Marfa, Texas

On Thanksgiving morning last Thursday, I embarked on a 5 day trip the state of Texas in order to finally visit the Chinati Foundation and Judd Foundations in Marfa as well as the Menil Collection and Rothko Chapel in Houston.  I am in Houston now, ready to leave the hotel for the Menil.

The trip has been one of the most fascinating I've ever been on--there is nothing both good and bad in the world quite like what Donald Judd and his heirs have wrought in the Texas desert.  I have many, many things to say about what I have witnessed.  

Death In Vegas

The shocking accident that took the life of Indy Racer Dan Wheldon on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Sunday is already being called one of the most spectacular crashes in the history of motor sports.  The 15 car smash-up caused little human damage except of course to Dan Wheldon.  The coroner's report released yesterday stated what was obvious: Wheldon died of massive blunt force injuries to the head. These no doubt occurred when he hit the catch fence.

I haven't followed auto racing closely since I was a child growing up in the 70s watching ABC televise the big races and watching the Speed Racer cartoon series. Then it was all about the Indy racers--Foyt, Unser, Allison, Andretti, and Rutherford.  Nascar was still pretty much of a regional phenomenon and one would hear a lot about Richard Petty and that was it. But then as now, the death crashes were always a source of incredible fascination for people.

The first I can remember was the 1973 Indianapolis 500, which was  was marred by 3 deaths--Art Pollard and the young Californian Swede Savage.  He was an up and coming racer who was very different than the rednecks who dominated American motor sports.  He looked more like a movie star.  At Indy,  on lap 58, turn number 4, what many longtime Indy observers still call the single most spectacular crash in the history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway transpired as Savage's car exploded after hitting an angled wall head-on. Savage's injuries were serious but he was expected to survive, however a bad plasma transfusion gave him hepatitis B and he died 33 days later of liver failure.   A young crew member of a teammate rushed onto the track but was struck and killed instantly by a fire truck.

Hemmingway said famously "Auto racing, bull fighting and mountain climbing are the only real sports...all others are games."  That is what makes auto racing so different than all the others.  After Savage there was Gordon Smiley,  Senna, Earnhardt  and tens of others.  It is why so many are fascinated.  Nascar is the second most popular spectator sport in the United States.  But most casual sports fans don't follow auto racing and only take notice of the sport when tragedy strikes.  The last time I watched a lot of auto racing coverage was when Earnhardt crashed into the wall at Daytona in 2001.   

When I was changing channels on Sunday I noticed the race on ABC because the announcers were speaking in hushed tones,  so I knew something bad had happened.  It wasn't until about 35 minutes later that they announced that Wheldon had died and ABC started to show what exactly had happened.  The wonder of it all is that no one else was seriously injured. Sunday night I spent about an hour and a half on you tube watching as many final crashes as i could.  Race car drivers are a different lot.  They are not the same as most of us.  I know you are supposed to feel a little sullied to watch these things.  But to me, they are heroic.  These men (and now women)  who live to race and in the process risk everything.

The Execution of Troy Davis

Last night, the state of Georgia executed convicted killer, Troy Davis.  Everyone knows the story by now and with so much controversy surrounding this case--witness recantations, no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime, it seems that the arrogance of Georgia officials from the corrections' officials, to the prosectors to the Governor himself prevented them from even considering a thorough examination of the new circumstances.

What was it about Mr. Davis that made his execution so necessary last night?  Not much it seems.  I have had my own conflicted feelings about the death penalty but I come out on the side that it should be the people's right to hold it in reserve for particularly heinous crimes.  The murder of off-duty officer MacPhail though cowardly and cold-blooded was not a pre-meditated act of hours and weeks of planning.   It does not meet the heinous criteria.  

In the meantime, serial killers, child killers and mass murderers escape the gallows.  In California, the all-time champion of serial murder, Randy Kraft  has been on death row since 1989.  He is part of a bridge club on California's death row with other serial murderers including Lawrence Bittaker (death row class of 1981) and Doug Clark (death row class of 1983).  Kraft himself  is responsible for perhaps 60 or more murders of boys and young men. This is the problem with the death penalty.  States have it on the books yet wield it in such random and arbitrary ways.

The reason I believe that the death penalty should be held in reserve is that sometimes death is the only reasonable punishment.   The only reasonable punishment for the Connecticut atrocity perpetrated by Steven Hayes on the Petit family is death.  Anything else is an insult to the victims, their families and society.    There is no justice to be meted out in any kind of fantasy afterlife.  This is it.  I hold no special sanctity for the life of vermin like Steven Hayes or Randy Kraft.  I wouldn't mind strapping them into the gurney myself.  But these are rare cases.   

The smugness of Rick Perry talking about the execution of Todd Willingham is repugnant.  Somewhere between the Troy Davis case and the laughable practices of the California penal system is common  sense and a sober realization that reform is needed.  And even though the United States is in the company of China, India, Iran etc. as far as Death Penalty states, it doesn't give me the willies that some Americans get.  

I like the fact that for violent crime the United States doesn't mess around.   We have a vast prison industrial complex because we have many more violent criminals than Europe.  I am all for rethinking the stupid and costly war on drugs and the hundreds of thousands of wasted lives serving time for non-violent drug offenses.  But as far as violent offenders I have no sympathy.  The era of mid-century era rehabilitation and early release culminated in the 
1970s and 80s crime wave that only ended with the changing demographics produced by factors such as the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973.  

