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Art In Conversation
with Leeza Meksin
On ViewTang Teaching Museum
May 12 – August 12, 2018
New York
Dona Nelson is the smartest person you've ever met, but she gets one thing wrong. She says: "I don't have a signature style." And if you look at how widely and wildly she has expressed the intensity of her vision, you might nod and agree. Over a fifty-year career she has painted yellow figures and blue octopuses, charcoal on canvas and enamel on linen, hung paintings on walls, ceilings, and made them stand in the middle of a room on paint-splattered milk crates. But this isn't an infinite variety without order. Nelson's signature style is, precisely this: she is always showing you what IS there with contagious and joyous verve. I met Dona over ten years ago at Tyler School of Art—my first real teaching gig after grad school. She came up to me—tall, striking, instantly iconic—and said, without any preamble: "I want to be friends." I was already a fan of the work, and her straightforward and unabashed approach made me an instant fan of the person. The paintings grab you like Dona does, asking for your attention and refusing anything less than your keenest witness. She makes what she sees come to life, transforming a regular apartment into a living, breathing site for creation that makes you realize it was alive all along. I kept trying to convince her during our interview that her physical practice takes her to a spiritual plane. But she refused it. "The real is the spiritual," she said repeatedly, pressing on the table, gesturing to the wall, invoking the subway. Trust me when I tell you no limit can contain this brilliant and fearless painter with whom I had the pleasure of talking about her art in my Morningside apartment on a sunny May afternoon.
Installation View, Dona Nelson: Stand Alone Paintings, 2018, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photo: Andreas Vesterlund.
Leeza Meksin (Rail): Let's talk about your survey show, Stand Alone Paintings. The title evokes both a kind of defiance—like the paintings stand alone, and say what they need to say on their own—but also a sense of solitude. How did you think of the title?
Dona Nelson: I came up with that title because I don't do signature style paintings. Once in a while, I make a really great painting. It stands alone, by itself, a painting that you can actually remember. I didn't really try to be that kind of artist, but that is the kind of artist I am. So I have individual paintings, and it would be fine if each was the only painting I ever made.
Rail: The installation is very striking. How much of the plan happened on site?
Nelson: The curator, Ian Berry, picked the paintings. He came to my studio a couple of times and looked through all my images. He came up with this arrangement of paintings. It was he who suggested that we hang paintings one above the other, because if we had not done that we wouldn't have been able to put as many paintings in.
Rail: There are close to thirty paintings in the show. And since you work so large, it is amazing to get that many large paintings in one big room. The way that they are installed evokes screens and partitions, a network of chambers where you can find yourself suddenly alone even when others are nearby. How do you think about architecture and its effect on your paintings?
Nelson: I am interested when architecture does not dominate the experience of the paintings. Maybe one of the strategies of Pollock and Still making such big paintings was anti architectural. But art galleries evolved as a white cube, basically Bauhaus, and often times the gallery space dominates the art experience. I want you to walk in and have your first experience be my paintings rather than the walls around my paintings.
One of my first and most intense experiences of painting was seeing Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950 – 51). Sometimes I go to MoMA and I just walk through the whole museum very fast, but that's the one painting I really can't walk by. It makes such a statement, and it is so convincing. There was a circular exhibition of Newman's paintings, Stations of the Cross (1958 – 1966), at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. which was one of the greatest painting installations ever, and I can't believe that they dismantled it. There was a bench in the middle. All the paintings were black and white, but they were made with different paints. There was magna; there was acrylic; there was oil; and there was just this incredible liveliness. It was very enjoyable to look at the paintings because there was no added aestheticizing. It's just Newman's spatial divisions and the materials. The essential experience of painting was that installation.
Installation View, Dona Nelson: Stand Alone Paintings, 2018, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photo: Andreas Vesterlund.
Rail: One of the things that struck me at the Tang was that corner where there are four large paintings based on your mother's small pastel of a landscape and a village. We don't see the pastel in the show, but we learn about it through these versions that you made of her work. Those four paintings started to function as a key to understanding all the other works in the room, and also how to understand the relationship between the performance of painting—its physicality—and also the kind of metaphysical quality that activates memory and desire and loss. I'd love to hear you speak more about the experience of watching your mother paint.
Nelson: I sometimes accompanied my mother to her adult education art class in Kokomo, Indiana, when I was in second grade. I remember walking home with her on a summer night. I was always into drawing, since I was three or four years old, like many artists. My mother and I took an art class together in our church basement in Columbus, Ohio, when I was about eleven. It was great fun; I just loved it. I always loved my mother's paintings and pastels, even though they were just tiny little paintings. You might think that they're basically calendar scenes, but I always found them very moving and really authentic, and they have this kind of amazing scale to them.
Rail: Did you make those paintings while she was still alive?
Nelson: No, but I was thinking about her.
Rail: She was a teacher right?
Nelson: She was a grade school teacher, a really good grade school teacher. She was also a Brownie leader, and that was the only group I was ever a part of, when my mother was the leader. [Laughs]
Rail: In the four paintings that are in the show at the Tang, each takes a different approach, treating the image differently each time, including the one that is actually contextualizing the little pastel in your apartment. And that's the one that has the most texture. It's sort of mimicking the mantel on which the work lived in your apartment.
Nelson: That was the last one made. It's named The Apartment. I was living in a very interesting apartment in Jersey City that had a really nice black marble fireplace.
Rail: Did you consciously approach your mother's pastel as an impetus for a series of work?
