The New Yorker endorses Obama

Politics

Of all the endorsements I have seen this year, the New Yorker seems the most thoughtful (and, as is usual for the New Yorker, the longest). They both make the case for Obama and against Romney. If you can, I suggest you check it out.

The money shot for the case for Obama is: But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.

And the case against Romney: these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.

 

Awesome people hanging out together

Art

Every year – for the last several years, at least – Time Magazine posts a list of what they consider to be the best blogs for that year (they do seem to change every year, so, I assume, they are really the best blogs of the year that haven’t been mentioned before). Either, way – best blog or best unmentioned blog – the list often has some previously hidden gem. This year, one of those gems is a blog called Awesome people hanging out together. The combinations are often surprising and sometimes shocking. Here are a couple of examples with their labels from the blog. Check it out.

The Digerati: Front, left to right: Eric Schmidt, CEO Google; Unknown; Steve Westly, former eBay executive; Steve Jobs, CEO Apple; Barack Obama, President, USA; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook; Unknown. Back, right to left: Dick Costello, CEO Twitter; Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo; John Hennesy, President, Stanford; Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix; Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle; John Doerr, Partner, Kliener Perkins Caulfield & Byers; John Chambers, CEO Cisco Systems, Unknown, Art Levinson, CEO Genetech.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite

Al Pacino and Christopher Walken

Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong and Neil Gaiman

 

 

 

Reflections

Art, Photography, Psychological Musings

Last Sunday, Michele went to the annual National Bioneers Conference and we agreed to meet at the end of the day at the Tracy Taylor Grubbs Open Studio.

One of the things that is fun about going to the same Open Studio over a period of years is watching how the artist changes. Sure, sometimes they don’t change and sometimes they change all over the place at random, but, every once in awhile, the change is growth. It is like you – in this case, I – can see the artist try to solve the same, intellectual? metaphysical? problem in a variety of ways, getting closer – but, like Zeno’s paradox – never getting there because the search is really the endpoint.

I first saw this in a Jasper Johns show at the old San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at Marine’s Memorial – more accurately, it was pointed out to me on a tour put on by the  Stanford Art Department – and it seems to me this is what Tracy is doing. I have heard her talk about impermanence as a condition that interests her and, while I don’t want to speak for her, that seems to be central in what I saw last weekend (especially in her lovely iceberg paintings).

She also had on display some lovely little square images made by smoke that seemed to almost be frozen impermanence.

While Michele went to Bioneers, I took BART into The City and spent the later afternoon taking pictures of reflections.

I thought that a series of building reflections printed as small squares similar to Tracy’s smoke squares would be fun. But, sitting here, I think that these reflections reflect – sorry – my interest in what is reality vs. the distortion of reality as my projection. I see a scene – oaks and rolling, golden, hills on Highway 120 by Oakdale come to mind – and photograph it. Only when I look at the image, back home on my monitor, do I notice the power lines and towers, the dead, dry grass. What I saw is not what was there. Building reflections offer a similar distortion; the reflection on a building – so prominent in my mind’s eye – is often overwhelmed by the building I almost didn’t see.

With all that preamble, here are several reflections.

And a final picture from Southern California where the hold on reality may not be as strong.