Odd Technology

We have a small portable DVD player. Little bitty thing, smaller than a laptop computer. It works well, but the screen has to be in exactly the right position to be seen clearly, and if you're more than about two feet away, you won't be able to see anything. But the thing that gets me is that all the controls that mean anything are on a remote control that's about the size of a credit card. So my question is, if you can't see the screen if you're more than two feet away, why in hell do you need a remote control??

George Tenet

George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, has a new book coming out, and he's making the rounds of the talk shows to plug it. Tonight he was on 60 Minutes. As a retired Navy cryptologist, I'm very interested in things like that and made it a point to watch.

Tenet made a very passionate case that the CIA was wrongly accused of producing inaccurate intelligence that led to the current war. He made a strong case that war with Iraq was in the planning stages since at least Sept 12, 2001, and that the Bush administration (not Bush himself, evidently) used him as a scapegoat when their war started going wrong. Tenet was pretty convincing.

But there's another side of the story. CNN has published a letter that was written and signed by six former CIA officials that takes Tenet to task for the inaccuracies in his book. Specifically:
- Tenet was "a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war";
- Tenet signed a National Intelligence Estimate (this is the Big Thing: an official pronouncement of the best thinking in the entire national intelligence system) that was in line with groundless statements by Dick Cheney and at odds with existing CIA intelligence;
- Tenet testified before Congress that Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda even though the CIA had hard evidence that they didn't;
- Tenet helped the Administration bully analysts into saying the things that supported the Administration's preconceived ideas;
- And a lot more. Most entertainingly, it calls Tenet "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community--a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality."

You can read the full text of the letter here. It's well worth the time.

The Politics of Iraq

This week, the media has been all abuzz about the supplemental spending bill that funds the Iraq war but sets a timeline for pulling out, and Bush's promise to veto it. Actually, I think both sides are on the wrong track.

First, Congress should not set in stone a withdrawal date, particularly since it just unanimously confirmed General Petraeus to go clean the place up. The General is a smart man and a straight shooter (unlike the Republican administration in general). The troops he's getting aren't all there yet, and he's right to ask for time to do the job. When he says he'll know by mid August whether the buildup is working or not, and will tell Congress his views regardless of political pressures, I believe him. If the Dems are really serious about this, they wouldn't set a withdrawal timeline until after General Petraeus says that the buildup isn't working.

But no, the Democratic leadership is hell-bent on pulling out, regardless. Actually, Congress under the Democrats is no better at passing clean laws than Congress under the Republicans. The Dems promised to clean up the pork, but this bill is just loaded with it. Oink, oink: the sound a Senator or Congressman makes, regardless of political affiliation.

On the other side, we have a chickenshit chickenhawk for President. Here's a guy who skipped out on his own military service, surrounded by lots of other guys who skipped out on THEIR military service, who has no problem whatsoever in sending our young men and women off to be killed or hideously maimed in a really stupid stupid stupid war. When he says he "carefully considered" whether to invade Iraq, he's lying through his teeth. The bastard knew long before he was even elected that he would invade Iraq, he was just looking for some kind of excuse. He didn't need, and didn't want, any evidence one way or the other. This draft dodger still talks about "victory" in Iraq, even though even General Petraeus acknowledges that we can't "win" this war. It's not our decision. We "won" the military conflict by defeating the Iraqi army. Everything since then is a civil war and we can't impose our will by military force. All we can do is give the corrupt Iraqi government some time to get their collective act together and start acting like a government. If they don't step up to the plate, we can't "win" Bush's war even if we had a million troops in country.

Don't even get me started on Cheney.

So why do I still support the buildup? The "Pottery Barn" rule: we broke it, we should try to fix it. There is still a tiny chance that the incompetent crooks in the Iraqi government might start acting like statesmen instead of a cabal of organized crime families. So I say, give 'em till the middle of August. If they aren't seriously doing their job by then, pull our troops out as fast as humanly possible. And none of this "gradual redeployment" bullshit, either. We're in, or we're out.

Sleepytime

So, yes, I'm a grandfather now, and yes, I have a collection of about 80 photos from the tyke's first week on earth. Most will sit in the photo folder and be coo'd over by Janis. This one, though, I had to share. (The photo is by the mom, Julie Kane, so if you're going to copy it and use it somewhere else, please give her the photo credit!)

