Spiderfox has been stewing over the Sarah Palin affair the entire week. But rules are rules and I couldn’t say or do anything about it until, much to my great relief, some guy in a coffee shop watching CNN said loud enough for me to hear, “Help. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.” Technically, he wasn’t asking me for help, or even speaking to me for that matter, or even asking for help in any real sense, but my superpowers were activated nonetheless, and I started a rant that ended kind of badly when the coffee shop owner discretely asked me to leave and I stopped with a dangling modifier and slinked out, foxlike, leaving wet fur sprayed across his table tops.

I hate to waste a good rant so here’s a summary:

The fact that Sarah Palin is a mother and the mother of a pregnant teen and the mother of a Down’s syndrome baby is not the problem or even the issue or even anybody’s business. Nobody ever asks whether a man can handle the responsibility of political office just because he’s got a family. Why on earth are these kinds of attacks coming from the supposedly more liberal “left” side of the political “spectrum” (and I use that word fully aware of its meaninglessness)? I am sick to death of hearing women, of all genders, arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother. As if that should matter to anyone but her own kids. The only thing that matters in this national discussion is whether Sarah Palin would be a good vice president and potential president in the perhaps not so unlikely event of a John McCain, ahem, premature departure.

And that brings me to the next point, which is Why on earth would anyone think she would make a good vice president? This is the area where the “lefties” should be aiming their attacks. Begin with the experience issue: She was the mayor of a small town in Alaska, not a senator from a large urban city. She’s been governor for almost two years. She doesn’t even have any stated opinions on foreign policy or immigration. Imagine what would happen if McCain dropped dead and Sarah Palin was left in the Oval Office facing issues like, um, er, say, Iraq or Russia. I’m sure Palin could outshoot Putin, but does she have any say concrete ideas about Georgia?

Then move on to the following distressing facts:

• Palin tried to get books banned from the Wasilla library and then tried to get the librarian there fired when the librarian opposed the book banning.
• She wants creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools. (Hello? Anyone ever heard of radio carbon dating?)
• Palin supports aerial shooting of bears and wolves even though Alaskans voted twice to ban the practice.
• She believes that global warming is not man made, which I guess would make it the fault of God or maybe women. Probably women.
• Palin opposes protections for salmon from mining contamination.
• She sued the U.S. government to stop listing polar bears as endangered. I think most five year olds know that polar bears are in fact endangered whether anyone officially declares they are or not.
• She wants to open ANWR to drilling.
• She believes that health care must be market-and business-driven. (I guess she doesn’t realize we tried that already.)
• She argues that, regarding the issue of health care, people must take personal responsibility for personal health and that personal responsibility and choices are the keys to good health. In other words, if you get hit by a drunk driver and require nine or ten surgeries that require you to mortgage your house three times, for example, you simply shouldn’t have been driving that night. Bad, bad choice. Or if you get cancer, you probably shouldn’t have been living downriver from the mine that Palin supported.

You can understand why a Barbarian would vote for Palin.

And why are the “righties” suddenly pretending to champion women’s rights and claiming to have invented the idea of a female vice presidential running mate? Geraldine Ferraro anyone? That was more than twenty years ago, way back in 1984, and she was a Democratic party nominee. Also, lest the Dems get big heads on this one, there have been 83 female official vice presidential candidates across the years, the first one, Marietta Stowe, nominated by the National Equal Rights Party in 1884. And I’m not even talking about the presidential nominees. So big fat hairy deal, Republican Party. It’s about damn time.

And one more thing. The fact that Sarah Palin has a pregnant teenage daughter is really no one’s business. But it is most definitely not a sign of her virtue or her moral superiority. The Republicans are pretending that having a pregnant daughter means Palin is a staunch anti-abortionist and therefore ethically superior to those baby killers on the left. But what it really means, if indeed it does mean anything more than the fact that her daughter and her partner didn’t use a condom, is that Palin and her husband didn’t have enough of those all important “talks” about birth control or, in their case, abstinence.

