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Adi Parashakti – Mother's name implies Eternal Limitless Power, the Power beyond the Universe. Mother is the power of Para Brahman. All other deities are forms, extensions and manifestations of her. She is the active energy to create and destroy. As such Devi Bhagawat Maha Purana describes her as Param Prakrti. Adi Parashakti is often mistaken for Shakti. Mother Adi Parashakti is spirit without form. Shakti refers to power or material energy of the Trimurtis or other deities. She is present in everything we see. She is represented in plants, the animals, the birds, the sea, the sky and the holy river. Thus Mother is Shakti Power who drives this world. It is gainsaid that she is the mother of the mankind. Parashakti is made to appear as saguna form for the purposes of expression and visibility to her children. It is the same with art and sculptures.
For instance, Goddess Parvati is a saguna manifestation Mother Adi Parashakti possessing gunas. To assign the role in the Universe, in Devi Bhagavatam, Mother tells the Trimurthis: 'I am Adi Parashakti, goddess Bhuvaneshvari. I am the owner of this universe. I am the Absolute Reality. I am dynamic in feminine form and static in masculine form. You are three parts of me. You all are my partial expansions. You have appeared to govern the universe under my jurisdiction. You are the masculine form of Absolute Reality, while I am the feminine form of that Reality. I am beyond form, beyond everything, and all the powers of God are contained within me. You will admit that I am the Eternally Limitless Power.'
Thereafter Parashakti assigns each Deity their respective roles. Thus Mother rules the three lokhas and performs the material tasks of the Trimurthis. In Devi Bhagavata Purana 4.44-50: Bhagavan Narayana tells Brahma the warning tale – You are the Creator, I am the Preserver and Rudra is the Destroyer; yet it is to be known that the saints, versed in the Vedas, have come to this conclusion by inference from the Vedas that creation, preservation and destruction are performed by creative force, preservative force and destructive force. The Rajasik creative force residing in you, the Sattvik preservative force residing in me, and the Tamasik destructive force residing in Rudra are the all-in-all. When the Shaktis become absent, you become inert and incapable to create, I to preserve and Rudra to destroy…."
Adi Parashakti's appearance is described variously in the Devi Bhagavata Purana, Lalita Sahasranama and Kalika Purana. She is said to be the goddess sitting on a jeweled seat in a chariot drawn by seven lions. Her face contained the radiance of millions of stars and her celestial beauty was so great that even the Trimurti were not able to look at her directly. Then then concede that she is the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the whole universe. She is said to reside in Akshara Dhaam, the Imperishable Abode. Mother is also depicted in the Auspicious and Inauspicious nature.
The Supreme Cosmic Form of Adi Parashakti is described in Devi Bhagavata Purana 7.33.1-21 to be: "The Satyaloka is situated on the topmost of Her head; The Sun and Moon are her eyes; The quarters of the sky are Her ears; The Vedas are Her words; The Universe is Her heart; The Earth is Her loins; The space between earth and sky is Her navel; The constellations are Her Thighs; The Maharaloka is Her neck; The Janarloka is Her face; Indra and the Devas of the Svarloka are her arms; Sound is the organ of Her ears; Fire is within her Face; Day and Night are Her wings; The mountains are Her bones; The rivers are Her veins, And the trees are the hairs of Her body. Childhood, youth, and old age are her finest modes; the two twilights are her raiment; and the Moon is the mind of the Mother of the Universe."
Manifesting as Lakshmi, Sati-Parvati and Prithvi, She plays the positive roles of protection, fertility and establishment of dharmic order, cultural creativity, wifely duty and material abundance. These are seen as three aspects of Adi Parashakti.
(1) Wisdom, Learning and Liberation: based on three aspects: The Mahabharata states Mother to be liberator and mother of the Vedas. She is also the destroyer of ignorance. Lalita Sahasranama describes as Mahabuddhi – great intelligence; Vijnanabhanarupini – Mass of Knowledge form; Prajnatnika – Wisdom itself and Pasupasavimocini – Releases from bondage.
(2) Embodiment of Female Beauty: The Saundaryalahari describes her to be divine beauty; In Lalita-Sahasranama she is stated to be Ramya-beautiful one; Kanta – loveliness; Vamanayana – Beautiful eyes and Ratirupa – the form of Rati.
(3) Food and Nourisher: Mother is associated with Prithvi- Earth. Lalita Sahasranama describes Mother as Ananda – Giver of food; Pusti – gives nourishment; Satakasi – hundred eyes; Sakambari – bestows vegetables; Annapurna – abundant food and Jagaddhatri – supports the world.
Mother Adi Parashakti, through her manifestations depicts terrible and ferocious appearance. Her shaktis, Durga, Kali and Bhairavi are associated with war, blood, destruction and death. They enter into fierce battles against demonic characters. They assert the spiritual power of Para Brahman or Lord Shiva by their material energy. They maintain peace and order. Anger is reduced to calmness and lead aspirants to higher spiritual levels.
The sect of Hinduism that devotes to the goddess is known as Shaktism, and a member of this sect is called a Shakta. Shakti is divine, or sacred feminine power of Hindu Shaivite and Vaishnavite Goddesses. As consorts they complement Virya, the power of male Gods in their life force, creative and procreative power. Virya is authority or energy that tames, directs, constructs, and gives purpose to the Shakti power and energy. However in Shaktam, goddesses play an independent role outside the male domain. They hold that Shakti is taken to be an abstract and all-pervasive power. For instance, Durga and Kali are not depicted with Shiva. Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati also stand independent in various roles. Indeed they are equal partners in the divine power-play. One without the other is redundant divinity. Therefore it is Shakti and Shakti alone that is the ultimate feminine power behind all creations. This is the concept of Adi Parashakti.
Shakti theology sees the threefold power and nature i.e. creation, preservation and destruction, as a positive, creatively potent illusory power, rather than a crafty, deceptive power. Prakrti is nature, or the material manifestation of Maya and Shakti. Maya is illusion, the illusory power of the goddess. Prakrti is both the body of the goddess, and all other material forms, as these are part of her body. Mother also has a Lila function or divine play. Its purpose is to bring pleasure which again is part of maya. Thus Adi Parashakti is Shakti, creating all the material forms as Prakrti or Nature which is the goddess herself with Maya, the illusion that these forms have an existence apart from her; for the purpose of her own divine pleasure which is Lila. For this Mother takes four main manifestations.
1. SATI-PARVATHI: The original manifested form of Adi Parashakti is Gauri, the virgin Parvati and Durga. She is declared to be the greatest Goddess in Devi Purana. They are beyond reach even to Lord Shiva, Brahma or Vishnu. Thus she is considered to be the Supreme Goddess, the parallel being Lord Krishna of the Vaishnavites. Her mild form is represented by Lakshmi and Saraswati; the wrathful form by Kali and Chandi. Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are her masculine forms. Mother's colour is white and she is the embodiment of purity, love and bliss.
2. MAHASARASWATI: She is the first expansion of Adi Parashakti and the Shakti of Brahma. She represents Sattva guna. Mother is the goddess of wisdom, creation, and learning. She is the source of all of the arts. She removes darkness; hence she slew Sumbha and Nisumbha who symbolized ignorance and ego. Mahasaraswathi was created from the body of Mother Parvati. Industry, spirituality and devotion is attributed to her. Her colour is yellow. When she is formless, she becomes the Pranava Om.
3. MAHALAKSHMI: Mother is the second expansion of Adi Parashakti. She represents Raja guna. As goddess of wealth, she preserved the material world b bringing fortune and spiritual satisfaction. She is the Shakti of Lord Vishnu. Mother is born from Goddess Parvati's mind and advents as Katyayani. When mother is formless, she becomes Light.
4. MAHAKALI: Mother is the third expansion of Adi Parashakti. She represents Tamas guna. She is the Shakti of Shiva. In her ferocious demeanor, Mother presides over destruction of the universe, thus paving the way for new creations. Mahakali is the goddess of spiritual fulfillment. She is born from Parvathi's eyes. The demons, Madhu and Kaitabha represent ego and evil. Mother slew them symbolically to compliment Vishnu's preservation powers. Her colour is dark blue or black. When mother is formless, she becomes Heat.
Mother Goddess Adi Parashakti or Adi Maya Shakti manifests as various forms of Goddess Devi. Brahma, Vishnu and Siva reacted to her splendor and celebrated her. While male-god temples made room for Mother Goddess, the reverse was always not true. Mother worship was redefined and in her sacred seats, especially in the Shakti Peeths. Mother Goddess stood independently with the exception of their companions or attendants 'moved to the courtyard'.
Some 108 temples are said to be exclusive to Mother Goddess. Of these 51 are attributed to Shakti's manifestation from Sati's severed body. Out of these 18 are very prominent Peeths. These Shakti temples are spiritually energetic places of worship; something that the male god temples did not really enjoy. They were personification of Goddess Adi Parasakthi's various iconic forms, her bounty, wisdom and mystery. It would appear that the great Acharya Adi Shankara, while strongly propounding Advaita Vedanta, consecrated several Shakti temples and sang beautiful Shakti hymns.
The classic text of the Devi Mahatmya, tells a story of Sapta Matrika's Shakti Energy. Each Shakti possessed the form, ornament, and mount of the particular god. These are the goddesses who serve Adi Parashakti and carry out her functions. The Sapta Matrikas are:
- Brahmani
- Vaishnavi
- Indrani
- Chamunda
- Maheswari
- Kumari and
- Varahi
They represent eight mental qualities which are morally wanting: Yogeswari – kama or desire; Maheswari – krodh or anger; Vaishnavi – lobha or coveatness; Brahmani – mada or pride; Kaumari – Moha or illusion; Indrani – Matsarya or fault finding; Yami or Chamunda – tale bearing and Varahi – asuya or envy.
The Ten Maha vidyas are known as Wisdom Goddesses. Dasa means ten. 'Maha' means great. Vidya means 'revelation, manifestation, knowledge, or wisdom'. It is a total representation of Goddesses of Great Knowledge. Thus Dasa Maha vidyas means the Great Wisdoms of the ten aspects of the Divine Mother or Devi in Hinduism. The ten manifestations are also believed to be that of the Divine Mother Kali in ten different facets or cosmic personalities. These personifications are Tantric in nature and also what is hidden, secret, subtle and sensitive, what has to be searched out and discovered.