New Painting

I've finished a new painting. This one is titled "The Soccer Game" (oil on canvas, 24" x 30"). It's based on my experiences in Sarajevo in 1996. I saw kids resuming their lives as kids, playing soccer and other games, in the shadow of buildings destroyed in the fighting. It's my homage to kids who are caught in the middle of wars everywhere.

We're Grandparents!

Jackson Charles Kane (aka "Jacks") was born tonight just after 9 pm EST. He weighed in at 8 lbs 13 oz. His daddy had the cell phone on, so Janis and I got to hear his first cry. He's got a good set of lungs, too! And with the miracles of modern camera cell phones, this photo was taken just moments after his arrival, transmitted across the country, forwarded to our home computer, then uploaded to a server in God knows where, so everybody in the world can share in the miracle!

Jacks already has a large selection of stuffed animals to cuddle up to, courtesy Janis (aka "Granny Ro". Something tells me his collection is going to grow in the very near future ...

I never had kids of my own, so I'm jumping straight into grandpappyhood. It's quite the thrill.

Hypocrisy and the Imus Scandal

Don Imus got fired yesterday for his racist and stupid comments on the Rutgers womens' basketball team. After a week or so of his groveling before the whole world, CBS dumped him.

Frankly, I'm pissed off. I never liked Imus and think shows like his are stupid. But when you spend several hours every day talking unscripted before a huge audience, and your job is to push the envelope, sometimes you're going to step over the line. Imus certainly did in this case. And he did the right thing: he immediately and profusely apologized. Today the Rutgers team accepted his apology. CBS and NBC had previously announced a two-week suspension. Sounds like the case should be closed.

But NOOOOO!! The "Reverend" Al Sharpton and the "Reverend" Jesse Jackson raised holy hell. These two guys behaved in a totally un-Christianlike manner. Whatever happened to the concept of forgiveness? Instead of acting according to their alleged faith, they acted more like wolves on the scent of blood. They literally hounded the networks into firing Imus. Seemed like every time I turned on the news, there were Sharpton and Jackson, solemnly making statements about how offensive it all was.

Just a few minutes ago, I came out of the post office. There was a black guy in a car on the street playing some rap music on his stereo. The windows were literally rattling for yards around (scared the hell out of my dogs, too) while every other word out of the performer's mouth was "niggah", "bitch", and "ho". THAT is offensive, my friends. I don't want to listen to crap like that, and Imus can lose his job for using terms like those, but rappers get rich off the same damn words.

So Jesse and Al, where the hell is your solemn anger over the offensiveness of black rap music? If it's offensive for Imus to use those terms, it's offensive for rappers, too. "Niggah" is "niggah", I don't care whose mouth it comes out of. And if you say otherwise, you're a bald-faced lying hypocrite.

Priorities in the News?

For the past couple of days, it seems like all I hear from the news channels are stories about (1) Anna Nicole Smith and (2) Don Imus. This is ridiculous! Is a bimbo with big tits, no brain, and loose morals, and a shock jock who said (gasp) something shocking really more important than Iraq, Iran, Darfur, or global warming? Apparently so. I took the dogs for a walk this morning, and when I left, CNN was talking about Anna Nicole. When I came back 20 minutes later, CNN was talking about (you guessed it) Anna Nicole. The next story was Don Imus. The next sound was a "click" as I turned the TV off ... it was better than throwing a brick through the screen, at any rate.

I thought news channels were for news. If I wanted the dirt on celebrities, I'd watch E! or read People or something.

Children of Men

We watched the movie "Children of Men" this past weekend. It was a supremely powerful movie. There was a lot that we missed, though, so on Sunday I watched it again. This time I caught a lot of things that had blown by me the first time, and everything hung together. In fact, I thought it was even more powerful the second time around.

"Children of Men" is an apocalyptic movie set in 2027. All women on earth have been sterile for about 18 years, and nobody knows why. Civilization has collapsed everywhere, with only Britain still maintaining the facade. A man in London is thrust against his will into helping a refugee woman escape to something called the "Human Project" ... nobody really knows what it is, except that it's something far off, mysterious, and the only hope. As it turns out, this refugee woman is pregnant - the first pregnancy in almost two decades. The two are caught between the government and a rebel force, both of which would use the pregnancy for their own ends.

"Children of Men" is exceptionally well made, beautifully shot, powerfully scripted, and extremely intense. It was well worth two viewings this past weekend and I'd see it again in a heartbeat.

If It's April, It Must Be ... Snowing?

