Seize the Day

Seize the Day

New Mexicans joke that this state is the land of “mañana,” and before I leave I am going to purchase my favorite T-shirt which has the slogan: “Carpe mañana.” However, now that my sojourn here is winding down to its last thirty days, I'm thinking more along the lines of the original Latin - “Carpe diem” and trying to take advantage of all the unique experiences Albuquerque has to offer.

First and foremost that means early morning bike rides along the “bosque,” the forested area of cottonwoods and native trees that runs along the Rio Grande about a quarter mile from my house. In this area of New Mexico the Rio Grande is not very impressive - “el rio no muy grande” (the river that is not very “grande”) is a family joke, but the ribbon of green that borders the river on either side is very impressive, a striking vision of green in a landscape that otherwise paints itself in muted tones of browns, yellows, and the darker blues and greys of the mountains.

At 7:00 a.m. with a cool breeze blowing across my face, it's just about the most wonderful thing I can imagine to bike along side the river and have the city disappear from view as the green space on either side and the gentle slope of the hills create the illusion that there are no housing developments over the horizon. A gentle curve brings me face to face with the Sandia Mountains, bathed in the soft light of the morning sunrise or cloud-covered as they are so often now in monsoon season.

A family of geese will waddle across the bike path; a rabbit will dart in front of me; or a road-runner disappear into the brush with a lizard in its mouth. Only once or twice have I seen a coyote, but I know they are there as well, waiting in the shadows.

For a brief hour I can imagine there really still is a “wilderness” in this metropolis of 600,000, and even when another biker or walker or roller-blader crosses my path, there is the pleasant exchange of “Good morning” or “Passing on your left,” followed by “Thanks” and a wave.

I kick myself for not having discovered this pleasure when I first arrive, for letting the goat thorns that deflated my tires, or the homesickness that made any sight of the desert unwelcome, keep me from the pleasures of speeding or strolling along a path that brings me in view of all the beauties Albuquerque has to offer while conveniently obscuring its urban sprawl.

Dumped by the Democrats, or What have the Telecomms Got that I Ain't Got?

Dumped by the Democrats, or What have the Telecomms Got that I Ain't Got?

It's the fate of a progressive Democrat. You keep hoping this time your party is going to tie the knot and make all your dreams come true, and there you find yourself all alone at the chapel, jilted one more time as Democrats make nice with the Bush administration allegedly to court the “center” of the electorate.

Actually, I've never been that naïve about any political party, but it has been a hard slog these past eight years watching the Bush Administration and a Republican-controlled Congress eviscerate the regulatory authority of agencies from the EPA to NEA, try to deep-six any factual information about climate change, and wreak havoc with the Constitution, especially when it comes to Americans' civil liberties.

But I really feel betrayed by Democrats over the recent so-called “compromise” FISA legislation which is less “compromise” than “capitulation” by the one group of politicians progressives have supported through thick and thin, mostly thin, for the last eight years.

What is going on with the Democratic party? Here we have a piece of legislation that will tear the guts out of a law Democrats sought as a check on unbridled executive power when Nixon authorized the burglary of the Democratic National Headquarters that created the Watergate scandal. And yet Democrats are voluntarily lying down in front of this legislative steamroller, led by Representative Steny Hoyer, and Senators Pelosi and Reid, as if they had never heard of Nixon, Watergate, and have suffered collective amnesia about the Bush administration's repeated attempts to subvert constitutional checks on its power at every turn. Have they even read any of Bush's recent signing statements?

I hate to seem paranoid, but I can can only wonder what the telecommunications lobbyists have been up to on Capitol Hill lately. According to Wired, for example, “Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to [Senator Jay] Rockefeller totaling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon),” (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/dem-pushing-spy.html). Jay Rockefeller is one of the main proponents of the “compromise” legislation.

On the other side of the aisle, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has “dozens of lobbyists [with] political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate,” according to USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-23-mccainlobbyists_N.htm).

According to statistics compiled by MAPlight.org, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave contributions averaging $8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for the telecommunications companies and $4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity. 88% of the Democrats who changed their position to support immunity(83 of 94 Democratic representatives) received PAC contributions from telecommunications companies affected by the proposed legislation during the last three years.

As the late Molly Ivins used to say, “It's not that they sell themselves that hurts, it's that they sell themselves so damned cheap.”

From the 69-28 vote in the Senate today, it's clear that Democrats really don't want to fight the administration any longer to protect Americans from whole-sale spying. Instead they've been buying into the Republican spin that we should protect and even thank these “patriotic” corporations for their assistance in the fight on terrorism. Oh sure, please read my email, listen into my phone calls – does anybody really care about unreasonable search and seizure anymore?

I wish I could still find words to convey a sense of outrage that this latest assault on the very values we once fought an empire over – the right to free from government intrusion on our lives – has now been turned on its head – and any resistance to government intrusion recast as “unpatriotic.” But frankly, I feel exhausted by the accumulation of eight years of being told we have to give up our civil liberties in order to be “safe” without anyone debating whether we really want to be safe at that price.

