v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

GismontiPascoal - André Mehmari & Hamilton de Holanda

Madison Park in Yesterday's Rain

Vallejo Noctunro 2012-rain of fools

King of Bain

From the NYRB, reviews several books on Mitt Romney and the viedoe on his years at Bain:

Kranish and Helman give a comprehensive reading of the Bain years—the greatest contribution of their book. They write that the “most thorough” analysis of Bain’s performance during Romney’s tenure (1989–2001) came from an analysis written by Deutsche Bank, which found that of sixty-eight major deals, nearly half—thirty-three—had lost money or merely broken even. On the others, though, profits soared, sometimes for everyone, and sometimes not. Certain success stories, like Domino’s Pizza, are widely known. On the other side of the ledger, there was a buyout of a department store chain called Sage Stores, for example. It made Bain $175 million in 1996–1997. But three years later, the company was in bankruptcy.

All these matters came starkly to the fore in mid-January with the release of the twenty-seven-minute film King of Bain, one of the most stunning and mysterious campaign artifacts of our time. It was made not by a liberal but by a conservative, Jason Killian Meath, who had produced ads for the Romney campaign in 2008. It was commissioned, according to Peter J. Boyer of The Daily Beast, by another conservative—Barry Bennett, who works at a firm whose principals include Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary.⁴ The rights were then purchased by a Super PAC affiliated with Newt Gingrich, apparently with money supplied by right-wing Las Vegas tycoon Sheldon Adelson. All this right-wing muscle has been invested in a project that makes Oliver Stone seem timid. A typical snippet of the voice-over goes:

This is a tale of greed, playing the system for a quick buck, a group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.

The film was quickly and largely (though not wholly) discredited. Gingrich and Rick Perry, who led the attacks on Romney’s “vulture capitalism” (Perry’s phrase), were warned to cool it by Rush Limbaugh and others on the right. Romney has tried different defenses, first saying Bain created “more than 100,000” jobs, then revising that downward to “tens of thousands,” then to “thousands,” before it spiked back up in a January 16 debate to 120,000. The Obama people are presumably building their file of legitimate attacks on Bain. An argument about whether Bain created or eliminated more jobs will dissolve into the usual fog of unprovables, and it would be foolish of the Obama people to pursue that. (Still, is 120,000 jobs over twelve years really that impressive?) The point is that Bain Capital existed not to create jobs or destroy them, but to enrich the investor class—that now much-discussed “1 percent”—Romney himself very much included.

 

Fresh, Cutting Edge Corporatism

Nathan Jurgenson at The New Inquiry writes about the downside to the TED conference:

Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism. With the Facebook IPO around the corner, we are all well aware of the big venture-capital sums floating around Silicon Valley (the new Wall Street?). What’s infuriating is how Silicon Valley capitalism consistently attempts to sell itself as outside or even above corporatism. In announcing Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has consistently violated user privacy in the name of profit, stated that “we don’t build services to make money.” He actually said that.

Fewer and fewer people are falling for this. And they have begun to realize TED events raise similar corporate-speak red flags as well. Yes, people want new and entertaining ideas but feel alienated by the branding and packaging reminiscent of the corporate Silicon Valley establishment. “Consumers” are savvy, and they know when they are being sold to. So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery. Each new “big idea” to “inspire the world” and “change everything” pitched from the TED stage reminds me of the swamp root and snake oil liniment being sold from a wagon a hundred years past. As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”

TED attempts to present itself as fresh, cutting edge, and outside the box but often fails to deliver. It’s become the Urban Outfitters of the ideas world, finding “cool” concepts suitable for being packaged and sold to the masses, thereby extinguishing the “cool” in the process. Cutting-edge ideas not carrying the Apple-esque branding are difficult to find.