Just a few days ago, we were having record high temperatures. I was grumbling that I'd have to spend all day Saturday (today) mowing the lawn. Yessir, that's the way it was just a few days ago.

Woke up this morning to almost 3" of snow on the ground.

Guess I don't need to mow the lawn today.

Pelosi's Visit to Syria

It's a sad state of affairs when the Speaker of the House is doing more to promote peace in the Middle East than the President is. Nancy Pelosi is doing what the Bush administration should've done years ago: open a dialogue with Syria. As Lee Hamilton noted, if you've got a problem with somebody, you talk with them and try to find a solution. No talk, no solution.

Actually, Bush is "all talk, no solution". But that's because he's only talking to his right-wing base, not to anybody who really matters.

My Dogs Are Smart

Yesterday, I was down in Hendersonville. I was in the gallery talking to the owner, while my two dogs kept watch over the place. My dogs are little Shih Tzu's. They're sweet little girls, but they normally don't like other dogs at all. Right outside the gallery, however, there was a German Shepard. It was sitting by the bench while its owner was playing a guitar and singing. For some reason, my two dogs were perfectly cool with this. They just sat there and looked out the window and completely ignored the German Shepard.

But when a Fox News van drove by, they went nuts! They did not like it, and they wanted it gone, NOW!

So, evidently, my dogs are smarter than several million supposedly intelligent Americans. Good on 'em!

B.B. King

Janis and I went to see B.B. King the other night. He's on tour for about the gazillionth time. It's always a treat to see a living legend, and BB's one of the best. He's 81, as he told us several times, with a body that doesn't work at all like it used to. Still, he could belt out some hard-ass blues with a voice that's as rich and strong as it ever was. His guitar playing is phenomenal - it seems so effortless, but that's what comes from 70 years of practice. Combine the voice and guitar, and you have music that is incredibly rich and deep.

BB is obviously having the time of his life. What a kind and gracious man, very gentle, but still with the fire in his belly .... just not as wild a fire as it once was.

Go see him if you can. While you can.

Studio News

This past weekend I had a long road trip. I drove down to the Durham/Chapel Hill/Raleigh area on Friday. On Saturday, I checked out the art galleries to see if any might be interested in carrying my work. Then it was on to Fayetteville for the opening of their juried art show, which has one of my paintings. Finally, it was another long trip home on Sunday.

As it turned out, the weekend was a big success. On Saturday I went to four galleries and found one that wants to work with me. It's Bill Hester Fine Art, located on the main drag in downtown Chapel Hill, right by the university. Bill's an interesting guy, with some very definite ideas about art which he isn't the least bit shy about sharing with you. But he's also a very straightforward businessman, which counts for a lot in my book, especially after some of the gallery owners I've dealt with over the years. Anyway, I'm very excited about working with him. Bill wants to start with six of my paintings, three from the "Meditation on War" series and three from the "Old Times" series. He'll get 'em at the end of the month.

After visiting with Bill, I headed down to Fayetteville. The Museum's show is a big event in the NC art world. They had nearly 300 entries, selected 46, and my painting "Lament" was awarded Second Place in the show.

So all in all, the weekend was a success. Now it's Wednesday and I'm almost back to a normal schedule. I'm getting the six paintings ready to go to Chapel Hill, and meanwhile have two more on the easel. Too much to do, of course, but hey, I'm pretty happy!

Spring Has Sprung

The title line comes from a poem that I saw when I was a kid:

Spring has sprung,
the grass has riz.
I wonder where
the flowers is?

Well, it certainly has sprung. The weather has been warm. Tonight I saw a couple of frogs hopping across the road. The weeds in my yard are starting to sprout. Fruit trees are starting to bloom, birds are pooping on my truck, and hundreds of jihadi bugs are suicide-bombing my windshield.

I love it!

I'm not a fan of cold weather. Haven't been since I was in the third or fourth grade. Cold weather is like death. But spring, ahh, spring is great! The earth starts stirring again. Things that looked dead are suddenly alive. It's warm enough for me to break out the shorts and sandals again. My dogs (finally) want to go outside again and maybe chase the cows through the forest. (My dogs are two 13-pound Shih Tzu's ... the site of them chasing a herd of 2000-pound cows through the woods is quite startling).

Okay, so it's gonna be a bit colder for the next couple of days. Big deal, spring is just about here, and I'm happy!

At least until I have to start mowing the lawn again ...