The United States is one of the few countries in the world where a life sentence means a life sentence.  European and  Latin American countries frequently release murderers after 20 years because of cost and because anything after 20 years is regarded as cruel.   In the United States we now throw away the key.  That's fine by me, and in today's political climate why the last two Democratic presidents, Clinton and Obama both support the death penalty.

The Glass House

A few weeks ago, I finally made it to see Phiillip Johnson's famed "Glass House" in New Canaan, Ct.  The tour of the house begins at the Glass House visitor center across the street from the Metro North stop and then a 10 minute van ride to the Johnson estate.  The complex houses about 7 structures including his famed painting and sculpture galleries.  The house itself is a simple 1700 square foot open plan with little more than the timeless furnishings of Mies and some eccentric artworks about. The verdict on Johnson's career, life and work are all still points of great controversy.

His early politics seem unforgivable, his chameleon-like stylistic proclivities opportunistic but as a patron of important art he was as instrumental as anyone in the promotion of the New York School. But no one can hold the Glass House against him. It is modest, beautiful and  poetic and along with  Mies' Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, the Glass House demonstrated that after the horrors of world war, modernism could provide the  underpinning of a new way to conceive of shelter and home.

All of the blue-chip paintings have been liquidated from the Johnson painting galleries in order to fund the complex, but Frank Stella's paintings (reportedly Johnson's favorite painter)

were not sold at auction.  They would have fetched millions but much less than the more expensive  Pop paintings that were sold did.  One Warhol remains, however, Andy's 1972 portrait of Phillip Johnson himself.

SUMMER, SUMMER, SUMMERTIME

                                 Summer in Bushwick

                          (Photo by Max Estenger all rights reserved)

Tragedy at Trader Joe's

Yesterday I witnessed a horrific scene on 6th Avenue and 20th Street.  In front of the Trader Joe's, three bags of newly purchased groceries were run over by a tan livery cab.  Strewn throughout the asphalt was an assortment of TJ's groceries--broken beer bottles, smashed soda cans, squashed Butter Chicken frozen dinners and chicken enchiladas.

Right-Wing Revisionism and Imagine For A Moment....

The killing of Osama Bin Laden has been the worst week for American Conservatives since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.  It was painful to watch the Sean Hannity Show on the Fox News Channel with Rudolph Giuiliani as his guest.  It took nearly 3 minutes into his interview to hear Giuliani utter the words President Obama.  Before that we heard about how President Bush was to be commended for all his work on the War on Terror. 
And they all got the memo:  mention Bush's resilience, mention (without evidence) that torture had provided the intelligence to get Bin Laden. The resilience of Bush?   The same Bush who in an embarrassing rambling March 2002 press conference on Bin Laden all of a sudden was proclaiming his lack of interest in Bin Laden?  That  Bush? 

Of course, if Bin Laden had been captured or killed a week later Bush would have been preening like a teenage girl on prom night over Bin Laden's corpse and calling himself the Terror Conquerer. The Bush presidency was what Conservative governance looks like. Now, the Right runs away from Bush as some sort of apostate.  But what exactly wasn't conservative about Bush?  Tax cuts for the wealthy?  Check.  Anti-abortion, anti-stem cell  research, anti-Gay,  anti-Science?  Check.  Preemptive wrong headed war?  Big check.
Pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues? Double check.  Deficits as far as the eye can see?  Check.  Bush and Cheney ran the most conservative administration since Calvin Coolidge.  It was a disaster for the United States and if you happened to live in Iraq and found yourself on the wrong end of a bomb or bullet, lethal. 

This is the restoration that is promised by the Right in 2012.   The Right's fealty is not to this country or Constitution but to Conservatism.  There are no American triumphs unless they are Right Wing triumphs.  They are consumed by ideology.  They love money and pretend to love Jesus.  They are chauvinists of the worst kind.   

Imagine  that between 1993-2001 George W. Bush had been President and turned over the reins in January 2001 to a Democrat named Barack Obama.  Imagine also that he had handed over the same country that Bill Clinton had really handed him.
Imagine then that within 9 months of peace and prosperity, President Obama had been out reading to children in school and the United States was attacked on 9/11/01 and thousands had died? And this after the smoking gun of an August memo warning of planes crashing into buildings?   Would Republicans have given President Obama a pass and said we are all with you now?  Sure, maybe on the way to his execution.

But George W. Bush got a pass. He had the special pass that is called straight white male privilege.  He could then even invade a country on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction,  kill thousands, waste trillions, find NO weapons and still get reelected.  If that had been Obama some wingnut  would have been calling for a repeal of the 13th Amendment. 

Do I wish President Barack Obama was more pugnacious with his enemies and with Wall Street?  Yes.  But in 2011 America, Barack Obama is about the best we can do.  And since we have to judge Presidents versus other Presidents, this one is the best we have had in a long, long time.  Only the LBJ of 1964-1966 was better, and that was only in the extraordinary circumstances of assassination.   And then he threw it all away.   But greatness has eluded all but a tiny few,  let's see when this one decides to roll back the empire before that's even in the equation.