Humorouz

If you studied art history or another of the humanities in the 1990s or 2000s — say, if you are around the age of the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, 45 — you may remember the word “problematic” from your long-ago seminar days. Back then it was a voguish noun, borrowed from French, that described the unconscious structure of an ideology or a text. Soon, though, like so many other efforts to think critically, “the problematic” got left behind in this century’s great shift from reading to scrolling. These days we encounter “problematic” exclusively as an adjective: an offhand judgment of moral disapproval, from a speaker who can’t be bothered by precision.

A whole cast of professional art workers — conservators, designers, guards, technicians — has been roped in to produce “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” a small exhibition opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (It is a title so silly that I cannot even type it; I am cutting and pasting.) The show, one of many worldwide timed to the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973, is essentially a light amusement following on from “Nanette,” a Netflix special from 2018. In that routine, a sort of blend of stand up and TED Talk, Gadsby riffed on having “barely graduated from an art history degree,” at the bachelor’s level, and attempted a takedown of the Spanish artist: “He’s rotten in the face cavity! I hate Picasso! I hate him!” Now this entertainer has come through the museum doors, but if you thought Gadsby had something to say about Picasso, the joke — the only good joke of the day, in fact — is on you.

Like the noun-turned-adjective “problematic,” this new exhibition backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture. At the Brooklyn Museum you will find a few (very few) paintings by Picasso, plus two little sculptures and a selection of works on paper, suffixed with tame quips by Gadsby on adjacent labels. Around and nearby are works of art made by women, almost all made after Picasso’s death in 1973; finally, in a vestibule, clips from “Nanette” play on a loop. That’s the whole exhibition, and anyone who was expecting this to be a Netflix declension of the Degenerate Art Show, with poor patriarchal Picasso as ritualized scapegoat, can rest easy. There’s little to see. There’s no catalog to read. The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point.

That Picasso, probably the most written about painter in history, was both a great artist and a not-so-great guy is so far from being news as to qualify as climate. What matters is what you do with that friction, and “It’s Pablo-matic” does not do much. For a start, it doesn’t assemble many things to look at. The actual number of paintings by Picasso here is just eight. Seven were borrowed from the Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been supporting shows worldwide for this anniversary; one belongs to the Brooklyn Museum; none is first-rate. There are no other institutional loans besides a few prints brought over the river from MoMA. What you will see here by Picasso are mostly modest etchings, and even these barely display his stylistic breadth; more than two dozen sheets come from a single portfolio, the neoclassical Vollard Suite of the 1930s.

Unsigned texts in each gallery provide basic invocations of gender discrimination in art museums, or the colonial legacy of European modern art, while next to individual works Gadsby offers signed banter. These labels function a bit like bathroom graffiti, or maybe Instagram captions. Beside one classicizing print of Picasso and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter: “I’m so virile my chest hair just exploded.” Beside a reclining nude: “Is she actually reclining? Or has she just been dropped from a great height?”

There’s a fixation, throughout, on genitals and bodily functions. Each sphincter, each phallus, is called out with adolescent excitement; with adolescent vocabulary, too. What jokes there are (“Meta? Hardly know her!”) remain juvenile enough to leave Picasso unscathed. The adults involved at the Brooklyn Museum (principally its senior curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris, Gadsby’s collaborators here) really could have reined in this immaturity, though to their credit, they’ve at least fleshed out the show with some context on the cult of male genius or the rise of feminist art history in the 1970s.

The trouble is obvious, and entirely symptomatic of our back-to-front digital lives: For this show the reactions came first, the objects reacted to second. A show that started with pictures might make you come to wonder — following the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin — why Picasso’s paintings of women are generally lacking in desire, quite unlike the pervy paintings of Balthus, Picabia and other cancelable midcentury gents. A show properly engaged with feminism and the avant-garde might have turned to Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Nadezhda Udaltsova or Olga Rozanova: the remarkable Soviet women artists who put Picasso’s breakdown of forms in the service of political revolution. A more serious look at reputation and male genius might have introduced a work by at least one female Cubist: perhaps Alice Bailly, or Marie Vassilieff, or Alice Halicka, or Marie Laurencin, or Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, or María Blanchard, ​ or even Australia’s own Anne Dangar.

