Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 26 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Skype here

I finally signed up for Skype so I could talk to Brian Russell while my tween son is on the land line. The good news is that Skype was simple to install and use. The bad news is that some one already has PaulJones. But my AIM handle smalljones is now my Skype handle so all is well.

Additive art – museum editions

The British graffiti artist, Banksy, practiced the art of giving art at four of New York’s fine museums.
At the Amercian Museum of Natural History, he hung his drawing of “Withus Oragainstus” a beetle with sidewinder missiles and satillite dish in the Hall of Diversity.
Withus Oragianstus
At the Brooklyn Museum, he hung a colonial era portrait with anti-war graffitti, “Soldier with a Spray Can.”
Soldier with a spary can
At the Museum of Modern Art, he hung “Discount Soup Can,” a silkscreen print that Warhol would appreciate.
Discount Soup Can
And at the Metropolotian Museum of Art, “You have beautiful eyes,” shows a period woman in a gas mask.
You have beautiful eyes
His site also has a short clip of him, dressed as Inspector Clousseau, installing his Brooklyn piece to the music of the Pink Panther Theme.

Soft Tissue of T-Rex

The Museum of Natural Sciences announcement today describes how soft tissue was discovered in a T-Rex femur. Several important findings here. One that the soft tissue, the cells and blood vessels of T-Rex resemble those of an ostrich–supporting the dinos are big ass birds theory. The discovery is repeatable and has been repeated on two other T-Rexen and a hadrosaur. The scientific paper by NCSU’s Mary H. Schweitzer and Jennifer L. Wittmeyer will appear in the journal Science tomorrow.
[I refered to this announcement earlier as a reason to go to Raleigh]

Quiz Show Connections

Charles Van Doren Faces the Press
Just getting around to seeing Quiz Show (1994). The scandal of the fixed quiz shows of the 1950s is revealed by a tight focus on three characters, contestants nerdy Herb Stempel and handsome Charles Van Doren — and the author/producer of the movie Richard Goodwin played Rob Morrow. Goodwin is by far the most complex character. Stempel is portrayed as a sort of stock character almost. Van Doren as an over privileged WASP trying to get his famous father’s attention.

Not unlike the phoney “news” shows of today, our phoney press conferences, etc, the quiz shows were seen by the networks and sponsors as entertainment while leading the public to see them as reality.

But the story after the story is more telling. The after credits tell us of the fates, as of 1994, of most of the important characters. Even a brief bit on Goodwin:

Richard Goodwin became a speechwriter for the 1960 Kennedy campaign and then a member of the White House staff. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, he retired from politics to become a writer.

Doris Kearns Goodwin meets the Press
One bit of trivia not in the aftercredits is that his second wife — his first wife died — is Doris Kearns Goodwin. A Pulitzer Prize (1995) winning historian and author, Kearns Goodwin was discovered to have plagarized large portions of her books from others. The scandal was complex full of denials and cover ups and revelations as this longish description of the “developing story” from the History News Network from 2002 show. Slate’s Timothy Noah was less subtle writing an article in January 2002 entited “Doris Kearns Goodwin, Liar” that she not only plagarized and lied but that she also “paid hush money to one of the people she plagiarized.”

It makes you wonder what she was thinking as she was watching Quiz Show. What was in her mind when the Goodwin character questioned the Van Doren character about his book in progress on Lincoln? What is she thinking now as her next book, due October 2005, is “Master Among Men : The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

You are the News you read

Forwarded from many folks, most recently the poet Terri Ford. I am solidly in numbers 3 and 11 (but prefer the Weekly World News):

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country–if they could find the time and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country … or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. None of the above is read by the guy who is running the country into the ground.

Two reasons to go to Raleigh

Two reasons to go to Raleigh.
woven stick bust by Patrick Dougherty
Artist Patrick Dougherty is creating a giant woven bust on the grounds of the NC Art Museum. The News and Observer did a good write up on the project, but it’s nowhere to be found on the Museum’s own site. Dougherty’s work is original and delightful. I recall his woven cacoons relaxing on the front porch of the house he rented near campus. Then the flowing forms that seems to appear around town and even, as I recall, at the NC Art Museum some years back. Patrick Dougherty has since created over 100 stick weavings all over the world. He’s just back from Wisconsin where his work was documented on a daily basis as he created a piece called “Putting Two and Two Together” for the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.

From the Museum of Natural Sciences:

WHAT: Joint News Conference between N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences & N.C. State University

WHEN: Thursday, March 24, 2005, 2:30 p.m.

WHERE: N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences Auditorium, 11 W. Jones St., Raleigh

WHY: A remarkable dinosaur discovery in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana has exposed a never before seen specimen. This discovery
could change the way modern scientists view fossilization. This is part of an embargoed story that will appear in Science Magazine this week.

WHO:? Leading author, Mary Schweitzer, Ph.D, Dept. of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at N.C. State University, and Jack Horner, Curator of Paleontology, Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana will be available to answer questions.

Note: News Release will be available at 2 p.m. on Thursday when the embargo is lifted.

