Post-Hiatus & Elizabeth Edward RIP + Prizes (United States of Artist & Turner Prize)

It's been eons, but I fell down the rabbit hole of classes, committee work, and boom! it was already December. Now, classes are over, all my students have submitted their final papers or revised story or novel drafts (yay!), and I almost have a bit of breathing room. There's still committee work, and final grading, but I am greatly looking forward to the tiny break before classes resume the first week of January. (We are on quarters, which are bruuuu-tal!)

So much has transpired I'm not even going to try to cover all the ground between my last post and this one, so I will be posting some photos of events (readings, musical events, etc.) that I attended, with minimal commentary, and, in a subsequent post, a short note about a superb event I participated in this past weekend, one of the best things I've been a part of since, well, last December, when C and I went to Caltagirone, Italy.  This was in the C city where I spend a good deal of my waking life, Chicago, but it was almost like being in a magical place. But I'll say more in my next post.

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I did want to note the passing of Elizabeth Anania Edwards (1939-2010, at right, Reuters), a lawyer, author, wife, mother, and politically engaged citizen.  Elizabeth Edwards, who died of a recurrence of breast cancer, is best known for her support her husband John Edwards' campaigns for the Presidency and Vice Presidency, but both in 2004 and especially in the 2008 campaigns, she emerged as powerful public figure in her own right.  Edwards demonstrated tremendous poise, courage and resilience in the media spotlight, both after announcing that her cancer her returned and her husband's public disgrace, just as she did in her final days. RIP.

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Congratulations to Martín Espada, Greg Tate, Glenn Ligon, Renée Green, Mel Chin, Siah Armajani, Doug Wright, Danny Hoch, and all the other artists who received 2010 United States of Artists fellowships!

Also, today the Tate Britain announced the winner of the 2010 Turner Prize in Art. It went to Susan Philipsz, for an acoustic installation entitled "Lowlands Away," which was first mounted on three bridges in Glasgow, and then as part of the finalists' exhibit at the Tate Modern.  Previous winners have included Gilbert & George, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen, and the infamous paragon of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst.

I must admit that I was pulling for the exciting theory-and-cinema-focused Otolith Group, one of whose founding members is the extraordinarily brilliant artist and scholar Kodwo Eshun. There time will certainly come.  Simultaneous with last night's Turner Prize ceremony at Tate Modern, art students and their supporters protesting the new Tory-Liberal Democratic coalition government's proposed cuts in education and arts funding occupied one of the museum's gallery and also picketed the event. Turner Prize ceremony attendees, it's good to note, in the main supported the protesters.

I Like It To Make Sense

With 500,000,000 "members" on Facebook, can't they do something useful with that sort of base? I mean something really useful. Not something that's fake-useful. (By the way, I use the quotes around members because the number of accounts is different than the number of people who actually use the service on a consistent basis. See, I can do that when I'm not one of those who benefits from trumped up numbers. But either way, it's still an enormous buttload of people.) How about if I amend that request? How about if instead of asking if Facebook users could do something useful I instead ask if Facebook users could just stop doing things that do absolutely nothing, all the while pretending as if they're saving the world from certain destruction. (Trust me. Certain destruction doesn't sound that bad when the alternative is surviving with a bunch of morons that just blindly follow something without giving any thought to what they're doing.)

Here's the scoop: A certain status update has been going viral on Facebook. It's women who are blindly doing the updating without stopping to think a) Why am I doing this, and/or b) Why am I doing this? It goes something like this: The status starts off with "I like it on the" and then women are supposed to fill in the blank with where they like it. Like what, you ask? Why, where they like their purse, of course. Wait. Wait. Their...purse? Yes. Their purse. Melissa Bell over at the Washington Post explains it "Women are posting where they like to keep their purses when they come home, but they conveniently leave out the word "purse." Oh. Ha-ha. Is there a reason for this? Of course there is, silly! It's for breast cancer. Wait. What?

Correct. Breast cancer. According to The Huffington Post (which sites other references) "October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and the "I like it on" trend is an attempt for women to unite around that cause in a top secret way. The idea is figuratively to leave men in the dark." Um, this might be one of the stupidest "feel good" things that I have heard about in quite some time.

First of all, how does posting where you like to keep your purse (assuming that you carry a purse) help raise awareness for breast cancer? And second, how is leaving men in the dark about it helping anything at all? (I realize that it's a small percentage, but it isn't like men don't get breast cancer also.) Is it just women who should be concerned about breast cancer? Assuming that this was even a legitimate tool for raising awareness, why is it that men should be excluded from all of the being aware? Explain to me how it is that men should be excluded from caring about breast cancer? Explain to me how it is that men are not affected by breast cancer? Better yet, explain to some guy whose wife has breast cancer how breast cancer awareness should exclude him.

I'd love to hear from anyone who actually posted this on their status so that they could tell me not where they like their damn purse, but what did they think was going to be accomplished by their going along with it? I'd like to know if they in some way felt smarter by posting it or if the goal was just to feel smarter than the men who had no idea what it could possibly mean (and who, stereotypically, just jumped to the assumption that it was about sex). Thank God that the folks who have been actually been doing actual things to raise awareness about breast cancer didn't run their campaigns with inane Facebook statuses.

