Awwww. Sorry, Norman
We went to London Saturday. No, no…we didn’t meet up with the Socialist Rent-a-mob, we went to a Norman Rockwell exhibit at the excellent Dulwich Gallery. First time Rockwell has been shown over here.
The critics here (who probably thought Tracy Emin’s Bed was geeenius) greeted the show with predictable sniffy put-downery. For them art, like medicine, doesn’t work unless there’s something bitterly unpleasant about it.
And the public? It was the Dulwich’s most popular show ever. They sold out of show catalogs two weeks before the end.
I’d never seen a Rockwell original. I was prepared to be disappointed. Rockwell relied heavily on carefully posed photographs and I hate illustration that leans too hard on photo reference — because I had to do a huge amount of that in my career (hey, I worked for an engineering company. Accuracy outweighed my artistic pretensions every…single…time).
It has a certain look. Tracing a photo and making the result look artistic is a totally different mental process than staring at something then turning away and trying to rebuild it on paper. The latter is harder work and almost always results in something more interesting to look at.
Anyhow, I was wrong. Totally, totally wrong. Norman Rockwell was a superb painter. His canvases — particularly the early ones — had a Dutch masters quality, with thick, creamy impasto and beautiful finish. Most were big — bigger than I expected — but he worked in many sizes. And there were plenty of loose, painterly studies. And some beautiful pencil drawings!
How he did thousands of paintings (over 4,000 — 323 Post covers alone) in that quality at that size with that much preliminary work…honestly, I do not know. As a matter of personal taste, I could wish he dialed down the schmaltz just a pinch, but as a matter of painterly chops, dude was a genius.
Turns out, the most reproduced artist EVER really doesn’t reproduce all that well.
March 28, 2011 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 42
Good news! Words don’t mean things anymore!
I hope Gaddafi is enjoying his airstrikes, humanitarian intervention, kinetic military action, time-limited, scope-limited military action, skittle-pooping unicorns!
Looks like Obama WTF again!
See y’all here tomorrow 6pm WBT for the new Dead Pool. Looks like my new server is every bit as shit as the old one. I’ll set it up to autopost, so if it’s locked up, just keep refreshing. Good luck!
March 24, 2011 — 11:15 pm
Comments: 22
RIP Liz
You know what that means. Harbqll, if’n you want your dick, drop me a line. The rest of you…Friday, six p.m. Weasel Blog Time, the new pool goes up. We aren’t on British Summer Time yet, but I truly have no idea if that affects WBT.
Check the timestamp. Be here or be squeer.
March 23, 2011 — 1:45 pm
Comments: 16
This is just alllllll kinds of wrong
This is the fighting in Libya. This picture bugs the shit out of me, and I’m struggling to put together a coherent post about it.
I’m not calling fake. These photographers put themselves in actual danger. The photo is nicked from this article describing the four NY Times journalists (including the lady at the far left of this shot) who were later picked up by Gaddafi’s goons at a checkpoint and given a very rough week before being released.
And we certainly have a proud tradition of embedded journalists who show courage and provide a valuable service in times of war. So I’m not knocking that.
But this thing here, this smells wrong. That young man can’t be firing at anything significant, or they’d all be hauling ass for cover. So, he’s…what? Posing? Mmm.
I just. I dunno. When reporters seemingly outnumber the thing being reported upon three to one — and all the cameras point the same way — they aren’t so much reporting as shaping the narrative.
All the cameras but one. The guy who took this picture told me something a lot more interesting than an image of another angry young brown fellow with a shoulder-fired doo-dah.
March 22, 2011 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 33
Optics: FAIL
I know what y’all are thinking — you did this P’shop last week, Stoaty. Yeah, well, hey — HE DID IT AGAIN. His current political advisers flat out suck.
Anyway, shut up, I have some important news: Mapp laid her first egg today. She’s the little ginger chicken. You never heard so much clucking and be-GAK-ing. I told you she’d be a drama queen if she ever got around to laying an egg.
Actually, poor thing, it took her all morning and she shed a little blood over it, so I shouldn’t make fun. I wouldn’t care to blow large hard objects out my vent after breakfast. Especially if it took me by surprise.
In honor of Ovum Prime, I broke out the Oscar Mayer bacon I’d been saving and fried up a proper breakfast-lunch. Oh, don’t get me wrong — English bacon is lovely stuff. But it’s thick and chewy. Like Canadian bacon. But not round.
Oscar Mayer (made in Spain) is the only American-style bacon I can get — and I can’t always get it. I suspect English people think there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with it.
“Oh, I say, Clive, there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with this bacon — it shriveled away to nothing and left the most extraordinary pool of grease behind.”
Anyhow, if I picked up a dose of salmonella, I’m going to drop kick that silly ginger bird into the next county.
March 21, 2011 — 9:20 pm
Comments: 31
Eh. So I’m a banana.
I’ve been wearing this around Second Life for a while. It’s so me.
