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Serrano & Science
Saturday, April 22 2017
The plan today was to drive up to Albany and participate in another thematic anti-Trump March, this one on behalf of science. If you're reading this in an enlightened future where reason rules and reality is studied so as to best manage our relationship with it, it might come as some surprise to learn that there were times (as recently as after humans managed to set foot on the Moon) when the results of science were first ignored and then reviled and finally replaced with the gut feelings of a deeply ignorant narcissist. But I write from within such times. This protest was designed to show that, even through such troubling times, science still had an avid constituency willing to carry and maintain its diminished flame in the hope of a more enlightened time to come. Just before getting in the car, I gathered up a pair of permanent markers and a roughly rectangular piece of cardboard.
Our first destination was Ray & Nancy's place. Jack the Dog greeted me enthusiastically and then excitedly looked around to see where Neville and Ramona were. Unfortunately for him, we hadn't brought them. Nancy got me a travel cup of coffee and then we carpooled in her newer Subaru to the Kingston traffic circle park & ride, where Sarah the Vegan joined climbed in our car. As we headed north up the Thruway, I made the cardboard into a sign reading, "PRAYER IS NOT HEALTH CARE." Soon thereafter Gretchen made the back of the sign read "TRUMP SUCKS. THAT'S JUST SCIENCE" Soon thereafter she saw it as an opportunity for vegan outreach and appended "go vegan!"
The march would happen later, but we would stop for a few things along the way. Our first detour was to the small village of Kinderhook, where something called the Jack Shainman Gallery is located in a repurposed school next to an exquisite brick church. For whatever reason, this gallery can afford to display works by world-famous artists without charging visitors any admission. We'd come to see the Andres Serrano photography exhibition. Serrano, for those who remember the late-1980s phase of the American culture war, was the guy who infamously provoked the religious right with a photograph of a Jesus figurine immersed in his own urine. On entering the gallery, we were greeted by an enormous five-panel black and white landscape photograph of what appears to be a Last Supper sculpture immersed in a carbonated beverage. It's creepy and beautiful in a way that I didn't actually find many of his other photographs to be. From there, we were pointed by the staff to begin the tour by heading leftward. Initially most of the photos were other immersions, though eventually we went downstairs into a large room (the school's old gymnasium perhaps), passing a portrait Serrano had taken of Donald Trump maybe ten years ago. There was nothing unusual about it except that it was Donald Trump, and it had been positioned around a corner to come as a complete and disturbing surprise. The photos in the gymnasium included a number of various people engaged in various sex acts (a woman fisting a man, a man fellating another man, and a woman engaged in a contortion while doing something to either her anus or her vagina). These had all been attacked by a group of knife-wielding nazi skinheads while on display in Sweden. Serrano had decided to simply cover the punctures and tears with translucent red tape, thereby recording the parts of the photographs that had so enraged the attackers. Amusingly, as the woman working there pointed out, the only face not attacked was that of the man receiving a fisting. Perhaps this was because he was a white man with a shaved head, someone to whom a nazi skinhead attacker could relate. Other photographs in the big room included a series Serrano had staged to resemble torture poses from Abu Ghraib (these didn't engage me much, mostly because I have seen the very real photos that inspired them).
Upstairs, there was a group show featuring the works of several different artists (mostly sculptors), including Nick Cave (not to be confused with the musician). Cave's work was mostly fabric art, including a pair of odd button-covered trumpet-headed suits designed to completely conceal every indication of a person's minority status. There was a glorious painting featuring an incandescent cat that I moved me to take pictures in a way that little else (except some pudgy sculptures by Claudette Schreuders) in the gallery had.
I should mention that, though the gallery was mostly empty aside from us and the staff, a group of people showed up while we were in the topmost group exhibit. They came in and were so immaculately dressed that their appearance was situated somewhere in the uncanny valley. This might've been a side effect of their wealth, which brings with it a different manner of moving. It's also important to note that I had a touch of a hangover after having tied one on by myself in my laboratory last night, and that can put a vague hallucinatory aura around strangers and their hands and feet.
Had we stayed much longer, I would've become hangry, but before too much dawdling, we were back in the car heading mostly eastward toward Albany. We still had another stop before the protest for science, and that was lunch at Van's, a Vietnamese restaurant Gretchen likes. The place was full of people (some of them apparently Vietnamese) when we arrived, though there was only one harried (though very nice) waitress. I ordered the vegetarian pho (thereby going for the most thoroughly Vietnamese experience), Gretchen ordered a tofu steak, and Sarah & Nancy ordered a dish comprised mostly of spring rolls. It turns out I'd had pho before once in Silver Spring, which I soon remembered as I undertook to begin the slurpy, splashy process of devouring it. Gretchen always likes to get dishes that everyone can share, a practice I've come to tolerate. But even she admitted that pho was something not easily shared. This was especially true of the way I ate it, which involved enough pepper sauce to initiate a runny nose, which tended to drip into my pho no matter what I did. Meanwhile, Sarah and Nancy didn't much like their spring rolls, which initially appeared to contain some sort of animal meat that our waitress insisted was seitan. As for Gretchen's tofu steak, it was huge and absolutely delicious, particularly with that reddish brown sauce it was in. As for my pho, there was a lot of it and it was full of fresh, lightly-blanched vegetables, so it seemed healthy. But I knew that even stuffing my gut with such food would lead to hunger not too long after the end of the meal. (Unfashionably racist "Half-hour-later, hungry again!" jokes — and it's amazing how deeply-mined this one comedic conceit can be — were a staple form of comedy between me and my late father back in the '80s and '90s, though Chinese food is rarely as fresh and carbohydrate-poor as this pho.)
