…for the last time EVER.

Massimo Guerrera. Meeting. Via Crawl Space Gallery.

Crawl Space is pleased to present Stranger Circumstances, an exhibition that brings together artists who devise strategies to connect with people they would otherwise never encounter.  The artists approach strangers either as collaborators, research subjects or participants in unconventional performances.

The exhibition, which includes work by Massimo Guerrera, Alana Riley, Ron Tran, and Seattle art collective PDL, was curated by gallery director Jennifer Campbell. Opening reception tonight from 6 to 10 p.m.

On the one-year anniversary of Translinguistic Other, I unearthed several of the most popular search terms that bring unsuspecting viewers to stumble onto my blog, among them “Jesus,” “William Blake,” “dinosaurs,” “erotic art,” and “Bea Arthur.”  In order to keep giving you lovely folks what you apparently want, I’m going to be making gratuitous posts on these hot topics from time to time.  Today I will be killing two birds with one stone, tagging this one both “Bea Arthur” and “erotic art.”

John Currin. Bea Arthur Naked, 1991.

In 2006, Karen Rosenberg asked the painter John Currin about his inspiration for his infamous portrait of Bea Arthur in an interview for New York Magazine:

[The] Bea Arthur painting is from Maude, which I used to watch as a kid. In the eighties, I didn’t have TV for, like, a whole decade. When I started watching again in the nineties, The Golden Girls was in syndication. When I had a loft with Sean and Kevin Landers, we’d always take a break in the afternoon and watch The Golden Girls. When I made the painting, I was living in Hoboken and still making abstract paintings, and I was very frustrated. I was walking back from the PATH train and this vision of Bea Arthur just came to me.

Whoa!  Looks like I get to tag this one “visionary art” as well!  You’re welcome.

Trevor Johnson. Title not known. Carved styrofoam

There is a promising group show opening tonight at Vermillion. From the press release of We Built This to Leave:

This show speaks to the obsessive creator in all of us. From our youngest memory of playing with blocks to the daily compartmentalization of our lives we are always building, organizing, and making something new. Each artist in this show explores what we are so busy building, why we are compelled to do so, how those creations impact the environment, and what becomes of the left over materials.

Sharon Arnold. 20 B/p/M (detail). Ink on Rives Heavyweight, 2009.

Today on the Slog, Jen Graves called We Built This to Leave a “tight, teeming universe” that “reveals the built environment to be the network of obsessive, pumping bodies it is.”  Participating artists Sharon Arnold, Ryan Molenkamp and Trevor Johnson use a variety of labor-intensive methods to create two-and-three dimensional works that bow and sway under the weight of their own commitment to themselves.

Ryan Molenkamp. The Flood. Drawing on paper(?)

Without having yet seen the show in person, I am reminded of the 2005 exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, WOW: The Work of The Work which examined, among other things, the transformative power inherent in a rigorous process.*

Wolfgang Laib. Installing "Yellow Square." Hazelnut pollen on floor. Photo via Portlandart.net

As a fellow artist drawn to Sysyphian tasks, I am intrigued by the premise of the exhibition and the snapshots of the installation.  There is an opening reception this evening from 6 to 11 p.m.

*Can someone remind me who delivered a guest lecture on this topic? I don’t think it was Elizabeth Brown.

Tonight is First Thursday, and I sincerely hope the crappy weather doesn’t keep you folks away from all the great stuff happening tonight in Pioneer Square. Joey Veltkamp has a fairly comprehensive list of openings on Best Of, so I’ll just share a couple of images I recently received from the supremely groovy Aubrey Nehring to tantalize your eyeholes.

Aubrey Nehring. Hand-Eye. Watercolor on paper, 2009.

Aubrey is best known to Seattle music fans as the co-founder of the psychedelic music and arts collective Portable Shrines, which puts on the spectacular Escalator Festival as well as many smaller events throughout the year (including Midday Veil’s tour kickoff party on Friday Nov. 13!) In addition to making some of the most badass rock posters in recent history for PS, Aubrey creates intricate and engaging works on paper which he regularly exhibits with the (misleadingly stuffy-sounding) Capitol Hill Watercolor Society.  His characteristic style blends bright colors and fanciful characters with hypnotic geometries and psychedelic slogans. Dig?

Aubrey Nehring. We Are One. Watercolor, 2009.

Aubrey has an exhibition of watercolors opening tonight at Some Space Gallery, which will also be showing some remarkably absorbing imaginary landscapes by Katherine Hepburn’s Voice drummer and visual artist D.W. Burnam.

