IDEAS AND THE ELECTION

LET'S FACE IT IN 2012

a serious review of the candidates' faces

By Amanda Sebastiani

Face to Face

This presidential race is peculiar in that we have two fairly good-looking candidates. In the past we’ve had men like Richard Nixon and his bulbous nose, John McCain and his stoplight red cheeks, Shorty Dukakis, big faced John Kerry, Bushes 1 and 2, too preppy inbred to be handsome and Al Gore, he of the sweaty jowls and the high forehead. True, we’ve had some make-my-heart-flutter poster boys—Hollywood Ron Reagan, knee shaking John F. Kennedy, and even the big boy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who was kind of good looking in a hick by way of Yale way. But this year, unbelievably we have two candidates who are, well, not so hard to look at. Both President Obama and Governor Romney are good looking, attractive men, at least sevens, maybe eights on the standard ten point scale of attractiveness that the entire world is judged by. The President and Romney are visually perfect candidates for the type of voters their respective parties want to attract. So let’s start with the obvious.

ART

THE ANGER CHILD VS. INFORMATIVE ADULTS

a review of YBCA's Occupy Bay Area!

By Amanda Sebastiani

All around the world/We are the 99%!

You enter Occupy Bay Area at YBCA through the back and up the stairs. When you get there, you aren’t quite sure whether you are at the beginning or the end. It’s like the movement itself: are we at the start of a well-needed revolution or the sad, last gasp of progressive politics? It’s all a little disconcerting, especially when you look at the first wall and it’s small, so small. There are a handful of posters, mostly ones that anyone living in the Bay Area in 2011 would recognize. That’s me all over: take a trip on a time machine and go back one whole year! But behold, I turn the corner and I’m facing several framed typewritten documents (this is a museum after all), exclaiming: “PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS,” “U.N. Plaza,” and “YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!” What’s going on here? Are the curators at YBCA actually suggesting that there was another Occupy movement?