Observations from the Window 7.23

With the Olympics opening Friday, football/soccer on Wednesday, the sports freak in me is more than a little excited. While rock climbing isn't one of the 26 sports at the London games it is possibly the fav sport of the friend who sent me this awesome vid. The video features the 19 year old Sasha DiGiulian, all 5' 2" of her.

Sasha DiGiulian from adidas Outdoor on Vimeo.

"On October 15th 2011, adidas team athlete, Sasha DiGiulian became the first American women to climb the grade 9a (5.14d) with her historic ascent of "Pure Imagination" in Kentucky's Red River Gorge. Keith Ladzinski and Andy Mann (Three Strings Media) were there to capture her efforts and tell her story."

For more about Sasha read The Washington Post article "Rock climber Sasha DiGiulian, 19, is making her way to the top." The article also includes an awesome photo gallery.

To Whom It May Concern

Now that the dreaded Nittany Lions have been declawed to everybody's satisfaction could we please put the same enthusiasm into taking assault rifles out of the hands of wackos or at least make it once again illegal for them to purchase them? Somehow I didn't think so ....

Observations 7.23

I really wanted to stay away from the whole Paterno statue, NCAA sanctions, what did Corbitt know, its so easy to blame the dead man story, for now anyway. It's just such a total no win situation for me, too damn emotional too, and I have other things I want to write about. But yesterday I read Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times,  "Paterno Sacked Off His Pedestal",  and to my surprise I found it good. Good other than where she falls into the same trap as everybody else and believes the Freeh Reports's assumptions about Paterno to be fact. I know, I know, stay away from it Katie.

Sometimes all to eager for punishment I was skimming the comments to the column when I came across this one from a Times reader in Dallas. I just had to nod.

"Pretty decent column Ms Dowd ...
I enjoy college football, that said, the over the top fasination with football as heroic, it's players and coaches, elivating them to such high levels of adoration is absolutely puzzling. It's a game, entertainment, little more.
We have no one else to blame but ourselfs if they get "too big" for their jobs, and believe the hype, pumped up by the "fans" misguided adorations, and the sports writers must take some of this blame as well. For all those writers recent "outrage", who help create that public image?? But I do not see how killing PSU football program serves any useful purpose. Leave Paterno's statue where it sits, it will for ever remind everyone of the good and the bad that lurks in all of us.
Let the courts handle the rest."

I should note it wasn't the first time I had read that Penn State should leave the statue up as a reminder but sadly the PSU President didn't agree. Early Sunday morning a shroud was thrown around JoePa, a tarp was thrown over his head, and he was carted off to that proverbial secure location. Later the words on the wall behind the statue were removed as well, as if it had never been there.

Memory is a fickle thing.

Observations

James Eagan Holmes walked into a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado late last night, threw tear gas canisters, and opened fire. When he was finished a dozen moviegoers were dead and at least fifty more injured. He carried four guns, all of which had been legally purchased, including an AR-15 Assault Rifle with a drum magazine holding 100 rounds of ammunition, a 12-gauge shotgun, and two Glock pistols similar to the one I once owned. The assault rifle and drum magazine were both illegal under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was allowed to expire in 2004.

You probably have seen and heard enough about the massacre to make you ill but I have a few random things too add.

As always happens in these situations every politician and political commentator had something to say today. Only one is worth repeating here, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "You know, soothing words are nice, but maybe it's time that the two people who want to be President of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it. Everybody always says, 'Isn't it tragic' .... there are so many murders with guns every day, it's just got to stop. Instead of the two people, President Obama and Governor Romney, talking in broad ways that they want to make the world a better place,
okay, tell us how."

It may sound cold but please spare me the political grief and flags lowered to half staff. Since 1968 more than a million Americans have died in gun related violence, a level of carnage we as a nation found unacceptable on our highways but somehow manage to tolerate in our homes, schools, and public spaces. In 2010 alone there were 8,775 gun related deaths in the United States or an average of two dozen a day. Our flags could very easily be kept at permanent half staff.

