Category: Art

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It was divine!

Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.

Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.

I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.

In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)

Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:

Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.

As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.

We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.

Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.

After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.

If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes

  1. a comics-related art exhibition,
  2. an old library,
  3. some bizarre cuisine, and
  4. conversation with good friends

is pretty much as good as it gets.

(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)

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Underworld evolution

If you’re like me (fate worse than etc.), you revel in the amazing subway stations in foreign countries. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best intro to this article about making art from metro stops:

Building beautiful metro stations isn’t just a chance for cities to show off. It also provides valuable exposure for up-and-coming local artists and architects, giving them a chance to bring their work to the masses. “Artists have a captive audience,” says Edward Barber, director of programs at the London College of Fashion, who has been involved in the city’s Platform for Art initiative.

The accompanying slideshow has a pic of one of my faves: the Arts et Metiers stop in Paris, which looks like Jules Verne’s Nautilus.

(Bonus: my pics of the metro stop in Brussels decorated with a massive mural by Herge)

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Unrequired Reading: Nov. 17, 2006

What we see at Ground Zero and what we will see:

When the towers first fell and, in practically the same moment, so many turned to imagining their replacement, I was appalled. Later, when I started to write about the site, I avoided proposing designs of my own, both because they were banal and impracticable — I thought it would be cool to flood the bathtub — and because I felt such activities were beyond the scope of a responsible critic. I would often say, however — as I think I wrote or at least implied here once — two things: that the ultimate form of the reconstruction was unimportant as long as the process to achieve it, from the first planning session through the ribbon-cutting, was conducted with dignity; and second, that New York should be left to be New York.

t was as obvious then as now that those two ideas were in absolute conflict — that the city could in no way be the one we love and also comport itself with a special reserve — so I concocted a third idea, one that has proved remarkably durable, by way of resolution.

* * *

Last week in this space, I mentioned that Donald Rumsfeld is more than just The Guy Who Blew the Iraq War. He also tried to revolutionize/transform the U.S. military. This profile on him in the New Yorker is more charitable than I expected, or at least more willing to see the grays than to place him in a Manichean context.

And he blew the Iraq war.

* * *

Look, kids! An interview with writer, critic and Official VM Buddy Paul Di Filippo!

What do you use for note-taking, capturing ideas and tracking submissions? Are you a proponent of pencil and notebook; do you favour proprietary software; or is it open source everything for you, even though your initials are PDF?

I am old-fashioned enough to still stick with pen and paper for my note-taking. I have a pocket notebook brand that I love, Oxford Memo Books, because it’s sewn together instead of employing a metal spiral, and so when you sit on it, it doesn’t imprint your butt like something out of a Re/Search tribal scarification volume.

* * *

From science fiction to science disappointment: the 25 worst tech products of all time.

8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)

Full of features, easy to use, and a virtual engraved invitation to hackers and other digital delinquents, Internet Explorer 6.x might be the least secure software on the planet. How insecure? In June 2004, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) took the unusual step of urging PC users to use a browser — any browser — other than IE. Their reason: IE users who visited the wrong Web site could end up infected with the Scob or Download.Ject keylogger, which could be used to steal their passwords and other personal information. Microsoft patched that hole, and the next one, and the one after that, and so on, ad infinitum.

* * *

If you’re a professional basketball fan, and you like getting some idea of what goes on behind the scenes in player negotiations, you really need to read this long and candid interview with the owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Glen Taylor.

I can tell you that Chauncey [Billups] left not because of Kevin [McHale, the team’s GM] but because of Flip [Saunders, the Wolves’ coach]. Now, have we said that? We didn’t want to say that about Flip because he was here at the time. But I think since then it’s been stated that Kevin asked me if I would pay for Chauncey. I said I would. Kevin said he would, went to Chauncey, Chauncey said he would stay, because we were going to offer him the same [money] as Detroit. But then Chauncey went to Flip and said, would you play me, and Flip — I’m not saying that Flip said the wrong answer, but he said, “I’m not sure that I think that you’re our starting guard.” Chauncey then went back to Kevin, and Kevin says, basically, we’re going to be truthful. Kevin could have said to Chauncey, “Oh, we’re gonna start you.” And I know some GMs do that stuff. Then they get the player but they have an unhappy player. But Kevin doesn’t do that.

