The NYC police and firefighters don’t have to worry about barricades, or someone telling them when and where they are allowed to protest.

From today’s New York Times:

And in recent weeks, the mayor has been drawn into another protest battle, with firefighters and police officers who have trailed him at his public events, holding loud and sometimes raucous demonstrations. Last week, they even gathered outside his home at 1 a.m., clearly violating the city’s noise code by yelling loudly and at length.

During at least two other protests, police officers and firefighters moved freely without barricades, at times blocking traffic in the street. A group of police officers and firefighters also swarmed the mayor outside a community meeting, forcing his detail to hustle him into his S.U.V., which was momentarily blocked before it pulled out.

No firefighters or police officers were arrested at any of these events. By contrast, during that same time, four women were arrested after trying to hang an antiwar banner from a hotel window in Midtown, and four other protesters who erected a tent near the south end of Central Park to protest Bush administration economic policies were arrested and detained for hours. The Police Department said that police officers and firefighters had not been given any special treatment.

The city has been signaling that it will deal with convention protesters forcefully, permit or no permit.

… from today’s trip to the gym. An occasional series.

It’s listed under the “fashion” baseball caps on their site.

Via one of my newest daily reads, ionarts, I just learned of a new collaborative art and culture blog called ArtsBlogging. One of the contributors is the harpist Helen Radice. I nearly spit my coffee out onto my computer when I read this on her personal weblog:

… I would like to read a good book about Wagner and the Third Reich.

Could anybody recommend one? There are so many I am rather at a loss, although the one entitled Penetrating Wagner’s Ring made me laugh so hard I had to leave Borders.

I have written before about Conrad Cummings on bloggy. Now is your chance to see his brilliant political opera Photo-Op, with a libretto by James Siena.

Monday, August 30, 2004 – shows at 6:30pm and 8:30pm
Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY.
Tickets available at the door; $15 with a one drink minimum.
$5 discount for anyone who presents convention floor credentials!

You can listen to samples on Avian Music’s web site.

Amazon has the CD.

I’m not kidding. That’s actually the headline on the article on the official NYC visitors site.

This comes one day after Bloomberg tells us that free speech is a privilege, not a right.

“People who avail themselves of the opportunity to express themselves … they will not abuse that privilege,” he said at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Because if we start to abuse our privileges, then we lose them, and nobody wants that.”

Todd Gibson (From the Floor) visited the Spiral Jetty recently. Here is the first post about it. Not only is it not submerged, it’s currently land-locked!

We saw some great museum shows while in LA. I really enjoyed the fact that we could see interesting modern and contemporary work in the museums, as the NYC ones haven’t been great about that lately with the exception of the Whitney.

I already mentioned the (now closed) minimalism show at MOCA, which was brilliant. Other shows we saw of note:

Made in Mexico, Rob Voerman, and Tara Donovan at the UCLA Hammer. I especially liked the work by Anton Vidokle and Andrea Fraser’s video. It’s one of my favorite works by her that I’ve seen.

Beyond Geometry at LACMA. I agree with Tyler Green that the premise is a bit baffling, but I loved the show. We didn’t make it to the show on race and 18th century colonial Mexican painting, but we wanted to. LACMA is free after 5PM all summer so you get a cooler mix of people at the shows than a museum might normally have. I like the open terraces between the buildings there.

If you like Tara Donovan’s work, you should also check out Sharon Louden. See here and here.

… and encounters the Pakistani ambassador.

We had lunch here yesterday, on the old Route 66. It was the last day for these owners (after 30 years), having sold the place. We got some (actually rather tasteful) Route 66 t-shirts for $10 each, and she threw in some Peek’s trucker hats. Be very afraid…

More photos.

The hotel only has dial-up in the rooms, so posting won’t happen too often, or be very link-ish.

On Saturday we went to some of the Chung King galleries. Highlights:

Brad Borevitz’s video titled PornoCopia: 10 Machines for Fucking Your Eyes Out and 1 Romantic Interlude, which uses wacky image manipulation, like screens which break into geometric “shards” with the original source material being hard-core gay porn. Good soundtrack too of various mixed music. At 4-F gallery.

Terence Koh at Peres Projects. You may know of his previous “incarnation”, asianpunkboy.

Rosson Crow, Andrew Guenther, and LoVid at The Happy Lion.

We also went to the minimalism show at MOCA, which was very good. We spent so much time there we didn’t make it to sixspace, but we did have drinks with Caryn, Sean, and their friend Mike later at the beautiful Millenium Biltmore.

After drinks we had dinner at The Standard Downtown‘s “coffee shop.” I was surprised by how great the food was, given the over-the-top scene. They have a Calder mobile and a Jenny Holzer scrolling LED text piece in the lobby, along with a pool table and plenty of bouncers. Our waitress was like Suzanne Sommers’s character on Three’s Company, but maybe 10-15 years later. We loved her. At one point, when she started to pour more wine for us, we told her, “That’s OK. We’ll pour it.” Usually, people are offended when we do that. This time, the response was, “Thank you! I appreciate that!”

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Updated: Oops, left off one great show: Tapestry From An Asteroid at David Kordansky, with some of the artists we know from NYC galleries like Foxy Production, Daniel Reich, and John Connelly Presents. I especially liked the sculpture by Sterling Ruby.