Tag Archives: bailout

Bob Hicks, General

Celebrating a year of the Artificial Me

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Bend it like Beckham/Gray's Anatomy

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, that great American bacchanal on a boisterous Irish theme, and here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we trust our stockholders are out on the streets whooping and hollering and downing tankards of green beer and generally celebrating the corning of the beef. Or not.

My own plans are slightly different. I figure instead on relaxing in my lush private retreat overlooking the grand garden estate I purchased with a small slice of this year’s Art Scatter upper-management bonus distribution — how else could we attract the best and the brightest talent in these tough times? — slowly savoring a fine Irish whiskey served by one of my several personal assistants as I contemplate the successful completion of a full year of the Artificial Me.

The funny thing is, I don’t feel in the least artificial, and I’m wondering if that makes me and Bernie Madoff blood brothers.

Yet here I sit, and stand, and walk, and even bend, things that had gradually become so difficult that a year ago today I found myself lying in an operating room at Providence Portland Medical Center, where a team led by the blessedly skillful orthopedic surgeon Dr. Steven Hoff scraped and jabbed and sliced into my left leg, stretching tissue wide enough to insert something very like a hockey puck into the degenerated space between my femur and tibia that had become the laughably inadequate remnant of a once solidly workable knee. (Strictly speaking this isn’t quite true. I didn’t “find myself” lying in the operating room; I never saw the place. By that point, swaddled in the sweet bassinet of modern pharmacology, I was deep into lullaby land, and thank goodness for that: This was no Civil War surgery, with hack saw and clenched teeth and a bottle of booze to stanch the pain.)

Today, after a few months of rehab under the gentle yet firm prodding of Providence’s physical therapy squadron, I’m happy to report the bailout was a success. For some time I’ve been back to “normal” — that is, under ordinary circumstances I don’t think about my knee any more than an AIG executive thinks about ethical responsibility. Sure, there’s a little tightness of the skin around the scar tissue, but that’s just the new normal: Think of it as one of those niggling oversight requirements that might go away if you just ignore it. Before surgery, stairs and even slight inclines on sidewalks were obstacles. Before surgery, I hesitated between walking-sticks and walking-canes, uncertain of which was more stylish/less obtrusive (and foolishly self-conscious in a way I hadn’t felt for years) but always with one or the other at hand. Now, sticks are long forgotten and stairs are just life.

In other words, everything’s natural — except for that highly artificial, nonorganic, composite hockey puck that separates bone from bone; that blessed chunk of shock absorber that takes the stiffness out of my ambulatory stride. I am artificially normalized — engineered into effectiveness. And while the whole process has hardly been on the order of a heart transplant — I join millions and millions of other people who’ve had knee or hip replacements — I have dipped my toes into the brave new world of Robot Man. I am, just slightly, less a biological being than when I began. And I feel good about it. I feel stimulated.
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Bob Hicks, Environment, Food, General

Lighten up, lad: Diamond Jim, we hardly knew ye

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Ah, 2008. The year when the fat got lean and the lean got leaner. The year when the big fat lie led to the big fat crash. The year when the faked memoir devolved from the merely mercenary and narcissistic to the unbearably sad and pitiable. The year, more cheerfully, when Obama won and the Yankees lost.

Oh, well. We’ll always have our heroes to look up to.

Oops. Turns out, Diamond Jim Brady was a fraud. Or maybe just a garden-variety (make that stockyard-variety) glutton. Or maybe it wasn’t him so much as his image-mongers, who seem to have larded the truth like it was a prize-winning pie crust at the county fair. David Kamp, in a mortally funny piece of debunkery in this morning’s New York Times, has pricked Diamond Jim’s balloon, reducing his reputation like so much Slim-Fast: Turns out Brady was the bloated beginning of a reputational Ponzi scheme that leaves us tail-enders holding a severely depleted bag.

Granted, Brady’s an odd sort of hero in the first place — not a role model so much as a bigger-than-life phenomenon, a sort of Zeus (or maybe Dionysus) of the foodie set. Anything you could eat, he could eat bigger. And did, so the stories go, four or five times a day, in all-out cram-athons, often in the company of his gustatory inamorata Lillian Russell, the even more fabled songbird of the Gilded Age, whose appetites seemingly rivaled Catherine the Great’s.
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Books, Cities, Environment, General, Language, Visual Art

Scatter links: A beer with Henry James, a bail-in for Detroit, why NOT sell off some art?

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Cool things to read in other places:

— Laura Grimes, charter member of Friends of Art Scatter, has a delightful piece in the Sunday Oregonian’s books pages about reading Henry James‘s The Ambassadors (or trying to read it) on the bus, and whether James was quite the sort of fellow you could sit down and have a beer with. Read it here.

— Also in The Oregonian, on Monday’s op-ed page, is a bell-ringer by Tim Smith on how to “bail in” the reeling auto industry instead of bailing it out. Smith, a principal at SERA Architects in Portland and a Detroit native, suggests: “(L)et’s reorganize GM to replace it. Why not fund a conversion of General Motors from a purveyor of private transportation hardware to a planner, fabricator and supplier of a renewed, nationwide public transportation system?” An elegant, provacative piece, with some historical sting. Read it here.

— And, in case you missed it in the New York Times the day before Christmas, this intriguing piece via Art Journal about the brouhaha over deaccessioning art at museums to raise bucks, a move that’s recently put New York’s cash-strapped National Academy Museum in hot-to-boiling water. Is it an idea whose time has come? Maybe so, maybe no. Author Jori Finkel talks with, among others, former Portland Art Museum director Dan Monroe, now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Masachusetts. Read it here.