Scream!

I remember when Scream was stolen along with another Munch painting, Madonna. I thought to myself what an icon the world has lost in Munch's Scream (although of course it lives on in inflatable punching bag mode). Now they've been recovered.

Ma'am, do you know how fast you were going, and by the way, what are you doing to preserve the white race?

Has everyone heard about Robert Henderson, the Nebraska State Trooper who joined the KKK and has also been posting white supremacist garbage on another hate group's website (the "Knights Party")? Nebraska tried to fire him, but it's always a dicey thing when you try to get rid of someone for their associations, no matter how heinous they may be (unless of course you happen to be Arabic or Muslim in general), and eventually an arbitrator and then a judge agreed that Henderson should be reinstated with back pay.

Arguing on his behalf, his defense attorney claimed it wasn't really a big deal:

Valentino said Henderson has resigned his Knights Party membership and apologized to the State Patrol commander, Col. Bryan Tuma. The attorney also said Bruning and Tuma blew Henderson's membership and activities out of proportion.
"Bob Henderson wasn't running around in a sheet and hood," he said.

OK. Obviously this guy is unfamiliar with the Public Enemy lyric from Apocalypse 91: "These days you can't see who's in cahoots/Cause now the KKK wears three-piece suits." After all, in today's Klan, you don't have to invest in a sharp 400-thread count bedsheet and go to the trouble of assembling your own robe from the Butterick "racist heritage collection"*; you can come as you are:



By the way I took this photo from an excellent if stomach-churning display of contemporary KKK photos from the Generation KKK project. Stories like Henderson's and projects like Generation KKK serve as good reminders that we are not out of the racist shithead woods yet, although the trees are thinning. Someday, maybe, someday.

*before anyone sues me, Butterick doesn't actually have a "racist heritage collection." I made it up.

Adrian Fenty and the Art of Bullshitting.

Let me first say this: I have an Adrian Fenty sign in my front yard. I'm not sure how long it will stay there, but for now it's in the front yard. Fenty helped push through large capital funds for improving DCPS infrastructure, and he has advocated for more support, both financial and logistical, for the school system, although the fact that the mayor has limited power over the school system leads to such useless wording as "ensure that we prepare our students for high-skill/high-wage careers in our labor market." The useless part of that statement is that the mayor's office doesn't determine curriculum. All the mayor's office can do is advocate and cajole. That being said, I think Fenty is sincere in his desire to bring stability and efficiency to DCPS and to raise the superintendent's profile within the mayor's office.

However, I cannot accept it as anything at all but supreme bullshit Fenty's response to his not sending his children to public school as he pledged before last school year's end. Here's the Washington Post -- which by the way has been in my opinion rather favorable to Fenty -- report on Fenty's mealy-mouthed BS:

Meanwhile, Fenty, who has made improving public education a cornerstone of his campaign, said in February that his 6-year-old twins would be enrolling in public school "next year." But when school starts today, the boys won't be going to West Elementary. Instead, they will be staying in the private Tots Developmental School for at least another year, Fenty recently acknowledged.

Now I don't know about most people, but when you're talking about schools, my perception of a statement made in February about "next year" indicates the next school year, as in September. As in "who are your teacher's next year?" or "Next year I'll be in 5th grade." Now his kids are in something called "Tots Developmental School." It sounds like a cutesy place for infants and toddlers. Except Fenty's kids are 6 years old -- also known as 1st grade age.

What makes Fenty's backtrack particularly galling is his description, in typical weasel politician style, of his statement and the school:

Fenty said his February statement was a "miscommunication," adding that "I've always said" the boys will start public school "after they finish the nursery school that they're in." But even some of Fenty's closest allies were surprised when they found out that Tots, which Fenty said costs about $6,000 a year, holds classes through the third grade.

Nursery school? I went to nursery school, too. When I was 4. Nursery school is what comes before even kindergarten. Nursery school? Can you imagine being a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grader and being told you're going to nursery school? Hello, even my kid last year in kindergarten would have yelled back, "I'm not a baby."

On a side note, $6,000 a year? What do they do, lock the kids in the basement and feed them through a slot in the door?

