The Ornamental Figure

Excellent art by Heather Robinson at my friend's gallery. Beautiful works on paper, collage, acrylic with some interesting techniques. The Drugstore Gallery is part of the Drugstore Vintage Decor shop. My friend Lynnore is the owner, tell her I said hey.

scar3

scar3, originally uploaded by ck23.

detail of assemblage "scarification" of found objects, mixed media. copyright 2006 charles keatts, view from below.

My Burroughs and Language Squidoo Lens

Not only is my Lens an interesting beginning but this is an interesting new site I discovered through Solsken. Check out her Lens also on Overlap.

in the mission

in the mission
Originally uploaded by ck23.

comparisons and other traps

my novel today seems like a mix of W. S. Burroughs,Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Neal Stephenson. Burroughs for the chaos, the sci-fi cut-up, and ARG for the overall postmodern sheen, the glossy hard focus on aesthetics/form over content and NS for the real interest in technology and the future it may lead us to. Thank god I have the basic narrative structure down.

Don't forget my Genet-like semifictional memoir/journaling which comprises a lot of the content. I don't think it's all that interesting but it's good enough I guess. It's all about the form.

As much as I try to tame it, move it more toward the traditional narrative I think is needed or wanted somehow, the more clear it becomes that this will not happen. This doesn't mean that someone would look at it and not see it clearly, in their own mind, as characters, story. It's just my perspective from inside the process. It's fascinating, if difficult. This is the only novel I am "inside" because it's mine. Others I only see from the outside.

technorati tags: barthes derrida

Fashion and the Super Bowl

So far this is the most interesting thing I have seen related to the SB, which isn't saying much, but it's pretty great...

technorati tags: sports fashion

Helping Bill O'Reilly by Nicholas Kristof of the NYT

[This is an op-ed from yesterday's NYT with a link above to his web page: I have copied the text because you may not be able to view it w/o a subscription.]

After Mr. O'Reilly denounced me in December as a "left-wing ideologue" (a charge that alarmed me, given his expertise on ideologues), I challenged him to defend traditional values by joining me on a trip to Darfur. I wrote: "You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared ... and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause."

A few days ago, I finally got my answer. Mr. O'Reilly declared in his column: "I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio. There's no way I can go to Africa."

No need to give up so easily, Bill. With a satellite phone, you can do your show from anywhere.

But maybe Mr. O'Reilly's concern is cost, so I thought my readers might want to give him a hand. You can help sponsor a trip by Mr. O'Reilly to Darfur, where he can use his television savvy to thunder against something actually meriting his blustery rage.

If you want to help, send e-mail to sponsorbill@gmail.com or snail mail to me at The Times, and tell me how much you're willing to pay for Mr. O'Reilly's expenses in Darfur. Offers will be anonymous, except maybe to the N.S.A. Don't send money; all I'm looking for is pledges. I'll post updates at nytimes.com/ontheground.

(Note: pledges cannot be earmarked. It is not possible to underwrite only Mr. O'Reilly's outgoing ticket to Darfur without bringing him home as well.)

Sure, this is a desperate measure. But with several hundred thousand people already murdered in Darfur and two million homeless and living in shantytowns, the best hope for those still alive is a strong dose of American outrage.

Worse, all the horrors that we've already seen in Darfur may be remembered only as the prelude. Security in the region is deteriorating, African Union peacekeepers are becoming targets, and the U.N. has warned that if humanitarian agencies are forced out, the death toll may rise to 100,000 per month.

Just as dangerous, the government-supported janjaweed — the brutal militia responsible for the slaughter — is now making regular raids across the border into Chad. There is a growing risk that Chad will collapse into war as well, hugely increasing the death toll and spreading chaos across a much larger region.

Last week, the United Nations agreed to plan for an international force. It will be nice if the force materializes — but even that half-step is probably almost a year away. The solution isn't American ground forces, but a starting point would be American resolve to put genocide at the top of the international agenda. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush barely lets the word "Darfur" past his lips.

The best way for President Bush to honor Coretta Scott King isn't simply to recite platitudes at her funeral today, but to push loudly and forcefully to stop genocide. Was the essential message of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about the need to be seen at funerals? Or about standing up to injustice, like a genocide in which infants are grabbed from their mothers' arms and tossed onto bonfires?

The reality is that the only way the White House will move on Darfur is if it is flooded with calls from the public — and that will happen only when the genocide is brought home to living rooms around America.