Nelson: Well, it was after I had done The Stations of the Subway, where I tried to make the experience of looking at abstract paintings and being in New York City kind of equal. It was my contention that a lot of the abstract painting of my generation is very much a response to the architecture of New York City . . . so much geometric abstraction. The Stations of the Subway was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Reality, to me, is the highest spiritual thing. Just the subway. I love the subways. So I made that series, and that was like twelve, thirteen paintings, and when that was over I was thinking about other experiences of looking at art within the context of a place. My parents were from Iowa. I grew up in Nebraska, Indiana, and Ohio, so I looked at my mother's little artworks in the context of the Midwest, and also in the context of the stories I've heard about immigration and homesteading.
Rail: Have you ever collaborated on a painting with an artist?
Nelson: When I use string on my two-sided paintings, I am collaborating with my assistant on the other side. I have made major string paintings with Ryota Kuwabara and Kristen Mills, who are interesting artists themselves.
Rail: With your two-sided paintings, are the front and the back interchangeable?
Nelson: There's usually a definite front and a definite back, but sometimes I reverse the canvas and work back into it.
I make three kinds of double-sided paintings. First, the kind I work on with an assistant in which I punch holes in the canvas and pass back and forth painted string. My string paintings are different than my other two-sided works, because my assistant has the choice of which hole to return the string, which opens up the field of drawing. I have noticed that the person I'm working with is very important. Every painting with a different assistant has a different quality. I love the process. It takes decision-making off my shoulders. It's more like play.
Another kind of two-sided painting, which is maybe the more radical kind, is when I don't look at the back. I work flat, while the painting is on milk crates. I glue down cheesecloth ropes which act as dams, and then I stain the canvas with watery acrylic. When that dries, I lay down puddles of pigmented tar gel. The back ends up being a surprise—an index of the processes done on the front of the canvas.
The third kind takes the longest because I take the canvas off and re-stretch it again with the back becoming the front, sometimes several times! One side becomes a color source for the other side. Unpredictable patterns happen because I'm not watching how colors are soaking through. For these pieces, I often do prep work. For instance, I'll glue down a grid of cheesecloth rope and pour puddles of fluid acrylic into the little squares. Sometimes I'll punch holes through the middle of each square so the canvas plane is porous, then I'll work with that porosity so that there's communication between the painting's front and back.
Rail: Do the two sides have a yin/yang relationship? Do they complete each other?
Nelson: I don't think "complete" is the right word. They form each other, even if one side looks completely different than the other side, they are totally interrelated.
Rail: When in your process do you decide that a painting needs to be two-sided?
Nelson: Most of the paintings start as two-sided paintings, and sometimes, early in the process, one side looks particularly good to me. I decide that the painting is a wall work and usually cover the back with muslin.
Rail: What determines the installation of the two-sided paintings?
Nelson: It depends on the space that I have to work with. When the paintings are connected with hardware to the wood structures that I had made for the Tang show, the two sides are equalized. The wood structure that connects the two paintings that sit on milk crates become a loopy architectural construct. The crates are stained with paint, and I like using them in the art piece, because the paintings rest flat on the crates while being worked on.
Rail: So these new wood structures create a theatrical space in which the viewer is brought into the very innards of the painting?
Nelson: Yes, and you don't see a front without a back, like a physical cubism. I will also probably continue to use the steel stands. There's a certain way in which they have their own aesthetic. They have a stubborn medieval quality, with screws on either side. They are just functional, but they declare themselves as separate from the paintings.
Rail: How do you feel about the contemporary fad of double-sided paintings?
Nelson: That's just a fact of life. Many painters use it as a device to activate space rather than to make a particular kind of painting. When paintings are truly double-sided, they are viewed from different angles, and they are often viewed close up. There is not a prescribed way to view a two-sided painting.
Rail: Do you think memory plays a role in how a double-sided painting is viewed?
Nelson: The idea of remembering one side while looking at the other side activates something that is usually not a part of viewing paintings—to simply remember what you just saw. It makes the mental, physical. It asserts vision through the body. You need more effort as a viewer. You cannot be passive.
Rail: I really liked what you wrote in your essay "Second Sight," where you talk about how during the process of painting you feel like you're in the dark. So painting is not actually about seeing, or at least not solely about seeing . . .
Nelson: Paintings are surprising to me, particularly working the way I do, because I don't have plans ahead of time, I don't do drawings ahead of time. I don't have compositions ahead of time. I go to the studio and just start, and usually I'm feeling lazy and like, "Oh I'd really rather not paint today, I'd just rather lay around and read." But I start, I go out there, and there are piles of materials and I'm like, "All right, let's get going! Come on, come on, come on!" And then I just start doing something. A lot of times I'll start with some cheesecloth and wet it with gel medium, throw it on the canvas, and I'll try and get four or five paintings going at once. I just do anything. Then slowly over a couple of weeks the thing starts to evolve.
I think people don't focus sufficiently on the specifics of the way paintings are made and how that makes different categories of paintings that have a different relationship to energy. For example, it's very important if you gesso or not. We can divide painting into those who use gesso and those who don't. Those who don't are connected to Gutai and to Arte Povera. I saw a great show in London: Giorgio Griffa, an Arte Povera Italian painter. He wrote, "I don't make lines or circles with the paint, I put the paint in the canvas." That's the phrase he used, "I put the paint in the canvas." I wish people would think about painting in concrete ways.