In Bloom for Spring

Toadshade
Spring in NC is solidly here. Everyone is out walking — until the games start. We took our walk down to the Botanical Gardens. Just a little hike through our neighborhood. Then a brief walk along the stream trails to see what’s in bloom.
The American Trout Lilies are incredible and everywhere. A few Trilliums are mixed in with the lilies. The trilliums that we saw all had dark red to purple blooms; these are the trilliums know as toadshade or Little Sweet Betsy. Dark tight flowers rising out of the mottled triple leaf.
Now on to basketball!

Fetishizing the Original

Dropped in on the 75th Anniversary of the Southern Historical Collection this evening. Dropped in only on the last session of a day and a half long symposium. Sally had been to the whole conference. I did get to drop in on two great talks.
One by John Hope Franklin who talked about his experience as a young African-American historian coming to work in the archives of North Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama during the 1940s.
One by Ed Ayers who talked about digital projects including his famous and wonderful Valley of the Shadow project.
So far not obvious fetishizing or at least not as pertains to the title of this post.
In question time, one concerned audience member spoke of the feel of the paper, the scrawls on the back of a photograph (never mind that the photo had faded so far from the state in which it was seen in the past), the smell of the archive (this the smell of the archive rotting like a slow compost), etc.
This impassioned talk reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction. An essay in which Benjamin worries that photography will completely replace painting and that the value of the original, the aura, will be lost as seamless reproductions are made generally available.
Of course, we now see that Benjamin was completely wrong. That we rush to see the Mona Lisa because we are familiar with that painting. Our desire to see the “real” Mona Lisa is increased at each viewing of a reproduction, a surrogate.
What painting would we go to see by Grant Wood? Most likely the one we know from surrogates, from parodies, from endless reproductionsAmerican Gothic (it’s at the Art Institute of Chicago).
The ultimate fetishizing of the original resulted in the daring and somewhat bizzare theft of Edvard Munch’s Scream. Desire may have led to destruction of the desired and we will have been left with its many many many surrogates.

The Mystery of Selling Airplane Food

Flying back from the Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego took most all of today. The mystery of American Airlines trying unsuccessfully to sell boxed food continues. They offer it. $3 for a box that no one wants. People open their bags of sandwiches that they paid $6 for in the airport. We sit eating only slightly better food for which we paid twice as much.
No movies. No music anymore. Of course I was on two half flights. That is SAN to OHR then OHR to RDU. Similar flights except sub DFW for OHR on the way there.
All the flights were completely full BTW.

Modern Love (the poetry and the music)

Rocking Paul Muldoon
One of my guilty pleasures is reading the “Modern Love” feature in the New York Times Sunday Style section. The pleasure shouldn’t be that guilty; they have very good writers writing very good and interesting takes on varieties of love in the modern age (or at least the contemporary age). Over and over I see articles by writers that I know are good but I am surprised to see in the Times and more surprised to see in the Style section.
Take today’s for instance. Novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz writes of the surprise of watching her husband at age 53 decided to take up rock guitar, to join up with an financial manager, a Renaissance poetry professor and a lawyer to form a band called Rackett, and to end up with a song co-written by Warren Zevon and produced by Bruce Springstein. The unsurprising part is that her husband is the immensely literarily gifted poet Paul Muldoon. The surprising part is that her husband is the rather wrinkled and distracted 50ish Irish intellectual Paul Muldoon. Hanff Korelitz does a wonderful and loving and modern take on mid-life crisis and the odd success of Muldoon’s passion and her sharing of that passion.

Small personal note: I was a reader/reviewer for some of Paul Muldoon’s earlier works when they were being published by Wake Forest University Press and the wonderful Dillon Johnston (who looks much more like an older rock star than Muldoon). I particularly remember the joy of reading his complex Quoof in manuscript. I still believe that Quoof is the most significant book in the Muldoon canon.

Still Wicked; still an eyesore

Lots of press lately on the abandoned Wicked Burrito downtown. Most saying how the new Downtown Development Corporation is trying to take charge of the problem. And now without speaking to the Corporation, Lone Star the owners are already getting to work on the exterior.

I was down there today and saw another change: The awnings have been replaced. They are now bright yellow! At least they’re not ripped and flapping and faded green. The paint is still peeling and ugly.

Another thing that would have improved my lunch would have been wireless access. My lunch partner wanted to show me something on his laptop, but …
The good news is that the Downtown Development folks are working on that too.

Why they call it a “Hook”

BBC reports that scientists at Dartmouth College have discovered how and where music works in the brain–specifically what makes a catchy tune catch, what sets the hook in your mind.

[The research team] played volunteers tunes with snippets cut out.

They scanned for brain activity and found it centred in the auditory cortex – which handles information from ears.

When familiar tunes played, the cortex activity continued during the blanks – and the volunteers indeed said they still mentally “heard” the tunes.

When listeners were exposed to snipped songs that were unfamiliar to them, they “heard” the silences. But when familiar songs, “Pink Panther theme” and “Satisfaction,” were played the brain filled in the silences so that the listeners were unaware of anything missing.

Once exposed to a catchy song, you are hooked in the auditory cortex. But do you then have to pay 99 cents to iTunes?

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