Next time you look in the mirror ask yourself a question, ask yourself if you really care about all this, if the grief is real. If your answer is that you really do care about it you're probably lying to yourself. There are 300 million Americans and only 4 million of them are members of the NRA. If you really cared, if we cared, the carnage would stop but instead, for now, we'll just wait for the next massacre.

Finally, in some states it is now easier to buy a gun than it is to vote. That says more about the current sad state of our nation than even
James Eagan Holmes did.

Observations on the 2012 Election

The political comedy that is Willard's campaign continued as John Sununu was let out of his cage to do Rush Linbaugh's dirty work only to have him put back in his cage when Willard again demanded an apology. This time Willard demanded Sununu apologize to President Obama for saying the President should "learn how to be an American."

Seriously, sometimes you just can't make this shit up.

Meanwhile the Obama campaign continued to respond with ads such as this. The dude's face at the end is just classic. Hopefully the link works, the spot hasn't been released to the public yet.


link

Observations from the Window 7.17

Sitting her it just looks hot outside my window. Checking the weather I see the city is under a heat advisory until tomorrow night but it's a
balmy 60° in Paris. I can't say I mind the thought of weather that cool but it's playing havoc with my packing plans.

Thought I would try and finish one of the posts I have started already, maybe clean up a bit. I have one about driving between the Village and State College. A 'war on women' one I started months ago but is seems so dated now I should just delete it. Way too many thoughts, ideas, and scribbles on sheets of tablet paper in a basket next to my comp plus the Droid notes that never leave me. I probably have started and deleted more posts than I have actually posted.

I am always thinking of art related things to write about but I never get around to writing any of them. I love talking about art and sometimes I still wonder if I would have enjoyed staying at PSU and teaching. But that is a decision that's been made and I don't dwell on it, I just wonder.

So instead of finishing something or writing one of my ideas I wrote this. Sometimes I'm just weird.

Stay cool.

Observations on the 2012 Election

Friday David Corn broke the story in Mother Jones that Willard Romney may have lied on his financial disclosure statement. This is important because it means he either lied to the American people, which should be reason enough not to elect him, or he lied to the SEC, which is a felony. President Obama and his campaign ran with the story and Willard spent Saturday demanding an Obama apology in five different interviews. This itself is funny because Willard once said apologies are for losers, but the Obama 'apology' is even funnier in its own way.

The Obama campaign released this commercial late Saturday. I take it this as all the apologizing he is going to do.

"I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message."  

link

Observations 7.14

I'm going to drive over to State College in a bit to meet up with my brother and take in some of the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. Maybe I can remind myself of some of the good that is Penn State. Against my better judgement I decided to write down some of my random thoughts on the never ending Sandusky scandal. Take a deep breath and read on.

Honestly i don't think we will ever know the truth, if the Freeh report is to be believed the knowledge of Sandusky's evil just has to have been that widespread. In my current cynical mood I have to ask a question. Sandusky's abuse went on for at least 15 years and was apparently widely known in some circles yet those closest to him seem to have had no clue. His wife, friends, neighbors, and coworkers had no clue? Really? I don't think I'm that naive. No, we will never know the full truth because it's all to easy to blame Joe. After all its not like you can defend yourself from the grave.

A have special spot for Mike McQueary in my thoughts of the scandal. McQueary says he witnessed Sandusky sexually abusing a young boy in the shower of the athletic center. If my memory is correct the center is full of baseball bats and golf clubs. Personally. I don't care who he was, I would have grabbed one and beaten Sandusky senseless. Doesn't seem that thought ever crossed McQueary's mind at that moment or when he played in Sandusky's golf tournament the following week.

How supposedly intelligent men could allow this to happen to our school is totally beyond me. Did they learn nothing from Dick Nixon?

Even though I haven't read any of it I will mention the Freeh Report here. I was talking to my dad who told me of a conversation he had with a friend who has read the report and had some interesting thoughts. For a supposedly conclusive report Freeh didn't interview Paterno, Sandusky, McQueary, Curley, or Schultz. One would think those would have been important people to talk to. The current damnation of Paterno stems from Freeh's conclusion that he knew of the 1998 investigation of Sandusky, something Paterno denied to his grave. Freeh's monumental evidence comes down to just two emails, neither of which are from or to Paterno.

