A flame upon my sadness

photo : Jorg Sasse
9137, 2004

"Hey, Thats No Way To Say Goodbye"

Roberta Flack

Settee

Settee, unidentified Shaker maker,
about 1830, Enfield, N.H.
On loan from Bob & Aileen Hamilton.

From the current exhibition of The Bard Graduate Center for Studies
in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture,NY
Out of This World: Shaker Design Past, Present, and Future
Thursday, March 13, 2008 - Sunday, June 15, 2008

I thought I Saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the Back Room of the Commercial

I thought I Saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the Back Room of the Commercial,
South Bank, Middlesbrough, 1984

photo : Graham Smith

A Column Fountain

Heike Bollig
Wasserspiel - Ernst Litfa?, 2008
(Installationsansicht Badischer Kunstverein)
Mixed Media Installation

Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe

The Clock in Profile

''Pourquoi chacun affirme-t-il que la forme d'une montre est ronde, ce qui
est manifestement faux, puisqu'on lui voit de profil une figure
rectangulaire etroite, elliptique de trois quarts, et pourquoi diable
n'a-t-on note sa forme qu'au moment ou l'on regarde l'heure ?''

Alfred Jarry, Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien;
Livre IIa, elements de pataphysique ; VII Definition (Oeuvres completes
tome I, La Pleiade, 1972, p. 699)

The Radical Reformulation of the Coordinates of Identity

The Radical Reformulation of the Coordinates of Identity (Saving History from Dystopia)
310 x 80 x 100 cm
wood, acrylic, spray, felt, fur, coal, varnish
2008

Building Techniques and the Destruction of the Prototype

works by Oscar Tuazon at Daniele Balice booth

Open Plan 08

Ulrich Strothjohann
Jocker?, 2007


Dieter Detzner
"Barnett", 2005


Sophie-terese Trenka Dalton
"The dreamer Whose Dreams Came True", 2008

Curated by Bettina Busse

Athensville

Andreas Angelidakis Podium Bar


from the left side: Anastasia Douka, Nikos Charalampidis


Nikos Alexiou fountain


Dimitra Vamiali


from the left : Christina Dimitriadis, Christodoulos Panayiotou


Dimitris Papadatos poster


Savas Chistodoulidis


inside Maria Papadimitriou's trackitecture

ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS, NIKOS ALEXIOU, ATHANASSIOS ARGIANAS, DIMITRA VAMIALI, NIKOS VARITIMIADIS, KOSTIS VELONIS, EVA VRETZAKI, ALEXANDROS GEORGIOU, GEORGE GIPARAKIS, CHRISTINA DIMITRIADIS , ANASTASSIA DOUKA ,KONSTANTINOS DREGOS, APOSTOLIS ZERDEVAS,MARY ZIGOURI, THEODOROS / VASSILIS CHARALAMBIDIS, YANNIS THEODOROPOULOS, ANDREAS KASSAPIS, ELENI KAMA , THEODOROS KLONARIS ,DIMITRIS KOZARIS , YANNIS KOFTEROS ,PANAYOTIS LOUKAS , MILTOS MANETAS , DIMITRIS MERANTZAS , VASSILIS BALATSOS , IOANNA MYRKA , ANTONIS DONIEF , YANNIS SAVIDIS CHRISTODOULOS PANAYOTOU, DIMITRIS PAPADATOS , MARIA PAPADIMITRIOU, NIKOS PAPADIMITRIOU, LEONIDAS PAPADOPOULOS , KONSTANTINOS PATSIOS , ANGELO PLESSAS ,ARTEMIS POTAMIANOU, DIMITRIS PROTOPAPPAS , GEORGIA SAGRI, SOCRATES SOCRATOUS, IRIS TOULIATOU, THANASSIS TOTSIKAS , PANOS TSAGARIS , GEORGE TSALAMANIS, FANTASTIKOI IXOI, NIKOS CHARALAMBIDIS, SAVAS CHRISTODOULIDIS , AIDS 3D.COM, STEVEN HARVEY, INTO THE PILL , THE ERASERS, ALEXANDROS PFAFF, WE NEED

Curated by Marina Fokidis

Porcelains of Fribourg Collection

koiro ginsai ichimatsumon shiho sumikiri sara

Ginsai refers to the silver patches and ichimatsumon is the checked pattern, while the last three names refer to the shape: shiho means square, sumikiri refers to the cut corners and sara means plate. Sumikiri is usually a feature of lacquer trays.
Hayashi's works bearing the koiro label. It basically means incense-colored, or light beige. Koiro was popular during the Heian Period and among Buddhist priests ranks second only to purple for color used in clothing.

