Recent posts there that might have been here, or at least a couple in that category that come to mind, are:

• A write-up, with some decent pictures, of a hurried tour of Frank Gehry's Stata Center on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. As you know, I love Disney Concert Hall, where the LA Philharmonic plays. So if you liked my pieces here about Disney Concert Hall, you may want to check out the wac6.com post about Stata Center.
• A reflection on a large public sculpture at the San Jose airport.

I'm still here! I'm just over there!

It's mysterious to me how he does this technically and how he clears copyright. Perhaps because the images captured are of public figures - Anderson Cooper, David Gergen, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, to name a few - statutory and common law rights of personality do not apply? –

In any case, each feed seems to loop longer than any typical break for commercials. And you get to see how each personality passes the time. Chris Matthews stares into the camera as though he were facing himself down in a mirror. Larry King presses his chin into his upturned fist, just as he does when listening to his guests. Then-Senator Obama languidly flips the pages of what looks like USA Today.

I find the "before and after" moments on C-SPAN to yield more insight on the political character, but these silent passages of Harry Shearer's curation - if you give them the same attention you would lend the pictured celebrities when they are talking on the air - do throw into relief how driven these people are. I imagine the average person would look restless and guilty, like she had better uses of her time.

To see things as they are not meant to be presented, that is a gift and that is an essence of art.

So it is fitting that you may see a collection of the Harry Shearer videos, running simultaneously, now at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. The show is called "Silent Echo Chamber."

This post is republished from William Carleton, Counselor at Law.

Sounds like the show will be in Seattle this Friday, Tacoma on Saturday, and then Puyallup on Sunday. Details here.

Sounds like Scott is moving, too; will have to get to the bottom of that.

 Lawrimore Project • 831 Airport Way S • Seattle, WA 98134

A well organized group has proposed a Chihuly museum. Everyone seems to agree, or assume, that this proposal will be wholly funded by the Wright family and won't cost taxpayers anything. It's also stipulated by just about everyone, it seems, that the Chihuly proposal will be the best, economically, for Seattle.

But many feel the Chihuly folks have claim jumped. They don't like how smoothly the Chihuly group showed up with a packaged deal, and want more civic process around the decision of what will fill the available space. Seattle Center is not private property; it is owned and operated by the City of Seattle.

The controversy has moved political forces to slow the process down. Input is being sought; those with alternatives to propose have been asked to come forward. KEXP, an independent radio station with a large online following, looks to be the leading challenger to Chihuly.

Art critic Regina Hackett's latest post about the controversy is the most intelligent and persuasive piece I've read on the affair. She says that "on Dale Chihuly's tide, other boats can rise."

A public hearing took place Wednesday evening at Seattle Center, and I went. A friend went up to the mike and offered his own thoughts on what should be done. He and most of the persons who spoke were civic and polite. But a few who oppose the Chihuly idea were smug. One fellow said he supported a Chihuly museum "in the Northgate Mall," implying that Chihuly's work is tacky for being commercially successful.

I know no good deed goes unpunished and that a prophet has no honor in his own country, among his own kin, and in his own house. But wouldn't it be refreshing if Seattle's government had enough sense to ride out the resentments of the bewildered, went ahead and claimed the brass glass ring?

First impressions of the new show: 

• There's an older person's sensibility at work here, at odds with Layman's youth. An older sensibility, but contemporary, not belated.
• The photos are now actually paintings, in spite of being photographs, or layers of images, or digital renderings (I'm not sure which). The fact that a camera is involved merely means these paintings are rendered without paint. 
• What results is a kind of reductionism: the surfaces of the canvas have no texture. The photographic-like smoothness of each surface rhymes, too, with the consequences of the portraitist's choice to give the subjects time to prepare for the shoot: the oven has removed its racks, the cupboard has ordered its dishes, the doors have walked out of the frame and have taken their hinges with them.
• The scale of the Otter Pop paintings means you have no choice but to relate them to color field paintings from the last century. But Layman's have so much more narrative resonance than those paintings ever could.

Well, anyway, I saw the Rat City Rollergirls at Key Arena last night. It was quite an entertaining show, with roller derby matches, drum and air guitar performances, interviews from the stands, decent stadium food, cheerleaders in drag, and one or two things I can't begin to explain.

One of these things I can't explain is the ritual pictured above, performed by the members of Grave Danger, one of the four roller derby teams.

When the cloaked and daggered ritualists set off, they left behind what the emcee described as a "gigantic, bleeding cupcake."

But there is a point of view, and it is to catch what's publicly catchable, including those bits that everyone on camera knows will be edited out, or not even shot, by the other news organizations in tow. It's not that C-SPAN is showing you private conversation -- no, the public figures remain at all times aware that they are in public. But C-SPAN often catches them in a slightly less guarded "beltway" public space, something other than the national stage, if that makes sense.

Here's a bit edited together from three photo ops that the President's nominee for the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, gave with, respectively, Senators Specter, Schumer and Brown. In a quick 15 minutes, you glean:

• Sen. Specter really, really likes being a senator;
• Sen. Schumer is all about New York (you can imagine Sen. Specter switching policy, party or state, anything to be there; not so Sen. Schumer);
• Sen. Brown is intensely handled, although that may be self-imposed (notice who closes the door on the cameras).

Solicitor General Kagan is impossible to read. Which is what a lot of people are saying about her now.

The video below taken last evening around 7 pm.