Sherry Chandler

An editorial in today’s online Washington Post should be disturbing to any artist. It recounts an act of vandalism that took place in Moscow in 2003. Vandals broke into a gallery that is part of the Andrei Sakharov museum and destroyed a number of paintings that they found offensive.

The exhibition, titled “Caution! Religion,” was intended, the curators explained, to get people to focus on the danger of religious fanaticism and prejudice in a country where only Russian Orthodoxy has any firm legal status. The vandals were acolytes of the Russian Orthodox Church. After a brief investigation, charges against them were dropped on the grounds that the exhibition was indeed offensive. Instead, museum administrators were put on trial. Last week a judge found the museum’s executive director, Yuri Samodurov, guilty of “inciting hatred”; also convicted were a colleague and an exhibiting artist. All were fined…The case also illustrates the degree to which Russian justice is once again becoming beholden to the whim of authority. [Boldface added by SC.] The constitution guarantees freedom of expression and religion and forbids censorship — none of which dissuaded prosecutors from demanding that museum administrators be held criminally accountable.

So, why should we care what happens in Russia now that its leader is a soulmate to our own? A question that answers itself perhaps.

Ernie O’Dell is the Prez, and here’s why. She has graciously given me this poem for my catblog during National Poetry Month. The cat is Smokey, who knew his own beauty.

A Love Poem

Night after night the cat stands long-legged on my chest
between my eyes and the page, her arrogant, innocent
fur-ness guarding me, regarding the words unaware.
Meee, she is saying.
Meee – the purr
the rumble –
love meee.
She rubs the slit of her mouth on my chin, her perfume,
faint and funky, rising with warmth, a reminder of a
recent slant encounter, rising not unpleasantly.
She slides off finally to snug beneath my arm, content
to watch my pen crawl the paper – an eye-tease.
She cuts her eyes to mine
like the insolent flirt that she is,
then lets them slide away
as if she is privy to the only truth that matters.