Nicole and I rescued another dog yesterday. We named the above pictured little girl Lucy. She is a two-year-old Dachshund-Corgi mix, and she is extremely sweet, though still a little shy, especially around men. We’re doing a lot of hanging out today, so I hope she figures out that I’m a pretty cool dude and won’t hurt her. I’m sure she’ll love me in no time.
The fever is gone, but the cough has worsened. The good news: Death is still far off. The bad news: My computer is making me dizzy. I’ll try again tomorrow.
In the meantime, watch this. It makes me laugh:
Slight fever. Major cough. Must lie on the couch. Doctor’s orders. Such is life when you are a quarter-century old. Will be back tomorrow to tell about where I’ve come after six months on the “job.” I’ll give you a hint: The news is not particularly good.
To hold you over, take a look once again at how it all began:
Turns out all us hasty bloggers were had. Aliza Shvarts didn’t actually impregnate herself and then induce a bunch of miscarriages, all for the sake of art. I must admit that I’m sort of disappointed that it’s not real. It’s a lot less provocative now. At the very least, when we all thought it was legit, it was something to talk about. Now it’s just a weird performance piece with some fake blood and staged events caught on video. Fucking artists.
A student’s stunning claims of repeatedly artificially inseminating herself and then taking drugs to induce miscarriages for her senior art project aren’t true, Yale University said Thursday night.
The student, art major Aliza Shvarts, told several high-level Yale officials that she did not do the things she said she did in constructing the exhibit, according to the Ivy League university’s strongly worded statement sent to FOXNews.com.
“The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” said Helaine S. Klasky, associate dean and vice president for public affairs at Yale. “Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.”
“She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” Klasky said in the statement. […]
The timing of Klasky’s statement — more than 10 hours after the school paper published the story, which was picked up by several Web news outlets — indicated that Yale officials had taken Shvarts’ claims seriously enough to launch a full-scale investigation.
“Her art project includes visual representations,” Klasky wrote. “[Shvarts] stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. … Had these acts been real they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”
The stomach-turning display will be showcased next week — complete with depictions of blood samples and videos purporting to be from the terminated pregnancies. … Click here for the full story
Shvarts’ project may ultimately provide greater commentary on the speed of the modern news cycle than it will on her intended topic. Kudos, I guess, to the artist for doing her thing, though it bugs me when people lie to the press — even a student paper — in order to advertise themselves. Normally I’d have something to say about reporters not doing their jobs, but, with something like this, Shvarts was really the only source. As long as she was saying it was real, there’s not much a reporter could do. Once again: Fucking artists.
Thanks to my kid sister for sending the update, by the way.
Every now and again, the art world wakes from its hazy fog of pretentious, postmodern self-importance and forces something provocative on the populace. Of course, most normal people would rather wedge hot, metallic spars into their eyes than voluntarily attend an art show, especially a postmodern one. But most normal people are stupid and boring, and artists love to prove this by fucking with the minds of the Average Joe and Jane, who are predictably dumbfounded by, let’s say, a Jesus painting smeared in elephant dung or a mason jar filled with a preserved pig fetus. I mean, really. How does anyone not get it?
Personally, I don’t mind being lumped in with the stupid and boring on these matters because, as pretentious an self-important as I pretend to be, I’m really just a wiseass with no self-esteem and nothing better to do than make fun of people and things I don’t like, usually doing so with veiled literary references and pop-culture satires. It doesn’t really matter to me on which side of the fence I happen to fall. But, while I think a good number of postmodernists are bat-shit insane, I have to give the accomplished artist his or her due for taking a chance and encouraging discourse, even if I don’t get it or think it’s just sort of dumb and uninteresting.
However, there are other times when these nut jobs get carried away in their self-professed genius and distract from the social and/or political discourse they are trying to encourage. And that leads me to Aliza Shvarts, a Yale University art student whose senior art project is not just nutty but downright damaging to an important movement, perhaps doing more to set it back than any recent court decision, depending on how far the media decides to carry the story. You see, Shvarts’ little project, which debuts next Tuesday, is “a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.¹”
The goal of the project, according to statements made by the artist to the Yale Daily News, is to encourage discussion on the relationship between art and the human body. This is a worthwhile conversation to have, especially in a high-level academic setting like Yale, but the method here is a little off the beaten path, to the say the least.
I’m going to leave out whether or not I think this project is in good taste, is unethical or amoral, is an indication of some deep-rooted psychological issue in the bowels of Shvarts’ blackened soul, or any other taste-based critique of the young artist and her work. Rather, the more important issue here is the socio-political implications of this project on the greater pro-choice/pro-life battle, which is surely going to lurk its way into popular conversation now that Baron Von Pontiff and his team of child-raping aides has hijacked the cities and airwaves of this once-great secular nation.
