After writing a eulogy for Del.icio.us 14 months ago I gave it up for dead, even though I later heard it had been sold rather than dismantled. Just looked at it again recently and boy did the new owners mess it up.
February 2012
ralf hütter: last man standing tour 2012
NYT Arts Beat blog:
Kraftwerk* will give a series of eight performances, each devoted to one of its albums, as part of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of the electronic music pioneers in April, museum officials said. The performances during “Kraftwerk-Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” on consecutive evenings starting April 10, will not only feature tracks from one of Kraftwerk’s albums,** but also other original compositions intended to showcase the group’s influence on contemporary culture. Projected images, including 3-D ones, will accompany the music. The albums will be performed in chronological order, one each night, starting with “Autobahn” from 1974 and working up through “Tour de France” from 2003.***
*Ralf Hütter plus three impostors
**Will The Mix be one of the "eight lps between '74 and '03"- guess so - but why - it just rehashes the old material
***The last album is called Tour de France Soundtracks, not Tour de France; Tour de France was an EP from 1983 #kraftnerd
Update: Wizardishungry put up a very funny Downfall parody about MOMA's two-ticket limit [YouTube]. Didn't realize that you can only have two tickets for the entire 8 night series. Meaning, you could win the speed-dial lottery and still end up with only one choice: going on the night Hütter & Co. perform The Mix. (On second thought, that might be the one to attend because even though it's a weak album, it is a greatest hits package.)
flower_crop
see previous post. i think the flower was based on a Thos. Hart Benton reproduction but it's my painting (oils). the canvas is now a series of cut-up scraps - scan fodder
not made on a pad or phone
that cobalt turquoise was expensive, as I recall
if your pad is broken you get an incomplete
Via Paddy Johnson's blog we see certain art schools are drinking the Apple Koolaid and giving their students pads "pre-equipped with a number of applications for use in their art and design classes."
Just thinking back to my prehistoric art training. We learned how to make stretchers - Fredrix snap-together stretcher bars were acceptable. Preparing canvas - acrylic one-application gesso was OK, no need to mix glue sizing or prime. Premixed paint and varnishes - check. After a year or two you could imitate reality just using your eye and wrists. The resulting image could sit in a closet until the present day, then be scanned using an Epson scanner, rendered to JPEG, posted to the web and it would have a slightly different flavor than an image produced entirely in the software realm, moving your finger around on a piece of glass and picking menu items on your pre-equipped tablet.
Nevertheless, if I were teaching this class I would be fired for encouraging the students to retro-engineer all the Apple programs and move them over to Linux boxes where they could be customized to express each student's individuality.
against the world, against life
book jacket from wikipedia
Belatedly coming to novelist Michel Houellebecq's 1991 essay on Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life. Strange argument that "those who love life do not read" and that because HPL hated life the most he is the writer who will show us the way: "a supreme antidote against all forms of realism." A strong, passionate case is made for HPL as a poetic writer.
Houellebecq delves into HPL's racism more than most critics, asserting that had the author not encountered and been repelled by the "swarthy masses" at the moment of his most dramatic personal failure (his two years in New York when he couldn't find work), he never would have retreated to Providence to write "the great texts" (8 stories listed by Houllebecq, unquestionably Lovecraft's best work) about alien entities breeding with Earthlings and otherwise meddling malignly in our affairs. No racism, no depictions of transcendent, life-hating evil.
Interestingly, African American sf writer Octavia Butler also spun metaphors from racism but instead of evil her books present aliens as agents of implacable, inevitable change. In story after story, a people or culture encounters a superior force and yields to it, becoming something new and other. Lovecraft, the self-identified Yankee patrician without money, despised change and personified it on a demonic, cosmic level. To Houllebecq this is noble, no matter how questionable or ignorant the roots (at least, I think that's what he's saying--he quotes some of HPL's worst letter-writing vitriol without the expected layers of apology). According to Houllebecq, once the great texts were vomited out, the personal racism abated -- or at least, HPL changed his mind about admiring Hitler.
Houllebecq notes that HPL avoids two topics: sex and money. (This led John Banville a few years ago to wonder why Houllebecq liked Lovecraft so much.) I would add, HPL's stories cloak their politics almost to invisibility, regardless of the author's privately-expressed views.