According to the Tyndall Report, which analyzes the content of the evening newscasts of the broadcast networks, their coverage of Darfur actually declined last year. The total for all three networks was 26 minutes in 2004. That wasn't much — but it dropped to just 18 minutes during all of 2005.

ABC's evening news program had 11 minutes about Darfur over the year, NBC's had 5 minutes, and CBS's found genocide worth only 2 minutes of airtime during the course of 2005.

In contrast, the networks gave the Michael Jackson trial in 2005 a total of 84 minutes of coverage. There aren't comparable figures for cable networks like Fox, but Mr. O'Reilly and other cable newscasters pretty much ignored the Darfur catastrophe.

Mr. O'Reilly has a big audience and a knack for stirring outrage. Lately, he (quite properly) galvanized an outcry over a ridiculously light sentence for a sexual predator in Vermont. The upshot was that the sentence was increased. Good stuff!

So imagine the furor Mr. O'Reilly could stir up if he publicized the hundreds of thousands of rapes, murders and mutilations in Darfur. He could save lives on a grand scale.

Join the pledge drive! I'm starting with my own $1,000 pledge to sponsor Mr. O'Reilly's trip. Please help.

***

For more on the exchanges with Mr. O'Reilly, see Mr. Kristof's weblog.

metacritic.com

interesting stuff. sad that Munich did so much better than Murderball.

found on http://www.plasticbag.org/ by way of http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

Munich and Mad Cow Girl

Saw Munich Friday night. Intense, violent, powerful, all these things. A bit heavy-handed in that Spielberg way when he wants to make a point. It was a powerful statement I thought about how violence and vengeance tear people down in spite of their best efforts, destroying their humanity, leaving them paranoid and insane. I don't know enough about the history of Munich, Black September, and the role of Golda Meier and Israeli assassins to comment on the historical angle, but it was a powerful film, not as a good film but in the context of these historical events, perhaps roughly sketched. The Wikipedia article goes into the history and controversy around the film.

The main character becomes increasingly isolated as he carries out his mission to assassinate all those involved in the kidnapping and execution of Israeli athletes at the Munich games. Janislovski's normal pretty camera work was noticeably absent here except for a few key points. Everything looked pretty normal. This was not Minority Report or Schindler's List. Better than MR and maybe in some ways a sequel to SL.

from Wikipedia: "Of those believed to have planned the Munich massacre, only Mohammed Daoud Oudeh (Abu Daoud), the man who says Munich was his idea, is known to be alive, and is in somewhere in the Middle East or Africa. He was shot thirteen times from a distance of around two meters on July 27, 1981 in a Warsaw hotel coffee shop, but survived the attack with surprising strength. It is even said he chased his would-be assassin down to the front entrance of the hotel before collapsing."

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Tonight I went to the San Francisco Independent Film Festival and saw Mad Cow Girl. Fragmented, experimental, lots of blood, beef, cows, sex, sex with ministers, martial arts, various strange murders, mad cow disease, lust, etc. Interesting stuff. Walter Koenig from Star Trek played the crazy obsessed preacher. The lead was a woman who looked a bit like Sarah Silverman, did just as good a job as SS would have done, probably. She is a woman who inspects beef, packing plants, butchers, whatever. She is sexually obsessed with a minister, a televangelist. She loves meat and martial arts movies, and while we see news broadcasts about mad cow disease she is eating lots and lots of beef and being told she has some kind of brain tumor. She vomits a lot and eventually goes insane in a confessional, going on a Kill Bill type spree. Most excellent stuff. Definitely full of wonderful gags, bizarre sex, enough gross meat scenes to get you off beef for a while, etc. etc.

It's true that the audience was more or less speechless during the Q&A. I thought that even though some of the production was lower quality it really didn't matter which is problem the ultimate for a low budget film. And I don't think it will give me nightmares which is a plus.

New Work: Wangechi Mutu

I went to see Mutu tonight at the SFMoma as she talked about slides and videos of her work with the curator of her new installation there and then spoke with the audience. It was rather intense: she is really a true artist/intellectual in the sense that her art coexists with her ideas and vice versa. It is a symbiotic relationship, one mode would suffer without the other and possibly die. She may not see a difference, as the art may be expressions of her ideas. True enough, but more powerful with her explanations. She is very articulate.

The image above is interesting and powerful, not in this show but a piece she did on an old anatomy book, a series.

This photo is closer to her current installation at the SFMoma:

She gave me some ideas for a piece I have been working on. What struck me is how she is less of a "visual artist" than an intellectual, and I don't mean that as a slight but as a promotion, in the sense that intellectuals can be superior to artists. Or maybe it doesn't matter.