We are lounging by the pool at the Claremont Club with our laptops (connected to web via satellite). Milo is my guest today. It is sunny, and the smoke is gone, though the chemical soup that is Southern California air is our medium. Today a Wall Street Journal opinionator called concerns about human-caused climate change a “religion.”
PJM: Do you wonder, Milo, whether chemistry is the cause of skin cancer, and not the Sun, at least not directly, or not-contingent?
MILO: Actually, I’ve been thinking about George Will lately, and reconsidering his hit piece on the Obama administration in September, arising from the Yosi Sergant faux scandal, the much ballyhooed episode, framed by the Right and its trolls as an attempt by the NEA to mobilize creative professionals to advocate for the President’s reform agenda.
PJM: Funny, I have, too. As you know, I integrated the scandalous episode into my NEA panel responses. Do you recall how down and out, like Orwell in London and Paris, Glenn Beck was then, how close only a few months ago that Tens of Millions of Dollars man of Ailes was, to losing all the sponsors over blatant racist comments, not to mention those mad rants, when Beck mustered all his might, against the tide of accountability, and took it upon himself to save America from the Endowment? Beck seems to have rebounded nicely, and I doubt accept the challenge of Jerry Saltz, that poser, and curate a couple of shows in New York.
MILO: Yes. What do you think about the tempest, the anti-NEA surge, now? …Aside from the obvious fact that George Will is in dire need of a hair stylist.
PJM: I love that George Will mentioned 15th Century Florence in his syndicated article. You might not realize it, Milo, but Florence is a dimensional city. Lula spent a year there, so we have books about it, plentiful data. Plus, the Italian jewel of a city travels around the world in her mind, in her memory. We could consider George and his putrid pedantry through the faceted lens of Florence.
MILO: …Which would certainly be more pleasant than confronting that gnome directly. It’s bad enough to have watched him mumble his fateful anti-cultural control message at the tables of the media monopoly, to the nodding painted faces of the himbo/bimbo info managers.
PJM: Agreed, though I personally would love the opportunity to confront G____ more viscerally and immediately directly than is possible through a keyboard. You know, I’ve been working the heavy bag again. I imagine I’ll be fit enough for a substantive exchange with a windbag in short order.
MILO: Yes, that would be satisfying on so many levels, dimensionally. Gangsta Will G and I are roughly equivalent in age, but I don’t know whether age is a gauge of fairness, in competition. Probably vitality and experience are more suited to qualifications, in a representative and accountable (free) social arena. Plus, George wears spectacles.
PJM: Your orbs are as keen as hawks’. He puts specs on his Gangsta nose, and wears spectacles on his sleeve, the way I used to wear a strip of my labor historian Mother’s dress on my arm in the ring. Speaking of labor, Massey is blasting away again at Coal River Mountain, close to the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment - 8.2 billion gallons of toxic coal slurry waste in an enormous retention pond, which, if it fails as we’ve been warned it might, would kill hundreds and wreak horrid and catastrophic damage on the countryside.
MILO: …And these hands make and break things, they are familiar with those dimensions. Do you fancy that Will aligns himself with the Medicis or the artisans?
PJM: You’re being rhetorical.
MILO: I am.
PJM: I would suggest that George Will aligns himself with the Council on Foreign Relations, and Robert Hughes, the great paunchy wag. Both and all align with fantasies of Manifest Destiny, and other excuses to murder and steal in the name of progress, advocacy for oppression as bloody stability, and God’s blessings on efficient redistribution of wealth upwards towards the stoic Protestant avatar class, no matter the cost in suffering and waste and horror. Does this have anything (I almost said aught) to do with Florence.
MILO: Certainly, there are disparities, as with any comparison rooted in malice. For instance, in 1950 - which as a year contains some of the same numbers as 1500, or 1492, with Columbus sailing that ocean blue to find gold adorning kind natives (who would soon be dying by the millions to mine gold for Europe’s kings and queens) and build a stockade. He was from Genoa, not Florence. Look here! Lorenzo Medici died in 1492, in Florence. Did George Will confuse American representative Democracy with the reign of the Medicis, in the golden age of Florence?