In 1989, when I was out in California, I decided that I hated gesso. A metaphor came into my head at the time—or maybe it was a dream—that I went out into a cotton field, with a lot of cotton plants, with a gallon of gesso. I poured it on the cotton plant, and it killed the plant! I woke up and said, "I'm not going to use gesso anymore!" My paintings changed then because every piece of canvas, no matter the weight, has a kind of reality to it. If you cover that with gesso, you cover that reality. Then you try to replace the reality of the canvas with some idea you have, as if your idea, your composition, is more important than the reality of the canvas. To me, it's not! I went to see the black and white Pollock show in Dallas a couple of years ago. He used enamel on raw canvas. You can't erase that. Once you put that on there, that's the painting. There's a lot of pressure when you do that. You have to be completely in the moment, not distracted.
Dona Nelson, Anne's Lace, 2002. Graphite and acrylic medium on canvas, 88 × 106 inches. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Photo: Jeremy Lawson.
Rail: When you're sculpting pieces of muslin that have been saturated with paint or medium, you're looking with your hands and creating these landscapes that flip the vertical plane of the canvas and make it into a horizontal typology. How do you think about sculpture and ceramics, where the touch of the hand is visible as an imprint on the material?
Nelson: In the early 1990s, I lived near a fabric store on Broadway near Canal Street. Outside the store I spotted a bin with a big roll of cheesecloth that had little strips of denser weave running through it. I had been painting with a brush and oil paint in the 1980s, a slow way to paint. One day I decided, this cheesecloth is so cheap, I'm going to buy the whole roll! It was six feet wide, and I started a big painting with it, just gluing it on. I didn't know what I was doing; I had no idea actually, but I had started going out by subway to the Coney Island Aquarium, and visiting a couple little whales they had out there in a tank.
So anyway, I bought a whole bunch of this cheesecloth and started these really big paintings with this material, and the whales floated into the paintings. The way cheesecloth took acrylic was fantastic. I started squeezing the gel medium through the cheesecloth and it was like clay. I could still go on being a painter, making reliefs and whatever. In 1989 I went to the British Museum. In the basement they have all those Assyrian reliefs. I loved them. I've always loved sculpture, ancient sculpture. I get a lot of energy from looking at sculptural reliefs. I can feel it in my hands and my arms.
Rail: Reliefs are typically an architectural art form that references history. Like your paintings, reliefs activate the haptic sense, with images emerging out of serious stone facades, and creating a human connection. What gave you the idea of actually making rubbings or frottage from your reliefs? How did you arrive at that?
Nelson: I've lived in many different places, many different studios. Space itself is very alive for me and has been since I was a kid. I've always loved to go into empty apartments or just any place I haven't been. When I did those rubbings, I had moved to Philadelphia. I lived and worked in a carriage house in Germantown. I made a big construction with muslin and cheesecloth and medium, and it was so heavy, I could barely move it. And I thought, "Oh let me put a piece of canvas over this big construction, and do a rubbing!" I thought, "Oh my god, what a thing I discovered!" What is really interesting is that I could do several rubbings from the same construction and would get different images, depending on the drawing materials I used.
Rail: Your images often feel to me like they've been there all along, hidden in plain sight, as if you've just pulled the curtain and uncovered what was there. It reiterates this idea that the image or design of the painting is less important than the experience of making it, or the experience of seeing it.
Nelson: Absolutely! And what you are seeing is not separate from the space you are in while looking at it, and the image is not separate from the space that I'm in when I'm making it. I think I'm very sensitive to place. My family always jokes, "Dona is off someplace, roaming around town." That was my favorite thing, just to roam around and experience different places and spaces.
Rail: There's a mnemonic device for re-entering certain moments in your life by visualizing things in different rooms and that kind of spatial awareness within a particular memory will help you keep things structured in your mind. So the more I looked at that series of work that deals with your mother's paintings, the more I felt like they were different rooms of memories. The work feels very spiritual, but you access the spiritual through these very basic things, whether it's the texture of the canvas, or the way a certain color looks on another color. Do you think that literal objects in our life, or let's say, during the process of making a painting, serve as portals into the spiritual plane?
Nelson: No. Reality is the spiritual plane. I don't like the idea that I have to go someplace. I like the idea that I'm here.
Rail: How do you put so much emotion into the paintings?
Nelson: I don't put emotion into it. The emotion is in you. I just make the painting. One of the many things I'm against is putting meaning into painting. What does it mean? I'm like, "You missed the whole point!" You're not going to have the experience if you are waiting for this meaning to come along. Even the word meaning kind of meanders along. You have to wait for it. I feel like the artist is not responsible for putting meaning into their work because everybody is so full of meaning, they will put their own meaning into whatever they are looking at.
Rail: So when you're making a painting, there's not part of you that intends something to come across?
Nelson: It's a painting. I don't think it means something else! It's kind of surprising. I never really have a handle on what I've made, and that's not just a metaphor, but a handle, an actual... I don't have a handle on the pot. You know? It just is. It was my day, or my two days, or my week in the studio, and I really was in to it! And then I went on to something else. I'm not an expressionist. I'm a materialist. [Laughs]
Rail: Would you say that about your figurative painting also?
Nelson: Well that's different. In the eighties my work was different . . . yes, there's one painting in the Tang show of a tabletop. It's just a very messy tabletop which is kind of like my tabletops usually are, with a million things going on. It was a period of turmoil, and so the painting did reflect a kind of scattered attention. I actually made the painting to hold myself together, because right in the middle of that painting there's a plate—there's a plate I actually own with some pigeons on it, an old plate.
Rail: That's the painting that has a newspaper that says "Clumps and Voids" at the headline. [Laughs] I love that, was that a real newspaper heading? You didn't make that up?
