Are you one of those people who leaves a football game in the fourth quarter if it’s raining, or if your team is up by four touchdowns, or you want to beat the traffic, or you’re just generally kind of feeling like a pansy that day? If so, you are not qualified to be a University of Alabama fan. In fact, I hope you never meet any Alabama fans, because they would sense the pansy in you and eat you for lunch. Perhaps literally.
Yesterday, Auburn University announced that the two giant oak trees at historic Toomer’s Corner have been poisoned and will likely not survive, which comes two weeks after an Alabama fan who identified himself only as “Al from Dadeville” called in to Paul Finebaum’s radio show (which is a whole different circus of insanity that I encourage you to explore on your own time) and claimed to have administered a lethal dose of herbicide to the trees following the Crimson Tide’s defeat in the Iron Bowl. Since Al from Dadeville is an Alabama fan, he obviously didn’t claim responsibility by using such big words, but you get the idea.
Trees might not seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but they’re central to the most Auburn-y of Auburn football traditions: Rolling Toomer’s Corner with toilet paper after a victory. Killing the trees at Toomer’s Corner is akin to a Michigan fan blowing up The Horseshoe and then pissing on the rubble or an Oklahoma fan shooting Bevo in the head and butchering him for steaks. Not only is it a drastic act of crazed fandom (and, it must be noted, sore-loserdom), but it’s also at least vaguely illegal; the FBI has opened an investigation because the poison used to kill the trees may have seeped into Auburn’s groundwater. Al from Dadeville potentially succeeded into sorta-poisoning not just the trees but the whole town, the prospect of which I can only imagine would make him nothing less than sexually excited.
The Great Toomer’s Tree Tragedy marks the second time in the past six months that an FBI investigation has rubbed up against the Auburn-Alabama football rivalry (the first involved dog track impresario and Auburn booster Milton McGregor and his possible financial involvement with some guy named Cameron Newton, a young man of whom I have certainly never heard and on whom I would cast nary an aspersion), clearly setting some sort of asinine fan-scandal record for American sports. We all have a lot of catching up to do in order to be the kinds of fans who commit not just regular felonies, but federal offenses for our teams of choice.
As a Georgia fan and somewhat impartial third party, I’m not really sure where I stand. My first thought was, “Sounds like something an Auburn fan would do,” which is perhaps even more telling when you consider the fact that my sainted mother is an Auburn alumna. And really, the only way that an Alabama fan could have cut further to the core of the Auburn fanbase would have been to hide Cam Newton’s Crest WhiteStrips. Killing the trees could have been an act of vicious brilliance if Al from Dadeville had only found it within himself to let them die silently, but like the moron he most surely is, he had to call in and claim ownership for the Crimson Tide. If a redneck sports fan does something rash and doesn’t document it on sports talk radio, does it still count? Of course not.
Which means that the real endgame of this whole debacle is not that the historic trees are about to be actual history, but that Auburn has a free shot at Alabama, one which surely no one will begrudge them, and Auburn fans can take that shot on as grand a scale as they see fit. Mostly because Alabama deserves it, but also partly because they’re already Auburn, the Dick Cheney of modern college football, so no one will be surprised when they retaliate. If I were them, I’d start trying to figure out some way to sell Nick Saban into white slavery immediately.
UPDATED: The man arrested this morning for the tree murders, Harvey Almorn Updyke, has children named Crimson and Bear. You cannot make this shit up. He was also never an Alabama student and has never been a season ticket holder.
Multimedia performance artist Laurie Anderson would like you to know the following three things:
1. Sydney’s dog population loves rock music.
2. There are no further plans to develop the amusement park she was planning with Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel in Barcelona. Peter Gabriel no longer wants to do it and the saddest thing Ms. Anderson can think of is a modern, high-tech amusement park one year after it’s opened and all the technology has become obsolete.
3. If you want to do a fall tour in Europe, and you’ve never done a tour, let alone been to Europe, email 500 performance spaces in Europe and you’re bound to hear back from some of them. You will get your fall European tour.
Laurie Anderson gave a lecture, entitled Spirit and Opportunity (named after the Martian rovers), at the historic Detroit Film Theater as part of its lecture series on space last night and she wanted to talk about two things: Her stint as NASA’s artist-in-residence and how that influence her later project building Japanese sound gardens for Expo 2005.
