Washington Post, By Jeremy Borden, May 25

Woodbridge, VA - Before she was 2, her mother recalls, Lori Anne Madison was reading her first book — Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop.” At age 3, she competed in her first spelling bee.

Now 6, Lori Anne is the youngest contestant on record to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Her ticket to the competition that begins Tuesday was the word “vaquero,” meaning cowboy, which she spelled correctly to win the Prince William County bee.

It will get tougher onstage at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center when the home-schooled girl from Woodbridge faces 277 opponents, most of whom are at least twice her age. Last year, the winning word was “cymotrichous,” which means having wavy hair. The previous winner spelled “stromuhr,” which is a medical instrument.

But Speller 269, who will compete for $30,000, among other prizes, reports that she isn’t particularly nervous and isn’t cramming.

ART HANDLERS

So I was in New York City last weekend to play a jazz gig (I'm a drummer) and a friend took me into Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to show me two famous sculptures: Fernando Botero's "Adam" and "Eve," which are 12 feet tall, naked, and massively, bulbously erotic in Botero's style. Turns out, though, that Adam's protruding penis looks way more worn than the rest of him -- because it has become popular for passersby to grab his johnson and pose for photos. Some say it's good luck, although I'm guessing it has more to do with plain old sex play. A similar thing might have happened with the companion Eve statue except that her breasts are beyond the reach of anyone who doesn't play in the NBA. (Interesting to ponder why a woman statue's vulva does not attract public fondling in the way a penis does.) Anyway, my quick photo of a woman posing with penis in hand (guys do it, too, by the way) was out of focus, so above is a NY Post photo of the oft-repeated ritual act. Full pics of both the Adam and Eve sculptures are after the jump.

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The results of this poll sort of reflect my own feelings and experiences with Facebook:

According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.

While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.

Adrienne Rich died March 27th. Her righteously deep-sea impact as a poet is bottomless. Here is one of the poems that made her famous for breaking through silences about gender, among other things.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

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The sudden death last month of American landscape artist Thomas Kinkade, at age 54, left the art world perplexed at the loss of one of its most ridiculed yet successful practitioners. A coroner’s report released yesterday showed that Kinkade died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and the anti-anxiety drug Valium. His brother’s response to this report indicated that Kinkade suffered from alcoholism, and depression over his divorce, substantial financial problems, and the incessant criticism of his art by professionals.

This last point is rather surprising, since throughout his career Kinkade showed scorn for the critics, and claimed to be crying all the way to the bank. Apparently all those millions of dollars he made mass-producing his art didn’t really assuage his inner need for critical approbation. Or, to put this another way, maybe it really was about the art after all. His art did have an immediate emotional pull, and had he chosen just to do oil paintings without all the reproductions and marketing hype, the emotional pull would still be there. The fact that critics didn’t like the nature of that emotional connection to the viewer – that it was too coy, too 19th century, too deliberate – apparently offended Thomas Kinkade. After all, he said, he was only giving the public what it wanted.

PHOTOS FROM THE 2012 BALTIMORE KINETIC SCULPTURE RACE

It's back. The 2012 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race – a 15-mile race of human-powered sculptures over a course of streets, water, and mud and sand pits – was Saturday. Here are photos from the race website, where you'll find more pics as well as a link to additional photos uploaded by spectators. I've also posted more photos after the jump.

"The 1%"

"Lickety Split"

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BLACK MOSES BARBIE

What if Harriet Tubman were marketed as a Barbie? What if Ken and another Barbie were marketed as escaped Barbie slaves she was leading to freedom? What would the TV commercial look like? And what would it mean? Watch and see. Here is the first in a series of 3 "Black Moses Barbie" mock commercials by filmmaker, artist, and social activist Pierre Bennu. (Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Bennu, who lives in my town of Baltimore.)

The New York Times, By Stanley Fish, April 23

Early on in his new book, “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University quotes the economist Richard Vedder and the former university president William Brody to the effect that little has changed in higher education despite enormous changes in technology, demographics, funding models, and student habits and attitudes. Vedder notes that “with the possible exception of prostitution, teaching is the only profession that has had absolutely no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.” Brody is less wry, but the point is the same: “If you went to a [college] class circa 1900, and you went today, it would look exactly the same.”

In many of the books on higher education now flooding the market, statements like those would be preliminary either to a denial of the point (everything is not the same; here are the new things we’re doing), or to an affirmation of it followed by detailed recommendations (here’s what we should do to catch up). Delbanco, however, not only accepts the fact that little has changed in the classroom — “most of what we see in the past looks a lot like the present” — he celebrates it in the course of answering his title’s question. College, he tells us, “is a hedge against utilitarian values” that “slakes the human craving for contacts with works of art that somehow register one’s longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself.”