Nelson: [Laughs] No, I thought that was so funny, because that's kind of the way I was experiencing life.
Rail: It makes sense to me that you're against meaning in painting, but the fact that you're against emotion is really revelatory because your work just feels so emotional to me, and there's so much mood and evocation of time and place; they never feel the same to me. You must be feeling some emotion when you're making the painting.
Nelson: I'm really not. I'm completely focused on struggling with my materials!
Rail: You've talked about coming across an old journal that you kept in college where you wrote that your approach is one of a man to the female space of the painting. You were putting yourself in a male role in order to articulate the female space of the painting. And you bring up W.J.T. Mitchell, and his idea that it's not about images of women or images objectifying women, but images as women. I'm curious to hear you talk about that a bit more.
Nelson: On many levels it's a radical thing to be an ambitious painter and a woman. Making paintings is exciting, it's erotic. I love making paintings. And that's one reason I paint the way I paint, with buckets of liquid and that kind of thing. When I started painting that way in 1989, pouring buckets of paint onto a construction, it felt like I was using radically different parts of myself.
Because when you paint in oils with a little brush, it's very arduous and takes a long time, and you do have a different relationship to the painting than when you have a bucket of color and you throw it on there and it stains. And I'll tell you this, this sounds awful but I had a very sexist teacher at Ohio State, and he was so sexist that he was ridiculous, you know? One day he said "Yeah, you should look at Helen Frankenthaler because she does staining" and he thought it was related to menstruation, female fluids, which is so outrageously sexist nowadays, but at the time? I kind of took it as a positive thing! I'm like, "That's cool. I like that idea."
Rail: The luminosity of your color feels so piercing and immediate, like weather. It feels sublime and terrifying, like stained glass in a big cathedral. In movements like Gutai and Arte Povera, material, textured experience of the world is foregrounded. Whereas your work somehow combines that haptic experience with an intensive experience of color.
Nelson: It's about developing the possibilities of stain painting. The paint and the canvas are one. Stain painting is pretty profound. It was only invented seventy years ago. It's an aspect of painting that can be developed. I don't like putting judgments on material reality. It's like they say some trees are trash trees, you know? Tree of Heaven, which springs up between the sidewalks in cities and has so much vitality, or dandelions. One of my earliest memories when I was running around the neighborhood as little kid is visiting an old woman who had a big collie, and she would make it my job to brush the dog. I would brush the dog until I got a gallon bucket of hair. One day I picked her a huge bouquet of dandelions on my way to brush the dog. I could hardly hold it in my hands. [Laughs] I knocked on her door, and said, "Agnes, these are for you." She said, "Pee-yew, dandelions!" She grabbed them from my hand and threw them in the garbage! [Laughs] It hurt my feelings that she didn't care for them, but I loved them because dandelions are so yellow. Of all the yellow flowers, they are the most yellow. That's the experience of color—that's why I like stain painting.
Rail: I was trying to liken the experience of being bathed by color—the scale of your paintings and the way they confront you in real space—to a kind of dumbfounded, speechless, even religious experience.
Nelson: Well, I very much like Yves Klein. I think that he is very important. His paintings are purely experiential because you can't experience Yves Klein unless you go and stand in front of an Yves Klein. It has to do with the powdery surface, and the matte-ness of the pigment that gives a very particular experience of color. I do actually really like the color of dirt I can find down in Georgia, the red earth. I do really like dirt, dirt color, I always have ever since I was a little kid.
When I was a little kid, my main thing was to dig holes. I was always out in the yard digging holes. I remember once there was a large silver bug in the bottom of one my holes. I was really excited! [Laughs] I also collected rocks; I always loved rocks. I remember my mother asking, "Who put this rock in the middle of my dining room table?" I would select rocks that I thought were really beautiful to put around for decoration. I'm actually very close to the person I was when I was a tiny child. And painting is very much connecting to those things, truthfully.
Rail: Which actually makes it so much more feminine than it has been thought of traditionally, because it's connected to this engendering of one's self as a subject in this primal moment when one is not yet gendered.
Nelson: Yes, exactly. But you don't have the descriptions, and this is something I've always resented. I resent the descriptions of being a woman, and I am so pleased that young women have the language now that I didn't have when I was young. Like "cis-women," and that's a traditional idea of women. Because I actually would not call myself a cis-woman, I never have been. Because I don't like thinking of myself in that objectified way. Why do I have to do that? And this is one thing I really object to, and a lot of teaching about gender, I've always objected to it since I was very young. I feel like I should be allowed to have myself be whole without your describing me as a woman in your cultural place where women have their place. That has nothing to do with me.
Rail: Have there been people in your life, men or women, who understood and respected that?
Nelson: Yes. I think most of the people I've been close to understand that. And even in my family—I had two sisters—there wasn't a necessity to define myself. I almost feel like I resent the impulse toward definition, whether it's in painting, or whether it's in people. Usually those impulses towards definition are assigning you the role of some other, some lesser. Mainly it's authoritarianism that needs to define better art from lesser art, and I have objected to that my whole life. Painting is my job, it's like being a farmer, it's like tending the cows, it's a job. Unless I see it as a job, and I say I'm pretty lazy.
Rail: I find that very hard to believe.
Nelson: Painting is not easy. It's not easy. For my really good paintings, I have to work them past success. I'll have a painting, and if I have another person around, an assistant or a friend, they'll come in, they're like, "Oh, that's a terrific painting," and I'm like, "Yeah... " And then I'll sit there and I'll look at it and I'm like, "It's so good, I've got to work on it!"