Instead, “It’s Pablo-matic” contents itself to stir in works by women from the Brooklyn Museum collection. These seem to have been selected more or less at random, and include a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, a photograph by Ana Mendieta, an assemblage by Betye Saar, and Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” a video art classic of 1978/79 whose connection to Picasso is beyond me. (At least two paintings here, by Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalene Thomas, draw on the example of Manet, not Picasso.) The artists who made them have been reduced here, in what may be this show’s only true insult, into mere raconteurs of women’s lives. “I want my story to be heard,” reads a quotation from Gadsby in the last gallery; the same label lauds the “entirely new stories” of a new generation.

This elevation of “stories” over art (or at least comedy) was the principal thrust of “Nanette,” a Sydney stand-up routine which became an American viral success during the last presidency, shortly after the wrongdoings of Harvey Weinstein were finally exposed. “Nanette” proposed a therapeutic purpose for culture, rejecting the “trauma” of telling jokes in favor of the three-act resolution of “stories.” It directly analogized Picasso to then-President Trump: “The greatest artist of the twentieth century. Let’s make art great again, guys.” It even averred that Picasso, and by extension all the old masters, suffered from “the mental illness of misogyny.” (Given this pathologization of Picasso, it is very intriguing that Gadsby has described the Brooklyn Museum show as their own deeply desired act of sexual violence against the man from Málaga, telling Variety: “I really, really want to stick one up him.”)

When the police started shooting people in the face and throwing flash grenades at the unarmed crowd, everything changed on January 6.

The government opened fire escalating the protest. Only one side was armed using deadly force: The police.

The crowd became livid as they watched cops shooting deadly rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash bangs or “sting balls” at civilians, often aimed at their heads.

Footage obtained by The Gateway Pundit showcases the unjustified use of deadly force employed by law enforcement against demonstrators protesting the stolen election.

Anyone who wants to get to the bottom of January 6 must focus on the key moment: The precise time the typical protest escalated into “the most investigated demonstration in FBI history,” defense attorney Steven Metcalf told TGP. 

“This is crucial —  this is crucial — because this is where what everybody is saying” about J6 being a set-up and a fedsurrection “actually matters. But nobody is pinpointing the precise time,” he said. “Everyone is saying, ‘There’s FBI agents in the crowd,’ ‘There’s CHSs in the crowd.’ There’s blah blah blah — I’ll tell you exactly where shit went crazy.”

“It went crazy at that precise time when the protesters, all standing in the west side terrace, and then shots start going off and people are getting hit in the faces… There were a couple of agitators in the crowd don’t get me wrong, but what took it to a whole different level is people being shot in the face with rubber bullets.”

“That’s where people who were angry got even angrier and rightfully so.”

Metcalf, who represents several J6 defendants including Dominic Pezzola, the only Proud Boy acquitted of seditious conspiracy charges, has scoured through the hours of footage lawmakers refuse to show the public.

After protesters knocked over a bike rack blockading the building, the moment the government characterizes as ‘the first breach,’ police were positioned in a “riot line.”

Riot line protocol instructs officers to remove agitators from the crowd.

Instead of removing the agitators, police on the riot line were strategically positioned “on the terrace above” to shoot protesters, Metcalf explained.

“The first line [of police] is called the ‘skirmish line. The second line is called a ‘linebacker line.’ What they are supposed to do is when there are agitators in the crowd, specifically, get them out of there,” he said. “And they set themselves up from an elevated position – so they had people on the terrace above.”

“They started off with one shooter and then they got a second shooter.”

A law enforcement official, identified by government witnesses during discovery as Inspector Lloyd, “wearing a white shirt behind the lines,”  gave the initial orders to shoot a “moderately calm crowd,” Metcalf continued:

Behind the linebacker line is Inspector Loyd. This is what Dominic was talking to TGP about. He said, ‘There was a guy who signaled.’ There were a couple of people pushing the line but ultimately they weren’t doing anything crazy and they ultimately stopped their behavior and everything was somewhat chill at one point.

Lloyd repositions himself, he looks up, he does a circular motion and then points in the direction of the crowd, in a particular direction of the crowd, I can show the hand signals that were done.

They’re all standing there at the West Side terrace and then shots start going off into people’s faces. And then there are five or six people that get shot.

We got video from above and then we got audio above. There was a shooter and a guy recording. From the guy recording next to him, you hear someone telling the shooters who to hit. ‘Hit the guy in the red shirt.’ ‘Hit the guy in the green hat.’ ‘Hit the guy in the brown jacket.’

“Don’t shoot him in the fucking face!” a man is heard, screaming at the top of his lungs.”

“Is it a rubber bullet?” another protester asks Black.

“I don’t know,” Black responds, pouring water over the wound as the bullet protrudes through the left side of his mouth.

“Motherfucker! We gotta get him out of here, man,” another protester exclaims.

