October 6, 2005
That '80s Artist Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:00 PM EST One sure sign that you’re getting old is when the decade you grew up in becomes the subject of campy nostalgia. It’s a 20-year cycle, so when I was growing up in the 1970s, we all watched Happy Days and Grease and put on what no doubt were grotesque parodies of 1950s sock hops in our high-school gyms. Did 1950s kids imitate the Depression, I wondered? Maybe not, but a few years ago, when I was reading a lot about the late 1940s, I was surprised to learn that Al Jolson and live vaudeville made comebacks after World War II. In recent years my own decade has gone through the wringer, though it seems to be waning now. I knew the ’70s revival had passed its peak when I went to a basketball game and the team’s mascot appeared during a time-out disguised as what the announcer called “Mr. ’70s.” This basically amounted to a hippie on a skateboard, and I thought: Okay, if you take the average of ’60s and ’80s, I guess it comes out to ’70s. Right now it’s the ’80s’ turn, and not just in pop culture. Jenny Holzer, a stalwart of that decade’s art scene, is back too. For a while now, she’s had an installation over the front entrance at 122 Fifth Avenue in New York, a few blocks north of American Heritage World Headquarters, and now she has installed a much bigger one at the New York Public Library that will be on view from tonight (Thursday) through Sunday, October 9: http://www.nypl.org/research/calendar/eventdesc.cfm?id=1471 Holzer is a word artist; her work consists of sentences or phrases, usually with a vaguely menacing tone (e.g., EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU or YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY), which are projected onto walls, programmed into electronic signs, or occasionally even painted on canvas. This may sound lame, but by the standards of 1980s art it’s actually quite advanced, because she went to the trouble of writing the phrases herself. I knew an artist whose paintings consisted of sentences or phrases extracted from novels—sometimes just a single word—that he painted on canvas over and over until he ran out of room. That’s it. He didn’t even do the lettering by hand; he used a stencil. And you can get posters of his stuff at the Whitney. Jenny Holzer is Michelangelo compared to that guy. At any rate, after looking at some of Holzer’s literary/artistic productions—you can get a sample at http://slate.msn.com/SlateGallery/96-06-24/holzer.htm —the thought occurred to me that she has missed out on her most natural medium: fortune cookies. Almost any of her mottoes would sound great when read out loud after a nice plate of General Tso’s chicken. Some of them even work with “in bed” at the end: SAVOR KINDNESS BECAUSE CRUELTY IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE LATER OLD FRIENDS ARE BETTER LEFT IN THE PAST PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT YOU HOVER NEAR LOVELY UNCONSCIOUS LIFE FORMS THAT OFFER NO IMMEDIATE RESISTANCE So that’s my brilliant business idea: Get in touch with Holzer’s agent, arrange for a license, get the cookies made, and sell them to hip restaurants or irony-oriented novelty stores. It’s a potential gold mine—okay, maybe a tin mine. And all I want out of the deal is the knowledge that I’ve done my bit to advance the cause of Art. (Well, that and maybe a small royalty . . .)
October 5, 2005
More on Watergate Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:00 PM EST A few days ago, I wrote that the federal government’s meltdown in the wake of Hurricane Katrina might, in the long run, lend the Republican party a boost. In response to this argument, my colleague John Steele Gordon wrote the following: “Mr. Zeitz notes that the Watergate scandal of the Nixon era—far and away the greatest political scandal since World War II—gave the Democrats only a temporary boost. He argues that Watergate was evidence that government doesn’t work and conservatives always benefit in the long term from such evidence. I disagree. I think Watergate was evidence that while men are frail and always will be, the Constitution is not frail and government did indeed work.” I think two points need clarifying here: First Mr. Gordon has not accurately summarized my argument. I did not write that Watergate was “evidence that government doesn’t work.” I wrote that “Watergate shook the American public’s faith in government.” These are two very different ideas. Second, while it’s Mr. Gordon’s prerogative to disagree with my overall argument, I was not speculating about Watergate’s impact on the public’s faith in government. I was making an observation that is well-grounded in polling data. Since 1958 the University of Michigan National Election Study has included in its annual election surveys the following question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust government in Washington to do what is right—just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?” Between 1958 and 1962 the portion of respondents who answered “just about always” or “most of the time” fluctuated between 73 and 76 percent. By 1972 that number dropped to 54 percent, signaling an erosion of public trust stemming from the upheavals of the late 1960s. But in the wake of Watergate the portion of respondents who expressed trust in government dropped to 33 percent, tumbling to a low of 25 percent in the late 1970s. Since then, plenty of factors have helped drive down the public’s trust in government, including the Iran-Contra and Monica Lewinsky scandals, the sharp spike in negative campaign advertising, and more skeptical (and perhaps sensationalistic) media. The years since 1980 have not been kind to the Democratic party. There are many reasons for this, but on a fundamental level, when the public loses faith in government, the party that promotes public-sector solutions to social problems is bound to face some serious electoral problems.
