A Thousand Words

I took this photo last fall at an anti-Tea Party demo in Washington, D.C.  I brought it out today in light of President Obama's overtures to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

THE REAGAN LEGACY

Happy Birthday Gipper!
Here's a look back at some of the shining accomplishments....
1) Increased the National Debt by 189% ($998 billion to $2.6 trillion) no one else comes close.
2) Converted millions of highpaying union jobs into low paying nonunion jobs.
3) Cut spending on healthcare leaving exservicemen, disabled people, and the old without any support and left to rot on the streets.
4) Doubled the number of poor in the country.
5) Turned the US from the major exporter of manufactured goods in the world to the major importer of manufactured goods.
6) Turned the US from a net importer of raw natural resources into a nation that exported raw natural resources (just like a third-world country).
7) Funded terrorists and tried to trade arms for hostages.
8) Funded and added Saddam with his WMD.
9) Reagan encouraged corruption, allowing companies to sell $25 toilet seats to the military for $360 and $8 hammers for $120.
10) Reagan cut income taxes on the working class but increased payroll taxes and the mandated contributions to Medicare and Social Security but did so in such a way that the top 1% paid 15% less than they did before by limiting their deductions on the first $61,000 but the working poorest had theirs increased 15%.
11) Reagan took a staggering 436 vacation days at his ranch in 8 yrs. 
12) Allowed Rupert Murdoch to circumvent the immigration laws to purchase American media sources.
13) No mention of AIDS until 1987---after 21,000 Americans had already died
Let's not forget Ronny made it impossible for any future president to actually speak the truth to at least half of the American electorate--the infantilized right for whom fairy tales and lies became the modus operandi. (Hat tip to freethinkergirl for the above list)

Milton Babbitt and the End of High Modernism

When Milton Babbitt died last Saturday in Princeton at the age of 94,
one of the world’s last great living mid-century artists had died. In the music and artworlds, there are very few left. Elliot Carter and Pierre Boulez come to mind in music, as well as Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly in the visual arts. They were all born in 1930 or before.

Babbitt was the father of Serial music in the United States which was being developed simultaneously in Europe in the late 40s and early 50s, by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Unlike Boulez, Babbitt would remain loyal to Serialism to the end of his life. His infamous essay for High Fidelity magazine in 1958, “Who Cares if You Listen?” (not his title) was viewed by many as an elitist disdain for the mass audience. But it was actually an impassioned statement that some music needed the same kind of expert ears to listen to it as the latest advances in physics or mathematics would. He stated that both the average man on the street and even the typical Lincoln Center concert goer already had their music but that his job as a composer was to raise the standards of music, not make it accessible to everyone. Babbitt was the high priest of the monastery of modernism.

I have been fascinated by Babbitt for decades. His music is as inscrutable to a laymen like myself as any could be. He was the last Serialist which is like being the last Stalinist. But he was no Kim Jong Il, but instead a charming man with many passions. This is evident in a brand new posthumously released documentary on Babbitt by the late Robert Hilferty and completed by a former Babbitt student UCLA professor Laura Kaupman. I have watched it two times in the last few days. See the link below to watch this extraordinary film which hopefully will be picked up by the American Masters series.

It is interesting that the world of serious music is not comparable to the artworld in terms of monetary rewards. All the aforementioned visual artists are wealthy whereas Babbitt was a university professor for nearly 50 years. Millions more have seen a Johns than have ever heard a Babbitt work. Yet his contribution to the field of music is probably larger than any of those visual artists made to art. Babbitt saw his own music as the continuation of a certain Germanic tradition which began with Brahms and continued through Schoenberg, Webern and himself.

Watching the new documentary I noticed at times the filmmakers used examples of abstract painting (Hoffman, Kline) to illustrate Babbitt's music. But an abstract painting can never be as difficult for an audience as music like Babbitt's. One can always spend as little time as they want in front of a painting or sculpture and move on. Music, however, is temporal. It demands one's time and if the payoff is not evident at some point, most people check out. The closer analogy is to experimental/abstract film and here the documentary sets some of the music to the films of Harry Smith who created abstract animations. Here the temporal aspect of film echoes the one in music.

Another interesting point about the new Babbitt film is that Babbitt calls himself a "maximalist." He wanted no repetition in his music and every sound was to be a new musical landscape. This is where it gets difficult for the listener. When there is no repetition it becomes hard to follow, just as if there's too much repetition some may lose interest as composer John Corigliano explains.

One of the most telling moments in the film is when Babbitt briefly discusses mortality and references his most famous student, and unlikeliest, Stephen Sondheim. Babbitt repeats that for Sondheim it doesn't matter what will happen to his own music once he dies because Sondheim says he won't be there to see the reaction on people's faces to his music. Babbitt takes a different more pragmatic tack and for him, he won't care about his music after he's gone since he himself won't be there to hear it.

TO WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY CLICK ON LINK BELOW

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/02/02/133372983/npr-exclusive-new-documentary-on-the-late-composer-milton-babbitt

Alan Uglow Update

I have been swamped with emails regarding my post on the death of Alan Uglow who died on January 20.  There is a lot of news to report.   I have been informed that a memorial is being planned for April in New York.  Also, Roberta Smith's Times obit article should be appearing in tomorrow's paper according to an email I received from Milco Onrust who is the owner  of  Galerie Onrust in Amsterdam where Alan's last show closed on January 22.    Their website has an extensive survey of  Uglow's  past 20 years of artmaking.  Click on the link below and take the 50 image tour.  

http://www.galerieonrust.com/artists.php?cid=00017&seq=1&page=1&med=pai

  (from Galerie Onrust website)

Tom, Do You Really Want to Go There?