Listen, if you want to raise awareness about something, what say you tell folks what it is that you want them to know, OK? Wouldn't you raise more awareness about breast cancer by simply posting on your status "October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now you know."? Or something like that? I'm sure that you probably would, but that wouldn't be nearly as cutesy as where you like your damned purse. We're so doomed. So, so doomed.

It's Not About Insurance

I cannot begin to tell you how freaking sick I am of hearing about health care. I am over it. The politicians in Washington have no idea what they're doing and have their own self-centered and power hungry reasons for wanting whatever bill they've constructed to go through. All they're going to end up doing if the thing passes is causing more taxpayers to foot the bill at a higher price. And it's highly unlikely that the higher price will accomplish anything. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to know because the bill has swelled, at last count, to over 1,900 pages. There is absolutely no way that any given Senator or member of Congress can know precisely what is on every single one of those 1,900+ pages. None. (Granted, I wouldn't trust half of them to know what was in the thing if it were only 19 pages, but with 1,900 I know they don't know what's in there.)

And before you start shooting me emails or leaving me comments saying that things like it must be easy for me to say those things because I obviously have insurance, pipe down. I don't have insurance because I'm uninsurable. I got extremely sick about 10 years ago and damn near died. (I had awesome insurance at the time, but gave that up when I left that particular job.) Since then, whenever I've attempted to get insurance again, time after time I am denied because they dub me to be high risk. Now, my sickness was something that anyone could get, regardless of any particular lifestyle trait or quality, and that over 200,000 people every year come down with. But the fact that over half of those folks die within 48 hours is what makes me "high risk".

The insurance companies can suck it. Would I like those aspects of health care in this country to change so that those with pre-existing conditions or those with past conditions can easily get insurance to access health care? Sure I would. Do I want it done in via this particular health care bill passing? Hell no. In the meantime, I'll just do what I've always done and take care of myself rather than sit around and wait for the government to offer me something to take care of me. I suggest that everyone else do the same.

But my point (surprisingly) wasn't to come here and rant about being uninsurable. My point was to rail on media publications that try to exploit any sort of death out there that they think could possibly be related to someone not having health care. Today's media abomination of exploiting the dead for political gain comes to us courtesy of People.

Apparently, on Tuesday, a one 37-year old Jennifer Lyon died of breast cancer. Until reading about her passing, I had no clue as to who she was. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard the name before in my life. She was a contestant on the 2005 season of Survivor: Palau. (I wasn't real sure that I had ever heard of Palau in my life either, but then realized that it is a tiny little island that is about 500 miles east of the Philippines. Actually, I didn't realize that, but tomato, tom-ah-to. Whatever.)

And while it's unfortunate that Ms. Lyon passed away at such a young age, here's the angle that People magazine felt the need to include in their article. "It all began in the summer of 2004, when she "felt something in my right breast that didn't feel normal," Lyon told PEOPLE in October 2005. "I thought it was probably scar tissue related to my breast implants. It was right along the ridge of the implant, so I let it go, and I let it go for a long time."

See, now I'm thinking after reading that passage that they're going to go with the angle of how important it is to always get these things checked out. Yeah, not so much. Instead they went with: "Asked why she delayed seeing a doctor, Lyon said, "I didn't have insurance, which is a big part of it. And it really wasn't changing much. But a year later, I felt another lump, and then I felt something under my armpit."

Soooo....if the not having insurance was a big part of it, what was the other part? Um, People? Hello? Oh, that didn't get asked. I see. OK, how about this question: When you had your implants, did you have insurance? Oh, what? Oh, riiiight! Right. Implants would be cosmetic and insurance wouldn't necessarily cover them. Huh. Sooooo....you went to a doctor then, right? So, why didn't you go this time? Oh, that's right. People didn't ask that question either. And when you finally went to the doctor because, after a year you felt another lump and something under your armpit, did you have insurance then? Hard to say because People did go there either. Thanks for the craptastic article there, People. Gee, I wonder what you wanted the angle on this story to be?

Let me take a guess as to what happened her. Again, it has nothing to do with the no insurance thing. According to Wikipedia (take it for what's it's worth, I realize that), for the particular season of Survivor that Ms. Lyon was a contestant on, "Applications were due on June 22, 2004. Around 800 applicants were selected for an interview between the latter part of July and August 2004...48 were chosen as semi-finalists...during September 2004. From these...20 were chosen to participate (on) the show between October to December 2004." I think that her desire to be on Survivor was a huge factor in her putting off seeing a doctor. I have absolutely nothing but speculation to base that assumption on, but it seems fairly reasonable, given as how she had proven in the past that she had no problem seeing a doctor when she wanted something to be taken care of, ie breast implants.

Look, I'm not trying to malign the deceased, all right? My condolences go out to her friends and family. But the other thing that goes out to her friends and family is the utmost hope that this doesn't get turned into something that is about having or not having insurance because it doesn't sound like it is. If this is going to get turned into anything at all (and I pray to God that is isn't) it needs to be on the importance of getting checked regularly and to not put off seeing a doctor when you find some abnormality on your body. No one knows your body better than you do. If you find something that isn't right, go find out why it isn't right.

Lately, so many people are obsessed with being on TV for no other reason than just being on TV. There are a gazillion reality shows out there for people to choose from so that they can claim their fame by being seen as whatever it is that they're portraying themselves as by (unfortunately) millions of viewers. I watch these morons that cannot sing a lick try out for American Idol. They act as if their life will be over if they do not make it on that show. There are things that are more important than reality TV. Priorities people. Priorities.