Nancy drove us over to the site of the beginning of the march, which was in a small park (West Capitol Park) across the street from a building (the Department of Education) with a beautiful Roman-style colonnade. There appeared to be thousands of beautiful nerds holding a great diversity of signs in support of learning from objective reality. The massive crowd mostly hadn't come in buses, so all the parking was taken. We circled the protest on side streets, passing near The Egg and the windswept North-Korea-Style Empire Plaza, but we never found parking. Eventually we took a spot in a library parking lot with signs about it being only for people using the library. Yeah, whatevs. The library should've been happy we'd come all this way to stand up for the people who, among other things, think books are a net positive in society.
Walking to the protest, all of us except Gretchen had a hankering for coffee, but it was foolish to go into a coffee shop so close to a nerd rally. There was a hopelessly long line for anything anyone wanted to do there, including for the bathroom.
Soon we were there in the crowd, and somehow Gretchen found us quickly even though she'd gone into it well ahead of us. She had a sign made by some lady who has handing them out. It read "Science doesn't lie. Guess who does?" and it was illustrated with a caricature of one Donald J. Trump with his trousers ablaze. At this point, the march had yet to begin, and an unidentified speaker (who said things that suggested he was a minor politician) was speaking. I looked around, and it was a mostly young, white crowd. It was nerdy, but not really all that much nerdier than the women's march in Washington had been. People had found a fun way to get together and resist, even people a little further out on the Asperger's spectrum. More amusing than any of the signs (at least so far) were the knitted pink caps made especially for this march. You may remember the knitted "pussy caps" from the women's march. They had catlike ears on them and mocked Trump's prehuman views of gender relations. The caps for this march had wrinkles on them in the manner of the brain. "Brain caps" is what they're probably called, and the idea is to celebrate the idea of actually thinking with a brain instead of feeling with a gut. We all thought George W. Bush was an idiot and made colossal mistakes thinking with his gut. And yet here we are in 2017, remembering Bush as representing a pre-insanity Republican party.
And then the march began. We headed northwest up Washington Avenue and then busted a left on Lark and headed back south on State Street (through a beautifully eclectic 19th Century neighborhood of the kind sacrificed to build Imperial Plaza) to the place we'd started. It was a surprisingly quiet march, with little chanting (and only then kind of half-hearted; this wasn't much of a follow-the-herd kind of crowd). Periodically people would drive past honking their horns in support. Most of these were African Americans.
Back once more where we started, we had a good chuckle over some of the signs. A favorite was "What do we want?/Evidence-based science!/When do we want it?/After peer review!" (Later I would see this meme had been spread widely before the march, but when we first saw it, it looked fresh and brilliant.) One gentleman in a Lambda Lambda Lambda teeshirt carried a sign that had nothing but binary code on it (ones and zeros). When I saw spaces between groups of bits, I thought it had been organized into bytes. As I took a picture, I asked the guy if it was in ASCII code. He shrugged his shoulders as if it was a mystery. Which was fine with me; maybe it was a puzzle! (For her part, seeing a sign completely in binary had to be "the nerdiest thing ever," matched only by the fact that I thought I could decode it.)
Our last errand while in the Capital Region was to stop at the sort of grocery store we don't have in the mid-Hudson region. Initially Nancy wanted to go to Trader Joe's, mostly because she knows exactly what she likes there. But then Gretchen convinced her (and, to a lesser degree, Sarah) that the Honest Weight Food Co-op is the best place to go. It's like a cheaper Whole Foods. It might not have all the things we know we love at Trader Joe's, but (as Gretchen pointed out), there's plenty of opportunity for hitting the Trader Joe's on Route 17 in New Jersey. So there we were at Honest Weight. I pointed out to Nancy that now she finally could get her coffee from the Honest Weight coffee bar. I also tried to interest her in free samples of kombucha (something I always take advantage of), but it turned out that it was Sarah who was into that.
Gretchen had overscheduled the day, because after the long ride back to Hurley, we only had a half hour before the next scheduled activity: dinner at Plantæ in Tivoli with Justin and Erica. Plantæ is the one other vegan restaurant in the mid-Hudson region, and word on the street is that it is struggling. And here it was a Saturday night, and we were the only customers. I'd brought my Dave's Insanity Sauce, since the one problem with Plantæ is the weakness of the heat. This allowed me to turn the split pea soup into something delicious. I don't, however, think the hot sauce did much to improve the tempeh-lettuce-tomato-and-avocado sandwich I ordered. There was also a bottle of wine that we'd brought (Plantæ still doesn't have a liquor license), though for some reason Justin was not drinking. The biggest revelation today was the news that Justin & Erica had never been to Albany and have no knowledge of it.
My sign.
The painting with the cat I liked. I cannot figure out who painted it. Click to enlarge.
A detail of the above painting.
A pudgy pair sculpted by Claudette Schreuders.
Another sculpture at The School.
Gretchen poses with the big black & white Serrano in the entranceway.
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