D.W. Burnam. Hardy Perennials. Oil on canvas, 2009.

After the art openings, I hope you’ll consider heading up to the Rendezvous Jewelbox Theatre in Belltown for a night of experimental and electronic music that includes Mem1, Steve Barsotti,  Tiflin, and visual artist/Dragons Eye Recordings musician Wyndel Hunt.  See you tonight!

Wyndel Hunt's SCORES performance, Lawrimore Project, June 2009. Photo via A Spiral Cage.

Exterior view of the proposed facade of First Baptist Church, Dallas.

This morning I felt like I got sucker-punched in the soul when a friend in Dallas emailed me this article from Dallas Business Journal:

First Baptist Dallas announced plans Sunday for a $130 million capital campaign that would pay for what it claims will be the largest church construction project in U.S. history. Plans call for a state-of-the-art campus in the heart of downtown. [...]

Dr. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas, told church members that prior to the Sunday launch of the capital campaign the church already had secured $62 million in pledges from donors—nearly half of what is needed to complete the project.

Plans call for a new 3,000-seat worship center complete with state-of-the-art audio-visual technology, a fountain plaza with a highly visible cross at the center of a cascading fountain, a sixth-floor education building, two gymnasiums, an outdoor patio, green areas and a skywalk connecting the campus’ buildings.

Other facets of the project include a new parking garage with more than 500 additional spaces, a roof-top green area for outside concerts and events and a transparent glass-design that will illuminate the church’s various walkways and the historic First Baptist Church sanctuary. That worship area will remain standing and in full view of members walking inside the church as well as to downtown visitors who are driving past the campus.

Pastor Robert Jeffress, First Baptist Church, Dallas

Has your head exploded yet?  It gets so much worse:

Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, a member of the congregation, started Sunday services with a prayer session. During a press conference after the service, Leppert told members of the media the church is an integral part of the city’s plan to rejuvenate downtown Dallas.

Wait, what?!  The MAYOR?!!

“This is an important investment in downtown Dallas,” Leppert said. “It will be part of what we are trying to accomplish in creating an urban setting.”

During Sunday’s services, Jeffress highlighted the benefits of building a significant structure in a down economy. Pricing in the current economy is attractive, he indicated, with the church estimating that for every $1 spent it will be getting $1.30 in construction value.

Oh Jesus.  Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.

Emily Pothast. Instant Values! 2 (detail). Collage on paper, 2006.

My experience with Robert Jeffress began almost two decades ago.  He was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas where my family moved from rural Iowa when I was eleven years old.  One year for Christmas, someone gave us tickets to a performance of The Living Christmas Tree, a pageant that was staged annually by the church.  Young, naïve, and accustomed to the austere, wood-paneled interiors of midwestern Lutheran churches, I was shocked and fascinated by the extravagance of the building. There was a bowling alley in the basement.  The sanctuary itself was enormous and adorned with a half-dozen or so chandeliers that would make Liberace blush.  The pastor was a slight, folksy little man with a crisp suit and a sharp, effeminate Texas accent that may well have served as the model for South Park’s Mr. Garrison. (Lots of video here.)

“Oh wow, the minister is gay!” my mother whispered, impressed.  ”How progressive!”

As it turned out, Dr. Jeffress is not only NOT gay, he really really really hates it that other people are gay.  In 1998, our town made national headlines when he stole two books from the public library aimed at helping children with gay parents feel better about their families—Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate. The ensuing controversy exposed the political faultlines between my family and many of our friends that had previously been unspoken, foreshadowing the evangelical polarization that came to the forefront of American politics in the years that followed.  In the early 2000s, a close friend of mine was asked to step down from his role in the music ministry at the church when he came out as a homosexual.

Since moving to Dallas in 2007, Jeffress’s anti-gay flame has only grown…more flaming.  In 2008, a series of sermons titled “Why Gay is Not OK” prompted protests and more national headlines.

Sign outside of First Baptist Church, Nov. 2008. Photo via Dallas Voice.

Over the past eighteen years I have watched Pastor Robert Jeffress rise from a small-town irritant to an enviable position of national prominence primarily through his controversial gay-hating shenanigans.  He has, in recent months, made numerous appearances on Fox News where his opinions on religion and politics are clearly an invaluable asset in the campaign to keep the Republican base fired up against the rest of us.  He also has an internationally syndicated TV show and a growing catalog of bestselling books to help fan the flames.

