Archive - Mar 2010
March 4th
Juxtaposing Blog Posts and Museum Exhibitions: A Deconstruction of a Family Trip to the Whitney Biennial
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/04/2010 - 10:13”Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow.” Said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.
Miranda is home from college for winter break. Not completely home, she’s staying at her mother’s house, and she has her own life now. She’s studying art and would rather spend time having lunch with gallery owners in New York than dinner with her dad and his family in Connecticut. Of course the best of all worlds might be if she could go museum hopping with Fiona, Kim and I in New York.
Kim had to work, but we decided to take Fiona out of school for the day. She has been longing to see her half-sister and a trip to the Whitney Biennial could be a great educational experience. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, I did not expect Miranda to be up with the lark, and we planned a late morning train.
What a lark! What a plunge! My thoughts shifted to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. I discovered Virginia Woolf in my college days and fell in love with her writing. She captures a world from a viewpoint so different than I had developed growing up on a small farm in Western Massachusetts and that diversity of viewpoints I found so intriguing. Slowly, I grew out of my fascination for the outsiders that Hermann Hesse portrayed to the crazy older men of other great literature. What did Mr. Ramsay struggle with as he tried to get beyond ‘R’? What opium induced visions did Augustus Carmichael see as he shuffled past Mrs. Ramsay, reminding her of the inadequacy of human relationships.
Some one had blundered.
As I thought of these characters, various idealists from Anton Chekhov’s plays came to mind. Marcel Proust joined the fray and the opening line, For a long time I used to go to bed early comes to mind. Fiona went to bed early before the great trip to the museum, and my thoughts mingled together into strange dreamlike sequences as I drifted off that night.
The train ride in was uneventful. Fiona was full of excitement about seeing her big sister. Miranda was full of excitement about seeing the Biennial. I settled into my role of the crazy old uncle. I had thought about titling my blog post something like, “Having a Crazy Uncle for a Dad”. As we talked, I asked Fiona what she thought ‘art’ was. I explained that it sounds like a very simple question, but really, it is very complicated. She admitted it was complicated and started talking about things that are painted. I asked if a painted house, car, or mailbox is art. As we talked, Fiona decided that everything was art and moved on to other topics.
Is this blog post art? How does it compare to the video of people talking about America projected on to the cracked windshield of a 1960s era ambulance? What is the purpose of art? Miranda was less interested in those installations that were making some sort of political statement. If she were older and more cynical, I could hear her deriding anything except art for art’s sake. Yet what is the ‘sake’ of ‘art’? Towards the end of the exhibit, we looked at a painting by Mark Rothko and Miranda talked about how he resisted his work being called abstract and berated using words like ‘juxtaposed’ to describe it. We joked about so many of those little write-ups on the walls using words like juxtaposed and deconstructed. I remember the old joke about people who can’t do, teach, and wandered if something similar applied to these art write-ups. Those who can’t do art, write little descriptions for the walls of museums.
At one point during the visit, I glanced out of one of the rare windows in the Whitney to the scene outside. I remembered the old homeless man that Miranda and I had seen dumpster diving at Grand Central. What is art? What is its purpose? What do we learn by juxtaposing the homeless man against the Whitney?
More immediately, what am I doing here, writing my blog post about going to the Whitney with two of my daughters? How do blogs fit into the greater picture? Where does other technology fit in?
For me, perhaps some of it comes back to the crazy old men who look at life a little bit different. Perhaps I’m becoming one of them. Perhaps, I might even cause someone else to stop, if even just for a moment, and look at life a little bit differently. I know that my experience at the Whitney has caused me to look around a little more closely, and I hope it has had a similar effect for my daughters, as well as for others that visit it.
March 3rd
Woodbridge Board of Finance Trims Another $107,000 From Proposed Town Budget
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 09:22Tuesday evening, the Woodbridge Board of Finance gathered to review the proposed budget for the coming year. In these difficult times, revenues have fallen, as has the value of houses on the grand list. As a result, even a very lean budget would result in tax increases and an even greater increase in the mill rate when it is most challenging for residents to meet new expenses.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 08:13
March 2nd
Lebanon CT Rejects Budget Ordinance
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 12:51Yesterday, I received a phone call from a Lebanon, CT resident concerned about a town meeting that had been scheduled for last night. The purpose of the meeting was to ‘Consider and act upon an Ordinance providing for the separate consideration of the General Town Budget and the Board of Education Budget’. However, last November during the municipal elections there had been a ballot question asking if the town should enact such an ordinance. If it was already voted on in November, why was there this special meeting?
Lebanon is a small town in eastern Connecticut. The population was just under seven thousand at the 2000 Census. In 2005, there were about 4,800 voters in the town. The local paper is the Norwich Bulletin from the city 12 miles to the southeast.
Last November, there was a ballot question about whether or not the town should enact an ordinance separating the town budget from the education budget. Prior to the vote, there were a couple of informatory meetings to discuss the pros and cons of the proposal, but only a few people showed up for the meetings.
According to the town clerk’s office, this ballot question received 954 yes votes and 391 no votes. However, this question did not have the language of an ordinance and was only informatory to the town boards. Based on the results, a town meeting was scheduled to vote on the ordinance.
On February 18th, the Board of Selectmen posted a Legal Notice of the Special Town Meeting. It was posted in the Norwich Bulletin, on the town website and at town hall. Still, many people did not know about the meeting or about the issue.