Perhaps it is youthful naiveté that makes Shvarts believe the topic her project will provoke involves the relationship between biology and art. But anyone with even the faintest whiff of life experience can see the way this will play out in the public forum. Every pro-life yahoo tuned to Fox News will have a field day shouting about the ways Roe v. Wade has made a mockery of life and has allowed deranged far-out artists to drench their cervices with semen using little more than a turkey baster, a well-positioned mirror, and a presumed mandate from hell. Pro-choice enthusiasts will then be forced into the absurd position of having to defend Shvarts’ behavior, because somehow being pro-choice has come to mean that you also love killing babies and smearing afterbirth onto the walls of some little student gallery in Connecticut. That’s the discussion that will ensue thanks to Shvarts’ little endeavor.
Now, perhaps that is a worthy debate to some, but let’s get real for a second. This type of bullshit is what fragments discussion into its most extreme elements, forcing the nuts who reside on the periphery of rational thinking into the driver’s seat of social and political conversations. And that’s why nothing gets done. It’s like filming Boy George sodomizing a ferret and then expecting people to civilly discuss the nature of human sexuality.
No, fragile artist. What will happen is that every anti-gay-rights lobby in America will take the streets telling residents of Podunk, USA that letting gay people get married will soon lead to men marrying beasts, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! And then sane gay people and those who love and respect them will have to spend unnecessary time telling everyone what they already should know, that the average gay person has no interest in banging farm or domesticated animals and the Boy George-on-innocent ferret exhibition was just some extremist artist trying to get known and not to worry. It’s one big waste of time, and a distraction from the real issue.
The truth about the majority of people who believe in a woman’s right to choose whether or not the time and circumstance are right for her to bring a child into the world is that these individuals see redeeming social value in the legal protection of this right. Contrary to what Diablo Cody would have you believe, unwanted or unplanned pregnancies are not always blessings in disguise. There are many factors that go into the decision to have an abortion. It’s not simply irresponsibility or blood lust. The moral and ethical questions involved in abortion (1) hinge on scientific evidence not yet available in the medical community, or (2) are rooted in the absolute right to privacy between a patient and her doctor, meaning there can be no outside government interference in the medical decisions made by an individual while under the care of a physician.
These points raise genuine points of debate, the discussion of which is absolutely necessary in order to reach a societal consensus on this or any issue. There is inherent societal value in discussing — because science is unable to provide the answer — when life begins. There is value in discussing whether or not that matters, and whether doctor-patient privacy issues are the overriding factor in the ethical and legal standing of abortion. It can be taken even further by granting early-term abortions but still outlawing those in the second and third trimesters. These, and many others, are all worthwhile discussions that society must have.
But we too often get distracted by intellectually marginal figures like Shvarts or your favorite abortion-clinic bomber, those with extreme ideas and methods that polarize people, divide them into opposing camps, and create an us-versus-them dynamic that leads to nothing but resentment, hostility, and anger.
Now, does Shvarts deserve a break due to her age and relative inexperience? Absolutely. But serious questions need to be asked of Yale’s faculty members, most of which should know better. Did anyone discuss the long-term health issues that could arise by repeated forced miscarriages in such a short period of time and explain to Shvarts that perhaps she should reconsider her decision not to consult a physician? Was the possible social and political effect of the project carefully thought out between student and teacher? If so, how does the faculty explain the project? These are all topics that need further investigation. Of course, I don’t expect to get much from the Yale faculty. I can only imagine the pretentious, delusional jerkoffs teaching art school at Yale.
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¹ Click here to read the full article from the Yale Daily News.
Courtesy of 23/6.com.
For more on why being elite is better than being “a shit-kicker from Kansas,” click here.
And then watch this:
Neil Diamond has a new album coming out May 6! Thank you, Neil. Thank you.
From the May 2008 issue of Esquire magazine:
Blond hair the way God meant, blond like Clorox sunshine. A caviar body, if you like your caviar lacquered in barbecue sauce. Breasts like plucked guinea hens, undercooked and overstuffed. And those legs, like those of every coed in every early-80s corduroy skirt, waving across the quad at the guy just behind you. Cheerleader legs. Jackknifing legs that split in the air like seesaws. In the Dukes of Hazzard music video, those legs are in cowboy boots, moving like joysticks across your screen. She’s got that dumb-fox high-maintenance pout. She’s got her own money: She can buy your house just to use the toilet. She’s one of those Easy-Bake celebrities, up from Abilene, Texas, with a fizzy pop beat on church-choir training wheels. She’s hot as fresh milk and has an okay voice, and the rest just happens around her. Luck on Red Bull. […]
Now look north, into her eyes: Jessica Simpson is the future face of the new American job of celebrity, the first of the self-made, small-talent applicants who’ll last a Liz Taylor lifetime.