Which brings us back to the big money.  Not surprisingly, given his position of prominence within the conservative evangelical movement, Jeffress seems to have no shortage of outrageously wealthy donors lined up to shell out millions of dollars to buttress his gilded empire.  Prior to his move to Dallas, he presided over a small but similar multi-million dollar expansion project at First Baptist Church of Wichita Falls.  The guy is a fundraising machine.

Sanctuary of First Baptist Church Wichita Falls, Texas. Photo via Acoustic Dimensions.

So let’s talk about megachurches for a moment:  A couple months ago, I wrote a blog post called Created in Our Image: The Making of an American Idol in which I traced the tradition of uniquely American representations of Christ, paradoxically, to the iconoclasm of the Puritans and Protestants who dominated the scene in the early days of American Christianity.  At the time, I almost included something about the architecture of megachurches, but I figured that was enough information for its own post.

In a nutshell: The early Puritan and Protestant settlers in the New World—disgusted by the decadent displays of wealth that characterize the visual culture of Catholicism in Europe—created new, stripped-down forms of religious architecture that focused on the utility of the spaces, the ethics of democracy, and the virtue of the common good (typified by the colonial Meeting Houses of New England).  But as the asceticism of the early colonists gave way to the emergent mythology of the capitalist market, Americans gradually grew increasingly comfortable with opulent displays of wealth in their places of worship. Rather than raid the gothic dustheap of European history for design ideas, American Christians gave birth to an innovative new category of architectural forms dictated by an increasing reliance on technology and mass media to simulate the power and glory of God.

Interior view of Lakewood Church, Houston. Photo by Paul Duron, via Panaramio.com

Today’s archetypal American megachurch bears more resemblance to a commercial sports stadium or supermall than anything out of the history of sacred architecture.  (Lakewood Church in Houston, home to the incomparably creepy Joel Osteen, is a former basketball arena.) Religious emblems are absent or played down.  In their place is a conspicuously costly abundance of cutting edge media technology, stage lights, sound systems, and the capacity to seat tens of thousands of “worshipers.”

Anyone who’s been to the Vatican can tell you, of course, that there is nothing new about grandiose church architecture.  But there are some key distinctions that make the American megachurch a relatively recent evolutionary development.  Unlike Old World houses of worship, which were by and large designed to create a consecrated environment worlds away from everyday concerns, megachurches conjure their power by simply magnifying the intensity and scale of the secular experiences of the marketplace.  As a result, the object of reflection is not the aesthetic world of evocative beauty nor the invisible world of the interior soul (or even the projection of the soul onto the personality of Christ or the Bible, for that matter).

Interior view of Crystal Cathedral, Orange County, CA.

At a megachurch, the primary object of reflection is the impressiveness of the show.  The charismatic celebrity of the pastor.  The vindicating affirmation that materialism, capitalism and the American way of life are not just permissible, they are virtues worthy of worship.

Of course, Robert Jeffress would say no, the object of reflection is the Bible, which is taken literally.  Again, this is a whole other post, but for our purposes I will simply point out that nothing about political conservatism or megachurch culture follows necessarily from the study of the Bible.  If it did, we would not expect to see the diversity that exists within Christianity, even among literalists.

If I thought he had any capacity for spiritual insight and I had the power to do so, I would encourage Jeffress to re-read the parts of the Bible with Jesus in them, particularly his advice to a rich man (Mark 10:17-25), his attack on the money-changers in the temple (John 2:13-16) and the episode where he is tempted by Satan in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11) which ends like so:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ”All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

What if we were to replace “all the kingdoms of the world” with “state-of-the-art audio-visual technology, a fountain plaza and two gymnasiums”?  Couldn’t we very easily draw the comparison—with no trace of irony!—between the worldly lure of the megachurch and the Satan of Matthew 4?

Duccio di Buoninsegna. Temptation on the Mount. Tempera on wood, 1308-1311.

Now, I’m not suggesting that spending $130 million on a church is Satanic, at least not in and of itself.  But the act of taking one’s own darkest, most shadowy urges—fear and hatred, greed, lust for power (in the guise of “winning souls”)—projecting them onto an idol and bowing down before it and enticing those around you to follow suit?!

That, my friends, is the very essence of Satanism.

In summary: it is my sincere and humble opinion, based on almost two decades of observing Robert Jeffress’s career and evaluating it in the context of the whole history of human religious behavior, that the deity worshiped by the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas is none other than the dark Lord Satan himself, the sworn enemy of all that is decent, insightful, and holy.