The Maha Vidyas represent knowledge, teaching and comprehension. Thus they are inner guiding power through ten wisdom forms which teach intellectually. This is a challenge to look deeper. Their forms may be disturbing and difficult to bear. Indeed they are not meant to be merely present but to jolt one from ignorance or to awaken the coiled serpent called kundalini. They inspire and promote the deepest spiritual inquiries in their ambiguous, contradictory, even paradoxical forms. The Dasa Maha vidyas are provocative Shakti energy of Mother Adi Parashakti.


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Left: Bruno Bischofberger, Larry Gagosian, and Cecily Brown. Photo: Patrick McMullan/PMc. Right: Jane Holzer and Rachel Feinstein.
"Jerry and Roberta hate me and Artforum doesn't know I exist," Cecily Brown was saying to playwright Tom Stoppard and Artforum senior editor Scott Rothkopf. The three were sharing a rear banquette on the third floor of 5 Ninth, where—despite the winter's first major snowstormLarry Gagosian had brought out the troops to toast Brown's opening at his Chelsea gallery.
The artist was swapping war stories with Stoppard, a surprise guest, sharing tales of the awkward moments that can result from being friendly with critics. Stoppard, who has won (and deserved) just about every top honor the theater can bestow on a playwright, had never seen a Cecily Brown painting before, nor had he ever met the artist, though he was acquainted with her mother, a London novelist. All present seemed to agree that life is more interesting when it includes your critics, and that art is more interesting when you get to know the artist, as it enriches your understanding of the work, even if you think that the work is hateful.
At the opening, Brown's seven new semiabstract landscapes attracted a number of other artists (David Salle, Christopher Wool and Charline von Heyl, Will Cotton, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison) and clear admiration. Painted at heroic scale in her layered, quick-flick manner, they made economical use of her Bacchanalian nudes and offered copious amounts of falling leaves in every color of the harvest and the planting season, even in I Will Not Paint Any More Boring Leaves (2) (2?). Brown has kept her promise. The leaves are not boring but glorious, and every single painting sold before the evening began, at prices ranging from $50,000 to about $130,000. ("Quite reasonable, don't you think?" commented one gallery assistant.)
"That must be what Cecily meant when she said there was one really difficult painting in the show," observed Rachel Feinstein as she stood before a spectacularly weird yellow painting with thick, dog-doo-brown patches that set it off from the rest. (Rumor: Gagosian is keeping that one.) "It's the best one," said Feinstein's hubby, John Currin, who will be showing in the same space in the not-so-distant future.
The party was a lubricious affair that felt more like an old-fashioned after-hours club than a blue-chip art dinner, possibly because it was standing-room only, there was a bar and loud music on every floor, and people tended to go to the bathrooms in groups of three. Painter Hope Atherton seemed especially to interest dealer Gavin Brown (no relation to Cecilythat we know of). Other guests, a mix of art, fashion (Tara Subkoff, Daryl Kerrigan, Camilla Nickerson), and money of vague provenance, made do with finger-food served by waiters who passed by every couple of hours. Currin, an avid follower of political blogs (particularly the right-wing variety), observed that his old friend Sean Landers had anticipated blogging in his painting long before anyone starting doing it on the Internet. Landers added that he would love to do an actual blog, but only if he could be sure that lots of people would be reading it. Risk you take, Sean. Risk you take.
Left: Paul Graham and Bronwyn Keenan. Photo: Patrick McMullan/PMc. Right: Sean Landers and Cecily Brown.
Left: The marching band. Right: Bridget Hall, Cecily Brown, Jeff Koons, Veronica Hearst, and Justine Koons. (All photos: Patrick McMullan/PMc)
"Pam: American Icon," a series of photographs by Sante D'Orazio of sexy-deluxe former Baywatch star and preeminent pop icon Pamela Anderson, opens at Stellan Holm Gallery in Chelsea. Crowded, but slightly mystifying. Velvet ropes. I stand tentatively at the door until some guy in black waves me in, hearing inwardly a not-altogether-agreeable echo of my club-going days. Paparazzi galore, but, with Ms. Anderson a no-show, who are they planning to take pictures of? Cologne art dealer Raphael Jablonka? It's almost impossible to see the photographs given the unseemly hordes. I did admire Pamela Anderson, Hollywood, CA, 2000. D'Orazio posed said icon on a narrow path, presumably somewhere in the Hills, clad only in a very short transparent pink rain jacket, pink shades, and spike-heeled silver mules. Bamboo stalks frame this femme sauvage, her long blond tresses coursing down in calculated disarray. I pushed and shoved my way back to the entrance. Outside, I heard a statuesque gentleman on his mobile: "It's thinning out"an odd assessment, considering the scads of people still trying to claw their way in. The as-yet-unpublished catalogue promises essays by Jeff Koons and Richard Prince—no sense in not gilding this particular lily.
Of course, Koons and Prince have both visited Ms. Anderson before in their own oeuvres, a connection that provided a nice slithery transition to the night's big event, a surprise birthday party celebrating Jeff Koons's fiftieth, hosted by Jeffrey Deitch (along with the artist's wife, Justine, Peter and Stephanie Brant, Athenian Koons collector extraordinaire Dakis Joannou, and TV producer Bill Bell and his wife, Maria) at his commodious Wooster Street gallery. Guests numbered 160, Pam scribe Dick Prince among them. Jeffrey had promised me an excellent table and delivered: the Rosenblums (Robert is the author of the classic Jeff Koons Handbook), the Mardens, our own Jack Bankowsky, John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, Marc Jacobs, and Lucy Barnes and her fetching swain, Luis Ruiz. Looking beyond my own jolly company, I took note of the critical mass of art-world powerbrokers—including dealers Larry Gagosian and the beyond-blue-chip Bill Acquavalla and New York museum directors Glenn Lowry, Tom Krens, Adam Weinberg, Lisa Phillips, and Michael Govana consolidation of clout that made the celebration far more than just a big-year birthday.
Left: Peter Brant, Aby Rosen, and Jeff Koons. Middle: Anna Curtis AKA Lady Ace. Right: Stefania Bartolami and Ingrid Sischy.
The gallery was splendidly tricked up with Koonsiana. Inflatable toys such as those that have served as models for recent sculptures covered the ceiling: Incredible Hulks, dolphins, monkeys, centipedes, and lobsters. Light boxes with images of Koons through the years were arrayed near the entrance. One of them was an actual work by the artist, The New Jeff Koons, 1980: a tidily groomed little-boy Jeff smiles at the viewer, a jumbo crayon in hand and one arm resting on a children's book, Ethelbert the Tale of a Tiger. This piece belongs to the early series "The New," which otherwise consists of the famous Plexiglas-encased and fluorescent-illumined vacuum cleaners. The next day, I revisited "The New" in the 1992 SFMoMA Koons catalogue and discovered these words from the artist: "It's brand new, it's in a position to out-survive you, the viewer. It doesn't have feelings, but it is better prepared to be eternal." Does this remark concern a household appliance or the special-powers kid himself? Both, perhaps, as Koons has always played on fantasias of omnipotence and deathlessness, e.g., the heroic, Canovaesque Self-Portrait, 1991, a gym-bodied stargazer chiseled in marble who emerges from a pristine, unearthly crystalline mound. Whatever the case, there's no missing Koons's obsessive calculation of persona from the outset of his career to the present. Two slide montages of the "Life of Jeff" and the full range of his oeuvreincluding a great photo of him in his MoMA-membership-selling days, standing in front of Rosenquist's Marilyn Monroedrove the theme home. You really have to give it up for Koons, I thought, even if you recoil at the same time; he's a genius! The loveliest image, for me, was of a giant puppy composed solely of verdure, surrounded by tall treesa sublime folly worthy of Stourhead.
Mr. and Mrs. Koons finally arrived, and the window gates of the gallery ascended as they entered; Jeff's ever-smiling countenance didn't quite disguise his distinct non-surprise. The first person he greeted was Ileana Sonnabend, pushed in her wheelchair by Antonio Homem. And then a genuine surprise: a forty-piece marching band, with an escort of ponies, entered the gallery behind a Gigantor cake, played "Happy Birthday," and then segued into an oompah cover of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." Of course a blonde bimbo jumped out of the cake, but this was a tad anticlimactic. For one, her boobs weren't imposing. And I wasn't alone in hoping that Pam herself would materializeor even the former Mrs. Koons, Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina. The party was jumping anyhow. The entertainment continued as Yvonne Force and Sandra Hamburg appeared on the balcony to regale the birthday boy with a song from their upcoming album, Mother Inc. "Jeff, where are you?" Mrs. Force-Villareal purred. "This song is about the post-human condition, something I believe you've addressed in your work." Then the duo intoned a cute ditty about plastic surgery. A youthful guest exclaimed, "This is the greatest night of my life!" and waved his arms toward the stage like an Ecstasy-supercharged raver. In the midst of this jamboree, Robert Rosenblum slyly queried if we had noticed Laura Bush among the guests. No, alas, she wasn't really there, but plenty of collector ladies and their man-things do look like her set. At this point, John Currin jumped in with the evening's ne plus ultra zinger: "Did you know that George Bush just bought Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture?" This remains unconfirmed by Nauman's representative.
A number of Koons guests headed to Sante D'Orazio's after-party at the Maritime Hotel; Francesco and Alba Clemente prevailed upon me to accompany them. I spoke to a nice woman who had been "handling" Ms. Anderson's much-desired presence at the unveiling of D'Orazio's photographic paean, who mentioned that they, too, had wanted Pam to jump out of Jeff's cake. But the actress just couldn't make it. She was at Sundance, you know.
Art junkets always sound good on paper: the allure of expense-paid travel to some distant metropolis; a conference or fair or biennial to dive into; a crash course in the local art scene; a highly condensed bit of gratuitous tourism. Yet inside this pretty Trojan horse lurk a host of challenges that arise when you spend concentrated blocks of time crowded into minivans alongside other art professionals with whom you might not see eye to eye, to put it mildly. Luckily, last weekend's SITAC conference defied such uneasy expectations. While the "serious" side of the conference was a real mixed bag, forty-eight hours of immersion in the crevices of Mexico City turned out to be criminally fun and absolutely stimulating.
Having arrived for day two of the conference, our morning kicked off at the Teatro de los Insurgentes with an odd, three-way panel (Roger Buergel, Alex Alberro and my jetlagged self) followed by a conversation with Hans Haacke. Even if our presentations didn't completely jibe, our exchange was totally collegial and even humorous—Alberro and I found some unexpected common ground in the figure of Martin Kippenberger. At lunch Thierry de Duve introduced his tablemates to a deadly combination of tequila and spicy-tomato-juice chaser; thus fortified, I found that the afternoon session hummed by, albeit with occasional moments of total discursive wackiness. I lapped up Dawn Ades's talk on late Dalí, taking copious notes as she lauded the artist for being "an enemy of modernism"a stance that was something of a metaphorical life jacket in SITAC's vast sea of politically correct discussion.
