Cheryl Marie Wade

Posted on July 28, 2020 by JMN
[Image description: Wade with frizzy hair and a jacket in a wheelchair with her feet, in slippers, in front of her.] Credit… Brenda Prager.

Cheryl Marie Wade died in 2013 at age 65 from complications of rheumatoid arthritis.

“She embodied and modeled disability pride before it was a thing,” Judith Smith, who worked with her in two Bay Area performance groups, Wry Crips and Axis Dance Company, said by email. “Cheryl was unapologetic, proud, complex and loud.”

“Instead of trying to fade into the nooks and crannies as good Cripples of the past were taught to do,” [Wade] wrote, “we blast down the main streets in full view, we sit slobbering at the table of your favorite restaurant, we insist on sharing your classroom, your workplace, your theater, your everything. The comfort of keeping us out of sight and out of mind behind institutional walls is being taken away. And because there is no way for good people to admit just how bloody uncomfortable they are with us, they distance themselves from their fears by devising new ways to erase us from the human landscape.”

(Neil Genzlinger, “Overlooked No More: Cheryl Marie Wade, a Performer Who Refused to Hide,” NYTimes, 7-23-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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War on Horns?

Posted on July 27, 2020 by JMN
Demand for rhinoceros horns spiked in the 1970s and 1980s because of their use in traditional Asian medicines and their status as a symbol of wealth, and conservationists have since fought to protect the animals.

Demand for rhinoceros horns spiked in the 1970s and 1980s because of their use in traditional Asian medicines and their status as a symbol of wealth, and conservationists have since fought to protect the animals.

(“Iliana Magra and Lynsey Chutel, A Detective Pursued Rhino Poachers. Now He’s Dead,” NYTimes, 3-20-20)

The Times article includes a link to “African Rhinos,” wwf.panda.org, which says the following about the use of rhino horn in Asia, and particularly Vietnam:

Powdered horn is used in traditional Asian medicine as a supposed cure for a range of illnesses – from hangovers to fevers and even cancer… But the current surge has been primarily driven by demand for horn in Vietnam. As well as its use in medicine, rhino horn is bought and consumed purely as a symbol of wealth.

The American “war” on drugs has demonstrated the futility of focusing on source and not demand. It’s hard to see how the rhino is not as good as extinct already unless cultures that use its horn for medicine and ostentation replace it with something less precious.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Blood & Rabbit Enchiladas

Posted on July 26, 2020 by JMN
Kelsey Grammer’s daughter Spencer was slashed at The Black Ant in the East Village yesterday. Dan Herrick. [New York Post photo]

Spencer Grammer (Kelsey’s daughter) was slashed at an NYC restaurant! Or maybe not.

Dried blood remained Saturday afternoon outside The Black Ant, whose dinner entrees include $24 rabbit enchiladas and $27 braised pork cheeks...

“Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer downplayed his daughter’s injury on Saturday, saying through a spokesman: “There are elements of truth to the story but Spencer was not slashed; she is fine.”

(Larry Celona, Tina Moore and Khristina Narizhnaya, “Spencer Grammer, daughter of Kelsey Grammer, among victims in East Village slashing,” New York Post, 7-25-20)

I enjoy the possibility that the three journalists credited with the story may have sampled the restaurant’s cuisine while they were at it.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Dalí Among the Tchotchkes

Posted on July 25, 2020 by JMN
A wood block print based on a piece painted by the artist Salvador Dalí was discovered at a thrift shop in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Credit…via Seaside Art Gallery.

When Dalí, who died in 1989, finished the project [illustrating the “Divine Comedy”], he had completed 100 watercolors for the poem’s 14,233 lines: 34 illustrating Inferno, 33 illustrating Purgatory and 33 illustrating Paradise.

Then, over several years, artisans carved 3,500 wood blocks to make prints of the original watercolor illustrations for the book, which was published in the early 1960s. Some of those prints required up to 37 individual blocks to impress each of its colors of ink, one at a time.