In SL, you can be anything you want to be. A dinosaur. A flower. An astronaut.
And seemingly 90% of players want to be slutty-looking girls with huge tits. Including the men.
It’s so depressing.
Anyhoo, it seemed like the right graphic to put next to this story from the excellent Watt’s Up With That blog. It’s a timely repost from a February article.
The Cliff’s Notes version: lots of foods are radioactive. Bananas are especially radioactive. Radioactive enough to set off the bomb-detection doo-dads at our ports. Radioactive enough to give you a measurable dose if you stand next to a crate of the treacherous yellow bastards.
So proponents of nuclear energy use the banana equivalent dose as a way of expressing the risk of various radiation exposures. How many bananas would you have to eat to get similarly irradiated?
We don’t have any numbers coming out of Japan yet (and when we do get them, I freely admit those numbers might be bad), but to use an example from Three Mile Island — after the accident, the NRC found traces of radioactive iodine in the milk. I’m sure it was a story at the time. That’s the kind of place you get radiation poisoning — not so much from breathing it, but the stuff gets in the air, gets in the grass, gets in the cow, gets in the milk.
So how much radiation was in the milk? You’d have to drink seventy-five twelve-ounce glasses of contaminated milk to equal the radiation dose from eating a single banana.
A little perspective from a giant animated bruised banana. Good weekend, all!
March 18, 2011 — 11:51 pm
Comments: 24
Happy St Patrick’s Day!
Not an Irish bone in my body, but I do drink. So yay!
Changing the subject, if I’m reading this WSJ article right, the New York Times‘ second go at a paywall isn’t as retarded as it sounds.
They’re making around $100 million per annum on advertising (not too shabby!). They didn’t want to screw that up, so they looked at the numbers and worked out that 85% of their readers read 20 articles or fewer in a month.
That’s where they put the cutoff. Free front page and 20 articles a month. Print subscribers get full digital access, so they’re really just trying to squeeze a little juice out of whatever slice of the 15% heavy users aren’t already covered.
They’re asking stupid money, but they’re asking true believers. Non-story, really.
Not like the poor old Times of London. If Murdoch’s paywall was supposed to stop the bleeding, it failed: print circulation of the Times has dropped almost 15% this year. Pretty much on par with everyone else. Plus, their online readership (and the lovely advertising moolah that goes with) has dropped from 20 million uniques a month to to 50,000 subscribers.
Ow.
March 17, 2011 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 36
A little slice of heaven on a sesame-seed bun
I know I’ve bitched about this before, but if you get hungry between 3 and 6 in the UK, you’re screwed. Restaurants and cafes, from the poshest to the unposhest, open from about noon to three, shut for three hours and reopen from about six to…whenever. It’s maddening.
Except for fast food chains. Good old Mickey D’s.
Got ourselves grievously lost trying a new route into Londinium (exactly as I predicted when I was handed the map and told to navigate). Got there hours late, quickly conducted our business and scooted back home again. Too late for shopping or museums or anything. One Big Mac and out.
So, the usual.
March 16, 2011 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 31
At least the Romans got fiddle music
It’s a metaphor for world events at large, of course. I don’t expect Obama to put on breathing apparatuses and go charging into Fukushima Daiichi his own self.
I do expect the Leader of the Free World™ to act like he gives a shit about anything going on in the big wide. Anything beyond his golf game and his basketball picks.
Dude isn’t even playing president on TV any more.
Update: oh, hey, it looks like Stealie McLightfingers here stole that title from Jim Garaghty (I follow him on Twitter). Man, I hate when I do that. I hate it even more when I suspect I’ve done it but can’t find the true source.
March 15, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 48
You are…nowhere near here, lucky you
Lumme some maps. I follow international tragedies through maps. The reportage on the Japan earthquake/tsunami thing is more than usually fucked up, map-wise. Stuff changing names and moving all around. When they bother to name places at all.
I understand translation is difficult — especially with languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet — but couldn’t we agree on some conventions before the shit hits the fan?
Okay, well, nobody died and made me Gaia — I got these placements from eyeballing Google maps. But, near as I can figure it, this is the lay of the land.
Sendai is the biggest town in the path of destruction. Downtown is on higher ground and survived okay, but they lost their port. This is one of the places where bodies have been washing up.
Kamaishi is the setting of that amateur video of the wave; the one shot from high ground. The one shot in Kesennuma at street level is even scarier.
Reports about the damaged nukes are alllll over the place, but I’m pretty sure these are the three we’ve been hearing about. Of these three, the bottom one is of most concern (which is called either Fukushima II or III, so I went with Fukushima Daini. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds all Japanese and shit. Babelfish says it means “Daini”).
Despite the all the spectacular images and news overload, the devastation is confined along this fairly small portion of the Japanese coastline. The quake was huge, but the tsunami did the damage.
Still, this would be an pretty good time for Gamera to turn up.
March 14, 2011 — 10:54 pm
Comments: 43