TRACI L. SLATTON
Author Blog
I went through an ordeal, and I wanted to help other people who experience something similar. So I wrote this piece. It’s received a wonderful response, with many people contacting me to thank me or to comment on the usefulness of the information. Jayne Hitchcock herself, founder of Haltabuse.org, commented. How cool is that?
How to Handle Email Harassment, in the Crime vertical
Other people think the way I do: caring about small American businesses, caring about ethics, wanting to challenge big business, appreciating Ralph Nader, who is a genius.
I would also mention that citizen privacy matters profoundly to me. The government does not have the right to read my emails nor to listen to my phone conversations, even if the most dangerous thing I ever talk about is clipping my own hangnail.
It is a great joy to discover intelligent writings on how the Democrats and the Republicans have let us down. To Bill Curry, author of the piece: Great work!
Here’s the article on Salon: My Party Has Lost Its Soul: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Victory of Wall Street Democrats.
Speaking of Ralph Nader, here’s what the article says:
His latest book, “Unstoppable,” argues for the existence and utility of an “emerging left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state.” The book is vintage Nader and ranks with his best. The questions it poses should greatly interest progressives. The question is, will any read it.
The corporate state is evil.
And here is my biggest beef about the Democratic Party, to which I used to belong:
Democrats aren’t even having a debate. Their one think tank, the Center for American Progress, serves their establishment. …If Democrats had caught populist fever they’d be reappraising their own orthodoxy and offing a few of their own incumbents. Owing only partly to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, they instead spend their days as Republicans do, in an endless search for new ways to help the rich pump money into politics.
The Democratic Party has become about the very rich, whose money is protected, imposing lower-middle-class socialism on the middle class. The Wall Street Democrats, also known as Cadillac Communists, congratulate themselves on being good people when they vote in socialist reform.
So who will stand up for the middle class?
It isn’t Obama: “By buying into Bush’s bailout, Obama co-signed the biggest check ever cut by a government, made out to the culprits, not the victims. As for his stimulus, it didn’t cure the disease and hefty portions of it smelled like pork.”
Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
This isn’t just a slow recovery from a financial sector collapse, or damage done by debt overhang or Obama’s weak tea Keynesianism. We’re in crisis because of all our broken systems; because we still let big banks prey on homeowners, students, consumers and retailers; because our infrastructure is decrepit; because our tax code breeds inefficiency and inequality; because foreign interventions bled us dry. We’re in peril because our democracy is dying. Reviving it will take more than deficit spending and easy money. It will take reform, and before that, a whole new political debate.
Populists offer hope.
I couldn’t stop laughing when I first viewed this video.
I blast Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines on my iPhone when I’m on the elliptical trainer at the gym, working out until I shake with sweat. So I know the tune.
This is just fantastic, I love Weird Al. Can we elect him President?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc[/youtube]
I saw a lot of art in Italy. The Accademia in Venice, the Uffizi in Florence, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the Canova Gipsoteca in Possagno, and a thousand Tintoretto/Tiepolo/Giovanni Bellini-graced churches in Venice. Then I came home to NYC and went to the MOMA with my museum buddy Ying.
The Exhibition Guide for the Sigmar Polke show was filled with the kind of pretentious art-speak that gives art historians a bad name because it distances viewers from art. For example, it describes Polke, a German artist who lived from 1941-2010, as having a “promiscuous intelligence.”
Ying and I had a conversation about that diction, “promiscuous intelligence.” Why couldn’t the writer just say Polke was interested in many subjects? Or something equally direct and to the point. It would be nice if artspeak didn’t try to call attention to itself, but rather served the art it references.
I should note that Ying is even more educated than I am, and has a few advanced degrees. She’s also one of the most dauntingly engaged readers I know. If she’s taking exception to word choice, her opinion matters.
My husband Sabin Howard the master sculptor has a lot to say about the vanity, self-importance, and general silliness of most art historians. He believes that great art should stand on its own, without need for the conceits and airs of PhD’s who are trying to justify their scholarly degrees.
Indeed, no one needs to explain the immensity and gorgeousness of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel–they deliver themselves directly to your heart.
Sabin would have been skeptical of Polke, who worked in many mediums: painting, photography, film, sculpture, drawing, print-making, television, performance, and stained glass.
Sabin Howard is about mastery, uplift, perfection. Polke was about experimentation, curiosity, irreverence. Sabin operates from an admirable, even enviable, inner certainty. Polke was questing.
I enjoyed the show, though I did roll my eyes at Potato House, a wooden lattice with potatoes nailed into it that was supposed to evoke pedestrian objects in German life: the garden shed and the potato.
But I do like the wit and boundless curiosity with which the prolific Polke approached his art, and what do you call it if not art? In this I disagree with my husband, who would call it entertainment.
Maybe it isn’t the eternal high art of Michelangelo or Botticelli, but it’s valuable and important, partly as a cultural document–Polke grew up in post-war Germany, and that carries its own weight, a particular gravity. But Polke’s works offer more than cultural and historical reverence. His works attempt to change the viewer’s consciousness, to provoke questions and a kind of delicious uncertainty akin to Buddhist beginner’s mind. In that, it often succeeds.
Though I must agree with Ying who commented, “I like it, it’s very intellectual. But will I be thinking about it in two weeks? Will I be thinking about it in two hours?”
An insightful question, perhaps the salient question. I’m still thinking about Giotto’s frescoes and Botticelli’s Primavera.
Worth seeing, and do go to the Painting and Sculpture I floor, where are housed some stunning Kandinskys.
Last year when we came to Italy, we went first to Venice and then to Florence and then to Rome.
