Weenies

Weenies are small negations, little affronts to which a response creates a larger annoyance than the weenie itself produces.   Weenies are additive.  Taken alone they do not typically warrant a response, but taken as a group they diminish the quality of our lives and must be resisted. Some additive weenies are killing us.  An example of a weenie is seen in the example of the high tech bank robber who is  also a bank teller.  This person adjusted his bank computer so that it shaved a penny from each of his bank’s transactions and placed those pennies in his own account.  After two years, bank boy was a few hundred thousand dollars richer.  An offensive bumper sticker is a weenie.  I saw one the other day that said: “If you exercise your right to burn the American Flag I’ll exercise my right to adjust your attitude.”  A small threat fouls the Common.  Everyone who reads this bumper sticker gets a weenie.  If you follow this truck and scratch the paint you would be over-reacting.  To do anything other than ignore  it would be a validation, giving it the dignity of recognition, yet there it remains in its small offensiveness - a weenie.

Take a close look at your next telephone bill.  Do you know the meaning of all of those tiny fees?  You don’t really care.  It’s only pennies,  you pay it.  The telephone company makes millions of dollars on their weenies. When a ten dollar movie  clutters many scenes with brand name products you have been weenied.  When vulgar language occurs in the dialogue of a prime time television show - you have been weenied, unless you don‘t mind.  Hollywood, very jealous of the multibillion-dollar porn industry, has been slowly slipping a big weenie to the movie-going public for years.  Boiling the frog.  Soon there will be little distinction between porn and mainstream films.  Given that we are currently in a sea of violence-porn at the movies perhaps the skin variety will be a welcome relief.

An unspoken aspect of the weenie is time of  transit.  How long will it take to get a weenie all the way up the public’s ass.  If a corporation or government organization has five years, it can usually get its weenie up where it will do the most good for The Big Engine.  Public relations and incessant television advertising are effective lubricants.  The legal system is a very efficient weenie delivery vehicle.  We can change an obscure line in the Federal Tax Code that is seen only by the bureaucrat who changed the line and the $450 per hour accountants who read it and over the course of a few years, a new hatch of millionaires has risen into the morning mist.  A small change in maritime law, a small change in meat-packing regulations, a new definition of pollution can be invasive weenies that quietly erode our constitutional rights.

If we look at legal weenies that affect you directly, and replace each one with a hot dog, you would look out upon a sea of weenies wiggling toward you like Oscar Meyer zombies, pressing into your pores and orifices and dancing away from you having gotten fat at your expense.   Your local police force, rolling tax collectors, delivering municipal weenies directly to your car.  Strobe-lit cameras catching you at intersections eroding your constitutional rights with every flash.   Many weenies enter your life the size of pinworms and leave as polish sausage having gorged upon their specific reduction of your quality of life.  Telemarketers and internet spammers are invasive weenies, clearly visible yet difficult to combat.  The government tends toward support of these institutions of annoyance using tortured interpretations of our Constitution such as the all-pervasive Dartmouth College Case from John Marshall‘s court.  This 1819 ruling  has been more than a weenie, it has proven to be the whole hog rooting around up the global ass.   For a government that uses weenies as its stock in trade,  to ban these egregious pests would be a blow to the institution of weeniedom itself.  It would be a case of the government killing its own evil children.  Weenies damage bliss.  Weenies are enemies of bliss.  Eat one hot dog per week and discuss the weenies in your life with your family and friends.  You can create new categories - they surround us.

Weenies come in six colors: green, yellow, red, purple, blue and white. Get to know them.   They have a powerful effect on your life, your diet, your attitudes, your prosperity.  They are distinguished as follows.   Green weenies are interpersonal.  They come from people you know: family, friends, classmates, co-workers, teachers.  Yellow weenies come from people you meet: strangers, salesmen, usually in the context of  brief encounters.  Red weenie assault comes from large and small businesses and institutions and the media they use: television, radio, feature films and the internet.  Newscasters and political pundits are also agents of the red weenie.   Purple weenies are in your food, drink, medicine and many consumer products.  Blue weenies are federal, state and local statutes.  White weenies are launched by mother nature delivered by small acts of God.

"Wicker Chair" - 18" x 24" - oil on canvas - 1979

Panama Canal - Mc Culloch

Ten thousand Frenchmen died of various tropical diseases in an effort to build a Panama canal.  The French effort ended  ten years prior to the start of the American work.  The Americans solved two problems that stymied the French: mosquitoes (they carried the diseases) and where to put the dirt (it kept getting in the way).  The mosquito problem was solved by spraying a mist of petroleum onto every water surface in the country from lakes to tiny puddles below downspouts.  The dirt / spoils problem was solved by Chief engineer of the Canal project, former railroad engineer,  John F. Stevens who spent the first year of his tenure in Panama, to the mystification of his supporters back home, building a railroad into the Panama hinterlands.  It was rail cars that carried away the dirt and rock thus making the entire project feasible.

