp Peanut Oil
2-3 cloves of garlic
1 small onion
1 pound of ground beef
3 0z bottle of Gephardt's chili powder
Salt and pepper
2 8 oz cans of Hunts tomato sauce
Mince the garlic and chop the onion
Heat the oil in a thick-bottomed pot and saute the garlic and onion
Add the ground beef and brown it
Add salt and pepper and 1/2 to 3/4 of the bottle of chili powder (If you need to add more chili powder later, take some of the chili from the pot, mix in the chili powder, then dump the mix back in. Don't just shake dry chili powder into the chili.)
Add the tomato sauce and 2 cans of water
Cook at a low boil for 30 minutes or more.
Coney Islands
Preheat the oven to between 250 and 325 degrees.
Heat the chili.
Put some hot dog buns in a baking dish.
Heat the hot dogs in boiling water for a couple of minutes then stick them in the buns. (If you have young kids, slice the hot dogs about 3/4 of the way through lengthwise.)
Add mustard, relish, onions and chili in that order. (My daughter adds ketchup, too, but I don't vouch for that, either. You do what you want.) At this point you have a pretty good chili dog.
Cover each chili dog with a couple of strips of American cheese. Absolutely no substitutions. I use 1 slice, broken in half, for each Coney Island. Sometimes I use 2 slices, but I think that makes the cheese too thick.
Bake in the middle of the oven until the cheese is completely melted and the buns are toasty.




I like to cut my Coney Islands in half before I eat them.



What?
Beer is good with Coney Islands, but, for my money, milk is actually better.

People I'd Like To Interview

Terry Gross



For my money, Fresh Air is the best program on radio. And Terry Gross is the best interviewer in the world. Nobody follows-up the way Terry Gross does. My favorite interview? Divine, explaining how John Waters talked him into eating a dog turd and what he did after he ate it. If you can get your nerve up to interview Terry Gross, you're ready to interview anybody.




Riverbend





I don't know who River is, but Baghdad Burning is a brilliant blog. It's out in book form now, complete with introductions and assessments by foreworders, but I like to read it on line better, the way I read it first. When River left Iraq and stopped blogging, I felt an important voice of Iraqi nationalism had been silenced. I may never know who River is, or even whether she is a woman or a man. I may never know if her blog is one of the finest examples of citizen journalism I've read, or just clever propaganda. For all I know, River is an Iranian agent. Juan Cole seems to believe she's authentic, but, for all I know, Dr. Cole is an Iranian agent himself. This is cyberspace. It's worse than Chinatown. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

Norman Schwarzkopf



I keep this picture on my desktop to remind me that I know less than zero about what's going on most of the time.

What's happening here is Norman Schwarzkopf, the first general to double envelop an enemy army since Hannibal, and an authentic genius with an I.Q. of 168, is telling the leaders of the Iraqi army he destroyed that they can keep their helicopters so they can massacre the Shiites down around Basra when the Shiites revolt. The Shiites in the South were Iran's way into Iraq, you see.

Schwarzkopf's version of the event is that the Iraqis fooled him. I saw him say that in an interview. He said it with a wry smile. He thought they wanted those helicopters to fly to business meetings or something like that, he said. The Iraqis fooled Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and George H.W. Bush at the same time, of course.



This is Schwarzkopf's envelopment of the Iraqi army. Look where the 24th Mechanized Division is. You tell me if you believe Schwarzkopf could be gulled by a bunch of Iraqis.

Madonna






When Camille Paglia started writing about Madonna back in the Sexual Personae days, I had a hard time keeping their life stories apart. It was never clear to me if Paglia was writing about Madonna or about herself. It's not hard to tell these days. Apparently, Paglia doesn't approve of the way Madonna has chosen to age.

I always figured it was a bad idea to talk about anybody's body parts, but Paglia and the British press are into the contrast between Madonna's face and her legs. Paglia says Madonna looks like a dissolute old streetwalker. Maybe Paglia has written about Madonna so much she thinks she owns her. For Paglia, writing has become a kind of sympathetic magic. She uses the written word instead of a voodoo doll.

I'm more interested in Madonna when she was starting out, when she was dancing and posing nude for Lee Friedlander.



How did Madonna become Madonna. That's what I want to hear about.

An Unknown Soldier



He was probably a Russian, though he might have been Polish. He was among the first Russian Army soldiers to enter Auschwitz, one of the first to liberate a concentration camp with living prisoners. On January 27, 1945, he found 7,000 survivors at Auschwitz. Like the prisoners at the other camps on the Eastern front, the rest of the Jews and political prisoners at Auschwitz had been killed or relocated as the line of battle moved toward Germany.

Thornton Wilder constructed his novel The Bridge At San Luis Rey around the collapse of a suspension bridge in Peru. Wilder asks why some people ended up on the bridge that day, while others escaped death.

If one of those Russian soldiers is still alive, I'd like to know how he ended up at Auschwitz that day. Exactly how did history choose him for that great honor?

5 Cookbooks That Changed My Life

The Talisman Italian Cook Book was my first cookbook.  I bought a copy when I moved out of the dorm my first year in college, and I still refer to it now and then.

Ada Boni's recipes were different from the ones my grandmother gave me.  Boni uses carrots in her chicken cacciatora.  We used celery.  We never cooked with wine, and my grandmother skinned the chicken before she browned it.

Mastering The Art Of French Cooking by Julia Child, of course.  The only Child recipe I still do is her roasted chicken.  She thought roasted chicken was the true test of a cook, and I agree.  Except for slow smoking and an occasional bird done standing up with a half-full beer can in its cavity, I don't do whole chickens any other way.

Julia's book led me into French wine, and Alexis Lichine made French wine fun.

The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was my introduction to Mark Bittman.

In the trade-off between time and taste, Bittman strikes just the right balance for me.  By now, everybody in the world has linked to Bittman's New York Times article about Jim Leahy's no-knead bread recipe, but one more link can't hurt.

Everyday Greens by Annie Somerville was my bridge into Vegetarian and Vegan cooking. 

Express Lane Meals by Rachael Ray is my daughter's cookbook. 

Because of Ray and the other Food Network foodies, I have a 10-year-old who eats everything and concocts her own recipes, including interesting dressings, some of them actually edible.