October 3, 2005
State Flags Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:40 AM EST Fred Schwarz notes below that New York State has little that unifies it into a politically cohesive whole and that that is reflected in the state’s flag. Let me leave New York’s tangled politics and its even more tangled political history to another time and write a little about state flags. They are for the most part simply terrible. You can see them at www.50states.com/flag. I certainly agree that the New York State flag is one of the worst in the country, but partly that is because it is virtually indistinguishable at any distance from 16 other state flags (Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, and Utah). They are all the state seal on a dark blue field. One wonders if the governors of these states told some underling at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend to design the state flag before he went home. The first rule of good flag design is to be distinctive, whether flying or hanging limp on a windless day. Flags after all, were invented in the Middle Ages to help tell the good guys from the bad guys on a battlefield. Other rules for good design are: no writing; simplicity (flags should be instantly comprehensible, even to the nearsighted); and references to the history of the place the flag represents (the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack are perfect examples of this) or geography. Most state flags throw down one or more of these rules and dance upon them. California’s flag, for instance, violates them all, but of course it is far too historic in its own right to consider changing at this point. There are, to be sure, a few first-rate state flags. Maryland uses the splendid heraldic arms of the founding Calvert family. Arizona has a vivid stylized desert sunset in the top half over a deep blue bottom half with a copper star in the center, a reference to the state’s great copper deposits. Hawaii is the only state to incorporate the Union Jack, in honor of the European discovery of the islands by Captain Cook (and, I like to think, as a backhanded apology for the Hawaiians having subsequently eaten him). Ohio has the only swallowtail flag. But mostly the state flags are dreary and forgettable, what you’d expect from don’t-give-a-damn bureaucrats with no talent for graphic design and no sense of history. So attention governors of states with lousy flags (you know who you are): Have a contest to design a new flag, one that people can recognize at a glance and remember forever, one that tells the world who and what your state is and where it came from, one that makes the hearts of your citizens stir a little when they see it waving bravely in the wind. And, please, no state seals on dark blue fields.
October 1, 2005
Flag Football Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:45 AM EST According to a recent newspaper article, Syracuse University is now marketing itself on a Manhattan billboard as “New York’s College Team,” for football at least. The idea is that since there’s no major college-football team in New York City, its residents will adopt the Orangemen as their own. One potential problem with this plan is that Syracuse is 250 miles away. Rutgers, a mere 30-odd miles distant, would seem to have a much better claim, except that they’re in New Jersey, which is equivalent to having cooties for most New Yorkers. So it’s a question of which place New York City feels less of a connection to: New Jersey or Upstate. It’s a conundrum, because New York probably has the least unifying identity of any state. That’s been true at least since the fierce struggle, ultimately successful, to move the capital from New York City to Albany in 1799. It means something to be a Texan or a Californian, despite those states’ great diversity, geographic and demographic. But New York State doesn’t conjure up any sort of image in most people’s minds. And while I don’t know whether this is cause or effect, the difference is even reflected in the states’ flags. The main element of Texas’s flag is a Lone Star—strong, simple, direct. California’s has a picture of a bear—again, straightforward and to the point. New York’s flag, by contrast, looks like a garage sale, with two women carrying things, a globe, an eagle, mountains, Mr. Sunshine, and some ships on a body of water. With all those contrasting visual elements, the flag is as busy as Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It seems unlikely that Syracuse will gain much traction in New York City’s sports affections (except among its alumni, all of whom seem to live here). On the other hand, Rutgers has even less of a shot, not least because their team is so lousy. In the end, maybe New York City just doesn’t care about college football, any more than it cares about auto racing. New Yorkers like to think that they’re first-class in everything, and in football that means the NFL. The fact that the Jets and Giants play their games in New Jersey is, of course, a mere technicality. P.S. The token historical note here is that 50 or 75 years ago, New York did have a major-college football team with widespread and fervent support: Notre Dame. That’s much less true today, because the city has a lot fewer Catholics and most of them are Hispanic, which in many cases means they are more interested in soccer or baseball than in football.
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