Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.
A couple of months ago, Sluggo and I drove down to Washington D.C. for the big DADA show at the National Gallery. Even though it was scheduled to come to MOMA (and it’s there now), we figured it was easier to drive 500 miles roundtrip with a Boston Terrier and stay in a smelly, cheap tourist hotel than try to see art at a big MOMA show.
To get from New York to Washington, you have to drive through Maryland. They should have put a rest stop on their state quarter, because they definitely have the best highway rest stops anywhere, all clean and fancy. My favorite thing is the Maryland rest stop penny machines. I love penny machines: They’re so low-tech, and so satisfying. You put in a penny—and also two quarters—and turn a big crank, and the machine keeps your fifty cents but it gives you back your penny, all squashed with a design pressed into it. The designs are usually the state bird, or the state capital building, or something like that. But at Maryland rest stops you can get the FRANK ZAPPA PENNY.
Here it is. I guess Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore. I didn’t know that. The only famous person I ever knew of from Baltimore was John Waters. Someday I will get a squashed John Waters penny, and my life will be complete.
It was on this trip that I found another reason to hate the Patriot Act. The day before we left for Washington I came down with the worst sore throat and bad headcold that I’ve had in years. I was chugging Airborne, sucking on Cold-Ease drops, and gulping down Dayquil and Nyquill the whole way. Okay, here’s the thing about that: Because the rest of the country is addicted to crystal meth, the latest version of the Patriot Act, signed by George W. this past March, included a section called the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 that restricts the sale of over-the-counter products that contain pseudoephedrine. I guess it’s a good idea. (I saw a TV show about how cutting the supply of pseudoephedrine directly correlates with a reduction in the rate of meth addiction, and I wish I could give you a link to it but I forget what it was called.)
Anyway, since this federal law went into effect, the big drug companies
have the option of either putting their products behind the counter or
changing the formulas. I guess Dayquil and Nyquil changed their
formulas, ’cause you can still buy them right off the shelves but they
don’t work worth a darn. Once you give up on the natural stuff and go
to icky pharmaceuticals, you expect them at least to make you feel
better, but Dayquil and Nyquil are both useless now. I spent the whole
trip sniffling and coughing and feeling like crap, and I blame the
Patriot Act. I can’t get a cold medicine that works, but congressmen
like Patrick Kennedy can get any drug they want.
Here’s another thing the federal government has done that I didn’t know about before: They made a deal with the cable TV network Showtime to give them the rights to all the documentary film archives in the Smithsonian. No kidding. If an independent filmmaker wants to use material from the archives that used to belong to the citizens of this country, they have to be working for the Showtime on Demand digital cable channel that only twelve people will ever see. The Washington Post article about this deal quotes some person whose title is “vice president for media services at Smithsonian Business Ventures.” IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A BUSINESS VENTURE, IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A NATIONAL ARCHIVE. The government has sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.
By the time we got to D.C., not even the Chinese-American Waffle House
could cheer me up very much. That’s when I knew I was really sick. But
the Dada show turned out to be totally worth the trip. We wandered into
the National Gallery on Sunday afternoon just in time to hear a long
selection from Ballet Mechanique played on reconstructions of the
original instruments. There were plenty of other audio moments in the
show, too: Most of the galleries had smaller anterooms featuring
recordings of sound poetry, as well as Dada films and documentaries of
Dada performance pieces. Instead of being strictly chronological, the
show was organized by cities—Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Köln, New York,
Paris—to trace the growth and development of the Dada movement. This
allowed one to see that everything was pretty much Kurt Schwitters’
fault. The biggest revelation, for me, was the work of Sophie Taeuber.
We especially loved her marionettes, of course, but her Dada
needlepoint work was SO far ahead of its time, and you could really see
how much she influenced Hans Arp, and how that influence spread out
over time to others. It’s a great show.
Seeing the Dada exhibit in the National Gallery really was much more
pleasant than seeing a show at MOMA. We were at a big, blockbuster show
on a Sunday afternoon during the last couple of weeks, and just walked
right in—there was no line at all. (And admission is free, versus $20
apiece at MOMA.) The galleries were busyish, but not jammed with those
lock-step “audio tour” people, so you could actually see the art, and
go back a couple of galleries if you wanted to look at something again.
