Optics, as they say, are everything. And by “they,” I mean the mouth-breathing children at Politico, who would sooner self-immolate than file a story on anything other than “what to watch out for” in tonight’s exit polls of elderly, Jewish, pressed Cuban sandwiches.

So imagine our surprise when Politico and the rest of the lamestream media failed to home in on the surprising optics behind Gabby Giffords’s triumphant return to the limelight—post-book, pre-resignation, and all cuddly wuddly Congress-victim.

The now-former Arizona Congresswoman and assassination-attempt survivor just doesn’t look like the cactus-eating, border patrolling Blue Dog Democrat she once was. In fact, she looks like a rather accessible lesbian—an accessbian.

Old Gabby

New Gabby

With her short cropped hair, slightly askew glance and sweet doe eyes, she feels like the nurturing, hyperliberal non-profit mom/friend of your aunt’s who’s ready to sit down with a nice bottle of NPR before she pets you with her thesis on cisgender performativity.

She’s just different now—and that’s a good thing.

Old Gabby would’ve driven to the office in a mid-sized American sedan, disguising her double shot Dunkaccino® inside a carefully selected tumbler bearing the logo of a local java joint as she careened down the streets of Phoenix. New Gabby drives to Taos with her womyn friends, sipping on tea from a Dukakis ’88 thermos.

The possibilities are endless. Just look how much Obama loves her:

Hugz we can believe in

Now, please enjoy this gallery of lesbians who look like Gabby Giffords. We salute you, Gabby.

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Credits

Photography Marco Roso
Casting Preston Chaunsumlit
Models Johanna, Kremi, Charlene, and Anni at Ford, Emily at Marilyn, Iana at Supreme, Serena at Women Direct, Varsha, Jlynn, and Anna Z. at Wilhelmina.

DIS met all the guidelines as recommended by the CFDA as issued for the season of Fall/Winter 2011:

• models at least 16 years old
• limited working hours and frequent and sufficient breaks and time for rest; work not extended to after midnight for those under 18
• nutritious snacks and non-alcoholic beverages provided
• a non-smoking set/backstage

Credit cards are not a battle between good and evil, but a battle between the future and reality. Recently, the debt landscape in the United States has quantum shifted in the direction of reality, away from the virtual. In 2008, regular Americans began paying off their credit cards. In a recession, debt becomes more expensive – not necessarily in terms of credit card interest rates – but more in terms of the value of cash being wasted on repaying debt. Credit tightening doesn’t usually mean drastically higher rates for existing consumer debt (they are already profitably high) – but it means fewer new credit cards. It probably means $1000 dollars in cash buys a little more. It definitely means companies large and small have more trouble borrowing money. It’s better to give gold coins now than to have a treasure map.

Credit crunches because the future is less certain. Statistically, loans in a recession are less likely to get returns. Defaults increase. The virtual reality of debt gets spookier and closer to the hard reality of human economy. We are forced to consider an economy that may not grow as we imagine and hope it will. This most recent level of the masterplastic credit wargame was challenging, with many looming costbots, camping around bends in textured dungeon walls. A bank aims a sniper rifle of surprise fees. A big lumbering housing-crisis juggernaut blocks an exit.

Recently, consumers began taking on debt again. For macro economists, this was a good sign. A sign of consumer confidence. For econofuturists and capital activists, this is an indication that the game-layer of virtual money has swooped in again to cover the real economy with a wonderful +5HP purple cape.

What does the turning tide of credit mean on a global scale? Perhaps it means the recession is over. Perhaps it means real economic value adjustments have occurred. But who knows?

From my PC gaming set-up (custom LED tower, 27-inch monitor, roller-ball mouse), things still seem very grim in the MMORPG of the global economy. With this concrete uncertainty, expect a more spiritual brand of wealth management to emerge in the United States (it already has in India). Expect the unreality of debt and wealth to expand in scale and complexity.

In America, the level boss of all this debt gameplay is perhaps the US domestic government debt – or maybe rising health care costs – or fossil fuel energy prices? There will be an end to this game, however pixeled or un-cinematic. Our virtual lives may continue, though our bodies will get older and we will be less able to work, to procure funds. Our love for abstract rewards goes on infinitely, but our material world will only exist if we can afford to pay the monthly premiums.

