もうすぐ夏 Summer soon

立ったまま Standing,
上下に筆を動かすって I move the brush up and down,
わくわく Excited.

わたしの道楽につきあうかっこう Cuckoo socialize with my hobby,
きらきらした窓辺。 sparkling by the window.
自然信仰、神像彫刻。 Natural religion, statue sculpture,
羽をつけた女性の絵葉書。 postcards, feathered female.

墨もはじめて持っていってみた。 I also bring the first ink.

こどもたちが Our children
自分のおなかにぐるぐる描く Draw circles on my tummy. 

今回のアトリエは This workshop
風に揺れるもの shall swing in the wind.
夏がやってきました。 Summer has arrived. 

(An assembled po-em. Samejima Tamayo paints on cloth, usually tee shirts or white dress shirts. I met her through my friend Lauren when the two of them were studying in London. This is an arrangement of a Google Translation of her website, tamayoatelier.blogspot.com.)

light and stone

Estate of Roy Lichtenstein,
 “Indian” (1951), at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

I don't remember ever seeing Roy Lichtenstein's pre-Pop work before. This is rather beautiful. 

If you click and enlarge it, the sense of the eye being teased into dimensionality beyond the plane is very strong. This prefigures the comic book art work, in which the eye is practically dared to see a broken series of regular Ben-day dots as an object, a familiarity cut up and cut out in circles.

This image is taken from Roberta Smith's New York Times article on three Lichtenstein shows now viewable. If you check out the slide show, you'll see a late sketch clearly in homage to Matisse, as are the leaf-like structures and the triangle of red visible in this painting completed forty years earlier.

The title, Indian, probably has something to do with the stitch-like dashes in the upper right and the suggestion of unfolding at the left center - I think of tee-pees. And the two vertical dots - two "eyes" - in the stitched area make me think of Philip Guston's klansmen, masked but unveiled in the '70s.

mo' no

As of Monday, pro-Republican third-party organizations had paid for a total of $23.6 million worth of ads, while Democratic-aligned groups had spent just $4.8 million on TV. 

Mo' money, mo' money, no money! Info from Politico via Firedoglake.

no news

Some of the things I have neither blogged nor linked recently:

Sterile, genetically-engineered salmon "with higher disease resistance and environmental tolerance" competing for resources with natural, fertile salmon.

The white supremacist candidate for Congress endorsed by the NYS Republican party... in New York State. He's not so fond of the Jews, either.

Obama mocking Democrats angry that there's no public option in his health care reform bill, when he explicitly promised a public option during the campaign.

Fifty thousand American soldiers in Iraq become - poof! - fifty thousand American advisers in Iraq. They still have guns and missiles and use them when requested by Iraqi forces... and under other circumstances that I'm sure we'll eventually read about.

American soldiers charged - by the army - with killing Afghan civilians for fun, keeping fingers as souvenirs.

Glenn Beck. Haven't even heard anything terrible about him in a week, not since his big payday on 9/11/10.

My brother's driving me crazy. Mom is well, though!

You can already see the results of the insurance industry gaming health care reform. But you haven't even seen the beginning of the financial industry gaming derivatives reform.

A nice middle-class African American lady criticized Obama at a town hall, in terms I can well agree with. The loathsome NY Post ran her words and picture on the cover. This is like finding out that the political editor at Juggs favors allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire.

During the W administration, the FBI broke a ton of rules while improperly surveilling pacifists and animal lovers. They lied about it to Congress and hid behind declarations of classification.
During the O administration, this is reported by the Office of the Inspector General and... that's it. No criminal charges, no loss of seniority, no reprimands. Law be damned. Same thing goes for torture, eavesdropping, kidnapping, killing civilians with remote armaments (drones, missiles).
Tornadoes in Queens and Brooklyn.

The Chinese government is creating a high-speed rail line to cross Asia into Europe. Beijing to London in two days. It won't be oil-dependent - China's building three times as many new nuclear plants in the next decade as the rest of the world put together. Who needs America?

