Who's Super?

Am surprised at the lack of real insight about Super Tuesday. Obviously there is a rift in the democratic party that may be as much generational as it is race or gender-driven. The Boomers aren't really ready to hand over the reins to the new generation X of leadership. We want a chance to make up for the wreckage of our own generation's frat-boy CEO leader. So why not a feminist leader? But at the same time it's hard to ignore Barack's Jedi-mind-trick ability to convert people to whatever it is he is representing.

All the professional pundits aren't offering much by way of explanation of what's happening outside the beltway. What's with this record turnout across the land, not just with Obama voters but all over the Democratic spectrum?

My marketing class has been examining the different techniques of the campaigns. Obama's is "lateral" marketing -- broadening the brand or the appeal to unexpected provinces, while Hillary's is brilliantly "vertical," demonstrating a complete understanding of and ability to tap every identifiable voting demographic. It's a fascinating contrast in styles, not just of the leaders, but of the whole way of operating.

Meanwhile, it looks as though the "Superdelegates" will play a big role in deciding the Dem nominee, and no one seems to remember why they were inserted in the process. Many are "blaming" McGovern, which is partially true, but I recall vividly that August night in 1980 when the Democrats came to sputtering end of a horribly divisive one on one primary battle between the increasingly disliked incumbent Jimmy Carter and the challenger, Ted Kennedy. Kennedy had gotten off to a terrible start and Carter had smoked him in the early primaries, but as the Iran hostage crisis dragged on, and the Soviets made him look weak in Afghanistan, the Olympic boycott irked everyone without moving the Soviets an inch out of Kabul, public opinion coalesced around Kennedy.

But there were no superdelegates, and Carter had a slim but real majority of the convention in pledged -- contractually bound -- delegates. The rest of the story's obvious. Carter nominated, defeated by Reagan, superdelegates added to make sure there would be a cure for late summer "buyer's remorse."

It's a long time till August. Stand by, supermen and superwomen

Proud to be an American (U)

My wife, son and I were among the 6,000 jammed into Bender Arena at American University to hear the Kennedys and Barack Obama speak on Monday. The hours of icy standing in line were well worth it. I've seen endorsements before, but never in person, and there have seldom been endorsements of this significance. The Kennedys didn't just endorse, they passed the torch, their own Camelot torch, to Barack Obama, with the 6,000 witnesses in person and a few million more on TV.

The Obama campaign does a lot of little things right -- the music ("Graceland," the fusion of black and white, of old and new), the slogans, the campaign-created handmade billboards designed to look spontaneously homemade, and the Kennedy appeal to older folks via TV while filling the room with college students to generate that crazy enthusiasm that, well, only college students can produce.

I feel lucky to work at American U. and to have been part of this historic, made for TV art happening. I actually haven't decided who to support in the election, but being in Obama's presence does help one understand the appeal...

No audience

Blogging seems the perfect and logical consequence of the profusion of literary magazines and journals in the 1980's and 1990's. I founded my own, Indiana Review, in 1981, and it's still going. Most of the ones begun then are still around, chugging along through subsidy, editorial grit, and human desire, fueled by the massive number of submissions from writers who, weirdly, dwarf the number of readers.

Litmags are still where good writers get their start, so the function is important. But even in my heyday as a "creative writing person," I never devoured them by the dozen, nor do I recall animated conversations with other writers about the latest TriQuarterly or Fiction issue.

So now we have come to the point where millions of us are Authors of cost-free Blogs about everything from thrift-shopping to cat-photographing, and often about nothing in particular.

I asked my students in arts management to invent an arts organization and their choice was one in which the audience members and the performers were essentially the same people. So it has become, in a high-tech reprise of the arts and crafts movement, a participatory, hands-on culture, where the work is done for its own sake, apparently, and not for the audience's.

If everyone is an author, what's really being said, exchanged, understood?

a holiday weekend meditation.

what if Martin Luther King Jr had been an unread blogger, writing the same brilliant words we universally celebrate today?