Unfortunately, it looks like questions about the remarkably stupid tampering arrangement with Joe Smith were off limits. This is a pity, because you can pretty easily make the case that the T-Wolves would’ve been in much better shape if they had draft picks over the years. But losing those picks and having a salary cap-buster like Garnett on the team meant they had to be the most creative team in the NBA. And with Kevin McHale running the show, that made it a recipe for disaster.

* * *

Amy sent me this great post by Dan Jardine on the varieties of cinematic inexperience:

I am not of the Pauline Kael School of film criticism that argues that your initial impression of a film is the only one that matters, and to revisit and reevaluate a film is a fool’s errand fraught with the potential for emotional and intellectual dishonesty. Indeed, I can think of plenty of legitimate reasons to take stock of a film anew. What if there were mitigating environmental factors — such as problems with the projector or the sound, or even with the audience itself — that hampered your ability to enjoy the film? What of format issues? I mean, what if, like me, your first experience with Lawrence of Arabia was on television, in full screen format and interrupted by commercials? Or what if you were in the wrong head space after a fight with your partner or a bad day at work and weren’t able to give the film the attention and scrutiny it deserved?

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Witold Rybzcsinski on the decline of architecture magazines:

A reduction in intellectual content in the glossies was largely the result of an increased reliance on photography, especially color photography. There’s something about a color photograph that glamorizes its subject, and architectural writers soon adopted the slightly breathless tones of fashion reporters. You are more likely to find tough architectural criticism in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and The New Yorker than in any of the major architecture magazines.

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Victor Davis Hanson sings “I left my appendix in Tripoli”:

Libyans seem to talk nonstop. It’s as if they have been jolted from a long sleep and are belatedly discovering, thanks to their newfound Internet, satellite television, and cell phones — many carry two to ensure that they are never out of service from competing companies — that there is indeed a wide world outside of dreary Tripoli and beyond the monotonous harangues of government socialists on the state-owned TV and radio stations.

They talked about their new gadgetry, and much else, with infectious optimism. As one hopeful Libyan travel entrepreneur with friends in the government explained, there might be some irony after all to Libya’s long, self-imposed insularity. Yes, he conceded, foreign investment declined. Oilmen left. Petroleum production nose-dived from more than 3 million barrels to never more than 2 million. But there was a silver lining: Did all that not have the effect of saving Libya’s precious resource to await the return of the present sky-high prices? Yes, Libya had banked a sort of strategic oil reserve that now was to be tapped at its most opportune moment. Yes, it was Libya’s grand strategy to deny Westerners its petroleum treasure for years, until they finally came around to pay what it was really worth

* * *

At Slate, Daniel Gross discusses the trend of foreign companies to buy U.S. brands that are on the wane:

[T]o these foreign owners, the U.S. market represents the holy grail. American consumer-oriented firms that have saturated the U.S. market, such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Nike, look to developing markets for their growth. But these foreign buyers see a different kind of opportunity here — an unmatched combination of wealth and growth that doesn’t exist in Germany, or China, or Denmark. The U.S. domestic market, 300 million people strong, is composed of wealthy consumers who routinely spend more than they make.
But iconic American brands only tend to come up for sale when they’re damaged.

It’s funny to me is that, for more than a century, China has been the holy grail for U.S. & European companies, along the lines of, “If we just get [x]% of them to go for our brand, we’ll be rolling in dough!”

* * *

Dare to dream and all that, but I still don’t believe Rem Koolhaas’ Chinese Television Authority building is going to stand up.

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Mourning light

I started Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier this week. It’s about his explorations into that mourning prayer following the death of his father. My brother gave it to me a few years ago.

