letters, 1/22/2003

[January 22nd, 2003] FINALLY, A USE FOR CALCULUS!

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Willamette Week is now employing advanced mathematical techniques in the espousing of its editorial opinions. I'm speaking of last week's article "Save Our State for 31 Cents a Day," in which the author effectively showed how Measure 28's generation of $724 million of extra taxes should actually be thought of as only being 31 cents a day. "Golly," I said, "how could anyone but a sleazeball argue against paying a mere 31 cents to save our state?"

But then a flash of pure brilliance hit me: Couldn't we expand upon this concept further? Feverishly putting my little mind to work, I realized that this 31 cents a day could be further reduced to 1.3 cents an hour, and then to only 0.021528 cents a minute, and finally to a practically nonexistent 0.000359 cents a second! And by using the principles of calculus and a differential time element, we can state with the greatest sincerity that the cost to you and me for such a tax increase practically vanishes into thin air!

So there you have it: A mathematical process of reducing the trillions of dollars of local, state and federal taxes we pay every year down to a perceived cost of zero. What a fine, objective and incontrovertible technique to argue against anyone who so dares to want to reduce government spending, and our taxes.

Gary L. Dye
Southeast 8th Avenue

IMMORTALITY THROUGH ART
I was wondering about the propriety of Richard Speer saying of Ed Kienholz "he's 75" [Visual Arts, WW, Jan. 15, 2002] when he died in 1994 at age 67.

His funeral is notorious: "His corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe," wrote Robert Hughes in Time magazine. "There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk. He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West, a fitting [exit] for this profuse, energetic, sometimes brilliant, and sometimes hopelessly vulgar artist."

Paul Sutinen
Director of Art Programs, Marylhurst University

Richard Speer responds: I stand corrected and thank Sutinen (a former WW contributor) for the colorful details of the artist's farewell tour.

ARSE FOR ART'S SAKE
Richard Speer's critique of the Kienholzes' exhibition details the workings (?) of the cultural alcoholic's mind. Anal retentiveness as a cultural pathology is demonstrated most efficiently between the pages of this particular representative rag. Vapid consumerism and its attendant repression of, and suicidal destruction of, the natural world cannot be recognized by a mindless reproduction of same. Even in the "art" world. Trash, entertainment, shit and its fear-based reactionary denial epitomize Western (American) culture. Wake up, Speer, and smell the roses--so to speak.

Joseph Hertel
Southeast 56th Avenue