Stunned and outraged, the crowd angrily confront the officers in the police line standing idle as Black bled out.

“You fucking shot him in the face! You’re on our side! You’re on our side!” a man screams in an officer’s face. “We are Americans. You fucking take him and help him!”

“Fucking traitor! Traitor!” another man yells at the cops, as flash grenades erupt.

As Pezzola told TGP, he is heard on footage warning the cops, “You are going to kill somebody if you don’t stop this shit!”

While the injury that nearly killed Black is caught on camera, scores more protesters almost died during the government’s reign of terror on January 6.

On Tuesday, Black was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for entering the Capitol building with a knife on his hip and a gaping wound on his face. Prosecutors had recommended a five-year prison sentence.

Aerial footage, played in slow motion, reveals exactly what the crowd was doing when police decided to shoot hundreds of civilians with tear gas, grenades and bullets.

Police showed up to the mega MAGA march on January 6 intent on a killing spree with rubber bullets;  the weapons they used are marked with a warning label that states, “Could cause “death.”

“Now, [Black is] the one who the bullet penetrated. Other people were getting hit in the head. I saw other guys getting hit in the ear. That is not proper protocol. You cannot do headshots with a rubber bullet like that from that vicinity,” Metcalf said. “The firearm officer’s used to shoot the rubber bullets had a warning label. We read the warning label to the jury which stated in sum and substance, ‘Do not shoot in the head or face because it can cause serious physical injury and or death.’

“I asked witness after witness, ‘If these people got shot in the temple would they die? If they got shot in the eye, would they lose an eye?’ Every answer was ‘Yes,’ it didn’t matter whose witness it was,” My witness, [the government’s] witness it didn’t matter, the answer is, ‘Yes.’

“So, now you have deadly force against nondeadly force and then everything was pumped up from there. That’s how we got to people going in the building.”

Confidential Human Sources deployed from the MPD, FBI, CIA, HSI, and government plants, incited violence during the protest and coordinated to entrap patriots. But the actual terror attack waged by police to agitate and incense the American people on January 6, is the “set-up,” the fedsurrection.

“That’s what people don’t understand,” Metcalf said. “[The shots] set everyone off! Then Dominic [Pezzolla] gets the shield, people were getting shot right by him. Dominic is standing next to Joshua Black in the video…  the guy standing next to Dominic is getting shot — this shit was going on!”

“Everybody is almost there, but they don’t have it right. If you want to talk about a setup, you have to talk about how they figured out a way to agitate the crowd. That’s what it comes down to,” he continued. “Focus on the people who were there and what they were doing at that time. Police could have controlled that situation based on their training and experience, and any reasonable experience from any of these guys, they could have handled this way differently and they didn’t. They shot people in the face. Then Dom gets a shield. Then Dom goes back and he backs up and then is where the flash bangs were thrown at the crowd — at their heads. During Dominic Pezzola’s cross-examination by the government, they tried to downplay the attack by saying it was ‘sting balls’ rather than ‘flash bang.’”

Ethan Nordean, the former leader of Proud Boys Washington state chapter known as Rufio who was convicted of seditious conspiracy on May 4, told the TGP on a call from solitary confinement he was shot in the back nearly a dozen times by police on January 6.

The vest he wore to prevent getting stabbed by Antifa kept him safe.

Rufio and other peaceful proud boys fired upon by Capitol police at 1:18pm on 1/6.

This shooting was ordered by @DCPoliceDept Officer Thau. @CondemnedUSA pic.twitter.com/RXzNPLsiue

— InvestigateJ6 (@InvestigateJ6) May 15, 2023

Pezzola told TGP the onslaught of deadly attacks against unarmed civilians on January 6 “felt like the beaches of Normandy.”

At 1:17pm, Thau orders Capitol PD ‘snipers nest’ to continue firing indiscriminately into the crowd.

He screams “let’s go, fucking shoot them!” “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” pic.twitter.com/R2zzliZJlx

Four people were killed on J6, yet no investigation into their deaths has been launched by GOP members of Congress. Black Lives Matter and Antifa have yet to protest or burn down cities over the unparalleled police brutality against the J6 “super-predators.”

Micki Witthoeft, mother of slain Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, met with House Speaker Sen. McCarthy in March, McCarthy allegedly told her in the closed-door meeting he has never even seen the footage that aired across mainstream media of Lt. Byrd shooting Babbitt.

Previously, McCarthy stated Byrd was “just doing his job.”

