Abstract Expressionism in context at MoMA

A big part of Abstract Expresssionism, if we get right down to it, was to push art out of context. So yea, I appreciate it's a bit ironic for me to say that a current retrospective of the movement lacks context. The current big show at the Museum of Modern Art is really just that -- out of time, at sea, and serving purposes that are hard to grasp at first glance.

This show is something that has been on my radar for a long time, and since I live far from the city, getting there requires a bit of planning. I have been a big fan since high school, and i wrote my thesis in college about Frank O'Hara, the poet, man-about-town, and associate curator of painting at MoMA who was close to the movement.

MoMA's show pulls together a large number of highlights from the movement -- much from the museum's own collection. It is a greatest hits collection, but one that lacks a sense of nostalgia, passion or affection for the work. I've been struggling to find the right word for how all that feels -- not elegiac, nor like an obituary. It isn't a tombstone, but more of a cenotaph. At the same time, the show seems to be missing the sort of intellectual heft you'd expect from one of these once-in-a-generation reassessments. It is almost taxonomical -- this is what Abstract Expressionism is, this is who did, here are the best examples of it. It feels like the first draft of an art history textbook for high school students.

But the question of context is always right there, because it is a tricky issue when it comes to this work. Group shows about Abstract Expressionism in general seem to fail, because they don't make coherent points with each other as much as they do with themselves. Solo shows of particular artists can be brilliant. I have distinct, happy memories of shows devoted to Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still, and my personal favorite, Barnett Newman. The MoMA show seems somewhat aware of this, and does a good job of tracing the development of Pollock from the student of Thomas Hart Benson to "Jack the Dripper." But everyone else seems to suffer from a selective approach.

And yet, even though Abstract Expressionism is so often a punch-line, (for the record, why do people still insist on dismissing AbEx by saying that "any four-year-old could do it?" I spend a lot of time painting with a four-year-old, and I tell you, she never does anything like this), the show was packed. Part of that is because New York museums are always packed (sorry, I'm desensitized to Berkshire museum going, which is usually blissfully quiet and solitary in the winter). So it hard to avoid the idea that this show was a crowd-pleaser, MoMA making its once-in-a-generation effort to present a comprehensive show about a movement that is intimately bound up in their own history. It is a reminder that this happened.

'God's empty chair'

I can't be the only one who first heard about George Shearing, who died this week at 91, in Jack Kerouac's On the Road...

Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o'clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was a distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer's-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat., his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that's all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said.

'Winning' the Space Race

Look, I like to mock the former half-term governor of Alaska as much as anyone, but her recent comments about the "Space Race" prove the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day (if only for a few glancing nanoseconds, and it doesn't realize why it is right).

America's chest-beating about "winning" the Cold War is so profound and pointless, it makes us merrily buy into the Tom Hanks version of a heroic, patriotic victory for our side.

Folks that I ordinarily agree with have been jumping to the safe conclusion...

Yes, the Soviet Union won many of the early contests in the space race (including putting the first man in orbit, which may have been what Palin meant by "race to space"). But it was the U.S. that walked away with the biggest trophy in the space race when it put a man on the moon.

But here's another take... the Soviets jumped out to a huge lead with Sputnik and manned flight, and then they kept it.

While America chose to believe it had launched into some kind of sci-tech rodeo contest, the Soviets were actually doing science. I'll make the bold assertion that the work Soviet engineers and cosmonauts did on long-term space flight will prove far, far more useful in the long-run than the explorations by American astronauts of how far you can hit a golf-ball on the moon.

And the fact that future crews going up to the ISS will be launched from Baikonur for the foreseeable future -- not Cape Canaveral -- seems to suggest the final outcome could at best be called a draw.

World Cup High Comedy Edition

The bidding process for the World Cup, much like the process for the Olympics, feels like a scandal-in-waiting. But the details of the back-scratching and other funny business isn't as interesting at the moment as the fact that now, Russia and Qatar are going to have to actually go through with this.

