I hate Mark Rothko.

A few years ago, I was visiting the Tate Modern in London, a beautiful museum housed in a decommissioned 19th-century power station that thrusts into the sky like the Tower of Mordor. The effect was stark on that winter evening, and I felt a little overawed, but the weather was so blustery that I would’ve been happy to duck inside even if I hadn’t wanted to look at the art.

I soon discovered that the museum has a “Rothko Room,” meant to let the viewer appreciate the artist’s work in a setting close to the one he would’ve wanted. From the Tate website:

In the late 1950s, Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the fashionable Four Seasons restaurant, in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York. […] However, the murals were darker in mood than his previous work. The bright and intense colours [sic – Britain] of his earlier paintings shifted to maroon, dark red and black. […] Recognising [sic – more Britain] that the worldly setting of a restaurant would not be the ideal location for such a work, Rothko withdrew from the commission. […] This installation includes all nine of the paintings owned by Tate. Perceived, as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character.

Continue reading →

Too deep in the morass of news ranging from bad to awful to make the cut, there was a stabbing at an AutoZone in Columbus, Georgia. Had it been at a protest or riot in Portland or Kenosha, it might be the subject of infinite discussion on social media, but it was off the map and few noticed it. But it’s worthy of notice.

Columbus Police are looking for the person responsible for attacking an AutoZone employee with a knife Tuesday morning.

The incident happened on at the AutoZone located on 32nd Street at around 8:26 a.m. According to police the suspect entered the store and attacked the employee with a knife in an unprovoked incident. Continue reading →

As much as I abhor Trump for being a vulgar, amoral, lying ignoramus, neither one more voice saying it nor one more person harping on his every word, every move, every act, is going to change anything. Trump lied? Oh no, it’s another Tuesday at 10 a.m. So what? Who expected otherwise? And so if it goes without saying, don’t say it. There’s no reason.

It’s also bad tactics, despite the Trump-hating obsession so many carry, to exhaust any utility to challenging the president. People are so inured to attacks that they mean nothing, and nothing he says or does has much of an impact. One lie is an outrage. A million is a statistic. Things that would have toppled any administration before just roll off his back, both because he does such wildly inappropriate stuff so regularly and there is so much screeching that it’s just background noise at this point. No outrage lasts longer than a few hours, tops, before the next comes along and captures the moment. Continue reading →

The contrast is jarring. Videos were everywhere showing Kyle Rittenhouse shooting his rifle. Yet, there was a killing in Portland, a bullet to the chest that left one man dead, and the only piece of information about it is the hat.

The man who was shot and killed was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Portland that has clashed with protesters in the past.

There may be video, but it’s not offered, no link, no embedded video. And apparently it doesn’t really do much to illuminate what happened. Continue reading →

National media’s attention focused on Tennessee about a week ago when Governor Bill Lee signed into law a bill potentially stripping protesters of their ability to vote. At least that was the attention-grabbing narrative during an election season rife with incessant screeching about voter suppression. The context of SB 8005 adds no shine to the law and blunts that narrative’s credibility.

As interest and energy waned in Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” talk of establishing a similar community in Nashville started briefly on social media. Governor Lee wasn’t keen on a similar “summer of love” in Music City, warning protesters Nashville would never allow a Volunteer State version of CHAZ. Continue reading →

The looting and rioting was the outgrowth of the news that police had killed yet another man, except the man was a killer himself, and then killed himself as the police were about to arrest him. It doesn’t take much to light a tinder box, especially one where you get free stuff. Well, free for looters. Whoever had it before had to pay for it, but if you make up stuff about how people you don’t know are undeserving or evil, it all becomes magically fine.

Then the Minneapolis police came and someone in the crowd decided to engage in mostly peaceful protest. Continue reading →

This week I’m telling you my all-time favorite “crazy but true” story. It’s about the time “The Tennessee Stud,” Ron Fuller, wrestled in the Bahamas.* I first heard Ron tell it a couple of years ago and this unbelievable yarn still tickles me to this day. My problem is any written version of this won’t nearly do it as much justice as if you heard it from the man himself. Check the link at the bottom of the post to remedy that.

“Dynasty” is an excellent term to describe the Fuller/Welch family’s impact on the wrestling world. Their influence spans 90 years across four generations. Countless grapplers learned the business from the family.** Ron’s grandfather, Roy Welch,*** was a master promoter with a knack for turning a dying town into a cash cow for the wrestling business.**** Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is a former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

There is further information relevant to the situation in Kenosha on more than one front. This deals with both the situation with Jacob Blake and the situation with Kyle Rittenhouse. I imagine that both sides are not going to like what I have to say, not that this will stop me from saying it. Continue reading →

It’s been obvious for a long time, though denied with a vehemence that only the unduly passionate could love: Identity trumps facts, law and reality. Orin Kerr summed it up.

These days, if it's announced that X assaulted Y, a lot of people can't decide whether that's good or bad until they know the politics of X, Y, and the reporter who wrote the announcement.

That's not good.

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) August 28, 2020

Simultaneously the excuses and condemnations fly, ranging from the inane to the outright lies, all to achieve the only possible outcome: as to the shooting of Jacob Blake, that this was a clear example of racist police attempting to murder a black man, and as to Kyle Rittenhouse, that he was a white-supremacist vigilante out to murder protesters. Continue reading →

At Reason, Zuri Davis runs through the failures, bit by bit, of how Tennessee cops searching for a 16-year-old suspected of breaking into cars managed to not merely end up pointing guns at a naked woman in her own home after breaking down her door because she didn’t open it within 30 seconds, but it ended up being the wrong house.

Several minutes later, the officers told Hines they had the wrong home.

How is that possible? Continue reading →