Romney campaign has monopoly on gaffes

It is typical of Mitt Romney's luck that, on the morning after he all but secured the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign became embroiled in a controversy over a 1950s plastic toy.

On Wednesday, hours after Romney's 12-point victory over Rick Santorum in the Illinois primary silenced most of the remaining doubters, senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom went on CNN and gave new meaning to the term "game change."
   
"I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign," he said, explaining why the fight for conservative primary voters has not pushed Romney too far to the right. "Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again."
   
Actually, it appeared more like Romney was playing Chutes and Ladders: He just landed on Space 87 and slid all the way back to 24. Suddenly, Romney's event at an American Legion hall here in the Baltimore suburbs was transformed from a gab session about gas prices into an Etch a Sketch fest.
   
Alice Stewart, a Santorum aide, brought a bagful of pocket-size Etch a Sketches and handed them out in the parking lot. "Conservative principles should be written in stone, not on Etch a Sketch," the Santorum aide declared righteously.
   
Thirty feet away, Romney was shaking hands. Reporters inquired: Would he address the toy story? "We think gas prices are more important," spokesman Rick Gorka replied, examining the reporters' Etch a Sketches.
   
Santorum, who has taken Romney apart as if playing Operation, posed in his car Wednesday with the rectangular device. His campaign tweeted out the photo with the caption "Rick Santorum studying up on Mitt Romney policy positions."

"You take whatever he said and you can shake it up and it will be gone, and he's going to draw a whole new picture for the general election," Santorum crowed at a campaign stop in Louisiana.
   
Also campaigning in Louisiana, Newt Gingrich, who has turned the trail into a round of Twister, gave an Etch a Sketch to a young girl in the audience and told her, "You could now be a presidential candidate."
   
Will Romney ever end his string of debilitating gaffes? As the Magic 8 Ball says: Outlook not so good.
   
After the New Hampshire primary, Romney appeared to have it made in Candy Land. But Santorum and Gingrich felled his inevitability like dominoes, and — Sorry! — Romney finds himself in a coast-to-coast game of Connect Four with competitors who were not supposed to have been in his league but who are benefiting from voters' disenchantment with him.
   
There is some enthusiasm for the Republican front-runner. Outside the Romney event here, retiree Jim Wilson sat in his GMC truck decorated bumper to bumper with Romney paraphernalia and American flags. Wilson, who lives outside Charlottesville, Va., has been on the road since August, to each primary state except Colorado — and that's only because he wanted to make it to Kansas in time. "That's a bunch of horse apples," he said when asked about Romney's enthusiasm gap. "Look at this crowd," he said, between puffs on his pipe.
   
True enough. Two hundred supporters filled the hall, with at least that many outside. "This is really something," the candidate exulted to the overflow crowd in the parking lot.
   
But holding that enthusiasm has been, for Romney, quite a Rubik's Cube. Inside, the candidate talked about health care, education, Iran, the economy — anything but children's toys.
   
Although it was not particularly warm in the hall, Romney ended by saying that the temperature had "reached 140 in here" — and retreated while glaring at reporters shouting Etch a Sketch questions.
   
Realizing that he could not shake the queries, Romney returned a few minutes later for a "short Q&A," known in the jargon as a "press avail." It lasted 90 seconds.
   
"The issues I'm running on will be exactly the same," he declared in response to an Etch a Sketch question. "I'm running as a conservative Republican. I was a conservative Republican governor."
   
So he was a conservative when he enacted Romneycare?
   
"Can you guarantee to Republican voters that you won't take more moderate positions?" CNN's Jim Acosta asked.
   
"I answered the question," Romney replied.
   
"An avail is more than one question, governor, if you don't mind my saying so," Acosta told him.
   
Romney grinned. "This wasn't an avail. It was a chance to respond to a question I didn't get a chance to respond to."

Gilbert and George open dark new show in Hong Kong

British artists Gilbert and George have never shied away from looking the brutal truths of life directly in the eye, and their latest collection, which debuted in Hong Kong this week, is no different.

"London Pictures" is a disturbing examination of sex, violence, power and death through the medium of Britain's tabloid billboards, collected over six years from newsstands near the artists' home in East London.

From the shocking ("Suicide Gang's Terror War on Britain") to the banal ("Cat Is Killed in Park Dog Attack") and the bizarre ("Big Bummed Burglar Banged Up"), the headlines are a morbid narrative on society's grim obsessions.

But the artists — Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore — are the first to defend the tabloids from calls for greater regulation in light of the hacking scandal that has gripped the News of the World and the Sun, despite saying they were bugged themselves.

"It seems very, very difficult. Regulation is going to interfere with a lot of freedoms if we're not careful," George told AFP in an interview at the new White Cube gallery in Hong Kong, surrounded by panels of tabloid headlines laid over photographic images of the artists themselves.