Rail: [Laughs] It's too good, too good for it to be done. Maybe that has something to do with caution around success, that when something is successful it's too complete and that finishedness ends up being a deadening thing.
Nelson: It hasn't been taken to a place where it's really surprising, that's why it can be in the safe category of "good," good is another word that I really don't like, I don't like the two "o"'s. [Laughs] Good [prolonging the "o" sound.] He is a good painter. Well, I always think, that poor person! [Laughs]


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There are some pretty badass Black women in comics, and Agent 355 is at the top of my list of favorites. Created by one of my favorite comics writers Brian K. Vaughan in his epic series Y: The Last Man, she was a secret agent for of the Culper Ring, a secret spy ring that grew out of the American Revolutionary War and conducts all sorts of shady covert ops.
After the world goes haywire and almost every single male on the planet dies suddenly Agent 355, sometimes referred to as "Three-Fifty" is charged with finding and protecting the world's last man Yorick Brown, a twenty-something kid obsessed with magic tricks. 355's training in the Culper Rings makes her highly skilled at hand-to-hand combat, stealth, and the use of various firearms and weapons. She was recruited to the Culper Ring at a very young age, and her first code name was 86. But after she killed her mentor (the original 355), who was plotting an assassination of the President, she took on the name 355. Her real name was never revealed. I'm guessing her codename was inspired by the mysterious Agent 355, who was possibly the first female undercover operative in the real-life Culper Ring.
355 protects Yorick throughout many adventures in the post-apocalayptic world, while Yorick mostly bumbles about pining for his lost girlfriend and generally getting them into serious ish with the rogue lady bullies trying to survive in the post-male-apocalypse. Eventually 355 finds a female scientist Dr. Allison Mann, who might have the solution to the plague that killed all of the men. Dr. Mann is pretty bad ass herself, displaying some pretty decent fighting skills and basically taking no shit, ever. She's half-Chinese, half-Japanese, and has had to deal with her crazy warring parents. Dr. Mann is also attracted to women, and has the hots for Agent 355, with whom she shares a brief romance.
The team, including Yorick's friendly monkey Ampersand, go on the hunt for Yorick's girlfriend. But throughout their travels Yorick and 355 become close and develop romantic feelings towards one another. Naturally, of course, Yorick is too dense to realize this until the very last minute…
The best part of this series isn't just the multi-culti crew, or the cadre of generally ass-kicking women (and there's a lot of both of these), but the fact that Agent 355 is really the series's hero. Yorick might be the only guy, but he doesn't necessarily take center stage. In fact, his role is best described as damsel in distress. Kiinda great. Also, I just want to hug Brian K. Vaughan, and point other writers from every entertainment field ever to this example with a very sarcastic, " Holy shit! Who knew a Black woman and a white dude could actually be sexually attracted to each other, without f*ck*d up over-sexualization, weird exoticism, or skin-whitener?? Crazy sauce." Not to mention, being the only dude in the world, Yorick literally had his pick of the ladies. Good choice, Yorick. 355, I woulda stuck with Dr. Mann if I were you.
Anyway, if you haven't read it, do. If you have, read it again, I'm gonna. Apparently there are clues to 355's real name, and I bet my mind will only be blown again (double brain explosion) by all the stuff I didn't pick up the first time around.

subset: commoncrawl


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Big Brother 20 – Friday Recap?
Good morning. There really isn't anything to recap from yesterday except a few conversations. There probably won't be with the short amount of time we have left so I think the recap portion of this season is over. It's just a waiting game for the final 3 and for us. They will play part 2 of the hoh comp sometime today and we may get a spoiler about who won. I'm sure Steve will post it as soon as we find out.
My pathetic attempt to recap:
KC and Tyler studied whenever JC wasn't around so he's trying to get her prepared. KC is still sore from part 1 and she's hoping there isn't too much of a physical part to the next one. (It's usually a combo of physical and game event knowledge) Tyler told KC that JC keeps saying KC will win if she gets to the end. KC told Tyler that JC said he'd take her. They filmed the memory lane episode and continued that conversation once it was over. They were making each other say something nice about all the hg's. This involved a lot of making fun of each other while it was happening. JC's favorite thing about Angela was when she didn't talk. (Lol) They had dinner together, slept and tried to figure out what day the finale is going to be. JC went over AGAIN how he controlled everything and Tyler is having fun with JC at this point. He made sure KC heard it too. He'd already told her JC might win if he got to the end and I think this was Tyler driving the point home. (not that he really has to worry about KC changing her mind) JC also got mad when he found Tyler with the heating pad. You have to remember, that's an ongoing thing with them. Yep, that's your recap, sorry!
Unless Steve would like or needs me to do something different, I'll probably take the next few mornings (Sun, Mon, Tues) and go over my thoughts on the individual games of the F3, doing one each morning. I can include any feed recap information that happens from the day before…if there is any. That would leave Wednesday morning for me to cry and whine a bit and tell everyone how much I'm going to miss this season and all of you.
I mentioned the "remember when" episode was filmed yesterday and it sounded like that's why Jeff was there. (I'm with Steve, it's a stupid episode) They usually do that alone so I have no idea why they needed Jeff. Production has tried to work in past hg's more this year since it's the 20th season, in lieu of another All Star season would be my guess. I've said for years, there will never be another all stars imo for three main reasons bit there may be more.