Lord Satan. Proposed mural for the interior of the new First Baptist Church of Dallas. (Artist unknown. Mural proposed by me. As satire. Duh. But seriously...wouldn't it look badass next to the fountain?)

No one’s point of view is objective, but over the years of pursuing an avid, albeit amateur interest in spirituality, I have arrived at a simple set of criteria I tend to rely upon when assessing the relative “goodness” of an organized religion.  For these purposes, I define “goodness” as the degree to which a religious body fosters those near-universal moral imperatives collectively described by a good many saints and scholars as the Perennial Philosophy, and my criteria are as follows:

1. Does this religion foster a sense of awe, wonder, and appreciation of the sheer amazingness of existence?

2. Does this religion foster a sense of interconnectedness and interdependence between all beings, both living and non-living?

3. Does this religion place a premium on love or compassion as its highest virtue?

For what it’s worth, the megachurch movement—as does the majority of evangelical American Christianity—fails the Perennial Philosophy test miserably.  Although the rhetoric of these denominations is cloaked in the idea of “community,” in practice they define their identity from an us-vs-them exclusion of outsiders (gays! liberals! non-Christians!)  Add to this the fact that the political ends they support often have the effect of encouraging environmental destruction and enforcing an economic system that helps the wealthiest among us accumulate more wealth at the expense of the poorest, both violations of criteria (2) and (3).

So what have we got?  Given its failure to meet at least two of the three above criteria, I think it’s a stretch to even call this game a religion at all.  Let’s call a spade a spade.  What we have here is a political and economic movement that has cloaked itself in the language of righteousness and manipulated its members by appealing to their basest, most profane instincts for the cynical purpose of the accumulation of power.

(But you can call it Satanism for short.)

Artemio Rodriguez. Avaricia 2. Silkscreen, 2005. Image via Davidson Galleries.

Happy Hallowe’en, TLOers!  Lots of freaky shit going on this weekend.  First I’ll be attending OCCULT USA: A Process Church Sabbath Assembly at the Fremont Abbey.

Fresh from a series of sold-out events in Los Angeles and New York, this live performance and multimedia presentation simulates a “Sabbath Assembly ritual” as conducted in the psychedelic ’60s by one of the most notorious occult groups of the era, the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

The Process Church was an intensely creative, apocalyptic shadow side to the flower-powered ’60s and New Age ’70s. The influential group opened Chapters in London, Europe and across the United States. Dressing in black cloaks, they created their own heavily-designed magazines and promoted a controversial, quasi-Gnostic theology that reconciled Christ and Satan through awareness and love.

Tonight, to celebrate the recent release of LOVE SEX FEAR DEATH, Feral House, Process Media, and Sound@One present a simulation of an actual Process Church “Sabbath Assembly” ritual. The Sabbath Assembly band, comprised of Kyle Forrester (Crystal Stilts), Jex Thoth (I Hate Records), Sophie Gonthier (Anything Maria), Anders Nilsson, and David Christian (of No-Neck Blues Band), will perform Process hymns and songs throughout the ritual.

Then it’s over to Neumo’s for Broadcast and Atlas Sound.  More info about this highly anticipated show at Mood Organ and The Stranger.

Unfortunately, I’ll be missing a few things, like the amazing show at the Rendezvous featuring Kawabata Makoto with members of Kinski, Thrones, Amber Asylum, ?alos, and Sugar Skulls. More info about that one here.  I’m also very sad to have to miss Degenerate Art Ensemble’s Sonic Tales at the Moore Theatre.  Hey DAE:  will you please consider more performances in the future?  Two is simply not enough!

Last but not least, don’t forget to save some energy for the Portable Shrines Dia de los Muertos show tomorrow featuring Blues Control, Little Claw, and Brother Raven.  See you there!

Matthew Offenbacher. Untitled. Oil, acrylic and distemper on stainguard cotton, 2009. 52 x 45 inches.

This week in The Stranger, Jen Graves reviewed Matthew Offenbacher’s C.A.T., installed at Howard House through October 31.  Like most reviewers of Offenbacher’s work, Graves makes generous mention of his numerous outside projects that make him one of the Seattle art community’s most ambitious organizers. (More on those activities here, here and here.)  But when it comes to his work, her verdict is slightly less charitable, at least on the surface:

There is something deeply embarrassing about Offenbacher’s paintings. They are embarrassed to be paintings—as if it were just an embarrassing thing to be a painting, so fancy and loaded and ambitious—and you are embarrassed to be looking at them, and in this way a connection is made.

Matthew Offenbacher. Untitled. Oil, acrylic and distemper on stainguard, 2009. 52 x 45 inches.