We spent hours and hours looking at art, watching the films, and
discussing what we saw, instead of spending hours and hours standing in
a line outside, waiting to get in. I’m sorry you don’t have that
option, but I still think you should see this exhibit, because you’ll
probably never have the chance to see anything like it again. It’s at
MOMA through September 11.
Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.
In fairness to the Feds, it was the Smithsonian big whigs who sold that right of first refusal to Showtime. And Congress is Very Pissed Off about it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/10/AR2006051002415_pf.html
Posted by: Joe | July 24, 2006 at 06:40 PM
oh..lord. i just got a nasty cold yesterday and i've been slugging nyquil down like it's soda all day. i thought my cold had just gotten so bad overnight that nyquil just couldn't handle all my soreness and misery. but there it s on the label. no. fucking. pseudophederine!!! it seems like they could have made a more reasonable law to combat the spread of meth in the patriot act, just off he top of my head maybe limit the amount of bottles of nyquil one person can buy instead of making it completely ineffective. if somebody with a meth lab has got to go to a mllion different drug stores to collect 2 bottles of nyquil from each, that seems like it'd be effective.
this really cheeses me off. i don't even have a health plan anymore, so i can't harass my doctor to give me some prescription cold aids without spending a ton of money. and the popularity of meth is just an enigma to me! other than being cheap, it's got nothing going for it. people would probably end up in better health if they decided to become heroin addicts. uggggh patriot act. uggggh ignorant hicks loving meth.
Posted by: marge | July 25, 2006 at 04:02 AM
In my town at the local CVS, they had a procedure for recording purchases of cold meds with pseudoephedrine. You had to show a picure ID to the clerk who then logged your name, address and telephone number into a book. The amount of the nefarious compound that you purchased was printed out on the receipt as well. The poorly trained clerk eyed you as if you were guilty of being the head of a Colombian drug cartel when all you wanted was relief from nasal stuffiness. Aieeee. Suffice it to say that I don't purchase Nyquil at CVS any longer.
BTW-That's one cool Zappa penny.
Posted by: Krys O. | July 25, 2006 at 08:14 AM
Ha! We were in DC around the same time (got to see the last 2 performances of the entirely-robot-performed Ballet Mechanique excerpt, which was one of the truly great experiences of my life) and if you were there anywhere near the same time we were there, then one big reason why the Dada exhibit wasn't cram-packed might've been that every-fucking-body was across the street at the "old" Nat'l Gallery building, lined up down the hall & around the block for the big Cezanne show. Still didn't cost $20, though, so that's something . . .
Posted by: grady | July 25, 2006 at 09:36 AM
I'm almost positive that TV show you referred to was an episode of PBS's "Frontline":
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/
Posted by: Richard | July 25, 2006 at 01:22 PM
So what do you get when you buy a bottle of Sudafed nowawdays, placebos?
Posted by: Snarfyguy | July 25, 2006 at 03:25 PM
Q: So what do you get when you buy a bottle of Sudafed nowawdays, placebos?
A: Paranoid.
Posted by: Krys O. | July 25, 2006 at 03:54 PM
Yes thank god for that brilliant piece of legislation being passed. Now all the meth cooks will just get their ephedrine directly from Mexican druglords. Or better yet - our country will become flooded with tons of new high-potency Ice from huge commercial meth labs operating in Mexico.
Oh wait - that's already happening. Apparently Atlanta has been consumed with this Mexican ice crap over the past couple years, and something like 85% of their prison population is in there due to meth-related crime. And alot of the drug dealers who used to sell crack, now offer crystal meth in the hood. Not a good scene!
Posted by: anonymeth | July 26, 2006 at 12:06 PM
[url]http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/etc/updmexico.html[/url]
[url]http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2006/02/13/story6.html[/url]
Posted by: methanonymou | July 26, 2006 at 12:45 PM