She received a call one day back in 2003 and the man on the other phone said that he was from NASA and wanted to invite her to be the inaugural member of their artist-in-residence program. She told him he wasn’t from NASA and after a series of assertions that he was, indeed, from NASA she asked him what an artist-in-residence for America’s space agency even does. The answer?
“We don’t know”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Who are you people?” Ms. Anderson replied.
“We’re NASA,” the man replied.
Eager to jump on board with a project that had no definition, something completely new, Anderson started visiting NASA sites and annoying technicians. Artists and scientists, she says, are very similar. They must create an idea and then they must execute said idea, working out the problems as they go along.
She was especially excited by a white board she came across that showed a series of problems the scientists were working on with terraforming Mars. In other words, making Mars look like Earth which caused Ms. Anderson to sarcastically remark that we as a species have done such a fine job perfecting our own planet. She, if you did not know, is against manned space travel. She thinks that it’s a waste of time given the advancement of robotics, a mere propaganda tool to advance nations over their enemies, much like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon was a great victory for America during the Cold War. She does admit, however, that she got very excited about manned space travel during “the Kennedy thing.”
The Terraforming Mars project, by the way? It’s scheduled to be completed in ten thousand years.
Not everyone at NASA was too pleased with her though. Astronauts had no time for the short, androgynous woman with the artist-in-residence namebadge and the people in charge of colorizing the photographs received from the Hubble Telescope (the Hubble does not actually take pictures, it merely sends a series of data that are then organized into pictures) were not so happy when she questioned their heavenly color scheme of pale pinks and pastel blues.
“People like it,” they said. And NASA is an organization that relies heavily on a positive public opinion.
Laurie Anderson would like you to know a fourth thing
4. China is currently in international court claiming ownership of the moon. The Russians say they were there first, the Americans say they had the first people there and the Italians? Well, they saw it first.
Laurie Anderson was the first and last artist-in-residence as the people in charge of the budget decided that $20,000 to have an artist look around and be inspired by the program for a year was an outrageous, unnecessary expenditure. Ms. Anderson has campaigned for it’s reinstatement ever since so that other artists may get the opportunity accorded her.
Part of their problem with the program, she thinks, is with the work she decided to produce upon completion of the experience: a long-form poem entitled “The End of the Moon.” She thinks that, as a multimedia artist, they thought that she would do something with bouncing lights off of satellites and onto the moon in a sort of cosmic light show and they were disappointed with her creation. She said in a Q&A portion after the show, that no new work (other than the poem) had come from the experience, but in quoting a selection from her suggestion for Crasstalk’s book club*, she said “Who told you that to be a good person, you had to be a productive person?”
She wasn’t completely unproductive, however. A year later, when working on Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, she was concerned with gardens, and what they meant. The Japanese don’t think of gardens the way we do and in the Japanese language, the word for garden translates to setting stones. Japanese gardens are stone arrangements and, working with a Japanese architect (the preparation for this exhausted her as the Japanese work ethic was a culture shock to the already hardworking artist), she studied how they work as spaces and how to incorporate sound and visual.
Working in a space about the size of Central Park, Anderson came up with a series of solutions that answer the problem “How do we see?” An aquascope that is basically a tube that lets you see underwater (there are no lenses, it is merely a tube) A box of air that created imagery of moving birds and a series of haiku sticks in different languages.
Ms. Anderson loves haiku because it captures a moment. She came up with one on the spot:
Cold Icy Morning
A Puppeteer Blinks
What am I talking about?
She also incorporated haiku into a fountain that, when water rippled the water, spread various translations of various haiku throughout the water, though it was unclear if this was a visual or a tonal piece.
There was a bridge that, when you held onto the rail while walking across it, caused a unique tune produced by gongs sounding softly against the river and the space as designed by the architect started out very dark, until it turned scary, then awful until, finally your life felt over.
A garden by Xanax.