- The hg's were too big of a pain in the ass the last time and caused too many problems. They sang nonstop until they could get food deliveries that they'd demanded. Someone even snuck out of the jury house to go party. Those are just a couple of examples.
- They have to pay them considerably more than they would regular hg's to get them to come back.
- Most of the people we'd want to see are older, have careers, kids, etc. They were younger the first time around and when you're a little older and more established, it isn't easy to leave your life for 3 months.
I didn't mind the past players showing up this year but I do think it was a missed opportunity. (I'm sick of seeing Rachel so again, I agree with Steve) Several past players hosted comps and several comps included funny things about past players. (movie posters, dating game, etc.) I've liked seeing those and they even managed to work in an alumni marriage proposal so they tried at least. I wish they'd done more of it but made it more obvious. Instead of the theme being technology with email, buffering and emojis, why not actually have some version of "remembering the ones who came before you" be the actual theme and do it big? It would've felt so much more intentional. I liked the play on words with some of the comps, like using Goober instead of Uber, although I've heard the smart and cool people use Lyft. It's a tradition (accidental or not) for production to start with a theme and lose their way through the season so that too, is just a part of BB. We've come to expect it and we get a laugh out of it. Remember the BB Takeover year? We were told that every week someone would "takeover the game" that season. There were a couple guest appearances and then it quietly went away. They never announced it had stopped, just crickets. There are more examples but I can't think of them at the moment because truthfully, I wasn't planning on writing about this today. As usual, I started typing and my brain went a different direction from my original thought. (If you read my recaps, you've suffered through this before and shouldn't be surprised) This season has its own examples anyway. We just saw a veto comp of them running through a maze with a medieval theme. Could they get any further away from technology? Even the technology they chose was sooooo BB and cheesy. I mean, emojis and email are on the cutting edge of what's new, right?
This is the image with the caption about the leak on feeds:
The jury discussion was filmed yesterday and I read about a leak on the feeds. I didn't see it so don't know the details. There's another one Steve can add to his list of production oops moments if it's true. I saw a picture of Haleigh so maybe the leak wasn't audio. I hope Dr. Will spent some time learning what was going on before he guided them through the conversation. People want to believe he's an avid feed watcher because he's one of the best, if not the best player ever. (Dan vs Will is going to be debated forever) Well, sorry folks, he isn't a feed watcher acording to things he's said. He also wears an ear mic during the discussion to guide him through it. He'll still call them out when they're being whiny and taking things personally so he does a really good job and I thinks he's a great choice. Someone who's glued to the feeds would probably have a favorite and I'd rather have someone neutral. (I don't think Will gives a shit who wins, his legacy is secure regardless)
Speaking of the jury, I want to bring up the "bitter vs no such thing as bitter" debate. We've adopted the word "bitter" to describe several things and maybe that's why it's turned into such a debate. I would agree that if you can't get rid of people while making them feel somewhat good about you, it's on you and you have to blame yourself. The jury is "bitter" because you made them feel like crap. In that way, it's justified for a juror to vote against you. Even if it's an emotional game reason, it's still a game reason. That isn't really being bitter, that's being hurt over how someone in the F2 treated you as a person in the game. It's poor jury management and instead of "bitter," that juror is an emotional game player who is guided by the personal part of the game. That's completely reasonable because people aren't robots.
However, when I say "bitter," I'm talking about something else and so are many other people. Everything can't be personal in the game because no one wants to be evicted. What I think is unacceptable is being petty and selfish. We're not stupid as viewers and we aren't blind either. We can see the difference when someone was unnecessarily wronged in the game vs someone who simply doesn't like another person. I'll use Rockstar and Angela as an example. Those two have nothing in common and never connected. An argument can be made that it was Angela's job (if she'd been in the F2) to find a way to connect with Rockstar, find some way to relate to each other. That's the social aspect of the game. Even if she wasn't successful, Angela's goodbye msg could've been something like "I know we didn't connect or get to know each other very well but I admire you as a mother, being here fighting so hard to bring this home for your kids, blah, blah, blah." If it didn't work and Rockstar voted against her, it was personal and that's ok. If it didn't work and Rockstar voted against her because she drove a Range Rover and was "rich white privilege," that's just petty. That's what many of us mean when we say "bitter." It's being petty without a justifiable game reason, emotional or strategic. In the end, it's their vote and not mine so they can vote and justify it however they want, it's their choice. What I think of how people play and vote are my opinions and those belong to me. I can respect it or not, that's my choice and I don't respect petty voting. Bitter yes, petty no.
Have a great Saturday!


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The ideas below that I have outlined are just based on my rudimentary observations of what is happening.
Please use my feedback form and I will include your suggestions also.
I am sure that if enough thought was put into it by experts, we could figure out a proper way for contracts for works that was fair and just to the contractors, but more importantly fair and just to the public taxpayers to whom the contractors must be held accountable.
The below conditions apply to all contracts for large works either civil and infrastructure, electrical, telecom, information technology, healthcare, education and any other works.
For all works, especially large works, the first thing these governments should do is get rid of lowest price based selection, or rather selecting vendors solely on price.
Price based selection makes the vendors cut corners.
Either they under quote and cut corners later, or they bribe and dont do the work at all.
There should be a base price below which nobody should be considered if they quote below that base price.
Qualifications, credentials, past experience and financial stability of the contractor should be considered and given higher weightage than price.
In all contracts, at least 45% weightage must be given for qualifications, credentials, and past and experience, 20% for financial stability, 5% for warranty and defect liability period assurance, 10% for small business partnerships and only 20% for price.
