Sheehan's Delegation to Conyers: Initiate Impeachment Now

[The following was posted at 3:29 p.m. today on democraticunderground.com, live from the delegation led by Cindy Sheehan to Representative John Conyers to demand the impeachment of V.P. Dick Cheney. Conyers is one of the good guys who's been doing the kind of work I think we need done -- e.g., almost single-handedly investigating the irregularities in the 2004 elections. But he is chair of the Judiciary Committee in the House, out of which any impeachment initiative must issue, and he's been quoted as saying he would proceed only if three more Representatives added their support. Let me know if any of this was mentioned in your corporate evening news.]

I am sitting on the floor of a phone booth . . . . Lisa from C-ville is standing in front of it, hoping I will not be noticed.

I have never seen anything like this one, folks. . . .

There are HUNDREDS of people lining the hallway to John Conyers' office. Cindy and a few others are inside, speaking to the staff, we assume. But the scene is incredible -- people have come from all over the country to deliver the message that we cannot tolerate illegal actions and an unConstitutional government.

I will update this as I can . . .

But hello to all from the center of democracy! We are taking it BACK.

Oh -- and CALL!

Phone Chairman Conyers [see contact info at the end of this post] and ask him to start the impeachment of Dick Cheney; and phone your own Congress Member [see contact info at the end of this post] and ask them to immediately call Conyers' office to express their support for impeachment. Your Congress Member might be one of the three needed, not just to keep impeachment activists out of jail but to keep this nation from devolving into dictatorship.

UPDATE: They are NOT HEARING US CALL.
CALL PELOSI. CALL OTHERS. MAKE A RUCKUS because they are not listening and I'm told it's quiet there!!!

Cindy Sheehan just left John Conyers' office and announced that Rep. Conyers is NOT going to move on impeachment.

The crowd is very upset.

Rev. Yearwood announced that the government has failed the people and the people must act NOW. This needs to be spread everywhere.

PEOPLE MUST CALL.

The phone must NOT STOP RINGING. POST THIS EVERYWHERE!!!

Contact info for Conyers: Washington Office: Phone (202) 225-5126; Fax (202) 225-0072; Main District Office: Phone (313) 961-5670; Fax (313) 226-2085; Detroit: Phone (313) 961-5670; Fax (313) 226-2085; (another) Phone (734) 675-4084.

Contact info for Pelosi: Washington Office: Phone (202) 225-4965; Fax (202) 225-8259; Main District Office: Phone (415) 556-4862; Fax (415) 861-1670; (another) Fax (734) 675-4218.

Your own Rep.: Washington: General Phone 202-224-3121; and for additional contact info, see the link in the left hand column of this blog called, "Contact your U.S. Congressional reps."

Rights Reserved to Delete This

and of course other posts.

Life sometimes seems to consist in turning yourself inside out, and sticking to things. I might mean having your insides get stuck to things outside of you that you didn't necessarily intend; but I might just mean perseverance – prolly both.

I was in therapy for the better part of my adult life. My dad died just over a year ago. I'm still trying to make him love me. I've been writing an account of his death -- how I happened to visit him, 1,000 miles from my home, just in time to find him collapsed, naked, on his bathroom floor; how he died; etc. Every time I go back to what I've written, it sprouts like a hydra.

In the dark, I'm often sure about direction, less sure about distance. In life, I've usually grossly underestimated the distances.

When I was 7, I imagined heaven as involving a room full of watermelon, a room full of steak, a room full of french fries, and a room full of chocolate milkshakes.

When I was 12, I decided heaven could not possibly involve the physical, since it seemed to be the source of too much pain and difficulty. Without physical bodies, there would be no hunger, disease, racial discrimination or other judgments based on appearances, no insecurities about or over-compensations for height or weight. (I was highly ambivalent about my own body – I had zits, scant armpit hair, small boobs, small hips – while on the other hand, too many men, including my own dad, seemed nonetheless to take my personally-disappointing pubescence as sufficient cause to treat me like a whore).