To be sure, Graves admits to being won over, if not by the peculiar charm of the paintings themselves, at least by their eccentric heroism:

Offenbacher pushes his paintings beyond all this into a sort of awkward, liberating confidence. To proudly present a large painting of your cat’s face upside down on fabric that rejects the paint itself—it is an act of freedom, of perverse strength.

Matthew Offenbacher. Untitled. Oil, acrylic and distemper on stainguard cotton, 2009. 52 x 45 inches.

I commented on her post that Matthew Offenbacher is probably my favorite painter in Seattle right now, for reasons I had not yet attempted to put into words.  But I am inspired to do so now in response to the charge of “embarrassing.”

I’m fairly sure I see the qualities Jen Graves reads as embarrassing.  Offenbacher’s canvases are awash with garish color combinations, rendered with an anachronistic expressiveness and a disarming sincerity, and garnished with a calculated whiff of naïveté.  But I wouldn’t say I’m embarrassed by them.  On the contrary:  I think I’m more likely to find myself “embarrassed” by artwork which lacks these qualities altogether.  (Like art that desperately wants to convince us of its “smartness” or “hipness,” for instance.)

Matthew Offenbacher. Untitled. Oil, acrylic and distemper on stainguard, 2009. 52 x 45 inches.

Offenbacher’s work is refreshingly free from all traces of pretense.  He has a cat that he likes, so he paints the cat.  He paints other things too.  These things are important, but not nearly as important as the voluminous, interpenetrating Space Between Things that gets rendered with all the exuberant, idiosyncratic delight of a psychologically tetched outsider.

Matthew Offenbacher. Untitled. Oil, acrylic and distemper on stainguard, 2009. 52 x 45 inches.

The resulting images are resoundingly charismatic; so confident in their freakishly egoless self-ness that they make us keenly aware of our own pretenses.  If Offenbacher’s paintings cause us any existential discomfort, perhaps it is because we know that we are nowhere near as much ourselves as they are.

Matthew Offenbacher. Untitled. Oil, acrylic and distemper on stainguard cotton, 2009. 52 x 45 inches.

Matthew Offenbacher’s C.A.T. is up through the end of the week at Howard House.  Thanks to Jen Graves for the inspiring food for thought, as always.

Midday Veil played a set at Deerborn House last Saturday night with Kelli Frances Corrado and Geist and the Sacred Ensemble.  Here’s a video of “Remember Child” from our performance, courtesy of Tiff Deerborn:

If you missed us, your next chance to see the band live is tomorrow night (Thursday, October 29) at the Josephine with Cursillistas and Paintings for Animals.  Dave Segal wrote a preview of tomorrow’s show in The Stranger:

Cursillistas—Matt Lajoie and Dawn Marna—trek from Portland, Maine, to play their stoned strain of ooze-on-down-the-road sigh-chedelia. As always with music of this stripe, some will find it tediously dawdling while others will revel in the liquid blissfulness of it all. Overall, though, Cursillistas conjure an eerie, rural vibe that will cause folks to freak—very gradually and naturally. Seattle’s Midday Veil have become one of the city’s most reliable sorcerers of slow-building psychedelia, with one fashionable boot in beauteous songcraft and a bare foot dangling in deep, krautward-bound jam space. I recently described Paintings for Animals’ music as “a weird party soundtrack at the microcosmic level or a score to your most mystical, baffling dreams.” I’m sticking with that story until further notice.

There is currently an exhibiton of Tim Roda’s photographs at Greg Kucera gallery.  Now based in New York City, Roda is one of my favorite artists in any medium ever to call Seattle home.

Tim Roda. Untitled # 141. Photograph, 2007. 25 x 36 in.

Since graduating with an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington in 2004, Roda has been building on a theme he began in grad school.  He poses himself and members of his family—most often his son Ethan—in elaborate tableaux of found objects and idosyncratically constructed sets.  The resulting images are gritty, psychologically-charged documents of ritualistic moments that seem to underscore a vaguely threatening tenuousness to the construction of familial bonds, simultaneously operating on a dreamlike, archetypal plane.

Tim Roda. Untitled #175. Photograph, 2009. 14-1/2 x 21 inches.

A recent Fulbright recipient to Italy, Roda’s most recent work employs costumes and props drawn from multiple points in history to create a series of single-frame family dramas within the evocative palimpsests of Rome.  The pairing is exceedingly appropriate:  Not only is Italy Roda’s paternal ancestral home, his images are to “family photos” what Italy’s centuries of layered ruins are to “architecture.”