The first email is from Athletic Director Curley to University President Spaingler with the subject line "Joe Paterno" in which he says he has touched base with the coach and the coach wants to be kept informed. We are to assume the coach is Paterno and he wants to be informed of the investigation. Freeh never talked to Curley and Spaingler says he doesn't even remember the email.

The second email is even more vague yet is supposedly the smoking gun. The email is again from Curley but this time to head of the campus police Schultz which simply says "Anything new? Coach is anxious to know where it stands."   Freeh assumes the coach is Paterno and he also assumes the 'it' to be the Sandusky investigation, but remember Freeh talked to none of them. At the time of the email Sandusky himself was still employed as a Penn State coach and was negotiating his retirement. Why is that important? Because Gary Schultz was also University Vice President for Business and Finance.

For these two emails JoePa shall be damned for eternity.

One final thought. Let us not forget the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office ignored the Sandusky case for at least three years. The Attorney General for those years none other than current Pennsylvania Governor and member of the Penn State Board of Trustees Tom Corbett.

I guess Freeh didn't talk to Corbett either.

Observations 7.12

Surprisingly I don't have much comment on the Freeh report.
Former FBI Director Loius Freeh's company was hired by the
Penn State Board of Trustees to investigate the PennState/Sandusky/Paterno/Spanier/Curley/Schultz scandal. The Freeh report was released today but I haven't read much about it and probably wont. This is one sad episode I would just like to put behind me but I doubt I ever will.

For now I'll say my thoughts mesh pretty well with those of former Penn State and Washington Redskins linebacker LeVar Arrington who said this today ...

"On the one hand, Joe messed up. Joe was not perfect, Joe was not God. Joe was a person, and he messed up. On the other hand, if you're looking at everything Joe has done and all the lives he's impacted and all the things he's done ... that still remains as well. So how do you separate the two? I don't know. I don't have the answer for that one, I really don't."

The King is dead, long live the King.

Observations on Art 7.10

I have been rolling a question around in my sometimes empty head for a couple weeks now, probably since I was at the shore. On the surface it's a fairly simple question but looks are always deceiving. Why does art matter? The New York Times Magazine article I recently wrote
about (l) only morphed my question into why does art history matter?

A few years ago I may have answered it matters because it matters to me and that would have been enough. The problem with that answer is it doesn't win many arguments let alone grants or funding.

One thing I have come up with is that it matters because it endures. The human species has a beautiful, colorful, sometimes terrible history on this planet. That history goes back well beyond the 3,000 years ago when some would say the master builder flipped the breaker and created all this. Art in its myriad forms has been a part of our history since its very beginning. The earliest known cave paintings, in the Cave of El Castillo in Spain, date back 40,000 years. Those cave paintings aren't all that different from something you would see today on the side of the D train in the Bronx. If we try hard enough in that link to our past we can sometimes see our future.

But that is just the philosophical answer of an art trained mind. How does art matter to somebody struggling in today's world? Now the question gets harder to answer.

For now I'll go with a simple answer. In this deranged finite world of sound bites and wars on this or that art is an escape. Art is infinite. I often go to the Museum of Modern Art and I am always amazed at the number of people quietly pondering this painting or that. By now I know by look who is an "art person" and who isn't and most of these aren't art people. They are just normal people lost in thought. I often wonder what they are thinking but I know in my heart what they aren't thinking. They aren't thinking about the presidential election, the weather, or what they heard on the morning news. However briefly art has helped them escape this finite world we live in and that makes art matter.

Not long before he died John F. Kennedy said this, "We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."

A final thought. In my mind I can picture the last person on Earth after we have destroyed it. She is sitting on a beach, stick in hand, drawing a picture of a flower.

Truth.

Observations from the Edge 7.9

Hubris, the characteristic of excessive confidence or arrogance, which leads a person to believe that he or she may do no wrong.
Person, or movement.

