Straight Up | Jan Herman

Depending on who's talking, the cult of Frida Kahlo has either been amplified or demystified by the centennial touring show that started out in Minneapolis, is now in Philadelphia, and is soon heading to San Francisco.

I second Peter Schjeldahl ("The world will have cults, and who better merits one?"), as well as Holland Carter ("...Kahlo enters your system, fast, with a jolt..."). Both of them can't help gaping.

Neither can Sanford Schwartz. His remark is my favorite ("She is giving the world the finger ..."). He cites her own frequently quoted final words, written in her diary not long before she died, "I hope the exit is joyful -- and I hope never to come back."

I'm a late convert to the cult.

On a trip to Mexico City last October, I went to Kahlo's family home -- La Casa Azul in the city's Coyoacán suburb, where she was born and where she lived for much of her life and where she died. The place was crawling with diligent tourists like me.

More than a museum, it is a shrine to her memory. When I was there, the curators had mounted a touching exhibition of dozens of personal letters, photos, and artifacts. On display were some of the traditional Mexican dresses she famously wore. They had been tucked away in closets and were being exhibited for the first time. Many of the letters had also been secreted in the house, unseen for decades. Some, hidden behind a bathroom wall, were opened for the first time in 2004.

One in particular that struck me was a letter Kahlo wrote in 1939, defending her husband Diego Rivera against a complaint by Leon Trotsky, one of her former lovers. It is typewritten in English.

Dear Lev Davidovich: In your letter you say: 'Diego should never accept a bureaucratic position in the organisation because he never writes, never answers letters, never comes to meetings on time ...' So your conclusion is that he is a lousy 'secretary'. This position of yours I find rather unjust and childish. On several occasions in your house I observed that whenever there was a discussion of any kind, and Diego gave his opinion, you always took it with a certain irony and doubtfulness of its truthfulness. This kind of irony in time gets on one's nerves.

I'm now a bona fide Kahlo cultist. That's me in the tour-guide headphones, trying unsuccessfully to mimic the sad whimsy of a huge papier-mâché mask she made. It hangs on an exterior wall of the house adjacent to the garden, along with a handful of colorful papier-mâché skeletons strung up in a jolly kindergarten dance of death.

Not incidentally, the house where Trotsky was assassinated is only a few blocks away. That, too, was a revelation -- though of a different sort. Unlike La Casa Azul, it is grim and ugly. You can still see bullet holes in a bedrooom wall from an assassination attempt that failed. His hammer-and-sickle gravestone -- looking grand, in contrast to the house -- is an ironic reminder that everything he worked for is buried with him, swallowed by what he himself used to call "the dustbin of history."

Postscript: Notice Frida Kahlo with her hand on Diego Rivera's shoulder in this detail from Rivera's 1947 fresco "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda," on exhibit at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera. The museum is located at the west end of the Alameda in Mexico City. (Click the photo.)

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

It's probably been said before: The Lower East Side is both a location and a state of mind. At least it used to be. Before the developers arrived. Before the la-di-da gentrification of the real estate boom. Before the boutiques.

It's also probable that nobody represented the old Lower East Side with more sweat equity and flesh-and-blood belief than Clayton Patterson -- not Allen Ginsberg or Abbie Hoffman, not Ed Sanders or Tuli Kupferberg, not The Living Theater or The Hell's Angels, not Keith Haring or Taylor Mead, maybe not even Emma Goldman or Dorothy Day.

Clayton who?

This Clayton Patterson -- the videographer, photographer, artist, photojournalist, archivist, community activist, neighborhood preservationist. The motivating force behind the books "Captured" and "Resistance" -- their instigator, editor, and slave. The irrepressible and irreplaceable Clayton Patterson who recorded the infamous Tompkins Square "police riot" of 1988 on videotape. The Clayton Patterson who is the subject of a new 90-minute documentary, also titled "Captured." (It's being screened Thursday, April 24, at 6 p.m., free, at NYU's Cantor Film Center.)