Now, I think heaven should definitely involve french fries (thick yet crispy, with salt, ketchup, and sometimes vinegar), lots of sex, booze, drugs, and rock n' roll, and perhaps above all – what's the phrase – I guess there's no better term than art. Meaning, this time, intentionally aesthetic expressions in response to challenging exigencies.

Guess I'll need the physical world after all.

Russia Claims the North Pole

Surprise, it's hydrocarobon-rich. Ever feel like our gummint's most machiavellian imaginings are, like, five decades behind? I mean, if you're going to ditch the Constitution and all scruples for some kind of putative efficacy . . .

Update Re- Diamond-Coated Skull

Re- Damien Hirst's piece, I asked, "[w]ould we like this as much with cz's?" An artist named Laura took a step toward finding out: she created a replica covered with 6,522 Swarovski crystals and left it on top of the trash outside Hirst's gallery in the middle of the night. (From The Wooster Collective via boingboing.)

Current TV Re-Broadcasting Cindy Sheehan Short

Al Gore's cable channel has asked to extend its rights to broadcast Grace at Camp Casey, my "pod" about Cindy Sheehan's protest outside President Bush's ranch in 2005; they did a nice page on it here; you can see the original version here.

(By now, that subtitle would prolly have to read, "has built.")

If You Liked Macbeth . . .

You'll love this: "James Coldwell, 49, disguised himself as a tree when he robbed a bank in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday. He had tree branches attached to his clothing and head with duct tape. Police nabbed him after surveillance video that played on TV news led to several anonymous tips of Coldwell's identity. This is according to the police captain whose real name is apparently Dick Tracy."

Coldwell was charged with one count of robbery. (From boing-boing, citing The New Hampshire Union Leader.)

Report from the Venice Biennial, Documenta, and Other Fronts:

I.e., the Venice Biennial, Kassel's documenta, the Münster Sculpture Project, and the ZKM museum of tech-based art in Karlsruhe.

Your virtual "Grand Tour" starts here. Sincere apologies for the deficiencies in my photography (conditions were less than ideal) and for the lack of title and artist info in some instances (I didn't quite realize I was doing this 'til the trip was over).

Venice was sunny and suffocatingly hot; Kassel, rainy and cold, with exhibitions too darkly lit not to credit its curator with having intended the eyestrain. Appropriately, since many artists seem more or less urgently involved in dealing with what certainly seem to me to be our dark days (though I'm disappointed to realize I can't read too much into U.S. pavilion artist Félix González-Torres' selection of black candy, since he's dead).

Additional trends:

Tech-based art is getting the love, and much of the more interesting painting is clearly influenced by tech.

Charting, mapping, and architecturally-influenced drawing continue to offer possibilities, if not quite the import of Mark Lombardi's.

Conceptual art, which I like, was well-represented, but it can make for a dry exhibition experience, except when interactive.

Feminism is back, thank goddess. Perhaps because of that, or the aging of the Boomers, so are images of older women's bodies. I've seen enough of Tony Soprano to consider this overdue.

An awareness of multiply-layered referentiality remains supremely useful.

Minimalism lingers but drew little attention. And there's still some not-really-so-interesting video out there. Sorry; I'm just frustrated at what strikes me as more-or-less benighted under-utilization of a medium having the potential for maximal meaning and impact.

Of the work I saw (and I did miss some), a few pieces I especially loved (although there were many other wonderful works):



In Venice, Yves Netzhammer's video installation in the Swiss Pavilion – for me, a total knock-out (starting here); the three-channel video installation by the collective, AES+F, in the Russian Pavilion (starting here); Hyung Koo Lee's video and installation, The Homo Species, in a pavilion near the Russian pavilion (starting here); Joshua Mosley's video, Dread, in the Italian pavilion (starting here), in which the gray, digital claymation philosophers Pascal and Rousseau encounter an oversized dog; Philippe Parreno's video, I think in the Arsenale, The Writer (here); and a video in the Arsenale involving deliciously snarky, naked older women on a VW bus (sorry, thought I shot some video but I either hit the wrong button or somehow lost it).