Mamiko Hayashi's porcelain

The Headlace of Xerxes

By Tom Morton

On a wall in the ruins of Persepolis, Iran, there is a relief sculpture of Xerxes the Great, king of the Persian Empire from 485 to 465 BC. Sitting straight-backed on a throne with his bare feet resting on a dainty stool (the better not to touch the humdrum earth), he wears long, pleated robes and holds a lotus flower, symbol of his eternal dominance, in his left hand. Beneath his crown froths a fulsome head of hair, and from his chin juts a great crocheted beard, as long and as thick as his upper arm. Half-god, half-barroom bruiser, this Xerxes seems more than capable of keeping most of the known world under his thumb.
Fast-forward to 2007 and the release of Zach Snyder's 300. Based on a 1998 Frank Miller comic book of the same name, the film recounts the tale of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which three hundred Spartan warriors held off a vast Persian invasion force (Herodotus reports an improbable and improbably specific 5,283,220 men) for three days in a famous last stand that gave the united Greek city-states time to assemble a fleet that would banish Xerxes's troops from Greece forever. Snyder, however, evokes Thermopylae as a metaphor for present-day tensions between the West and Islam, and more particularly between America and Iran something not lost on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose blustery spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, described the film as an act of "cultural and psychological warfare." And yet, while there is much that is politically suspect about 300, this CGI-heavy, nu-metal-sound-tracked adolescent power fantasy fails in its mission to equate the Spartan king Leonidas's band of outnumbered brothers with George W. Bush's military-industrial machine.
In his essay "The True Hollywood Left," Slavoj Zizek asks whether the Spartans "with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice [are] not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, as a matter of fact, the elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion?)." Well, perhaps. But what's most interesting about 300 is not that the supposed heroes, with their ripped abs, rubber briefs, and taste for infanticide, are so unappealing; rather, it's that the villain is so unintentionally attractive. Elsewhere in his essay, Zizek describes Snyder's depiction of the Persian court as "a kind of multicultural different-lifestyles paradise [where] everyone participates in orgies[:] different races, lesbians and gays, cripples etc." At its center stands Xerxes the Great. But this Xerxes is not the Achaemenid alpha male of the Persepolis reliefs. Rather, as portrayed by the beautiful Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, 300's Xerxes is Middle America's every subterranean fear and desire brought to burnished, glittering life. His unstable ethnicity flickers between southern European, sub-Saharan African, Arab, and Persian. He's a poster boy for miscegenation, containing within himself a genetic trace of every subject race in his continent-spanning empire. Standing some eight feet tall, he is possessed of a Brad Pitt-in-Fight Club (1999) musculature and a rumbling voice to rival Barry White's. Yet despite these signifiers of heterosexual hypermasculinity, he has a certain joyfully swishy quality, taking languorous sniffs of Leonidas's scalp when they meet to parley, wearing clear lip gloss, and dressing like the sartorial stepchild of Liberace and Dhalsim from Street Fighter II (1991). (In a recent South Park spoof of 300, Xerxes is depicted as an Iranian club owner who attempts to buy up an American lesbian bar named "Les Bos" and refurbish it with "blue carpets and gold curtain rods," only to fall in love with one of the protesting customers and reveal himself to be a drag king. Try applying your postcolonial queer theory to that.)
The only facial hair Snyder's Xerxes seems to possess is his exquisitely plucked eyebrows. Chains snake across his bald pate, and his smooth cheeks and chin are pierced with rings that glisten and shiver with every grimace or sigh. If these historically anomalous accessories are intended to suggest that the king is an S&M enthusiast, they also, in their asymmetric, almost haphazard, distribution, hint at another sexual peccadillo what the American porn industry charmingly terms "getting a facial," which is to say kneeling down before a masturbating man so that he might ejaculate on one's face. (Significantly, "facial" scenes are often filmed from the standing perspective, allowing the viewer to fantasize that it is he who is, um, delivering the goods.)
In a movie that seeks to portray the Persian king as effeminate a move beloved of Western Orientalists since Herodotus's Polymnia reading these baubles as blobs of semen seems oddly reasonable and becomes even more so when we consider the role proskynesis, or ritual prostration, plays in this tale. Snyder's 300 is all about not kneeling before a king only slaves and traitors do so, here and the implication is that by wearing these gilded sperm proxies, Xerxes is demonstrating that he bends the knee to a higher power. If Snyder is using this device to contrast masculine, rationalist, straight (ha!) Sparta with feminine, mystic, polymorphously perverse Persia, it's hard to know whether to find it grossly offensive or merely to laugh. With their Muscle Mary glutes and wipe-clean underwear, Leonidas and company look just about as gay as it gets, and one is tempted to suspect the director of a secret, shaming crush on them, like the homophobic frat boy who nurtures private fantasies of rubbing Deep Heat into the star quarterback's tectonic shoulder blades. Curiously, the director's other creation, the fictionalized Xerxes, is far better adjusted and seems to find his own ambiguous relationship with sex and power rather fun. An out bi man with the world at his feet, he wears his kinks on his sleeve, or rather his face.
In the concluding battle scene in 300, Leonidas, the sole remaining Spartan, hurls a spear at Xerxes in a final act of defiance. The historical Xerxes did not die at Thermopylae, of course, so Snyder has the spear glance his cheek, ripping out several of his ringlike facial piercings in a slo-mo spurt of blood. Some critics have interpreted this as the moment when the Persian king becomes aware of his mortality, the freedom-loving Spartan having divested him, albeit briefly, of the metaphoric ties that bind him to the idea that he is a living god. Me, I just think he looks disappointed. This Xerxes knows just what to do with a Spartan's spear, but it's not blood he had hoped to be wiping from his chin.