Have a look at the trailer:

It's the Clayton Patterson who was sentenced to 90 days in jail for refusing to give up the riot tape to the district attorney as evidence against the cops unless the original was screened in public, because he feared the authorities would edit out the most damning footage. It's the Clayton Patterson who went on a 10-day hunger strike to make his point and finally succeeded.

"What effect did the tape have on the police?" Patterson has written. "A bunch of cops were fired, five were indicted, a chief was retired, the captain was moved out of the precinct, and there were numerous departmental trials against the rogue officers." As he once told Oprah Winfrey, while brandishing his video camera, "This is a revolutionary tool. Little brother is watching Big Brother."

Over the next 15 years, Patterson would be arrested many times for challenging the authorities. But that's only a small part of his story. Never without his camera, he "has dedicated his life," the filmmakers note, "to documenting the final era of raw creativity and lawlessness [of] a neighborhood famed for art, music and revolutionary minds. ... He's recorded a dark and colorful society, from drag to hardcore, heroin, homelessness, political chaos and ultimately [to] gentrification."

Postscript: In what is being billed as its world premiere, "Captured" will be screened on June 13 in the 2008 Summer Series at Rooftop Films.

The lead editorial in today's New York Times -- "The Torture Sessions" -- makes some excellent points about the secret White House meetings revealed earlier this month by ABC News. Here's one:

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We're glad The Times finally got around to chiming in. But the hope it expresses that "a new Congress and a new president" might provide "the full truth," let alone hold the war criminals to account, is rosy at best.

The Times knows that, of course. Even so, it offers a bromide for the Pollyannas that "only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again."

What about the damage that is not repairable? Uh, take two aspirins and call us in the morning.

Meanwhile, better late than never, the front page investigates a not-so-hidden hand:

Do you have a subscription to Sirius Satellite Radio? I don't. Never listened to it either. Until yesterday, when I was invited to be a guest on "The Blog Bunker." It airs on Sirius Indie Talk Channel 110, which is described as "political talk for people who hate political talk."

Isn't this cute. Aw gee.

Update: April 21 -- Now have a look at "Murdoch, Ink," Newsweek's huge takeout about the actual WSJ that hit the street today. In the orotund prose of magspeak:

With its increased focus on politics, international news, culture and sports, Murdoch's reconceived Journal represents nothing short of a formal declaration of war on that most venerable of journalistic institutions, The New York Times. Not since William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal challenged Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the late 19th century has there been such a clash of newspaper titans.

Give-'em-hell Rupe offers his own sedate description about some of what he's up to in this morning's unsigned column, "The New Opinion Pages." OK, I'm exaggerating. Paul Gigot may have written it, or someone who reports to him. But you can be sure Rupe looked it over and gave his approval.

Robert Parry explains how the United States became a Banana Republic.

A reader writes: "Thank you.  Parry's article is incisive in overview and on the mark in particulars. Excellent." He continues:

One example of Parry's thesis -- that "sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in" -- is waterboarding being dismissively defined by journalistic leaders as "simulated drowning" rather than something like "repeated, forced drowning to near death."

However, what I see as "sophisticated" in that context differs somewhat from Parry's thesis: Much that is now classified and lamented as "sophisticated manipulation of information" is and used to be called "prevarication."

My view is that "what would do the Republic in" is not so much the "sophisticated manipulation of information" as the orchestration (think Rove) of the large-scale, often very clever, sophistry that results in journalistic leaders buying the prevarications by treating them as fact and continually repeating them as fact.

For instance, the Nixon-era's catchy but trivializing and dismissive term "Whitehouse horror story" is still with journalists who use the term "horror story" these days in place of "very serious violations" of criminal statutes, ratified treaties, or constitutional guarantees.  Equating Abu Grab torture and "Animal House" is another example.

The BananaRepublic keeps it going ... six months at a time. Click the link. It's a smart video from moveon.org.

Postscript: I see I completely overlooked the ABC News report on the top war criminals in the White House. It's not as if we didn't already know who they are. But the report -- in the mainstream media, let's not forget -- gives vivid details worth noting.

Watch the report: Bush advisers approved torture.