(Christine Hauser, “Is That a Dalí Among the Tchotchkes?” NYTimes, 3-13-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Memo to U.S. — Sort of How to Speak English

Posted on July 24, 2020 by JMN
“Candles,” 11×14 in. oil on canvas (JMN 2020)

Boris Johnson speaking to the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg:

“We didn’t understand (the virus) in the way that we would have liked in the first few weeks and months… The single thing that we didn’t see at the beginning was the extent to which it was being transmitted asymptomatically from person to person… I think it’s fair to say that there are things that we need to learn about how we handled it in the early stages… Maybe there were things we could have done differently and of course there will be time to understand what exactly we could have done, or done differently.” [My bolding]

(BBC online, 7-24-20)

Of course there will be time — the dead, especially, have plenty of it on their hands.

Tentative, highly cushioned, wordsmithed to a fault and grudgingly concessive, nevertheless it’s a beginning at approaching a start to a semblance of accountable candor from a putative leader in this hemisphere.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Kind of Really Mealy-Mouthed

Posted on July 23, 2020 by JMN

“The time frame from when you get a test to the time you get the results back is sometimes measured in a few days,” [Dr. Anthony] Fauci said Tuesday.

“If that’s the case, it kind of negates the purpose of the contract [sic] tracing because if you don’t know if that person gets the results back at a period of time that’s reasonable, 24 hours, 48 hours at the most … that kind of really mitigates against getting a good tracing and a good isolation.” [All bolding is mine]

(Christina Maxouris and Holly Yan, “1000 died of Covid-19 in 1 day. Now the US is on track to hit 1 million new cases in 2 weeks,” CNN, 7-22-10)

Flabby rhetoric kind of really mitigates against cogent messaging. In a healthier country, when you expound the fallacy of what was fallacious, to use John Stuart Mill’s phrase, you don’t beat around the screaming bush.

It would do America kind of good if the embattled Dr. Fauci, justly touted as our leading infectious disease expert, were granted immunity to lose the frog in his throat.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Indelible Obscure Abstractions

Posted on July 22, 2020 by JMN
Romare Bearden’s “Wine Star,” from 1959, on view (and online) at DC Moore Gallery.Credit… Romare Bearden Foundation; via DC Moore Gallery.

Bearden (1911-88) is best known for his indelible figurative collage depictions of African-American life in all its quotidian richness, strength and struggle… Bearden’s far more obscure abstractions… have tended to be given short shrift in his biographies and retrospectives…

“Green Torches Welcome New Ghosts” (1961), “a field of pale green with faint intimations of a procession of beings of some sort,” our critic says. Credit… Romare Bearden Foundation;, via DC Moore Gallery.

While most stain painting technique in the 1950s and early ’60s derived from Helen Frankenthaler’s innovative “Mountains and Sea,” of 1952, Bearden developed his approach on his own… studying informally with a calligrapher he knew only as Mr. Wu, who had a bookshop on Bayard Street. Mr. Wu showed Bearden the often more delicate techniques of Chinese ink painting which Bearden soon adapted to oil paint by thinning it with turpentine (which all stain painters did). This way of working provided a new ease by bringing Bearden, who had never liked the thickness of oil paint, close to one of his favorite mediums, watercolor.

(Roberta Smith, “Romare Bearden’s Rarely Seen Abstract Side,” NYTimes, 3-?-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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“No Mimetic Ability”

Posted on July 21, 2020 by JMN
Frank Stella in his studio in upstate New York, photographed on Dec. 18, 2019. Credit… Douglas DuBois.

[Stella’s] emphasis on two-dimensional surfaces was a clear rejection of the idea of painting as a window into a three-dimensional space.