The piece that captivated me, however, involved mud. She had noticed that the Aichi soil had a remarkable similarity to what we know of Martian soil and designed a piece wherein plasma screen televisions would be set into the ground, their cover appearing to be a thin sheet of water that displayed images captured by the Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. She recalled being in the control room when Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. All of the engineers who had worked on the project were there, each one of them only designing a small portion of the robot. Nobody knew exactly how they actually worked, and no one knew exactly where they were until the numbers started coming in. Remember, there are no cameras in space, only data and numbers. The numbers showed that the robots had entered the atmosphere. The numbers showed that the robots had released their parachute. The numbers showed that the robots had landed. The numbers showed that the robots had unzipped themselves from their case and started basking in the sun in order to fully power up. And then?
There are no cameras on space, but, thanks to NASA, there are cameras on Mars.
She gave a Q&A and then left after going ten minutes over. In case you were wondering, by the way, she wore a boxy black suit with a white shirt , and red flats with matching red socks.
Photo: Matthew Piper
My friend and I, quite invigorated from the experience but not yet ready to drive home decided to head over to the famed Scarab Club for their poetry series. We were able to catch the last two poems from the mesmerizing William Copeland, though were sad to have missed the previous poets as we thought the event was from 8-930, not 7-830. The Scarab finished their Silver Medal Exhibition earlier in the week and had debuted a new gallery of work, three of which caught our eyes (unfortunately, they only had the listings from the previous show so I currently do not know who created these works).
A doorway with striations of sticks coated in graphite
A series of photographs of images from years past (painting, photograph and mural) covered with their modern corollary. An image of Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” mural was covered with a piece of photojournalism, the caption of which announced the opening of a new car plant in Turkey.
Paintings on wood and a sculpture that told the tale of a claustrophobic animal cracker with a broken leg.
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The Detroit Film Theater is located at the John R entrance of the Detroit Institute of Arts at John R and Farnsworth. They are open Friday through Saturday and are currently showing the Academy Award Nominated Short Films and Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas. Vision and Sampson & Delilah start next weekend. Tickets are $7.50 and $6.50 for students and members of the DIA. The full lecture calendar, along with further information on the Detroit Institute of Art including current and upcoming exhibitions can be found on www.dia.org
The Scarab Club is located at 217 Farnsworth across the street from the Detroit Film Theater entrance. Galleries are free and open to the public Wednesday-Sunday from 12p-5p. They also have weekly life drawing sessions on Thursdays and Saturdays that are free to members and $7.00 to non-members. There are also a number of special events including Third Thursdays and Brown Bag along with Costume Balls and Garden Parties that are member exclusive. In conjunction with WRCJ 90.9 FM, The Scarab Club hosts a monthly night** of chamber music that costs $20 at the door, $18 if ordered in advance and $10 with a student identification. More information about The Scarab Club can be found at www.scarabclub.org
*Laurie Anderson’s Book Club selection is How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. It discusses productivity and its meaning in a world where we are experiencing technological burnout.
**The Scarab Club sponsors and runs the night of chamber music. However, the event only takes place at The Scarab Club every other month. The next night will be March 6 and will take place at The Scarab Club
Note: If you’re hungry after a visit to the DIA, The Scarab Club or anywhere in Detroit’s Cultural Center, I suggest a trip to the Cass Cafe for cheap, good food and drinks along with what is always an eclectic sampling of local art. The Cass Cafe is located at 4620 Cass Avenue at the corner of Forest Avenue.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to email 500 European performance spaces about the European tour of my exciting new piece “Gee, I’m Drunk”
Today is going to be hot. It’s 50 degrees here on the North Coast, and we would totally go to the beach today if it wasn’t so cloudy. Clouds aren’t hot. The sun? That’s hot. Get ready, kids, because it’s everyone’s favorite daily: Life, Death and Violence. It’s gonna be a hot, hot heat.
LIFE! (Conception is hot. The actual miracle of birth? Not.)
Everyone born today is either hot, or has made a career out of the word “hot.” We’ll also be bringing you the exception to the rule.
1490: Charles III, Duke of Bourbon: This sexy thang look spectacular in a suit of armor, and why wouldn’t he? He’s a hot, distinguished French military leader who defied the stereotype and never surrendered, until he was killed in battle, which, of course, means he surrendered in life. Those French! Always surrendering!