Source : Bidoun, OBJECTS / Issue 14 / Spring-Summer 2008

Greek Peasant, Playing Bagpipes

Edition of Nicolay's The Navigations, Perigrinations and Voyages Made into Turkey, 1585.

Moonmad

Max Ernst,1944

Flying Satyr

Bernard Perroud

In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture

By Bill Hatch

These thoughts are provoked by Gerald de Groot's Reflections on The Sixties Unplugged, an arrogant volume by an ignorant historian which argues that the '60s counterculture achieved nothing of lasting importance.

There are two kinds of hypocrisy about sexual and political matters in our generation: the left hypocrisy and the right hypocrisy. Between the two, one ought to prefer the traditional approach of the right -- mis-, mal- and nonfeasance in office and in bed. The left invented the dialectics of "relationship," and while no less promiscuous than Republicans, they have proved themselves far more self-righteous about it. The left, in general, also runs the American bureaucracy and has invented an entire alternative form of English to explain what they are doing to individuals and why. Only the well-to-do escape this aberrant form of our language.

One of the great achievements of the hippies is that they have never been a part of either faction in terms of ideology, sexual or otherwise. Although they are capable of a social cohesion at times, under certain specific circumstances (from a good party to a political action), hippies are firm believers in the individual's right to private property and will fight any timber corporation to prevent encroachment on it. I didn't even understand Peter Coyote's statement, quoted reverently by De Groot, "Any structure is mutable, but once you've chosen it, you have to accept it -- if you're ever going to get any depth. Because depth only comes in the struggle with limits." But, I have no doubt whatsover that Ringolevio, by Diggers founder Emmett Grogan and Coyote's leader, was the best book ever written on the Haight Ashbury, generally considered to be the fountainhead of lamentable "anarchist excesses." A second take always worth rereading, is the series of articles written by Nick Von Hoffman and illustrated by the great photography of Elaine Mayes, on the anarchic market in marijuana in the Haight. It could not be organized even by organized crime, which tried.

What de Groot, no doubt irrigated by the rouge corncob placed somewhere on his person where the sun never shines, fails to see is that the hippies were and remain the only genuine working-class movement that came out of the Sixties. The other thing he fails to notice is that the hippies, as opposed to their "leaders," transcended hippydom, in fact and later fiction on the period. At Berkeley, a friend who would definitely be classed as a former hippie, told me years ago, "You watched the anti-war speakers. When they left the podium, you left the crowd because the cops were coming." Basic working-class wisdom as old as the Haymarket Massacre.

My finest tidbit of revolutionary romanticism from the era comes not from the hippies but from the new left, a friend announcing in a frenzy of ambition that Cesar Chavez was starting a revolution. He meant one that would bring down the state. Any movement based on people not gringos was grasped fervently by the new left to be used as a club against the hippies, those messy Americans (white, black, brown, red or yellow -- whatever) having fun. And for those of us who had actually done farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, oh well, how could our opinion count? It is essential to the misappropriation of the complexities of Marx's critique that anyone with any empirical experience with any memory of actual hard farm labor should be silenced by the terribly articulate suburban pink diaper set.