Alberto Gonzales Should Be Fired

There's a lot of news coming out of the Justice Department over the past few days and none of it is good. For starters, there are the eight federal attorneys who were fired last fall. The reasons are still a bit murky at this point, but it's clear that this was a political move. That is actually legal, since the attorneys serve "at the pleasure of the President". But legal isn't always right, and some of the moves were clearly payback for doing their jobs too zealously. An example is the attorney who successfully prosecuted Republican representative "Duke" Cunningham, who was convicted of bribery last year. The eight firings got the attention of Congress, and Tuesday all eight testified before a Senate committee. Then the Justice Department, which had threatened retaliation if the eight testified, made good on their threat, and publicly embarrassed each of the attorneys with personal details as the ostensible reasons for their firing.

And if that wasn't bad enough, today comes news that the FBI has grossly abused their snooping powers under the Patriot Act. They've collected far more personal information than they've previously admitted, they routinely collect information without any oversight whatsoever, and more than half of their snoops have been against American citizens. These are the very things that Gonzales assured Congress (during the Patriot Act hearings last year) weren't being done.

So now we have an Attorney General who uses his office for partisan political maneuvers, intimidates federal attorneys, abuses the authority granted by Congress, and lies about what he and his people are doing. Am I surprised? Actually, I've just been waiting for this to happen. When Bush & Co. were brow-beating Congress into giving them extraordinary powers, it was clearly just a matter of time before the public found out what was really going on. Every time an administration thinks it's above the law, they prove that they should never be. As Nixon found out, for example. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

Gonzales has blown what little credibility he had as an Attorney General. He should be fired. Immediately.

The Walter Reed Scandal

Today, every news channel is covering the ongoing Walter Reed scandal 24/7. This is the one in which wounded soldiers were stuffed away in decrepit housing and forced to find their own way through the bureaucratic maze. Two generals and the Army Chief of Staff have been fired, and rightfully so. They were in charge, it happened on their watch, and they bear responsibility. Congress is falling all over itself to see how many investigations it can launch.

But Congress bears some responsibility, too. The reason: Base Realingment and Closure Commission, or BRAC. Congress created BRAC to do what it wasn't capable of doing: making decisions about which bases to close. A few years ago, BRAC decided that Walter Reed should be closed and its functions merged into Bethesda Naval Hospital. That made sense except for an ugly little thing called "war", which left Walter Reed struggling along on crutches. The hospital was unable to keep up with the workload and unable to get resources from the Army and Congress. Since it was slated to close, the brass and Congress reasoned, why spend money on infrastructure upkeep? So our wounded vets were told to tough it out in dank mold-ridden buildings. Donald Rumsfeld would probably have approved.

So the Army, the Bush administration, and Congress bear responsibility for the squalid conditions.

But it's the Army that's responsible for the deplorable bureaucratic jungle they created. Having worked in bureaucracies, I know it's easy for them to spin out of control and take on lives of their own, where "procedures" trump "people". But it doesn't have to happen. A number of years ago, the military was awash in something called "total quality", or TQ for short. TQ focused on procedure to determine better ways of doing business. I thought the way the military implemented it was a pain in the keister, but it had a lot of value.

Apparently, the Army doesn't care about quality any more. Nor its people.

You don't like it? Fill out this complaint form in triplicate, email it to the Lost Cause Department, and somebody will get back to you. Maybe.

Ann Coulter

Ann's at it again. Now she has called John Edwards a "faggot". The woman is the worst kind of leech: she makes her fame and fortune by saying the nastiest things about other people. There are lots of terms for people like her. Bloodsucker. Blonde trash. That unidentified slimy shit left on your shoe when you walk on all those worms washed up after a rainstorm. Yeah, that's her. A couple of years ago, after she called veterans like me "traitors" for opposing the war (ummm, Ann, exactly how much time did you spend in the service of your country? Oh, right: none.), I painted a picture about her entitled "Ann's Slander". It's just as appropriate today. And it'll probably be just as appropriate in ten years.

The Web Has A Life Of Its Own

Just about all of us have had an experience with something going out in email, or being posted on the web, and having it take on a life of its own. (If you haven't, you will ... or maybe you just don't know about it yet!) I just had it reinforced.

A week ago, I sent out an email that announced some news from my art studio. It was pretty benign: I'm going to have paintings in three juried shows over the next two months, plus two solo shows this fall. So I wrote up a nice little blurb and sent it out to people on my email list. And promptly forgot about it.