LuckyPDF ñ BubbleByte Party
Friday, January 27th
Bussey Building, 133 Copeland Rd, London
bubblebyte.luckypdf.tv
bubblebyte.org

Mendeel Um A7mad (N x I x S x M) is a multimedia installation by Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid al Gharaballi, to be exhibited at Contemporary Art Platform Kuwait (CAP) in Kuwait. The project presents the tissue box as an unlikely Kuwaiti national icon. The two-part installation consists of a film projected inside a monumental tissue box — created in collaboration with Kuwait-based designers Aziz Alqatami and Nanu Al-Hamad. The film aims to create a representation of the Chai Dhaha ritual, a traditional female forum, using an all-male cast in homage to Abdul Aziz Al-Nimish–who pioneered gender role reversal in Kuwaiti theatre.

In Mendeel Um A7mad (NxIxSxM), the Chai Dhaha ritual is set out-of-context, in a wedding ballroom to illustrate the absurd spatial conditions of post-oil boom Kuwaiti interior aesthetics, where designing to human scale took a backseat to supersized ostentation. The tissue box sculpture acts as a displaced, large-scale replica of an actual box featured in the film–a sixth “character,” performance instigator and voyeur/witness.

Exhibition open from Wednesday January 25 to Thursday February 9th, 2012
Hours: 5-9pm. Closed Fridays.

To the Acquisitions Committee at the Museum of Modern Art,

As you are aware, on Friday January 13, 2012, a coalition of art groups from Occupy Wall Street including Occupy Sotheby’s, Occupy Museums, and OWS Arts and Labor joined in an historic protest within the walls of your institution. The immediate purpose of our protest was to call for an end to the nearly 6 month lockout of unionized art handlers from Teamsters Local 814 by the Sotheby’s auction house. Sotheby’s sold 3.4 million dollars worth of art in the first half of 2011 alone–a record profit–yet it wants to cut the health benefits and pay of the workers that make its operations possible on a day-to-day basis. We chose MoMA as the site for our protest because your institution has various ties to Sotheby’s, including shared board members. Furthermore, Sotheby’s board member Danny Meyer is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality group, a corporation that owns the three MoMA restaurants and many more throughout the city.

Our assembly at MoMA, which involved more than one hundred participants, culminated in the dropping of a large red-and-black banner from the 5th floor of the museum into the central atrium. Designed by a group of OWS artists called the Novads, the banner read “When art is just a luxury, art is a lie, end the lockout!” and “Sotheby’s: Hang art, not workers, end your lockout.” The banner-drop was captured by dozens of cameras, and images of the event are rapidly circulating across the globe.

Minutes after the banner was dropped, it was taken without our consent by the MoMA’s Director of Security. We would like to make it clear that we consider this to be a unilateral acquisition. It was a hostile appropriation of our art by your museum. Institutions around the country are negotiating with OWS to acquire archival materials for their collections, and through this act MoMA has now made itself an important site of this national debate.

If the museum is serious about acquiring this artwork, we demand a proper negotiating platform and acquisition-process. We therefore present the following conditions for MoMA in keeping the historical banner of January 13th as part of its permanent collection:

1. MoMA releases a letter addressed to Sotheby’s calling on them to end the lockout of Teamsters Local 814.

2. “Target Free Fridays” are never publicized by MoMA without citing the Art Workers’ Coalition whose protests led to free museum days in the early 1970s.

3. Whenever the banner is on display, the details of its acquisition, including the action of January 13, 2012 are available. Any accompanying text must be approved by Occupy Museums and the coalition of groups that collaborated on this action.

We would be open to meeting to discuss the logistical details of these conditions; but if our terms cannot ultimately be met, we respectfully request the return of our art.

As part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Occupy Museums is concerned with advancing economic justice in the cultural realm for the 99%. We believe that art and its history is part of the commons, and we are acting to take it back from corporate interests. Our concerns exceed any single institution, and this is only the first of many interventions planned for the Spring and beyond. Expect us.

—Occupy Museums