Although the hippies preferred to make love, not war, when attacked by police they exhibited excellent abilities to defend themselves. My favorite scene from the chaos of late 1968 was, during yet another SWAT invasion of the neighborhood, a fellow with a molotov cocktail alight in his hand, who streaked through several cops, threw it under a squad car and escaped as the car blew up. In the context of that and other riots of that time, it was not fundamentally an attack on the federal, state or local government; it was a statement: Get the fuck out of my neighborhood, quit beating my neighbors and scaring our women and kids. One did not have to be an admirer of either Dylan or Marx to appreciate the magnificently courageous gesture of our neighbor with the flaming cocktail that night.

As for the hippies' contribution to the election of Nixon in 1968 and the general breakdown of the Roosevelt coalition in the Democratic Party, oh well, whatever, as the hippies would say. De Groot revises the history of the Sixties anti-war movement from the standpoint of the anti-Iraq War movement? Our academic neo-Reds are on the prowl again. The latest credit crisis provides the excuse and once again we get secondary causes as reasons to do what? Man which barricade, where? These clowns haven't learned anything since the last depression. Socialism is the answer, right? And the question is: what government produces the happiness of its people? The three anti-war demonstrations in which I marched down Market Street, San Francisco, were as far as I could tell, organized by Palestinians. Willie controlled the cops, the Palestinians controlled the peaceful crowd, and it all worked except for the inevitable bullshit provocateurs. The press called them "anarchists," yet an Asian hippie woman I know and met in the crowd on one march handed me a broadside of a beautiful poem written by a real anarchist postman from Mendocino County. Your basic theoretical anarchist ain't got no experience in what he preaches.

At least from the vantage point of having worked that summer of 1968 for the US Senate candidate with the most unambiguous stand against the war, while living in the Haight, I have another analysis for the Nixon election: Larry O'Brien was the only Irishman in America who did not indulge himself in a four-month wake after the assassination of Bobby. When the Kennedy faction woke up from the hangover, it was too late. If they had been able to really mourn the man instead of the power they lost that night, they might have realized more important things were at stake than their collective self pity. One need not even mention Lyndon Johnson's incredible legislative achievements on behalf of the American working class, the huge backlash among racists, or the totalitarian excesses of the Chicago convention to indicate that it remains a bit difficult to blame Nixon on the hippies, who took the brunt of the Daley Machine beating. By that year, out on the west coast, they were already leaving San Francisco in droves to make their amusing, profitable contributions to rural life on the north coast of California.

The greatest achievement of the hippies was and remains humor -- comedy asserted in the face of tragedies, including their own. Speaking personally, an unavoidably literate hippie will inevitably find his way to Don Quixote, even if led there as a result of writing articles for hippies about anti-NAFTA politics in Mexico. The only other source books that provides the necessary philosophical scope to understand hippies is Aristotle's Politics and, of course, Leopold Kohr's Breakdown of Nations.

Absurd drug laws and the whole mature, corrupt system of prohibition are a hippie comedic specialty, providing endless amusement around hippie winter fires to this day, along with the occasional tragedy of busts, murders, and other misfortunes common to the entire history of the American working class. Also, once out of the compression of the city, hippies turned out to make excellent parents. The happiness and intelligence of "hippie kids" alone gives the lie to almost everything De Groot is saying. Teachers on the north coast who do not suffer from authoritarian complexes prefer these fine children to all others. They exhibit independent thinking early and have shown themselves to be creative in a number of academic fields already, to my knowledge, from medicine to computers. Five hippie teenagers in the alternative high school of a town I once lived in, created a virtual reality machine on a few computers made of parts cobbled together by one father, an electrician. Their patron was a blameless horticulturalist who in his youth had been a denizen of Socialist youth camps.

So, yo, De Groot, don't tell me that you know anything significant about hippies. I brought my son as often as possible to stay with me in what Thomas Pynchon called Vineland, because of the sweet, good people there, whom Pynchon neglected to describe. My first house, a converted chicken shack, was called "Heartbreak Hotel," because hippie men repaired there after they lost their loves, to smoke, drink and play poker. The poker games in that establishment of which I became the host, were the only poker games I have ever been in where a winning hand was applauded by losers. There was one rule: if you fall off your chair you lose it. This is the joy of life itself and we reinvented it right here in America out of pure hell, but the puritans of the left like De Groot absolutely cannot abide it. Nor can they abide that after the wounds healed, the old husband and the new husband collaborated with the wife to raise the children well, supported by the wisdom, love and affection of their community. Ex-husbands fell off those chairs in despair, and their poker-playing buddies picked them up, let them cry and put them back together to face the next day.