PJM: 1950. George was evoking Florence to suggest, and Hughes was cited to this end, that there is a glut of artist labor currently, from the manager’s perspective. Neither Hughes nor Will evidently read my proposals for a New Art in Action initiative, the neo-New Deal to remedy the artist glut. Do you know you can fly directly from Columbus, Ohio to Florence? Did you know there is a Columbus Hotel in Florence. I see here it’s a 3-Star. I wouldn’t want to fly Northwest there, though.
MILO: Ah, yes! 1950: the Florence agreement is drafted by UNESCO “to ensure the free flow of cultural products, especially books” - the Universal Copyright Convention. Thought property. Manifestly destined, as such. Just ask poor liar Shepard Fairey, whom the AP now has by his proverbial golden nuggets. You know, in 1492, according to answers.com, “Granada’s Muhammad XI surrenders the keys to his city January 2 to Castile’s Isabella and Aragon’s Ferdinand II, who take the last Muslim kingdom in Spain and end the Nasrid dynasty founded in 1238, completing the Christian Reconquista.”
PJM: So, there were wars against the Muslims then, too, just like today! Weren’t those royals the great patrons of Columbus’ magnificent voyage of discovery?
MILO: Quite so! I believe our rhizome is starting to shape itself, as all-at-once history.
PJM: Not if John McCain and ATT/Verizon can help it! Wait are we getting mashed-up in all-at-onceness? I just transported to the Sunlight Foundation’s Real Time Investigations website, and discovered that Congress received nearly $10 Million in Telcom donations over the past two years! Think that affected the anti-warrantless wiretapper investigations by our elected representatives, old friend?
MILO: Indubitably, amigo, and how about that Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, and Keep America Safe? I feel less safe already! “About” is telling me that “The Taíno culture encountered by Columbus in Cuba will be wiped out within 30 years by disease, forced labor, and Spanish musketry, leaving almost no trace of its existence beyond a few words that will survive in the English words barbecue, canoe, hammock, hurricane, and tobacco.”
PJM: Ah, tobacco! Now that sounds like a dramatic mashup - the only things that don’t go together are the hammock and the canoe, unless you picture it on a timeline. “I was paddling to the barbecue in my canoe, smoking good tobacco, when a hurricane appeared, forcing me to take to a cove, where I set up my hammock and slept through the storm tides. I wonder why McCain would be so against the free flow of ideas, even post-Florence agreement. I wonder what George Will thinks of the free flow of ideas?
MILO: I don’t know that either has experienced the free flow of ideas. Is this assuming too much?
PJM: Yes, like all tyrants, they may have had a deep spiritual experience, or an open mind, at some point, but they may have decided there ought to be very strict rules about who should share in that experience - since realization is only superficially individual - and how the experience should be managed or administered. The Drucker Centennial is slated to blast off next week, the day after all Saints, two days after All Souls. I wonder what Claremont looks like now, through a window in Hell?
MILO: Remember last year, about this time, we were discussing your Platonic Cave rapture. You were preparing for the Content show, and executing the precursors for your Thesis. Are you any less tired?
PJM: No, Milo, I am still tired of the Druckers and the Wills, and their penchant for arrogant inhumanity disguised as moral clarity and operational precision. When G-daddy called lobbying ‘”expressive behavior,” and therefore it is …art,” he must have known how truly he spoke, given that Corporate Money is now about to become John Robert’s Bane, and be transformed by ink and stain to Free Speech, and therefore… of the same genus as Art!
MILO: So, George Will is not a coward and a liar at all!
PJM: Far from it, Milo! George is the sorcerer’s apprentice, a conjurer of a lesser scale. He is like the moon unto Robert’s sun.
MILO: So, John McCain is not a corrupt politician! The Telcoms are not Enemies of the State and leeches needing of annihilation with extreme prejudice!
PJM: Not at all, Milo! They are simply practicing their dark arts, like Cheney before them and Cheney after, at one with the everlasting corporation, it that never dies, possessing the timeline of God. These practitioners have aligned their deep and profound realizations unto their maker, their sustainer, their voice their corporation, universal in its copyrightness, its ownership, its riches and promise. And they looked at what they had wrought and saw it was good, through the monoptical eyes of a golem, the Drucker window.