And perhaps abstinence is what I should have practiced in the coffee shop that day. But when someone asks for help, I’m all over it. That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox.

©2008 Spiderfox

Last month I got a call from a young art curator in a fix. She said, “I have a good job. It’s one of the best galleries in L.A. I don’t know what my problem is except that I can’t take it any more, the kind of art we’re showing–glossy, popart, Koonslike stuff. It feels so empty. I want to do something better.” I didn’t really know what she was talking about. But she went on to tell me that she had approached the gallery owner’s with an idea for a transformative art exhibit to introduce some newer, lesser-known artists who were making social critiques with their art and had something worthwhile to say. But the bosses had said no; they were sticking with the popular shiny stuff that sold.

Curator said, “Help me, Spiderfox. The world is falling apart and I’m just sitting here nudging it along.”

That’s a common feeling these days. I don’t get a chance to do much about it, and so I was very excited to help but I didn’t know what she needed me to do. I asked, “Why don’t you just do your show somewhere other than the gallery?”

“Because I want it to be big” she said. “It needs to be seen by lots of people to have an impact. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Curator found an old warehouse down near the port and she got to work putting together her show. Meanwhile, Spiderfox found some ways to get people to see it. First thing I did, of course, was to call Captain F&G who summoned his army of men, so there were a couple thousand people—men—available right there. I told him they had to wear shirts for the event; Captain promised to do his best. Then I created the nicest museum-quality placards, the kind you see next to a piece of art showing the title and artist and date. But on these I printed the name of Curator’s exhibit, the location, and the date of the opening night party. I added a variety of little come ons like, “Is this art?” and “”Don’t you care about what’s happening?” and “Pretty but empty.” Then I had a good time sticking these up all over town in museums and galleries next to the stuff that’s already up.

Curator got mad at me about the “Is this art?” one. She said, “It’s all art. That’s not the question. The question is Why do we care? Or maybe What’s it for? Or better, Is this saying enough?”

Spiderfox is always learning things. So I did a little reading to figure out what Curator was talking about. I started with Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker article “Artists Get Serious.” Schjeldahl examines a new exhibit called “After Nature” of several dozen international artists. He writes, “If the common run of contemporary art risks triviality in the pursuit of seduction, the new kind incurs hysteria as a toll of earnest intensity. Emotional reach exceeds formal grasp throughout the show, and certain melodramatic lurches fail entirely. . . . But the futility of artistic technique in the face of world conditions may constitute a subject for art as substantial as any other, and rather more compelling than today’s stacked-deck models of success.”

He is critical of the art in the exhibit, referring to various works as hysterical, despairing, silly, gaudy, smug, and even dumb. But he recognizes the cultural imperative and context for art of deep feeling and sees in it the “exhaustion of a received cultural situation, whose traditions are slack and whose future is opaque.” And he admires the work’s “driven sincerity” and “raw-nerved provocations.” Most important for him, the work, with its “existentialist standards of authenticity” signals a major shift in art and heralds the possibility of a future “forward leap” in art or at least the arrival of a new major artist. But Schjeldahl recognizes that neither may ever come.

Look at these:

Maurizio Catellan, Untitled, 2007

Jeff Koons, Elephant, 2003

Do you see what Curator is talking about? The Catellan piece is in “After Nature.” The Koons piece is the kind of thing Curator is reacting against. The way I see it, human civilization is heading toward shirtless, metaphorically speaking, and art’s response has been to whip off our shirts and spin them around our heads whooping. I think that’s what Koons is getting at. “After Nature.” in contrast, sews shirts out of sealskin (no lie) and says, “Kind of nasty, huh?”

The turnout at the opening party was enormous. Between Captain’s army and the throngs from my placards, we counted about two thousand attendees. Ongoing media coverage means attendance will continue at the exhibit in the weeks ahead.