It's upsetting that such a supposedly strong advocate for public education would pull such a hypocritical stunt as school doors are opening around the District. Especially when West Elementary is one of the better public elementary schools in DC (not top ten, but close to it, and small as well). Of course, it's Fenty's choice to send his kids wherever he wants to send them, but as a public figure he should know such choices will be scrutinized and held up as symbols or statements about his perception of reality. Especially after making public statements about sending your children to public schools, it's going to be hard going to elude some public scrutiny of your personal education decisions.

Welcome back to school. Time to learn you something.

First day of school was today and it was great to see all the kids back and many of my son's classmates plus some new faces there. I remember looking forward to the beginning of the school year when I was a child, because you reconnected with all your friends and by summer's end I was actually ready for a little structure to my days. It'll be interesting to see how the first week goes. Everyone seems to be reenergized and the school looks incredible after several weekends of parent, teacher, and staff work.

When I was in elementary school, the persistent rumor was that they were going to tear down our school -- that it was condemned, but on a two year extension. The extensions, imaginary or not, seemed to keep the school up for the whole time I was there, but it is true that two years later they built a new school and tore that one down. As happens so often in small towns, that school had served at one time as the high school for the community, which may in part explain why our playground was entirely asphalt -- no soft play areas and no playground equipment either; just lines and circles and boxes painted on asphalt to delineate kickball fields, dodgeball circles, and foursquare courts.

Still, the rumors that they would tear down our school were useful in that eternal grudge all children seem to bear against their schools, at least when they're in them. Hissing radiators, cracked tiles, and leaking fountains were only symptoms of a larger decay that indicated the school could truly turn on us one day and swallow us whole.

Like most things, we remember patches and scraps of our past education -- the function of the school being as much to turn us into socialized well-behaved docile bodies as to fill us up with knowledge* -- such as the bullying we either gave or received or merely witnessed, the occasional fistfight, and of course the idiotic things either our classmates or better yet our teachers did, such as one classmate tripping and breaking the only computer in the entire school (it was 1980 after all), and the highlight of our computer use was to sneak over to the computer and write the following BASIC code:

10 John is an idiot
20 Goto 10

Ah the good old days. Of course, these days all of those wonderful awful experiences remain, except there are more computers to break and lawsuits to file. I'm looking forward to the year.


*We like to say we educate for "critical thinking skills" etc., but the sad truth is that as a society we don't care much for critical thinking and would much rather have the docile body than the malcontent.

A little story and a long story.

I was going to write about this guy in a blue Ford Explorer with DC Clergy tag 818 who had lots of trouble stopping at stop signs in Dupont Circle last evening, and in fact was swerving to go around cars in front of him that did stop at stop signs, but I figured that Clergy 818 obviously knew that God would never let him run over a pedestrian or be broadsided by another car, so it was OK. Anyway, stop signs are of this transient, temporal life; he answers to a higher law.

Instead I could talk about how Monday is the opening of schools here in the District of Columbia, and it's been a busy summer for my son's school, what with a new principal and fighting budget cuts and parents and teachers working weekends to paint the school and put in flooring since DCPS facilities is the most corrupt and ineptly run organization in the entire morass that is District government.

I've talked about the schools before and I'm sure they'll come up again. Many parents are anticipating Superintendent Janey's "Master Facilities Plan," which is due out in mid-September. The Post had a decent article on it in the District Weekly on Thursday. The plan will have not only modernization plans and renovation lists, but also will contain the next round of schools Janey would like to shut down. What the article doesn't tell you is that DCPS facilities are in shitty shape because decades of neglect tend to turn minor issues into major problems.

At my son's elementary school, the trim under the eaves of the roof needs to be painted. That job requires a cherry picker, two or three workers, and perhaps three days (scrape, prime, paint). However, neglect that job -- and it's being neglected -- and all of a sudden you've got rotten wood that needs to be replaced and then painted. Neglect that job, and in short order you've got water leaks that crumble plaster in interior ceilings and walls, rotten wood that needs to be replaced and painted. The jobs multiply as do the costs.