Charles, like any smart person, married into nobility when he married his wife, Suzanne, Duchess of Bourbon. This marriage led to his being named the male-heir to the House of Bourbon and therefore, we assume, an unlimited supply of Maker’s Mark. Lucky man! Damn, we still can’t get over how gorgeous he looks in that suit. Barney Stinson should redefine “Suit up.”
He became a turncoat and fought for the Italians after losing a promotion and having his wife’s money, which she left to him, taken away when the mother of the King of France decided it was hers because she was Suzanne’s closest blood relative.
1836: Gustavo Becquer: Salaciously hot. He is totally pulling off that soul patch in a way that Apolo Anton Ohno only dreams about. Gustavo was a Spanish poet during the post-Romantic era, which, naturally, increases his hotness tenfold. Let’s read a poem:
The dark swallows will return
their nests upon your balcony, to hang.
And again with their wings upon its windows,
Playing, they will call.
But those who used to slow their flight
your beauty and my happiness to watch,
Those, that learned our names,
Those… will never come back! Naturally, we’re smitten. Fun fact! His brother painted that portrait of him and when they changed their names, they took the same fake last name. Family should stick together.
1963: Larry the Cable Guy: Not hot (sorry, we’re just not into bears). Larry is known for being a redneck, but that’s only on stage. He’s not even from the South! He’s from Nebraska. However, our nephew is obsessed with Mater, so we’ll give him a pass.
Still, we’ve always been a fan of scripted comedy as opposed to stand-up, with the exception being Kathy Griffin because she’s just so funny and because as proper gays, we have to like her. Have to. We made Kathy Griffin laugh with a Celine Dion joke when we met her and it was one of the greatest moments of our lives.
What we’re saying here is that we’d much rather talk about Kathy Griffin, but it’s Larry the Cable Guy’s birthday, so we should get back to that. Larry the Cable Guy owns three champion bucking bulls that participate with that other PBR, Professional Bull Riders Inc. Now that’s a fact that’s fun! Their names are Chicken on a Chain, Booger Butt and Git R Done.
1981: Joseph Gordon Levitt: Not hot. Better than hot. The most beautiful man in the world and our main celebrity crush. There are so many things we’d like to do with him and it was probably a sign when we were younger and watching Third Rock from the Sun and only wanted to watch the scenes with Joseph Gordon Levitt in them. Look at that smirk on his face! So cute! He’s totally our Aubrey Plaza.
And what a name! We know that three-namers are associated with serial killers, but you know what? He is killing us with his serious good looks. The man (he’s thirty today!) is funny and smart and quirky and rocks in so many movies, our favorite being (500) Days of Summer which is our ultimate love/hate movie because we love it, but we’re basically Tom and being the romantic in the relationship hurts. WE LOVE YOU JGL! Call us!
DEATH! (Picking up a guy at a funeral? Hot. Picking up a dead guy at a funeral? Not.)
Let me open up my newspaper to look at today’s obituary, and by newspaper, I mean Wikipedia. Let’s talk about hot dead people because necrophilia is sexxxy.*
1673: Moliere: The original king of comedy and bad boy of theater, Moliere had several of his plays banned by the French government for being too perverse (on pressure from the Catholic Church). We’re currently re’reading our favorite play of his, The Misanthrope, which, if you haven’t read it, you really should. It’s a fabulous tale about an asshole who spends the entire play criticizing everyone including himself.
Moliere is also known for having one of the most ironic deaths ever. During a production of what was to be his final play, in which he played a hypochondriac, he succumbed to his tuberculosis. He was able to finish his performance, but died shortly after. Guess it wasn’t such an imaginary illness after all. Sad. A tragic way for a really funny guy to leave this little blue ball we call home.
(Excerpt from Act 1 Scene 1 Le Misanthrope)
“Great Heaven? let us torment ourselves a little less about the vices of our age, and be a little more lenient to human nature. Let us not scrutinize it with the utmost severity, but look with some indulgence at its failings. In society, we need virtue to be more pliable. If we are too wise, we may be equally to blame.”
1939: Willy Hess: He played violin, taught at Harvard and was concermaster for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His violin was a Guadagnini which we think means it was a really good violin, but we’re pretty sure he’s not dead. We’re pretty sure we’ve seen this guy at Metropolitan, like, a lot, when we used to go there on Tuesdays.