And then there's farce, Mittens-style

The GOP nomination battle is tragedy turning into farce. The tragedy is what GOP control has done to the country in 8 short (long?) years; the farce is this campaign. So Mitt Romney has won Michigan. We have a Mormon multi-state panderer, a formerly truth-telling Vietnam veteran war hawk, and a preacher-turned-politican who can play the bass and joke with Letterman while saying evolution isn't true.

Mr. President???

Not far behind are a washed up actor, an endearing but nutty Libertarian, and a self-parodying, philandering, scandal-ridden ex-mayor.

It's a tossup! No, it's a sitcom!

Too bad John Cleese as Basil Fawlty isn't an American citizen. He could run for President and bring art and politics together at last.

Where are the adults?

value of gruesome art

Comedy can be entertaining but tragedy sticks to your bones. Well, that's the conventional wisdom about art, and after seeing "The Savages," marketed with a light-hearted tone but comprising two hours of wall-to-wall suffering only occasionally leavened by humor, I think the old saying is true. Except that "The Savages" is just too gruesomely realistic -- not in the sense of explicit images, but with its relentless focus on the consequences of aging and death.

I suffered.

I had a bad night after I got home.

I'm glad I saw the movie. I think it deserves a ton of awards.

It's the story of a dying man whose companion dies and whose alienated adult children (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) step in to care for him. He's a jerk and it's an ugly situation. No one is connected to anyone else in a meaningful way, and though the characters grow during the film (the only real positive of tragedy), it's a rough, rough ride.

But wow. I felt cellularly rearranged by seeing it. Glad Hollywood had the guts to make it, even if the marketing was a little deceptive.

abu ghraib as only an artist could do it

Fernando Botero's exhibit "Abu Ghraib," an obsessive's several dozen oils and drawings of prisoners at Abu Ghraib has now left he art gallery down the hall at American University's Katzen Center, where I work. I would say I'll miss it, but it was very hard to look at. By using a muted palette (except for blood-red), by varying the skintones of his victims to imply all races, not just Iraqis, and by focusing on the victims in a timeless, painterly but not "beautiful" way, Botero did what only an artist can.

He ripped through the veil of blah-blah we shroud upon ourselves iwth our overexposure to "both sides," to "necessary war," and the like. His paintings were about human diugnity in the face of indignity imposed. Decades from now, who were the victims and who were the torturers will be a footnote at best. The paintings, which Botero created over an intense few months from his imagination and the few photographs that accompanied the original Seymour Hersh article, are both remarkable by themselves and, in the context of the endless war on terror, which we fight WITH terror, a testament to the power of an artist to tell the truth. In a way that no one else can.

The other ugly truth is: no one else in the U.S., except for a library in Berkeley, would show these works. All the major museums gutlessly passed, while little American University was left with the honor. For which we thank our director, Jack Rasmussen, and our president, Neil Kerwin, who had the guts to let this go forward.

If only Michael Mukasey had come before his hearings, he would have seen waterboarding in a way that no one could ever forget.

microblogging?

Spent the day at American University's annual Ann Ferren Teaching Conference. Like most conferences, a mixed bag. The morning session on Second Life held great promise, but they never could get Second Life to load. Maybe it's too soon for that one...second session was on "Using Technology the way your students use it," with five students on the panel, all of them agreeing they really don't use much technology! ipods, cellphones, and laptops, but no seamless integrations, few blogs, lots of facebook, and blackboard, the instructor's technical class-site. Boring!

Well -- we're teachers, we're supposed to lead. We would be way ahead of the students to have classes in Second Life.

So I just might.

The third session was on blogging in all its forms, particularly mass-blogging by an entire class full of students.

But you know what? It's still just thinking and writing and a little design. If you can't write, you can't blog. If you don't want to grade papers every night, you don't want to grade blogs!

I still feel comfortable with the markers and the whiteboard...

but shouldn't it be more artistic, since I'm teaching the arts?