Michelangelo’s First Painting
The Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth has purchased what is believed to be Michelangelo’s first painting, painted when the artist was twelve or thirteen years old.
Last summer an art dealer bought it for nearly $2 million at a Sotheby’s auction and then took it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one department chairman shared his hunch that it was the work of the Renaissance artist, Lee said.
Experts in the Met’s paintings conservation department carefully cleaned it by removing decades of dirt, as well as paint layers that art restorers had applied through the ages to fill in chips or dull areas, Lee said.
When they examined the painting further using X-rays and infrared technology, they were able to see how the artist made certain brush strokes, scraped paint layers to achieve detail and even changed elements of the painting before the final version, Lee said.
Museum experts said they determined it not only was Michelangelo’s — based on similarities to his other works and the artist’s stories of the piece as told to biographers — but also that it was his earliest work — based on its age and details in the painting. The confirmation came a few months ago, and then the Kimbell decided to buy it, Lee said.
Wilco, the album
Wilco is currently streaming their new album. I am not entirely through my first listen, but so far I like what I hear.
It is, however, very post- Jay Bennett.
Theater of the Mind
Nearly 20 years ago, Art Bell created the wildly popular radio program Coast to Coast, a wee-hour forum for weird science. We asked him why the show entertains, even encourages, the crazies.
56 years later
On a spring day in 1953, two babies were born at Pioneer Memorial Hospital in the Eastern Oregon town of Heppner — DeeAnn Angell of Fossil and Kay Rene Reed of Condon. The girls would grow up, get married, have kids of their own and become grandparents. Then, last summer, Kay Rene’s brother, Bobby Reed, got a call from an 86-year-old woman who had known his mother and had also lived next door to the Angell family in Fossil.
“She said she had something she had to get off her chest,” Bobby Reed said in an interview with the East Oregonian newspaper of Pendleton, which reported the story Sunday.
Hypersonic WaveRider
Hoping to bridge the gap between airplanes and rocketships, the U.S. military is preparing to test an experimental aircraft that can fly more than six times faster than the speed of sound on ordinary jet fuel.
Opium 8: The Infinity Issue with the 1,000-year Cover
Opium 8: The Infinity Issue
Learn about the thousand-year cover concept by artist Jonathon Keats at opiummagazine.com. Learn about the contents and see a preview of the interior at opiummagazine.com/opium8/home.html. I design the magazine, work as senior editor, and contribute content. Each issue is designed differently. Also, Opium holds Literary Death Matches across the country and the world. Visit LiteraryDeathMatch.com for information on the next shows in Boston (May 21), Chicago (May 23), New York (May 27), San Francisco (June 12), and Paris (September 23). I will be a judge at the Chicago Death Match, which is Saturday, May 23. Doors open at 7 pm and show starts at 8 pm at Viaduct Theater (3111 N. Western Ave., ph: 773-296-6024). The Death Match caps the week of the Pilcrow Literary Festival (pilcrowlitfest.com).
Ask a Wingnut
“Ask a Wingnut” is written by a real live conservative and former Bush official who chooses to remain anonymous. Each week “Glenallen Walken“1 will bridge the cultural divide and answer questions from liberals about why conservatives think and do what they think and do.
1. I guess Christopher was taken.
rowdy Amish youths
Police cracking down on rowdy Amish youths ticketed a teenager for having beer in his horse-drawn buggy when they pulled him over on a western New York road.
Detective Nathan Root said the teen admitted drinking beer, but passed a field sobriety test.
Root says another Amish man in the buggy, a 22-year-old, was charged with providing the beer. Both are scheduled to be arraigned June 22.
Patrols were stepped up after an Amish elder’s property was vandalized when he confronted youths about their drinking and listening to radios.
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg
Can you spot the spelling errors?
The plan was, 2 weeks of Greek sunshine.
I always end up being distracted by far more beautiful things.
First verse of the fourteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings
And he said, “But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man.”
Reading all this furry and hairy and nekkid mammalian malarkey, I was waiting for Elizabeth Perry to chime in, but I think maybe she is making herself useful today.
A good while back, she and I enjoyed an exchange. Thoughts of hairy-and-smooth set off my recollection, I think.
Prester John’s Kingdom, Viewed from a Great Height
“I’m a stranger here myself.”
Dear Clusterflock
Isn’t it amazing that we don’t have any fur? We actually evolved to lose our fur! Most of the other mammals walking around on land have fur or hair or fleece. We have lost ours! Isn’t that remarkable?
You weren’t expecting
the Apollo Belvedere, were you? It’s just a drawing.
It was called The Praying Wife
voices in my head
Uno:
I started off by saying I want to win this pageant so bad, I’ve worked so hard, I wanted to sound politically correct but still stay true to my values. But I just knew at that moment that God was just telling me “Carrie, how bad do you want this? Are you willing to compromise your beliefs for a one year crown of Miss USA.” And I just knew right there . . . And I said you know what and the switch went off. And I said, “A marriage should be between a man and a woman and that’s how it should be. ”
. . . . And I knew there was no way I was going to win Miss USA. No way.
Dos:
. . . I felt as though Satan was trying to tempt me in asking me this question. And then God was in my head and in my heart saying, “Do not compromise this. You need to stand up for me and you need to share with all these people . . . you need to witness to them and you need to show that you’re not willing to compromise that for this title of Miss USA.”
And I knew right here that it wasn’t about winning. It was about being true to my convictions.
Just landed
Here’s a sweet little visualization of people who have ‘just landed,’ according to their Twitter feeds. Made with Processing, by Jer Thorp.
Thanks, Coudal.
fake quote out of context
Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.
“Say I am a tree and there is another tree next to me.”
We don’t talk at first. That’s how trees are: cautious.
But then one afternoon it’s nice in the forest, not too warm, not too cold, squirrels and birds present in plentiful but hardly worrisome numbers, and I decide to say hello, and the other tree says hello in return, and that’s when it begins.
Leave me the F__k alone, II
My trip to the zoo was also depressing.
The Path of a Roomba
More here (via Luke’s Commonplace Book)
Awkward Family Photos
formula.chair, Matthias Demacker
Matthias Demacker’s indoor and outdoor ultra-thin formula.chair designed for Area DeClic is inspired by the seats used in the Formula 1 racing cars.
the case of the overdue library book
On March 16, 1978, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, Dick Cavett on late night TV and hi-fis on sale at Hecht’s, Sarah McKee walked into the Arlington Central Library and borrowed a book.
31 years later, she returned it.
McKee, now 70 and retired in Amherst, Mass., said the problem was that after the passage of so much time, she thought the book was hers.
She said she has long been plagued by a poor memory, noting in a telephone interview that she once bought a book on how to have a perfect memory only to discover that she already owned the title.
Transcendent Man
Transcendent Man introduces the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, the renowned futurist who journeys the world offering his vision of a future in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are billions of times more intelligent . . . all within the next thirty years.
(via kottke)
