Disappointment with Washington
Filed under: sports, Washington DC | Tags: Adam Dunn, attendance, baseball, ESPN, home runs, sluggers, sports, Washington Nationals, Washington Post
Leave a Comment Sure I could be talking about the White House, the Congress, Democrats and Republicans. Most of you already feel bummed about them so my saying so would not be a surprise.
It’s a move by Washington’s sports team that seems like one in their history of bad moves. The Nationals lost Adam Dunn and will get two draft picks back. Wow! Let’s see minus 76 home runs and in exchange the team gets two questionmarks.
How do you sell that one to your fan base? The Nationals had enough difficulty drawing warm bodies to their home games.
Here’s the analysis of the pros:
The losers in all of this are the Nationals, who probably could’ve locked up Dunn for something in the range of three years and $30 million at the All-Star break, when Dunn very much wanted to stay in Washington. After deciding to not make that deal, the Nationals’ leadership opted to not trade Dunn when the interest in him was at its hottest, in July; they failed to get any major league ready young players, which is exactly what they have a desperate need for today.
Their lineup without Dunn suddenly looks very different — significantly weakened. Without Dunn hitting in the middle of the order, there is no reason for opposing pitchers to pitch to Ryan Zimmerman.
Time will tell whether Dunn’s departure will erode Zimmerman’s feelings about the future of the franchise. Zimmerman, you may recall, had talked openly and repeatedly about how he wanted Dunn to remain with the team.
The Nationals have been damanged, writes Adam Kilgore, and he spoke with Zimmerman. From Adam’s story:
- “To me, this is the place where I want to be, where I want to be for the rest of my career,” Zimmerman said. “The only reason I wouldn’t want to play here is if I thought we didn’t have a chance to win … I still believe that we will.”Zimmerman was clearly frustrated though, and it’s a frustration that assuredly will represent the overwhelming majority of the team’s fan base. “I hope that this plan they have intact — I guess this is one of the years we were supposed to take that next step and become one of the teams that gets those free agent guys,” Zimmerman said. “They’ve told us and the fans to be patient. Hopefully this is one of the years we start acquiring impact guys and taking the team to that next level.”
Censorship Public Art
Filed under: gay, history, media, museums, personal, politics, sex, Washington DC |
Leave a Comment Washington DC museum makes news it does not want. The Smithsonian Institution’s Chief decides to take out a video from the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide and Seek Exhibition.
The offending piece of art is David Wojnarowicz’s video, “A Fire In My Belly.” The artist, who died of AIDS in 1992, included a scene with ants crawling over a crucifix. Some subsection of visitors thought the imagery sacrilegious despite the fact that artists have long used imagery of Christ symbols to make arguments.
Last night, I joined a group of 100 people, who marched 15 blocks from a gallery down to the museum. We held signs and walked quietly. I spoke to a few of the interested people we saw on the sidewalks. We reached the steps of the museum and stood their for half and hour. Over 20 media outlets took video and snapped photos. A few interviewed the organizers. It felt great!
The removal of the video made by a man who died of AIDS near the World AIDS Day is too ironic for words.
New Movie: 127 Hours
Filed under: politics, movies, personal, media | Tags: travel, movies, theater, James Franco, Signature Theater, 127 Hours, Walter Cronkite Is Dead, Utah, communication', time, solitude, red state, blue state, tourism
Leave a Comment Saw the new James Franco movie 127 Hours and the new Signature Theater play, Walter Cronkite Is Dead this week. The movie is gripping with severe editing that makes it thrilling to watch. The play is humorous and poignant.
This will not be a discussion of my crush on James Franco. Although watching his tongue lap at the last drops of water closeup has given me new things to think about.
Each made points about people and the company they keep. Based on the book 127 Hours : Between A Rock and A Hard Place, the movie indicates that Ralston learns that he needs to appreciate and spend more time with his family and those who he loves.
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| The play Walter Cronkite Is Dead illuminates the view point of two women who could be the mother of a man of Ralston’s age. While not completely forgotten about, the two women are lonely.