1961: Nita Naldi: This sultry silent film star was typecast as a femme fatale/vamp and boy was she able to pull that off. She was also in the Ziegfeld Follies and became famous after working with Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B DeMille while signed to the Famous Players/Lasky studio. She declared bankruptcy in 1932 and when she tried to make a comeback, was criticized for her weight. Hollywood never changes.
1970: Alfred Newman: Oh wait, there’s another Alfred Newman. That’s a picture of Neuman. NEWMAN! The most decorated composer in all of cinema, Alfred Newman was a force to be reckoned with. He won 9 Oscars and was nominated 45 times! He’s only second to Walt Disney in both wins and nominations for a single person. What we’re saying is that the guy was a really accomplished film composer.
VIOLENCE! (Napalm’s hot. Mustard Gas? Not.)
1838: We don’t understand a word of what is said in this, so we’re just going to copy Wikipedia’s words exactly and let you guys figure it out. It sounds cool though: Weenan massacre: Hundreds of Voortrekkers along the Blaukraans River, Natal are killed by Zulus. Seriously, we’ve read the Wikipedia page and all we get is that people died and that it took place in South Africa. Every other word confuses us.
1865: Union forces burn Columbia, South Carolina to the ground on orders from General William Tecumseh Sherman (he denied these reports) Hot! Literally, that must have been a hot day, what with all the fire. That Sherman sure liked burning things, but maybe that’s why he’s known as the first modern general. You know, because he was cool with killing citizens.
1871: After months of BANG BANG! SHOOT EM UP! ZING! POW!, the Prussian army captured Paris, thus ending the Franco-Prussian War. Wait, James Franco built a time-machine and lost a war against the Prussians? Watch out, JGL, your status might be in jeopardy! We here at LD&V have uncovered an exclusive photo of James Franco in his apartment, reacting to the loss while the Prussians marched upon his city.
That’s so Franco! And so French! Oh, the French! Always losing!**
OTHER NEAT THINGS THAT HAPPENED! (Future duelists? Hot. The moon? Not.)
1801: It’s a tie! The House of Representatives casts a vote and ZOUNDS! The winner is Tommy Jefferson! The loser gets the vice-presidency and that would be our high school hero, the one and only Aaron Burr! Why is Aaron Burr our high school hero? Because we really hated reading The Federalist Papers, like, with a passion and we were so glad that somebody shot that sonuvabitch Alexander Hamilton. GET OFF OUR MONEY ALEX, WE STILL DON’T LIKE YOU!
1904: Madame Butterfly opens. We never really liked that one.
1913: A lot of really important artists exhibited their work in the NYC 69th Regiment Armory.
1933: Happy Birthday Newsweek! Oh, what’s that? You’re completely hemorrhaging and had to be sold to the Daily Beast and now Tina Brown is running you and everyone’s being fired so that you can focus on an online presence because print is dead? Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to rub salt in the wound. Do you need some neosporin?
1965: Project Ranger photographs the moon in preparation for the Apollo missions.
1996: Gary Kasparov beat IBM’s Deep Blue at chess. Too bad Brad and Ken aren’t doing so hot against Watson, but, hey, at least they know Toronto isn’t an American city.
2008: Kosovo declares independence. Happy birthday, Kosovo! You go(sovo) girl! That was a terrible joke. An absolutely terrible joke. We’re ashamed of ourselves, so much that we’re just going to end today’s Life, Death and Violence right here without so much as a witty conclusion paragraph.
Oh! We couldn’t do that to you! You’re so special to us. Our readers? Hot. Dolphins? Not (but they sure are pretty cool!)
*Necrophilia is not sexy.
**We’re French and Irish. We’re allowed to make fun of those two nationalities as much as we please, thank you very much.
Contrary to rumors that he is in ill health, Hosni Mubarak was seen having breakfast on the beach of his private resort yesterday. The interim government is reportedly shocked by the amount of corruption and graft they have uncovered since Mubarak’s departure.
1490: Charles III, Duke of Bourbon: This sexy thang look spectacular in a suit of armor, and why wouldn’t he? He’s a hot, distinguished French military leader who defied the stereotype and never surrendered, until he was killed in battle, which, of course, means he surrendered in life. Those French! Always surrendering!
That’s so Franco! And so French! Oh, the French! Always losing!**