Drum Wisdom

“You either swing a band or you don’t”  Buddy Rich

War and Art

The epochal (500 year) paradigm shift of 1912 which affected all art,  science and politics was deeply affected by black emancipation penetrating the lapsed Enlightenment project in Europe i.e. the U.S. Civil War, six hundred thousand white men and thousands of black men die in order to acknowledge a non-white culture as citizens rather than property.  This potent event revitalized art and science that had been exhausted by the urban nightmare of nineteenth and early twentieth century labor abuse.  How to explain the fifty year delay?  It can take Europeans at least one generation to absorb the astounding drama and forcefulness of the reifications of the American character.  Declaration of Independence 1776 - French Revolution 1789.   Picasso celebrates Lincoln in “Le Demoiselles d’Avignon”

Matisse - Once Again

Henri Matisse is underestimated by almost everyone and commonly viewed as Picasso’s inferior when discussing paradigm shifting innovations in painting during the early years of the twentieth century.  This is a shame and it is not at all accurate.  This misconstrue comes from Gertrude Stein who bore a grudge toward Matisse for remaining socially, emotionally aloof from her and her cozy circle.  One can easily assert that Matisse fully grasped and experimented with the paradigm-destroying features of Cezanne’s late work: non- mimetic drawing, flattened, democratized picture plane, creating form with color, unpinned station point, simultaneity, warped linear perspective etc.  Matisse’s bold experiments with simultaneity occurred from 1901 through 1920 before his languid odalisques but for the first seven years of the century Matisse was bravely taking most of the arrows for the modern movement while Picasso was dallying in his lachrymose pastiche of Puvis de Chavannes (blue and Rose periods) waiting for the smoke to clear, waiting for the Indians to leave the building.  Once the rabid fervor over modern painting calmed down to a mild, gut-churning roar, Picasso along with his wife Braque make their appearance with their cogent abstraction of all things late Cezanne - Cubism and carry all of the glory of bold, earth-shattering innovation to the army of young painters, sculptors and architects in Paris in 1910.  Cubism is a shorthand for seven years of Matisse’s experiments with Cezanne’s innovations with some tribal motifs added for dramatic effectIt was Picasso’s bande that included the greatest writers  of the time, avante- garde pitchmen,  Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Cocteau (later) who launched the myth that Picasso was the heavy lifter for twentieth century artistic innovation.  This along with Henri Matisse’s self-immolating remark about wanting to make “pictures for a tired working man to enjoy while stretched out on his sofa” - a remark made after ten years of fierce battle - who wouldn’t want to rest up a bit.  Picasso had a p.r. machine to expand the perception of his particular contributions and Matisse did not.  The situation is similar to the settlement of the New England Western Addition (present day Ohio) during the early nineteenth century.  The men who fought Indians, cut trees, surveyed the land, platted new townships i.e. those who did the brutal heavy, dangerous work went bankrupt allowing the following generation of speculators to make a killing.  Matisse is the true pioneer of modern painting and Picasso is clearly a latecomer although a potent and important one.  Abe Lincoln was a latecomer to Indiana but an effective member of the community.  Cubism was simply easier to grasp, more transferable than the early oeuvre of Matisse and the Fauves.  The foot soldiers of the Parisian avante- garde could traipse through Picasso’s studio and see all they needed in order to grasp Cezanne.  Picasso and Braque’s Cubism is Cezanne in a pill.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Bliss

A writer is judged by their ability to tolerate a bliss state in which transcendent thought and spiritual emotion are reified into text.  Fitzgerald’s tolerance of this state of mind was far greater than Hemingway’s tolerance of his own bliss.  Hemingway may have had grace under pressure but the pressure of grace and its sublimity was too great for his constitution whereas Fitzgerald was a conduit throughout most of Paradise, much of Gatsby and considerable portions of Tender is the Night.  Fitz had lost it by Tycoon to that relentless Hemingway popular bandwagon and to alcohol.  Protestants fear bliss and transcendence so Catholic Fitzgerald had to be dismissed as second fiddle to solid, stolid, down to earth Ernest.