So yay. But I’m left worried about two things. One: Captain couldn’t keep the shirts on. The media were highly focused on the shirtless factor. I am worried that the exhibit will be seen as some sort of gay event and that the majority of people will then be able to dismiss it as irrelevant to them. On the other hand, gay support hasn’t hurt art before. Think of Warhol or Basquiat or Haring, for example. Two: Curator was fired. She doesn’t care because she has had tons of offers. She’ll be fine workwise. But what will it mean to her personally, in terms of her personal development, in terms of her rebel vision? As Schjeldahl writes, “There is nothing new in our culture which can’t be faddified.” That’s what “After Nature” was reacting to. That’s the trap Catellan’s piece is leaning over. That’s what could happen to Curator. And Spiderfox might not be able to help.

That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox

Shirtless image by chrichton91, 2008, Creative Commons license.

©2008 Spiderfox

Hey, Spidey! I need your help. Seriously, I’m getting really sick of all the eco this and eco that messages. What a drag! Why can’t these greenies have more fun? How do I get them off my back, doing the minimum, without turning into some kind of sad, green freak? —Rob, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The most important thing here is that no one ever should call me what it is that you called me. I won’t even repeat it. It’s offensive for reasons that should be obvious. Second, boo hoo hoo for you—are the facts of climate change getting you down? You want your Skidoo and your plastic wrapped case of Poland Spring from Costco too? Grow up, Rob. This isn’t preschool and the teacher didn’t just tell you to share the Thomas the Trains.

While you take a minute to grow up, let me tell you about the rescue mission I went on last night. A woman—I’ll call her Clare—had contacted me about a problem she was having at work. She had been passed up for a promotion even though she was completely qualified. Instead, the company promoted a significantly less-qualified man who was a good golfer and good friends with the son of the boss. Clare approached her boss to complain and he told her that the fact she would complain about something like this was the reason she hadn’t gotten the job. “You’re not a team player,” he said. “I’m looking for someone on my team.”

So Calre went looking for a new job. She found a great one, and the whole deal was finalized except that the new company required that she provide some current salary and other information from the job she was leaving. So she approached her boss again and told him she was leaving and asked for the information. He didn’t say much but agreed and then provided false and defamatory information to the prospective employer, costing Clare the job.

So she found a lawyer, but the lawyer told her that she didn’t think Clare had enough evidence and, besides, she knew that Clare’s boss played golf with just about all the judges in the district, and so she probably didn’t stand a chance in court.

Then Clare called me.

I have this tactic that involves a stealth refacing of billboards with messages more relevant to my purposes. And I’ll do this (at night) along the expected driving route of my intended reader. So I created a string of billboards that the boss would be certain to see the next morning on his way to work. Each billboard subtely addressed the whole idea of teamwork, successively getting more and more personal to the boss, but in a creepy way.

Anyway, the details are unimportant, but let’s just say the boss got the message. And he will probably never again feel so uninhibited in his hiring and firing decisions. And my pal Capt. F&G found Clare an even better job through one of his gazillion contacts.

My point, Rob, is that the day of the Happy Go Lucky Man in Power who laughs away the problems affecting the rest of the world, who thinks that nothing should be taken too seriously except his own personal advancement and prostate size, is now in evening. And that’s where you come in. Being green isn’t like being a Trekkie. It’s not nerdfill. Caring about the environment is essentially being sane and practical and also caring about your own future. So quit whining and get to work like the rest of us.

You want it simple? Let me give it to you simple. This is what you have to do, in a nice, tidy list. Follow the list and then devote all the rest of your time to meaningless fun and shallow pursuits. But not even one second of X-Box for you until you get down with the list.

Here goes:

1. No water in plastic bottles unless the Red Cross gives them to you or you’re in Mexico.
2. No plastic bags from stores ever. Buy yourself some manly reusables.
3. Eat less meat. For real.
4. Recycle. It’s just like throwing things away except in a different box.
5. Put in fluorescent bulbs. They screw in the same way, into the exact same lamps. And, while you’re at it, turn most of them off.
6. Plug your big energy suckers (Nintendo, massage chair, giant flat screen) on power strips so you can easily flip them off with a switch when you’re not using them.
7. Drive less. Buy yourself a Harley. Get a mountain bike.
8. Don’t use toxic stuff. It’s really simple: In your grocery store, buy the alternative, eco-friendly version. There are alternatives now to just about every toxic thing you’ve ever used.