Financial stability is not mentioned in terms of revenues, profits and book value, but in terms of positive networth certified by an accredited chartered accountant.
There should also be a warranty and defect liability period given by the contractor for maintenance and defect rectification and also for minimum guaranteed life of the project.
If a contractor is willing to give a higher warranty and defect liability period, there should be additional weightage.
If a contractor is willing to donate at least 50% of their profits to the True Temples in the state, they should get extra preference as a condition for higher quoted price but no relaxation for qualifications and financial stability and small business participation.
Even if a contractor has no significant past experience, but if they present a team of individuals or firms with requisite qualifications, the qualifications of the individuals or team should be given at least 50% weightage in the 45% allocated for the qualifications and credentials part of the contract.
Startups with equity funding less than Rs 15 crores can be given 100% weightage in the 45% allocated for the qualifications and credentials part of the contract.
Startups with equity funding less than Rs 15 crores can be given can be waived from the 20% weightage for financial stability if they can prove they will get assured funding to complete the job upon award of the contract.
But there should be no relaxation in the rest of the weightage for financial stablity, small business participation and warranty and defect liability for other experienced vendors.
In fact if the contractor has a stable credit history and no default history of at least 8 years to banks, employees, vendors and subcontractors, then loans should also be extended to them or they should be allowed to raise money from the stake holders or the public to finance the project.
All government projects must invite a minimum of 3 bids.
Bids can also be received on an unsolicited sole source basis from Startups and Small businesses and then put to Swiss Challenge to award the contract.
Qualified Startups are those with equity market value less than Rs 15 crores.
Qualified small business are those with turnover less than Rs 15 crores or net profits less than Rs 5 crores.
In no event can a government give a sole source contract, even to government owned contractors and consultants.
Government contractors and consultants should be evaluated on the same platform as private contractors and consultants while participating in government project bids.
All private consultants and contractors who bid for government projects should not have any hidden business or family relationships to the government client and even to the ministers in that government department.
If these private firms do have any business or family or other personal connections to the government client, then they should fully disclose this in advance, and no associated and interested government official of that department should be involved in the project evaluation or award or execution.
All evaluations for bids must be completely transparent and posted on the public RTI website.
After the bid is awarded all written, email and phone and personal communication of the bidders with the government clients should also be posted on the government RTI website.
All meeting minutes for any sort of meeting (verbal, personal, teleconference, email, messaging, whatsapp etc) between the bidder and the client must be documented and posted on the government RTI website.
In the event it is found that some communication is hidden and not disclosed, then the defaulting bidder must be blacklisted for 1 year and the defaulting government employee must be suspended for 1 year with no salary.
In the event it was found that the communication was hidden because it influenced or manipulated the evaluation, award or execution of the work, then the defaulting bidder must be blacklisted for 2 years and the defaulting government employee must be suspended for 3 years with no salary, and their pension should be cancelled.
Any bribe offered by the bidder to a government official or elected representative or other government or even non-government company official must have a penalty of 10 times the amount of bribe paid applied to the bidder.
The contract should be cancelled and the bidder should be blacklisted for 5 years.
Any bribe accepted by the government or non-government official must have a penalty of 10 times the amount of bribe recovered from the corrupt government official.
They should be subject to the law for corruption.
In the event it is found that some senior level administrator, minister or other persons pressured the government department and influenced the bid, then an amount of 50% of the contract value must be recovered from this influencing person.
They should be subject to the law for corruption.
In the event the corrupt bidders or officials or influencers are unable to pay the penalty, their assets should be auctioned to recover the amount.
If the firms cannot pay, the assets of the firms should be taken over by the state for the portion of the amount due.
This can also be in the form of a share holding – the state will get a share in the firm and be entitled to its profits and assets.
No awarded bidder can prevent other bidders to go to court and challenge the award of the contract if the other bidders feel there is malpractice in the award.
If any contractor has been blacklisted in the past they should not be considered for contracts for at least 4 years even if they quote the lowest price.
Contractors should be supervised by independent consultants especially for large works.
These independent consultants should not have any financial investment, loan or other financial associations with the firms they are supervising.
These independent consultant firms should also not have any family connections to the firms they are supervising.
In no event can an independent consulting firm hire a director, management partner or senior level technical leader from the contractor firms they are supervising.
In the same manner no contractor firm can hire a director, management partner or senior level technical leader from the independent consultant firms supervising them.
If there is any collusion between these independent consultants and the contractors, then they both should be blacklisted from any future contracts for 7 years and twice the amount that they have billed to the contract should be recovered from them.
If they cannot pay, the assets of both the companies should be taken over by the state for the portion of the amount due.
This can also be in the form of a share holding – the state will get a share in the company and be entitled to its profits and assets.
Sometimes a consultant may not have control over all its staff, the collusion may not be systemic, but individual based, as a contractor can bribe an individual.
If this occurs, then the contractor should be disqualified from the contract, made to pay twice the contract amount paid to them, and the employee of the consultant who took the bribe should be disqualified, and their entire salary for twice the amount of time they spent on the contract and 10 times the amount they accepted as bribe should be recovered from them.
If that means that they have to seize their assets and auction it, then that too should be done.
For small firms run by bright experienced individuals but with little no capital, we should have a small business quota for such types of people and it should be made mandatory for all large businesses to include small businesses in their bids for projects.
A small business should be based solely on the number of people employed, ideally less than 15 people or whatever is applicable based on the sizing of numbers as suited for the profession.
A law firm with even 10 or more lawyers is considered a large sized firm.
