Where did those pig lips get off to?

There they are! I need them for Congressman Pete (I used to be district manager for marketing at Southwestern Bell so I'm an expert on economic realities) Sessions from Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reports Pistol Pete flapping his yap today:

Sessions told The New York Times that the administration intends to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy.

And he asserted that the Obama agenda is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”

Precisely how a nefarious divide-and-conquer strategy will arise from staggering unemployment numbers and slumping equity values I don't know. Just why an administration with Obama's very high approval ratings would want to divide and conquer anybody I don't know either. Nor can I know the congressman's ability to divine the President's intentions to undermine capitalism, given all the gigabucks he and his have poured into our ailing financial institutions in an effort to save capitalism.

Moreover, blaming current employment numbers and stock prices on an administration which has been in power for less than four months is patently bad faith partisan posturing in a recession that's a year older than that. Below is a screen grab of a chart for the S&P 500 during the previous administration.


Note the precipitous decline at the end of 2008. That stomach-churning drop at the right begins in September, when Bushman Hank Paulson let Lehman fail. And it is most important to remember that in the several years before that fall as much as 40% of all profits reported by US corporations came from financial institutions, companies whose earnings statements we now know involved magical thinking about the valuations of the derivatives like CDOs, CMOs, and CDSs they had on their books. This made their stock valuations a fraud and unreasonably inflated the whole index. That boom in '06 and '07 was made of air. Talk about inflicting damage on the free enterprise system.

So I just visited Pistol Pete's Web site and left him a message about his utter ignorance. I doubt he'll read it, but I had to say something.

The pig lips I reserved for my blog.

Another one shuts down

The latest e-missive from young Dallas artist/gallerist Paul Slocum reports that his And/Or Gallery is closing when the next show (his 23rd in a little over three years) closes. The reason given is that he's going off to New York to pursue other plans. Slocum writes: "most of the artists that I personally work with are in New York, and I've decided that I need to be in closer contact to reach my full potential."

Slocum's Web site features some serious seizure-inducing wall paper, but more than that he's very carefully documented his art and culture activities over the past few years on it. He took a painting class from me back when I taught at UT-Dallas and successfully managed to vault far beyond it after graduating (computer science, summa cum laude). No wonder his Web site offers links to (among other things) numerous Atari hacks, a project to convert 1985 Epson dot matrix printers into musical instruments, and other nerdly items like a stop motion animation made of thousands of screen captures of found homepages.

Over the years, And/Or has featured works by Tom Moody, Cory Archangel, and many other edgy, intelligent artists. The last And/Or show will feature works by Austin artist Chad Hopper.

Image via the artist's Web site, which is worth checking out, especially for the Roz Chast-meets-Kurt Schwitters pictures.

It may not be everywhere

The inverted Ford logo would seem to signify almost as much as the cracked windshield.

Zombie banks

Via commenter "Bob" at the Baseline Scenario blog.

Richard Patterson review

My review of Richard Patterson's current survey at Dallas's Goss-Michael Foundation is online at Glasstire.

Patterson is a YBA who has relocated to Dallas where he's having a fine time romping around in ultra-American culture and making paintings and sculptures which display equal parts wit and craft.

(image via James Cohan Gallery)

Competing narratives about the recession

A guest post on the Baseline Scenario blog by "StatsGuy" offers a reasoned, thoughtful and well researched take (or rather several takes) on what led to the financial collapse. The essay looks at the concept of "too big to fail" in the financial world as it relates to systemic risk, the decline of the US middle class, and irrational exuberance as causes (either necessary or sufficient) for the Big Bust. Discussing the causes of the debacle is important to deciding what to do about it, of course. And the gist here is that getting all TR on the oligarchs of Wall Street -- worthy as the cause may be -- probably should be a lower priority at present. Along the way, the essay links to numerous informative publications, including this exhaustive timeline of political decisions that led up to our current mess.

Unlike most blogs, the readers' comments at Baseline Scenario are often as good as the articles themselves. I recommend reading the whole shebang.

On a related note, William Black's 2005 book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One probably should be on my reading list.

Perhaps unrelated:



Some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen...

A second look at the garden

Part I


Back at the beginning of April we had a major work party at the community garden because we were able to plug into a local civic work day called "The Big Event." We had kids from the junior master gardener program out there with us.

We had guys from fraternities helping out.

We had geezers with whiskers.

We had generous people from the town and from local churches.

An Ag Science professor showed up and broke in his brand new tractor with us.

Working together, we got a lot done. That morning we moved 130 cubic yards of donated mulch (a cubic yard is 27 cubic feet -- you do the math) and mostly filled 36 raised beds with amended soil.

Part II

Then there was the saga of the bees. My wife and I have lived with a hive of bees for about two years. They've colonized the north wall of our house. I've sporadically tried to get them removed, but the sort of expertise one needs to open a house's wall and capture a hive living inside is rare. I think I have finally found somebody to take care of the hive for me, but he's working long shifts at present and can't do the job for another week or more. I can't bring myself to kill them in this time of Colony Collapse Disorder. Whatever is happening to bees in this country, the bees in my house are definitely healthy.

So healthy that a couple of weeks ago our hive produced two small swarms. Here's a picture of one of them:

The county extension service put me in touch with a beekeeper by the name of Don who brought a hive box for one swarm and a "catch box" for the other. He left the hive with me and took the other swarm in payment. So a day or so later, I lost my bee hauling virginity when I loaded the hive onto the bed of a borrowed pickup and schlepped them out to the garden site. I waited till they'd gone to bed for the evening and stuffed a dish towel into the entrance, but it was nervous making all the same.

The next day, I hauled them again because we determined they were too close to the garden plots. Now they're about 200 feet away, which seems about the right distance. And they've settled into their new digs quite well.

I took that photo this afternoon, as well as the one below.

That's one of our bees foraging about 200 yards from the hive.

Part III


So the garden is beginning to take off. Green stuff is poking out of the soil here and there. A few things are even blooming. The bees are pollinating. I've met and worked with scores of people I wouldn't have otherwise--church folks, politicians, educators, master gardeners, anti-poverty volunteers, plumbers, farmers, and the local feed store proprietors. I've learned a lot about irrigation, mulch, soil amendments, compost, charitable donations, local government, legal matters, insurance, human relations, and bees.

Would Joseph Beuys have called what I've done art? And if he did, would he be right to do so?