It might be useful for Democratic voters to think about what each mayoral candidate has to say about the schools before the primary on September 12 (as an independent, I can't vote in the primary -- and let's be realistic: the winner of the Democratic primary will be the next mayor). The Post also ran an article giving brief summaries of the candidates' plans for the schools if elected.

At least during campaign season, each candidate seems to be interested in elevating Janey's ties to the mayor's office (Fenty would make Janey part of the Cabinet; Cropp would make him attend Cabinet meetings; Orange would make Janey part of the Cabinet; etc.). Marie Johns, who is the only candidate I have spoken to in person, would like to see the city take over the facilities management and let the superintendent concentrate on academic issues.

Regardless, the mayor's office is only one part of the problem and one part of the solution. The School Board is another matter altogether, and their day to day oversight borders on the criminally negligent. But that's a story for another day.

Still, I love our school and it's worth the fight.

Netflix Review: Derrida

Yes, indeed, there's a documentary on the late lamented "father of deconstruction," Jacques Derrida. Now it's only fair warning to say that I enjoy Derrida's work and was relatively distraught on the day he died. I was even more disturbed by the poor quality of obituaries that ran in the US following his death. But in the US, to be a philosopher is to be a punchline.

The documentary by Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick, titled simply Derrida, is amazing because he refuses to accept the convention of the documentary or even of the camera. He constantly reminds the filmmakers that the presence of the camera is unnatural and changes the behavior of the subject -- and he uses that great catchphrase of his, "always already," in reference to this fact.

At one point he asks how long they've been filming; he says at first "two hours" then immediately changes that answer to "25 years," and points out to the filmmaker that in the end she will edit it down to one hour and it will be what she feels is important and will therefore in a sense be a biography of her and not of him.

On the IMDB site, the reviewer utterly misses the point of the attention paid to everyday life -- Derrida is shown buttering bread as his wife empties the dishwasher -- and the inclusion of inept interviews, including the Australian journalist who tries to get Derrida to talk about Seinfeld, but Derrida has no idea what Seinfeld is. Or the moment at which Derrida tells the filmmaker he will not tell stories but only the facts of how he met his wife. In many ways these exchanges remind me of Bob Dylan's treatment of reporters in Scorsese's No Direction Home and D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back: Dylan also refuses to accept the role of the reporter as natural and turns their questions straight back at them.

Derrida understands that even before the camera begins rolling -- and long before the future audience buys a ticket to see the documentary of his life -- perceptions on the proper name "Jacques Derrida" always already shape the reception of the film. For that reason he challenges the documentary genre -- essentially placing it under erasure -- even as he agrees to make the film. It's deconstruction in action. Incidentally, he gives a beautiful description of deconstruction in the film. I will quote the entire exchange.

Amy Kofman: You're very well known in the States for deconstruction. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of that idea?

Derrida: Before responding to this question I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial nature of this situation. I don't know who's going to be watching this, but I want to underline rather than efface our surrounding technical conditions, and not feign a "naturality" which doesn't exist.

I've already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn't natural -- to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.

It's a beautiful statement because it gets to the heart of what confounds so many critics about deconstruction: deconstructive practice begins by challenging the foundations upon which we build our questions. And since for Derrida the practice of deconstruction begins within the object that is deconstructed -- that is, the object already contains the tools for its own unraveling -- he turns the documentary project -- and Kofman and Dick of course are partners in this pursuit (in fact at times you wonder if they aren't simply deconstructing Derrida) -- into an example of deconstructive practice.

Because he refuses to treat the film crew as a natural component to his life -- because he constantly reminds them and by extension the viewers that he is not acting as he would if the cameras were absent -- he and the filmmakers have created a Derridean text that revels in its resistance to the genre's constraints. However, since they've essentially created a cinematic illustration of Derrida's philosophical concerns, it's much more enjoyable if you are familiar with some of those concerns and understand why it is that he deliberately undermines the filmmaker's efforts to produce straight commentary, and the filmmakers in turn work with that impulse and use it a documentary that exposes the framework of its own making while at the same time gets at a certain truth of its subject.

Sick day.

Well my daughter started throwing up dinner around two in the morning
and you know it's not a good sign when you still recognize the
individual items.

So we're home sick today.