Exasperation: If you vote, and a superdelegate matters more, what's the point? I dunno. I voted anyway.



Project VoteSmart, via Brian on Myspace.

• Item: I've never voted in a Virginia primary. I'm 46. I stood in the long Bush v. Gore lines. Back years ago, I cast my first ballot for...(drum role) John Anderson. Once, I even voted for Ross Perot. The reasoning then was, he'd get in and provide a needed shock to the system. I remember the late great Barbara Jordan getting asked about whether Perot would make a good president and she paused for several long moments and said in her precise and authoritative voice, "I think the United States could survive a Perot presidency." And so I voted for him, with great misgivings. Oh, Barbara Jordan. We could use her around again. If you look at her keynote address before the 1976 Democratic National Convention, there's some Obamian glimmerings in there, in this excerpt:

"Even as I stand here and admit that we have made mistakes I still believe that as the people of America sit in judgment on each party, they will recognize that our mistakes were mistakes of the heart. They'll recognize that.

And now we must look to the future. Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore the common ties that bind all Americans.

Many fear the future, Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work wants. To satisfy private interests.

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

If that happens, who then will speak for America?

Who then will speak for the common good?"

Item: This morning, I was standing in line in the elementary school gym that is my precinct. The arrangement of people was out the door at quarter of nine. Here, the quiet majesty of one-person one-vote proceeded at a methodical pace. The registrars checked addresses and used a ruler to keep their vision straight while looking down long columns of type.

Unlike during a general election--and this even varies per precinct here in Richmond as I've learned--there was a Democratic queue on the, um, left end of the table, and a Republican queue on the right.

On occasion, the precinct manager would announce that if anybody was voting Republican, they could come forward, as there was no waiting. Nobody budged.

A few high heeled ladies ahead of me inquired of the manager, though, as they were Republicans voting Democrat, would they need to go over to the Republican end of the table. And the manager didn't know, "You'll have to ask the registrar."

Turned out, you declared your attention to the ladies with the register books. "I'm voting Democratic," I announced.

I marched over to my touch-screen box and made my choice. I joined the mass Obamasm.

And I'm preparing myself for disappointment. This is the nature of my adult political life. I vote for losers, and my winners foul stuff up. My memory is quite clear about seeing Bill Clinton giving his acceptance speech on the television at the Trolley Restaurant on West Main Street -- it's now the Six Burner . And there was young Bill, basking in his victory, and television was on and people quite interested in what he had to say--and a black man, standing and watching, pointed at the television and remarked, "You better not fuck up, is all I got to say."

Yup.

• Item: At my office today, someone had drawn devil's horns and a beard on Hillary's picture on the newspaper's front page.

• Item: The meaning and methods of superdelegates.

From Ben Smith, of Politico:

February 12, 2008
Read More: Delegates

Politico delegate count

My colleagues Avi Zenilman and Josie Hearn have put together an exhaustive, easy-to-use chart of superdelegates and their alleagiances.

Their current count is Hillary 230, Obama 138.5.

One interesting point, which is visible in the chart: Clinton has a lead of three among senators, a lead of 13 among House members, and they're tied among governors. So her real margin comes from the relatively anonymous DNC members, among whom she leads 125 to 57.5.

And some of the comments, also illuminating. The added emphasis is mine.


Posted By: Cathy | February 12, 2008 at 03:35 PM

"...her real margin comes from the relatively anonymous DNC members...." This doesn't surprise me, now that I've read the stories of Bill Clinton calling these lowly, anonymous superdelegates personally, and Chelsea Clinton taking them to lunch (!!) I mean, that's a lot of pressure! How do you say, "No, I'm sorry, Mr. President, but I'm not ready to support your wife?" This whole situation really hacks me off, though.

Posted By: ReasonedAnalysis | February 12, 2008 at 03:35 PM

Most of the state-wide DNC members surely endorse early during the "inevitable" stage of Hillary's campaign. It would have been politically expedient for them to endorse rather than to remain mostly anonymous to the Clinton machinery/presumed administration. ...But now, I think it's safe to assume that MANY of those votes by DNC members are subject to change if political winds start to change.

