Walk on By — Dionne Warwick
Crying in the street when one sees an ex doesn’t seem to be the best example of control, but how she lays ground rules here, how she sings words like private or stop, or even walk on by, has a restraint and devotion that avoids passive aggression or desperation. It also makes the song much sadder than it could have been.

Buck Owens — Big In Vegas
Where Owens talks about failing after “trying to play and sing in Vegas” each word has a caution, desperation and delusion.

Baby, Lets Have A Baby Before Bush do Something Crazy – Coup
Here, Pam the Funkstress, chooses life over terror and fear. The intensity of the work is personal, between two lovers the audience is ignored.

Borderline – Madonna
The opening music box notes, and the ambiguity, does she want to be finished or just have things beginning? There is rawness here, and the electronics that surround her weak voice have a taut sparseness

Northern Star—Hole
An iconic, broken and exhausted song, the closest Love got to explain exactly how she felt about her own chaos.

Anything But Mine – Kenny Chesney
I have written about this song, maybe a dozen times. I love it
unconditionally, and every time I hear it, I get caught on the verge
of tears, sometimes past the verge. I don’t know why, but I think its
because Kenny is doing his best to be ambiguous and almost cruel in
places, and he so underplays his hand. The song is about sex, but hes
too polite to tell us that.

Theme from The Valley of the Dolls — kd lang
kd continues her reclaiming of highly gendered songs, sung almost ironically. The problem with kd and irony, is that she also seems to believe in the work, so we have a camp, over produced, deconstructed cover that contains at its heart, a love for singers and materials. She also has a voice that is impossible to belt.

Hard Candy Christmas — Dolly Parton
When Dolly sings low and under accompanied, the sheer power of her voice overwhelms, add the most depressing holiday song ever written, and it’s a force of nature.

I’ve Never Been to Me — Charlene
The consequences of pleasure have rarely been written better, and the interesting bit is the verse where she stops singing, and the production ratchets down, and starts talking about the power of domesticity.

He’s Sure the Boy I Love — The Crystals
Restraint in another way, though the singing is as hysterical as the crystals have ever been, and even with the talking the beginning, there is nothing quiet here. Except the message of the lyrics, a sort of corrective to No Scrubs or other bling Anthems, and a genuine discussion of love even if all “he has is unemployment cheques”

Rent — Liza
An incredible song, moving slowly across the landscape, likes an esker boulder. The best thing about the song is that we are unsure what the phrase “I Loved You, You Paid My Rent” means: is Liza a whore, did she really love him, what is the punctuation between those two clauses.

