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Those reading this weblog outside New York should know that people in this city hate Rudolph Giuliani. Before 9/11/01 he was a nudzh whose tenure was memorable mainly for the bullying of sidewalk vendors and people dancing in bars, and racism. His current standing derives from looking televisually calm on 9/11 while Bush flew cluelessly around the country--it's an act that played well outside the five boroughs but no one here was impressed, because we know what a camera hog he is. As Al Sharpton said shortly after that horrible day, "The people didn't come together because of the mayor, they came together because of the victims. They would have come together if Bozo had been mayor." (Some people thought that was "too much" at the time.)
So imagine a collective "aah" of pleasure this week as Giuliani's personal pick for Fatherland Security, Bernard Kerik, went down in flames amid a host of accusations of...irregularities. Here's what the New York Press said a few days ago, when it looked liked Kerik would sail through confirmation hearings with minimum press scrutiny:
But it needs to be said: Not only is Kerik unqualified for the Homeland Security post, the politics behind his candidacy are built upon a myth—the myth of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. Sustaining this myth requires keeping a few facts from bubbling up the memory hole, such as: Rudy's headless chicken act on the morning of the attacks; his idiotic decision to place the city's emergency management center—and illegal fuel tanks—in WTC 7; his prompt melting of the wreckage, thus destroying the evidence from the biggest crime scene in American history; and his baffling negligence in preparing for a likely second attack on the towers following the Trade Center bombing of 1993, as evidenced by the lack of coordinated planning between agencies and widespread equipment dysfunction on 9/11.
The Rudy-9/11 myth is crucial to Kerik's nomination, because without this myth there is no Rudy the National Player, and without Rudy the National Player there is no nomination of brusque outsider Bernie Kerik to a major cabinet post in Washington. Rudy has always been upfront about his hand in Kerik's rise from pony-tailed narc to NYPD chief. And just as it was Rudy—and 9/11—that allowed Kerik to enrich himself in the terror biz, it was Rudy who put Kerik's name on President Bush's lips last week.
The following came in as a comment to an earlier post on Pierre Huyghe's "Annlee" project. I thought it was kind of dumb that Huyghe bought the rights to an anime character and then changed her physical appearance before making her available as "open source art." If the art dealt with branding why not use the brand you paid good money for?
I am a graduate student at NYU writing about Pierre Huyghe. [...] Considering how explicitly critical he is of the act of representing and defining, he sure is quick to outline what his work means. I recently attended his talk at the New School and fell asleep.I don't know enough about Huyghe to know if his "rap" over-determines his art. Possibly that happened with the Annlee project. But I only wrote about the premise and one writer's take on it, not the exhibit based on the premise.
The only Huyghe pieces I know well were the ones at the Guggenheim in 2002, the film of high-rise apartment building lights blinking on and off to a techno beat and the disco dance floor playing Satie. I liked the building piece, Les Grands Ensembles, 1994-2001, quite a bit and the music by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot particularly wowed (Pan Sonic rules). We probably don't need Huyghe informing us "These subsidized public projects ended up being an architectural and social failure, They were a corruption of Le Corbusier's social and architectural Modernist theory" but I don't mind knowing that. He even tells us what we see with our own eyes: "Without beginning or ending, the two low-income towers dialogue in a strange Morse code given by the light of their respective windows, a blinking existence." Which saved me having to write that.