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From two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Schneider on his blog, Cold Truth, a meal to kick off the tens, as in, 2010.

For the appetizer: San Antonio Bay oysters polluted with Noroviruses. For the main course: grilled beef infected with E. coli from contaminated tenderizing needles; chicken with Campylobacter or imported ham with Listeria monocytogenes. Then there’s a side dish of stuffing loaded with salmonella-contaminated hazelnuts. And for those watching their weight: a popular nutritional drink fouled with the food poison Bacillus cereus.

Even the family pet wasn’t forgotten. Its pigs ears and beef hooves were laced with salmonella.
All those item were recalled in December by the federal government or were the subjects of warnings by food safety experts.

And 2010 isn’t shaping up to set a safer table, according to some of the country’s leading food safety experts. (more)

Carrie Schneider

Happy New Year!

Jen Graves on Do-Ho Suh:

Some/One has been up so long at SAM, and in such a prominent way, that its impact has faded for me. But it is a majestic work, and by a terrific artist; I love his silken architectures, houses and structures that hang in the air, memories. (more)

Made of 100,000 dog tags that sweep the floor to rise to
a hero’s armor, Some/One is a salute to the soldiers whose deaths become a monument to the man in charge. Seen from the front, the gown is an empty
cavity whose inside is covered in cheap reflective material, giving
viewers the dubious honor of seeing themselves as the One in the title surrounded by  the Some.

There are music critics who call for a moratorium on Mozart. They’ve had enough, forgetting that for each generation, he is new, and new to those who know him already as they hear him again at different stages of their lives. But music critics are in concert halls all the time. The music holds up, but they wear down.

At least music critics are forced to sit in their seats and listen. Art critics, hurrying from gallery to gallery, museum to museum, respond to art that stops them in their tracks, art that, in Peter Brooks’ phrase, pulls them up by their own hair and turns them inside out. The next time they see that piece, they want the same high, the flush of the first time.

There’s the pleasure of encountering a significant form and the joy of its reverberations, figuring out its relationships and meanings in its context.

Tim Appelo:

Sometimes the only cure for boredom is to look harder.

Nice essay by Appelo, but his solution is wide of the mark. The problem is not lack of work.  Critics seeking to reengage their original reactions have already done the work. The thrill of that effort is gone. They’ve moved from being on a hot date to being with an old friend. The bedrock of any critic’s experience is old friends. As Graves is brave enough to note, it can be difficult to keep old friends from boring us.

Rare chance to see Dan Graham’s film, Rock My Religion from 1984. According to Graham, rock predates Chuck Berry to take root in America with the Shakers.

At the Henry, Jan. 15, 7-8:15 p.m. Preview below.

E.V. Day‘s Cherry Bomb Vortex is a party dress having (bad speller alert) an organism orgasm.

Turns out, that’s what brain neurons look like at any given moment. (From Wired, via)

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

People who want to protect American lives by means of a war on terror aren’t usually the same people who want to protect Americans with health insurance, education, decent jobs, pollution controls, bank regulation, safety nets and social justice.

Seattle painter Ken Kelly needed emergency brain surgery, which he was lucky enough to obtain. Now he has the bill, which is large. He is uninsured.

Were he a European, his friends could limit their involvement to a card, an email, a texted well-wish, a hug or a flower or two. Because he’s an American, they need to do more. In an event that is surely repeated for other artists many times around the country, Kelly’s friends are organizing a fund-raising art auction for him on Jan. 23, 7 p.m. at Lemon Lime Studio, 411 Yale Ave. N., two blocks north of REI.

(1/7 Update from Kelly: “As you can see, the brain surgery caused complications…”)

[Read more…] about Uninsured artist – the usual story

He opens Jan. 21 at Carmichael Gallery.

Nobody’s perfect, especially list makers. Half way in, they’re looking at the finish line. Which is to say, mistakes were made. This post, Opening Thursday Night in Seattle, needed to include Lawrimore Project. There is never a good reason to leave out Lawrimore Project, which is surely one of the West Coast’s top galleries.

Opening at LP Thursday night, 6-9, are Caleb Larsen‘s Everything All of the Time Right Now plus Wet And Leatherhard, a group exhibit focused on ceramics curated by Susie J. Lee. The latter features Sterling Ruby, Jim Melchert, Kristen Morgin, Wynne Greenwood, Ben Waterman, Meiro Koizumi, Doug Jeck and Tim Roda.

From Larsen, the $10,000 sculpture, in progress. It accepts your dollar bills and gives you nothing back.

Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs is looking for an artist to enhance a two-mile streetcar line from the International District, First Hill and Capitol Hill, slated to begin construction next year.
Here’s the pitch:

The artist’s artwork and design enhancements will be incorporated during construction of the streetcar line. The design should include reproducible or repeating elements and components that contribute to the overall identity of the streetcar. (more)

Sounds like a branding opportunity, more ad than art. There are artists who can make something substantial from these dim prospects, but why are they so dim? Must public art be yes-man to public projects? The problem is, no one is dreaming of baboons and periwinkles.

Wallace Stevens

Disillusionment of Ten  O’Clock

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches Tigers
In red weather.

Those who aren’t inclined to hoof it to gallery openings Thursday night have a reasonable indoor alternative. The Seattle branch of Pecha Kucha is host to What Was Old Is Now New at Ouch My Eye. Twelve designers and artists will each present 20 images that reflect the role of recycling in their work.

They are David Wesley Black – guerrilla letterpress;
Joe Kent & Sallyann Corn – reduce, reuse, restraint a return to normalcy; designer
Michael Taylor – 30 going on 8;
Valerie Farber – designer / musicians of stories past and present;
Jenny Fillius – recycled tin artist;
Ann Wolf – Old! New! Old! NEW!;
Animish Kudalkar – MUNDANE mass;
Brianna Holan – music and fashion from the eye of an urbanist;
Kristen Young – blank canvas;
Todd Waffner – 1000 years of evolution continues in a 21st century sailboat, and
Deborah Faye Lawrence – recycler of political propaganda and pop imagery
.

Deborah Faye Lawrence, The Mysterious Allure of Rural America, 2008

Eric Hairabedian

Jeanne Silverthorne

Andrew Miksys