1. The lyrics are really banal. Not only banal, but designed entirely in a lab to be an authentic expression of how the warm months affect the good ol boy in all of us.
2. As for the above, it is shameless in its attempt to enter the canon: Perfect song on the radio/Sing along because it’s one we know
3. None of the really excellent things about summer (ie drinking, all of the copius amounts of flesh on view) are mentioned.
4. Who the hell drinks YooHoo in the middle of July (Alan Jackson, who understands summer hits, knows what to eat from mid June to eary September, in the last great summer song: “Well we fooged up the windows in my old chevy/I was willing but she wasnt ready/So a settled for a burger and a grape sno-cone” ) Listening to Chattahoochee again, reminds me of how pure Chesney is his benders are n Greasy Cheeseburgers as opposed to whiskey, he doesnt really mention beer at all, and any fucking he does is of the wistful lovemaking variety, When Alan Jackson can out dirty you, theres a problem.
5. The closest Kenny Chesney has been to a swimming hole is the local municpal swimming pool (the second time ive heard this, was reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun House, and watching all the boys with very little clothes, wandering around the local outdoor pool, nestled in the river valley, with perfect aqua water and phone booths shaped like plastic shells–there was also a girl with the words paradise lost written in florid pink on her brown bikini bottoms; why the swimming hole, when the light reflects on such chlorinated paradises)
6. I keep wondering when people will notice how calcuated his work is, but they never do. In this weeks People, there are a dozen or so pictures of hsi summer tour, and it looks like Beatlemania, just as in several of his videos (the concert ones, as opposed to the ones shot on a caribbean beach) begin wiht crowds of hungry women, and Kenny annointing them, like the Pope or the Queen. I know that this is one of the functions of modern celebrity, and post Garth its something that we have expected in Country superstars and it should be deconstructed, and Kenny is so good at riding the wave, that hes not the one to do it but I’m bored.
7. Thats the crux of the matter. He is astonishingly popular, and beloved. America laps him up. So there must be something there, aside from his brilliant manipulating of audience expectation, but what is there are simulacrcas of down home pleasures—like Dollywood if Dolly didnt ever write songs about poverty or death.
8. Maybe thats the problem, Kenny is country music for the south of metastized suburbs–and there needs to be work like that. Sure Hank wouldnt ahve done it this way, but Hank’s lost highway is found and paved over. The problem is that though we need texts about the suburbs, written by people in the suburbs, describing the joys people find there, Chesney isnt this man.
9. Or to put it another way, how can you trust a man who claims to be of the people, when he spends 60 per cent of his time in a yacht somewhere near St Barts.
10. So I guesswhat annoys me the most, here, are silly things that I should have stopped caring out, personae, role, authentic voice, banality, and desire. Things that would have been a virtue on Britney or Rachel Stevens are gratingly plastic in Chesney. If I stopped considering him country and started considering him pop, maybe the previous 9 points would be rendered moot.
11. But his single from last summer: Anything But Mine is one of the great singles of country music, a tender and broken examanation of lost innonce, the longing and desire of first bloomings destroyed by time and geographical inconveince.
12. The song still annoys me.

Four Versions of Jeff Koons Balloon Knot Sculpture, in NY, Dallas, and Berlin. The New York one is the newest, and he has been working with the form for about 10 years. I dont know if its a brilliant peice of pop formalism or the same scammed out huckerstism (thats the central question with Koons isnt it?)

I do know that all of them look oddly kinky.

I was going to dismiss this as yet another act of cultural tourism, and not a very good one at that. The tourism charge seemed really apt for several reasons– the photos were commissioned by the U of Texas at Austin, and a museum there and because of Winnogrand’s status as a art world insider (the several NY:MoMA shows, the two Guggenheim grants, the NEA funding, and other grants and gifts).

But the photos kept sticking in my head–the work is very much part of the anti-aesthetic of the photogs that arrived in the 70s, and has the grit/dirt of Meatyard or Gednis, but most photos of the west, frankly most art of the west is empty, is about unpeopled vistas–and the photos here are of large crowds of people, dozens in all sorts of circumstances, in parades, judging, in the stands of rodeo, at parties after the stock sold well–having a peopled west, and having that shot like one would shoot new york cocktail or LA dance clubs has a certain egalitarian power…(this is strongest in two pictures he took of the stands, each of them a crush of people in their Sears bought best, overwhelming two painted murals, of a cowboy doing his work on bare plains–the reality of spectacle and stadium, abutting the mythology of the unpopulated west in a really clever way)

Continuing on that theme, the 13 photos he has taken of actual rodeo events, are fascinating when juxtaposed to the stills that come from professional associations. The tradition in professional stills is to make the animal and man alone in the frame, a struggle between two elements (element in the primal sense of the word).The photos here are of everyone involved, and the action makes the camera goes squirelly. The best are the several where the clown is running the fuck out of the way of 1000 lbs of angry meat, while the cowboy remains foolishly on top.

Looking through the book was a useful argument against assuming value in only one source.

The question about how political abstraction can be, esp. in relations to painting keeps popping up, an unsolvable corundum in western art history, related to what subject the viewer is extracting. Two relatively recent examples point out that there is an easy way out of these formalist labyrinths, and one that is harder, stranger and more ambiguous. I am thinking of the new Singaporean/Vegas/Texan painter Yek and new work (drawings/painters) by prominent east coast feminist Sue Williams.

