NEWS OF THE DAY

lisa lozano, you are here

All day yesterday the news went back and forth, the rebels are taking control, no Khadafi's supporters are taking charge, no, the rebels.... This morning rebels broke into Khadafi's compound and tore it up. No Khadafi. They don't know where he is. He may turn up in Venezuela. Who knows? Who cares? Now, a revolution that started because it started, a popular revolt without leaders that set a momentum going and stayed with it, assisted by Europe's military, and prevailed. Evidently the revolt was spontaneous and no one was seeking power. It will be interesting now to see what comes up as a new governing body there. With the "help" of European and American power telling them what to do. It's a very delicate time there. Circling buzzards in the air, power plays on the ground. I don't know what it is about this Lybia ordeal that makes it feel so internationally important.



Heard some good news yesterday. In Afghanistan a couple of Taliban guys with guns took a man age 60 for a collaborator. He said he was applying for medical attention. The shot and killed him. The man's son and some others beat the Taliban guys to death with rocks. It put me in mind of the movie Legend Of The Fall I saw Sunday after the race. Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt. Father and son, another son and 2 ranch hands in Montana had taken all they cared about taking from county law enforcement. They shot them down to the ground, buried them in a secluded place and got away with it. They had good reason, like the guys in Afghanistan had good reason.



In today's mail was a movie from netflix, a documentary of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz working on a project involving the "pickers" at the Rio de Janerio dump, the people who go through the trash picking up recyclables. It's a good paying job. He made portraits of several of the workers using objects found in the dump, like bottle caps, every kind of thing. They made beautiful portraits. He made 4'x6' photographs of them and sold the photographs for $250 thousand, the money went to the pickers in Brazil. Vik Muniz hoped his project would improve the lives of the pickers, giving them a boost. With that and some other money from surprise sources involving the pictures, the boosted self-esteem of the people concerned, they turned the job of picking up recyclables from the trash into something organized and respectable. The film is a tear-jerker from joy.



In Selma's coffee shop today talking with Selma and a few others. Artist Elizabeth Davis came in. I'd never met her, but have known her paintings for several years. I've seen a show by her at the library and several things at the art shop in town, something here, something there. We had a few moments of good conversation. I like her abstractions quite a lot. She largely uses the colors of autumn; browns, yellows, reds. To my eye, her painting has an Eastern European feel about it. At Selma's I have had conversations with people that make it hard for me to believe we're in Sparta. That's what I and the others like about the place. It's a happy, feel-good kind of place. Hard feelings belong outside the door. I find I think in terms of "we" about Selma's coffee shop. We who go there regularly, everyone who stops in there. It's an atmosphere of people together, enjoying conversation and good coffee. And the best part about the place: the right people don't go there. I'd never go there if they did.



Driving home from town I heard about the Virginia earthquake pulling into Food Lion parking lot. When I emerged from the car I saw Liz Dalton and she mentioned it. In the store I heard people talking about it. Driving home, it's all they were talking about on NPR radio until I turned it off. Grew very weary of NPR people talking with the fake excitement of Fox News and the British tabloid press, on and on about something very few people noticed. The ones that did notice were carried away with excitement and drama. It grew so tiresome listening to the exaggerated efforts to make something big of it, something that happened for about half a minute, if it lasted that long. The way they talk about weather now, like 2" of snow is a blizzard everybody will be snowed in indefinitely is part of a new take on the news to tell it with drama. Be afraid, it's telling us, be very afraid. You're so much easier to control when you 're afraid.  



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SELF-CONSUMING SELF-INTEREST

vik muniz, cloud cloud manhattan

vik muniz, earthwork

I have just come away from a video I found on YouTube, Vik Muniz: Art With Wire, Thread, Sugar, Chocolate. Vik Muniz flows freely through the art of the late 20th Century in his mind games that become art. He's an abstract expressionist, a pop artist, minimalist and conceptualist in one. Both of the above images attest it. Much of what he does is temporary and he makes a photograph of the image, then the photograph is the work of art. I'm guessing he hired a pilot familiar with sky-writing to make the outline of a cloud over Manhattan. He got photographs of it from the ground. His work is truly original while referencing other artists before him, like Christo made his life as an artist wrapping things, which Man Ray had done back in Surrealist times in Paris.