My first thought on Russia's successful bid is amazement at the scale of the job ahead. There is presently only one top-grade football stadium in the country -- and that is Lokomotiv Stadium, which is in a hard-to-reach corner of Moscow and only seats 28,800. Nearly every other stadium is an awful Soviet-era pile built to host track and field competitions, with concrete bowl seating and distant sight lines. The nation's premiere stadium, Luzhniki, has hosted many big football events, and always with a lot of bitching by everyone involved before and afterwords.

So, if I were a politically well-connected building contractor today, I would have passed out at the news. A lot of things are going to be built in the next eight years, and there is little cause for hope that Russia can do it without massive amounts of fraud, waste, and corruption. And it remains to be seen whether or not Russia can actually pull off an event this size. The Sochi Olympics in 2012 may well turn into a disaster, and if I were FIFA, I'd have at least waited to see just how bad the damage is before placing this bet. But who knows why the judges judged as they did...

And furthermore, it is my long-standing belief that Russia has no business hosting any serious international event until it completely overhauls its Soviet-era visa requirements. The present hybrid system of police-state bullying and organized shakedowns is unfit for a country with such high aspirations. Plus, you know what else would be nice? hotel rooms. Not Ritz-Carltons and absurd high-end ones, but normal, affordable hotel rooms where you can be reasonable sure you won't get robbed.

As for the 2022 Qatar Olympics, I can only stifle a laugh. I'm waiting to know if someone will open a book with odds that this will mark the first World Cup in which a player actually drops dead on the pitch during a match. Again, who knows why the judges judged etc etc etc.

The Carter legacy

I'd love to offer former President Jimmy Carter the kind of quiet respect his office ought to deserve, but his weirdly vindictive and plainly untrue comments as he hawks his new new book shouldn't be left alone. It would have been nice to forget the nightmare of his presidency, and the wasted opportunity his election was for generations of Americans, but if he's seriously going to say in public that it was Ted Kennedy's fault health care reform didn't pass, then I'm going to say what a fraud and waste his entire career was.

They like to say that Carter has been a better ex-president than president. Which frankly, isn't that hard a post to pass. But the man does not get nearly enough blame for obnoxious trends in national politics that he introduced. These are things many of us think may have come from Nixon, or Reagan, but are in fact his unique contribution to American culture.

The Rus, the rus, the rus is on fire...

"... we don't need no Forest Service let the mother-f__ker burn!"
-- the 2010 Russian update, with apologies to Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.

How best to describe the past few days around Moscow, the smokey, smoggy, disaster area you might have read about in the paper? It has been like standing closely downwind of a campfire, but you can't get far enough away. Your throat and nose burn, your eyes are on fire (if you wear contacts, just forget it.) Andrew E. Kramer in the NYT failed to complete the picture when he tried to describe it:  "Moscow was choked with smoke, which seemed more like a smelly fog, thick enough to leave an aftertaste and a sensation of cement dust in the mouth," he wrote. "Residents wandered in the milky haze, many wearing surgical masks and dazed looks." Close, but no mention of the permanent headaches, or your hands and feet going numb, or the urge to take three hour naps in the afternoon. Or the rat the size of a full-grown cat I found lying dead in the kids' sandbox outside our apartment Friday.

Any American assignment editor by now would have had enough. There are only so many disaster stories you can run about heroic firefighters, top government official expressing concern and scolding low-level officials, and health authorities offering tips like wear a wetted gauze mask and drink green tea. Eventually -- certainly before two weeks have passed -- they'll want to know who to blame. No surprise, few media outlets here have bothered to think in such scandalously Western terms (with the notable and heroic exceptions of The Moscow Times, Ekho Moskvy, and Vedomosti).

Of course, some have tried to move the process along. Two immortal pillars of the Russian Soul are xenophobic conspiracy theories and crackpot pseudoscience. And that's where the U.S. High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program comes in, the scientific outpost in the far reaches of Alaska has been a magnet for conspiracy theories. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made note of it, speculating that it may have caused the earthquake in Haiti. Some clever Russian intellectuals have wondered if this might indeed be some kind of ionospheric weapon aimed straight at Eurasia, presumable to keep Russia on her knees. The rabble-rousing tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted Georgiy Vasilyev, a physics professor at Moscow State University, as saying that the U.S. military has spent so much money on this for it not to be some kind of weapon.  "The American explanation that this station was built for the study of the aurora effect is not very believable," he said earlier this month. "Moreover, (the United States) has spent almost 20 years and 250 million dollars on equipment for the study of such a very complex natural phenomenon!" Oy, studying a complex natural phenomenon, instead of just jumping to conclusions. Again, this from a physics professor at Moscow State University.

