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NEWS
February 2010 I've donated a triptych to art auction benefit
for the victims of Haiti's devasting earthquake
which takes place on Wednesday, 2/10 at 7pm.
December 2009 At 7pm on Sunday, December 13th,
I will give a reading at one of NYC's only leather biker
cafes, Motorcycle
Federation. Organized by Madeleine Beckman, the
reading will also feature Roberta Bernstein, Jean
Monahan, and Nicole Sprinkle. More details later.
November 2009 I will have a couple of stories
published in the Brooklyn Writers Space first anthology,
The Reader. The launch party is on Thursday,
November 5th at 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court
Street, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
July 2009 A photograph from my collaboration
with LuLu LoLo, Pierrot 2.0, was included in an
Italian mail art exposition here.
May 2009 My short story Back Trouble is
a semi-finalist (top 27 out of 654) in Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter
Prize for Fiction. • Photos from my Suburban
Geometries series are published on Polar Inertia's Spring 2009
(#34) issue at the end of May.
April 2009 4/8: Max's cousin Elena
Takeuchi was born at 5:24pm Tokyo Time! • My long
story The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer is a finalist
(top 30 out of 900) in Summer Literary Seminars-2009
Unified Fiction and Poetry Contest judged by Lynne
Tillman. • A photo from my Visual Haiku series
was published in Shots's Spring 2009 issue
(#103).
February 2009 My short short story South of
the Border was awarded 3rd Place in the Sonora Review's Third Annual
Short Short Contest. The judge was Aimee Bender.
January 2009 My short story Second Actis a finalist won Honorable Mention in
Cutthroat Journal's 2008 Rick DeMarinis Short
Story Competition. The story will be published in
February.
November 2008 Brooklyn Writers Space Reading at
Union Hall, Sunday, 11/9, 5-7pm. BWS.
September 2008 Final LMCC Reading at U.S.
Custom House, Thursday, 9/18, 6-8pm. RSVP is mandatory
because of security. RSVP at LMCC's site here. Map of Bowling Green
here.
August 2008 Our Baby Boy Is Due! 8/15 is the
due date of our unnamed
boy. HE'S HERE! Max
Miles Takeuchi was born on Friday, 8-22-8 at
3:33pm! See tons of pix here.
His name is Jonathan Krohn and he just turned 14
(today apparently), but he was a darling at last
week’s Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s
already written a book, Define Conservatism, and
speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of a bar
mitzvah boy. His hero is Bill Bennett and he wants
Newt Gingrich to ascend to the presidency. Perhaps
he, rather than Jindal, should have given the
Republican rebuttal to Obama’s speech last
Tuesday. Anyway, we’re already working on Max,
brainwashing him at every opportunity to turn him
into the child prodigy heir to Kennedy liberalism.
|
Bush in Tears
01.27.2009 | 10:56 AM •
U.S. President George W. Bush re-enters the White
House East room to say goodbye to staff and friends
after his primetime address in Washington, January
15, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)
This Bush photo, along with many others,
are discussed on Errol Morris’ blog at the
nytimes.com. It’s hard to feel sorry for the man
after all the colossal mistakes he’s made, but
this photo, taken right after his final public
address to the nation, makes feel sorry for him.
As one of the photo editors who talked with
Morris said, it seems pretty obvious that Bush
had been weeping right before he returned to the
room to privately thank his staff and the press
corps for the last time. Most of Morris’s
Mirror Mirror on the Wall blog entry
concerns the subtle role of photography as
political propaganda and the way society--even
presidents--have come to view images as
aesthetic validations of history. The list of the Bush
administration’s failures and lies and outright
cronyist greed is just amazing, and Bush’s
reaction to a lot of these photographs seems to
confirm that he remains incapable of contrition.
No surprise, given his genius for denial. Of
course he did have one great success...
Anyway, this marks my last post about Bush--call it
the final catharsis.
|
Obama Inauguration at
BAM
01.21.2009 | 11:39 PM •
|
The Tumor Was Finally
Removed!
01.20.2009 | 10:48 PM •
It feels like a giant cancerous tumor has been
removed. Thank god!
|
Obama Inauguration Count
Down
01.18.2009 | 11:51 PM •
|
Obama Fever in E.
Village
01.17.2009 | 11:17 PM •
|
Q: What Was Bush Doing
While the Economy Was Melting?
12.30.2008 | 02:26 PM •
A: Reading books.
Thanks to spinmaster Karl Rove, we now know that our
supreme leader is not a philistine book burner, but a
learned man of letters. In Rove’s new career, to
rehabilitate his puppet’s legacy, he offers this WSJ column on how he and
W. competed to read the most books and pages
over the last few years. While it’s plausible
that Bush actually read the listed books, a few
investigators have done the math, in particular
this analysis over at Book
Patrol, which comes to the conclusion that it is
unlikely Bush could have plowed through his list
in so little time.
