Gehry Memorial Delays & Expense: I said it last year in the HuffPo
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Gehry Memorial Delays & Expense: I said it last year in the HuffPo

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Do you notice how it’s called the “Gehry” Memorial, not the “Eisenhower Memorial”?

That’s because this ugly, outrageously expensive, inappropriate memorial is a tribute to Frank Gehry’s ego, not to the revered former President and statesman. Ike is nowhere to be found in this ghastly monument to an aging architect’s vanity.

The New York Times is pronouncing on the Gehry Memorial, reporting that it’s being called a “five-star folly.”

I would like to point out that I wrote words to the same effect more than a year ago, in my Huffington Post piece about the memorial. I also wrote of the atrocious way Gehry treated my husband Sabin Howard.

Regarding the spiraling expense of the piece, I wrote:

Nor was the announcement written to give hard facts that allow people to know the truth. For example, what wasn’t said is how much Gehry’s design will cost: at least $142 million of taxpayer money, according to sources.

But the Times  quotes from a 58 page report stating that Gehry & Co. have pocketed over $10,000,000 for the memorial. What’s there to show for the sum of money? Where can I get a gig like that, where I can siphon off eight figures and produce almost nothing, or at most a few little macquettes? Nice work if you can get it!

I applaud Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah who has introduced a bill to appoint a new commission.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Great Flick
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Guardians of the Galaxy: Great Flick

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So, ok, it’s true, I admit at the outset, I like movies that are set in outer space, feature extraterrestrials and laser fights, and show things blowing up. Those are qualities I seek in excellent film entertainment.

Guardians of the Galaxy delivers. It’s set in outer space and things blow up. There’s a gee-whiz spaceship fight. Chris Pratt is adorable and hot, both at the same time. The characters are cute and quippy.  The plot moves along quickly and has a few moments that are almost touching.

This flick is great fun. It is what it is, and it is enjoyable.

Guardians of the Galaxy

My latest HuffPo piece: How to Handle Email Harassment
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My latest HuffPo piece: How to Handle Email Harassment

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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

My latest HuffPo piece

 

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So I am a populist.

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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.

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Word Crimes by Weird Al Yankovic

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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]

Review: Sigmar Polke at the MOMA
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Review: Sigmar Polke at the MOMA

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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.

Sigmar Polke at the MOMA