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the central public library in downtown Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement. – Joseph Ross

I'll add here that Emmett Till wasn't just beaten. He was tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. I'll also add that a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

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What to say about Dick Clark that hasn't been echoed and amplified over the past 60 years.

If The Ed Sullivan Show was the major leagues of rock and roll, then Dick Clark's American Bandstand was the entry draft. And in many ways, his was the better show for musicphiles.

Not that his taste was perfect: in 1963, he was offered the American rights to The Beatles' music and turned it down, saying they'd never amount to much. In case you were wondering why the Beatles never appeared on AB except in videos and a solitary taped telephone interview, that's why. Heck, even She Loves You scored badly on his segment Rate-A-Record, but it was undanceable, to be sure.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU CROSS A POEM WITH GUNTER GRASS, DAVE EGGERS, GERMANY, ISRAEL, AND IRAN?

This: Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the Israeli regime, since its birth, has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand. (Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.) Further, Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned his shame and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obediently self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in Israeli policy. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

The full text of Grass's poem is after the jump.

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BAD HEMINGWAY! BAD AUSTEN! BAD FAULKNER!

I knew there was a Bad Faulkner contest. I took second place in it one year. But I never knew until I looked that there were also Bad Hemingway and Bad Austen contests. And God knows what others. The idea is always the same: to do the best possible awful parody of the style of The Master. It's an honor, really, for an artist to have such an idiosyncratic style that people will compete to try to outdo it. Faulkner has always been one of my writer gods, and spoofing him is one hell of a party. I virtually never quote my own work in this space, but in this case it might amuse you. Here is my second-place-winning Bad Faulkner entry from way back in 1993, a parody of his novella The Bear:

The Hare

There was just the man this time, not the dog too, it of ears flopping and incongruous, howling in the unrequited fervor of one who must hunt and who must fail, the hound’s voice doomed but immutable in its comical inveterate reverberation, lost on each hunt in a forest of unseen laughter, ever thwarted and outdone before its frantic task but never, nonetheless, possessed to draw wisdom from its collaboration in its own caricature; not the dog too but just the man, Elmer, the hunter, bearing his rifle in a ritual older than any hanging moss or serpentine sycamore seeming to loom in the unreal half light of these impossible woods, older even than the old man himself, known only as Mel throughout the steaming conformations of this wilderness, his (the old man Mel’s) true hidden self a blank, forever incarnate in a voice said by legend to be that of this land and all of the creatures within it;

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Apostoli Fotiadis | Athens | Apr 9

IPS - The broken display cases at Greece’s Museum of Olympia, the site where the first Olympic Games were held thousand of years ago, have stunned members of the Archaeological Service who have been registering a stream of missing cultural artefacts.

Despina Koutsouba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), says treasure dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods has disappeared from the museum, including "a golden ring stamp, copper sculptures from the eighth century BC, coins and clay vases".

The burglaries in the National and Municipal Galleries during February, as well as the armed robbery at the Museum in Olympia on Mar. 5, have exposed weaknesses in the protection of cultural heritage sites around the country, made worse by the so-called austerity programme that is slashing all national public service budgets.

To add insult to injury, the Greek Minister of Culture has decided to cut funding for museum security by 20 percent. According to a new law, the Greek government is also planning personnel cuts of 30-50 percent at the Ministry of Culture.

Some of my favorite found art:



Parking lot at a highway rest stop



Wall outside the employee break room at a big-box store

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Toulouse, France | March 31

RFI - Over 20,000 people demonstrated in the south-western French city of Toulouse in defence of the local language, Occitan, on Saturday. Supporters of Socialist François Hollande pledged that he would act to endorse Europe-wide actions in defence of regional languages if he becomes president in May.

Green presidential candidate Eva Joly and MEP José Bové joined the demonstrators, as did the Socialists Senate president Jean-Pierre Bel and Toulouse mayor Pierre Cohen.

“In many places regional languages are threatened,” Joly said, calling for them to be taught in junior schools.

There's a theme in my thinking with respect to this nation that, eventually, some large-scale changes are going to occur, and that they might occur suddenly and perhaps even violently.

American culture is based on three things: democracy, faith, and capitalism.

There's a basic disconnect in there. Those three things are, jointly and separately, untenably conflicted. Somethings have got to give, because it's within the human nature that one of those things aligns.