Posted By: Jade7243 | February 12, 2008 at 03:40 PM

I think this focus on "automatic" delegates is getting a bit out of hand from both sides. Let's get through March and see where the pledged delegate count is and then we can talk about "automatic" delegates. I don't get why either side counts these people in their overall totals, b/c they are fluid and can change their mind one a moments' notice.

It's clear that Politico's count of "super" "ueber" "automatic" "special" or however you want to characterize them are different from NBC's, CBS's, ABC's NYT's, WaPo's and right on down the line. Let's agree to not count any of these people until we get a heckuva lot closer to the Convention. They can change their minds at the drop of a hat -- or loss of a state. Where they stand today may not be where a lot of these people, whose "support" is based on poltical fortunes, stand tomorrow. They are fickle. You may see Clinton's "lead" gone like "dust in the wind."

Posted By: dumbfounded | February 12, 2008 at 03:46 PM

What is this, a basketball game or the struggle for which ideas are going to rule America's future?

The superdelegate counts are going to shift everyday to some extent. That's because the Democrats have foolishly tied their fate to the traditional smoke-filled room politics of yesterday. The leaders, especially Dean, haven't yet settled the MI and FL mess, which stirs needless debates and contentiousness while providing the Republicans a grounds for showing the country that a party not able to reasonably handle its own primary process isn't ready to lead the country.

The Democrats are in deep over the heads; the vote on the telecommunications act proves that. It's been two years and no end to the war. Instead of counting mercurial superdelegate votes it would be far wiser to monitor how disaffected voters are with the party overall. See: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18349197/the_chicken_doves. That's right the Democrats have become Chickendoves, and that's in the view of liberal commentators.

Out on the campaign trail they're pitching change, but in Congress they're voting moderate or right. You think one presidential candidate is going to change that. Obama's right about this: The direction of the country's in the people's hands. And with that in mind, it's not in very good hands. Where's the outrage, the protests, the unrest regarding the immoral and illegal Iraq War? Gates just came out and said, in effect, that the surge level of troops is going to be continued past July. Yet hardly a peep.

No wonder Feingold didn't run.

He saw the writing on the wall. He saw that the selfish masses are more concerned about their own slice of the pie - better healthcare - than they are about the national welfare. Why? Because they fail to see that an improved national welfare will lead to improved individual welfare.

This isn't liberal politics. This isn't a devotion to the collective whole and the compassion that Democrats have shown for decades. This isn't the party of peace but the party of appeasement. Since Bill Clinton it became the Third Way party, happy to go along with moderate and right wing ideas. Who's anybody kidding about change?

Since '06 how much change have the Democrats sought? Conyers and Kucinich aimed for impeachment, but virtually no takers. But Clinton was impeached for a BJ. How pathetic. How derelict can the party get? Torture? OK. Spying on phone and email messages? OK. Continuing the surge? OK. Threatening Iran? OK. Pouring trillions into the "War on Terror" yet not catching bin Laden? OK. Selling fear? OK. Hey when the masses have exhausted themselves in this ridiculous race and are too tired in Nov. to vote, we'll know why. The Democrats aren't providing much of a reason to get up off our asses.

A Day Late and A Dollar Short Part VII:
Reading Ossie Clark and conclusion


Reading Ossie Clark (2003) is "a study of “Swinging London’s” preeminent fashion designer of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as seen through the pages of his wild and colorful stream-of-consciousness diaries," as the Corcoran literature explained. The image is via Kinz, Tillou + Feigen.

I recall from my absorption of the Duncan-Blake effect during the past summer how comparison was made between David Hockney's portrait of married designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, and the Yo! Venice images of Duncan and Blake that got plastered all over web sites (this one included). Even I, the philistine, thought the Venice images resembled a Hockney painting. That California light and the wide beach spaces.

Mr. and Mrs. Clark Percy (1970), David Hockney, via artchive.




[Below] Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan, Venice Beach, by Bret of Yo! Venice, May 2005. Looking David Hockney by way of Edward Hopper...



[Below] "The Hockney That Never Was." A digital painting from Idyllopus Press, J.M Kearns, presiding and posted this image, August 23, 2007. Based on an image from the Yo! Venice series.