A link: Jill Johnston is dead, at 81. I always found her to have interesting things to say in an interesting way. Tight prose. Not like mine, that goes on and on. This page features her recent work. Don't miss links to earlier pieces at the left.

grovel

...and you can't spell "grovel" without Rove.

gnash

Stephanopoulos interviews the victorious O'Donnell.
Check it: all credit to the Mighty Mooselina. O'D refers to Karl Rove et al as The Establishment. O'Dious utters the "word" unfactual and rather then gently correct her or let the literate viewer know that he himself has some familiarity with the English language, GS utters the word right back to her. Appease her, Geo, she might be a Mighty Moose one day herself. O'Darn'll also decries her opponent's mudslinging, which is like water calling fire wet.
The libblogs are all taking this as a herald of Democratic victory in November, but I'm telling you, CO'D will do better than any current poll suggests. Even if she doesn't win, the lessons learned will not be lost on the moneyed powers.
Later (like, the next day) - I've been trying to muscle my brain back into blogging, so this and the previous entry have been slow of thought and awkward in expression.
For example, I laboriously described in my previous entry, entitled "gnaw," the three factions of the Repub party, when they could have been shorthanded easily, as Matt Bai does in this NY Times piece:

Going back to the 1960s, the modern conservative movement has been an amalgam of three distinct factions: the champions of free enterprise, the foreign policy types often described as neoconservatives, and the social conservatives who became the spine of the party’s grass-roots campaign apparatus.

The neoconservatives are the current RParty establishment; the champions of free enterprise are the "socialism for millionaires, sucks to everyone else" group; and the social conservatives are the 'baggers that the second group will back/exploit and the first group will kowtow to.
For example, Romney endorses O'Donnell, donates to her campaign. Smart move - Mittens doesn't harm his chances down the road, but collects brownie points from tea'pers and Queen Sarah with a small investment of money and "integrity."
John Dickerson at Slate is also skeptical that T'per victory now means Dem wins in November. He points out that "only" 18% of independents approve of the Tparty and 12% are more likely to vote for a T-anointed candidate. Well, hell, the independents who aren't willing to drink the Tea can be divided into those who generally vote Dem and will again this November, and those who generally vote Dem and won't bother this November. That 12-18% of Independents is plenty enough to put O'Do or any other Teeps over the top.
Now that I reread Dickerson, he's not so skeptical about Dem opps. I just think the polls etc. he cites show more trouble for the Dems than he does.
Emma Mustich at Salon rounds up shocking confessions of Pristine O'Donnell, almost all of which are in line with the professions of successfully elected social conservatives. The exception is whether masturbation (sticking it to yourself) is as sinful as adultery (sticking it to someone else) - most soc'cons wouldn't agree, they just think it's icky and shouldn't be taught to schoolchildren and has a generally liberal taint to it. (I have no empirical evidence to cite for this. I keep trying to find some on the 'net and getting distracted.)
To end where I began, the Matt Bai article is mainly about the campaign tactic of Casting Shade on The Prez:

Mr. Obama’s alleged sympathy for so-called Muslim extremists who would desecrate the World Trade Center site, his socialist African ancestry and his early years in Indonesia — all of this creates a shadowy archetype that every conservative enclave (fiscal, foreign policy and religious) can find a reason to fear.

Bai's use of "shadowy" above is clever and knowing (like my use of "casting shade"! Get it? I'm clever and knowing, too! as much good as that's doing me). Muslim-hating and Obama-shading - even if it doesn't put the Unspeakables in charge in 2010, at least these things can be quantified for 2012.

gnaw

The current political season should be a true case of "follow the money." Christine O'Donnell, another Palin endorsee, is the Tea Party associated winner of the Republican primary in Delaware. The Repuglican intelligentsia (i.e., Karl Rove) are not pleased, nor are the national and state party organizations.
Keep an eye on who funds O'Donnell's senatorial campaign from now til November.
The Tea Party Express is already announcing support - they are our old conservative friends in teabagging garb - their roots are in the faux-populist health care riots of last summer. Basically an establishment front attempting to harness Tea Party energy. So not quite your current Republican party but happy to work within it.
The combination of seeming grassroots teabagging with a mysteriously well-funded campaign featuring lots of advertising, busses for rallies, pre-printed posters will mean that the folks liberated by the Supreme Court "corporations is people" free speech decision are boosting her. These are the people who think the current Republican party is too middle-of-the-road and that it's time we really, really, REALLY let the free market show what it can do, esp if losses can be pawned off on the peons.
I think the latter will be the case. What on earth do the wealthy malefactors have to lose? Money? That can always be coined, stolen, or hornswoggled.
For them, O'Donnell's campaign will make a great case study in how to present and handle a candidate even less qualified than Dubya; how much untruth a Fox-fed public will voluntarily swallow; what issues can best be exploded to obscure actual crises; and just how much money per voter might it take to put a national candidate from Wasilla, Alaska into the White House.
If the MOR Republicans warm to O'Donnell between now and November, it will mean that they recognize not the power of teabaggery but of the plutocracy that wiggles it.
La la la.