"As least rules as possible is the best, we think. We don't need ideas. Writers and artists and poets and musicians have the ideas. Governments shouldn't have brainwaves for us."

Both artists agree that until the scandal over Milly Dowler, a young murder victim whose voicemail was allegedly hacked by the media, no one would have been shocked to hear that journalists eavesdropped on private conversations.

"We never thought there was anything wrong with that," Gilbert says, wearing the tweed suit and tie that have become the artists' trademark.

"They were always trying to snoop on us for many, many years but in some way we accepted that, and we still accept that. I think it's a kind of freedom that has to be there... We were bugged, we know that."

Dowler's name appears in "London Pictures," but hers is just one of the countless personal tragedies the work forces the viewer to confront.

"It's a very simple poster just for one day, but it's a nightmare of everlasting consequences for the people (behind the headlines) and the people around them," George explains.

He says the artists "began to feel almost ill" as they assembled more than 3,700 billboard posters into groups according to their often gruesome subjects — murder, rape, suicide, money, killing, knife and so on.

"It made us think, is this the world we live in? How responsible are we? We began to think, is this the price of freedom, is this the price of democracy?" he says.

Gilbert points out the artists' ghost-like presence in the pictures. They became "very involved" in spiritualism during the creative process after watching a movie about Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the hero of the Battle of Britain who claimed to communicate with the ghosts of dead airmen.

"In some strange way we still think that we are in conversation with Dickens, or we are still in some way in touch with Shakespeare, and we would like the figures in these pictures to be like that," George says.

Gilbert and George met at art school in London in the late 1960s and have been inseparable ever since. They still live in East London, never go out to the theatre or the movies, do not have a kitchen at home and only entertain at restaurants.

Their profanity-laced early works were designed to shock and confuse establishment critics, but now the pair sit comfortably in the pantheon of modern British art, a reflection, they say, of how times have changed.

Even so, the "illustrious British duo," to borrow from White Cube's promotional blurb, insist their work remains as subversive as ever despite their new insider status.

They chuckle at the likely reaction of some critics to the image of Queen Elizabeth that appears in all 292 pieces of the collection, which eventually will be exhibited in major galleries around the world.

"I think we are still outsiders enough. As a friend said when he first saw these pictures and the queen in the corner: 'There goes your knighthood'," laughs George.

The tabloid headlines needed "something to preside over them," he says. At first the artists considered a policeman in a helmet, but then they seized on images of the queen's head taken from various coins.

Enlarged in panel-sized clarity, complete with the nicks and cuts of everyday use, the coin heads lend the monarch a Dorian Gray-like quality, as if, the artists say, she is ravaged by her reign over the mayhem they depict.

Around Allen, June 16-21

The Allen Public Library will screen "The Pursuit of Happyness," starring Will Smith, from 2 to 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 16, in the library auditorium.

In this inspirational true story, Chris Gardner follows his dream to make a better life for himself and his 5-year-old. This film is free for teens ages 13-18 and is rated PG-13.

The Allen Public Library is at 300 N. Allen Drive.


beTween at the Allen Public Library

The Allen Public Library will host beTween, a program for tweens ages 8-11, from 3 to 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 16, in the children's program room. Attendees will learn new skills and hang out with other tweens at this weekly program. Crafts, trivia and robotics will be among the featured activities.

The Read to Rover program will return to the Allen Public Library from 10:30 to 11:45 a.m. on Saturday, June 18, in the children's program room. Readers in kindergarten through sixth grade are encouraged to grab their favorite book and buddy up with a Heart of Texas therapy dog to share a story.

Sign-up starts at 10:15 a.m. There will be no pre-registration for this event. The Allen Public Library is at 300 N. Allen Drive.

The Allen Public Library invites teens ages 12-18 to watch "Despicable Me," rated PG, and enjoy an afternoon of crafts from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 18. This week's craft will be the Rubik's Cube.

This program is free. The Allen Public Library is at 300 N. Allen Drive.


Lucky Duck Kids Club June event announced

The Lucky Duck Kids Club, a free family-friendly activity series at Watters Creek, returns from 4 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 18. Enjoy hands-on activities specially designed for children ages 3 to 12 years old.

In celebration of Father's Day, little ones will color a baseball cap and give Dad a personalized gift he's sure to remember. The fun continues with face painting, hayrides, a visit from Boocoos the Clown, a balloon artist and free Paciugo gelato. Activities take place in the breezeway across from The Green from 4 to 6 p.m., with hayrides continuing until 7 p.m.

