After close to a decade of disenfranchisement, I have the opportunity to vote in the 2012 US Presidential election and by my thinking my choices are severely limited.
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My boss died today. And although there are numerous more eloquent eulogies out there, I thought I’d add one more to the growing pile of accolades.
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This weekend during trips to Cincinnati and Chattanooga we managed to put a little over 1,000 miles on a Chrysler 200. With that amount of time in the car, I thought it would be a good idea to document the experience.
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As an expat, I was trying to avoid making a public comment on the state of emergency in Trinidad. I’m not there, haven’t been there for a while, so I have no real concept of what’s going on a daily basis.
And here comes the ‘but’
One of the things I’ve always been proud of is good or ill you can say your piece and they’re always people who would. You don’t have to like them or what they were saying but they could and often times did.
In 2003 Trinidad was tied for 5th with Denmark in the World Press Freedom index and it was moment of true pride for me. Since then we’ve consistently slid down the ladder and in the 2010 index, we lay sandwiched between Latvia and Poland in 30th.
To compile this index, Reporters Without Borders prepared a questionnaire with 43 criteria that assess the state of press freedom in each country. It includes every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment). And it includes the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these press freedom violations.
Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2010
How the index was compiled
I thought I would be content to keep my mouth closed and let the state of emergency pass and for the government to realise what an abject failure that particular exercise was until this showed up in my news feed. Really, we’re keeping company with Egypt and China? For all the wrong reasons no less? Drafting legislation to deal with the regulation and monitoring of social media? Have these people been paying attention? What kind of backward, ignorant, clueless thinking is that? Oh wait, it’s the same kind of thinking that brought the state of emergency into play in the first place.
I recently had an opportunity to spend a couple of days in DC and visit the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art museums. As a designer I have a hateful relationship with modern art. I believe a lot of it horrendous and benefits from inflammatory press releases, gallery/museum curators looking to make a name for themselves and slow news cycles.
i don’t need three paragraphs to tell what i should see in a piece of art. it should be able to stand on it’s own, make me pause and think. maybe it’s an underlying societal problem, everything has to be given to us, we can no longer think for ourselves and art as a reflection of society is heading down that path.
Hockey intro at American Art Museum
Someone pointed out to me that I should say I dislike museums/galleries as opposed to modern art itself because they choose what is presented. But conversely if all they have to present is crap then what are they supposed to do?
But based on my experience I think a lot of what passes for modern art is lazy. There’s a lot of slap this together and get it out the door and make it controversial, make attract attention and we’ll be rich/famous in our lifetime. While at the museum, I came across a sign. Now aside from the video installations none of the other pieces in the museum had this kind of preamble associated with it and unsurprisingly it was by far the worst piece in the place.
I’ve had an opportunity to experience both the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern. The former left me with a feeling of awe and inspiration, while I departed the latter before I was removed for running commentary. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve been to either and while I can’t tell you about any of the trite shit that Tate should have just kept in storage, I do remember coming around the corner to see Joseph Wright’s The Blacksmith. I’d post a photo but you can’t get the feeling of warmth that almost emanates off the original painting. That painting didn’t a press release or explanation, it stops you and draws you in.
As the old adage goes, I may not know art, but I know what I like. I’ve included a gallery of stuff that I saw and liked at the American Art Museum.
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- Hockey intro at American Art Museum
the easiest place to start is the beginning – we lost our house. there, that’s said, four simple words, in retrospect not all that simple. we joined millions of other families that could no longer afford their homes and were foreclosed by the bank.
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you feel a connection that makes you happier or even less sad or restores, even for a moment your faith in humanity.
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the US empire is built on a dream that wave after wave of immigrants have flocked here to fulfil.
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i am a Caribbean black man married to a white southern woman. that statement alone is a set up for all manner of assumptions and all of them are wrong.
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wherein our erstwhile theorist waxes on the differences between ponce-y and spastic dancing and communing with the mothership.
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