After a quick pit stop at the hotel in the early evening, the SITAC crew was shuttled to the Roma district for two private views and a gallery opening before dinner. The three spaces—Garash Galeria, Galeria OMR, and the Galeria Nina Menocal—were impressive in terms of the meticulousness of the presentations, the charisma of those in attendance, and the decaying grandeur of the buildings themselves; though, weary (and wary) of cultural "parachuting," I couldn't fully judge the quality of the very young artists on show.
After the Nina Menocal opening, the crowd—SITACers, gallery patrons, artists (including local celebs Francis Alÿs and Miguel Calderón) and a few handsome hipsters—all wound up in a nearby social club called Covadonga—apparently a fixture for postopening dinners and artists' late-night drinking sessions, and, with its colorful cast of mostly older men swilling tequila and playing dominoes, a pleasantly far cry from the networking of Pastis or the "M'a tu vu?" of Café Beabourg. I ran into my friend Claire Bishop at a table with a few local artists. Two of her companions—artists Mauricio "Lord Byron" Guillen and Stefan "Gordo" Bruggemann—offered to take us out for an introductory taste of Mexico City's nocturnal life. So began an odyssey that involved several nightclubs (including an amazing trannie joint called Hysteria), a cruise through Garibaldi Square for a mariachi-band serenade, and an initiation into toques—a strange electrocution ritual/bar game.
Needless to say, the concluding session of SITAC was rough on a few hours of sleep. After the official closing panel and lunch, memories of the previous night's adventures beckoned us to skip the nap and keep going. Leaving the Teatro de los Insurgentes and its opulent-Marxist Diego Rivera mural, Claire and I hooked up with Mauricio again—along with Fernando Ortega and Jonathan Hernandez, two of the more interesting artists from local gallery Kurimanzutto's stable—for some daytime sightseeing. Our afternoon dérive took us past many famous landmarks, current hotspots, and numerous prosaic-yet-poetic street scenes that conjured readymade works by the likes of Alÿs or Gabriel Orozco. I got a sense of how densely woven the city's pop-cultural fiber is, and how numerous its aesthetic ghosts (Kahlo, Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros). It was edifying to hear how our companions navigated such a strong context in their own art practices. Our last stop was the crowded, highly animated opening of artist Xavis Rolo's show in a warehouse in El Centro. Despite the gentrification of Mexico City and its incorporation into the list of current art-world hotspots (e.g. Warsaw, Istanbul, Bangkok, etc.), such artist-run initiatives seem still to be the scene's lifeblood, and thankfully have not yet made it onto the pages of Wallpaper Navigator.
Left: Tania Bruguera and Pablo Helguera. Middle: SITAC advertisement. Right: Robert Storr holds forth.
Who knew that the SITAC conference is the art event in Mexico? The fourth International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory proved to be a nonstop slew of private viewings and collectors' parties complementing three long days in which a semiglittering array of art historians, theorists and critics slogged it out via an indefatigable (and often incomprehensible) translator. This year's theme, chosen by artist Pablo Helguera, the symposium's director and smooth host, was the relationship of art criticism to art history. Given the euphoric amnesia of most art magazines, this was a well-chosen point of departure, even if the resulting discussions managed only to arrive at the consensus that history is a good thing.
The daytime panelists shared a stage with a nightly production of Cabaret, whose low-budget Weimar set, along with the chat-show style of Helguera's hosting, gave the proceedings a curiously showbiz flavor. Helguera got things rolling by interviewing Shirin Neshat, who looked fabulous enough to numb you to her swooning over the "deep mysticism" of Persian Iran and the inability of Western audiences to "truly understand" her work. Someone later compared her talk to a readymade Andrea Frasera spot-on assessment. Neshat-style identity politics have become untouchable, and we need a Fraser (or French and Saunders) to set about dismantling it. Other artists treated to the talk-show format were Hans Haacke and Marina Abramovic. Marina held the capacity crowd spellbound, and everyone erupted into rapturous applause when she finished her tales of endurance and enlightenment. As she bowed before the audience, it was as if she'd rocked legions of fans with a comeback tour at the Auditorio Nacional.
At Wednesday night's preconference party I'd had my first taste of pollo en molechicken in chocolate sauceand many of the SITAC panels were characterized by a similarly unnerving combination of ingredients. Speakers from different worlds were thrust together in unsavory union, one of the most memorable being Dawn Ades (rigorous Dali art historian), Tania Bruguera (Cuban performance artist) and cute-but-way-out-of-his-depth Massimiliano Gioni (curator and Cattelan puppet). These three had nothing in common but a shared confusion as to why they were invited to talk about marketing and art history. Another ill-advised pairing was a session called "From the Media towards History" which conjoined Thierry de Duve's "In Bed With Madonna" (a seductive confessional about his relationship to artbasically, it's like sex) and Cuauhtémoc Medina's deconstruction of art criticism's ideological role in founding Mexican national identity. Medina's demolition of Octavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo hit a raw nerve, turning the audience against the conference's only Mexican speaker in favour of de Duve (or "Señor Monsieur" as one member of the audience addressed him).
With more thoughtful moderators these panels wouldn't have seemed so lopsided, and a number of key dropouts didn't help (Anri Sala, Vasif Kortun, Jens Hoffmann). Sala was replaced by a screening of his video Intervista, 1998, which came as a welcome break from Rob Storr and Paulo Herkenhoff's interminable stroll down MoMA memory lane. Storr rambled on about Richter, while Herkenhoff bemoaned center-periphery relations and Guy Brett. Less fragrant comments came from arch-grump Donald Kuspit, who hurled insults at Serge Guilbaut and anyone else in his line of sight. Kuspit's penchant for petty belittling would have been hilarious if he hadn't been so deadly serious (e.g., to RoseLee Goldberg: "What precisely is the significance of people running around naked?"). Unable to leave immediately because of snowstorms in New York, Kuspit kept up his cantankerousness the next day, snarling chippy comments at Alison Gingeras and Roger Buergel.
So who is Roger Buergel? After three days with him we're still no closer to the dark horse of Documenta. But at least we got to hear him talk gently about The Government, his recent curatorial effort in Barcelona. I just hope that SITAC's largely student audience, receiving at least 80 percent of the conference in English, managed to get more from the event than putting famous names to faces. Helguera aimed high, and assembled a brave cross section of new and established figuresbut it takes skill and confidence to elicit productive dialogue from such a menagerie. As Thierry de Duve might have put it: The guest list was great, but nobody got laid.
I was not overly keen on visiting the opening of "Log Cabin" at Artists Space, because the wind was whooshing and Manhattan was cold, getting colder. There was a terrific scrum at the entrance to the elevator, and I had to wonder if the icy gang upstairs would have their wits about them. If we were to spend the rest of evening muffled in layers, bashing into each other, well, it wouldn't be much of a party. But it was, actually, a lovely party. Curator Jeffrey Uslip has arrayed a jamboree of visual attack tactics against neocon homophobia and the suppression of contemporary queer lexicons. "It's essential for me that the exhibition is centered on diverse artistic practices rather than on a divisive, didactic approach toward the Republican Party," he told me. Without embedded polemics, or indeed a narrative arc, the works provoked and pulled us around the room in a long, dizzy waltz. Though the show, mostly great and thirty-four artists strong, crossed generations from recent Columbia MFA grads (Matt Keegan, Christy Gast) to certified avatars (Glenn Ligon, AA Bronson), there was no hierarchy and no anchor. You could trip from Paul Pfeiffer's either dumb or very abstruse projection of a wasp nest to Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny's either very stiff or pointed Pork Me Sport Piss sculpture. Bronson, surveying the scene with a smile, held court next to three monitors showing himself and a similarly bearded Nayland Blake smeared with goo, making out. There were a lot of guru beards in attendance. Over the course of the night I saw at least eight versions of those tangled salt-and-pepper wedges, from junior efforts (keep at it, cub!) to grizzly record breakers. I saw an orphaned vinyl deerstalker cap passed across the gallery to three different people, then returned to its happy owner's head. A gray wool beanie similarly migrated to the top of Scott Treleaven's video monitor, hung out as an ersatz installation for twenty minutes, then vanishedquick, cute visual poetry.
I caught sight of a chap in fluorescent Moon Boots and a gorgeous wispy, white, very familiar camelhair overcoat. It was Terence Koh, just back from a residency in Belgium, who had made my favorite work in the show: Twenty-nine framed eight-by-ten-inch portrait photos in a line on the floor with neat circular swirls of chocolate obscuring the faces. Koh reappeared outside as I was leaving. "Yo, is that a Dries [Van Noten] coat?" I hollered at him, twice, in my best South Philly accent. I thought he might enjoy this. He didn't even look at me, shouted "I gotta go!" and scampered across the street with his friends to a waiting taxicab. No one needed fashion that night. Though I have a cropped version of that coat in fab black oiled cotton that we could have talked about.
A few days into rehearsals for Tino Sehgal's Institute of Contemporary Arts showwhich took place in the galleries, with staff and invited guests permitted a sneak previewit was clear that not everyone appreciates the Berlin-based artist's deployment of dancing, singing, and chattering humans (and nothing else) as art. Sehgal's works, which seek to embody a categorical shift away from object-based art production, are never photographed or otherwise documented and are usually unencumbered by wall labels. This contributes to a certain mystique, but can also sow confusion. Unexpectedly encountering a woman writhing wordlessly on the floor in the main downstairs space, one man raced to the reception desk, demanding that someone help her: Shockingly for an ICA employee, he'd missed the embedded references to Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham in this, the first work Sehgal ever made. (It dates from 2000; he's had a fast rise, mainly due to the way his confrontational art stands out in the undifferentiated sprawls of biennials.) I wasn't faring much better upstairs with his latest piece, This objective of that object, 2004. After a short, ritualistic performance, five actors had seemingly gone to sleep on me. I staggered over one zombie slumped in the doorway and located Sehgala bespectacled, slightly preppy-looking young manwho suggested I might try interacting with them. However, the way back in was barred: There was a "technical hitch," said an attendantwhich, the artist smilingly explained, was actually code meaning that a new visitor had entered the space.
