My wife, Diane Eickhoff, has an op-ed piece in today's Kansas City Star reviewing one of the earlier chapters in American history that remind one that we have, unfortunately, been there and done that. It's about the little-known but hugely influential 1867 Kansas universal suffrage campaign. If successful, it would've given blacks the vote (three years before the 15th Amendment was ratified) and granted women their long-sought goal of suffrage. Instead, the historical initiative for women got pitted against the historical initiative for African Americans and ... well, let's go to the tape:
Diane Eickhoff | Democrats shouldn't repeat 1860s Kansas mistake
(P.S. While blacks waited just three more years to get the vote, the women's movement was deeply damaged by the campaign and had another 53 years ahead of it before suffrage was finally passed.)
Did I mention Diane's book just went into a second printing? And that you can buy it from us here? (Or them there?)
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Meanwhile, turning to the familiar green pages of FYI -- by the way, we were green before it was cool -- here's sort of part two to my late-night commentary that began here yesterday:
Kansas City Star | Is Fallon right for "Night"?
Although I did write part two first. Anyway, in the back of that story is a long sidebar I wrote assessing each of the major personalities in late night, so even if you aren't interested in Fallon, check that out. And see if you can set those commenters straight. Thanks.
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Finally, I see that Robert Rauschenberg has died at the age of 82. The famed creator of "Erased de Kooning Drawing" and the "Red Painting" series and "Bed," of course, not to mention tons of other sculptures created out of found objects, lived off the coast of Florida in a mansion with, I believe I read somewhere, nine TVs, which were usually all on. Long before the age of information, RR was living it, and his work was his payback.
My first exposure to RR was the ginormous Rauschenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1997. I hadn't known about all his TV sets at the time, but I do remember being impressed, like so many before me, at his talent at assembling detritus from the American overload of information into forms that were both coherent and incoherent. To me in hindsight, it's a humbling fact of working in media that we are awash in data, that we have our whole careers to sort through the data and make sense of it, and as a critic I have the double privilege of being able to interpret them in my opinion without worrying that someone will complain about my "bias." I'm paid to be biased. Fair, but biased. And yet rarely am I able to make a story, a thought, a concept, complete to my satisfaction. Writing for me is a battle with incoherence, and rarely do I feel I've completely vanquished my foe. So yeah, I liked the old guy and his crazy quilts of media.