So, my notes for Reading Ossie Clark don't amount to much. Clarissa Darymple's narration was compelling, the accent something an actor might need to invent.

At one point the words appear, "Yak, yak, yak...lies, lies, lies," and I chuckled to myself, thinking of, well, the rushing torrents of language that have poured forth about this artist and his fate...and to which I've contributed. The wonderful visuals were based in designs and elements within Clark's oeuvre. The loop runs nine minutes but seemed longer--maybe because I was experiencing "moving painting" fatigue.

I profess to a profound lack of knowledge about the history of contemporary fashion and Ossie Clark and Swinging London. Blake's fascination didn't spark me, though many of the images he generated under its inspiration are quite splendid.


Image via creative time.org

I left the gallery of Wild Choir with a sense that I understood better the critical praise bestowed upon Blake's work but also aware of the limited nature of new media and how we here in the present can't predict how these multimedia pieces will make their ultimate contribution to art history. I also wondered about longevity. Digital media may last how long? How does one preserve it? Of course, all art is rotting and deteriorating, no matter how careful the efforts at conservation. Artists seize upon new technologies and methods because they want to see what they can make them do; theirs is not to know how to make it last.

Blake's pieces exists only when projected. His drawings and paintings remain in three-dimensional space. In the end, those may survive the videos.

Earlier, I'd viewed rooms full of Edward Hopper and J.M.W. Turner. Hopper, cool, distant, refined, simple yet complicated, a Hemingway of painting whom De Chirico referred to as the U.S.'s only Surrealist. De Chirico fell out of his avant-garde and struggled to reconnect with representational realism. Hopper didn't fall out of anything; he built his own niche.

Hopper's own countenance, in the show's photographs and portrayed in his paintings, seems a blend of Dwight Eisenhower and Fred Thompson. His is a big solid U.S. face; the son of a dry goods salesman father and a housewife who liked to draw.

Hopper was influenced by cinema and theater, and he in turn influenced cinema. The 15-minute film that went with the exhibit, narrated by Steve Martin, pointed out several examples--some outright, others more subtle--like Hitchcock's Gothic home of the Bates family in Psycho.

Perhaps my favorite painting of his is New York Movie (1939).

He conveys the hushed darkness of a film house but that he's interested in the usherette, lost in her own reverie, having seen this picture in bits and parts maybe a dozen times. I'm gazing at her from my seat, noticing how the the lamplight shines in her strawberry blond hair.
Image via artchive.com.


Another picture that I don't recall seeing before was one made quite late in Hopper's career and the portrayal of silent spareness is disturbing--and brings to mind DeChirico's empty streetscapes. Except this is a motel room. I remarked to Amie that it looks like somebody from a foreign country trying to paint like Hopper and making it even more weird. Or a still from a n early David Lynch film. This image is via the Yale University Gallery of Art.




J.M.W Turner astonished me. I've certainly seen examples of his work in various museums throughout my assorted travels, but never gathered in one place, and how given the benefit of walking along the line of his artistic development one sees an artist who made the mold then broke the mold.

His massive paintings of horrendous sea battles and ancient temples and pagan rituals remind me of meticulous matte paintings, except Turner's pictures present the drama instead of providing background. Then he ended up becoming what amounted to being the first Impressionist. Trying to gauge Turner's power from muddy images online or even good ones in books is like describing the quality of sunshine in a summer rain. You just have to see this yourself.



The Perfect Storm ca.1810, via Wikipedia, The Wreck of the Minotaur.

The vivid, hyper-real landscapes and tableaux give way to swirling colors and objects in name only.

The so-called Sunrise With Seamonsters of 1845, was given that name by curators
who first exhibited the piece in 1906 (!) This is probably two flounder in the surf, but, the perspective is so unusual one perhaps can forgive gallerists who'd perhaps never been to the sea. Imag via artchives.


In the biographies of the two artists, living centuries apart, there's interesting differences and connections. Hopper, now considered as much part of U.S. culture as Coke, didn't sell his first painting until 1913 when he was 31, and his second, at 41. After that, things began looking up; he married artist Jo Nevison, she 40, he 42, and they remained together until his death in 1964 at the age of 87. Jo followed him nine months later.

