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Weak XXXVI

3 September 2019

No. 4,933 (cartoon)

The love you gave me will last forever.

No, but the herpes certainly will.

4 September 2019

Life Imitates Art (again)

I had a curious response when I read that McKrae Game, founder of a homophobic “ministry” in South Carolina, announced he was gay. He denounced the Hope for Wholeness campaign to make homosexual people heterosexual.

“Conversion therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful,” he admitted, “because it’s false advertising.”

I thought of Dr. Seuss’s book, Sneeches. A clever carpetbagger provides cosmetic surgery of sorts to revise the social order among sneeches by adding a star to the belly of second-class sneeches to make them indistinguishable from the upper-class sneeches who were born with them. The native star-bellied sneeches then have their marks removed to differentiate them from the others, and soon everyone has added and removed the distinctive marks so many times that no one can remember who’s who.

I wonder if Game will provide another bogus service to make heterosexual people homosexual, or maybe even bisexual. There could be a good market for the latter, for as Woody Allen noted, “Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.”

5 September 2019

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

I heard a lot about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial since it was unveiled in 1982, but nothing that fully prepared me for the experience of seeing it for the first time. I suppose a sculptural installation would be redundant if everything about it could be fully conveyed in words and photographs.

As I marveled in sadness at the names of 58,320 people who lost their lives in the geopolitical carnage, I realized that if a few little things in my life had gone differently my name might be on the wall on which I saw my reflection.

I found it telling that the installation is called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, not the Vietnam War Memorial. I wonder what sort of edifices the bureaucrats will erect as tributes to the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq since those colonial incursions certainly can’t be called wars.

6 September 2019

Steel Disc

Curators at the Hirshhorn Museum took Robert Barry’s simple piece, Steel Disc Suspended 1/8 in. Above Floor, and turned it into one their own creations. First, the sign on the wall noted it was made using nylon string. That ruined the experience for me; I hadn’t seen the string and thought it might be floating because of magnetism. They also added stripes on the floor to serve as a conceptual boundary fence, the visual equivalent of the ubiquitous “Do Not Touch” signs.

The way the piece was displayed changed the way I perceived the work, and not for the better. And in a farcical code, the artspeak comments on the wall noted that Barry was “concerned with the demarcations of space.”

Ha!

7 September 2019

Sidewalk Art

After looking at a lot of disappointing sculpture, I finally found something I liked. The creator didn’t make the installation as an art piece; that’s always a good move. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it was actually a protest. Apparently, a perfidious mattress company promised to pick up a customer’s old bed, but instead left it on the street to rust.

A plaintive, handwritten sign lamented ...

When Mattress Warehouse tells you that they will take your old bed away for you, don’t believe them! Silly me right?!?!

Silly, but both visually and conceptually entertaining as well.

8 September 2019

Oxford Comma

I told Shelly I wanted to install a sculpture of a giant comma in front of her house. Since she lives on Oxford Street, it would of course be titled, Oxford Comma. She nixed my proposal and explained that she couldn’t afford a fight with her neighbors by putting anything so political on her front lawn.

I understood. Some things merit a good fight, but the Oxford comma ain’t one of them since pedants can be so vile, mean, and ruthless.

9 September 2019

Robert Frank

Robert Frank checked out today. He didn’t have a good run; he had a great run. Anyone who hasn’t heard about his seminal book, The Americans, hasn’t heard about twentieth-century photography.

And speaking of semen, he went on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1972 and made Cocksucker Blues, a film so unfiltered—and thus unflattering—that the Mick Jagger Corporation’s lawyers bought a court injunction to prevent it from being shown. Censorship rarely works; I watched it on the Internet and was gobsmacked to discover members of the esteemed popular music ensemble used illegal drugs and had sex!

Frank could have made a zillion dollars imitating himself with The Americans: The Deep South, The Americans: The Rust Belt, et cetera, but moved on leaving thousands of copycats in his aesthetic wake. Frankly, they’re silly and not very good at all.

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©2019 David Glenn Rinehart