Ironically, when they finally let me back in there was a hitch. The performers were lounging and continued to chat idly with the current visitor, whereas my arrival should have snapped them back into marionette mode. I left and came in again; it worked this time. I was now determined to have a chatthe lurching and collective vocalizing my first time through just hadn't been enough for meand it turned out that clearing my throat sufficed, launching an entertaining five-way improv that ping-ponged from the politics of public coughing to semen to "boobies." One rule of this work, it seemed, was that the performers couldn't face the viewer. So, meanly, I tried to see how well they'd improvise while spinning like tops as I ran around them.
The quintet had begun by chanting, "The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion." A few days later that dream came true, sort of, as Sehgal sat on stage at the Goethe Institute to unpack a boxful of sharp ideas with the ICA's director of exhibitions, Jens Hoffmannthe two share a background in theater and dance and have worked together before. Discussion shied away from the most recent work, since this "clever provocateur" (as the ICA is styling him) didn't want to spoil the surprise. As a result, the first half of the chat was a slightly dutiful recap of Sehgal's career as a maker of residue-free, purely durational art, with Hoffmann asking such penetrating questions as "You've had this amazing trajectory. . . . Is there still room for surprise, for yourself?"
Things perked up when Sehgal explained how he actually sells his work in the absence of documentary photographs or certificates of authenticationa weird tale of oral contracts memorized by lawyers and of the artist teaching the buyer how to perform the work, thus instigating a pedagogical daisy chain if and when it's sold again. Later, he convincingly refuted suggestions that his work was either subversive or a rehash of '60s conceptual strategies, asserting that it is, rather, a politicized inquiry into the mutability of modes of production. He resembled an earnest economistdisinterested in getting Croesus-rich off his art and mentioning only in passing that Joseph Kosuth had told him he'd solved a fundamental problem of Conceptualism. Perhaps seeking to keep his friend's self-esteem in check, Hoffmann needled him for that. "You finally achieved the dematerialization of the art object," he said dryly, to a ripple of laughter. Sehgal quickly changed the subject and, shortly afterward, dematerialized into the night.
In 1971, a performance with a gun helped secure Chris Burden's status as an art-world legend. Now, more than three decades later, it seems another performance involving a firearm may have been a central factor in the abrupt retirements of Burden and his wife, sculptor Nancy Rubins, from the faculty of UCLA's Department of Art.
Rumors began to percolate before Christmas, and there has been increasing chatter on art blogs since then, but little official information has emerged about the situationall the parties have kept quiet on the specifics of the performance and its relationship to the departures, a few weeks later, of the two highly regarded professors, both of whom had been at the school for more than two decades. Burden headed the school's New Genres specialization, and Rubins, who has just opened a major show at New York's Paul Kasmin Gallery, taught sculpture. (Burden declined to be interviewed for this article; Rubins did not respond to an interview request.)
Yet through conversations with people familiar with the circumstancesincluding a student who witnessed the original incidenta picture emerges of a crisis that began on November 29, when in the course of a performance for a class taught by visiting instructor Ron Athey, a graduate student entered a classroom at UCLA's Warner building where roughly thirty other students were gathered. The student, wearing a coat and tie, produced either a gun or a convincing replica of one, put what looked like a bullet into the weapon, spun the cylinder, and held it to his head, Russian-roulette style. He pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. The student then left the room; while he was out of view, a shot was heard, at which point he returned, now apparently unarmed. A short discussion ensued between what the witness described as the "freaked-out" performer and a room full of people who were "a little frozen and a little scared," and then the class broke up for the day. This version of events expands upon but is basically corroborated by UCLA's official statement made by assistant vice chancellor Lawrence Lokman, who said that the performance "raised a number of important issues and concerns for faculty, staff, and students with regard to artistic freedom, safety, and the boundaries of performance art within an academic setting." He added that the dean of students office and the University of California Police Department were investigating to determine whether the student had used "an actual gun, or a replica."
But if the facts of the incident are not in question, what exactly occurred afterward remains unclear. According to Sarah Watson, a director of Gagosian Gallery who spoke on Burden's behalf, the artist had recently become disenchanted with the school because of budget cuts and other administrative issues. Yet Watson also acknowledged that the performanceand what Burden, who wanted the student immediately punished, perceived as a tardy and inadequate response from UCLA officialsdid play a role in his and Rubins's decision to retire. Meanwhile, the university statement asserts that "a well-established process . . . for investigating such matters" began promptly; a student in Athey's class reported that a meeting was held the following week led by art department head Barbara Drucker, which "centered around how the university was dealing with it, what kind of actions were going to be taken." According to the same student, the performer, who did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview, remains at the university.
Those familiar with Burden's well-documented penchant, at least early in his practice, for pushing the boundaries of performanceparticularly, of course, with the legendary Shoot, 1971, for which he had a friend fire a bullet into his arm at a Santa Ana gallerymight be forgiven for seeing some irony in the fact that this sort of incident would contribute to the end of his career at UCLA. Yet there have been accounts over the years of students attempting to emulate the transgressive character of Burden's early work, attempts Burden himself has reportedly criticized as dangerous and ill-considered. And UCLA's own published security policy does explicitly ban the "possession of firearms or replicas" on campus. Some people close to the situation say the bigger story has more to do with a shrinking budget and swelling discord in a department that is nowon the strength of a faculty featuring major contemporary artists like Burden, Rubins, John Baldessari, Charles Ray, Mary Kelly, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, and the recently retired Paul McCarthyone of the country's premier contemporary art programs. This year's brochure for the school describes New Genres as giving "emphasis to questioning preconceived notions of the role of art in culture." If nothing else, the current controversy confirms that, in some cases, such questions can have more than mere theoretical implications.
Left: Laylah Ali. Right: Cory Arcangel (Beige) and Paperrad, Super Mario Movie, 2005, installation view.
My Saturday night in Chelsea started at an unfashionably early 6:15 when I strolled in to the (at that point) subdued reception for Laylah Ali's second show at 303 Gallery. It's another collection of small-scale gouaches on paper, though many are now half-length portraits of individual "Types"as she calls the latest incarnation of her bubble-headed protagonistsseemingly excerpted from the stealthily violent vignettes, evoking schoolyard bullying or race-motivated attacks, with which she made her name. Ali has sublimated the cruelty even further here; it's evident only in the small scars on the cheeks and the positively cowed looks in the eyes of her otherworldly subjects. Curator Andrea Green, who organized Ali's current show at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (which also produced a pocket-sized artist's book illustrating the "Types"), was in attendance, as was Dean Moss, a choreographer who is currently producing an hour-long dance piece in loose collaboration with Ali. Moss previewed an emotionally charged excerpt of the work-in-progress at The Kitchen last Monday. He's animating Ali's works to great effect, occasionally freeze-framing the movement to offer the audience tableaux vivants that maintain fidelity to her compositions as well as to the sense of malevolence and pain that pervades the paintings. In the Q & A session afterward, Moss and each of his dancers came clean about the difficulties they face when performing such provocative material, admitting to feeling "violated" at various moments. I'm definitely heading back for the full performance in May.
Cory Arcangel's solo show of new works opened at Team on Thursday; his second opening of the week pulled me southward to Deitch Projects. I mistakenly headed toward Wooster Street before realizing the night marked the reopening of the 76 Grand Street spaceit's difficult to believe that four months have passed since a broken water main flooded this corner of SoHo. With a friend, I entered the typical Deitch fray: Hordes of young artists and fashionable twenty-somethings were packed into the low-ceilinged front room. In back, Arcangel was screening Super Mario Movie, 2005, a fifteen-minute video made in collaboration with Paperrad. It takes the form of a reprogrammed 8-bit Nintendo video game (the entire movie takes up less memory than the picture at the top of this diary entry) in which Mario navigates a psychedelic crumbling world of corrupted data. It's Arcangel's first narrative work to datethere's a funny correlation between the use of 8-bit interstitial titles and silent-era moviesand it is surprisingly engaging; I watched it three times in a row. At around half past seven, Jacob Ciocci of Paperrad, decked out in a neon-bright multicolored hooded windbreaker, gave an impromptu performance in which he danced wildly to a medley of crunk hits converted to the MIDI files familiar from your cell phone's ring tone collection. He interacted with a wall-size projectionof himself in a similar outfit, doing the same routinewhich made his hilarious seven-year-old-with-A.D.D.-channeling-Lil'-Jon performance an unwitting echo of Yoko Ono's Friday night presentation at MoMA. You can't beat that, and I didn't try, quickly exiting to head off into the cold night.
Left: John Lurie, My Name is Skinny, I am a Horse, 2004. Right: Steve McQueen, still from Girls, Tricky, 2001.
John Lurie's sardine-packed opening at Roebling Hall on far West 26th Street was a Mudd Club flashback so intense that Steve Buscemi went unnoticed by everyone including his own wife, Jo Andres, whom he had lost in the crush at the door. Figures from every period of Lurie's professional lifefrom Lounge Lizard, to Jarmusch star, to filmmakercame together to support his new life as an art-on-paper man. Musicians (Eric Sanko, Pat Place, and Connie Berg) rubbed elbows with scenesters (Chris Parker and Maripol) and artists (Tom Otterness and James Nares, who said that since Lurie had started drawing and painting so obsessivelypartly to counter the debilitating effects of Lyme diseasehe, Nares, has started filming himself playing guitar).
Lurie's first solo show last spring at Anton Kern was a sellout, and this one may be no differentnot just because most of the watercolors and ballpoint stick-figure drawings are priced under $5,000. Lurie's helplessly naïf style contradicts his more sophisticated sense of space and color. What's more, every single picture is both naughty and hilarious, thanks in part to captions like "My name is Skinny / I am a Horse and I want to have Sex with your Wife. Okay?" (Lurie is keeping that one for himself, alas.) Almost as striking were the bohemians who treat art openings as family outings. Charlie Ahearn and Jane Dickson had their college-dropout son in tow and former Bush Tetra Cynthia Sley was accompanied by her teenage son, Austin, who wants to be an artist. ("I like the camel," he said of one watercolor. Lurie is keeping that one, too.) So strange: When I was a teen, I didn't want to be caught dead with my parents, even when we were at home. Today, art is a family business (think Mirabelle Marden, Jessica Craig-Martin, and Will Ryman). "It's nice to see your art is so popular," I said to John when he emerged from his hiding place in the back. "I wish they would all go home," he said.