(Re Uptake Inhibitors, 2002, Acrylic on Canvas)

Sue Williams’ work is biomorphic abstraction in a cartoon style, so that the meanings can be juggled relatively easily—the work about the unruliness of lines in spaces. The way that they merge, and separate, fall together, and fall apart are really easy to decode. They are much less angry then the work that made her famous, but they are about the same sort of things. The formal interactions are metonymies of political systems, and the work is so clear about this. (I am talking about work called Reuptake inhibitors, Sea Life, or Hemit Vibrasse; work called things like Springtime for the RNC or newamericancentury.org are even easier to decode, they have ugly fields, and they have pink splotches floating about-it’s the post-painterly equivalent of “these fuckers are all assholes”). Her paintings are fantastic to look at, but aren’t the most subtle in the world.

(Springtime for the RNC, 2005)

Looking at Yek’s (formally Yek Wong, now first name only, darling) is even more interesting—they do not cut to the basics so immediately, they have the discrete precision of colourists like Noland, Truitt or Kelly, but they make one reconsider how those masters used colour. There is something so solemn, so polite, and so artistic about the object in post-painterly abstraction from the 1960s onwards. The work is solid, and the colour is tangible, the refusal of referents makes the work almost a tautology, and there is nothing outward looking in their meditative obsession with the rhetoric of painting (and it was needed to do that, and even sculptors painted, and where about the same issues.) Yek is really interesting; he has an obsession with looking outward.

His work is in hopeless bad taste, the colour of cosmetics, dystopian science fiction from the 70s, anime, and neon signs. They bulge obscenely towards the viewer; they are cut in sideways chevrons, like the doors to Cameros or AMC gremlins. But to make it about painting again, to make fun of the pretension/natural desire of some of his artistic parents, they are called things like nighttime or Forrest floor. There is a world in these panels. It makes sense that he went from Singapore, to Texas and then worked under Dave Hickey, in Las Vegas. Dave Hickey is an American curator who works angles people haven’t imagined, loves pleasure, and refuses the standard ways of looking. The pleasure of colour, the problems of cosmetic improvement, and the political implications of narrative are all found here (like they were in Warhol, and like they are in Williams), but he slips it to us, like the old story of the frat boy, the popcorn box, and the willing co-ed, all three at the movies. (There’s a reason why he calls himself the Barry White of post-conceptual painting)

The last image is from a series called Lies, which I think is one of the strongest, because of how many ways it talks about narrative. The colour transition slowly from the top to the bottom, telling an obtuse story, and the central figure comes from cartoon/comic explosions which explicitly attaches a second narrative relating to graphic tendencies and narratives (ie, they are about fiction, they are lies, its cute) (cute shouldn’t be a put-down)

I wrote here a little while back about how the spiral jetty was contained in a failed oil bed, and that the point was that Smithson considered his work in a larger context, of how people interfered with the land, and how it was considered an extension of modernist obsessions with industry. Cleaning it up, making it pristine, is removing the context entirely. The Tribune placed this as a last item in a series of exhibition notes, calls for submissions and minor news, like a “isn’t that nice coda”, ignoring the damage done.

I was w. mom again for new years, and we went for new years eve to the local lds church—I grew up there and mom was a member, and I took some photos, none of them really turned out, but I posted a couple on flickr, just because—one was of that night, two leatherette bound books under a lamp, on top of a cheap table.

The books, the bible and the book of Mormon, were used as tags, so other people could navigate them. Sometimes I use them myself, in the same way that Freudian psychoanalysts use word association to plumb the id—and while looking thru other tags w. lds, I noticed Nate ones photo sets (I also noticed dozens of really boring, picture perfect photos of various temples, but that’s another piece)

Nate’s photostream reminded me of one of the few photos to ever win credit in the LDS Museum of Cultures triennial art show. The art that usually wins the contest are realist paintings of families, kitschy work featuring Aryan saviors, and the odd metaphorical landscape—rarely there is anything so documentary, the art contest proves more then anything else, that the Mormons are now essentially middle American protestants.

