Talking About Obama’s Birth Certificate. Again.

Joe Arpaio, screengrab. Just look at all those old white men.

Joe Arpaio. Apparently, still grieving over not being sheriff anymore, so he’s running for senate in Arizona. Here’s a bit of what he had to say to people about his pro-Trump platform:

In a speech to a small group at the event, which was posted on YouTube by the channel Tru Conservative TV, Arpaio recalled introducing Trump at a campaign rally in 2015 where he spoke about his and Trump’s shared interest in cracking down on immigration and in investigating Obama’s birth certificate.

“I talked about another thing that made a little news,” Arpaio said. “I don’t talk about it anymore—until I become the U.S. senator…but that’s something to do with a document. If I ask you guys—I’m a nothing now, but if I was still the sheriff I could ask for your birth certificate.”

“So I’m kind of dropping that right now,” he said, “but I’m going to tell you something: 100 percent we proved that’s a fake document. One hundred.”

For someone who is not talking about “it”, you seem to be spending time talking about it. Unbelievable, all these old, white, conservative christians are like a terribly scratched record, it’s all skip, screech, bumpity bump bump.

No, you did not 100 percent prove the birth certificate to be fake. You couldn’t get anywhere at all with that, even though you put years into your “investigation”. Well, I suppose focusing on such nonsense is better than Mr. Arpaio attempting to address current affairs.

The full story, with links and video is at RWW.

Jack’s Walk

We had an errand in Toronto today and it’s a long drive so we stopped at this beautiful building near the airport for a walk on the way home. I popped my head in to pick up a brochure and learned that this is the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a Hindu temple built in 2007 with 95,000 cu. ft. of hand carved marble. There are more than 24,000 blocks fitted together puzzle style with no steel hardware or reinforcement. It’s highly ornate and more than a little imposing, but the day was sunny and warm and we had a lovely wander around. It reached a balmy 6 degrees today and actually felt like spring. Tomorrow we’re back to our usual and much more mundane stomping grounds.

©voyager, all rights reserved

 

 

 

 

 

Cy Twombly: Extravagant Synesthesia.

Cy Twombly, “Untitled (Gaeta)” (1989), acrylic and tempera on paper mounted on wooden panel, 80 × 58 5/8 inches, Private Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian.

Cy Twombly, “Untitled (Gaeta)” (1989), acrylic and tempera on paper mounted on wooden panel, 80 × 58 5/8 inches, Private Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian.

In her essay, “Cy was here: Cy’s up” (ArtForum, September 1994), Rosalind Krauss made this observation about Cy Twombly:

Twombly “misreads” Pollock’s mark as graffiti, as violent, as a type of antiform. And this misreading becomes the basis of all of Twombly’s work. Thus he cannot write “Virgil” on a painting and mean it straight. “Virgil” is there as something a bored or exasperated school-child would carve into a desktop, a form of sniggering, a type of retaliation against the teacher’s drone.

This reading of Twombly fits in with the commonplace critical narrative that the past is dead, and that it is only good for appropriation and ironic commentary but not much else. Krauss’s condescension towards Twombly is evident in her use of the descriptors, “bored or exasperated schoolchild.” In her neat hierarchical construction — a negative way of thinking that is recurrent in criticism and politics — Jackson Pollock resides at the top of the food chain while Twombly sits, at best, somewhere in the middle.

Krauss is not alone in her need to construct hierarchies. There are still lots of critics, curators, and artists content to ally themselves with established viewpoints as well as assert for the umpteenth time that painting and drawing are things that have been used up, that they are old threadbare coats that should been thrown out long ago. This is capitalist aesthetics in a nutshell — everything is disposable.

Cy Twombly: In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008 continues at Gagosian Gallery (522 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through April 25.

John Yau has an excellent look at Cy Twombly and his work, well worth reading.

Anatomy Atlas Part 1 – Spine

This first in a series of human anatomy sheets that I have drawn during my studies.  As future biology teacher I had to acquire some basic knowledge about most of biology – sort of  jack of all trades, master of none. However our class was one of the last where human anatomy was taught by a prominent Czech physician and scientist Profesor MuDr. Jaroslav Kos. He was eighty years old at that time and it was showing, however he still was formidable and very strict. I failed my first exam miserably, I do not even remember what the theme of the examination was. I think brain stem? Nevermind, it took me two attempts to pass and for the second attempt I really sat and learned latin like my life depended on it. He did not even let me finish on my second attempt  and waved me away with top grade after I described how  nervus olfactorius consists of multiple separated fila going straight through lamina cribosa directly into the bulbus olfactorius of the brain. I forgot most of my medical latin over time, but I still remember this.

Spine Drawing

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

A fun fact about spine – the “S” shape of our spine and all accompanying problems it brings stem from the fact that it originally evolved for movement in water and later on land with lateral undulations, which was later yet modified for movement on land on all four with vertical undulations, which was even later modified for upright movement on hind limbs only. The spine was definitively not intelligently designed for vertical posture and load bearing. Evolution has done its best, but that is always “just enough”.