Now I was faced with an admittedly privileged but awkward and recurring art world dilemma: Choosing between dinner parties. Should I run uptown to Steve McQueen's opening at Marian Goodman or just walk down the street to "Post Modern," Carol Greene's MoMA-nose-thumbing painting show? Morbid curiosity got the best of me and I went uptown, partly to see what kind of art Goodman chose to keep at home. The gallery itself was so dark, the light from McQueen's projections too low to be much help, that it was difficult to identify faces or even know if you were standing next to someone. I did find myself squatting on the floor with Cecily Brown at one point, both of us mesmerized by McQueen's video of Tricky in the recording studiothe most alarming of the four pieces on view. The othersall, in McQueen's words, "a slower burn"were a film of Charlotte Rampling's eyeball; a show of the slides NASA sent up on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 for the benefit of alien explorers; and an installation in which a man with a frightening lateral scar on his head (heard in voiceover and seen in a single projected slide) recalls the day he accidentally and fatally shot his own brother. People seemed either admiring or fed up with the pretension of it all.
At Goodman's beef-stew dinner at home, curators, including Rob Storr, Donna de Salvo, Chrissie Iles, Thelma Golden, and Christine Kim, outnumbered artists. Dan Graham, the most prominent of these, spoke at length with Bloomberg LP's Lex Fenwick. The Central Park West duplex, which Goodman described as "my walk-up" (it's on the thirty-second floor, but the elevator stops at the floor below), is a kind of railroad flatminus the dividing walls, with amazing views north, east, and west. The architect who lived there until Goodman bought it in the '70s carved the space from rooftop storage. To my surprise, the walls were completely bare. No art at all, unless you count the dining room chandelier, which Storr assured me was Murano glass. Turns out that the apartment was recently renovated, and Goodman hadn't quite moved back in yet.
On Saturday, I stole back to Greene Naftali to see what I had missed by passing up Greene's take-out Indian dinner from Queens, an affair Clarissa Dalrymple had described that morning as "very pleasant." P.S.1/MoMA's Klaus Biesenbach insisted, when I bumped into him, that the show had been given the wrong title. It's an interesting show, he said, but "it's not postmodern." With paintings by Dana Schutz, Mary Heilmann, Josh Smith, Amy Sillman, and Michael Krebber, it is, to my mind, a perfect reflection of the conservatism rampant in the market at this moment, which I must admit didn't keep me from liking it. From there, Nancy Rubins's new airplane-part "palm trees" at Paul Kasmin were great feats of engineering and form that, apparently, took three solid weeks to assemble. Like Lurie, Rubins spent the early part of her opening in a back room, perhaps so as not to distract anyone from the artthough openings are clearly not about art but about providing a roof for extended families who only come together weekly between six and eight pm.
Left: Brooke Geahan and Kimberly D. Spell. Right: Dennis Cooper and Void Books publisher Alex Kasavin. (Photos: Alexis Scherl)
A word about readings: Unless the author is a close friend, I avoid them like the Meatpacking district on Saturday night. The tawdry, awkward venues, the injurious scholastic chairs, the fake solemnity, the nervous laughs, the tucked-in torpor of the audience: The whole scene generally strikes me as less a promotion of the writer's work than a cheap dramatization of the debasement of literature in contemporary America, a Spinal Tap for poets, if you will. Which is why it was quite a bit more than a "refreshing surprise" to attend a reading by LA's post-punk Jean Genet, Dennis Cooper, at the new Accompanied Library inside the National Arts Club, Gramercy Park.
The Accompanied Library, "an intimate, not-for-profit private library and writers' club," is an essential venture that seems like it should have always existed in New York's literary landscape. That it hasn't existed, at least in recent years, highlights both the beggarly status of literature in the city and the pluck of the library's founders, Brooke Geahan and Iris Brooks. They are young writers who met at Simon's Rock College of Bard (an "accelerated" program whose precociously artsy students matriculate before graduating from high school) and moved to New York after graduation. Geahan and Brooks noted the lack of a downtown writers' library with the old-world feel of well-funded uptown institutions like the Municipal Art Society. Canvassing for an appropriate space, they found a home upstairs at the turn-of-the-century Tilden Mansion, location of the venerable if slightly blue-haired National Arts Club. Geahan and Brooks tastefully renovated the sixth-floor apartment/artist's studio themselves, and the result is like stepping into another time, a Jazz Age salon, say, complete with art-deco bar, high tea, and vintage books lining the shelves of the spectacular double-height living room.
Another word about readings: Alcohol. It's rare enough to hear a reading in the plush comfort of a robber baron's den; it's another thing entirely to hear said reading in said den after an hour-and-a-half of complimentary beer and wine in the type of genteel, festive atmosphere that perished sometime well before the Giuliani administration. I had the feeling of being at a genuinely fun private party for Cooper, where you could chat with the author, hobnob with a criminally attractive, unusually intelligent group of friends and strangers, and drink, drink, drink. By the time Cooper took the rostrum, the warm glow radiating from the crowd was palpable. Couches and chairs filled quickly, resulting in a standing-room-only audience.
Cooper read from his new novel, The Sluts, published by Void Books, a small press run by Alex Kasavin in Williamburg, Brooklyn. Kasavin, an old-school printer by trade, started Void in 2004 to publish "transgressive" authors like Peter Sotos and Cooper in high-quality, limited-edition hardbacks. With creepy-cute illustrations by Todd James, The Sluts is an impressively sturdy tome, its post-digital sans-serif font off-putting only until you realize that the book belongs to the fledgling genre of e-pistolary fictionnovels told entirely through e-mail chains or BBS postings. In this case, the context is a Southern California gay website where visitors post reviews of their trysts with area hustlers. The subject of all the posts, we find, is "Brad," a possibly underage, possibly nonexistent, possibly murdered boy of angelic face and God-given ass.
The constraints of the BBS-posting format are apparently good for Cooper. As the many full-throated laughs from the Accompanied audience confirmed, The Sluts is his funniest work to date. By the end of the reading (Cooper started at the beginning of the novel), the narrative began to turn toward the darkat times, exceedingly darkside of gay desire that has been Cooper's stock in trade for most of his career. Yet the writing retained all of his customary strengthsuncensored imagination, unflinching observation, the strange current of emotional warmth behind the nihilistic tableaux. Before the reading, Cooper claimed that The Sluts was "my last spurt of this stuff," meaning the Gay Guignol of his "George Miles Cycle." But one hopes that it isn't, just as one hopes that the Accompanied Library lives long enough to spawn its own Vicious Circle.
I'd been sick in bed with a cold and was excited to get out of my houseclothes, so I agreed to take the baton from my colleague Peter Plagens and check out two more "TimesTalks": Art Spiegelman (The Graphic Novel's Unlikely Hero) was chatted up by former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath; and Rem Koolhaas (The Prophet of a New Modern Architecture) was interviewed, or, rather, prompted by the paper's architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff. The discussions were set up like Charlie Rose-ish "conversations" in front of "TimesTalks" signage and videotaped with a flower arrangement strategically placed behind each speaker's head. While I waited for the discourse to commence in the plush new CUNY auditorium, multiple TV screens along the aisles added to the global-branding-trance ambiance, sedating me with soft jazz like boarding music on a plane. Ads for Sprint and California Closets pulsated repetitively, lulling me into a state of receptivity wherein Benetton, Koolhaas, and the "Paper of Record" soon merged into one cultural blob I sucked down along with my Diet Coke. Scanning the capacity crowd of Upper West Side types, I was amazed and touched that so many of the good people one sees schlepping the Times around on Sundays turn out to be such culture vultures. If the Times is the synagogue of enlightened liberal upper-middlebrow culture, this was like going to services; the interviewers, rabbis of the cult of Success. On my way out I passed a Borders concession where a dryboard announced, "Now signing: Terry Gross and James Lipton." Middle-aged groupies calmly waited on line. Not least exciting about the whole thing was the brochure with headshots of so many Times bylines that had been hitherto disembodied for me. Now I finally know what Anna Kisselgoff, the dance critic, and Lynn Hirshberg, the style and showbiz profiler, look like.
Spiegelman smoked during his interview. Like his frankness and slightly pudgy untidiness, his lighting up onstage in a nice auditorium was very retrobohemian. One felt the frisson of good old-fashioned artistic license in action. The nicotine obviously helped. He was a hilarious storyteller and totally inspiring re: his creative process. Of the plethora of new graphic novels he enthused: "You need to have really large amounts of shit for the flowers to grow." If Spiegelman was a haimisher hedgehog burrowing into his own psyche and insanely labor-intensive process, Koolhaas was an urbane fox and interdisciplinary smartypantsboth beneficiary and peevish critic of the "star architect" phenomenon. A tall, severe structure in (Prada?) black, Koolhaas's long, gangly limbs rendered his normal-size chair puny as he leaned toward Ourroussoff, eager to head off any misrepresentations. He opened the talk with a clever graphica map of the world with the Yen sign, the Euro sign, and the dollar sign spelling out Y-E-Sand announced that we're in a postideological age in which money is the only value. I had the same reaction to Koolhaas that I always do: He's so smart, I kind of want to work with him; then he's so slippery, it leaves me feeling icky. His research and projects are dazzling, but what rankles is the strangely righteous aroma of "demystification" he gives off when he is actually a mega-example of the celebrity/branding/global-capital cults he's supposedly "exposing." "We have a fundamental crisis of architecture," the prophet pronounced. "It used to be a representation of the public good. Now it's a free-floating vacuum: We architects only serve individual values and the interests of individual clients." The architect of the Prada store, surely a shrine to a brand, complained that "the label of celebrity is superimposed on a system of producers . . . and obscures the value of a building." On an aesthetic level, I especially like his upcoming Hermitage renovation, which respects the weird aura of the museum's decrepitude. With a great eye for incongruity, he showed a slide of one of the museum's major worksan important early Malevich painting that's installed behind a ridiculous velvet rope, sandwiched between picture windows festooned with not-nice, ruched curtains. Seen in its historically accurate yet mildly comical mise-en-scène, the famous black Suprematist square was certainly made "new" for me.
As with a lot of other New York liberals, my love/hate relationship with the New York Times has recently drifted toward active dislike. This discontent has nothing to do with the malfeasances of Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg or Howell Rainesit has to do with the fact that dull, over-considered centrism just pisses me off these days. I mean, I used to find the Times's ultramild leftism reassuring, butgiven the current occupant of the White House and his dangerous folliesI now find it primly beside the point. Yeah, I know it's at least partly irrational, and for better or worse the Times is still "the paper of record," especially regarding the arts. But culturally, too, despite a recent jazzing-up of the arts section with a passel of new editors and a revamped listings column, the paper's taste runs to anything big, official, staid and centrist-appearing (such as the new MoMA); it takes dangerous, hairy arts phenomena and makes them seem reassuringly middle-of-the-road. My puny protest of the Times's great gray blandness has been to quit buying the print edition and read it exclusively online for free.