However, there is something strange in LDS culture, 200 years of separate cultures, separate language, separate ritual and separate land. They can be in many ways, intensely insular. So, having these 70 or so photos by who ever Nate is and having this one photo by whoever Anderson is, teaches us about the church.

In Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, there is a line about two boys together clinging, and I keep coming back to that, when thinking about Nate One’s pictures—the same men in the same suits, doing the same jobs, the same homosocial tension of the military, the same desire towards god that comes with seminaries, but out in the world. There is the same drawing of Christ, throughout the photostream here, and the same photos of prophets in Rhonda Anderson’s meta-work. That image of Christ was on my door growing up, and it was the one I knew in Sunday school, it is the most popular image of Christ known, and it has thousands of copies, it is ubiquitous in LDS circles—and if it looks like it was illustrated in the 50s by people who did pulps, It was because the church rebranded under David O McKay about that time, actually hiring pulp artists (look at last months Illustration magazine for copies)

There appears stillness; loneliness in Rhonda Anderson’s work, there is so silence in Nate’s. Missionaries are not allowed to be alone, for the months they are gone, there is someone ever present (and when they transfer to new areas they all go together in clumps, 10 missionaries in the same greyhound bus station) They say the same thing then, there is an (unintential?) surveillance aesthetic here, the faces of the prophets of the church, the pulp Jesus, yr fellow workers in the fields of the lord. The absence of living people in Anderson’s is not still, the constant presence of icons of virtue maintain that.

It feels weird to be writing about this work as anthropology, though. To talk about something framed as art in opposition and conjunction with something framed as souvenir photos really seems churlish. But flickr encourages that—it is tagged book of Mormon, or LDS or Bible or Jesus not art/not art—it blasts apart any dichotomy between the personal and the public aesthetic (at least somewhat, if he wanted us not to see it, then he could have marked it private) and with a BFA in photography, and a tendency towards banal series, Anderson has swallowed the flickr aesthetic, the artless art photograph makes things difficult.

The question one has to ask then, is not is this art but does this add something valid to our understanding of what we are looking at. Nate and Rhonda both do that.

nate one
Rhonda Anderson

Now Robert Ryman has started using colour…The interesting thing is that there are two separate shows of his work in the next year. One is at Dallas, and is a 40 year old retrospective. One is in Hamburg and is a selection of new works.

Rymans work in 1964, just before he started with white-on-white is not very good. The form has not been dictated, the colour is ugly and random, the size underwhelms, and it seems lazy/typical.

The 40 years since, are like a monk in the desert, counting grains of sand–the paintings there are almost endless in variation of texture, but in colour they purposefully lack. It is almost like he spent the last 4 decades figuring out how to sort thru texture, and now at the end, he is moving away, reclaiming and reinventing the flaws of his youth.

The paintings in Hamburg are tiny, small things, a little more then a foot square. They have the typical white field rawly placed on top of an under field -he has done this before, so it looks like water under a frozen lake…But this time, the ice has broken.

The sides of the paintings are alive with an almost northern romanticism, the colours he has chosen, a greygreen and a bright raw blue, remind of Caspar David Fredich’s landscapes or Joyce’s infamous “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea”

Here is one of them:

Seeing them in Repro of course means that their full power cannot be judged.

Here is one from 1964:

I don’t think its possible to write about how bad near arctic winters are. Edmonton is one of the most northerly cities in the world, and even with the lack of snow, and the relative mild weather, it’s isolating.

50 years ago, people close to hear would travel for card games and never come back (there is a Sinclair Ross story about this). infastructure came with industry and the military, but it still feels wild. It’s dangerous in a way that is more elemental then anything else–and its danger is in the stillness, the darkness.

There is no drama to the death from exposure.

Thinking about all of this, a month before Christmas, I put on Mathias Goene’s volume of Schubert’s Winterreise. Going through what seems proper for the cold—a sort of Winter Death Mix, you could have Dylan’s Visions of Johanna or Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire or The Huron Carol or certain versions of certain hymns (the strange melancholy of Silent Night, the literalness of In The Bleak Midwinter) But nothing matches the melancholy of being alone in the cold like Schubert.

