June Soundings

Oh, who will weep when the petty officials are marched away? According to columnist Marc Fisher, in the Washington Post, May 24, 2004: "Andy Chasin's story begins at home, in Woodley Park, with Mom. Or at least a package from Mom, sent in March, with love, from Arizona, via FedEx. The package stayed at home, but somehow the air bill, the sheet of paper that contains Chasin's address, wound up in his pocket, where he discovered it earlier this month while walking on Connecticut Avenue NW.

"Having no need for the slip, Chasin tossed it into the trash can on the corner. This would be the crime scene.

"Last Friday, Chasin, 28, was in his office at the law firm of Baker & Hostetler, when he received from the District government a Notice of Violation, delivered at a cost of $4.42. The city's Department of Public Works charges Chasin with Improper Use of Public Litter Receptacles. Fine: $35.

"The notice is signed by Cecil Herd, Solid Waste Inspector. Attached to the notice is the evidence: the FedEx bill.

"'At first, I thought I must have thrown it to the trash can and missed,' Chasin says. 'Littering. But my co-associates and I broke away from other stimulating legal matters to track down the statute.'

"They found 24 DCMR 1009.1: 'Public wastepaper boxes shall not be used for the disposal of refuse incidental to the conduct of a household, store, or other place of business. . . .'

"'Folks hate to be caught doing something that maybe they weren't supposed to do.' That's Mary Myers, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Public Works."

The Imperial Media. "Are members of the press above the law? Some seem to think so. The result: absurd stories like this one: 'Reporters at three news organizations are resisting subpoenas issued in the trial of a lawyer charged with conspiring to support terrorists. Prosecutors issued subpoenas to four reporters at Reuters, The New York Times, and Newsday, saying they want the reporters to testify that lawyer Lynne Stewart said what they quoted her as saying in their articles. . . .Lawyers for the reporters have argued that making the reporters testify would compromise their neutrality by forcing them to side with prosecutors.'

"'Compromise their neutrality'? All that the reporters are being asked to do is to perform their duties as citizens and—like any other citizen—to testify in court about matters relevant to a criminal trial. . .

"And what's revealing—and troubling—is that these media organizations think that they're exempt from the obligations faced by ordinary citizens. . . . But free speech is an activity, not a profession, and there's nothing in the First Amendment that grants the press any privileges that the rest of us don't possess when we engage in free speech." Glenn Reynolds, Slate magazine, June 16, 2004.

According to an article by Guy Trebay, "Sex, Art, and Videotape," in the New York Times Magazine of June 13, 2004: In Andrea Fraser's videotape Untitled "the artist is seen having sex in what some have characterized coyly as 'every imaginable position,' with an unidentified American collector who paid close to $20,000 to participate in this curious 60-minute work of art."

Since the onset of the Romantic era, of course, many artists have complained that the bourgeois market for art is akin to prostitution. Baudelaire said so explicitly. But Fraser protests that her film is "'not a literalization of what is, in fact, a very old metaphor, that selling art is prostitution.'" How so? "'Andrea's work has been about exposing the mechanism of the whole art system,' explained Dan Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum. 'In this case, she's playing a little bit with what the act really is that takes place between an artist and a collector. It underscores the paradox of ownership and pushes it into a realm that hasn't been so pointed before.'" Oh.

Says Trebay: "Article 230 of the New York State penal code refers, quite straightforwardly, to the sort of exchange Untitled immortalizes as prostitution. It is safe to assume that transactions just like it are taking place this very minute in hotel rooms around the world. But those enterprises, unlike Fraser's, lack the frisson of what the art press tends reflexively to call 'transgressive.'"

The Stories You're Liable to Read in the Bible: Between 60 percent and 70 percent of Americans believe in the literal truth of the creation story told in Genesis, the story of Noah and the flood, and the story of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. According to a poll reported by ABC News (February 16, 2004), these Americans affirm that the stories are "literally true, meaning it happened that way word for word." Evengelical Protestants are far and away the most likely to believe in the literal truth of such tales, with approximately 90 percent agreeing that each of the stories is literally true. Those who profess no religion (which is not the same as being an atheist) are far more skeptical, but even among this group a quarter to a third take the stories literally.