MILO: But what of Florence? I would suggest G-raser or (Hughes) in context hadn’t considered the European art markets of that age carefully, or one or both might have cited Bruges or Amsterdam, instead, though probably not Venice. These haters of makers, of life, would despise the Venetians, especially the artists, who controlled the market entirely, for no one there and then could sell a painting, but an artist. Bruges (does it rhyme with Hughes?) was a better market, value-wise, than Florence, though G_______ purports to be a free-marketer and is anything but that. Amsterdam, at any rate, employed taxation liberally and was the richer for it.
PJM: As Duchamp, that wild lion, chanted: “In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History (ibid).” He said so in ‘66, probably from a Pasadena couch, to a room of adoring old ladies - not far from here.
MILO: When will the NEA define art, so Georgey Porgy, and that genius Courrielche, and Nissan or Scion, or Roberts and ATT and McCain can no longer do so? Hairpiece George quoted the NEH, mocking the notion that the lives of “ordinary Americans” might be worthy content for great arts. I wonder what reply Studs Terkel might have handed Corporate Will, on this subject.
PJM: Probably a stout combination, or series of them, high and low, and so brutally hard as to disgorge George’s expensive hotel breakfast.
MILO:. George Will is entwined in “rhetorical cotton candy.” It is his conjugation. The offspring is Martha Stewart’s “Good Thing,” which he projects like Kristol the Younger into the carnival of greed and excess that is the nation’s Capitol of Will’s royal kingdom. Kristol the Elder may now share a view with Drucker in Hades, but their seed is fertilizing yet. Perhaps the wingnuts and teabaggers are right, and it is time for a new American Revolution, only they have just that right and nothing else, except that maybe guns will be necessary to execute it.
PJM: Oh? Will they hang banksters from the street lights in Claremont, instead of Drucker Centennial banners, then? Will failed CEOs swing freely above Wolfe’s Market?
MILO: Zeelio suggests that all must be nationalized into Commonwealth shares - Health Care, Land, Art, the Telcoms… I can see his point and his concept is revolutionary. Once again, American innovation - in the political realm - would change the world. We could unify the mutants and hybrids afflicting Democracy. Capitalism and Marxism and the others would hear the final bell toll.
PJM: Look here! George Will suggested mockingly that public spending on art is a Good Deed, and ironically presented a dimensional conjecture by accident! He suggested that we “(Try this: For the word ‘art,’ substitute ’surfing’ or ‘religion.’)” Do you think this glorified peckerwood has seen Geoff Cordner’s most recent photo series?”
MILO: No chance. And look here! See how in touch with Beuys and Warhol George Will is! Unfortunately, he - as is usual among the corporatists - he fails to get the attribution correct. Will attributes the Beuys/Warhol combinative definition of art to the government, although as anyone knows our government is simply representative. We are it, and it is us. So he is wrong in the artist, but very good in his summary of the State of the Arts of Creativity, as espoused across all fields (until the NEA champions a definition of art that drives the money-changers out of that temple to the beaches): “…because in this egalitarian era, government reasons circularly: Art is whatever an artist says it is, and an artist is whoever produces art. So, being an artist is a self-validating vocation.”
PJM: I am self-validating. I am a genius, and I am Spartacus!
MILO: I am Spartacus!
PJM: The figures GW cites, the big numbers pushing the guns off the battleship deck of government interventionism - why doesn’t George explain why the government is so deeply embedded in those aspects of ordinary American lives, like a media monopoly reporter on his way to Baghdad?
MILO: 1980. George Will mentioned 1980. What happened that year in America?
PJM: Did you see The Warning on NPR’s Frontline?
MILO: No, but I did see Capitalism: A Love Story. That scene: Don Regan and Ron Reagan at the Stock Exchange, and Regan leaning over to tell his monkey to speed things up! Wow. In that moment, I foresaw in hindsight Bush-Cheney.
PJM: Milo, old friend, I have to get in the water. Will you watch my laptop, so McCain and ATT don’t steal it?
MILO: I’ll be napping, but I shouldn’t fear. The life guard is a Cameron, and his arms are coiled.
PJM: Do you want to know why the National Public Discourse has devolved over the past twenty-five years, into an ugly polarized hate cycle 7/24/365, televised and in all media unleashed?
MILO: The fools killed public art for the US and put down the artist.