Notional Significance: Disinterment

The entry to Bolton St cemetery is unremarkable: a gap in a white fence off a respectable street, a canopy of pines, plain crosses against a corrugated iron fence. But I know that I’m passing into a territory that would have the earth-magic wing of the psychogeographical movement panting with occult excitement. Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd would have a field day with the plethora of obelisks, resonant names and eroded inscriptions, but wouldn’t that be the case with any cemetery? It’s like shooting mystical fish in a semiotic barrel. Nevertheless, certain monuments catch my attention, so I decide to play along.

Broken Pillar

There’s a broken marble column near the entrance, and at first I file this away as a symptom of vandalism or neglect, but a closer examination of the carving shows the break to be too clean. A shattered pillar seems like an obvious signifier (a life cut short; the futility and imperfection of human endeavour; all that Ozymandian sort of thing), but a little research unearths other connections. The Broken Column is an important symbol in Freemasonry, though perhaps a relatively recent one. What’s more, it seems that some Masons map the Three Great Pillars of Masonry to the Kabbalistic Sephiroth, and when the central column of Beauty is broken, it represents Man’s separation from divine knowledge: the severed pathway between Beauty and the Infinite. But in this place it was the act of building a pathway that caused a severance, tearing the cemetery in two when the motorway smashed its way through. Beauty and the Divine were certainly not on the Ministry of Works’ agenda.

As the path winds down into a severed gully, past other broken columns, I remember back to one of my first walks in Wellington, what seems like many decades ago. It was a gloomy, misty Sunday, with low cloud whipping through the treetops and fine rain drifting down through the dark foliage. The graves seemed shattered, lonely and abandoned, overgrown by indifferent vegetation, and my (shamefully Eurocentric) imagination turned this into a science fiction movie: a doomed colony on an alien world, the last remaining settlers burying their dwindling colleagues as the host planet erased their hubristic attempts at replicating home. Even today, in the brightness of late summer, the drooping aerial pohutukawa roots can seem monstrous, and by the time that I realise that they are also invaders here, I know it’s time to move on before my allegories tangle themselves into total incoherence.

But first, I come across a grave that even I can see is explicitly Masonic. The compass and set-square make that clear, even if I had to go back and look up the capital G (for God and Geometry, and perhaps for Gnosis), the stone ashlar, the tessellated pavement and the uneven columns topped with terrestrial and celestial globes. This lavish memorial to Captain Henry Tucker was erected by Captain Edwin Stafford, who later completed their pact by joining him in the grave. Such dedication would seem unusual today without a more intimate connection, and I wonder whether a different interpretation could be put upon the two upstanding columns than the Boaz and Jachin of Masonic lore. But it would be prurient and pointless to speculate about what the Herald called “the fine feelings, and the rare sentiment” between these two men. The pillars have been toppled in the past by falling trees and ‘60s yobbos (“because there’s nothing else to do in Wellington on a Sunday”), but they escaped the bulldozers. Their friendship can stand on its own terms.

Masonic Pillars

Other monuments were not so lucky. Mass graves are not something one expects in New Zealand — they seem to belong to another world, a world of pogroms and plague pits — but the remains of 3,693 people are crammed into a “memorial vault” on the other side of the highway, their original tombstones scattered through the remainder of the cemetery. Time is a commodity that we can only value when it’s in our grasp: we’ll willingly mangle or erase the past to save a few seconds in the present, all the while burning through the resources of the future. Whole books could be written on the saga of the Foothill Motorway, but for the moment I’ll just mention that in 1965 a Councillor Morrison was reported as saying that “although some other transport system might be technically preferable the important consideration was that the National Roads Board had the money and was prepared to spend it.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

But the catastrophic changes wrought by the motorway construction were not the only reason why Margaret H. Alington called her history of the cemetery Unquiet Earth. From the start, this burial ground was fraught with contention, chaos and perturbation. Even before the land was granted, the plans were beset by sectarian squabbles and high moral dudgeon, and the land was frequently assaulted by encroachments, road-building and park construction as well as the natural hazards of fire, wind and landslides. Exhumation is nothing new, since overcrowding often resulted in the accidental unearthing of unmarked remains when new graves were being dug. It was alleged that some of these were quietly and unceremoniously dumped, and in one disturbing instance a child’s coffin lay in the adjacent stream for years. On many occasions the Inspector of Nuisances was called in to investigate “putrefactive fermentation”, “human corruption” and “foul miasmata”, and the sextons often had to battle vandalism, rubbish dumping from opportunistic neighbours and the nocturnal occurrence of what were decorously described as “improprieties”. Some of those activities may still be popular, if the infamous Wellingtonista “Spot the Dog” post is anything to go by, and perhaps the incongruous amphitheatre that overlooks the mass grave sometimes attracts an audience keen on improvised erotic theatre. Today, the only action is a pair of conservatively-dressed men practicing Tai Chi moves, their graceful movements tracing slow arcs above the restless resting place of thousands.