And don’t be a jerk. That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox.

Image of Skidoo by Timo Newton-Syms, 2008, Creative Commons License; image of billboard by mediaboytodd, 2008, Creative Commons license

© 2008 Spiderfox

Help me, Spiderfox!

I can’t deal with our continually rising gas prices. I can’t afford driving to work where they pay me not enough to afford to drive to work. It’s killing me. Please help! –C. C., Pleasanton, CA

Dear C. C.,

If it is killing you, I think you need to move to a better place, quickly. I recommend Darfur, or perhaps you’d like to consider Myanmar. Once you’re there or in one of a host of other possible relocation sites I can share with you, you’ll find that the cost of gasoline is not your biggest problem anymore. What a relief from gas.

Just for the record, I believe that current gas prices, while affecting all of us some and some of us more than others, are in fact a more accurate representation of the true cost of gasoline than what we were paying in the past. The system couldn’t go on forever the way it was. We’re talking about a finite resource, and sooner or later things had to change. We Americans certainly weren’t going to make the jump because of our foresight. We required something like $4 per gallon to make us begin to trade in our monster SUVs for SUV hybrids, and we’re still a very long way off from redesigning our lives to greatly reduce the need to drive long distances. But no one’s asking me for help in that category right now, so I’ll just pocket that rant.

Short of helping you move away, which I am happy to do, C. C., I can’t be of much assistance with your problem. You know how hard it is for me to sit one out, but I have to pass on the gas. To distract you from your personal gas problem, I’ll tell you a little story about my friend Animal Avenger.

A.A., who in my opinion selected her professional name carelessly, also unthinkingly or at least unwisely went against my counsel in deciding to take out an ad in the white pages for her services, especially an ad that lists only her initials. Approximately 80 percent of the calls she fields are requests for locations and times for the “next meeting.” I said, A, if you offer help, people or, in your case, animals, are going to come looking for it. You don’t need to advertise. Nevermind that her clients can’t read.

So when somebody called yesterday claiming to be a friend of Bill W., Animal was about to hang up with her usual disclaimer, “You’ve got the wrong number,” when in fact they don’t but that’s another issue. But her superior instincts made her pause long enough to hear the caller add, “Bill Wilson.”

Now, you may not know who Bill Wilson is, but we superheroes do. Bill Wilson is like the Brian Epstein to our Beatles. Without Bill Wilson, many, perhaps most of us wouldn’t exist or, at the very least wouldn’t be in the line of work we’re in. Bill is the kind of guy who makes things happen. He connects people, dots, lines, you name it. He’s a social networking genius.

It turns out that this friend of Bill Wilson, Chuck, was starting a YouTube channel on animals and climate change, and he was looking to do a segment on methane. He wanted Animal to pay a visit to a local cow ranch and in an undercover operation replace the cow’s corn with grass, which the animals can actually digest, thus cutting down on the methane gas. He wanted to film the whole thing, which made me nervous. But Animal was game because she always is if an animal is involved and can be helped.

So she sneaks over to the farm at night with a cartful of sod rolls, and I don’t know any more details than that but suffice it so say that she manages to load up the corn and roll out the sod in the troughs and get away just as a convoy of police cars, lights flashing, begins speeding up the road to the farm, and that’s when Chuck’s crew turns on the camera lights and rushes the farmer’s door to get it all on film. The farmer is heaping mad, and somehow Chuck films him ranting about the high price of corn and how he can’t afford to have people stealing it from him.

And this is where we get back to you, C.C. You see, you and the farmer are focusing on the wrong thing. He’s complaining about the price of corn, but he shouldn’t be feeding corn to his cows, so it’s irrelevant. And you’re complaining about the price of gas, which fittingly enough is connected to the high price of corn, but we all shouldn’t be so reliant on gas anyway. The whole world needs to change. We need to work near where we live so we don’t need to drive so much. Cows need to eat grass, and we need to eat a lot less cow, and if we weren’t so dependent on driving we wouldn’t be growing corn for ethanol and the price of corn would be much more reasonable.

