Sunday, October 07, 2012

Heard on Univision

Today Venezuelans as voting for President and running are the current strongman Castro-admirer leftwing nut Hugo Chávez, who over the years has shut down opposition newspapers, TV stations and other media, and who has even organized paramilitary militias to support him.

Running against him (and putting his life into the election) is a younger, more moderate centrist challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski, and for the first time in almost a decade and a half, things look shaky for Hugo... if the voting is actually done fairly, that is. The government militias are apparently on the look out to make sure that "things go right..."

Univision reports that Hugo Chávez has essentially threatened violence across the country if he doesn't win - he won't be able to "restrain" the disappointed masses, who apparently have forgotten what a democracy is supposed to be like. However, the Venezuelan Justice Minister, Tarek El Aissami, has all but guaranteed "fair elections."

Like Stalin said: It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes. 

Remember that when we have our election and your candidate doesn't win...

Update: Guess who was declared the winner? Didn't we know ahead of time?

(e)merge visiting

Dr. Alida Anderson, Mera Rubell and F. Lennox Campello at (e)merge art fair in Washington, DC 2012
The second iteration of the (e)merge art fair ended today. I went visiting yesterday (that's me with the amazing Mera Rubell and the amazing Dr. Anderson de Campello hanging out at the bar of the Skyline Hotel).

This second (e)merge cements this art fair as unique not only in its stated goal to focus on emerging artists - it does that and it does it well - but also it has become the leading art fair in the world for performance art.

Last year's (e)merge was the springboard for the extraordinary talent of Wilmer Wilson IV - a spectacularly intelligent performance and installation artist (and one of the artists that I mentored last year!) who used (e)merge to spring straight from student status to worldwide exposure via art fairs from DC's Connersmith.

This year the fair's center of attention was the brilliant performance of my good bud Andrew Wodzianski, whose Ishmael performance was described by a New York gallerist as "heroic" and he added that he needed to "look this guy up!."

Wodzianski (see photos from WJLA TV here), was a little shaky when he was finally "rescued" from the waters of the Skyline pool yesterday, but this multi-talented and multimedia artist was the hit of this second version of (e)merge. Let's all hope that good things happen to him as a result of (e)merge.

That's Andrew below with Mera Rubell.

Artist Andrew Wodzianski and Mera Rubell at (e)merge art fair in Washington, DC