what is normal?

or so this postcard-quote by Derek Jarman - the short-lived but prodigious English film director and artist - tells me:

Wowee it’s a good day! As if a small serving of normal tracking isn’t already at capacity (after a completely empty July), then someone actually sends in the first submitted what is normal? sighting! More odd, the submission was sent via a cell phone, courtesy of ‘vzwpix.com’, which is Verizon Wireless’s online site for user’s to manage their phone’s content. Wowee! Was it sent live? Shot in the wild? What is it, anyhow!?

A quick google search revealed what my suspicion somewhat hoped for, that not only is the phrase ‘normal readers’ indexed by the notorious googlebot, but it references a book that Google has also digitized for online reading!

A three-volume set by May Louise Harvey, the user-submitted image above shows the ‘THIRD BOOK’. Google has digitized the FIRST BOOK. The three grabs below show the only instances of normal I can be bothered to find in this title - it’s content otherwise being too much of a bore to troll through.

Even with a glance I couldn’t figure out why it’s titled what it’s titled.

Joe Torre, easily regarded as one of the best active managers in baseball - even if his Dodgers are merely .500-hovering all season - and who will no doubt enter the pantheon of baseball for his commitment to the game, the players, the fans and again the game, recently admitted following the Manny Ramirez trade to Los Angeles that part of his managerial repertoire includes conducting “normal meetings”:

“I don’t know what my thinking is right now. Manny obviously will be in the middle of that lineup, and we’re just going to have to, as we go along, try to figure it out. I’ll probably get the whole team in there together before we break up for our normal meetings just to sort of give them some thoughts. I really don’t know who’s going to get impacted the most on this thing.”

[via MLB article]

Pedro Martinez is regarded as one of the best pitchers in major league baseball these days, and is a guaranteed future Hall of Famer. He’s a strikeout maestro, currently ranked 5th in active pitchers and 15th historically. He came off a two-month medical rehab yesterday, and pitched a quality-but-not-Pedro-quality game, allowing three runs, walking three and striking out three. Three strikeouts it would seem, is considered “mid-season normal” for Pedro Martinez. MLB reports:

The modest performance spoke for itself — six innings (109 pitches), seven hits, three runs, three walks, three strikeouts. His final 11 batters produced five of the seven hits. But he pitched out of trouble in the fifth and sixth innings. He allowed two runs in the fifth after the first three batters reached base. The first two reached base in the sixth. But neither scored.

“He saved his best pitches for when they put runners on base,” Castro said.

In that regard, Martinez was mid-season normal.

His stamina and velocity — he was at or close to 90 miles per hour on most of his fastballs — were good.

“He looked good. I don’t think he looked bad at all,” Giants shortstop Omar Vizquel said. “He was still throwing 90 miles an hour. I think at the beginning of the game he had a problem hitting his spots, but then he settled down a little and started pitching better.”

The more uplifting development was this, in Martinez’s words: “I came off the field in the same shape I went on.” No trace of a problem, he said. The left hamstring that betrayed him before he reached the fifth inning in April behaved properly. It even allowed Martinez to make a trip around the bases. He scored one of the Mets’ eight runs in the fifth inning and had two hits.

full text here

trackback to the game wrap considered mid-season normal

The New Normal is an exhibition of artwork made between 2001-2008 currently on view at Artists Space in Manhattan, NYC, and co-organized by the iCI (that acronym isn’t even defined on the iCI’s own website, but it stands for “independent Curators International“). I haven’t seen the exhibition so I won’t pretend to say what the show is about, nor re-hash the press release text which purports the exhibition to be about notions of privacy.

The show’s title claims to come from a speech given by American vice president Dick Cheney shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but no such proof is given online (perhaps in the show’s catalogue the quote is reprinted). Cheney’s exact quote given on 2001 October 25 to the Republican Governors Association was:

Homeland security is not a temporary measure just to meet one crisis. Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy.

(download full PDF transcript of the speech, grabbed from whitehouse.gov)

Because of Cheney’s high-profile, and the overwhelming Orwellian nature of his speech and that quote in particular (the Patriot Act was passed the following day), the phrase was noticed and has since been picked up by several organizations: turned into a PBS series examining teens’ responses to life after 9/11; used to sell some spiritual fodder, “morning glow is here at last”; in 2003 the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights which has since become Human Rights First published a report, “Assessing the New Normal: Liberty and Security for the Post-September 11 United States” (download) critiquing life in relation to the law under an increasingly secretive U.S. government post-9/11; an exhibition in Los Angeles from 2006; and the exhibition title that inspired this blog post, which has an accompanying Web site, flickr account, del.icio.us feed, tumblr blog, and youtube account (too bad they’re so concerned about privacy they won’t allow embedding of their videos!).

McCain, quoted by the AP, regarding the situation in Iraq thanks to last year’s troop buildup there.

full story at the Huffington Post

scene from Ridley Scott’s 2007 American Gangster

Indeed. And so it begins!