I know that Tom Brokaw is a near icon in the history of broadcast news in the United States. No one has been a more dogged audio stenographer for official Washington than Tom. And besides, how else would any of us have ever heard of the greatest generation until Tom introduced them to us?

But Tom, please do not say a word about Keith Olbermann, unless it is to say that he was a more effective journalist these past 10 years than you.  Because while you were giving fawning and sycophantic interviews to George W. Bush on Air Force One days after the Iraq invasion, Keith was beginning his assault on our criminal regime in Washington.

"where it got sticky is when our commentators were anchoring political coverage," he said, in a clear reference to Olbermann. Brokaw was widely known to have complained about Olbermann's anchoring of campaign coverage during the 2008 race. "Those are, in some  ways, incompatible roles," Brokaw continued.  "We worked our way through that."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/31/tom-brokaw-speaks-out-olbermann-msnbc_n_816201.html

You see, when Tom was breaking out his pompons for Bush/Cheney he was being an objective anchorman,  because for Tom Brokaw being objective means serving power each and every time.  I'm glad I get it now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/international/worldspecial/25BUSH-TEXT.html?pagewanted=all
(The full transcript of the Bush interview April 25, 2003)

Death of A Rebel: Alan Uglow Dead at 69

Last week I learned of the death of Alan Uglow, the British-born, New York-based painter. Alan was not just any painter. It is quite arguable that he was for the past 25 years, the best painter in the world. I remember how startling it was in the mid-80s seeing his work for the first time. This was at the ebbing of Neo-Ex and the beginning of Simulationism. Alan's work was as far from those two styles as one could be.

Despite belonging to the 1960s generation,  Alan was a punk rocker. Upon moving to New York in the late 80s, I immediately sought him out and went to his studio many times where I met his wonderful wife Elena Alexander (whose milieu was the dance world). Alan's paintings are as subtle and delicate as he was brash and emphatic. He had little patience for bullshit of any kind.

There are two tragedies here.  First,  is the fact that Uglow died while still at the height of his powers (imagine what he would have done in his 70s).  Secondly, it has been over a week since he died and no obituary in the paper of record or any other major NYC publications. This is the city that he lived in for over 40 years.  Yet, with very few exceptions (Robert Nickas and Saul Ostrow) Uglow had almost no critical champions in the United States.   One wonders if he was just too unfashionable for the hedge funders and the critics who cater to them in the Times and weeklies.

I think the problem is that we really don't have many good working art critics so much as art journalists who cover the scene here.  They have developed quite the ear for art, but not the eyes.  An artist like Uglow demanded real eyes and was too hard to explain unless one really took  the time to look and write.  That's a difficult task with so many parties to go to.   His work was celebrated in Europe, however, and we will soon start to see the American necrophiliacs (curators, collectors, museums. critics, auction houses) rushing in to cash in .  It will happen. Trust me.  Better late than never and good for dear Elena.

But the critical neglect of such a great artist is a scandal and serves as a concise metaphor for the vapidness of the New York art scene--ALL OF IT.  Perhaps this city is officially dead as the center of production of new culture but as the center of consumption and kitsch things have never been better.   Uglow didn't really care about these things and just made what he called "the work."  The problem with "the work" is that to have elevated it to any prominence would have made most everything else seem trivial and worthless.

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST NEW YORK: The BIG PICTURE at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In this season of right-wing reaction, the notion of American Exceptionalism has become  yet another issue of conservative grievance.  Most particularly  Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin have talked of the pre-eminent grace with which our country has been bestowed.  They have railed at anyone who deems to question this central tenet of the right-wing mind.

When I think of American Exceptionalism I do not only think about some of our founders (who were so utterly NOT like their Tea Party appropriators)  but  I’m also inclined to think of figures that I’m sure wouldn’t quite figure that highly in the minds of a Gingrich or Palin.  To me American Exceptionalism means Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Ginsburg, Graham, Cunningham,  Pollock, Newman, Judd, Berry, Brown, Dylan, Davis,  Ives, Reich, Riley, Wright,  and Kahn to name just a few.  

In the realm of the visual arts, America’s grand contribution to western culture continues to center on Abstract Expressionism.   At New York’s MoMA, the temple of high modernism, the museum was able to mount a hefty show of large paintings  and drawings  soley from the museum’s holdings.  As a whole, the exhibition contains some wonderful paintings and is worth the visit just for these, but it also reveals the foibles of museum collecting and the establishment of a canon.

One thing that leaps out on first viewing this exhibition is that Jackson Pollock was a great painter even before his breakthrough drip paintings.  The big Pollock retrospective of 1998 was perhaps too big a survey, too overwhelming, whereas this informal survey of about 18 paintings testifies to Pollock’s rightful preeminence in American art.  The same can be said for his fellow radical painter, Barnett Newman who also gets his own gallery at MoMA.  It is exhiliarating to see Vir Heroicus Sublimis next to The Wild (1950).  The former  an 18 foot wide painting while the latter is about 1 5/8 inches wide by 83 inches tall.  That no one had ever dared to make a painting like The Wild  before would mean nothing if the painting itself were not  so stunning in its simplicity,  power and beauty.