Hopper was part of no school, no movement, and worked in figurative or narrative idiom while the rest of the world went its merry Abstract Expressionist/Pop/Op way. Maybe in his own manner, Hopper was putting back together the shattered pieces before they were already all the way broken. But once anything is busted, the pieces never constitute what existed prior to the destruction.

Hopper, for all this ability to convey a sense of quiet desolation--he stopped putting people in his street scenes because they gave them an energy he didn't want--couldn't paint reflections in glass or water. His Nighthawks depicts the denizens of an all-night diner in the precise manner worthy of a film or stage director. We almost don't see the huge window through which we're observing the hunched diners. The only give-away that it is there is the pale beam of the curve by the sidewalk. But as the critic Clement Greenberg described Hopper's lack of virtuoso painting flourishes, "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist." Image via artchive.com.


J.M.W Turner could paint reflections, all kinds of them, in different perspectives, and in watercolor. Turner enjoyed success and praise from the outset of his art life. As he matured, and his world became more dominated by the Industrial Revolution, the fanciful landscapes and historical tableaux may have seemed to Turner as ostentatious. Romantic realism couldn't convey what he was sensing in the wind. The artist began expressing his experience of a world that itself was waning and receding while mysterious machines and violent war clashed in flickering lights, mists and steam, and myth and old ways faded.

"In his later life he began sending to the Academy exhibitions unfinished canvases which one contemporary described as being 'without form and void, like chaos before the creation'," says the Tate Gallery's online biography. "He would then complete them in the exhibition room on Varnishing Days, virtuoso performances which soon became legendary."

Turner's housewife mother died insane when he was at the outset of his career and his barber and wigmaker father lived with him for more than 30 years and even served as his studio assistant, until his death. Turner thereafter experienced bouts of depression and his behavior became more erratic. He never married, but sired two children.

He left behind a fortune that he intended to be held in trust for "decayed artists" and his entire collection bequeathed to the English nation for the purpose of keeping his work together in one place, though that didn't happen. The current "Turner Prize," awarded to artists of distinction, was founded in 1984 but has no connection to the artist, except for the use of his name.

Now, upstairs at the Corcoran, away from Jeremy Blake's noisy introspection, is a big Annie Leibovitz exhibition. Unlike paintings, in many cases, photographs look just fine in books. There's no glass to negotiate.

I didn't expect much out of this show and was overwhelmed. and this was far more affecting than either of us had reason to expect, as her images of people whose fame she's helped to propagate were intermixed with her personal shots and of her relationship with writer Susan Sontag, who dies during the course of the exhibit, as does Leibovitz's father. These are tough pictures. Sontag is depicted in death laid out like an effigy upon an ancient sarcophagus. Her father, compared to earlier images of him, is a husk wasted by disease and age.

Near these images of her personal losses were the violent deaths from the siege of Sarajevo and massacres in Rwanda. I'd seen these in magazines and didn't know, or forgotten, that Leibovitz on these journeys eschewed all studio trappings and took herself and a camera. Their is world of hurt out there, and nations bathed in the blood of innocents, and at once removed from the rarefied spaces of her New York City studios--and yet not that distant at all.

Here, too, is Leibovitz at--I think age 52--her belly swollen with twins. The young children are shown growing up and the images get a little Sallie Mann-esque. Amie says to me, "What are you going to do? The most precious things to you in life are right there in front of you, and they will be this way for that moment, and never again the same way. So you're an artist and you want to record that."

In front of Leibovitz's portrait of Bill Clinton, Amie said aloud, "This makes me sad and wistful." Then then a woman standing next to her said,"Me, too." He was so young and vital in 1998, his hair not yet gone white, and he looked like The Natural-era Robert Redford playing Bill Clinton, and I said so, and the ladies agreed. His hands are huge--mitts-- and a thumb that looks the length of most people's index fingers. Ahead of him was a political tempest and heart surgery.

Chuck Close told Amie a little while ago that he met Clinton and that after being in Clinton's presence for a few minutes, even he wanted to go to bed with him, so magnetic is his personality.