The principle of Occam's Razor hasn't been a big part of the thinking around here. So don't consider the fact that in 2006, the Duma abolished the Forest Service and left forest fire prevention to an ill-defined mix of local authorities and entities that "hold the rights" to the forests. They're obviously doing a bang-up job. If you've ever bothered to wonder what deregulating yourself into a Hobbesian state of nature looks like, well, it looks pretty f__king smokey.

The story of the Great Smokeout of 2010 has yet to be written, but I've noticed that many western media outlets seem to suggest that the degree of popular dissatisfaction at how an ossified, corrupt, and inept government could let things get this bad might lead to some kind of tipping point. That everyone will look up from LiveJournal and exclaim, "My God, Kasparov was right all along!" To put it simply, not a chance.

An abnormal situation on an abnormal road to an abnormal airport in an abnormal country

It's really no joke to say that everything is harder in Russia. Take getting to the airport. This week, the main road that leads to Sheremetyevo Airport northwest of the city -- and still the major one -- has had to have emergency road work done. Since it is chancey to drive there as it is, this development has been catastrophic. The Moscow Times reports that there have been huge delays, and even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has had to get involved.

And then there's this nugget:

Sheremetyevo director Mikhail Vasilenko said on his blog Wednesday that City Hall had intentionally blocked off the roads in order to undermine Sheremetyevo and support rival airport Vnukovo, which is opening a new terminal in July.

Vasilenko sent a complaint to the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, which has opened an investigation into whether the traffic problems are linked with the Vnukovo terminal opening.

“In a normal economy, this would be an abnormal situation,” said Andrei Golomozin, the service’s deputy director, Interfax reported. “Those who are responsible should be punished. I am not sure whether it will fall into the realm of anti-monopoly law.”

“An intervention by the country’s top officials will normalize everything quickly.” Vasilenko said Thursday.

All very amusing, especially as we are supposedto fly out of there next week.

Accidental cultural competence

The ability to navigate through another culture sneaks up on you. Especially with language, when you reach a point that you spend so long focusing on how much you don’t know that you take for granted what you do know. Combine that with all the other bits of cultural competence you build up – the comfort-level of making a joke in what was once an uncomfortable situation, the ability to read street signs without thinking “I am reading a street sign in another language” – and you can forget how others see you.

I had a strange encounter on Wednesday in the park across the street. The family has been away at the dacha, and I’ve been staying in the city getting some work done. It’s been a lot of work, and of course, lots of football matches to watch on television. I watched the tense England-Slovenia, US-Algeria matches, and decided afterwards to take a walk. It was about 8 p.m., and the long Moscow twilight was still in effect. The weather has been beautiful, about 30 degrees C with a nice breeze, so I opted to take a walk.

 I went to a kiosk and bought a Starry Melnik beer and went through the park near our house and sat on a bench to think through some problems in the book. The park is interesting -- it is a woody place, with a few benches, but it is usually perfectly safe except when it gets dark. I sat and watched parents with their kids in strollers walk by, a steady stream of people heading home from work, a few groups of young men and women gathered at nearby benches drinking beer and talking.

 Along came a pair of visibly inebriated guys, who came up and started a conversation. One was a normally dressed fellow with a buzzcut and a tan, and the other was wearing blue workers overalls. They appeared to be Central Asian. Each of them was carrying a can of Baltika No. 9, a kind of strong, disgusting dark beer. Buzzcut sat beside me at a respectable distance, the other guy squatted a little to my right. They had a brief and poignant story about how they had just finished a long day of hard work, and that it was Buzzcut's birthday.

I realized quickly that these weren't muggers or hooligans -- just two hard-working guys who didn't have any more money and didn't want the fun to end. They needed someone to buy another round of something, and I looked like an easy mark.

