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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Jeremy Blake video paintings
Friday, November 23 2007

setting: Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland

Last night Brian Ba!rd had offered to give us a tour of the United States Capitol building, so we decided to take him up on the offer. In two cars, we drove down to the National Botanic Garden, where we met Brian, his wife, her parents, and their two kids, all of whom had feasted with us at Thanksgiving. Groups of this size always move like ponderous beasts, particularly when kids and strollers are involved, but eventually we were trudging up Capitol Hill past various large and labeled trees (most of them European species) with Brian in the lead.
Congressman have special powers that you and I do not have. These powers allowed Brian to lead us all in through a south entrance past a guard into the half of the building dedicated to the House of Representatives. There was a chatty guard at the doorway metal detector. When referring to the history of the House (including the minutiæ of procedure changes), he adopted the first person plural.
I don't think I've ever been in the Capitol before (though it's possible I went at some point when I was attending elementary school in Lanham, Maryland). It's more ornate inside than I'd expected, with arched hallways covered with elaborate murals, some deliberately tromp l' oeil. In various alcoves are larger-than-life statues of famous people from the various states of the union. As with Senators, every state gets two statues, though I don't know if that's for the entire building or just the House wing.
Brian took us past various velvet ropes and "no entry" signs (all of which were unguarded) directly to the floor of the House of Representatives, a place normally off-limits to tourists. It being the day after Thanksgiving, the House was not in session, though interestingly the Senate would be in session for thirty seconds today. This thirty seconds is the only evidence of backbone within the Democratic leadership; 30 seconds is the minimum time necessary to stay in session, and by doing so they thwart Bush's reliance on recess appointments to put cronies, religious nuts, and other incompetents in places where the damage of their kooky ideas might be amplified. Supposedly Jim Webb, who lives conveniently in nearby Virginia, was the one tasked with minding the store.
The House floor seemed both smaller and humbler than I expected. It looked rather like an old movie theater, with older, somewhat worn leather (or perhaps Naugahyde) seats, some of which looked to have been mildly slashed. The lectern where the President gives the State of the Union Address was only a dozen or so feet from the closest row of seats and had the inauspiciousness of similar devices used for the presentation of college lectures.
There is no assigned seating in the House, through traditionally the Democrats sit stage-right (facing a large painting of Washington) and the Republicans sit stage-left, facing a large painting of the hero Lafayette as an old man (a delicious irony for Brian back in the days of Freedom Fries). Votes are cast using a card-reader system, which tallies votes on a large scoreboard hanging from the balcony (the only place we'd normally be allowed to go in this room). Brian told us various stories from the close votes that have happened in recent history here on this floor. Particularly touching was the tale of Marjorie Margolies and her change of vote from nay to yea during the vote on President Clinton' controversial 1993 budget (which featured - wait for it - tax increases). She'd supposedly cast this vote with tears in her eyes, knowing it would cost her her re-election, and as she did so the outraged Republicans in the chamber (who don't believe in funding government and have used their subsequent time in power mostly to prove their theory that it can't do anything right) began waving and singing "Bye bye Marjorie." What a sweet bunch, and that was before the 1994 Republican Retrovution!
While Brian was explaining these things, the three three year olds were racing around on the floor and in the halls like there was nothing the least bit exceptional about the place. I remember some of my first inklings that I might have been born into exceptional privilege when I learned about the starving and diseased in both the Third World and the majority of human history. I have no idea what those inklings feel like (or when they arrive) for the child of a member of Congress. I sense they've still yet to arrive for President George W. Bush.
From the House floor, Brian led us to the Old House Chamber (which now serves as the National Statuary Hall), a tall domed room where the House met in the early days of the union. This is the place featuring the interesting acoustics by which someone talking quietly in one focus of the room can clearly be heard in the other focus, no matter what other noises are in the room. Brian showed us how it worked and it was amazing, as if the sound of a whisper was being electronically amplified.
We continued on to the Capitol Rotunda, with its soaring 190 foot dome, grand paintings, statues, and the assorted brickabrack that a hyperpower would be inclined to display in its national parlor. Interestingly, though, when I asked a guard where I might find the nearest bathroom, I was told I would have to go to a different floor.
Later, when I actually went to a bathroom, I was amused to find that everything was automated and it was unnecessary to touch anything. My sister-in-law went into a nearby women's room and reported that nothing whatsoever was automated in there.