Then around the corner from this was a big color portrait of Bush's first term team, with Rumsfeld and the rest, and they looked like the cast for some Fox Network night-time soap opera about the rich and venal. Perhaps there is something in that these portraits of recent U.S. leaders in their natural habitats they seem more like the actors Leibovitz is famous for dressing up and putting in contrived tableaux.

In the end, I cared less about her celebrities, and more about all our humanity.

"Who nowadays talks of the Armenians?"


REFUGEES AT VAN CROWDING AROUND A PUBLIC OVEN, HOPING TO GET BREAD. These people were torn from their homes almost without warning, and started toward the desert. Thousands of children and women as well as men died on these forced journeys, not only from hunger and exposure, but also from the inhuman cruelty of their guards. -- This illustration appears in Henry Morgenthau's account of his ambassadorship for the United States to Ottoman Turkey, 1913-1916.


I want to interrupt my own back-slapping about my slender volume of twice-told tales to make a point that I've not seen in the sliver of what passes for contemporary news media with which I choose to inflict my senses.

This most recent and quite late attempt in Congress to issue some kind of stern rebuke for the mass killings by Turks of the Armenians in 1915 has cropped up just as snarling and sabre-rattling occurs at the border of Turkey and Iraq. Nowhere, in the assessment of this distraction, has there been mention of Hitler's August 22, 1939 excuse for the destruction of innocent lives, just a week prior to the launch of the attack on Poland. Maybe because the remarks, made during one of his harangues to members of the German military high command and state apparatus at his Berghof residence, has undergone various interpretations.

"Our [Nazi] strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.

I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

The statement--though not the entire monologue--has received the description of "purported." John Toland, in his massive biography of Hitler, states in his record of the lecture that it wasn't based on a verbatim account but on notes of officers present. The Armenian statement isn't given by Toland.

From my studies even in Richmond and Virginia history, I've learned that when documents or accounts don't agree, or otherwise given accounts that may overlap except for one strange hole that somehow nobody every thought to fill with a description -- later interpreters are either forced to shove the varying accounts into the footnotes or choose one and punt.

Hell, nobody took notes for Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech, yet this didn't prevent a later writer from constructing one that was, perhaps, close enough to what he may have said at St. John's Church here (which wasn't even called St. John's at the time, but the Henrico Parish Church).

Nor have I heard--and this may mean I don't pay enough attention anymore to what the blathering white noise that passes for our news establishment--if anyone has mentioned that the Clinton administration tried in 2000 to pass a memorial of the mass murder of Armenians but the Turks threatened to shut down U.S. bases.

You can read about this shameful event in man's inhumanity to man here and here.

An excerpt:

    "History, of course, is a hard taskmaster, veined with inconvenient facts and
corrupted heroes as well as the massacre of innocents. The Armenian
community in Turkey had its Allied sympathisers when the Ottoman army was
fighting the British and French in the First World War, and Armenians also
fought in the tsarist Russian army against Turkey. But the proof of genocide
is intact. The Young Turk movement - once a liberal organisation which the
Armenians had supported - had taken control of the dying empire and adopted
a "pan-Turkism" which espoused a Turkish-speaking Muslim nation from
Constantinople to Baku.

Within weeks of their victory over the Allies at the Dardanelles in 1915,
they fell upon the Armenians. Churchill was to refer to
the "merciless fury" unleashed upon the Christian minority. The US
ambassador in Constantinople - himself a Jew - wrote heart-wrenching reports
back to Washington of mass slaughter. Near the Turkish village of Mus,
hundreds of men were lined up on bridges and shot into the rivers,
Serb-style.

Behind the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland, I was once taken by a camp
guide to a series of small lakes in which the Nazis dumped the ash of the
crematoria. Beneath the water and ice lay the powdered white bones of whole
cities of people. Yet in the north Syrian desert there are still skulls and
bones in caves and in the clay of river banks. This place of martyrdom is
visited once a year by the local Armenian community to commemorate their
holocaust. They even have a holocaust memorial day. Yet I wonder if a single
non-Armenian reader of The Independent knows what the date is?"