Not surprisingly, this hyperbolic, metaphor-ridden description was written by a woman. More specifically, a woman who clearly does not understand the sex drive of the average male. I think what gives it away isn’t so much the ridiculous things to which the author compares Simpson’s smoking hot parts but the completely asexual nature of the entire ordeal. As a red-blooded, American male preconditioned to lust after anything with pouty lips and an I-can’t-believe-those-things-are-real rack, after reading this, I did not want to have sex with Jessica Simpson, which is always the goal when so many words are spent trying to describe how beautiful and sexy a woman is, as much as I wanted to go out for ribs and get wasted at a little country pub off a dusty Texas highway, something with a fifty-cent jukebox and high-school football pennants hanging from wood-panel walls, where everything — the booze, the waitresses, the local economy — is bottom-shelf.
And this bothers me. If I’m wasting brain power reading about how Jessica Simpson is the no-talent pop star for me, and the lead to that piece is supposed to remind me that I should feel obligated to leave my girlfriend if I’m ever offered a cup of Simpson’s bathwater — filled, I assume, with the freshly rinsed barbecue lacquer that once besmudged her caviar body — I want to feel a desire quake in me, up through my groin and into my gut — Bam! — like a runaway freight train in my small intestine. All that talk of guinea hens and fresh milk, though, just made me laugh, yet again, at the expense of poor Jessica Simpson.
Mix all the metaphors you want, if you don’t make me want to screw her, then all your selling me is that okay voice and luck on Red Bull. That’s a shame, too. I bet she’s sweet girl.
Warning: Some language in the video clip below may be inappropriate for young children or the workplace. It is, however, funny. I think it’s worth it.
** I will have a post later about all my activities in Syracuse this weekend. It was a great time being back, albeit a little strange.
All I have to say are these three words: Nyack. Is. Hard.
25 Arrested in Nyack cocaine raid (click here to read full story)
NYACK - A cadre of police officers arrested 25 people yesterday on felony drug charges in a raid that started at dawn in the heart of the riverfront village.
The raid on apartments and homes was aimed at shutting down a cocaine-dealing crew that sold drugs out of the Nyack senior-citizen and apartment complexes on each side of Depew Avenue, authorities said. […]
During the investigation, police also seized six guns, five bulletproof vests, $74,000 and more than 9 pounds of cocaine with an uncut street value topping $400,000. They also took in 1 1/2 ounces of marijuana and about 10 packages of heroin, as well as scales and drug-packaging material.
The business was being run outside the Nyack Plaza,” Rockland Narcotics Task Force Director Joseph Tripodo said during a news conference in Nyack Village Hall. “The Building 3 Crew was entrenched in the community … and were dealing right in the middle of Nyack. It was an open air market.”
Dubbed Operation Ghostrider, the Narcotics Task Force and other departments began investigating in August based on information about drug dealing from the Orangetown Police Department. … Read more
This shit cracks me up, not because cocaine dealing is funny, but because I went to school with some of the people charged, and, like all self-proclaimed Nyack thugs, I can say with 100 percent confidence that they are all posers. They didn’t grow up in the ‘hood. They grew up on Main Street. They went to Upper Nyack Elementary School, which was the setting for a lovable HBO reality show a few years back called “Kindergarten.” They have no idea what it takes to be a real drug dealer. They watch a few 50 Cent videos and rent “Scarface” and all of a sudden they think they’re American Gangster. In reality, though, they’re just stupid kids who had little incentive to perform well in school, so they’d rather deal drugs than work at the mall. I worked at the mall. It sucks. If I didn’t get that NBA job, I probably would’ve considered slinging coke on the corner too.
The other funny part of this story is the cops. Nyack cops, like most law-enforcement agents protecting the inner-sanctum of suburban townships, are posers as well. Most of the time, their main duties involve breaking up high-school parties and issuing traffic citations. They also patrol the fourth floor of the mall and keep order outside of McDonald’s on a weekend night. Really exciting stuff. The pride of their communities, let me tell you. Most of them are douchebags, though. They get hard-ons watching “NYPD Blue” and “CSI.” They live for the attention that comes with real crime. Operation Ghostrider? A raid at dawn? Are you kidding me? Again, dudes, settle down. These criminal masterminds think Franklin Street is hard, never mind the million-dollar mansions around the corner. This is Nyack, not Bed-Stuy.