The floor beneath the rotunda is called the Crypt and features many stout columns holding up all that stone and cast iron piled up overhead. Along one wall is a series of displays showing the history and architecture of the building. The present dome was built of cast iron during the Civil War, a replacement for a smaller dome that had been dwarfed by the growth of the rest of the building. The dome over the Old House Chamber and a similar one over the Old Senate Chamber have both been subsumed by the rest of the building growing around them to the point where they are no longer obvious from the street.
I was a little surprised by how much U.S. Capitol history Brian Ba!rd had absorbed and retained. He geeked out on the details in the manner of a proud DIY carpenter showing off a new master bathroom. To him, being in the House was so much more than just having a job he liked. He was a component of a large and venerable machine, one in which he had a deep and abiding faith. It's easier to feel that way when focusing just on the engineering of the place, which has to be a great deal more precise and effective than the legislation that it is there to produce.
After the tour (which, since Brian is not a Senator, did not include the Senate wing), we thanked Brian and headed westward from the Capitol to the nearby National Museum of the American Indian, house in a large, ugly domed modern structure colored light brown to suggest adobe. We weren't particularly interested in Indians at this point, but Brian had recommended the musuem's restaurant as an excellent place to get a good lunch. The long, snaking (though fast-moving) line suggested that whatever lay within would be worth waiting for. Gretchen and I set out ahead of the others to get a sense of the lay of the land, and easily snuck inside. The buffet was divided into various regional stations, each referring vaguely to cuisines having some basis in Native American traditions. For me, the most appealing of these cuisines was "Meso-American," or Mexican. I got the stuffed (and frighteningly overpriced) pepper and was delighted to find it actually had a little bite to it.

Our original plan was to go to the Corcoran Gallery of Art and meet Dina, Gilad, and their new baby (all of whom normally live in Isræl. But via cellphone we learned of long lines, so we decided to go first to the National Building Museum, a place we've visited with them before.
Gilad is an architect, and his commentary on the Marcel Breuer exhibit drew my attention to things I might otherwise have missed. I'm not a big fan of the boxy modern concrete æsthetic, and tend to find buildings made this way ugly: either too much like a megachurch or too much like a redneck trailer, and never integrated acceptably with the landscape. But Gilad pointed out Breuer's various innovations, such as his heavy reliance on the cantilever.
More appealing with the exhibit of drawings by David Macaulay, an architectural populist and occasional satirist. Macauley has a particular interest in the reasons behind the way structures are built the way they are, and seems to take special delight in pointing out the features of domes and bridges. Viewing his graphical dissection of the US Capitol Rotunda meant so much more to me after just touring the place and learning of its history.
Also in the building museum was an interesting display of African wooden artifacts, including elaborately-carved screen panels and pillars made of stacked figures in deep relief. The reliefs were so deep that I wondered if perhaps art had been given ill-advised priority over structural integrity.

When we finally made it to the Corcoran, the lines were gone and we had no trouble getting into the building. It was only a half hour or so before closing, but still the woman at the front wanted the full $16 per person for admission. At this point I need to take a little tangent from my tale.
Between us, Gretchen and I have exactly one original piece of art by a famous artist. It's a pencil drawing by Jeremy Blake, the artist who made headlines by drowning himself in the ocean this summer. The reason we have this pencil drawing is that Gretchen went to high school with Jeremy (as did Dina). Back then he was part of a group of artistically-inclined neo-hippies. Jeremy was good friends with one of Gretchen's best friends, a guy named Spencer, and across this tangled web of relationships, a Jeremy Blake pencil drawing somehow ended up in one of Gretchen's boxes of childhood memorabilia.
Since Jeremy's suicide (which came two weeks after the suicide of his girlfriend), there has been rampant speculating and conspiracy theorizing on the web.
The reason we'd come to the Corcoran was to see an exhibition of Jeremy's video "paintings." Gretchen told the woman at the door that we'd been friends with Jeremy and couldn't we just go look at the "paintings" without paying? "You'll have to ask them," she said, pointing to another desk further inside the building. Taking the cue of her abdication, we walked in without paying.
Looking at Jeremy's video works on a large screen, it's apparent why they're called "paintings." Though they move, they have a painterly sense of composition that transition gracefully from frame to frame. Though the "paintings" have soundtracks, there's no obvious narrative. It's much more about atmosphere and decoration than it is about telling a story. In one of the "paintings," David Berman of the Silver Jews does the narration with a fitting sort of poetry, one that emphasizes atmosphere over narration.
None of these works had much resonance with my æsthetic, but I could see their value as art.
On the way out of the museum, we ran into another of Jeremy's high school chums, which meant that he knew Gretchen and Dina. Though they'd been part of the same circle back in the day, this guy had taken a rather different path from Jeremy's, moving to New York not to contribute to human culture but instead to help it move money around.

In the evening a bunch of us went over to Dina's parents' house for "desserts" and such (strangely, no alcohol was served). I ended up sitting in the living room with a Gilad, a three year old, and a four year old. While the little kids squabbled over which grandmother was taking more pictures of which child's creations, I urged calm and built my own structures. Gilad (who detests sloped roofs) made a marvelous little Bauhaus-style structure, while I built a Lego robot whose legs were striped as if covered by Wicked Witch of the West stockings.
Later the kids experience a bit of a detente around their mutual love of knock-knock jokes, which unfortunately have not died out as an avenue of preadolescent expression.


Gretchen's Jeremy Blake drawing. Click to enlarge.


The South side of the U.S. Capitol.


Washington Monument viewed from somewhere inside the U.S. Capitol. At this point it's clear we're in the north (Senate) wing of the Capitol, though I don't remember seeing anything particularly Senatorial. Unfortunately I don't have any photos from the floor of the House because photography there isn't permitted.


An Andrew Jackson statue in the Capitol Rotunda.


A sign outside the Corcoran.


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