John Giannotti has recently completed a sculpture of Matthew Henson, the African American explorer who assisted Robert Peary in the first visit to the North Pole on April 6, 1909. The sculpture will be part of a new maritime museum built out of an old church (the church was original constructed of ballast stones from the days when Camden was a shipbuilding town and busy port). PBS-affiliated NJN ran a segment on John and the Henson sculpture yesterday and here it is as a video recording. The piece on John comes at around 13 minutes into the program.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
"what a great face he had"
John Giannotti has recently completed a sculpture of Matthew Henson, the African American explorer who assisted Robert Peary in the first visit to the North Pole on April 6, 1909. The sculpture will be part of a new maritime museum built out of an old church (the church was original constructed of ballast stones from the days when Camden was a shipbuilding town and busy port). PBS-affiliated NJN ran a segment on John and the Henson sculpture yesterday and here it is as a video recording. The piece on John comes at around 13 minutes into the program.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