Also, do not miss the Matthew Barney/Joseph Beuys exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim; it included lots of important videos and sculpture I'd never seen before and strikingly illuminates the relationship between the work of the two.

In Kassel, the replacement of the grass in the square in front of the Museum Fridericianum with weeds, here; a body of work called Virus that grips me more viscerally than intellectually, but I like it, starting here; a piece that looks like neon lettering but which is actually some kind of wrought element glowing merely with extreme heat, which says, "Wir suchen uberall das unbedingte und finden immer nur dinge," which I think means something like, "We seek above all the unconditional and ever find only what's for hire" (here; corrections welcome); Zofia Kulik's re-photographed photo collages in Kassel, starting here; Andrei Monastyrski's Goethe (I don't want to spoil the surprise, but do interact, and look for the other part).

In Münster I think my favorite was a field of miniatures starting here – my photos don't do it justice; it contained miniatures of sculptures by over a dozen artists from Paik to Serra and beyond. Unfortunately, we missed several sculptures, including Mike Kelly's Petting Zoo featuring Lot's rock-salt wife.

Martha Rosler had important work in both Kassel and Münster (unfortunately also not done justice in my pics).

Practical tips:

Re- Venice: Bring a fan (seriously). And note, the Arsenale offers all five parts of Yang Fudong's Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, but they run between a half-hour and an hour apiece; I discovered them too late to watch them all.

Re- Kassel: Bring a flashlight (semi-seriously). And check out the documenta evening film series; they're showing great stuff, and a lot of it's in English.

Re- Münster: Go first to an office for the Sculpture Project for their map; the one our hotel gave us wasn’t as good. You might also want to flip through the official short guide before setting out, because some of the sculptures are not so easy to identify; we found ourselves wondering if every odd object we encountered was supposed to be a sculpture (a great way to go through life, of course) — there are old sculptures from previous exhibitions as well as the new ones. And some benefit from a bit of explanation — e.g., we found Martha Rosler's piece before we read the description, and had no idea that some of the objects were not just large bird cages but mimicked medieval cages in which corpses were displayed.

Finally, if you call ahead, you can get a custom tour of the sculpture show, walking or on bikes. It was €90 or so, so we skipped it, but it might be great if you can split the cost with a group.

I also took the opportunity to visit the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. It proved to be very large and apparently very well-funded, better adapted for technology-based work than most institutions; and on a per-square-foot basis, it may have provided the most exciting art. Two major shows, one entitled Between Two Deaths, "on the political, social, and cultural trend toward melancholic retrospection" (read more here), and the other, Thermocline of Art, an exhibition of work by more than 100 artists from ca. twenty Asian countries. Unfortunately, I'd allotted just one day here, so to my serious chagrin, I barely scraped the surface of the Asian show. Works I especially loved here included Sue de Beers' video installation, Black Sun (starting here) and Elín Hansdóttir's sound and sculpture installation, Drift, here; I also liked Aida Ruilova's Lulu, here, and I'm a fan of Ryan Trecartin's A Family Finds Entertainment, which they also had.

Karlsruhe is close to the border of France – not esp. convenient to anything I know of, other than the Moselle River valley, which was beautiful. We also stopped by the well-preserved, 850-year-old Burg Eltz while in the neighborhood (the castle pics included in my photos are not of Burg Eltz, however, but of Burg Metternich in Beilstein).

Happy 4th

For nearly fifty years, I've basically felt proud of my country, despite its many flaws. Yesterday, the patriotic music clanked in my ears like, shall we say, tin drumming.

The best thing about Zogby's polls is they ask you if you consider yourself a citizen of your city or town, your nation, or the planet. I click planet, wish the universes were an option [plural intended].


If you haven't seen Keith Olbermann on the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, check this out. "J'accuse!" has been in my head for months; KO says it for me, brilliantly.


KO left out that when the White House blew Plame's cover, it also terminated the effectiveness of her unit, whose mission was gathering intelligence on WMD's -- things that make you go hmmm . . .