With this bad attitude, I nevertheless attended two of the twenty-seven "TimesTalks" taking place during the paper's fourth annual "Arts & Leisure Weekend." The first was "Citizen Artist," with critic-at-large Caryn James interviewing famously liberal film star Susan Sarandon on her acting career (for about an hour) and her political beliefs (for about half that time) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Sarandon was smooth, quick, articulate and convincingly modest (then again, she's an Oscar-winning actress). When it came time for the anti-Bush money shot the full-house audience (Short Hills must have been deserted) was waiting for, she settled for a generality about the sad state of "democracy in this country." In fact, Sarandon reserved her harshest words"clueless and ball-less"for the poor, whupped Democratic Party.
The next day in "Self Portrait," painter Chuck Close took the stage to be guided in conversation by the Times's chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman. Since Close is beloved on all art-world fronts (he's on every public-service committee there is, and his accessibly realistic pictures are somehow considered permanently hip), and since he and Kimmelman have done this "dog-and-pony show" (Kimmelman's phrase) before, nobody really expected sparks to fly. None did. Those who paid twenty-five dollars a head to hear precisely seventy-five minutes of softball chat (and Kimmelman thinks twenty bucks admission at MoMA is high?) got a solid, friendly semisoliloquy from Close on the vicissitudes of photorealism, portrait painting, and technically innovative printmaking. Of course, Close's generation of artists (mea culpa: mine, too) was hothoused in university MFA programs and sent out into the world thinking of art as passionless problem-solving. That might explain why there was something missing at the center of the discussion: a revelation about what all those gargantuan, pixellated faces mean. Minus that, all the politesse about color separations and diagonal grids seemed, well, beside the point.
Left: Eric Ditmar, Nicola Bowery, Boy George,Traver Raines, Richie Rich, and Aimee Phillips. Right: Crystal. (All photos: Patrick McMullan/PMc)
"Useless Man," an exhibition devoted to the late Leigh Bowery featuring two films by Charles Atlas of the six-foot-six Bowery madly cavorting and numerous photographs by Fergus Greer, capturing his moods, whimsies, and full-body rubber outfitsopens at Perry Rubenstein in Chelsea. Definitely looks like an up-note for the coming season, given the rather staid and predictable offerings in New York lately. Bowery, legendary avant-garde drag queen, club diva, Lucian Freud model, and lead performer in the groovy beyond-underground band Minty, went to his great reward on December 31, 1994; as the Rubenstein show demonstrates, he hasn't been forgotten. Scores of creatively dressed and coiffed scenesters showed up, among others Boy George, wearing a pink button reading "Sassy." Several Bowery acolytes and/or intimates sported prosthetic latex glitter eye- and lip-enhancements, very much in the Bowery spiritand hats, let's not forget the kooky-club-kid hats. Thelma Golden looked art-world chic, dressed in head-to-toe black, but she caught a whiff of the fetish-fashion vibe, wearing knee-high black patent-leather boots. For the most part, one didn't know anybody, although one did recognize archival club trash dating back at least to the early '80s glory days of Pyramid. Ghost-faced and raven-haired Larissa was there, as well as David Yarritu, more evidence of the party-must-go-on diehards of days gone by (and probably tomorrow). Overall, the opening had something of a Paper magazine tone. Not your average Barbara Gladstone event.
I strolled down Twenty-third Street to Daniel Reich, who was perversely hosting a January 8 New Year's party at his gallery: Hey, let's get wasted every Saturday night and blame it on New Year's. Cute young crowd inside. I remarked to Daniel that it was awfully nice of Andrea Rosen to lend those Felix Gonzalez-Torres Christmas light sculptures to enliven the decor. "Oh, they were very, very expensive," Daniel assured me. Ran into artist Kathe Burkharta great exhibition of her "Liz Taylor Series" closed that very day at Mitchell Algus Gallerywearing some fuzzy-furry black overcoat and a lot of artfully applied purple-black makeup. We chatted about the Bowery show, and I said I couldn't get a good look at any of the works for all the bouffant hairdos and novelty headgear, just flashes of pink and yellow and lips and ass. "What did you expect," Kathe remarked. "It's a big old faggot all dressed up with nowhere to go. He can't get out of the gallery, darling, he's six feet under!"
"Dinner" was at ultrapassé Lot 61, which seemed appropriate, because all the art one remembers from the joint's fifteen minutesDamien Hirst spot paintings, Sean Landers's logorrhetic text paintings, Rudolf Stingel's orange wall carpetingwas gone, and the place resembled a random nightclub, anywhere and any time. It felt slightly depressing, but I stayed too long anyway.
Left: Mike Leigh. Right: Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake. (Photos: Universal Pictures, Fine Line Features)
Lancashire's greatest auteur took to the stage to meet the public after a screening of his latest, the almost universally praised Vera Drake. His Q-and-A session at the National Film Theatre was ably set in motion by the British Film Institute's Sandra Hebron, who had selected the movie to open her acclaimed London Film Festival last October. In print, Mike Leigh can come across as a grumpy old man, verging, in his invectives against the Hollywoodization of cinema (a disease, in his view), on the sanctimonious. In personand before an audience of informed and adoring cinephileshe is determined yet thoughtful, responsive, jocular, and unquestionably inspiring, though more in the manner of your favorite school teacher than your favorite rock band. "Who IS Vera Drake?" someone shouted from the back. "Where ARE you?" he barked in return, unable to see his interlocutor, before proceeding to speculate on whether Vera Drake, as he had discovered on another public occasion, was coincidentally the name of the questioner's mother.
As the film's title character, Imelda Staunton is fantastic. With her tiny, kind eyes buried like raisins in a bun, she's endlessly scuttling around with cups of tea, as comforting as Mrs. Tiggywinkle. And her body shrinks, quite literally, into a hedgehoglike ball as a postwar world of austere good cheer shatters around her. For Vera not only offers aid, comfort, and a cuppa to all who need it, but alsounbeknownst to her nearest and dearesthelps girls who find themselves unhappily in the "family way." Where Naked (1993) was a character study in badness, Vera Drake is a study of goodness. Does the film tell us, someone asked, that "it is inevitable that do-gooders suffer?" Definitely not, responded Leigh. The film isn't a statement but a dramatization of a painful truth: When individual and society hold conflicting moral positions, it's the individual who is likely to lose. Vera Drake is about "a good person criminalized by society."
It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Leigh as the great satirist of life in Thatcher's Britain. He encapsulated the beginning of the era unforgettably in Abigail's Party (1977), with his ex-wife Alison Steadman as the excruciating Beverly, the materialistic spouse of a suburban real-estate agent. And he chronicled its demise in Life Is Sweet (1990), a film that laments the human cost of '80s enterprise culture. Because he makes cinema that refers to real life and the issues and themes that articulate individual lives, Leigh is often described, in the same breath as Ken Loach, as a "kitchen sink" realist. But it is a misleading comparison: Where Loach's political agenda is clear, Leigh's is intentionally ambiguous; he's a poser of questions rather than a prophet of fact. Leigh's films have never been realist in the sense of "naturalistic" or "documentary." Their characters and their stories are distilled and dramatically heightened during a monthslong preproduction process of research and rehearsals that has given rise to the common misconception that Leigh's films are "improvised." The director described his own role in this process in practical, almost managerial terms, as the leader of a team of actors, designers, and cinematographers who "work together to expand the material, discovering the film through the process of making it."
Leigh also is frequently attacked for reducing his characters to caricatures of class, and while it is certainly true that anyone upper-middle or beyond tends to be sketched rather than drawn, the charge is irrelevant if you view him not as a social realist but as a "painter" of modern life. His ensemble pieces like Life Is Sweet or Secrets and Lies (1996) remind me most of those bustling Victorian genre paintings, by Francis Frith or Ford Maddox Brown, in which society is represented on a huge canvas populated by closely observed, sharply individuated types, the dramatic details of whose lives are used to figure a moral or social issue. Like those nineteenth-century paintings, Leigh's creations are conscientiously and laboriously crafted. By the time the actors' fully realized dramatic world is committed to film, it is utterly convincing to the audience. This is why, when Vera Drake starts crying about an hour into the film and continues almost nonstop until its end, you find yourself weeping unavoidably with her. As an observer of everyday life and a dramaturg of intense moral complexities, Mike Leigh may fall short of the effortless brilliance of a Satyajit Ray or a Yasujiro Ozu, or, then again, the radical brilliance of a Lars von Trier. But here in Britain, he's one of a kind.

subset: commoncrawl


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Our student leaders will develop and grow personally as well as professionally, and add value back to their Greek and university communities through the combined efforts of university advisors, volunteers, alumni and IHQ staff. It is with this collaborative attitude that we present Delta Upsilon's partnership proposal. You will find included supplementary information that we see as advantageous to consider in distinguishing DU from any other fraternal organizations.
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- Proctors of the UniLOA assessment
- Chapter Excellence Plan
- Three headquarters professional staff members specializing in expansion, recruitment and educational programming on site. They remain as advisors following the initial colonization effort
- Service oriented: Delta Upsilon's Global Service Initiative provides members with options for getting global service experience both abroad as well through domestic opportunities.
Leadership Development
- Delta Upsilon Emerging Leaders (DUEL), an educational retreat for freshmen and sophomore future leaders
- Leadership Institute (LI), our annual educational conference and convention for undergraduates and alumni
- Regional Leadership Academy (RLA), for collaboration with chapters and volunteers through each geographic province
- Presidents Academy and Advisors Academy, including dynamic recruitment training


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Don NobleSpring Hill, Tennessee, US
Make Don Noble your choice of voice for your next project! The versatile vocal range of Don's voices will capture the listener's attention and peak their interest for more.
The words crisp, clear, confidence, deep, energetic edgy, rich, warm, inviting, professional, and trustworthy come to mind when describing Don's voice. Clients will be pleased with how versatile Don's voice can perform with the multitude of reads he can offer, as well he offer a great attention for detail to create a polished final product for his clients!
Cartoons, Movie Trailers, Documentaries, Audiobooks, Business, Educational, Radio, Television, Internet, and Music are the areas of interest to Don so remember his name when you need to hire your next voice over talent!