Despite their residence in a blue and a red part of the US, the women through conversation overcome their political differences to find common ground mostly in their motherhood. They also discover that they both bemoan the loss of a sense of commonality and cultural “standards”, seemingly embodied in the title characters’ newscast to a large audience and his times of greater cultural common points or touch points. Was the 1960s really this time of great common touch points? There were many different ethnic communities with their own media, culture, and communities in the US. While less acknowledged as culturally acceptable then now do to cultural relativism and “political correctness” these distinct groups had their own distinctive ways of being that were not shared among the larger culture. Many within these groups resisted said mainstream cultural standards. Ralston, like the children of the two mothers in the play, leads a life generally apart from his parents. He hardly seeks connection with even like-minded people, let alone someone from a different background, with drastic political differences. The movie seems to indicate that he realizes his need for connection. His distance from his parents and his denial of a college girlfriend, a topic that would have been interesting for the movie to go into in greater depth, are for him the result of a macho attitude of doing it alone. To him it is, but I thought about people who like being alone and how the movie could have represented those people. I thought about people who seek out environments, such as the Utah mountains, to commune with nature because that is their major connection. The two women in the play saw the value of immersing into different cultures. Each sought to take a trio, either to see beauty or to wipe away their cultural attitudes and perceptions. The play shows that a US citizen who lives on either coast or in the great middle does not have to travel outside the country to immerse somewhere different. All they need to do is travel elsewhere and engage with an open mind. The movie and play raise the question of experiences alone in new and challenging environments. This is one of the reasons why people travel. They seek to immerse their self in a unique place to feel different things and perhaps come back feeling differently or thinking more broadly. The two works also make one wonder about how we each spend our time. How much alone time do we need and do we get it? How much time is spent with like-minded and with differently-minded people. Do we have enough of each. Seems all of us could use amounts of each of these experiences.
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Spectacular New Show
Filed under: gay, history, museums, personal, politics, sex, Washington DC | Tags: art, Cary Grant, Catherine Opie, Elvis Presley, equality, George Bellows, Haring, Hide/Seek, Lynes, Mapplethorpe, Marsden Hartley, movies, photographs, Photography, Pink Narcissus, Portrait Gallery, Randolph Scott, Roy Cohn, video, Warhol
Leave a Comment Walk through the Portrait Gallery’s second floor and you’ll see a montage of Elvis photographs, part of their exhibit on the great rock n roll star.
Down the hall is a painting of another famous icon: Andy Warhol. His face is covered over with streaks of color. The text aside the 1986 piece asks, is Warhol hiding?
The new show at the Portrait Gallery is called Hide and Seek. It is the first federal government sponsored show on issues related to art and gays, lesbians, and homosexuality.
The show is part of the Gallery’s missions: to depict the lives of individuals who have had a significant impact on American live and culture and to show major themes in American history, the struggle for justice and for all citizens to reach America’s promise of equality and inclusion.
Now that the opening text validates the reasons for holding the show, one can enjoy the range of types of art, the scope of years covered: about 120 in total, and the rich description that provides context for most of the pieces.
Video art ranges from the frustration of David Wojnarowicz, who engaged in art that confronted the apathy toward the AIDS epidemic in the mid 1980s, to the famous Pink Narcissus, a depiction of a single person growing up in the artists’ apartment in the late 1960s.
There are many artists who play with the symbols of gender in their photography. Males don wigs, females moustaches and other elements in what societies have deemed only appropriate for one sex or the other. This ranges from Marcel Duchamp during the 1920s, through the more recent work of Christopher Makos and Catherine Opie.
A series of photographs made by Carl Van Vechten show famous individuals in the entertainment and other realms during the 1920s through 1940s. The people were important figures in the Harlem Renaissance and homosexual cultures within the theater and writing circles. Van Vechten frequently Harlem and other parts of cities that historian Kevin Mumford called, Interzones: locations on the edges of usually African American neighborhoods where people on the margins of the mainstream could have nightclubs and congregation spaces freer from police intrusions. San Francisco had the Tenderloin District and Los Angeles had West Hollywood.
Several artists surprised me with bawdy depcitions. Many of us have seen the humorous classicism of Paul Cadmus. George Bellows showed a meeting in a male bathhouse in New York City. Jess Burgess Collins’s 1954 collage called The Mouse’s Tail includes a range of hot men clipped from physique magazines popular in the 1940s and early 1950s. Duane Michals’ 1970 photo series captures a cruising situation familiar to urban gay males.
J C Leyendecker, the creator of the Arrow Shirt Man, painted an oil painting that featured these iconic figures two decades earlier. His Arrow Shirt man, popular in the 1930s, evoked for me a series of Paramount Studio photographs showing actors Randolph Scott and Cary Grant in their Malibu Beach house from 1933-1942. One photograph is below:
The two most emotional pieces for me came from Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring. Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Roy Cohn is eerie and captures the contradictions of a man who sleeps with man and who promotes the distaste for the homosexual community. Haring’s unfinished painting from 1989, evokes his untimely death one year later.