We rented an apartment in Rome near the Vatican, and one evening went out for ice cream with our landlords. They had two bambini and we have one. In the course of the conversation, we discussed a large factory complex on an island outside of Venice that lies empty and unused. Marghera, I think it’s called.
“Some entrepreneur should come along and re-purpose the space,” I said. “Turn it into a nightclub or a mall or a skating rink.”
“That is not possible,” exclaimed our landlady, a lawyer, with total certainty.
“Sure it’s possible,” I shrugged. “Some bright person will come along and think of a way to re-use the space and make it productive. It doesn’t have to sit there and be empty. It could be an auction space, a market, or an art gallery. It could be anything.”
She insisted vigorously and with a rigid refusal to consider any other possibility that such a thing was not possible. The only possibility was that the factory would continue to lie fallow–forever.
She was a smart and educated woman, but I ended up looking at her and thinking that she was quite backwards. That’s my cultural bias, of course. In the US, some hotshot entrepreneur would come along and do something clever with the space and turn it into the next hot spot. If the first entrepreneur failed, the second would succeed. If the second didn’t, the fifth would.
The US–despite Obama’s best efforts to destroy the middle class and create a totalitarian state where every citizen’s most picayune communications are watched over by the NSA–is still all about reinvention. We still get second and third chances. Note to literary readers: we have long sense superseded Gatsby’s assumptions.
But in Italy, there is only one option: that the unused factory space, which was expensive to build, will remain empty and useless.
It’s an attitude that Sabin and I have encountered over and over again in our travels through Italy: “No can do.”
It’s not the fault of ordinary Italians. We meet people who work really hard. Over and over again, we hear the same thing: the bureaucracy in Italy is set up to thwart citizens, to deny fledging businesses any hope of success, and to create the conditions for business failure.
This year, our friend Paolo who owns rental apartments shared with us some of his woes. The government is constantly changing regulations, hoping to trip up rental businesses and thus fine them outrageously before shutting them down. This belligerence is in part sponsored by hotels, who don’t want tourists to have the option of renting apartments. But it is also the government trying to squeeze ever more taxes, fees, financial obligations, and huge fines out of a middle-class that is already wrung dry.
Other friends of ours here recounted how the government abruptly raised certain taxes from 20% to 22%, and consequently, over half of the small mom-and-pop shops went out of business. That 2% was everything for them. Businesses here have to pay for production, and they don’t get tax credits for it. Out of 1 euro, our friend said, he gets 40 euro cents, if he’s lucky. Sixty euro cents goes to the government, taxes, fees, tariffs, etc.
Plus, in Italy, the government can simply take funds out of a citizen’s bank account whenever it wants, like when it suddenly changes the rules on permits. A small business owner can go to the bank one morning and find there is substantially less than he or she expected–because of overnight changes.
Speaking of apartments, in Venice, there is a glut of unoccupied, closed up apartments. Families who have owned apartments forever have stopped offering vacation rentals because the government keeps changing the rules, and they don’t want to pay capricious and punitive fines. Owners are afraid to rent to students because they run the risk of the students destroying the property, and they’re even more afraid to rent to regular folks. If the renters stop paying, it’s almost impossible to evict them–especially if they have children.
So the smart thing to do is not to rent out apartments, but to board them up and let them be empty. And that is exactly what many Venetians do.
Our friends who run a small establishment won’t hire anyone to help them, because the laws governing labor are oppressively burdensome. So the husband and wife do everything themselves, and sometimes his mother pitches in.
Socialism destroys opportunities.
Then there is the corruption factor.
People still mention the Mafia. It’s a problem, more in the south than in the north, but people are aware that the Mafia influences the government and the passage of laws, that there is a criminal factor in the running of their country. In fact, in many places in the south, the Mafia is the government. What a shame.
One thing I always ask Italians, after everyone has had a little wine: “Perche Berlusconi?” I am thinking, How the hell could you have elected someone as mind-bogglingly corrupt, stupid, and bad for Italy as Berlusconi, and kept him in office for twenty years? If I am feeling particularly controversial, I mention the Bunga Bunga parties.
Over the last few years, many answers have erupted. Berlusconi owns much of the media is a favorite excuse. Someone from my Italian publisher told me that people voted for Berlusconi because they hoped that they, too, like him, would get away with corrupt behavior. “I am embarrassed about him,” one Italian woman, an educated professional, confessed the other day.
So here is a country with one of the great artistic, cultural, and historical patrimonies on Earth, and it is stuck in the mud and sinking. Italy is mired in failure, backward-thinking, socialism, and corruption. Che peccato.
When we are not in Possagno, Sabin makes dinner at home, at the sweet apartment in the Dorsoduro we’ve rented from his boyhood friend Carlo. It’s all luscious foodstuffs from the supermercato Billa Billa. Tonight we feasted on mozzarella di bufala con tomate e pesto, and green olives and paper-thin slices of chicken with herbs and a rather nice Dolcetto D’Alba… Molto buono.
We’re on a quiet canal with little traffic and the light from the sky still seeps in late in the evening. A bell tower nearby rings in the hours, and tonight riffs of noise drift up, all discussion about the World Cup. The last few nights have seen raucous thunderstorms, so now the air is clean and fresh and smells softly of the sea. Just before noon, Carlo’s daughter pointed out a fish in the canal, a silvery thing wiggling around an abandoned peach pit with a few tufts of yellow meat still attached. In the afternoons, I stretch out my travel mat and do 45 minutes or an hour of yogaglo, and hope that the repetitions of downward facing dog and chattarunga dundasana will combat the calories, of which there are many, all richly enjoyed.