So just a few minutes ago, I googled myself to see what, if anything, was new in my world. I found out that the local newspaper (Asheville Citizen-Times) ran my email as a news article almost verbatim. Pretty cool! And then I found that there were at least twelve other sites (count 'em, 12) that had the Citizen-Times article on their pages as well! Some of them seemed to make sense: they're local news sites or something. Others, I can't figure out what the hell they are. And some look downright strange. It was a strange experience to read my own newsgram on somebody else's really weird site. (By "weird", I don't mean goth or anything like that. I just mean that there doesn't seem to be any rationale behind the site at all. Just a collection of random bits of information and links.)

I also found several recent notices that a show of my prints is going on at a local business. What's really interesting is that the show never happened. When I went to install it, I found out that the company had gone out of business. So I took my prints and went home, considering myself extremely fortunate to have found out before the works were hung. A notice of the show's cancellation went out to local newspapers, but it doesn't seem to matter to these web sites. According to them, my prints are still hanging there, months after the place closed up.

So be careful what you post - it just might come back to haunt you!

The Cult of Celebrity

I was watching CBS's Sunday Morning today. It's a wonderful show, slow-paced, that takes a deeper look at things than is typical of television. Since tonight is the Academy Awards, the show focused on the theme of the Oscars.

One selection in particular got me to thinking. It was about how celebrity is being packaged and marketed. A new fragrance, for example, would have a difficult future on its own, but if a Big Name lends his/her name to it, it'll probably be an instant success. Puff Daddy or P Diddley or whatever the hell his name is this week was cited as an example.

Yes, celebrities have always been used to market stuff, but now it seems they're taking over the whole process. Instead of hawking somebody else's wares, they're making and hawking the stuff themselves. And getting insanely rich in the process.

Which gets me to the core issue. Why do we think something that's marketed by a famous personality is better than something marketed by somebody else? Just because a guy is pretty good at acting in movies doesn't mean he knows squat about designing jeans. Or anything else. But we accept the idea that this guy is cool and stylish and we want to be like him and so we buy stuff with his name on it, even if the other brand is made better and fits better. Still, it's no big deal, right?

Well, yes, it is. It's much the same, really, as Wal-Mart and Target and K-Mart crowding out the mom-and-pop stores across the country (ooops, I mean, across the world). It's Big Corporations elbowing out the little guys, even if the little guys have better products. I think people just go with the Big Name because it makes their decision-making much easier. Instead of trying on several different brands of jeans to see which ones fit best and are made best, they'll buy the ones that have the Famous Person's name. Instant cachet and much simpler, too.

This has been going on for years in the retail and corporate worlds, and I can't say it's all a bad thing. For example, I like books, and a typical Borders has a much better selection than a typical mom & pop bookstore. But that's a qualitative difference. Marketing based on just celebrity names is what irks me.

Celebrity marketing extends beyond retail into art. Remember when John Lennon's drawings were exhibited, celebrated, and sold several years ago? His music was great, but his drawings were only marginal. Great talent in one area doesn't necessarily translate to great talent in another. Still, these works took in a lot of money simply because of the Lennon name. And a lot of that money might have gone to living artists who are, in fact, much better visual artists than Lennon ever was.

That, to me, is the problem: People buying Big Names just because of the name, while ignoring the Little Names who may, in fact, be more capable and deserving.

My examples so far have been of Big Names moving into areas outside their expertise. Actually, it happens within their areas of expertise as well. Last time I went to New York, for example, I went to a lot of galleries. I saw some work by some of the current hot artists, work that was selling way way way into the six digits or more. And almost every bit of it left me cold, even work by artists I'd admired in the magazines. In person, these works seemed sloppy, or calculated, or didn't have anything to say, or whatever. One famous artist's work was rather obviously painted from projected photographs.

On the flip side, I saw work by artists that I'd never heard of that just knocked me out. Whether in subject matter, or technique, or composition, whatever the case, it was the work by the no-names that bowled me over.

So my point is this: why all this fuss over the Big Names when there are so many good Little Names around? Especially when the Little Names are often even better? Is a major league baseball game really that much better than a minor league one? Is Britney Spears really a better singer than someone in your local bar? Is an Oscar-nominated actor really better than a guy in an off-Broadway production?

I think there's no doubt that for somebody to get to be a Big Name in their profession, they're almost always pretty good. But that recognition shouldn't transfer to other areas unless they prove their abilities there, too. In the meantime, there are a lot of Little Names out there who are just as good, if not better, than the Big Names.

And I think that a lot of the Big Names know it.