At TED, “everyone is Steve Jobs” and every idea is treated like an iPad. The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons, pushing an evangelical, cultish attitude toward “the new ideas that will change the world.” Everything becomes “magical” and “inspirational.” In just the top-ten most-viewed TED talks, we get the messages of “inspiration,” “astonishment,” “insight,” “mathmagic” and the “thrilling potential of SixthSense technology”! The ideas most popular are those that pander to a metaphysical, magical portrayal of the role of technology in the world.

The way TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity leads to perhaps the most damming argument against the TED epistemology: It necessarily leaves out other groups and other ways of knowing and presenting ideas. As Paul Currion tweeted, TED seems “unaware of its own ideological bias.” Let’s take one example. Take a wild guess which gender is massively over-represented as TED speakers (answer, via Tom Slee @whimsley). And TEDxWomen stinks of tokenism. Hint: It is better to be more inclusive through and through than to segregate marginalized groups into their own token corners. But the TED style aligns much more easily to articulating ideas that sell than ideas that concern power, domination, and social inequalities. Real cutting-edge ideas also come from the margins. TED’s corporate-establishment voice and style aren’t without their uses, but they are certainly not innovative or cutting edge.

As problematic as TED is in itself, its popularity is more troublesome, coming to dominate the social conversation about what new technologies mean. Not that TED should be barred a role in the conversation. Because of the conference, some complex ideas get wider exposure than they otherwise would (as Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal pointed out in a Tweet). But TED and the larger TED-like world of Silicon Valley corporatism have far too much importance, as Evgeny Morozov points out when criticizing the “Internet guru.”

Das Puppendorf

llustrations for Das Puppendorf (The Village Dolls) by Hans Hoffmann (Germany, 1906) at 50 Watts

Legalized Corruption

From a review of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Republic Lost at The Coffin Factory:

Lessig details the anti-free-market interventions that our government has institutionalized, from dairy-price protection (making American milk and cheese 50% more expensive than in any other country), to subsidies for the steel and sugar industries, each resulting in the transfer of millions of dollars from tax-payers to multi-billion dollar corporations and the wealthy.  Because we use public costs to earn private profits, Lessig writes that America is “the dumbest form of socialism known to man,” spending $90 billion on “corporate welfare” just in 2009.  Big American businesses, especially agricultural corporations and oil/energy corporations, are only profitable because they are not paying their costs—tax payers pay more to clean up environmental pollution caused by energy companies than those companies make in profits.  Whether it is the fact that our education system is failing because we don’t offer teachers suitable salaries and allow for tenure to keep bad teachers in schools or that our financial system has failed because of “insane” deregulation, every problem facing our nation comes down to the “systematic irrationality” that lies at the heart of our political system: that politicians are essentially being bought by campaign donations.

Seventy-five percent of Americans believe that campaign contributions “buy results in congress,” and seventy-six percent believe campaign contributions “influence judicial decisions.”  This is certainly an issue that most Americans are aware of.  So why isn’t this problem being fixed, if three-fourths of our population want it to be fixed?  Mainly, Lessig argues, it is because problems pay.  No matter what the issue, perpetuating a problem allows a constant flow of money from special interest groups to political parties.  Having to run for election every two years, Lessig writes, thirty to seventy percent of a House member’s time is spent raising money.  We pay our congressmen to deliberate, but no member listens to another member’s argument anymore, or even attends congressional hearing. In fact, most congressmen don’t even read the bills they pass.  They are simply too busy trying to raise money to do the job they are hired to do.  Whether or not campaign contributions are actually corruption (the Supreme Court doesn’t seem to think so), this distraction alone is enough to show that our system is mortally plagued and needs to be cured.

Even if the contribution system is not outright bribery, Lessig quotes several congressmen who freely admit that they give the most attention to those who have contributed the most money to their campaign.  One former congressman is quoted saying, “people who contribute get the ear of the member and the ear of the staff.  They have access—and access is it.  Access is power.”  Despite the egalitarian rule of democracy—one person, one vote—contributions create easy access to politicians for those who can afford to contribute or raise millions for political parties.  Of course, as Bob Dole says, “poor people don’t make campaign contributions,” and so only the extremely wealthy have access to politicians, and therefore influence public policy.  “Access is power,” so when a minority has disproportional access due solely to their wealth, they have great power, and democracy disintegrates.