Tim Roda. Untitled #178. Photograph, 2009. 14-1/2 x 21 inches.

Tim Roda. Untitled #163. Photograph, 2009. 25 x 36-1/2 in.

A couple weeks ago, Regina Hackett wrote a post about Tim Roda’s work on Another Bouncing Ball, comparing his approach to that of other artists who use their own children in their work, including fellow UW alum Zack Bent.  The comment thread immediately registered the discomfort of a couple of viewers—both female—who see Roda’s images as “coercive” and “exploitive.”

Tim Roda. Untitled #167. Photograph, 20098. 16 x 24 inches.

Tim Roda. Centaur. Photograph, 2009. 14-1/2 x 21 inches.

I remember thinking the same thing the first time I saw the artist give a slide talk back in grad school.  Except I saw the palpable presence of power inequalities in several of the scenarios as one of their many strengths; certainly not an ethical issue to get worked up about.  After all, any sense of coercion we may see reflected in Roda’s photographs is Disney fare compared to the ramshackle belief systems we impose on our children from the moment we deliver them, naked and screaming, into this recursively busted culture, no?

Tim Roda. Untitled #51. Photograph, 2005. 42 x 32 inches.

Although each individual photograph contains a world of information, the best way to let the full effect of Roda’s images seep into your subconscious is to see several at a time.  Add to that the fact that the photos themselves are physical objects—oversized, rugged things with visible printing flaws on thick fiber paper, sometimes pinned directly to the wall—and you have a strong argument for heading to Greg Kucera before the show comes down on November 14.

Tim Roda. Untitled #60. Photograph, 2005. 33 x 42 inches.

William Blake. Portrait of Newton. Pen and ink with watercolor, 1795.

I started this blog one year ago today.  In honor of this occasion, I did a little digging in my stats to see what I could find.  I discovered that of the 153 posts I’ve written, these have been the most popular:

1. The Golden Girls and the Great Goddess – Weighing in at over 4,128 views in the past 5 months and counting, the most popular post on Translinguistic Other is a semi-serious examination of pagan themes in the Golden Girls, revealing the enduring presence of the triple goddess of birth, love, and death in the personalities and relationships of the protagonists.

2. Eyes All Around.  What do Jan Van Eyck, Hildegard of Bingen, and theoretical physicist Garrett Lisi’s multidimensional model of the universe have in common?  The answer is the subject of my second most popular post of all time.

3. The next two posts, Vadge at the VAG, about the feminist art retrospective WACK!, and Let’s Talk about Sex: or, How I Became an Erotic Artist, about the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, seem to be popular because of search terms like “erotic art,” “sex,” and, yes, “vadge.”  I am extra proud of providing those vadge seekers with an eyeful of Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll.

4. Eternal But Not Immortal: Painting Under Attack at Seattle Art Museum.  Not surprising, considering the popularity of this blockbuster show.

5. Rounding out the top are a handful of posts relating to religion and spirituality: Richard Dawkins Proves Poem False contrasts the vituperative rhetoric of the so-called “New Atheists” with the brilliant humility of fellow scientist Chet Raymo, while High Fructose Corn Syrup for the Soul makes the case that certain fundamentalist Christians—in this case, a deacon from Seattle megachurch Mars Hill—are in the business of peddling a belief system that rivals Dawkins’s in its godlessness.  On the lighter side, Created in our Image examines the phenomenon of uniquely American representations of Christ.

Aside from “translinguistic other,” my most popular search terms have been “golden girls,” “william blake,”  ”bea arthur,” “dinosaur”  and “jesus.”  Yes, dinosaur.  Who knew?

Less popular in terms of overall clicks but important to me and my primary audience are the art reviews I’ve written about exhibitions by local artists whose work happens to align with my interests.  Of these, some of my favorites have been about Brendan Jansen and Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel at Crawl Space, Yann Novak at Lawrimore Project, Lauren Grossman at Howard House, Mandy Greer at Museum of Contemporary Craft, and Zack Bent at Gallery 4Culture.  Dramatically underrepresented, unfortunately, are reviews of exhibitions that occur outside my walking radius, a situation I do not see being remedied as long as I’m trying to do ten thousand things with my time.

So there you have it.  As I begin the second year of this humble, sporadically-maintained blog, I will keep in mind what you want from me and try to work Bea Arthur, William Blake, and dinosaurs into every other post.  Meanwhile, it’s up to all of you to make sure that interesting things continue to fall into my lap.  Thanks for reading!