When I said the Occupy movement was in for a big summer I may have been wrong, yes I can be wrong sometimes. I could blame the relentless heat but I made that prediction in what felt like spring but was in fact winter. I like to think I'm politically knowledgeable but, caught up in the events of fall, I glossed over in my mind the movements major failing which in the end would start it down the road to the dustbin. Occupy has no plan other than being occupy. Protest is good but it can't be sustained without some sort of end game like the end of the Vietnam War or equal rights for minorities.

The movement bragged endlessly about its lack of centralized leadership or goal but the lack of that has finally caught up with it. Somebody needs to be out there talking every day, talking to the press, talking to anybody that will listen. They seemed to have forgotten, or never really knew, how to generate publicity. Looking back maybe the NYPD generated more Occupy news than the movement itself did.

A good example of the fall of Occupy can be found in last week's news from Philadelphia. Or I should say lack there of. Occupy held a convention in Philadelphia last week which you probably don't know about because it wasn't widely reported. The convention drew hundreds of protesters from around the nation, a far cry from the tens of thousands I once saw in the streets of New York. The only first hand knowledge I have of this event is from my sister. According to her it just added to the annual 4^th of July traffic debacle that is Philadelphia and pretty much just irritated her to no end as she tried to get to Penn's Landing. After the convention Occupy Wall Street marched back to New York in temperatures approaching 100°. For all I know they could still be marching across Jersey.

When I think of all the excitement and optimism of last year, of Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square, I hope I  am as wrong in writing this as I was in my original prediction. Otherwise it really is a sad world we live in.

I was ready to post this when I decided to add something. It really doesn't matter if an official Occupy slowly fades away. Occupy's lasting achievement is that it showed that the status quo can't be sustained indefinitely and it changed the national discussion to the massive economic inequalities in this country. It's now up to the rest of us to continue that fight in November and beyond.

Also, I may just be venting. 

Observations on Art 7.7

Due to the astounding number of magazine subscriptions I have I've become the unofficial gallery librarian. I'm always throwing new ones on the table figuring somebody should read them if not me so it wasn't surprising one of our friends picked up an old issue of The New York Times Magazine yesterday. What was surprising is that it was one I never read so when he said "I bet you loved this article" I had no clue what he was talking about.

It was an article about Edward Conrad, one time Bain Capital founder and Willard Romney employee, (The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy), who also happens to be one of the largest donors to Willard's campaign. What follows is the paragraph that got his attention and than mine.

"At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life."

I get so effing tired of people who equate studying art history with something like basket weaving. As for competitive, it seems the man doesn't know much about the art world. He may have made a fortune with a company that destroyed lives in the name of profit but he has never dealt with Larry Gagosian, unless he has bought something from him. At a certain level I may despise everything Gagosian stands for but he is very, very, good at what he does.

What can you do with an art history degree? Let me see, curate museums and galleries, manage auction houses, value art and other antiques, work for a historic trust, be an administrator, a journalist, picture editor, exhibition organizer, or you can
just teach something you love.

I'm sure a man of Conrad's wealth has an impressive art collection. I'm also quite sure he paid a tidy sum to somebody with an art history degree to tell him what to buy, another to handle the transactions, and yet another to take care of his most awesome collection.

For the record Kate Middleton has an art history degree from St. Andrews University, I know who I would rather do lunch with.

Vent over, for now.

Observations on the 2012 Election

A video that needs no introduction or commentary from me. 

link

Observations on Art 7.5

Court has been a bit lax of late, she has been too busy with her own film editing to send me any new time lapses. She more than made up for it today with this video. I swear as I watch the swirling water and stars I feel just a little bit cooler. These days I'll take even the thought
of cool air and water. 

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

"At a star party in August 2009 I took my first long exposure photograph of the night sky. I was so thrilled with the results that I dedicated most moonless weekends since then to photographing two things I love the most in nature - the night sky and the Ocean.
Taking a series of images and combining them into a time lapse video sequence made it even more interesting. I have since experimented with all-night time lapses, panning motion, etc. But most importantly I've enjoyed the journey immensely.
This time lapse video is the result of almost 1.5 years of work, 31 hours of taking images during six nights on Southern Ocean Coast in Australia. Ocean Sky was awarded the overall winner prize at
the STARMUS astrophotography competition. Alex Cherney"