10 Flea Circus Contraptions
(Via Oobject)
_____ is the new whiteness.
I pretty much expect every other politcial/sociological article about the US in 2009 to be a lesser form of this one:
The ’20s debate over the definition of whiteness—a legal category? a commonsense understanding? a worldwide civilization?—took place in a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia, and it is easy to regard these episodes as evidence of how far we have come. But consider that these anxieties surfaced when whiteness was synonymous with the American mainstream, when threats to its status were largely imaginary. What happens once this is no longer the case—when the fears of Lothrop Stoddard and Tom Buchanan are realized, and white people actually become an American minority?
Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.
forgive and forget?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.
Thoughts?
Andrew Wyeth dies at 91
1.
The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.
“The world has lost one of the greatest artists of all time,” George A. Weymouth, a friend of Wyeth’s who is chairman of the board of the Brandywine Conservancy, said in a statement.
2.
“Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes,” Wyeth said in a Life magazine interview in 1965.
“I don’t paint these hills around Chadds Ford because they’re better than the hills somewhere else. It’s that I was born here, lived here — things have a meaning for me.”
Paradoxically, he said, he loved Maine “in spite of its scenery. There’s a lot of cornball in that state you have to go through — boats at docks, old fishermen, and shacks with swayback roofs. I hate all that.”
3.
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there,” he once said. “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.
4.
N.C. Wyeth, the only art teacher Wyeth ever had, didn’t always agree with his son’s taste.
In a 1986 interview with the AP, Wyeth recalled one of the last paintings he showed to his father, who died in 1945. It was a picture of a young friend walking across a barren field.
“He said, ‘Andy, that has a nice feel, of a crisp fall morning in New England.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to do something to make this thing appeal. If you put a dog in it, or maybe have a gun in his hand,’” Wyeth recalled.
“Invariably my father talked about my lack of color.”
5.
The exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington drew tens of thousands, but it renewed the dispute between Wyeth’s admirers and his equally passionate detractors.
Some critics dismissed Wyeth’s art as that of a mere “regionalist.” Art critic Hilton Kramer was even more direct, once saying, “In my opinion, he can’t paint.”
The late J. Carter Brown, who was for many years director of the National Gallery, called such talk “a knee-jerk reaction among intellectuals in this country that if it’s popular, it can’t be good.”
“I think the man’s mastery of a variety of techniques is dazzling, and I think the content is in many cases moving,” Brown said.
BYOBL
Bring your own bike lane (via swissmiss)
The First Meal
The chef for the inauguration lunch describes the seafood stew they’ll be eating on tuesday in the White House.
A lyrical bit
A few people walked the edge of the pond and from the quiet cold and empty space I felt a sense of past grandeur, of bustling activity in grand public spaces, of the social wandering that the Park was designed for. Women in skirts, perambulators, boys with sailboats, parasols, peanut carts, a city fired by the new technology of steam or the elevator, the skeletons of the first skyscrapers rising to form something for which there wasn’t yet a term: skyline. A collective sense of wonder. The word Progress. Looking-ahead.
Fermenting/Fomenting
Dissent is, uh, brewing over at The Brooklyn Kitchen.
douglas and jasper
the future meets dungeons & dragons
Scientists have made progress on the cloak of invisibility.
“The new device can cloak a much wider spectrum of waves — nearly limitless — and will scale far more easily to infrared and visible light. The approach we used should help us expand and improve our abilities to cloak different types of waves,” senior researcher David R. Smith said in a statement.
The new cloak is made up of more than 10,000 individual pieces of fiberglass arranged in parallel rows. The mathematical formulas are used to determine the shape and placement of each piece to deflect the electromagnetic waves.
The greatest fan letter ever
was recieved by Ryan North of Dinosaur comics. It was a letter from one of his supporting characters, Mr Tusks, a minature elephant and Vice-Mayor of Tiny Towne.
Distracting Nick. For Cindy.
Sister Smackdown comes out of seclusion to distract Nick Douglas, King of Twitter.
–The Scroggins Deposit. Act 5
(This is all Cindy’s fault by the way.)