A garment factory with 20 workers is considered a small firm.
In engineering consulting any thing less than 20 people is a small business, but in construction contracting anything less than 20 people is a small business so this number will vary according to the type of business.
Even if small businesses are selected, in no event should the small business have any financial investments, loans or personal family associations with the large businesses that they are partnering with.


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I think that you will find variance on the answer to this question. In my mind, I think that each possessed a rather disturbing side to the modern conception of the President's office. Each one features an example of the President or members of his candidate acting outside the boundaries or norms of the office. I would say that the most dangerous would have been Watergate because it put forth the fundamental questions that would guide the other two investigations: What did the President know? When did he know it? These two issues first arose in Watergate and became the guiding questions that Reagan and Clinton had to answer. I think that Iran- Contra has received some of a pass over time because of the overall Regan Presidency, which has been perceived as a mostly positive experience. The Clinton scandal was one that ended up being more tabloid and while its symbolic scar on the president's office was present, it was not as nearly as Constitutionally challenging as Watergate.
Public vs. private is the major distinction of the three political scandals. Only one of the scandals, the Iran-Contra affair, involved scandal on an international scale. However, each scandal made an impact on U.S. history.
Watergate has been called the greatest political scandal of all time. It was a scandal of epic proportions, even though it only involved Americans directly. Pres. Nixon, who held the most power and influence in the U.S., directed and funded (using taxpayer money) a break-in. All of the evidence pointed to Nixon, including wire taps he had installed in his own office. After being found guilty of the actual and related crimes, Pres. Nixon was forced into a humiliating, public resignation.
President Clinton faced impeachment and removal from office after it became obvious that he used carefully-worded language to lie about an affair. During that time, many people stated that Clinton's lies hurt no one but his family. The belief was that the president's behavior was his own business. However, the affair did tarnish the world had of the U.S; jokes about the president were common.
Government officials normally refuse to negotiate with individuals who hold captives however the Iran-Contra affair was a case of indirect negotiation. The Iran-Contra affair had an impact on the U.S. international standing. Not only was diversion of government funds and cover-up exposed, but this affair was on an international scale. The situation began innocently enough with an attempt to help Iran, but the effort fell through. No evidence of the unethical act points directly to President Reagan.
Pres. Nixon's offense is the most offensive because he willfully committed a crime and then covered it up.
Great question. In all three of these examples, impeachment proceedings were at least talked about, and in two of those cases, followed through to the Senate trial phase. So I guess you can say they share the fact that some people in government at the time of the incidents believed that...
impeachable offenses had occurred.
I agree that Watergate was the worst of the three, although I also tend to weigh the fact that Nixon did a number of other unconstitutional things that are part of a pattern that make Watergate worse. The bottom line is he was trying to rig a Presidential election he subsequently won, and that is certainly justifiable to then want him removed from that office.
Iran-Contra involved a covert operation. And while the President can and does order such operations, this one involved two questionable things: 1) ignoring the stated, voted upon will of Congress regarding Contra funding, and 2) committing illegal transactions by selling weapons to Iran, violating the embargo.
Clinton's scandal with perjury - lying under oath about the Monica Lewinsky affair - seems the least qualified as an impeachable offense. It was stupid, to be sure, and Clinton used laughably bad judgement for a professional politician in that case. But in the end, he lied about doing something that wasn't illegal, and his impeachment seemed heavily due to politics, Republicans vs. Democrats.
This is, of course, a matter of opinion. My opinion is that Watergate was way worse than either of the other two.
The reason I say this is that Watergate involved an actual cover up ordered by the President. This is extremely serious in that President Nixon was ordering people to use their governmental powers to obstruct justice.
I think that this is more serious than what Clinton did. Clinton was lying, but he was not using the power of the government to try to cover up what he had done. I also think that his basic "crime" was much less important since it did not involve trying to subvert the process of democracy.
As far as Iran-Contra goes, the part that Reagan clearly knew about (the idea of supporting the Contras after Congress said not to) is not that bothersome to me because the branches of government try to maneuver to get around each other when they feel the need to do so.


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Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred to the Vladimir region some 200 kilometres (124 miles) east of Moscow to serve a 2.5-year term in a penal colony
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred to the Vladimir region some 200 kilometres (124 miles) east of Moscow to serve a 2.5-year term in a penal colony, Moscow's public commission that monitors detainees' human rights said Sunday.
President Vladimir Putin's most prominent opponent was sentenced this month to 2.5 years in a penal colony for breaching parole terms while in Germany recovering from a poisoning attack.
For several days, his allies had been unaware of his whereabouts, with the head of the Federal Prison Service saying Friday Navalny had been transferred from a Moscow detention centre to a penal colony without providing further details.
Reports based on unnamed sources circulated in local media over the weekend about Navalny's possible location, before Moscow's public commission said in a statement Sunday that the opposition figure was in a Federal Prison Service institution in the Vladimir region.
' We have 100 percent information that Navalny arrived in the Vladimir region to serve his sentence,' a member of the commission, Alexei Melnikov, told the Inferfax news agency.
' At first, he will be in quarantine, then he will be transferred to his colony,' he added.
Navalny spent months recovering in Germany from the near fatal poisoning with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok that he claims was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the claim.
The 44-year-old opposition politician was arrested on his return to Moscow last month, sparking a wave of protests across the country and a brutal police crackdown.
Leaders of Western countries have condemned his detention and called for his immediate release.
The European Union has agreed to impose sanctions on four senior Russian officials over the crackdown.