But I should remind Democrats that in an election when every vote counts, they may have sold their patriotism cheap. The same progressive anger that fueled the rise of internet political actions groups like MoveOn.org can easily turn off a significant portion of their base support if voters like me are so disgusted with their so-called compromise that we keep our money in our pockets and turn out as merely opponents of John McCain instead of partisans for Barack Obama. Change needs to mean something, and one of things it has to mean is a serious commitment to restoring Americans' civil liberties and putting real limits on executive power.

Alienation at the Art Museum

A few weeks ago I visited the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and it sparked an epiphany: I really don't enjoy viewing art in the constrained circumstances that many museums now impose.

I still love going to a museum like The Metropolitan in Manhattan where you can get lost in small rooms where only one or two visitors ever venture or where you can see so much art (the Egyptian tombs, for example, or the amazing new installation of Greek and Roman statuary) in natural light.

Of course, I recognize that many art works cannot be placed in natural sunlight without suffering damage, but does that mean that the artificial lighting in so many museums has to be so poor? At the Blanton I simply gave up trying to look at one Frederic Remington painting because the glare from the artificial lighting on it made it impossible to see one section of the canvas; no matter where I moved, it was obscured by a stubborn bar of refracted light.

More and more art museums also seem calculated to keep the viewer at distance and to impose a sense of constant surveillance more in keeping with a prison than an institution designed to let people see and enjoy art. Between the checking of bags, the security gates, and the fish-eye you get from the guards, you might find an eerie resemblance to the TSA. “Will they ask us to take off our shoes next?” I wondered to myself.

For example, if you have any kind of purse (especially the small backpack kind), a guard will descend on you and tell you it's not allowed because you might back into an artwork. I'd like to hear of an actual instance of this happening, and every time I have to listen to this rationale delivered in the falsely apologetic tones of a customer service operator, I want to ask the guard: “Oh really, and when did this last occur?” I really can't imagine backing into an art work because viewing art is a visual experience, stupid, and what would be the point of approaching it backwards?

However, in this instance, I once again divested myself of wallet, keys and other ID to the relative security of a coin-operated locker and returned to the gallery where I hoped I could browse undisturbed.

At the Blanton, before you can enter any gallery, you first have to pass through an enormous hall that opens up to the second story with a broad staircase that is blindingly (and I mean literally blindingly) white. Each time I ascended and descended this staircase, I kept my eyes firmly fixed on my feet hoping I wouldn't trip and fall.

The hall has all the charm and warmth of an operating room; as far as I could tell there was no artwork whatsoever in it – no tapestries or wall hangings or anything to break the sterile expanse of whiteness stretching in every direction. It made me want to run for cover.

Once past this alienating entryway, I did discover one of the best collections of contemporary Latin American art that I've seen in recent years, and my mood had improved a good deal while I was wandering through it. Yet here there were also not too subtle messages keeping me at arm's length, this time in the form of lines drawn around various installations and signs indicating that one should never touch the art work or cross those clearly demarcated boundaries.

And I thought to myself, “Why should art only be seen and not touched?” Public art rarely has this “Noli me tangere/don't touch me” aura about it so that students can happily rub the protruding foot of a statue of a former Yale president without anyone frowning at them, and even hold weddings in front of Rodin's “The Gates of Hell” on the Stanford campus without anyone giving them notice of trespass or bad taste.

I remember looking at late paintings by Monet and wanting so badly to touch the thick swabs of paint on the canvas and trace their swirls with my fingertips. Sacrilege, clearly. But would it be so out of bounds for modern artists to consider making their work a little more interactive? Maybe they could provide even a sample section of canvas for visitors to touch and hold and add a tactile dimension to their visual experience.

I believe this need to touch art is deeply embedded in our psyche from childhood. Who can't remember seeing something both crafted and beautiful as a young child and wanting to hold it but being told, “No, no, don't touch, just look”? For me these early aesthetic experiences were intensely frustrating, resulting in furtive attempts to hold a figurine or a china cup when I wasn't being observed.

I was reminded of this tension between “art” as object only to be viewed and “art” as object to be touched when I was in the Dallas airport during the holidays, and a voice came over the PA system to request that the “parent or person responsible for the child climbing the public art work please retrieve him.” I knew immediately that the child in question was my youngest son, and I was torn between fury that he had disobeyed my strict injunction not to climb the art and my frustration at the utter stupidity of this rule.

After all, place a steel structure that looks like skyscrapers fused together at odd angles with a hollow interior and convenient little fissures that look just like foot and hand holds in an airport terminal, and what would you expect a normal five-year-old to do? “Just look at it?” I thought incredulously as I ran over to retrieve my son and listen to the same-old, same-old spiel from the security guard. “If he'd fallen, he could have been killed,” he lectured me, adding the threat of mortal danger to the relatively innocent faux pas of not keeping an eye on my kid.

It didn't surprise me at all when I read the other day that one of the things mothers wanted most from the developers of a new shopping mall was “art their kids could play around or climb on.” What could be more natural?

And what could be a greater act of poetic justice? After all, a good deal of modern and post-modern art is all about the impulse to shock its bourgeois viewers out of their complacency. Why not turn the tables and break the conventions of viewership? Let's break at least a few of the barriers keeping art at arm's length and bring more artworks into the public sphere that can be touched, walked on, even surmounted by little boys with good climbing skills.