You know how they make us look on TV? Like we live on the front porch with flies and shit flying around us, with our stomachs all big eating watermelon rinds? That ain’t us, man. We’re smart, man. Our life is slowed down so we don’t miss nothing. When shit gets moving too fast you miss everything.
Three guys running the marathon at the 1896 Olympics. Primitive running gear aside, this is a lovely photo. (via)
I don’t want to say it was cool, [but] the girls was cool in school.
The art market is not a free market. It’s rigged; hugely distorted by the presence of public subsidy – the grants and funding available to organisations and individuals deemed to be producing “significant” work. To get access to this, it’s even more important that artists create the right theoretical discourse to surround their work.
Also known as bullshit. A handy guide for writing your own art bollocks:
A useful catch-all formula can be applied to all of this work, which I freely offer here, without charge:
“X’s work
{wryly/mockingly/cunningly/innocently/intelligently}
{deconstructs/subverts/disrupts/parodies/appropriates/undermines}
{popular notions/stereotypes/archetypes/conventions/the mythology/strategies}
of
{gender/representation/style/sexuality/commodification/identity}
by …”
followed by a nod at whatever images or objects are assembled.
Colin Marshall on Creative Community from Colin Marshall on Vimeo.
Colin Marshall on Creative Community. In which I continue to admire Colin’s thoughtfulness and wonder when his film based on an awesome Borges story is gonna drop.
THE SHINING: Spatial awareness and set design. Part 1. Part 2. See also Rob Ager’s Mazes, Mirrors, Deception and Denial. I’m not the biggest fan of The Shining, but dang, there’s some thought that went into it. (via)
1992 NLCS: Sid Bream’s Mad Dash. Just remembered the greatest sports highlight of my first 9 years of life: Sid Bream chugs around third, scores the winning run, and the Braves head to the 1992 World Series.
Let’s not bring flame where light is enough.
The ghost at the banquet of all public commemoration is always politics—above all, the mobilization of solidarity […] It is about the reaffirming of group loyalty rather than the establishing of historical accuracy, let alone the presenting of an event in all its moral and political complexity.
After 9/11: The limits of remembrance—By David Rieff (Harper’s Magazine)
A mature culture is one which wishes to know more about other cultures, and which values the best examples of what it has of them, and which is better able to appreciate them because it has standards and insights developed in appreciation of its own.
It was the African figures in the Louvre that inspired Picasso. That one fact alone could serve to remind us how porous high culture is, in both directions, and how symbiotic the existence of all cultures is, especially in the globalised world. When receptive sensibilities engage with the artefacts of the past and other civilisations, they are nourished by them and learn from them, not least how to be discerning.
A question of discrimination – AC Grayling on art and elitism | The Guardian
Probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
In practical life… one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing. Sometimes even the engineer does not want to go any further, and all of the passengers get off in Regensburg. How many, who sought God, finally remained standing before a carved figure! How many, who sought art, became caught on a form which an artist had used for his own purposes, be it Giotto, Raphael, Durer, or Van Gogh!
The impact of kitsch is limited to reminding the viewer of great works of art, deep emotions, or grand philosophic, religious, or patriotic sentiments.
People’s Champion: Behind the Battle. I was bummed I missed the Atlanta premiere back in May, so I’m glad the first half of People’s Champion is now online. It’s a documentary going behind the scenes of the Eli Porter vs. Envy freestyle battle. They’re trying to Kickstarter the second half.
I love this. Reminds me that I forgot to do notes on Tokyo. Should have done that when it was still fresh.
I just finished reading Chris Willett’s journals from the Indian Himalaya that I tumbled a while ago.
The purity of the alpine is not a reassuring quality. It is a fearful one, one that does not invite a person to linger or lounge. It is an abode that is best visited and not one to be domesticated, the living room of everything that is not the village, everything that is outside the bounds of settled, civil life.
But it is a place that one calls to some of us, bringing us to the hostile place to breathe the air and feel the sterility. It is a place, like the floor of Death Valley or, presumably, the ice floes of the Antarctic, that amplifies human existence. One does not feel insignificant in such places. Rather, one feels a sense of importance for no other reason that being alive.
It is not an importance born and cultivated to be ego satisfying or one that inspires arrogance. No, it is a sense that to be alive is an important quality and that to be alive is better than to be dead. Barren, lifeless places teach us this better than anything written, drawn, or recorded. And, besides, the alpine is a beautiful place to visit in fine weather.
The music we spend our private time on, and use to build our identities, varies more wildly than ever from person to person. But there’s at least one kind of music that needs consensus to function, and that’s the stuff we dance, party, and strut around to. “The club” might be the last remaining space where strangers are all forced to pay attention to the same songs. And whether it’s an actual club or just a bedroom, it tends to be a space where people enjoy feeling fabulous.
Cf. Norman Lebrecht.
“The Magazine’s recent piece on Americanisms entering the language in the UK prompted thousands of you to e-mail examples.” Picky picky.
Most of my days involve four- and five-hour stretches of what I would characterize as dicking around on the Internet.
Mark Larson 