I’m only starting out — about 70 pages into its 574, but much of it is sorta epigrammatic, so it’s not a long slog — and it’s helping me formulate questions about faith, prayer and language. It also yielded this wonderful paragraph during this morning’s reading:

I have read of people whose lives are transfigured in an instant. I do not believe that such a transformation can happen to me. For what changed those people was not only the instant, but also their subsequent fidelity to the instant. This is the paradox of revelation. It disrupts the order of things and then depends upon it.

Without tradition, a revelation is merely an epiphany. It can inspire nothing more than art.

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iPod & the CPI

The iPod turned 5 years old yesterday. Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek has a neat observation on how improvements over that span are pretty much beyond the pale of the Consumer Price Index, which people can contort to tell us that we’re much worse off than we were in, say, the year of my birth.

I find that argument to be BS; I’d rather live today with half of what I currently earn than be making twice what I make now but be stuck in 1971.

Of coure, there’s nostalgia and then there’s figuring out what was actually different “back then,” and maybe better. Reading Bob Dylan’s memoirs, I was struck by how, as a youth, he searched for folk records in the nieghborhoods and cities of his home state (Minnesota). It reminded me of how Robert Crumb would go door-to-door in black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, trying to find old records. Similarly, my comic-book cohorts can easily recount stories of visiting flea markets and comic shops in small towns to search for elusive issues.

Nowadays, those sorts of things are easily findable, either for sale or theft (in the case of a music download). The effort required to get every recording by, say, Robert Johnson, is almost nil, and it got me to wondering if that’s somehow depriving artists of a “necessary trial.” Is it too easy for us?

I guess this parallels with how Tarantino developed his aesthetic while working in a video store, as opposed to those directors and critics of a generation before who had to seek out art-house cinema in big cities and college towns.

But I’m rambling. Anyway: happy birthday, iPod! Someday you’ll be able to accommodate my 30,000-song library!

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 20, 2006

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been kinda busy in the evenings, and a little outta sorts in the mornings. Fortunately, I’m still up for some Unrequired Reading if you are!

* * *

When the official VM wife became the official VM fiancee, we had to go out ring-shopping. (Since I proposed a little sooner than I had planned, I didn’t actually have a ring for her.) She researched a bunch, and decided that the diamond trade was just too venal for us to get involved with it as a symbol of our love. So we went for a gorgeous aquamarine instead.

Here’s a piece (plus slide show) about shopping for the guilt-free diamond.

(Note that I’ve resisted making any comments about using the term ‘conflict-free’ as it relates to engagement rings.)

* * *

Congrats to the state of Oregon, for upholding a law restricting asset forfeitures. I never really understood how cops were able to seize and sell a person’s assets even if the person isn’t convicted of a crime.

* * *

I admit to letting the Darfur slaughter fall off the VM radar since I first wrote about it in May 2004. This is mainly because I believe the western world has failed to stop the Sudanese government and militia from killing the civilians and rebels in Darfur. By failed, I mean it’s gone past the point of no return. To make up for my lack of coverage, here’s an interview with Paul Salopek, the journalist who was imprisoned in Khartoum for a month on trumped-up charges:

FOREIGN POLICY: What is the biggest misconception about the crisis in Darfur as reported in the Western media?

Paul Salopek: Well, I think it’s been oversimplified as this Manichean struggle between ethnic Arab herders who are armed by Khartoum, and these helpless African farmers who are struggling for their rights in this very desolate, Western region of the Sudan. I think that has a fundamental truth to it, and that has been historically a problem that goes back for generations, if not centuries. But I think that perception has to be overlaid with much more complicated tribal rivalries that are then manipulated at the national level in Sudan. Even internationally, there’s a layer of interests that are tugging and pulling at that area of Sudan.

* * *

Holy crap! Discs of Tron was on the Atari 2600?

* * *

Playing it safe with the design for the NYTimes’ new HQ.