So, C.C., the next time you want to complain, think about the root cause of your complaint, and complain about that instead. And if you need help, contact me, and maybe I’ll say yes.

That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox.

©2008 Spiderfox

Image of gas prices by faithx5, 2008, Creative Commons license. Image of cows by Sunny Ripert, 2005, Creative Commons license.

Spiderfox was invited to AIPAC in D.C. to help find a path to peace in the Middle East. I was not there in any official capacity; the person who asked me was a fourteen-year-old girl, and her asking had something to do with a research paper she was writing but I was there nonetheless, and I got to see Obama and Clinton making their promises and political points. They both were very attractive and had on nice suits.

But I need to add that Spiderfox was initially not permitted to enter on account of the fox mask. Something about terrorists, but, really, how many terrorists do you know who wear fox masks? Anyway, I had to use my superfox stealth powers to sneak in, and when I did that’s when I ran into the group of women attending from Hoboken who asked me if we were going to be doing a number from Cats, because they loved Cats and one of them had seen it eight times. Do I look like a cat to you? See cat image and compare.

So I met up with the fourteen-year-old girl who asked a few interview questions. For example, Do I like Justin Timberlake? Do I wear base under the mask? Spiderfox answered nothing until she asked me, Can you help bring about peace in the Middle East? Then I was interested. Spiderfox had this to say: There will be no peace in the Middle East until Jews and Palestinians and other Arabs get to know each other and maybe have tea or play soccer or weep over the same loss.

Background: Today on the radio I heard about a program designed to help Iraqi college students pursue their studies at American universities in the United States. Several Americans expressed concern about terrorism. A few others worried about American school dollars going to foreign students. One man said that it would be more beneficial to invite Iraqi professors to American universities because then there would be a pedagogical component.

Spiderfox thinks people are basically ignorant. What do you think a pedagogical component is? Do you think it is a “unit” of curriculum? Do you think it is an AV cart or a map? Is it a teacher’s piece of chalk? I’ll tell you: A pedagogical component is something that contributes toward learning. Maybe Spiderfox has superior imaginative skills, but she thinks it’s patently obvious that an American student can learn gobs from merely sharing a classroom with a student from another part of the world, with benefits accruing for both.

In fact one could learn heaps from shadowing a pizza maker or picking up litter on the highway. Unless you’re a moron, you can learn just by listening, no pedagogical components required. But when people are yammering at each other instead of listening, their will be no peace; not here, and certainly not in the Middle East. So here’s a program I would implement if I were running for president. I haven’t figured out how, as president of the United States, I would force the people of Israel and the Gaza Strip to do this, but I’m still working on the details.

The program would go like this. Once a week, each person from one side of the fence would have a phone conversation with a person from the other side. So maybe ten-year-old Farouk would have to listen while five-year-old Sarah shared the names of all of her collection of twenty-five stuffed bunnies, and Sarah would have to listen as Farouk recounted the six best moments in FIFA history. And twenty-five-year-old Balkis would give interior decorating (her passion) tips to forty-five-year-old Zivah. Meanwhile, sixty-year-old Yoni would check in with nineteen-year-old Hazem, and give him advice on starting his own business.

The point is that when people get past borders, they find commonalities, they see people, instead of enemies. The point is that there is no wall that can achieve peace. All a wall can do is secure a temporary lull in violence and generate a false sense of security.

Take my quiz. Match the wall with its name.

a. Great Wall of China b. Berlin Wall c. WalMart

That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox.

Cats image by Sébastien Bertrand, 2006, Creative Commons license; Berlin Wall image by Siyublog (Siyu), 2007, Creative Commons license; Great Wall of China image by SmokingPermitted (Marianna), 2007, Creative Commons license; WalMart image by Daniel Ng, 2006, Creative Commons license

©2008 Spiderfox