Goene is new, German, and his role has some controversy, because he’s much more somber then his predecessors, and much darker. He adds timber and complexity to an artist who is mostly known for basically sweet candy. I know this is supposed to be a pop music blog, and this is not pop (and I am not going to insult you by saying Lieder was the pop of the 19th century.) but its important, vital even, to have gravity when gravity is called for.

This is as dark as the grave, and cold as the ground (in the words of Blind Willie McTell)

(The text of the Lieder written by William Mueller is here , with translations)

Hyperion is selling Winterreise as part of their Schubert collection, for about 13 pounds.

The thing is, that Smithson has gotten huge press lately, a bunch of articles, books, travelling shows, etc dealing with the aniversary of the project. He refuses to acknowledge the twin, barely 10 miles away. His ego and his presence only allows for the creation sui genris.

I think its a better idea to think of it as another (larger) example of how the creation of industry twins the creation of art, esp, in the 20th century.

So having this song starting with diagnosis and ending with her dancing at the prom–one is reminded about Wilde on Dickens (One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.) But they pull it off, its not mawkish at all.

The song features plain detail, common speech, little detail, and a touch of clinicism (actually mentioning blood flow and surrival rates) The plainness, the lack of hand wringing, the complete and pure rigor moves away (in fact refutes) domestic melodrama.

I am shocked Rascal Flatts had it in them.

Desire escapes, a limpid balloon on a line, and I want something else. The pictures that transgress for me, are the throw away shots, the super commercial work, the formal work, the photographs that are the closest to normal.

Mapplethorpe’s portraits from the 70s, including Patti Smith’s Horses, the sly and wise Ianna Sonnabend, Louis Bourgeois holding a phallus with a grin. All of the ones that look like they should be on the back page of disposable Catalogs, the well light and well designed skill of a Parson design graduate is soft, lapidary, exquisite, and much better then any man with his elbow up somebody’s arse. Or a scant 6 pages in the Nan Goldin volume, a two page spread of black trees and green grass taken out of a train window, on the way to Berlin and two shots broken horizontally, across a single page. One of fog bound skyscrapers in Kyoto and a medium close up of pink blossoms. The Arbus photos are the formal and well posed work with her husband at Vogue. Clear, concise, ripping away the rococo silliness of 50s pop, in black and white. Wolfgang Tilliman’s oranges, squash, tomatoes, on the window sill.

Think of it this way—each of these photographers have a public personae that assumes total honesty; an emotional frankness. They take pictures that are voyeuristic. But they are not honest, and they are not voyeuristic, they are carefully composed, surgically constructed to slice taboos, but the cleanness of the photos and blandness of something that is not supposed to be bland betrays. Think of the photos mentioned in the previous paragraph. They are commercial work, intended for other people, or tourist shots meant to pad a book, or playing with another genre. They are at a point, where the photographer says something that is unrelated to the construction of personae. Considering how rare that is, its surprising that they are not written about more often.

(Think about AA Breakfast by Tillman’s and what he really ate for breakfast. AA Breakfast is a sex act photographed high above the earth, on the way to England. It’s a nice penis. It is a well-composed shot, well light, with excellent tendencies towards colour. It’s also exactly the kind of photograph expected by consumers of Tillman’s and it is the work that got him famous. It is unrelated to the everyday, quotidian practice that marks the strength of the best work. The best work is another breakfast, one of muesli, yogurt, fruit, well light, and so close to a still life, not quite Northern.)

The Earwhigs upend that. It is v.v. fast–7 songs in less then 7 minutes, and the sound is tubthumping (ie bass, drums, etc. There is a rawness here that maintains less craft means more purity.

For a bunch of suburban teenagers in a basement trying to break themselves out, they have an intense amount of goofy fun with the genres earnestness. They take pleasure in the muck of chaos.