B Is For Basilika.

Basilika.

Finnish for basil. This one grew on my window last year and was replanted once more to a bigger pot, similar to the one in the left before getting eaten with pasta and tomato sauce. The both white plastic pots are self-watering pots, the water goes down a pipe to the reservoir in the bottom.

Click for full size!

© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.

Nazis: All About Taking Guns Away.

Image credit: STILLFX.

Frances Swaggart, wife of Jimmy Swaggart, has been mouthing off about the recent marches for gun control and reform, and she doesn’t like it, no sir. Ms. Swaggart did pop up with some interesting reasoning, which she claims is historical fact:

“Hitler’s regime took away guns from the people in Germany and then he herded all of those who did not like it into box cars and shipped them to concentration camps where they were enslaved, beaten, raped and murdered,” she said. “The victims didn’t fire a shot in self defense because their guns had been taken away. That’s a fact.”

“And that’s why evil people want to take the guns away from law-abiding citizens here in the United States of America,” the host opined. “Everybody says, ‘Let’s get rid of the guns.’ It’s the worst decisions that could be ever made. Get rid of the guns. No! No! No! Put God back into the schools.”

Um…how in the hell do you even address this level of wrong? I, uh, can’t even figure out where to start. Perhaps with this: if everyone was armed, maybe the time to go on a nazi shooting spree would have been before the herding into box cars? No, I just can’t do this, it all seems terribly frivolous to even address this monstrous falsity in the face of such evil. I certainly know where the evil lies in this country, and that’s with christian conservatives, who keep falling further off the cliff of lunacy. Dangerous lunacy. Unfortunately, there’s more of this, but even reading it makes me feel sick. You can read the rest at RawStory.

Jack’s Walk

That white stuff you see in the foreground is snow mould, not snow, and it happens every year in these parts. It comes with the snowmelt and is a fungal infection of the soil that kills grass. It puts out spores that cause allergies and poor Jack must avoid the stuff or his eyes get goopy. That means our adventure tomorrow will be in different parts.

 

A ‘Separation Of LGBT And State’.

Scott Lively, a man who thinks executing queer folk is a great idea is running for governor of Massachusetts. I most sincerely hope the people of Massachusetts bury this evil asshole in a blizzard of no votes at all.

Lively asserted that “there is no human right based in sodomy” and promised that if he becomes governor, he will ensure that the rights of religious individuals will always triumph over the rights of LGBTQ people.

“The two things that I would do in Massachusetts,” Lively said, “number one is what I call the First Amendment supremacy clause … It just simply says that whenever there is a conflict between [sexual orientation nondiscrimination] regulations and the First Amendment, the First Amendment has to prevail. It has to prevail; you cannot have newly invented laws and policies superseding the most fundamental right of Americans.”

Oh, how I wish these hateful, bigoted asshole christians would get the fuck over the whole sodomy thing. Men who happen to be gay are not the be all end all of LGBTQ, but you’d never know it going by Lively and those like him. Naturally, it’s all about the mighty, terrifying, all powerful penis! A teensy bit of education could go a long way here – all gay men don’t indulge in anal sex, and plenty of hetero people do indulge.

Of course you can have newly invented laws and policies, you flaming dipshit. They happen all the damn time. For all your waving about of the word amendment, you seem to be remarkably unaware of what it means. Oh, the irony!

“The second [policy] is what I call the separation of LGBT and state,” he continued. “To the extent that religion is restricted in government, so should the LGBT political movement because it is basically the counter to it. They’re opposite political forces and movements competing for influence in society and government should get its thumb off the scale when it comes to that and let’s get back to like we had it in the ’40s and ’50s.”

So much for the constitution love. Interesting how that goes straight out the window when it comes to separation of church and state. You don’t get to institute separations to cater to your unhinged hatred, Mr. Lively. It doesn’t work that way. As for the 1940s and 1950s, no, let’s not go back there. I wouldn’t mind if you went back there, Mr. Lively, then we’d be well shot of you. Can someone get on that time machine already? Please?

The full story with video is at RWW.

A Is For Arbetarrörelse.

We have a new series, from Ice Swimmer. Many photographers do an alphabet round at least once, it’s fun and it’s a challenge on several different levels, finding a descriptive photo to correspond to each letter of the alphabet. I’ve done this several times myself, back in the day, but Ice Swimmer elevates this from the standard challenge, and is bringing us words in Finnish, Swedish, and English. Fun, and we all get to learn something!

Arbetarrörelse.

Swedish for Labour movement. The Art Nouveau style stone building is Helsingin työväentalo (Helsinki Labour Hall) which is nowadays operated commercially as a congress centre. There were both Finnish and Swedish speaking workers in Helsinki. The facade of the building was built from the stones quarried from the rock that stood at the site. The oldest part of the building was completed in 1908, nine years before the Finnish Independence. Most other labour halls in Finland were wooden buildings.

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© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.