“For NASA, space is still a high priority.” - Dan Quayle
Let us all have a moment of silence for Colin Murdoch, recently deceased inventor of the tranquilizer gun.
I’m willing to let him slide on that whole child-proof cap thing, since he also gave the world the disposable syringe, which is one of those unsung revolutionary medical devices of our time.
Picked up the Washington Post Express to check for Artomatic coverage and saw that I’d been quoted again in the Blog Log, this time about the 32 ounce McDonald’s coffee I recently acquired on the way back from Philadelphia.
Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere still great, Odd Couple still not all that exciting. Maybe it’ll grow on me. It’s not bad, it just seems like they tried too hard.
I’ve discussed the current Administration’s hellbent mission to relax the ownership rules on television, radio and newspapers and the tomfoolery the FCC has been engaged in since 2003, most recently in this post.
In a turn of events too good to believe true, the U.S. Senate, led by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, voted to roll back the media ownership rule the FCC had recently passed with a 3-2 vote.
The unusual “resolution of disapproval,” sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and 26 other senators, was approved by a voice vote. The measures sponsors include both Democratic candidates for president, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.
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The White House is, of course, already pumping out it’s patented brand of misinformation, misdirection and outright lies. Stop Big Media has a piece posted debunking the media ownership lies being propagated by the White House.
I was desperate for coffee. We stopped at McDonalds and I asked for a small coffee. Either the woman misunderstood me, or McDonalds considers a half-gallon of coffee “small.” To add insult to injury, it was also awful. Blech.
Spent some quality time with the in-laws, catching the traveling Frida Kahlo show which celebrates the 100th anniversary of Kahlo’s birth by gathering together an astonishing number of her works and hundreds of photographs of Kahlo and her family and friends. It was organized by the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in between Minneapolis and San Francisco, the show spent a few months at the at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is where we caught up with it.
(Small New Yorker mention when the show first opened: Peter Schjeldahl, “All Souls: The Frida Kahlo Cult”)
It was an amazing show, but it was depressing. Deeply depressing. Profoundly depressing. Astonishing and completely worthwhile, yes, but deeply sad. Husband and I skipped the audio tour. Most of the people in the show had picked up the headsets, which was nice because it meant you could hear a pin drop even in rooms that were crowded. On the other hand, by the end of the exhibit the people who’d listened had a hundred yard stare that made me want to make sure the museum had locked the stairs to the roof and put away all of the sharp objects.
The show features over a hundred photographs of Kahlo and her family and friends, plus a dizzying array of her paintings. Many of these works have never been displayed publicly in the U.S. before, and certainly have never been displayed together. Arranged chronologically rather than thematically - although you could argue that in this show that’s really the same thing - the groupings represent the major periods in her life. Spinal surgeries, the miscarriage in Detroit, the first divorce from Diego, etc.
The show wrings the viewer out and plops them on the floor of the final room, wherein the last grouping of works is a series of cheerfully bright still life paintings.
These final works were introduced with words from Kahlo’s diary about her own death, “I hope the exit is joyful — and I hope never to come back.” They represent the agony of Kahlo’s final year as she coped with pneumonia and the amputation of her leg. These are mostly works she created because she knew they would sell and she could use the money for her medical bills. Look closely at the festive paintings and you can see she was so doped up that she must have struggled mightily to maintain her focus on her subject and to control her every brushstroke.
People exited the show looking like they’d just been released from Azkaban. To further disconcert the viewer, they then get to try to shake the dementors off their back while walking straight into a Frida Kahlo emporium with more licensed tie-in products than I think I’ve ever seen for any show. Rooms of neckties and paperdolls and jewelry and clothing and other happy household objects festooned with images of Frida and her monkeys. Looking at the reproduction necklace - complete with thorns and hummingbird - threatened to bring back the migraine I’d just gotten rid of. (Actually, I have to admit that piece was so weird, it was oddly attractive).
It’s a brilliant show and was well worth the trip, but before we left town we went back to the museum to hang out with the Buddhas and look at the stone temple for a while to recover.
Monday’s journey in the rain was no fun, but Tuesday’s trip back still took well over 4 hours and started to make us both a little stir crazy in the car. At one point I thought Husband brightly exclaimed, “Let’s pretend we’re Canadian!” When asked him what he meant, he couldn’t remember what he’d just actually said, because we immediately became preoccupied with ending every sentence with, “eh?”
It’s good to be home. Now I have to clean the house because Husband’s mother-in-law is on her way to stay with us.
Technorati Tags: Frida Kahlo, Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art
IndieFeed: Dance is featured as a “new and notable” podcast on the itunes front page (right next to the Nine Inch Nails remix project) and is currently #8 on the list of top itunes music podcasts.
Technorati Tags: IndieFeed
Husband pointed out my horoscope in today’s print edition of the Washington Post:
Talk about an understatement!
Well there’s a title that screams “Come on in and have a cuppa’” doesn’t it?
Police and Fire Fighter pensions are getting the axe all over the country, but I wasn’t sure how widespread the problem was. The situation is even more depressing than I thought, according to an article in the Washington Post today, “Growing Deficits Threaten Pensions.”
Between this and yesterday’s revelation that, “Some War Dead Were
Cremated at Facility Handling Pets” I haven’t been able to post a coherent thing about the situation in Burma.
I can say that I think Google’s matching funds campaign is excellent for the people of Burma, but may have a lasting impact on those who click because it does something useful in addition to raising funds - it educates people on where Burma is. Not just a spot on a map - the newspapers and news do that adequately. I feel like people engage with Google Maps in a way that gives the images they view some actual context (at least sometimes, or at least more often than a static image in a newspaper).
I think I need to go have some pho and a lot of Vietnamese coffee before I dig into the rest of the paper.
Later I’ll post about happier things like Artomatic, the SanFran MusicTech conference, and my trip in general.
Technorati Tags: pensions, Burma, pho, Artomatic, SanFran MusicTech
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