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band | “I’m Glad”
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – I’m Glad from Phil Bebbington on Vimeo.
Sweet soul music from Don Van Vliet, the artist formerly known as Captain Beefheart, whose birthday it is today, January 15.
(“I’m Glad” featured on the album Safe as Milk.)
Change we can taste?
Mike Steinberger (a name I don’t know which probably means he isn’t a hack) argues that with a change of Presidents should also come a change in White House wine policy (via Stephen Schenkenberg):
Even more dismaying, though, was what Shanks revealed about the process of choosing wines for state dinners. He told McCoy that because only 55 minutes are allotted for the actual meal, it is essential that the wines served on these august occasions “have presence.” And what did he mean by “presence”? “A perfectly aged cabernet may be great in the glass,” he explained, “but it can’t stand up to the intense atmosphere of a White House state dinner. You have to have something with youth and vigor.” Delicate wines will be overlooked; only strapping, assertive ones have what it takes to be “noticed in the context of the White House experience,” as Shanks put it. In other words, the desired effect is shock and awe, achieved not with cruise missiles but fruit bombs.
We, Americans, are often accused for our simplistic palates, so Steinberger reminds us: “…the rap on us is that we only like ‘em young and obvious” (like our women?). The counter perspective, of course, is that the European palate is sophisticated by preferring more “mellow” wines which is an idea as ridiculous as it is totalizing. Regardless, all the discussion about “shock and awe” versus the “conviviality” of mellow wines is ridiculous. It elevates wine to a cult status, or a coporate trading card, used to impress guests either with power or sophistication. I suggest, instead, that we see wine as a useful tool to help augment and accentuate a meal or social gathering. Wine should bring joy, not prestige.
Michael Buchino, Beard
Beard Revue is one year old today, 14 January 2009. To celebrate, I’ve gone and printed 200 posters of an illustration I drew a while back. The posters are 18″ x 24″ on high quality glacier white matte paper. This is a limited edition of just 200; each one is hand-numbered and signed by the artist (me).
Inspired by Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan, here is the my own Beard in the likeness of Leonardo da Vinci. I hope you like it.
Etta James, At Last
Foxes
via the ragbag with more cards to come
The Sucker Punch of a Brighter Tomorrow
Special Report — I awake in the 4:00 AM gloom, unable to breathe. A bearded, brown-eyed Cyclops wearing a feathery plumed hat lies on my chest staring at me. My Indiglo watch’s pale luminescence reveals the intruder’s identity: cat #27 nuzzling my pajama pants drawstring again.
I am by necessity a cat rancher. Felines are useful for their varmint-hunting prowess, pelts, and milk. A dozen or so can keep you warm when no other heat source is available. Milking them is not an enterprise to be underestimated, but I have small hands so no problem there.
The new elimae
is now posted.
Dear Robert,
You’re shorter in person than I expected, exactly my height; nicer, too, and just as handsome.
We climbed the stairs and you showed me why I came to meet you in the first place: the whole of the interior was white, cake white — every picture, every inch of carpet, the folds in the drapes — as though drained by a mindless Midas.
“It’s my grandma’s house. My dad did this.”
January 14, 2009
It’s where and when I live.
Y’all
The other dark meat (via mefi):
The meat is almost ready to be boiled, except for one thing: Although its head, innards and three paws have been removed, it still has one. That’s the law.
“They leave the paw on to prove it’s not a cat or a dog,” Washington says.
Mr Gabriel Betteredge
“Here I am, with my book and my pencil–the latter not pointed so well as I could wish, but when Christians take leave of their senses, who is to expect that pencils will keep their points? Give me your orders, Mr Jennings. I’ll have them in writing, sir. I’m determined not to be behind ‘em, or before ‘em, by so much as a hair’s-breadth. I’m a blind agent–that’s what I am. A blind agent!”
(p. 398, The Moonstone, Oxford World’s Classics edition 1999)
“I am a free man.”
80-year-old British actor Patrick McGoohan dies.
Apparently, Obama is not just our new bicycle
Knowing this place’s audience, I know you’ll click through, but do be sure to read the testimonials (a word whose etymology takes on an extra special resonance in this context).
(via)