Rosaire Appel

"untrapped melody", digital print, 16"x16" by Rosaire Appel

Robert Walser's Berlin and the Artist

A city like Berlin is an ill-mannered, impertinent, intelligent scoundrel, constantly affirming the things that suit him and tossing aside everything he tires of. Here in the big city you can definitely feel the waves of intellect washing over the life of Berlin society like a sort of bath. An artist here has no choice but to pay attention. Elsewhere he is permitted to stop up his ears and sink into willful ignorance. Here this is not allowed. Rather, he must constantly pull himself together as a human being, and this compulsion encircling him redounds to his advantage. But there are yet other things as well.

Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud, and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding.

The excellent gentleman from the provinces, however, should by no means imagine that here in the city there are not lonelinesses as well. The metropolis contains lonelinesses of the most frightful sort, and anyone who wishes to sample this exquisite dish can eat his fill of it here. He can experience what it means to live in deserts and wastes. The metropolitan artist has no dearth of opportunities to see and speak to no one at all. All he has to do is make himself unpopular among certain arbiters of taste or else consistently fixate on failures, and in no time he’ll have sunk into the most splendid, most blossoming of abandonments.

The artist who is crowned with success lives in the metropolis as if in an enchanting Oriental dream. He hastens from one elegant household to the affluent next, sits down unhesitatingly at the opulently laden dining tables, and while chewing and slurping provides the entertainment. He passes his days in a virtual state of intoxication. And his talent? Does an artist such as this neglect his talent? What a question! As if one might cast off one’s gifts without so much as a by-your-leave. On the contrary. Talent unconsciously grows stronger when one throws oneself into life. You mustn’t be constantly tending and coddling it like a sickly something. It shrivels up when it’s too timidly cared for.

The artistic individual is nonetheless permitted to pace up and down, like a tiger, in his cave of artistic creation, mad with desire and worry over achieving some output of beauty. As no one sees this, there is no one to hold it against him. In company, he should be as breezy, affable, and charming as he can manage, neither too self-important nor too unimportant either. One thing he must never forget: he is all but required to pay court to beautiful, wealthy women at least a little.

After approximately five or six years have passed, the artist—even if he comes from peasant stock—will feel at home in the metropolis. His parents would appear to have lived and given birth to him here. He feels indebted, bound, and beholden to this strange rattling, clattering racket. All the scurrying and fluttering about now seem to him a sort of nebulous, beloved maternal figure. He no longer thinks of ever leaving again. Whether things go well with him or poorly, whether he comes down in the world or flourishes, no matter, it “has” him, he is forever under its spell, and it would be impossible for him to bid this magnificent restlessness adieu.

from NYRB

Bryan Derballa/Lovebryan

from LoverBryan his shoot at Fashion Week

Ed Kienholz

Five Car Stud

From the LA Times:

It is a difficult piece on multiple levels. It is enormous, for one thing: a tableau installation involving nine life-sized figures, five automobiles, several trees and a truckload of dirt. More difficult still is what the piece depicts: a circle of white men, lighted only by the headlights of the circled automobiles, pinning and castrating a lone black man, while a child cowers in one of the cars and a woman — presumably the victim's companion — huddles and vomits in another.

The white figures are all realistically cast, but for the grotesque rubber masks on each of the men. The black figure's face is uncannily bifurcated: a clear plastic outer face is frozen in a scream while a darker one within it is "sadly resigned and quiet," as Kienholz put it in a statement at the time. His torso is made from a rectangular tin filled with black water, in which float letters that spell out a racial slur.

"It's a shocking piece," says Reddin Kienholz, speaking from her studio in Idaho. "If your sympathy is with the plight of people, it's a tough piece to deal with."