Literary Lights (Heavyweights)

F.Scott Fitzgerald taught young Americans how to flirt and kiss and play romantic games.  Hemingway showed them how to hunt and kill animals and people.  Which one of these writers would Americans deify?  The killer, of course. “November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence - the night”  F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and the Damned

“The nighttime wrote a check that daylight couldn’t cash”  Thomas McGuane - Panama

After reading three novels by Ernest Hemingway (Sun, Farewell, Belt Holes) and four by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Paradise, Gatsby, Tender, Tycoon)  Fitzgerald is stronger, deeper, far more subtle with more color, lyricism ie magic.  Hemingway is a plodder in comparison.  Hemingway gets boring often,  especially in Belt Holes.  The Sun Also Rises is the finest of the three.  This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald’s finest.

In The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald is mimicking Hemingway’s terse prose to ill effect.  The feminine narrator just doesn’t work.

Hard Edge Defense

The hard edge in late twentieth century painting was the circling of the wagons of the marginally gifted against the born warriors - those with abundant natural talent whom they massacred for the most part though a few escaped:  Oldenburg, Rivers, Dine, Johns, LeBrun, Liashkov, Praczukowski.

Episode and Illusion

All painting is episodic, illusory, narrative:  Pollock, Rothko, deKooning, Newman and Kline were illustrating/ narrating Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg’s theories.  These painters were as much illustrators as Norman Rockwell or Bernie Fuchs simply for a narrower audience.

Babies and Bathwater

Painters of the Renaissance paradigm (1412-1900)  fought the same battles in all of their work.  These battles were for: 1.  The center of focus 2.  For pictorial space  3.  For story line - the narrative.   Modern art, in its swerve,  has eliminated the center, flattened pictorial space and removed the story.  Has some part of the baby been thrown out with this bathwater?  Contemporary critics, teachers and curators  clobber this infant each time it crawls back onto the scene - cruel.  Time to lighten up.  Architecture entertained its turning of the soil of modernist dogma in 1966 with Robert Venturi’s  explosive treatise, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.  The art world still revolves around Duchamp, now a moldy old worn out set of notions that were tired when Andy Warhol took them for a spin around the block to great effect.

Thomas Jefferson and LeCorbusier

Two great architects: Thomas Jefferson and LeCorbusier had extended affairs with nubile young black women: Sally Hemmings and Josephine Baker respectively.  How might Jefferson’s affection / attraction to the vital earthiness, immediacy and power of the black soul have related to his unshakable belief in state’s rights, in a restricted federal government?  LeCorbusier’s towering precursor and immediate influence Pablo Picasso had invented the art of the century: Cubism, by exploring the power of African tribal art.  Picasso opened the door to the dark continent and Corbu walked in via Ms Baker.  The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” of global political innovation.  Jefferson and Picasso: great inventors, synthesizers, enablers of lateral, right brain thought and innovation.  One can sense Jefferson’s towering frustration as John Marshall, over thirty four years as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, hammered away in his Madeira-soaked wisdom,  the spirit of Jefferson’s Declaration with his left-brain, Enlightenment logic that was more Sherlock Holmes than Picasso.  Marshall has made us a nation of  corporate slaves (see: Dartmouth College v Woodward, 1819) who, as we serve the protestant ethic of salvation through hard work, are gutted by our foreign owned financial institutions and sold down the river to China via Wal-Mart and Home Depot.

Not Enough There There

It can be said of much art that there is just not enough right with it.  Perhaps it is finished but almost always stunted in conception and execution.  A painting has the potential to be explosively powerful in its expressive range and in its sublimity entirely independent of the subject matter.  See “Rain, Steam and Speed” by Turner or “Girl with a Shuttlecock” by Chardin.  The subject matter in these two paintings is incidental to the highly resolved power emanating from the color harmony and composition both tuned to a fever pitch.  Whereas Leon Golub or Robert Longo can paint men being tortured or falling through the sky, this work still elicits a muted esthetic/emotional response.  These paintings lack resolution.  There is not quite enough there there.

Gertrude Stein re-writes History

Gertrude Stein is guilty of casting damaging aspersions upon two immensely worthy subjects,  neither deserving her snarky opprobrium.  “Oakland, California - there is no there there”  Oakland is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and if not for ever-so-precious San Francisco, it would be the jewel of the Bay and of the whole west coast.  Stein’s denigration of Matisse comparing him unfavorably to her little lap dog Picasso and  her intentional mis-reading and mis-telling Matisse’s remark that he simply "wished to paint pictures that might add a little comfort to a bourgeois life".  Picasso rode into his exalted place in the art world on the coattails of firebrand Matisse who had been the stalking horse of modern painting while Picasso was painting murals in smoky cafes in Barcelona.  Matisse constructed an intellectual environment in the Paris art world that enabled Picasso and his bande to pursue their bold explorations.  If not for the new territory opened by Matisse Picasso would have remained a stylistic magpie.