The De Groot tribe of academic hypocrites cannot abide the care of the elderly that hippies generously provide their parents and their friends' parents. De Groot and his cannot abide the creation of real, organic communities that endure for love and affection. De Groot is totally ignorant of how love grows beyond the couple to the group, of how the "stupidity" of a man and woman in love can transcend themselves into the community. De Groot and his have no idea of friendship on their idiotic march to get us to their imagined barricade just in time to get mowed down by, really, quite overpowering police armament. De Groot and his hate happiness, period. They hate the gesture to the homeless or the alley cat or any gesture of human solidarity. They are all Commissars without an ounce of Wobbly in them. On the other side, we have the Republicans, many of them fascists. But, tell me the difference among the swine that would lead us now.

Historically literate? Not particularly, but the hippies have a good grasp of the history they've made for themselves, which is better than the books De Groot is reading and writing. And they don't watch much TV but their villages contain the most interesting video rental shops in the state. They also have lively community radio and alternative press.

In the miniscule world of American poetry, starting about 30 years ago, the best nature poetry in the country in these environmentally conscious times has come out of the northwest coast, roughly equivalent to the redwood belt -- from Santa Rosa CA to Seattle. You will hear the best American poetry about the natural world in places like Mendocino, Arcata, Portland, Walla Walla and Seattle.

De Groot's preference for the Beats is as nostalgic as is the nostalgia of which he accuses America for its love of the Sixties. If you want Greenwich Village 1955, Anywhere USA, but specifically in North Beach in San Francisco, the Beats (the few still alive and not yet on walkers and oxygen) are good. If you dig heroin, even better. If you want to live in a neighborhood where no one who is anyone can speak for more than 10 minutes without mentioning New York City, that's cool. It is also what Wallace Stegner spent his entire career resisting. Bierce, Miller, Norris, Sinclair, Steinbeck and Kesey were fine writers, ahead of the New York orthodoxy most of the time. The western US matters.

Finally, one imagines that the neo-Red set, aghast at those "anarchist excesses" of the hippies, obsessed in hierarchical fantasies on leaders of the "movement" that nobody in those days regarded as leaders anyway (not that hippies are not entertained by good rhetoric), is envious of the fun we had and still do have. A cultural sidebar to end this is that empirical observation indicates that people with rigid ideologies of either right or left, when under the influence of marijuana or LSD or even good red wine from north coast vineyards, develop symptoms of serious paranoia as their minds unwittingly wander to the authoritarian roots of their social existence. So, like dude, they can't get stoned and play guitar and drums as the women boogaloo outside the cabin under a full moon in the woods. People like these are unable to imagine people who, in the midst of mourning a beloved neighbor lying dead in his bedroom, bring his corpse out from his cabin and prop him in a chair, because "he always liked a good party." They are unable to conceive of a conga drum and burial society. They got no friends worth the name.

In short, these tedious pedants don't know shit about love or mourning, comedy or tragedy, or life. They reflect the sickness of our society and call it "criticism," and hate those who worked to heal it in their communities. "Un-fuck 'em," said the sexy wife of a candidate for state Assembly from the deep San Joaquin Valley in 1966.

Bill Hatch lives in California. He can be reached at: wmmhatch@sbcglobal.net

www.counterpunch.com

La Pêche au Soleil levant

Max Ernst

The King and the Queen

Le Chat de la Méditerranée

Balthus, painted as a sign for a restaurant around Place de L’Odeon, 1949.

Chieftain

Fine and rare Finn Juhl "Chieftain" chair with brown leather-upholstered armrests,
seat and tufted back, on dowel-leg frame with sculpted backrails.
(The Chieftain chair, Finn Juhl's masterpiece, combines comfort with elegance, and
elegance with architectural sophistication and crafted beauty).
Missing one button, minor crackling to seat leather.
Unmarked. 36 1/2" x 40" x 35"

Source: Rago Arts and Auction Center

Hal Glad am I that no one knew

Hal Glad am i that no one knew
video installation 1997/1999

Marcel Odenbach