 | Al Franken of The O'Franken Factor on Air America. |
Air America Arrives in Seattle
KPTK 1090 AM
On Monday, October 25th Seattle awoke to find 1090 AM — its quirky "Classic Country" radio station — replaced by Air America, the Left’s answer to the AM dial’s monoculture of angry right-wing talk.
With the election only days away, I was curious to hear what Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo — two personalities I have always admired for their humor and satirical bent — would have to offer me.
I must begin by letting you know that my politics are — by today’s standards — considerably far to the left.
Unlike the majority of people in this country, I have not forgotten that my family’s ascendancy into the middle class was not simply the result of determination and hard work: it was made possible through the progressive policies of the New Deal. I may disdain George Bush on account of his temperament and world view, but my primary fear is that he intends to reverse the great achievements in social equality and democratization that have occurred in the United States during the twentieth century.
In other words, I am a person who would be expected to enjoy Air America. But Air America is, I discovered, a most unpleasant experience.
What is completely lacking on Air America is wit, intelligence, and — most important of all — any sense of surprise. The hosts — Franken, Garofalo, and lesser luminaries named Ed Schultz (a Rush Limbaugh-type blowhard) and Randi Rhodes (a liberal Anne Coulter stand-in) — drive talking points home to listeners in the mind-numbing style of their right-wing counterparts who, we all know, take their cues directly from the White House. There is a feeling of desperation here, and worse, a kind of joylessness that I can happily do without.
What these dark times require is something more akin to parody. Why not use the conventions of radio to undermine the medium’s own sense of authority? This formula has certainly been successful when it comes to the mediums of broadcast news and the small town newspaper. Both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Onion force us to recognize the ways in which we can be manipulated through our blanket trust in broad spectrum news media. Jon Stewart and The Onion not only lead us to question our assumptions and beliefs about the world, they also make us laugh.
In this week’s Stranger there is a hilarious, if borderline tasteless, "do-it-yourself" Halloween costume guide for the busy parent that looks as though it might have come from Martha Stewart Living. The costumes — inspired by recent events such as the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Graib Prison — are worn by smiling, innocent children.
This shocking photo spread may well be the most astute commentary on the blindness of the American public towards the colossal failures and escalating violence of the Bush Administration. As a looked it over, I had to ask myself why two people as talented as Franken and Garofalo would abandon satire — a much more effective genre — for such uninspired partisan political hackwork. My guess is that they think they can appeal to the old base of the Democratic Party by dumbing themselves down to the level of their Republican Party-coordinated foes. This is as insulting as it is unoriginal.
Listening to Air America I also realized how much I missed the only local radio station that played Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash. If the Democrats ever hope to reestablish themselves as the party of the working people, of rural America and of the South, they could find no better voices to learn from.
 | Robert Irwin. |
Robert Irwin Lecture
Presented by The Contemporary Art Council
Seattle Art MuseumOctober 1st
Speaking at the Seattle Art Museum auditorium Friday night, Robert Irwin gave an account of his career within the context of the broader phenomenological history of art. Although it is essentially the same speech he has been giving in recent years, it has — like his art itself — steadily expanded and evolved.
As the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus says, "Just as no man can stand in the same river twice, that same man cannot stand twice in that river," and so it is with Irwin.
Irwin uses the language and structures of Hegel to describe this process, for they are uniquely suited to his program of philosophical inquiry and his explanation of his life’s work and the history of art itself. He talked at great length about the changing nature of art over the centuries, his story replete with dissolving picture frames, eroding hierarchies, and crucifixes that eventually gave way to expressionist brush strokes upon the canvas.
Inserting himself into this history, he spoke about his transformation from an abstract expressionist painter in the 1950s to an artist whose work began to reflect a growing interest in issues of perception and consciousness. It started, as observers of Irwin know, with his fascination with the shadows around the margins of his frames and has culminated, thus far, with his garden at the Getty Center and his landscape design for the Dia Beacon.
One of the subjects of Irwin’s talk was Nine Spaces/Nine Trees, a work commissioned by the City of Seattle in 1979 for the 4th Avenue side of the unloved and soon-to-be-demolished Public Safety Building. I was surprised to discover that this work was Irwin’s first site-generated landscape installation. However successful this piece may have been (Irwin did point out the work’s shortcomings in its former site) its presence downtown these last two decades is a testament to the courageous and innovative spirit that characterized the City’s Art in Public Places Program in those days.
If details can be worked out, it may also become the first such work to be moved from an original site to a different, more suitable, one across town as there are currently plans to re-site the work on the University of Washington campus. Although Irwin said that he preferred a location adjacent to the Odegaard Library across the road from the Henry, the exact placement of Nine Spaces/Nine Trees has yet to be determined.
Besides using the example of this neglected work to define a moment during which "public art" gave way to "art in public places," he also spoke at length about the larger trajectory of Modernism. He described the century between David’s Coronation of Napoleon and the abstract geometric paintings of Malevich as the first hundred years; the century between Malevich and the present as the second. He claimed that the era of Modernism is only half over – it will, in fact, take another two hundred years for humankind to fully understand its ramifications.
Irwin has never been content to remain doing what he has done before. More than any other artist of his generation, he has always been committed to taking risks that promise to carry his current investigation beyond the bounds of his last. Throughout much of his talk, Irwin told of the obstacles that presented themselves in the form of Richard Meier and, in the case of Nine Spaces, the Seattle Chief of Police. But in the true spirit of Hegel, he explained how these conflicts resulted in an escalation of understanding that would ultimately make the work stronger than it might otherwise have been.
If only we could watch and listen for another two centuries.