I love the Earwhigs for the pop edge, the random modulations of voice and the hyper self aware deconstruction that is maintained at the same time as making a political message about boredom and exhaustion. They are capable and shrewd critics of the same things that are so forward and important to their work.

It reminds me of the best of Tape Mountains work from Portland, or Edna Walthorpe’s albums with the Pinefox or the ambiguity in the way James Kolchaka uses the word Rock.

I do not have a hard copy of the album, but I do have mp3s, and the one that I have included here is called “Your A Jerk and I don’t like you Like You” and it does tautology like no one else can.
Earwhigs%20-%20Youre%20a%20jerk.mp3

I have no idea why I believed this shit. I Listened to him again today, and his voice was as dark and moving as ever, his feeling was as deep and wide. Whether he is attempting to be poor, or geographicaly different, or stranger is of little consequence.

There is a meme in certain circles, that Lomax deserves less points, because he chose the least commercially available, the weirder music, to make an ideological point.

Maybe Lomax thought that pop would ever always be pop, and we would always have the mainstream stuff, and the work that needed to be preserved was the oddities. Oldham seems the opposite, and I’m glad for it.

So when the soundtrack came around, its tracks a sort of compendium of domestic pop of the last 25 years or so; there were very little surprises. Mostly country, and mostly mediocre, and frankly mostly unrelated to what desperate housewives worked as both melodrama and meta-satire of melodrama. It was a pretty banal collection. (I am willing to take arguments that the Macy Grey and the Sara Evans tracks are exceptions, but not as strong an exception as the brilliant kd lang.)

kd lang was always smarter then her material. She continues to be smarter then her material. She covers here, Glen Campbell’s Dreams of an Everyday Housewife. The way she constructs it, making it sound swoony and dangerous, attractive and banal, extending the whole thing as far as it can go, making it appear and disappear in a languor that can only be pharmaceutical (in fact much more self aware and much more pharmaceutical then Liz Phair covering Mothers Little Helper a few tracks up)….just like her album Drag was about gender, drugs, presentation and sex, this song is about gender, drugs, presentation and housework.

The best thing about this cover is that it fully recognizes, and works w/i the genre that the television is making. If Desperate Housewives is about figuring out the domestic in a post-feminist age (and I recognize how strange it is to write that, realizing that it was developed by a gay republican working while inspired by his mother), kd lang realizes the strangeness, isolation and prescriptive hyper femminity of this task and messes with it, plays with it, fucks it up royally.

She’s good at that.

This time, for a few weeks in New York, she is scrolling excerpts from Abu Gharib Pentagon Reports, the 9/11 commission Report, and various poets; this scrolling occurs high up on various famous sky scrapers and is paid for by, among others the National Endowment for the Arts.

It strikes me as symbolic that Holzer is being paid to criticism capitalism, by capitalists on capitalist landmarks. I am not sure if this negates or deepens her institutional critique.

The painting of his son, 2 years old, is so warm and so pretty, so well constructed, so loose, and so confident that it is something new altogether. The toxic irony, the pathetic sadness of all history and no love has leeched out of him. One of the things about craft, is that it is useless if it is not placed next to context and emotion.

He keeps wanting to be part of a history of mannerism, the article talks about a hallway in his house that has two works facing each other—a Carruci from the 1590s, and a Picabo from the 1940s—the most over painted, over the top, mannerist work. He also talks of his bed, a reproduction of a reproduction of a mannerist disaster, and that is how is work seems, except for this largish picture of his kid.

Its loose, foreshortened, elegant, and beautiful. For the first time in my critical history with him, I see where everyone gets it. The man can paint like a motherfucker.

There is one though that has haunted me for days. It has a wide aqua field with undalting white patches. It looks better then Hockney, for example, because there was something unreal/surreal/subreal about his swimming pools, with this field it looks as if its august and you are pushing yr body thru the water.

This is even more important–the phrase that rides on top the wave:

FIND
CONTACT
LENS AT
BOTTOM OF
SWIMMING
POOL

The shape of the words is rectangular, like a little raft. The lack of puncation means that we do not know if this is a commandment or an interogative or something else. The words are white, like they are painted on the deep end at the same time as floating above–stable and unstable, in stasis.