I wasn't particularly interested, so I fell back on my default position for getting out of these things -- "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

They repeated themselves, hard work, birthday, etc. And I stuck to my story. They began asking, politely, where I was from. They were from Uzbekistan -- did I know where that was? Yes, I said. Near Tajikistan (I was very careful not to mention Kyrgyzstan in any imaginable way). I even said something about how they made lovely tea-cups (piali, which are actually, quite lovely).

And they wanted to know if I lived in Moscow. I said no, and insisted I didn't understand what they were saying. They wanted to know what "republic" I was from. I insisted I was from somewhere else. Probably Latvia? Lithuania? Eventually, I said I was from Canada. I have fallen back on this for years. Given the ambient anti-Americanism in Russia, there is an assumption that all Americans are rich idiots. There is also a weird contempt for Brits afoot, so I decided during the Bush years that pretending to be Canadian was best for wriggling out of these kinds of situations. It accounts for my accent, but is a country that I think most folks in Moscow feel indifferent to, or regard as a distant thing they can't quite map onto their radar of prejudicies. These two guys seemed not to know what I meant. So I explained that Canada was a friendly country over the ocean, far away.

They seemed to decide together to continue onward to their primary goal. "Look, it is his birthday! We've had a hard day of work, and it is his birthday!" They raised their half-empty cans of Baltika, and what could I do? I am, above all, a polite and culturally sensitive person. So I raised my half-empty Starry Melnick and, for the first and perhaps only time in my life so far, wished him a happy birthday -- apparently in a way that would make my long-suffering Russian tutors proud. Я поздравляю Вас с днем рождения.

Buzzcut remained perfectly friendly as he said, "I"m sorry, but you're Russian." I insisted no, I don't understand. Canadian. And he kept saying, "I'm sorry, but you're Russian."

The squatting fellow tapped him on the knee to get him to stop. But the conversation continued this way for a several more minutes. I was pretending I was dumber than I was, and they insisted I was more than I would admit. I kept apologizing and saying I didn't understand, and Buzzcut kept insisting that I was a Russian.

Eventually they gave up. We toasted one more time to Buzzcut's birthday, and they wandered off. They paused for a few words with two pretty young women sitting alone nearby, who unceremoniously told them to screw off, and they stumbled off toward the Metro station.

Moscow slowness

We are on our annual trip to Russia, and it has hardly been a particularly eventful visit so far. Mostly lots of domestic cares. You forget how tricky it is to look after an energetic toddler when you take them out of daycare. Plus, the weather here has been chilly and damp, and we are without WiFi, so all there is to do is watch lots of World Cup matches and do the household shopping. A very slow time of year.

The Unfolding Tragedy of the Blown Call

The Call Everyone is Talking About gives us a perfect example to talk about a weird quirk of American sports culture. There are lots of inexplicable things about American sports -- like how league structures here prove how socialism works great for rich people -- but in particular, we still hold a naive and weird understanding of officiating.

Somehow, somewhere, we developed a bizarre positivist sense of what an umpire or ref is supposed to do: that they are in the same category as doctors and scientists in determining Right and Wrong on the fly. This is childish, and an unreasonable expectation

This is one of the hang-ups I think Americans have towards "soccer" -- that it requires a more sophisticated sense of reality. In soccer, you have two side judges who solely monitor offsides and boundary violations -- just because the one referee can't see the angles. And everything else is handled by one fellow who is huffing and puffing up and down the field all match like everyone else, watching for fouls, keeping the official time. And he doesn't see everything, and trying to fool him is part of the game (thus, the much derided on this side of the Atlantic art of flopping).

But we insist on Truth, and that if the human factor can't solve it video replay should. Which raises logical questions about why not just install a ball and strike machine to make the calls -- the technology exists after all (as Slate explains). Why shouldn't we do it? because the human factor is important. The size of a strike zone, how it changes from game to game, pitch to pitch -- these are the things that make baseball interesting and not just an elaborate math problem.

Which brings us to what happened in Detroit. Obviously, by that point in the game, umpire Jim Joyce should have been incredibly prejudiced to give Armando Galaragga the benefit of any doubt, no matter how small. That would be the human thing to do. The fact that he didn't is the big mistake. If he had erred in calling him out -- even by a good few feet, no one would be freaking out right now. That's the game.