From the Lone Star Looney bin

The great state of Texas that gave us the honorable President George Bush and a renewed focus on teaching creationism to schoolchildren is insisting on staying in the news with their latest idea:

Texas Considers Allowing Guns on Campuses

Considering their recent offerings, I could see this fitting into their grand strategic policy planning roadmap!

Julian Schnabel, 'St Francis in Ecstasy', 96" X 84", oil, plates, wood and puttywood, 1980. Photograph from a recent visit to the Mary Boone Gallery showing 'Image Matter', an exhibition curated by Klaus Kertess.

W

Interesting characterization of the protagonist in a new play starting on Broadway this week.

He's a cocky but bumbling fellow, trapped forever in puberty, always eager to play and eternally armored in the self-assurance that often goes with a lack of self-knowledge. He is given to jaw-dropping malapropisms and misinterpretations, and he has a raunchy exhibitionist streak. He is, in other words, a typical leading man from a Will Ferrell comedy. The character being portrayed is exactly the right leader for his time: a man who translated the most enduringly popular movie archetype of the last two decades — the clueless doofus — into the most powerful political position in the world.

While on the subject of lampooning political figures, they have another play starting in Chicago about an equally clueless, bumbling person who also seemed to be smugly stuck with the self-assurance that sometimes tags along with a head full of h(air). It starts next week. The teaser video is hilarious. Jon Stewart called him ScumDog MillionHair just the other day.

The trillion dollar war

This analysis, first published in 2005 is still relevant (as outlandish it might have sounded then). A trillion is a big number.

Fallout

I had talked about the above picture back in February of this year on Simplistic Art and thought that it was amazing on a number of aspects - love, a war that I never understood, women's ability to look beyond what lies on the outside and the institution of marriage - all very powerful qualities that was succinctly captured in this very compelling photograph.

Well, I will be going to see this photo and more of this kind at the Jen Beckman gallery tomorrow and look forward to this very much - as much for appreciating the artist’s (Nina Berman) vision in capturing the brief sparks of some wasted lives as for the underlying hope in the pictures that seem to spring from the most direst of times...

From the review in the Times…

‘The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.
Two years earlier, while in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, Mr. Ziegel had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber’s attack. The heat melted the flesh from his face. At Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas he underwent 19 rounds of surgery. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.’