Is Warhol hiding in his painting? Probably in a similar way to Hollywood, which had a style that us historians have called, the Open Secret. In the 1920s and 1930s, gossip pages followed Hollywood stars who went to see female impersonators at clubs in West Hollywood. Warhol hung at the sexually ambiguous night club Studio 54 in the 1970s. Hollywood gossip columns contained code words that carried hints to the in the know crowd and probably to many other newspaper readers as well.
Happy Halloween
Filed under: Washington DC, personal | Tags: Halloween, Animal, cat, holiday, black cat, pumpkin, holiday symbols
Leave a Comment Our cat posed this morning for some holiday shots.
Gleeful over Glee’s Rocky Horror
Filed under: gay, Hollywood, media, television | Tags: Glee, midnight movies, Rocky Horror Picture Show
Comments (1) Like so many who grew up from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, I went to the local theater that showed Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight.
In seventy visits to see the show, fully armed to launch materials at the screen and audience members I always had a blast.
Two weeks ago, the Glee previews had me singing songs that I had not thought about in a long time and was I thrilled.
Like several critics, I wished the show would have featured more songs and scenes and less of the forced triangle of Will, Emma and Carl.
Both Kurt and Santana and Brittany were excellent in their roles. Mercedes as Frank-n-furter was interesting briefly. She can certainly sing but the gay sexuality and transvestism were key components to the show and were sadly missing in this reimagining.
The summary of the rationale for embracing the show appealed to several critics, including a writer in the New York Times. I don’t disagree.
Rocky Horror meant going out to a cool place when you lived in the suburbs and getting the chance to act zany and crazy. Finally, it gave a vision to a world that many of us had no clue about.
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
Filed under: politics, Washington DC, history, personal, media | Tags: Obama, Broadway, Sarah Palin, banks, wall street, theater, Andrew Jackson, Tea Party, populism, Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, elite, media elite, middle class, poor, community activist, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, bankers, American Enterprise Institute
Comments (1) Closed last weekend of taking our nephew out in Manhattan with new musical to Broadway, Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson.
This rock musical decked out the theater in all kinds of color and props. It created a great environment with so much to see. Like other shows: re Passing Strange the show has a post-modern veneer that disrupts the fourth wall.
It is filled with imagery and songs that play with the 19th century but says more about today. This is what political junkies will love.
The politician as celebrity that the show evokes says a lot about Sarah Palin as does Jackson’s evoking of a populist campaign style and language. The New York Times critic and my relatives focused on this part to see the show has having much to say about the Tea Party.
That is one reading of the opening song, Populism. The anger of the characters in Bloody Bloody validates the link to the Tea Party.
More intriguing is that the show illustrates the lack of a populist language coming from the political left. Jackson’s party spoke for a greater inclusion of the common man (white non-landholding male) in the political process. This was for the expansion of democracy, certainly a trait commonly found on the political left. The “people” believed he was speaking for them as one of them!
The lack of left leaning populist language makes me think of a different current political figure. Barrack Obama talked the language of helping the middle class on the campaign trail in a poetic manner. Yet, there was hardly the feeling of boots on the ground: a deep rooted support among the people that he was speaking for them as one of them that also carried the intensity of wanting to go to the wall with this politician. Jackson had that in reality and in this play.
Indeed, Obama has rarely used populist language as President to push his agenda. The media and other elites have warned him away from using class warfare language. The choice to do so has been part of the limits that have made him unable to generate excitement among the middle class, the people, even the base.
Even member of the Progressive Era elite, Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President attacked the mendacity and organized thievery of financial institutions. Obama has been lukewarm in his condemnation of these things among today’s Wall Streeters. His Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission have hardly pursued the criminal aspects of the banks, the Wall Streeters, and others in the financial worlds.
Why is this so? Could this be because Jackson was a member of the common people class. A man who quit the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate after a single year. What group is Obama a member of? Did voters expect him as a child of raised by a single mother and a former community activist to have sympathies for the poor and middle classes?
Is he not a member of the New Elite? American Enterprise Institute scholar describes this new elite as attending the same Ivy League schools as the older elite, working in finance or consulting, living in isolated areas in a small number of the U.S.’s biggest cities and not being aware of the same cultural events and people as the majority of Americans.