English (North American), English
North American, US General American (GenAm), US Midwest (Chicago, Great Lakes)
Middle Aged, Senior
Special Skills
Audiobooks, Business, Documentaries, Educational, Internet, Music, Podcasting, Radio, Television
As a retired pastor, I am very comfortable with biblical names and characters. As a former teacher, I am familiar with presenting ideas to be learned and concepts to be grasped. My voice over experience is limited but my other experience is invaluable for your project, providing an excellent return on investment.
Masters of Science in Special Education From Fort Hays State University.
Master of Divinity from St Paul's School of Theology in Kansas City, MOI
class with Rodney Saulsberry; many roles in community theater
Computer & Software
Apple Mac G4 Notebook
Special Equipment
Audiobox, Garageband
Delivery Methods
Voices.com, Mp3, E mail, Internet
Turnaround Time
within 24 hours, depending on the length of the project
Service Description
Telephone patch
Voice Over Clients
United Methodist Communications
Payment Terms
Hire Don as a voice actor. Payment is made through Voices.com SurePay, an escrow service that guarantees your work is done to your satisfaction. Send payment securely by Visa, Mastercard or PayPal through Voices.com then download your files from the website.
Watch a video to see how to make a payment
Next Steps
To contact Don Noble about your project, request a quote today. We'll walk you through the process step-by-step. It's fast and easy.
Hire Don Noble as a voice actor. Working with Don Noble is fast and easy. We'll walk you through the process step-by-step.
Request a quote for your project today.


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Healthline Blogs
Diet Diva
Get advice on healthy eating, nutrition, and weight loss from expert dietitian Tara Gidus.See all posts »
Autumn Apples
Fall is definitely here, and we even had a "cold front" come through Florida last week when it got down into the low 60's overnight and high 70's and low 80's during the day. While I love living in Florida, I do miss the change of seasons. My favorite season is fall and it is tough to get into the spirit when you live down here. I miss crisp Saturdays watching football and the leaves changing.
One food that always reminds me of fall is a good crisp apple. A caramel apple is especially good, but be careful because just one could top off at over 500 calories. Instead, enjoy the natural sweetness of the apple itself without drowning it in added sugar. I also remember the sign going up at the local apple orchard advertising "Fresh Cider." Cider is different from apple juice in that it contains solids from the apple and is often not pasteurized.
Apples aren't just for eating whole or in the great American Apple Pie. You can use them in stuffing, slice them into salads, or even bake them with chicken or pork. Sliced apples go really well with a little bit of peanut butter or a slice of cheese.
Apples might be one fruit you might want to consider to purchase organic. They are high on the list of pesticide residue. If you do not buy organic apples, make sure you wash them and wipe them vigorously before eating to remove as much as possible.
Fun facts:
- A large apple has about 100 calories and 5 grams of fiber
- Contain phytochemicals called phenolics found in the skin of the apple
- The largest source of phenolics in the American diet
- High in antioxidants, specifically quercetin, catechin, phloridzin, and chlorogenic acid
- The antioxidants and phytochemicals in the apple, especially the peel, may be very potent against cancers of the breast, liver, and colon
- An apple a day may indeed assist in prevention of many diseases including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes
- The fiber in apples may assist in lowering cholesterol
- The average US consumer eats 19 pounds of apples per year, or about one per week
- More than half of apples grown for fresh eating in the US are grown in Washington state
- There are nine major varieties of fresh eating apples
For more apple recipes, click here
Photo courtesy of http://www.bestapples.com/Recipes/
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text:
Look at other dictionaries:
Coble — Co ble, n. [AS. cuopel; cf. W. ceubal skiff, ferryboat.] A flat floored fishing boat with a lug sail, and a drop rudder extending from two to four feet below the keel. It was originally used on the stormy coast of Yorkshire, England. [1913… … The Collaborative International Dictionary of English
coble — [kō′bəl, käb′əl] n. 〚ME cobel < OE cuopel, prob. < Celt, as in Welsh ceubal, Bret caubal (> ? L caupulus)〛 1. a small fishing boat with a lug sail, a deeper draft at the bow than at the stern, and a large rudder, used off the northeast coast of… … Universalium
coble — [kō′bəl, käb′əl] n. [ME cobel < OE cuopel, prob. < Celt, as in Welsh ceubal, Bret caubal (> ? L caupulus)] 1. a small fishing boat with a lug sail, a deeper draft at the bow than at the stern, and a large rudder, used off the northeast… … English World dictionary
Coble — For people named Coble, see Coble (surname). Three cobles at North Landing, Flamborough Head … Wikipedia
coble — 1) a flat bottomed, single masted North Sea fishing boat. See also plosher (1) 2) an open or deckless fishing boat used principally on the north east coast of England, with sharp bows, flat, sloping stern, and without a keel 3) a short, flat… … Dictionary of ichthyology
coble — couble m. couple techn. ; paire ; pièce de bois, poutre. cf. expr. Vèire la palha dins l uelh dau vesin e pas lo coble qu es dins lo sieu : voir la paille dans l œil du voisin et pas la poutre qui est dans le sien. voir pareu … Diccionari Personau e Evolutiu
coble — noun Etymology: Middle English Date: 14th century a flat bottomed boat propelled chiefly by oars and used in Scotland and northern England especially for fishing … New Collegiate Dictionary
coble — co|ble Mot Pla Nom masculí … Diccionari Català-Català
coble — I Cleveland Dialect List a kind of boat peculiar to the North east, in use among fishermen and pilots, with sharp bows, flat sloping stern, and without a keel II North Country (Newcastle) Words a particular kind of boat, very sharp and wedge… … English dialects glossary
coble — n. small flatbottom rowboat; boat used for fishing herring (Nautical) … English contemporary dictionary


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Over There
Full length clay animation from Dustball and gel!
Fallen Angel
The world as we know it comes to an end.
The Little Freakin' Knight!
another nice episode in this series.
that was pretty dang funny! if anyone was gunna rib off salad fingers im glad it was you. Although..the end kinda threw it off.
IT will grow back!!!
Good God
Man that kicked some major shizz. Yo dat rocked. The end was really disturbing though.
Ha! Brilliant!
I think you've surpassed Salad Fingers in your own weird way. The ending was a bit weird.
They get better and better
You sir, are a God. These are funny as hell. Banana Finger's voice is what makes this, it's inspired and I love it. I can't wait 'til the next installment.
By the way, your voice is teh sex0rz.
Overall: great stuff.


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Top Stories
How Wildfires Could Radically Change Forests, Your Life
July 26, 2017 08:11 AM - University of Guelph
A lonely bird call breaks my concentration and I glance upward. Where glacier-topped mountains should be filling the horizon, instead my view is obscured by a strange orange haze. Even the bright sun has given up. It seems to float in the sky as a faint pink ball.
I am a field ecologist working east of the Denali mountain range in Alaska, but the postcard-worthy view of my sites today is obscured by smoke drifting across the border from wildfires burning throughout British Columbia. I have been studying boreal wildfires for years and have a strong understanding of the importance of fire to the boreal forest of Canada.


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Borrebach, Hans (42 items)
Welcome back! Whilst you were away we added the functionality to view auctions and bid in pounds.
Borrebach, Hans: Information on the Catawiki site about Portretfoto's in kleur en zwart-wit, .
At its heart, Catawiki is an online catalogue with images of, and information on, collectibles. Our catalogue is compiled by users in a similar way to Wikipedia.


text: Breadcrumb Home / Schoolword What Does It Mean? buoyant --Listen to the pronunciation: WAV format or AU format Sam's beach ball was buoyant , so therefore it 1. was lost. 2. would not sink in the water. 3. was out of air. Yesterday's Word Quiz | Tomorrow's Word Quiz Analogy Quiz Spelling Bee Advanced Word Quiz Infoplease Daily Almanac


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We don't want to shout about this just yet but SunSeeker Doors is planning to have a London showroom in the not-too-distant future.
Our innovative Frameless Glass Doors will be available to 'play' with - far better than trying to visualise their elegance and understand their simplicity via Internet images and telephone conversations.
But if this is what you'd like to do in the meantime, you can see and read about all SunSeeker Doors products and options on our corporate site and find additional information on our exclusive Frameless Glass Doors UK site.
And, of course, if you would like to talk to us, we would be delighted to hear from you! Please call 01582 492730
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Customer installation, Frameless Glass Doors in Weaverham
A recent customer was so pleased our new product - frameless glass doors, installed between his house and new orangery - that he sent us a series of photographs, which we have added to the gallery on our web site.
SunSeeker Frameless Glass Doors are available as single or double glazed.
Tempered glass single glazed doors can be used internally or on conservatories where doors do not have to meet building regulations' insulation standards.
Where thermally compliant double-glazing is mandatory, a narrow seal is visible around the edge of the frameless glass unit.
SunSeeker Doors' Frameless Glass Doors are made to specific measurements at our Bedfordshire site where we also manufacture SunSeeker Slimline bi folding doors with a narrow profile aluminium frame, powder coated to your RAL colour choice. All our doors are made to each customer's exacting requirements and installed by our experienced team.
View more of this Frameless Glass Doors installation.
Labels: client testimonial, frameless
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Rosewill RHTS-11004 Supra-aural HeadphonesPerformance »
The Package
The box just contains the headphones and its cable. The specifications list is wrong. The headphones are listed as circum-aural (around-ear), but are actually supra-aural (on-ear). Of course, if you have absurdly small ears these could be considered circum-aural, but I highly doubt you will find European or American ears that can fit inside those cups.
The cable is of the same quality as that featured on the RHTS-11002s. It is fine for everyday use and has a good mix of bulk versus durability.
Removable cables are in vogue at the moment and the RHTS-11004 has one as well. The cable uses a standard mini-jack on both ends, which makes it very easy to replace or swap for a custom-made cable.
Closer Examination
The style of the Rosewill RHTS-11004s is a bit old fashioned, but it looks quite tasteful to these eyes. If you look closely you will notice that some of the metal looking parts are actually made of plastic, but these headphones look very nice from a normal viewing distance. The chromed steel parts are well made and the steel runs all the way through the headband, which should make it quite durable.
The headphone features standard dynamic drivers held at a neutral angle towards the ear. The cups only swivel around the axis of the headband, which limits its ability to follow the shape of your head a little bit. This small draw-back is not super critical because the pads will conform to the shape of your ears instead. The ear pads are quite hard compared to that of KRK or Sennheiser mid-range headphones. They will, of course, soften up over time, so the ear pads might be hard on purpose to improve their longevity.