Stella’s “Ambergris” (1993). Credit… Frank Stella, “Ambergris,” 1993, from the “Moby-Dick Deckle Edges” series, lithograph, etching, aquatint, relief, engraving and screen print on TGL handmade paper, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art © 2020 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A story in one of his mother’s Vogue magazines, featuring models posed in front of a painterly Franz Kline-esque Abstract Expressionist backdrop, provided him with an early clue that art wasn’t only about figuration. At Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in the early ’50s, when European abstraction was a prevailing force in studio art, Stella was especially influenced by the work of Hans Hofmann, a kind of proto-Abstract Expressionist from the ’40s, and the Bauhaus color theorist Josef Albers. “I had no mimetic ability,” Stella tells me, “but I was never interested in finding one, or cultivating one. No, I worked directly with the materials, actually. The big deal in postwar American painting was ‘its materiality,’ and so that was heaven for me.”

(Megan O’Grady, “The Constellation of Frank Stella,” NYTimes, 3-18-20)

For me as an amateur painter the scariest prospect on the square feet of earth in front of my easel is to grope past mimesis and “work directly with the materials” as Stella puts it. That jump-off hovers just beyond my slogging daubs like the mirage where hot asphalt meets horizon on the highway between Balmorhea and Pecos.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Irish and Not Proud

Posted on July 20, 2020 by JMN
William James, right, with his brother Henry James. Disavowing their Irish roots would be no easy thing. Credit…Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

William James arrived penniless in Albany, NY from County Cavan, Ireland in the late 18th century. Over the next 30 years he created a fortune second only to that of the Astor family. His grandsons, novelist Henry and philosopher William, forcefully repudiated their mercantile Irish roots. William wrote to H.G. Wells:

“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’ — is our national disease.”

Disavowing their Irishness would not be easy for the brothers, however. Henry crowed that his paternal grandmother, Catherine Barber, was purely English. “She represented… for us in our generation the only English blood — that of both her own parents — flowing in our veins.” He conveniently omitted that John Barber, Catherine’s father, came from Longford County, Ireland.

Henry James remained classist and anti-Irish. William, however, seemed to evolve.

In his Ingersoll Lectures… [William] James scolded his xenophobic audience, insisting that “each of these grotesque and even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast.”

The perception of immigrants as “grotesque and even repulsive aliens” is an ember in America’s private breast that malignant votaries of the bitch-goddess still blow on.

There are at least two types of moral “blindness” — the inability to see the inner lives of individuals unlike ourselves, and also the unwillingness to recognize those aspects of ourselves that quietly underwrite our histories. It is difficult but essential to remember that at one point in the not so distant past we were all trespassers and foreigners.

(John Kaag, “William James’s Varieties of Irish Experience,” NYTimes, 3-16-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Mindreading the Meritocracy

Posted on July 20, 2020 by JMN
The Columbia University campus in Manhattan. Credit… Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.

Of the opinion writers I read regularly in the NYTimes, the one who uses the term “meritocracy” most by far, and with pronounced ambivalence, is Ross Douthat — himself a confessed meritocrat (Hamden Hall Country Day School, magna cum laude Harvard University 2002, Phi Beta Kappa).

And wouldn’t it be especially appealing if — and here I’m afraid I’m going to be very cynical — in the course of relaxing the demands of whiteness you could, just coincidentally, make your own family’s position a little bit more secure?… Not that anyone is consciously thinking like this. What I’m describing is a subtle and subconscious current, deep down in the progressive stream. [my bolding]

Douthat’s leap of intuition at describing “a subtle and subconscious current, deep down in the progressive stream” sounds almost extrasensory. He’s too canny a thinker, however, not to postposition a discrete “maybe” to his insight.

But deep currents can run strong. And if the avowed intention of the moment is to challenge “white fragility” and yet lots of white people seem strangely enthusiastic about the challenge, it’s worth considering that maybe a different kind of fragility is in play: The stress and unhappiness felt by meritocracy’s strivers, who may be open to a revolution that seems to promise more stability and less exhaustion, and asks them only to denounce the “whiteness” of a system that’s made even its most successful participants feel fragile and existentially depressed.

(Ross Douthat, “The Real White Fragility,” NYTimes, 7-18-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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