Vik Muniz follows Robert Smithson and some others doing earthworks. Smithson used the timeless universal symbol of the spiral making the Spiral Jetty, which is now underwater still visible from above. Muniz uses things like the lines of an envelope, a paper clip, scissors in his earthworks, things everyone on earth connected with civilization recognizes. He is dedicated to the art in the mundane like Claes Oledenberg, who made sculpture of a giant pair of pliars, a safety pin standing on its head at least 25' into the air and the pointed end sticking out at a 90 degree angle, a giant clothespin standing straight up. Vik Muniz works with the familiar objects in the spirit of play, like Oldenberg in that way too. While Muniz is referencing these artists before him, he has his own eye, his own mind, his own humor, his own spirit so uniquely that none of the referencing is copying. At netflix I found a film called WASTELAND made either by Vik Muniz or about him making art from things found in the dump in Rio de Janerio in Brazil, where he's from, though living now in New York. Wasteland should be here one day next week.

Today's movie was a documentary, The End Of The Line, having to do with the earth's oceans being fished out. What I learned from the day's viewing is the race to catch the last fish is happening all over the world. It's not far off, either. Cod have been fished down so low they can't come back. A kind of manta ray is becoming thick in the area, because the cod ate them. Now the rays are the crop. Due to the end of the cod, lobsters are coming in thicker than ever, increasing the lobster business. Bluefin tuna are now gone. Remember Charlie the Starkist tuna? He's dead. The people studying the rate at which the oceans are being fished out are saying 90% of the oceans fish have been eaten by us. Only 10% of the underwater life is left. Ten more years and we won't have any more fish. That is, if it keeps on going like it is. Nothing, no power, no government can stop the fishing fleets that are largely pirates. When fish become rare, prices go up, fishing increases going for the big bucks. We can hunt individual fish now with hi-tech sonar, so the last fish is a near at hand likelihood.

Things, however, have a way of changing. Maybe if we have a financial meltdown all over the world, fishing will decrease. It's quite amazing to see the gigantic trawlers that scoop up huge nets heavy with wiggling fish. Like everything else in our civilization's excesses, it doesn't seem right. It's like the Christmas tree business here; everybody knows why our county has the highest cancer rate in the state. Nobody does a thing about it, because a handful of men are making mightily multiple millions on Christmas trees at everyone else's expense, poisoning mountain spring water at its source and fouling the landscape. That's the way it is with the fishing industries around the world. Billions are made all around the globe on fishing the deep blue sea. A dozen or so billionaires around the globe aren't going to put an end to the source of their wealth until there is nothing left. Now we have an unbelievable number of frozen bluefin tuna warehoused toward the time when the ocean is fished out, to be sold at highly inflated prices to people able to pay it. A whole new business. At whose expense is this? Everyone on earth, including the people doing it.

We've come into the time when all our dues are coming due at once. I've been seeing it in my mind since the 1960s that we humans on earth are collectively in a big jet plane flying into the side of a mountain at full speed. It seems by 2011 the nose-cone is making contact. The plane being the planet itself, it makes the calendar year 2012 look like a pretty good guess at when the humans render the planet unable to take care of us any longer. It could be ugly. I'm not going to play prophet and make a guess at a possible scenario when many are possible, and at least one it will be, probably a conglomerate of all possible. The Age of Oil has brought us to this. I have an idea that something will happen to save us from certain extinction. Maybe after this time of the plane hitting the side of the mountain will be the time of melting down military equipment, tanks, ships, guns, and making farm equipment toward mindful crop growing. No more Capitalism. No more Communism. Living more altruistically, looking to the well-being of all concerned, including self. The Age of All For Self didn't last very long.

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