The adjuster mechanism is very basic and the covers are made from plastic. It would look better if it was made of metal like the headband stringers.
Like the Skullcandy Aviator headphones, these take some design cues from the pilot headsets of the last century.
The headband is quite stylish with the Rosewill logo on top of the pleather. These small quality-related details give the RHTS-11004 some much needed flavor to set them apart from the vast majority of pubescent-looking, colorful headphones of today. The general construction seems alright and of better quality than what you usually find on $30 headphones.


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Know more about this business than we do? Cool! Please submit any corrections or missing details you may have.Help us make it right
Dons Sunoco located at 375 Chestnut Ridge Rd in Woodcliff Lake, NJ services vehicles for Gas Stations. Call (201) 391-2494 to book an appointment or to hear more about the services of Dons Sunoco.
Be the first NJ.com user to add photos or videos of Don's Sunoco
Very nice people.\r\nYes, overpriced. One part because the area its in.\r\nToo much for oil change.\r\nAlso, once had an estimate to get car repaired would be $1,500 - $3,000. (to much of a gap for me).\r\nAlso, took that car back to PA and only got charged $900.\r\nYou may look at it as you get what you pay for. (because for what they do it is good work). But the point is there are other...
I am saddened to see that someone felt so cheated over an oil change that she felt the need to come on here and write three reviews (all the same day) pretending to be different people. Don is a friend, a friend that I made through years of going to his gas station. You might have felt that the oil change was overpriced, but you obviously haven't compared the service you get from Don and that...
Since 1972, Don's Sunoco Inc has been providing Retail - Filling Stations, Gasoline from Woodcliff Lake.
Don's Sunoco can be found at Chestnut Ridge Rd 375. The following is offered: Gas Stations. The entry is present with us since Sep 8, 2010 and was last updated on Nov 12, 2013. In Woodcliff Lake there are 1 other Gas Stations. An overview can be found here.


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Black Sheer Mesh Tee
- 92% polyester, 8% spandex
- Machine wash
- Model wears size Small
- Made in the U.S.A.
- Undergarment not included
Make a daring statement in this edgy tee! It's cut from sheer mesh fabric with a ribbed knit crewneck. Rock it over a trendy bandeau or bralette for a stand-out outfit.


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Trying to conceive after mc? Pregnant after MC and seeking somewhere safe to hide? Recently graduated from the mosh pit? Come on down to the mosh pit for some serious metalling and cake part 5(315 Posts)
Hoping the new thread brings a plethora of BFPs and lots of healthy arrivals!
HJ I was like that when pregnant with ds and hadn't had any miscarriages at that point. I bought hardly anything before I was on maternity leave! I just couldn't believe I was really going to have a baby!
Congrats Redbird glad you had a good scan. Boys are great! I'm convinced I'm having another one partly because I think the sonographer let it slip accidentally! I got an appointment for another scan through yesterday which made me panic a bit. After much confusion when I rang antenatal they eventually found the sonographer that had scanned me and she remembered she'd booked me in for an extra one for reassurance due to my previous miscarriages and because there is still a bleed outside the sac. Glad to be so well looked after but not very reassuring when she didn't bother telling me!
Dorita don't worry about movements. It is true what they say about feeling them much earlier with second baby. I didn't feel them until really late with ds. Also think it's probably the position of your placenta.
Glad all going well Daisy.
Evening ladies ..... Hi mrshp I'm still hanging in there with you - AF came and went this week [bitch] though her visits seem to be getting shorter ( only 2 days this month) so back to counting the days. Pretty much think its the end of the line for us 3 consec mc's and I'm 43 soon!
Wedding preparations are kicking in but am still having my weepy moments - lets hope the cheery weather stays to brighten the mood!
Have a fab long weekend all xx
Evening all
Daisyflower think I've worked out who you are. . . . Glad everything is going ok for you too. Hope number 2 makes a swift and drama free arrival.
redbird many, many congrats on your scan.
pixie it's ok feel weepy. We're all here to listen. We're pretty good at wedding advice too. Ps there is a lady in my antenatal Pilates group who is 45 and 6 months pregnant after several miscarriages so fingers crossed all will work out for you.
beans I bought a babygro in the sales a few days ago but then told my sister off when she brought round 2 bags of newborn clothes for me.
Have a good weekend everyone
Love the stories daisy beans redbird etc I truly believe what I read at the time of my mc, that it is common and even more so to go on and have a normal pregnancy. Before Christmas my friend told me about a 38yr old in her work who'd had one and was then pregnant, now that's me. Didn't think it would be then. hp and pixie you're doing everything you can and we're all here rooting for you and other ladies on here too x
All ok everyone?
Is everyone ok? I never seen this page so quiet? x
I'm on the Sept thread so using that for my baby related discussions, so not on here as much. I keep en eye on it to see how everyone's doing and if anyone has any mc questions etc...
Hope everyone is okay
Dorita - I still haven't joined an antenatal thread. Too superstitious!
Ditto - been wondering where everyone has gone. Like dorita also on the Sept antenatal thread but keep checking in here. Jollyb give an antenatal thread a go, lots of useful info and advice.
I'd like to think that the quietness means everyone is ok but that anyone struggling should know everyone's here to listen if needs be.
I'm still a bit shocked I'm 23 weeks now - not really any movement yet from her and keep thinking something may still go wrong...Until she's in my arms I don't that feeling is going to stop.
I'm still here, but not much to report outside of getting bigger and all going well as far as anyone can tell. Have also not joined an antenatal thread - far too superstitious and feels too late to hop on board for July.
Irrational dread far less bothersome now that he's moving around loads, but still thinking more about rare late pregnancy / birth complications than I think I would have done without the mcs. Can't imagine how awful it would be to lose him now, so try not to think this way at all - but find it does keep me from feeling comfortable with usual antenatal excitement.
How's everyone else?
Hello you lot! I am focusing on my job at the mo, still checking in, but trying not to obsess any more... hmmm..... we shall see!
I am so excited about all your babies, please do feel free to post on here if you ever want to, it gives me hope!
Hi All
I am doing ok, like jolly and beans been too paranoid to join an antenatal thread though have looked at Sept thread occasionally, if it's not too late, may join you on it dorita and lcr.
Lcr totally know what you mean about movement, I am 22 weeks and havent felt much at all which sometimes still makes me think this isn't real and actually happening. But the 20 week scan showed the placenta was low and at the front so assume it is cushioning me from much movement.
Hi as well to pixie and mrshp, hope job and wedding stuff is going ok and you're not stressing too much about TTC.
Off to Centerparcs tomorrow with some friends, weather doesn't look great but looking forward to a mother to be massage and some relaxing.
Glad everyone seems to be doing ok. redbird I've got the low laying placenta too. Another scan at 32wks, you too?
Off to Wales for my sis-in-law to be's hen party tomorrow. Can't wait, really lovely group of girls and Eurovision!
Have fun on your weekends away girls. We're off to Bournemouth to visit friends. Last time we saw them it was a week after my last MC so this should be a happier experience.
I had an anterior placenta with my daughter - wasn't convinced about movements til 24 weeks , so don't fret too much.
Can't believe I'm nearly 30 weeks. Seem to have hit a bit of a wall over the past few days - can't get comfy at all. At least I've only got 9 weeks til my section - I went to 42 weeks with DD and it felt like forever.
Pixie and Mrs HP - hope everything's ok. Maybe a wedding night baby is on the cards for you Pixie!
Hear you about hitting a wall, jolly. Having not got this far before, I never know what to expect and was surprised and a bit dismayed at massive growth spurt the last few weeks and ever increasing exhaustion and discomfort with 2.5 months to go!
My friend who is several weeks ahead of me says she's feeling much better than she did last month - so keeping fingers crossed. Have a very heavy travel load for work coming up in June but just want to take to bed -with all the pillows in the house- until the baby arrives..
My friend who's 39 weeks said exactly the same thing Beans. I feel like there's just been a huge spurt and my insides need to stretch to get used to this massive lump sitting there.
Any news?
Mrs HP and pixie how are you both doing?
Hi everyone, I was on this thread last year after a mmc and ectopic pg, i also dipped in and out in this pg when I was off work with pneumonia. If anyone remembers me, i just wanted to let you know that mini tas was born last week, 12 days late- he almost shot out in the corridor outside the delivery room after a lovely calm labour, in contrast with most of the pg which was not all that calm! Thanks to everyone who listened to me moan and fret. I was in a very dark place after the ectopic pg and I never thought I would get pg again, let alone have a baby. Hope this gives you hope if you are ttc or having a rough pg .
Sorry not to name check everyone but I have lost track of who is around, but congrats to all those pg and hope the rest of you are lucky soon, need to get off MN now and eat cake!
tasmainian. CONGRATULATIONS! Thanks for sharing, it is always lovely to hear good news and have hope!
jolly nothing much doing here, I am trying to lose a bit of weight before taking things further with conception support, and trying to pretend I don't care a bit!!! At the start of one of my looooooooong 2ww's!
Aw, wonderful news, tas - so many congratulations and thanks for sharing the good news here.
No news to speak of here - all still seems as it should be at 31 weeks and this weekend we've planned to Buy Some Things. All getting to seem very real...
Good luck on your 2 weeks, mrsHP, and hope everyone else is well.
Many Congratulations Tas - I remember you well from my early days on this thread.
31 weeks here - feeling more comfortable I think she may have dropped. Beginning to buy some bits and pieces too. Only 4 more weeks of work hurrah. . . .
Mrs HP - keep up the good work
I remember you Tas, congratulations!! You did it!!
Good luck Mrshp x
Enjoy shopping jolly and beans...
I'm 25wks this wkend and feeling kicks now, things are so different from a year ago
hi jolly, hj and dorita, so pleased to "see" you all with growing bumps, I remember you getting your BFPs, I'm very excited for you all. Mrs HP hope you get your BFP soon, good luck with this 2ww
Where is everyone?!? I have never seen this thread sooooo quiet!
No news on my front we have been purposefully missing the 'best' days over the last couple of months as the wedding is in six weeks. After my last three pgs ending in MC or MMCs between 6/12 weeks we didn't think the stress of the wedding would help we will defo be 'jumping back n the saddle' as soon as possible
Hope everyone is ok jolly mrshp??- though I have been absent - the happy stories do make me sad at times - thats very selfish of me I know - I do still like keeping up to date with everyone!
Hope to read all your updates soon xx
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