Avante-Garde Institutionalized

It is strange to attempt to institutionalize the avante- garde in university studio art programs knowing that a feature of any avante garde is the loss of the great majority of its members to random exploration that, however valiant, intelligent and well-meaning, leads to penury, mental illness and suicide (see La Boheme).  An institutionalized avante garde is a gross contradiction of terms.  Our university art programs create yet another cluster of anemic, static and claustrophobic academic artworks as lifeless as those that launched the Impressionist/ Fauvist /Cubist revolution against the nineteenth century French academy. All cultures require an avante- garde for the new ideas that will save it from itself.  It is counter-productive of the vital societal raison d' etre  of the avante- garde to homogenize its purpose, program and agenda in a university art department.  Academic art is all heading in the same direction.  The jargon has become uniform.  Language directs the exploration.  The current shared dogma celebrates non-narrative, non object oriented, conceptual, gender inspired work that is pale, wan and always doctrinaire.  Duchamp wrote out the marching orders in 1920 and so it is.  This art is no fun to look at.  It is no fun to think about.  It all smacks of faux enlightened laziness of mind and muscle.  It is as empty as the soupiest, graviest nineteenth century Beaux arts historical narrative extravaganza.  The art of today is produced hermetically at a computer or in a studio or factory as separated from nature as the precious polishers of the past.

Cezanne Calculus

The generation of young artists in Paris from 1900 to World War One looked at Cezanne’s late painting as if it were nature itself, thus the work of the Fauves, Cubists, Futurists, Purists et al was already a meta-art, an art about art rather than art about nature or even historical ideas or mythological motifs. From Matisse onward through the twentieth century painting is about other painting.  In mathematical terms, Cezanne’s late work is the first derivative of nature and Cubism is the second derivative of nature.

Artist v. Painter

The terms artist and painter are not synonymous.  The word artist implies innovation, exploration and a conscious effort to extend the boundary of art.  Paul Cezanne was the last painter who was also an artist  who used nature as a direct source of inspiration.  From the Fauvists:  Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck,  who directly followed late Cezanne   during the first decade of the twentieth century to the present, all painting as art ie painting in the lead in defining what art is in its time, has looked only at other painting or into the psyche for inspiration not out into the landscape.  Very little painting of the past seventy five years can even be considered art  i.e.  extending the range of the avante garde.  Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Richard Prince perhaps - no one else.  Now that painting has reached a dead end (see celebrations of  the paintings of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, John Currin, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella and countless others, all others) perhaps it is time to direct observation and interpretation of nature for a painting that aspires to the status of art.  It is time to return to the source.  The oeuvre has been exhausted.

Stalin Cools Commies

Stalin didn’t give a damn about communism.  Some considered him a double-agent for the Czar.  He kept silent about his true allegiance and controlled the communist party as a grand infiltrator.  He was alarmed when party hardliners began to complain about his wavering dedication to communist principles.  Stalin killed the party leadership during his purge of 1938.  When Senator Joseph McCarthy began harassing communists in the U.S. in the early nineteen fifties, Stalin’s communists had been dead for fifteen years.

Big Blender - Dick Cheney

If you took every adult in the United States and put them in a big  blender and turned it to puree, the substance you would draw off would be pure Dick Cheney ( the foam would be Sarah Palin)  Dick Cheney rose to prominence as the former most influential individual in the country for at least eight years.  He is the embodiment of all Americans including the populous silent majority - the warm, dark matter,  along with all of the pretty people we see on television, in the movies and in glossy magazines.  If you are uncomfortable with this you might stop using petroleum products ie stop being an American.  You say Cheney is mean spirited?  The most friendly of us are a single degree of separation from violence, meanness and greed.  Conservatives are not as shy about this as liberals.

Lake Letterman Indiana

It is time for a very large scale WPA style civil engineering project to get the heartland and the rest of us back on our feet.  Let’s turn Indiana into our sixth great lake and connect this lake to the rapidly diminishing Oglala aquifer that lies beneath the Great Plains states.  What to do with the farmers and small town residents?  Swap them their soon to be submerged land for lakefront property.  There will be thousands of new miles of this valuable real estate.  The actual edge of  Lake Letterman will be located ten miles from adjacent borders.  Indianapolis will become an island of sorts connected by spokes that form the five major highways into surrounding states.  Lafayette / Purdue may lobby for island status but it is not likely to be granted.  This project will employ all willing workers on the North American continent for ten years: blue collar, white collar, no collar.  Lake Letterman will become a thriving tourist destination for vacationers  and shoppers from around the world with direct flights from Asia and the Middle East.  Our new great lake will replace rust-belt industry with global scale recreation opportunity. “Make no little plans” - Daniel Burnham