Last night, around 150 people showed up for the town meeting. After a discussion of the proposed ordinance there was a paper ballot where 101 people voted against the ordinance and 49 voted for it.
It may well be that there is something about this in the Norwich Bulletin, but my search online turned up nothing. Previously, I’ve written about Public Notices and Covering the News. In order for ballot questions and votes on proposed ordinances at town meetings to be meaningful, voters need to know about the town meetings as well as understand the issues they are voting on. I suspect that many of my friends could argue strong points on either side of whether or not a town ordinance to separate the town budget from the education budget would be a good thing. Unfortunately, this debate did not seem to happen in any visible manner in Lebanon. Either people didn’t know, didn’t care, or couldn’t attend the town meeting.
Yesterday, Chris Powell, posed the question, What are legals worth? in a column in the Journal Inquirer. He writes:
In determining whether the legal notice requirement gives value, the value of news reporting about government has to be considered, since that is also what legal notice advertising pays for and what will diminish if that advertising diminishes. Right now Connecticut's newspapers report about state and local government all out of proportion to the public's interest, apparently in the belief that the public should be more civic-minded than it is and that newspapers should strive to compensate for the long decline in civic virtue.
I do believe that newspapers should strive to compensate for the long decline in civic virtue. They need to do it for the good of the country as well as for their own good. He is right in noting that newspapers report about local government disproportionately to the apparent public interest. Yet there may be a chicken and egg problem here. Why are people interested, or not interested in something? Does some of it have to do with whether or not it is being reported on?
Unfortunately, despite the legal notice about the town meeting, the Norwich Bulletin does not appear to have covered the event and there was low turnout. Yes, Mr. Powell is right, the value of news reporting about government needs to be considered, and in this case I have to question the value of the legal notice in the Norwich Bulletin and the value of any reporting it might have generated.
CT Senate Debate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 10:26Tuesday morning. The first debate of Democratic Candidates for U.S. Senate in Connecticut this year took place at University of Hartford last night and everyone is bound to be out spinning the results and claiming victory. As is often the case, I have my own peculiar perspective which I hope will flavor some of the discussion.
Friends of mine spoke highly of Merrick Alpert’s appearance last night and a Richard Blumenthal support wrote to say that she did not think Blumenthal helped himself by debating Alpert so early.
Alpert did do very well, trying to wrap himself in the mantle of Paul Wellstone and Howard Dean by claiming to represent the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. He went on the offensive against ‘incrementalism’. However, his rhetoric did seem a bit over the top at times. For example when he spoke about his mother-in-law and Cuba, it almost sounded like he said he could see Cuba from his mother-in-law’s house.
One of the narratives leading up to the debate was that Alpert is a fringe candidate that shouldn’t be taken seriously. I always dislike and distrust such narratives and I think Alpert did a good job of destroying that narrative.
On the other hand, Attorney General Blumenthal delivered a steady and solid performance. In fact, he seemed to take the famous Goldwater quote and turn it inside out. Incrementalism, in the pursuit of justice, is, in fact, a virtue. Alpert called for immediately normalizing relations with Cuba and for a single payer health care system. I agree with him that these are goals we should seek to obtain. However, it seems like Blumenthal, through his willingness to work incrementally through the system is much more likely to obtain them.
Another narrative that I would be very concerned about if I were part of the Blumenthal campaign is that Blumenthal is Coakley 2.0. Indeed, many have compared the current Blumenthal campaign to Coakley’s campaign and even gone so far as to suggest that Blumenthal might have been better served by Coakley’s team than by the team he’s assembled so far.
Blumenthal’s charismatic nature, showing up at just about every event in Connecticut has not been shining through in the campaign so far. Rob Simmons has ten times as many people following him on Twitter as Dick Blumenthal does, and they do a great job or repeating Simmons’ talking points.
This only furthers the Coakley narrative. Coakley was the Massachusetts Attorney General who seemed likely to inherit Ted Kennedy’s seat. She was challenged by two progressive candidates in the primary, and while she received twice as many votes as her nearest competitor, she still did not receive a majority of the votes. She did not seem to get out there and campaign the way it has felt that Blumenthal has been campaigning for ever.
Fortunately for Blumenthal, he deflated this narrative a little bit last night. He showed himself willing to debate even a long shot underdog in an effort to talk seriously about the issues our state faces. He spoke about the importance of listening, something he’s always seemed good at doing. He would be well served to take attitude into the rest of his campaign.
Yet Blumenthal isn’t running just against Alpert. He is also running against Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon. It appears as if he has given bait to Simmons and Simmons has take the bait and ran with it. Simmons tweeted during the debate “Say what?! Blumenthal says his lawsuits “actually create jobs.” Bizarre. #ctgop #ctsen”. This was promptly picked up by his supporters and retweeted broadly. He then used it in a press release.
It seems striking that a former CIA operative like Rob Simmons would be so weak on crime. Typically Republican candidates are strong on crime, wanting to see state laws enforced. Simmons seems to be saying the corporate crime does not hurt citizens or honest business people.
In the end, Merrick Alpert came out much stronger than many suspected and it will help his campaign. However, Richard Blumenthal came out even stronger and showed why, despite his lackluster campaign so far, he would be a great senator. Rob Simmons on the other hand came out in defense of corruption and that is going to have to hurt his campaign.