A basic drive of humanity is self-protection: food, clothing, shelter are all manifestations of our primal drive to survive. To believe that, somehow, that urge ends just because we satisfy those basic needs flies in the face of modern marketing, Maslow's theory notwithstanding.

The Art of Lying

So it turns out that Mike Daisey, the Apple-exposé monologuist praised by many (including me) as a truthtelling artist, wasn't so truthful in his tale about his interviews with Chinese workers. You've seen the story; it's everywhere. In the space of a week Daisey has gone from being the patron saint of political art to being the poster boy for expedient fibs. The popular radio show This American Life's spectacular retraction of its broadcast of Daisey's monologue has triggered an avalanche of angst and anger about Daisey's dishonesty, the media's response to it, and the damage done by both. I had my say about all of this Daisey business yesterday in my blog. What a bloody mess. But as a performing writer myself, I can tell you that the aesthetic issue here is simple: If you present your real self to an audience and tell them, "This happened to me," it's on you to make damned sure that you then report only what actually happened to you. And if you feel the need to blend in some things that didn't happen to you, you say to the audience, upfront, "I'm blending in some things that didn't actually happen to me." That's it. That's all there is. Mike Daisey, after doing some denial dances, has finally acknowledged, in his March 25 blog post, that this is what he should have done. Good. But is it enough to outweigh the harm?

Sidewalk Illusions

The above – except for the two people in the "raft" and the crowd of onlookers behind them – is a chalk drawing on a sidewalk. There is no river, no waterfall, no raft, no alligator. It is all colored chalk on pavement. The artist who does this mind-bending work with depth perception is Julian Beever. Maybe you've seen photos of his sidewalk drawings. They have been all over the Internet for years. The only word I have for this kind of talent is "scary." What I love about it, in addition to its brilliance, is that Beever does it in public. It's a kind of shared visual performance art. No museum. No admission fee. More photos of his drawings after the jump.

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On the face of it, this seems like a particularly silly story, unless you're the parent or friend of one of the dead girls:

Time travel TV series have come under fire since two schoolgirls in East China's Fujian province killed themselves on Thursday after leaving notes saying the suicides could help them travel back to ancient times.

The two girls, Xiao Mei and Xiao Hua (not their real names), were fifth-grade classmates at a primary school in Zhangpu county, Zhangzhou.

On Thursday afternoon, Xiao Hua realized she lost the remote control for a rolling door at her house. She was worried and told her friend Xiao Mei.

ART THAT MOVES YOU

Frog gets a push through the mud pit

Ever been to a sculpture race? I mean literally: a race where artists design and propel sculptures on wheels in a test of speed through the streets of the city to see who crosses the finish line first. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore sponsors one each year. It is inspired and insane: a kind of loony art triathlon in which human-powered sculptures traverse a 15-mile course through city streets, a water loop in the downtown harbor, a sand pit, and a mud pit. Only human-generated power is allowed: no engines, no motors. There are prizes for first place and next-to-last place (making for a killer sprint between the last two finishers), a "mediocrity award" for finishing in the middle, awards for creativity and engineering, and general awe for finishing at all. Teams of artists and gizmo freaks work all year on their entries.

Above is my photo of one of the contestants from the 2007 race. Other photos from that race are after the break.

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Scat!

Awright. Before The Last Poets, before Gil Scott-Heron, before Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy and Queen Latifah and 50 Cent and Jay Z, there was scat. Voice as the ass-kicker of all improvisatory instruments. With or without words. Mouth as sax, piano, drum, dream, whatever. No instrument in your hand? No problem. If you can sound it, you've got an axe. Get ready for this mind-melter from the 1950s/60s trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (check out how Jon Hendricks plays air saxophone with his fingers):

Assassination and Art

What happens when an artist puts up a large installation in Manhattan with a big sign out front advertising it as "The Assassination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama"?

In June 2008, when this actually happened in the midst of the presidential race, what the NYPD did was pounce on it, shut it down, and detain the artist for questioning. The artist, Yazmany Arboleda, protested that the exhibit was actually a take on the racist and misogynist media assassination of the two candidates. One piece in the exhibit, for instance (see pics after the jump), a sweet photo of candidate Obama's two young daughters with their dad, carried the caption "Nappy-Headed Ho's" (as in Don Imus's infamous slur of a black women's basketball team). A truck-sized black penis on the wall was captioned, "Once you go Barack..." You get the idea.

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Outdoor construction walls are natural canvasses. I saw this one in New York City. I have no idea what it means. But I like it.