From the Washington Post:
The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks.

Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

December 16, 2010. The above is taken from the Vimeo page of PPOW Gallery and from the archives of NYU's Fales Library. It represents two segments, of approximately 13 and 7 minutes, that David Wojnarowicz shot and edited on Super 8 in 1986-87, which he entitled "A Fire In My Belly". It is NOT the four minute piece that was yanked from the National Portrait Gallery show on December 1. It is also NOT the video I posted earlier on this blog, with its Diamanda Galas banshee wail/dirge of "Unclean". Nor the segment I have seen with an overlaid soundtrack of a 1980s ACT UP demonstration. Wojnarowicz shot and presented his original footage without sound, a suggestion of the urgency and severity of the political climate that led to the mantra of "Silence = Death".

It is two weeks since the "silencing" of "A Fire In My Belly", and as we near Sunday's rally on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, it's clear that the culture wars are by no means over. This is hardly news to anyone following the hurtful antics of the Tea Party. Ever more empowered by their victories in the midterm election, the same purveyors of fear and purposeful obfuscation who demonized Obama for the past two years are trying to legislate and coerce the cultural landscape, to make art conform to their hypocritical and faux Christian yardstick. The fact that their cynical misunderstanding and bad intentions AGAIN fall directly on Wojnarowicz's shoulders is testimony to the enduring raw, elemental, and confrontational power of his art. Although the forces of reaction and censorship will always find something to belittle and attempt to repress, we almost have to thank them for forcing the issue and focusing attention on work that especially needs to be discussed and re-evaluated right now, as an antidote to right wing resurgence.

New Yorkers who want to protest the censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s video at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. get their chance on December 19. Organizers have called a march, gathering at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and concluding at the Cooper-Hewitt on 91st Street (like the National Portrait Gallery, the C-H is a Smithsonian Institution).

Protest Sunday, December 19 at 1:00 PM in New York City and take collective action for free expression.

GATHER on the Metropolitan Museum steps Fifth Ave. & 82nd Street

Then MARCH to the Cooper-Hewitt/Smithsonian FIFTH Ave. & 91st Street

The presumptive Republican Speaker of the House, orange-faced crybaby John Boehner, currently bathing in a post-electoral glow, is taking a retrograde Conservative stand against freedom of expression, calling for censorship of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, an exhibition of "gay art" at the National Portrait Gallery, and threatening a curtailment of government funds if they do not bow to his will. The NPG has cravenly caved in and removed David Wojnarowicz's 1987 video, "A Fire in My Belly", from the exhibition.

We have undertaken the necessary corrective of posting it above.

Saturday, November 27, 2010. Landing in Miami a few days before the wall-to-wall insanity commenced, I had a chance to take the temperature of the town, to selectively buzz through various Wynwood galleries and project spaces, to survey the tents of Art Miami, -Scope et. al. on Midtown Boulevard, to watch the graffiti boys throw up a mural on the side of a garage, to hook up both with the local scene and with other recent arrivals lured by the heady promise of Art Basel week.

In other words, I felt commendably and reassuringly early. That is, until Jill Clark, an art adviser from New York now relocated to South Beach, informed me that Basel-themed parties generally start in the middle of November, two full weeks before my arrival. Faced with the looming, inevitable immanence of the Great Influx and its concomitant doses of frenzy and glamor, many art dealers, club owners, party promoters, real estate speculators, fashion doyennes and benefit committees cannot resist the obvious marketing ploy. They resolutely hang their efforts on that familiar ABMB shingle, hoping to define their event as some sort of preamble

From Gawker comes word of a scurrilous but unintentionally hilarious volume called The Liberal Clause, which employs the typical rightist wing-nut agenda of conflating Obama with Stalin, Mao and Rev. Wright, questions his place of birth, shows him using a teleprompter and bowing - to the Chinese, not the Saudis. It attempts a satirical Animal Farm-type approach with a gimlet-eyed Nancy Pelosi, a snarling Harry Reid, evil trade unionists, truculent elf-commissars and other flatfooted narrative devices in a cautionary tale of ConservaChristmas almost lost.

I might decry this book as a sinister attempt to pollute young minds with hateful, partisan indoctrination. But considering the mental capacity of many adult Tea Party brownshirts, as revealed in their hand lettered signs and corresponding sloganeering, it is apparently intended as a Christmas story appealing to Tea Partiers of all ages.

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