Posted: 21 Oct 2010 07:01 PM PDT

October 21, 2010 | 7:00 pm

Steve Hurd takes a shotgun approach to painting in "Five Fictions," an exhibition with nearly as many ways of making a painting (five) as works displayed (eight). At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, the tactic pays off in spades, evoking both the try-everything desperation of a culture in freefall and the all-at-once/all-the-time mania of the present.

The first group consists of the two largest pieces, "End of the Road" and "Tower of Babel." Each occupies a custom-made canvas whose shape exactly matches the image depicted: the front end of a life-size semi tractor, which appears to be barreling right at you, and a stack of pre-digital audio-visual equipment, its reel-to-reel decks and mixing boards forming a teetering tower that messes with your body's equilibrium.

The second group is made up of three rectangular canvases that initially appear to be juicy abstractions, their surfaces dense tangles of serpentine lines in various combinations of lusciously mixed colors. Then you notice the tiny fairies, each holding a paintbrush and seemingly hard at work. In Hurd's art, the impossible happens. And it's never what you expect.

Each of his three remaining paintings follows an approach all its own. One is a still life of an inflatable globe going flat. Another is all text, a business proposition by an artist who sounds clueless but may be more clever than most. And the third is a drippy picture of a yellow street sign, its warning printed in reverse.

That's how you'd see it in your rearview mirror, too late to heed but with plenty of time for the dread to begin building in the pit of your stomach.

-- David Pagel

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com

Photo: Steve Hurd's "End of the Road." Credit: Rosamund Felsen Gallery

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Aaron Sorkin's Facts and Fictions - Reason.com

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 11:37 AM PDT

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reacts to the social network:

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has been doing an deceptive little dance when it comes to his movie's accuracy. Usually he takes the position that he's an artist, not a journalist. As he told New York magazine, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to story-telling." And that's fair enough. But when he's challenged on his storytelling choices, Sorkin falls back on a that's what really happened defense, even when he has his facts wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, Sorkin offered this defense of how the film depicts women:

It's not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about....I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They're very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren't women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

That's a familiar cliché, but it's hard to square that picture with Irin Carmon's earlier comparison of the film to the facts:

Never mind that [Mark Zuckerberg] has had a serious girlfriend since 2003, which includes the time when the movie was set. That would make it hard to show Asian girls blowing him and his friend because Facebook was so cool!
In real life, plenty of members of Zuckerberg's inner circle are and were gay men. And Facebook's current success has also been predicated on the hard work of women Zuckerberg trusts, including COO Sheryl Sandberg (also a Harvard grad, profiled in The Times today) and his sister....
The fictional Mark Zuckerberg starts Facemash, a site where girls can be cruelly judged on their looks, the only thing they're good for. In real life, Facemash was criticized by groups representing women of color, but it was also equal opportunity judgment: It had men and women on it, which you'd never know from the movie. The real life Sean Parker may be a womanizer, but unlike the character played by Justin Timberlake, he didn't find out about Facebook from a nubile co-ed in Stanford panties who was thrilled to find out she'd scored with a Silicon Valley celeb -- he found out about it from his roommate's girlfriend.
It makes you wonder why the filmmakers tried so hard to create a world so hostile and diminishing to women, where -- aside from a small character for real-life Harvard grad Rashida Jones that seems to have been designed to preempt criticism -- the choices are being a stern bitch (like the ones in the administrative board hearings) or dropping your panties at the sight of power. I don't know from personal experience, but that sounds a lot more like Hollywood.

This is slightly off -- the cast includes one more woman who rises above those caricatures, though she appears in only two scenes. But Carmon's core critique is correct. Sorkin selected (and sometimes invented) the facts that would allow him to paint the digital world he despises as the spawn of a bunch of sexually frustrated misogynists. He ignored the facts that would undermine that tale. If this were journalism, it would be indefensible. As art, it reveals a writer who's guilty of some of the very sins he's trying to pin on his target.

The cuddly nerds we made movies about in the '80s. By the way: Has Sorkin seen the movies about cuddly nerds that came out in the '80s? Rent Revenge of the Nerds sometime. It's got geeks, jocks, and cheerleaders, and its sexual politics ain't gonna win any awards from NOW. I'm just sayin'.

Nothing Confused About Backlash - Hartford Courant

Posted: 21 Oct 2010 03:33 PM PDT

In an increasingly desperate attempt to develop a narrative for the coming Democratic collapse, the Democrats have indulged themselves in what for half a century they've habitually attributed to the American right — the paranoid style in American politics. The talk is of dark conspiracies — secret money, foreign influence, big corporations, with Karl Rove and, yes, Ed Gillespie lurking ominously behind the scenes. The only thing missing is the Halliburton-Cheney angle.

But after trotting out some of these with a noticeable lack of success, President Barack Obama has come up with something new, something less common, something more befitting his stature and intellect. He's now offering a scientific, indeed neurological, explanation for his current political troubles.

The electorate apparently is deranged by its anxieties and fears to the point where it can't think straight. Part of the reason "facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time," he explained to a Massachusetts audience, "is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared."

Opening a whole new branch of cognitive science — liberal psychology — Obama has discovered a new principle: The fearful brain is hard-wired to act befuddled, i.e., vote Republican.

But of course. Here Obama has spent two years bestowing upon the peasantry the "New Foundation" of a more regulated, socially engineered and therefore more humane society, and they repay him with recalcitrance and outright opposition. Here he gave them Obamacare, the stimulus, financial regulation and a shot at cap-and-trade — and the electorate remains not just unmoved but ungrateful.

I have a better explanation. Better because it adheres to the ultimate scientific principle, Occam's Razor, by which the preferred explanation for any phenomenon is the one with the most economy and simplicity. And there is nothing simpler than the Gallup findings on the ideological inclinations of the American people. Conservative: 42 percent. Moderate: 35 percent. Liberal: 20 percent. No fanciful new syndromes or other elaborate fictions are required to understand that if you try to impose a liberal agenda on such a demonstrably center-right country — a country that is 80 percent non-liberal — you get a massive backlash.

Moreover, apart from ideology is empirical reality. Even as we speak, the social democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. It's not just the real prospect of financial collapse in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, with even the relatively more stable major countries in severe distress. It is the visible moral collapse of a system that, after two generations of increasing cradle-to-grave infantilization, turns millions of citizens into the streets of France in furious and often violent protest over what? Over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62!

Having seen this display of what can only be called decadence, Obama's perfectly wired electorate says no, not us, not here.

And it isn't as if this political message is new. It had already been sent in the last year with clarion clarity in the elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts where independents — the swing voters without ideological attachment one way or the other — split 2-to-1, 2-to-1 and 3-to-1, respectively, against the Democrats.

The story of the last two years is as simple as it is dramatic. It is the epic story of an administration with a highly ideological agenda encountering a rising resistance from the American people over the major question in dispute: the size and reach and power of government and, even more fundamentally, the nature of the American social contract.

An adjudication of the question will be rendered on Nov. 2. For the day, the American peasantry will be presiding.

Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated writer in Washington.

Fiction

Kamis, 21 Oktober 2010

“Art review: Steve Hurd 'Five Fictions' at Rosamund Felsen Gallery - Los Angeles Times” plus 2 more

“Art review: Steve Hurd 'Five Fictions' at Rosamund Felsen Gallery - Los Angeles Times” plus 2 more

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