A recommendation of art

I went to a lovely gallery show tonight for a Tunisian Jewish artist, a painter who is now living in Paris, named Lisa Seror. She makes blurry, lonely oil paintings of tottering chairs on skinny legs, huddling together, and somehow, each group of painted chairs has a different feel and mood to it, but they all still add up to something more - a community of chairs, a flock of chairs.

She got her chair obsession psychoanalyzed and says it has something to do with communities - with homes, with talking - with how the Tunisian Jews would always sit around and talk to each other. But all her chairs are empty, or they just have one squiggle of a line on them or around them that suggests a face.

The Tunisian ambassador was at the show and made a brief speech, which was a nice gesture toward the Jewish community, which I don't think is having such a great time in Tunisia right now.

Midtown is crawling with ambassadors. and the only thing that there are more of than ambassadors are cops. And the only thing that there are more of than cops are Falun Dafa activists, who stand silently with their t-shirts and flags, or drive endlessly around the block in vans with Falun Dafa banners on them (I saw one today that just said "Falun Dafa Good" and something presumably equivalent in Chinese).

They're doing a great job, these guys, you got to hand it to them. Maybe they started out as a little peaceful spiritual yoga club, which is how they always portray themselves, but they have this incredible, massive, mobilized PR campaign and corps of recruits, and they're freakin' everywhere.

--M