* * *

If you have a Wall Street Journal account, you really oughtta read this article about how Holt & Co. blew more than a million bucks trying to engineer the next Da Vinci Code.

Historical thrillers in particular are hot. One theory says readers are seeking a certainty in these books that since the end of the Cold War they’re having trouble finding elsewhere.

“We’re seeing a return to the past because everything was in its place, and people were recognizably polarized in a way that gives us comfort,” says literary agent Richard Curtis. “In the post 9/11 world, we aren’t clear about our enemies. Is the military officer in an Iraqi uniform a friend, or is he a terrorist posing as one? We need to know who to root for and historical fiction provides us with that.”

So Holt went after a novel starring Freud & Jung. No, seriously. (In what may be a first, it looks like Amazon is actually charging more than a bricks & mortar store, since I saw this book with a 50% off sticker in Borders on Wednesday.)

* * *

The new issue of Men’s Vogue (sue me) has an excerpt from the autobiography of art critic Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know. It centers on Hughes’ awful car wreck in 1999 and the legal problems he had after. He was raked by the “meejah” for being an elitist expat.

For of course I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and ufll to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails or someone trying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be iwth as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unles the latter is a friend or relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm arond apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has.

Here’s a review of the book in the Telegraph.

* * *

Why is NYC losing financial jobs? Relocation, relocation, relocation.

The city and state bear some responsibility for the space shortage. A nearly ten-year effort to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side for commercial development wound up getting bogged down in Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to build a stadium there and lure the Olympics to New York. Potential construction of office towers in the area is thus still years away. The city has now missed two real-estate expansions, going back to the late 1990s, in trying to rezone the Far West Side.

Meanwhile, state and city officials haggled for years over the plan to redevelop Ground Zero, with some observers, including Mayor Bloomberg, pessimistically calling for a reduction in the office space planned for the site, assuming that it would be unneeded. As a result of the delays, only one building, 7 World Trade, is nearing completion — developer Larry Silverstein could rebuild it quickly because it wasn’t part of the site that the government controlled. Other Ground Zero towers won’t be ready for years.

* * *

VM bleg: Anybody know a gin snob who can tell me if Cadenhead’s Old Raj Gin is worth the $44 for a 750ml bottle they want at Wine Library?

* * *

The official VM wife sends word that Cameron Diaz looks like crap.

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Whatcha really get’s a box of Newports and Puma sweats (damn!)

(I just felt like making a 3rd Bass ref; sue me)

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We should go to the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens next Thursday night! Who’s with me?

* * *

Congratulations to the Cardinals for pulling the upset on the Mets, earning the right to walk into a buzzsaw.

* * *

This week’s non-web reading: Chronicles Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan. The first chapter, covering the period he first arrived in New York, is fantastic. The chapter discussing losing his mojo in the late ’80s, and rediscovering it while playing with the Grateful Dead? Not so much.

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Fauxhawk Friday

Well, Amy said that on Fauxhawk Friday, Musee D’Orsay offers free admission, and I fell for it.

They charged for admission, but it was all worth it. Orsay’s a fantastic museum, between the collection and the crazy vibe of an antiquated vision of the future. (In a sense, I suppose that grotesque Centre Du Pompidou provides another of those visions, but it appears to be one circa 1975, a period that should just be avoided.)

Anyway, we both posted our new pix to our flickr photosets (hers and mine). They’ll likely be the last pix from this trip, since it’s raining cats and dogs outside, and we’re heading out tomorrow.

Fortunately, we got a bunch of shopping done today. I wasn’t able to find great stuff for everyone in my life, but we both found some pretty neat gifts (and some nice treats for ourselves).

How we’re gonna pack all this stuff, I have no idea. Thanks for checking in on these posts. I know I haven’t gone off and posted 2,000-word rants on “Paris & Yesterday’s Tomorrows” or anything, but I did receive some illuminations during the trip, which I hope to share with you, dear readers.