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Two Art Things
Posted 9:37 AM, Aug 29, 2008 |
In the recent trend of posting two or three of things, here are two things about art:
1) A painting by cubist painter Fernand Leger is missing from Wellesley College’s collection after loaning it to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art last year. It may have been thrown out with the packing crates, but nobody’s quite sure. (Earlier this year, a Leger painting sold for almost $40,000,000.) Oops.
2) Also, the EC and I watched My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about a four- or five-year-old “painter,” Marla Olmstead, who is, arguably, a fraud. The film plays into this idea of questioning the viability of modern art - after all, if people buy this girl’s paintings and think they’re “museum-worthy,” is there really that much skill involved? Well, of course, there are two things to consider, both of which I will present in this sub-list, so hang on:
2a) The people that bought the paintings are, arguably, fools, easily taken in by what sounds like a charming and unbelievable story. There were no actual art critics present in the movie (not that art critics are the only people that can appreciate art). The one person who proclaimed the pieces “museum-worthy” was a psychologist.
2b) Of course, the paintings aren’t really by the girl. They’re (arguably) by her father, or at least touched up by her father, an aspiring (but not very successful) artist in his own right. Paintings produced by Marla on camera are, well, childish, and bear no comparison to the higher-quality pieces hanging on foolish people’s walls.
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Three Things to Remember About Guitar
Posted 11:52 AM, Aug 26, 2008 |
This post is more for me than you.
1) Use the ring finger for the high e-string.
2) Use the thumb, when necessary, to fret the low e-string.
3) Seriously, I forgot the third thing. I came up with this list yesterday and now don’t remember.
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Guitar
Posted 11:49 AM, Aug 26, 2008 |
Warm skulls
and spidering fingers
linger over the six-string,
nails pluck rosewood notes
like pulling chicken feathers,
each one singular and connected
to the roadmapped flesh of melody.
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Two Jokes
Posted 11:38 AM, Aug 26, 2008 |
Q) Where do the Russians keep their armies?
A) In their sleevies.
Q) What did Saddam Hussein and Little Miss Muffet have in common?
A) They both had curds in their whey.
See you later.
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Two Unrelated Topics
Posted 2:00 PM, Aug 19, 2008 |
Here’s two things, totally unrelated to one another (apart from the fact that both came from Jason Kottke’s website, in some form or another).
1) I know lots of doctors, joy joy, and so this list of 10 people with unbelievable medical conditions caught my eye. It tells me just the right amount - it tells me what their condition is, and, where appropriate, gives me an explanation in layman’s terms of what might be causing it, and then it tells me what the effect is on their normal lives. It is a perfect medical list for me.
2) I generally avoid politics because people on the Internet (and everywhere) get kind of insane when you mention John McCain or Barack Obama. So I generally stand clear. So let’s pretend that this story isn’t so much about politics (which it isn’t, really, so not much pretending required). Let’s say that the reason I’m most interested in this story is simply because of the investigative power of the Internet, the same Internet that first broke the John Edwards affair story, before the National Enquirer and then the mainstream media.
So John McCain tells this great story, repeatedly, about someone in a prison camp he was in drawing a cross in the sand in front of him and how he was all inspired. Only problem, as it turns out, is that the story is actually plagiarized from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Also, it turns out that McCain is a big fan of Solzhenitsyn’s, as evidenced by this piece from the New York Sun written by McCain. (At least we think it was written by McCain.)
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No Time for Proper Spelling
Posted 12:04 PM, Aug 18, 2008 |
Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England says we should just allow people to spell things wrong, and instead of saying that their spelling is incorrect, we should say it is a “variant spelling.”
Of course, Ken Smith is a fool.
He notes some commonly misspelled words like February and twelfth, noting that they are often misspelled as Febuary and twelth and that the confusion is due to silent letters.
Of course, February should be pronounced with both rs intact, and I don’t know how you pronounce twelfth in England, but here in the US, the f certainly isn’t silent.
Now, one could say, well, Ken Smith, in addition to being foolish, is just some random guy. Of course, the story where I learned about Ken Smith was in Time magazine. Awesome.
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Could’ve Been Faster
Posted 9:52 AM, Aug 16, 2008 |
So one of the reasons I don’t like watching track events is that the winning runner, if they have any sort of lead, always slows down toward the end. In fact, in the US trials in Eugene, OR, one runner slowed down so much she almost got passed at the end and had to clumsily sprint to the finish.
In the 100m final, Usain Bolt finished in a world-record 9.69 seconds. Too bad it could’ve been faster, as he started celebrating with 10 strides to go.
How can I take a sport seriously where the competitors don’t try their hardest all the time (or at least in final events; I understand lagging it in heats to conserve energy)?
(Note that we’re not talking about doping in this post, even though this post is about the Olympics. We regret the oversight.)
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Olympic Spectacle
Posted 10:02 AM, Aug 12, 2008 |
Sure, we can’t be sure that the Chinese female gymnasts are of age to compete - how will we ever know?
But, keep in mind that the 9-year-old girl who sang “Ode to the Motherland” during the opening ceremonies wasn’t actually singing - turns out she was lip-syncing to a 7-year-old’s voice.
Oh, and those great shots of the fireworks at the opening ceremonies? Yeah, those were fake too.
But seriously, I’m sure those girls are old enough to compete in gymnastics.
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Seattle, WA
Posted 9:38 AM, Aug 8, 2008 |
As mentioned previously, the EC and I took a trip to Seattle. Here are some photos I took there.
Seattle, WA
I hope you like them. If they’re slow to load, remember that the Sistine Chapel took years to paint.
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Delayed Reaction
Posted 11:54 AM, Aug 7, 2008 |
After many delays departing LAX (a 1:00 flight, originally, that ended up leaving at about 7:30), the EC and I made it to Seattle. We did some fun things - we recorded a 10-minute jam at the Experience Music Project, we visited the Pike Street Market, and had some fine food.
We also went to a Mariners vs. Twins game at Safeco Field. Before the game began, a seagull shit on me, so that should have been a sign. The Twins got out to a quick lead, extended it to 6-0, gave one run back in the 6th inning, and made it to the bottom of the 7th leading 6-1. At that point, they gave up 10 runs to the Mariners, all in the 7th, and ended up losing the game by 4 runs or so. Ah well, we all thought, at least the Twins are still in first place.
That was true until the following day, when the lowly Mariners beat the Twins with another come-from-behind victory.
Nevertheless, a fun trip, but exhausting, as vacations are. There are photos that I’ll put up a little later, probably on the weekend.
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Still Pursuing Trivia, I Guess
Posted 10:52 AM, Aug 2, 2008 |
So I auditioned for Trivial Pursuit: America Plays yesterday with no luck. It wasn’t that they weren’t swayed by my winning personality - we never got that far. I didn’t pass, as I refer to it, “their little trivia test.” I’m not allowed to say a whole lot about it, confidentiality, etc., but I’ll say it was loaded on pop culture and all the questions about things where I should have been able to separate myself (literature, science) were either absent or mind-blowingly easy. The topic that separated the wheat from the chaff was, apparently, celebrity marriages and offspring.
Sorry, I must be busy doing other things. If that’s what trivia is all about, I’ll pass. Hopefully, in thirty years, nobody will care about Britney Spears, but Ben Franklin will still be on the $100 bill.
I’m not sure what that means, but I will say if they ever put Britney Spears on any denomination of money, I’m taking a vow of poverty.
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