Flag Day

Tina Modotti, Untitled (Woman With Flag, Mexico), 1928

Lovett/Codagnone, Stripped, 2006

Robert Mapplethorpe, American Flag, 1977

Robert Frank, Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955

Bernhard Wilhelm x Francois Sagat, Spring Summer 07-08 Men, 2007

See Also:
http://www.usflag.org/

Once More, With Feeling

"...y’know, I always wanted to be the kind of person who really took chances in life. Someone who got off the main highways, and took those little back roads and byways, and experienced a kind of an America that few of us get to see... a bittersweet, nostalgic, brave America.

I wanted to walk through the Midwest early in the morning, and watch all the farmers on their way to work in the amber fields of grain in Nebraska.

To pick strawberries next to my Chicano brothers and sisters underneath the hot California sun.

To watch the morning light shining off the lady of the harbor onto all the Korean grocers as they stocked their salad bars.

These were the sounds, sights, and smells I that I wanted to incorporate into my worldview. To learn to change my own damn tires, and get dirt under my nails and jack up my car, and live life to the fullest. I never wanted to depend on Triple A.

And I don’t know if I’ve become that kind of a person… But I would like to dedicate this last song tonight to all of those that came before me and forged those emotional and aesthetic highways so effortlessly. To those that had the guts to live life right on the edge..."

From Without You I'm Nothing, Sandra Bernhard, 1990.

Sandra Bernhard returns to New York City June 10th to re-perform Without You I'm Nothing, celebrating the show's 20th anniversary at Town Hall. The 1990 film version of the performance reenacts the original off-Broadway production as it is staged in LA. In the film, Bernhard executes Without You I'm Nothing for an almost entirely African American audience, and throughout, everyone slowly leaves. No laughter is heard, and at the film's end the audience's one remaining member scrawls "Fuck Sandra Bernhard" on a tablecloth in red lipstick.

The staging of Bernhard's film skillfully and subtly underscores racial strain and anxiety in the United States. It was also released a full two years before that stress catalyzed the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Throughout the film Bernhard addresses multiple facets of the American dream and its failure. She manages to narrate and inhabit the various characters she conjures with both a compelling, empathetic sincerity and caustic wit. The performance's greatest strength is her singular ability to occupy both of these disparate polarities simultaneously. What could easily be derided as a sarcastic and brittle or "petty, bilious" critique emerges as the best film about American Life in the 1980s.

See also:
http://www.sandrabernhard.com/