The above picture, I’ve just learned, is actually a
fake. This was disseminated not long after 9/11 when
Bush was reading along with an elementary school
class down in Florida as the planes hit the towers.
Snopes.com nailed the fraud here. I hadn’t realized
though, that the book they were reading,
America, A Patriotic Primer, was
written by Lynne Cheney. Perhaps the
only thing better than Oprah to enhance book
sales is to have your husband be the vice
president.
|
Finally the Nightmare Can
End!
11.05.2008 | 11:57 AM •
Congratulations, Barack! As the Onion said, you are
about to inherit America’s worst job. Only ten
weeks until Inauguration, ten weeks for Bush to
continue his reign of destruction. With a 25%
approval rating, I’m sure he’s more than happy
to gift industry with some more loose
regulations. After all, he’s going to need some
big donors to break ground on his presidential library at SMU.
|
Max's First Election
11.04.2008 | 05:18 PM •
|
Halloween
10.31.2008 | 10:38 PM •
The nominees took some time out from their busy
campaigns to stroll with the crowds in the Park Slope
halloween parade.
|
Powell Finally Does the
Right Thing
10.19.2008 | 05:12 PM •
After tarnishing his reputation with his U.N. speech
about Iraq’s WMD, Colin Powell finally stopped
waffling and offered his well-reasoned conclusion on why he’s
supporting Obama. While I’ve never been a fan of
generals, I did have respect for Powell’s calm,
smart demeanor, at least before he shamefully
toed the Bush line about the imminent danger of
Iraq. Whether pundits want to spin this as a
race thing or not, Powell did himself right this
time. Tireless diplomacy and engaged
multilateralism are the best approaches to
ensure world peace, not bullying and jumping
into unwinable conflicts. Powell’s experience
tells him this and he knows Obama is clearly the
better man for the moment.
Speaking of a calm, smart demeanor. The best
advertisement for Barack Obama happens to be his
appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show on September 4th.
If you haven’t seen this 4-part video, you
should. Under O’Reilly’s dogged pressure, Obama
remains confident, intelligent, and totally
reasonable, even displaying a sense of humor.
While the Fox News flat-tax, pro-corporate
commentator could have sharpened his chainsaw a
bit more, he was obviously impressed by Obama’s
command of the issues. The usual stuff is
discussed--class warfare, cap gains tax, Bill
Ayers, Iran, Afghanistan--with Obama refusing to
take O’Reilly’s inflammatory bait. Also
mentioned, are my two biggest Obama
disappointments, his support of FISA and embrace
of nuclear power, both of which clearly show
Obama is willing to imperil the citizenry at the
profit of big corporate power. (I can only hope
that this will not actually play out in his
presidency.)
|
The Manipulator
Manipulates McCain
09.21.2008 | 11:46 PM •
Somehow I missed this photojournalism
controversy last week. Jill Greenberg, aka The Manipulator, was hired by
The Atlantic to shoot a portrait of John McCain
and she posted photoshopped outtakes (a few
shown here) from the shoot on her website (all
since removed). The editor of The Atlantic
released a condemnation of Greenberg’s
actions as well as an apology to the McCain
campaign. The whole controversy has spawned some
lively discussions (here, here, and here) on photojournalist
ethics. Though I find her actions unprofessional
and childish, I don’t see why Greenberg can’t
publicize her strong political views. Of course,
she won’t be working for The Atlantic again, but
so what? Maybe she’ll have to give up her title
of photojournalist, since she can’t remain
impartial. But that’s okay, she’s not
documenting reality anyway, she’s an artist
illustrator.
Artists can and should take stands; too often they
end up only making slick PR advertisements for the
subjects they shoot. Even if McCain’s image was made
into propaganda, it does not change the fact that
he’s a Bush lapdog, a man who has totally lost his
principles, and someone we should really fear running
this country.
For an interesting read on how a real pro dealt with
photographing a subject he considered evil, read
this about Arnold Newman
posing Alfred Krupp.
|
Client 9 Gear Already
Available
03.12.2008 | 09:16 PM •
|
The End of
Unilateralism
01.28.2008 | 10:17 AM •
Photo Illustrations by
Kevin Van Aelst
Parag Khanna makes a long, persuasive
argument
in the Sunday Times Magazine about how the
future of the world is in the hands of the big
3: the U.S., Europe, and China. The most
important part of his essay is that it will be
the rising second world (countries like
Venezuela, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan) who will have the leverage as
they grow, picking and choosing alliances with
the big 3.
Seen in this context, the Iraq War was an act of
desperation by a waning superpower run by an idiot
with an oedipal complex who all too willingly
bankrupted its coffers to benefit the biggest
multinational corporations. And it really was about
oil, securing the cheap, free flow of it, because
without cheap energy, the U.S.'s economic leverage is
greatly reduced. Starting in 2009, diplomacy and
innovation, not arrogance, will have to rule the day.
Barack will have quite a job ahead of him.
Photo Illustrations by
Kevin Van Aelst