Hell, many will probably be in Washington DC next week for the Jon Stewart Rally. Jon Stewart, who one member of the media elite praised for making him laugh as the person who sits in the back in of the room and shoots spit balls at the goofy “Conservatives” and politicians like former President George Bush. My questions: Was it really that hard to take pop shots at Bush and weren’t the shooters of spitballs disruptive to the class and bullies in school? How is that funny?
Aren’t the people who supported Andrew Jackson and the people who expected more from Obama, tired of the spitball shooters as much as the targets?
Bloody Bloody illuminates the savior aspect of Jackson’s persona. Here, the political analog might be a Tea Party figure. However, a stronger argument can be advanced for 2008′s Barrack Obama. Jackson’s campaign offered in the play offers people change and hope.
The play shows him struggling with Congress, the Supreme Court, and even his supporters, as he attempts to make decisions to affect positive change. Doesn’t that sound familiar. The play seems to emphasize these struggles, making the analogy to the sitting President more obvious.
Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson left me wondering about the differences when a politicians supporters embrace his language as speaking for them as opposed to supporters who look on the politician as a savior.
Get Some Velocity
Filed under: Washington DC | Tags: CityDance Ensemble, ClancyWorks Dance Company, culture, dance, dancing, Edgeworks, Furia Flamenca, performance, Performing Arts, theater, Urban Artistry, Washington Ballet
Leave a Comment Tonight and tomorrow experience velocity at the Harman Hall, Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC.
DC has over 450 dance companies, ranging from regular touring pros, to mom and pop and single person outfits. The community created a festival for dance last year. This year’s version includes works from the city’s wide range of dancers.
The Washington Ballet does there signature peice choreopgraphed by Trey McIntyre to Beck’s music. The CityDance Ensemble does one classic piece by Paul Taylor and a more modern piece with challenging movement.
The female company ClancyWorks Dance Company impressed me with their physicality on Thursday night. The four women did a lot of pairing and partnering but included several lifts and athleticism. Urban Artistry brought funk to the stage and the aisles before and after the show.
The African American company Edgeworks brought a moody piece while Furia Flamenca stompped to classic folk stylings.
For $20 bucks you can’t go wrong.
Jobs, Justice, Equality
Filed under: history, personal, politics, Washington DC | Tags: D.C., Democrats, equality, Glen Beck, jobs, justice, Mall, marches, MLK Jr, politics, Washington
Leave a Comment Today’s March brought out more people than Glen Beck’s March did. The unions, churches, gay and lesbian rights groups, and political organizations filled the Mall around the Reflecting Pool and the grass leading up to the Lincoln Memorial.
The speakers were not very skillful orators. Many of the same old same old speakers, including Jesse Jackson, took the podium and were frankly dull.
I got tired of all the simple mantras, like we need to fight for education for everybody, and most of the chants did not generate audience chanting it back in response.
Evoking Martin Luther King Jr. in your talk does not automatically generate enthusiasm in the crowd. Fighting for economic justice was dame tough for King too and they did not succeed like they did with the Civil Rights fight.
The best thing were the homemade signs like:
Wall Street has two parties, the people deserve one too!
Go out and vote, then hold the Democrats to helping the everyday person make their live better!
Book Festival Fever
Filed under: books, history, media, personal, Washington DC | Tags: authors, biography, books, boxing, Bush, celebrity, children books, fiction, history, Library of Congress, mystery, poetry, politics, sports, writers
Leave a Comment Lines of people carrying red book bags filled the National Mall. A co-worker stood the back of a long line holding the hard cover his grandson wanted signed. Grandma and grandchild luckily sat in the tent listening to the author’s talk.
This Library of Congress National Book Fair draws big name authors in history and biography, poetry and prose, fiction and mystery.
All these police motorcycles stood around the history and biography tent. Men in suits with dark sunglasses and hearing devices stationed around the perimeter, a few giving me odd glances. I reached the entrance and saw a swarm of people. Applause broke out and Lara Bush took the stage.
The tent stretching from 4th to 5th streets had tables filled with hundreds of books for sale. Since I have a book on sports in DC, I was interested in the biography of boxer Ray Robinson and saw a few other baseball and other books that caught my eye.
C-Span TV covers the event and holds the interviews with authors on its Booktv. The schedule includes:
Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart
David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People
Wil Haygood, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson
Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898
Adele Logan Alexander, Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)Significance of Melanin
James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life
Interesting to me was the fifteen tables where authors signed books at hour intervels. The large number of people who waited up to two hours to get a single signature shows me how strong celebrity culture is in the US.