Then that sentence, think of it as a Robert Townes update on Amazing Grace. I once was blind/but now can see. But it’s an impossible task isn’t it, seeing a clear object in 1000 cubic feet of water ? Anyways, do contact lenses float or sink? So it is more like I once was blind/now I see/then I was blind/now can I see? This is the whole of Ruscha–giving us basic and banal questions, and telling us no answers.

I assume that the narrative behind this is of loss, a meloncholia mourning and a sort of blind panic. I lost my contact less at the bottom of the pool, and I can’t fucking see–help me, HELP ME. But maybe thats becasue i’m blind, and i panic. There are ways of reading this, of burma shave bemused, of resigned laconic, of something else entirely.

All we know is the contact lens and the swimming pool.

Its weird, it seems like i-tunes has replaced the goats stomach, tarot cards and dice as divination tool of choice. Its shuffling function provides a way of throwing the I Ching – connecting it to popular cultures ubiquitous search for meaning.

So, Waylon Jennings version of the song is on the stereo right now and though it is 25 years ago, the shock of familiarity stings. The first line that really comes thru is he chucking away the central point of the song, namely: “it wasn’t me who started that crazy Asian war/but I was proud to be my patriotic chore”.

It might be helpful here to get some context. His girl is cheating on him, and he cannot physically leave his room or his chair – and this isolation matches her loneliness; the actual suffering of an unjust war is made explicit. (I.e. “its hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralyzed”).

In this gothic version of Coming Home makes one, of course think of the popular culture of resistance that provided a constant correction to the pentagons view of the war in Vietnam. But this song is more of a problem then the Hollywood lefts arrogance found in movies like Coming Home and the Deer Hunter, it gives the credit to the solider, as brave, as sad, as tragic, but as unwilling to be viewed as a hero.

I wonder what the implications of patriotic chore are in relation to the implications of this song. The man does not die but he has no legs and no useful cock and nothing but a sense of exhausted loneliness, which the person who was supposed to take care of him takes advantage of.

The work cannot even end as a proper Appalachian murder ballad, though it tries (“if I could move/I’d get my gun/and put her in the ground”)—violence begets violence, and the war across an ocean becomes a localized domestic fury and there is no solution, the song ends with ambiguity and exhaustion.

What needs to be said was this song was so popular that it became almost a country standard at the same time as the ballad of the green berets, for example. It was recorded and often a hit for Bobby Bare and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. The version by Kenny Rogers is advertised in several late night ads for K-Tel comps for Christ’s sake.

My question is then, where is this now? The closest we have to someone with the personae of a Waylon is Toby Keith, and he has been in enough Iraqi hospitals plus Walter Reed to know that this pattern of boys and girls with their arms and legs blown off cannot work anymore. Then there is Chely Wright, and her refusal to brook any dissent on the war, in the chilling Bumper of My SUV, or Clint Blacks silly and opportunist Iraq and I Roll a dozen of examples, but not one recent one I can think about that have the dissenting power of Ruby and her vet lover.

Any one has any ideas?

the video is supposed to be even better.

no
a) he doesnt work on paper (ie he is not ephemeral)
b) he doesnt use words (is the usual conflation and split b/w language and image requiste?)
c) his work can appear apart (ie can it be modular and still be sequential ?)
d) his abstraction (ie do you have to know it is a sequence or is being told enough?)

yes
a) his work is intended to work in sequence (or so he says)
b) a subliminal political narrative is implied (ie he calls them prisons, conduits and cells–and he talks of the objects connecting to each other–flowing and ending as power flows and ends) (is narrative nessc. for comics?)

i guess my question is then–how formally distended can a work become before it is no longer considered a comic.

are questions of taxonomy that interesting?

links to work:

http://www.waddington-galleries.com/ARTIST/HALL/SHALL.HTM

http://www.maryboonegallery.com/exhibitions/2003-2004/halley/

http://www.peterhalley.com/