The wrongful death lawsuit Babbitt’s husband Aaron announced he would file against U.S. Capitol Police and Lt Byrd for taking Babbit’s life has never been filed and the two-year statute of limitations has passed.

An uncut hour and twenty-one-second video obtained by TGP showcases the events following the first breach during the J6 protest — from when protesters knocked over the bike rack and police opened fire to protesters breaking windows and trespassing into the Capitol building and Byrd shooting Babbitt.

Your reaction to this fairly harmless team-building activity is pretty intense. Why is that? Now, I hate having my picture taken, and I’m not a fan of mandatory fun, so I don’t judge your distaste for a group picture. But what is so mortifying about wearing a company T-shirt with your colleagues? Why would anyone in your life think anything negative or judgmental if they saw these images? It may well be silly, but it isn’t unprofessional.

I hear that this is not something you want to do, but people over 40 with advanced degrees take group pictures sometimes. If you don’t want to take the group picture, don’t. It will be fine. Just tell your colleagues you would like to opt out. You don’t have to explain yourself. You’re allowed to have boundaries. I hope the rest of the retreat is wonderful.

I recently completed my master’s degree, thanks to my company’s tuition reimbursement program. Since my employer took on the financial component of this schooling, I owe them three more years or else I will need to pay back the reimbursement in full.

Your job has not paid you in the form of a degree. Tuition reimbursement is one in a suite of benefits employers offer to recruit and retain talent. It’s fine to be grateful for the benefit, but you earned it. You don’t owe your employer anything beyond continuing to do your job well and, as mandated, staying for the next three years.

If you feel you deserve a raise, ask for a raise. Unless it’s a very small company, I doubt your taking advantage of the reimbursement benefit is even on your manager’s radar. Make some notes to yourself about why you merit a raise and/or promotion, and when you feel the time is right, make the appeal. You may not get what you want, but there is no harm in asking.

Now, in terms of recognition for the work you did to obtain the degree, sure, that’s a human thing to want but this is your employer. Though they clearly benefit from your advanced education, your employers aren’t family members or friends so they aren’t really going to care about work you did, of your own volition, for your own betterment. Look for that validation elsewhere.

A Little Gratitude Would Be Nice

I’m a 37-year-old manager of a nursing home. I have an outstanding employee I hired two years ago as a new college grad. I taught him everything and put him through an administrator-in-training apprenticeship, which he completed. He is great for our business and helps ensure everything runs smoothly. Recently, I made him an excellent offer. After some negotiations, he signed the offer letter for his new position: an assistant administrator. Four weeks later, a recruiter called me to say my outstanding employee is about to sign elsewhere. I confronted the employee and he has tried to backtrack saying he hasn’t signed elsewhere, and that he was only “talking” to other employers.

Meanwhile he confided in a nurse that he got two job offers, and he was countering them on terms. He said he can’t shake the feeling that he wants to go somewhere and be the boss. He can probably get a job as an administrator elsewhere, but I feel he doesn’t appreciate how good I have been to him. I really saw growth opportunities with him. Several co-workers and I think he lacks the finesse and emotional intelligence to be “the boss” right now and needs more experience. I am paying him well. I’ve treated him how I would have wanted an employer to treat me at his age.

I asked him to either give me one year of professional courtesy in his current job (which he began four weeks ago) or leave in 30 days. He said he’ll let me know in two weeks when he returns from vacation. I am left waiting in suspense. Does this mean I should be interviewing candidates for his role? What if I find someone better and cheaper? I am hurt because I feel betrayed. Is this because he is a straight man and I am a gay man, and he has made clear to me that we don’t agree politically? He’s a great employee. Is loyalty to a good employer dead? Is this a Gen Z thing?

— Anonymous, California

You’re taking your colleague’s choices (however inadvisable you think they may be) way too personally. We are supposed to be good to one another in both our professional and personal lives. Treating your staff well isn’t something that requires deference in return, and it’s a shame that social mores have degraded to such a point. Your frustrations are understandable in that you’ve clearly invested time and energy in your employee. You have feelings and they’re hurt, and you should separate that from the professional decisions you need to make. It sounds like this young man wants to run before he walks.

I don’t think he is doing this because you’re a gay man. He’s just being young and irresponsible. As someone with more experience, you know he is being premature but lots of people take on jobs they aren’t ready for and either succeed or fail in growing into those positions.

People who love talking about diets and the surrounding culture really seem to love it or feel a compulsion to perform being good, disciplined people who watch their weight and blah blah blah. The next time your team members spiral into one of these discussions, simply ask if you can talk about something else. Or raise a different subject.