Author's posts
Aug 28 2008
Spiral Jetty Pony Party
Public art, particularly sculpture in public spaces, is the most democratic of art forms: no admission required, you just have to go and look at it.
Today, a few pics of perhaps the most obscure public work (because it is generally submerged)–Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. Constructed in April of 1970, it extends into Great Salt Lake in Utah, and is a bravura work. Although the lake covered it for about 30 years, by 2004 it had re-emerged due to drought.
For nearly three decades Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” lay underwater in the Great Salt Lake. Since 1999, as drought has lowered the water level, this famous American earth sculpture — a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt rocks — has slowly re-emerged. Now it is completely exposed; the rocks encrusted with white salt crystals are surrounded by shallow pink water in what looks like a vast snow field. [snip]
“The trip to see the artwork brings people to a place they would not normally experience,” said Nancy Holt, Smithson’s widow and executor, who lives in New Mexico. “The ‘Jetty’ is a vortex that draws in everything in the landscape around it.”
NY Times
Below the fold are some pics I found at photobucket, plus a nifty video.
Open thread: be excellent to each other. And remember: don’t REC the pony party!
Aug 11 2008
Guerrilla Gardening
There was once an alarmist diary at dKos about the coming hard times, and how people in the country can grow their own food, but city-dwellers and those people who will be rendered homeless by the mortgage implosion during the Great Depression Redux will have no such recourse.
And it made me remember a few things.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/u…
That link goes to a pic of one of the most famous headlines in 20th Century U.S. journalism:
“FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”
and it ushered in what we were subsequently to understand was the GOP’s compassionate conservatism toward all beings, human and otherwise.
Jun 20 2008
Connie Willis and why she’s fabulous
When you despair, as I do, frequently, of what will become of you…
When you are out of work and have no money to pay the rent…
When your boss is a tyrant and you don’t know how you can last another day…
When the politics finally has you beaten down because the idiots outnumber you…
There is an answer. Albeit a temporary answer…an answer nonetheless…
And her name is Connie Willis.
Connie is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met…and I consider it an incredible privilege that I was able to meet her at all…at a few cocktail parties, years ago. She probably doesn’t remember me, but that’s all right.
She is a brilliant writer. That’s all that matters.
More below the fold.
Jun 01 2008
As American as Apple Pie
The whole keffiyeh kerfuffle over Rachael Ray’s Dunkin Donuts ad set off a dKos thread (very humorous) that included someone writing about wanting their apple pastries.
Of course we all know that apples aren’t native to the western hemisphere–if they were, Johnny Appleseed would have had to find another line of work. But where are they from?
Biblical references are often ascribed to pomegranates rather than true apples. But that might be wrong. Wikipedia points out that one problem with assuming the ancients meant the apple as we know it today is:
Apples appear in many religious traditions, often as a mystical or forbidden fruit. One of the problems identifying apples in religion, mythology and folktales is that the word “apple” was used as a generic term for all (foreign) fruit, other than berries but including nuts, as late as the 17th C. CE.;[6] For instance, in Greek mythology, the Greek hero Heracles, as a part of his Twelve Labours, was required to travel to the Garden of the Hesperides and pick the golden apples off the Tree of Life growing at its center.[9][10][11]
May 24 2008
Blame it on NPK
It’s Nightprowlkitty’s fault. For years I have been repressing my second love. My first love is books and reading: that, I can do anywhere. But my second love is my adopted city: New York.
Sublimated, and how, as I live in this stupid cow town in stupid PA where the (Dem) governor is selling the f*cking turnpike. Where people are more likely to vote their religion than their conscience (if they even have a conscience–they all claim to be Xtian but seem to have no clue about what Christ–assuming he may have existed–taught in that book they keep lauding); anyway, I had managed to repress my love of NYC until this evening. When NPK posted a YouTube of “42nd Street” and I watched it.
Consider this my tribute to the second greatest love of my life.
May 24 2008
“The Fall of Conservatism”
George Packer has an interesting analysis of the implosion of the GOP in this week’s New Yorker, which finally landed in my mailbox yesterday. It’s rather long but well worth reading in full. He begins in 1966, when Patrick Buchanan went to work for Nixon, and follows the rise of conservatism from that point to the present. Some of this should sound very familiar, even to those of us who weren’t old enough to follow politics back then:
In order to seize the Presidency in 1968, Nixon had to live down his history of nasty politicking, and he ran that year as a uniter. But his Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.
May 03 2008
Real pony party: Kentucky Derby Day!
Please forgive me for usurping an open thread, but: I cannot believe that a site which has terrific pony parties almost every day of the week is ignoring the very real ponies running this afternoon in the 134th Kentucky Derby.
The last triple crown winner was Affirmed in 1978:
Apr 16 2008
I’m mad as hell
and extremely tired of sucking up to power. It is well past time to flex our collective muscles. What is wrong with people in this country? Most of us are wage slaves because we have to be. Okay: fine. Maybe that’s the way of the world. They call it “work” for a reason, right? And I don’t think anybody here opposes work, per se. What I oppose is the suppression of the “underclass”–which increasingly means anybody who isn’t a multimillionaire.
Feb 24 2008
Keep the Pressure ON
Just a note of encouragement for everybody. Well, I found it encouraging: Finally checked my in-box today and there’s an email from Sen. Bob Casey–apparently a bunch of his constituents contacted him regarding FISA and telecom immunity, and our actions worked:
After careful deliberation, I voted in favor of legislation to revise and update the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance (FISA) Act of 1978 to provide our intelligence community with the tools they need to target terrorists. This bill is not perfect, but it does improve on the legislation hurried into law last summer by the White House when it comes to strengthening civil liberties protections for Americans and enhancing judicial oversight.
In updating the FISA legislation, however, we did not need to extend retroactive immunity for those telecommunications firms that may have cooperated with the administration in warrantless surveillance programs. I proudly voted for the Dodd-Feingold amendment that would strip immunity from the bill, and I am disappointed the Senate did not agree to this important change. I believe that the retroactive immunity provision is inconsistent with the protections afforded every American by our Constitution. It is my hope that, when the House and Senate conference meet to reconcile the two different bills, they will agree to narrow and limit the immunity provisions for telecommunications firms.
I have been gratified to hear from so many of my constituents on this issue. Please be assured that I kept your concerns in mind as I deliberated and casted my vote.
[emphasis added]
Feb 02 2008
Christo’s The Gates: An Appreciation
It was an audacious project: 7500 saffron-orange gates covering 23 miles of footpaths in Central Park. A work of art some 25 years in the making, with an estimated total cost of $21 million, paid for by the artist. And it had the whole city talking.
Feb 02 2008
Christo’s The Gates: An Appreciation
It was an audacious display: thousands of saffron-orange banners in a gray, February Central Park, a work of public art that took decades to complete.
Billowing in the wind, clouds scudding across the sun so that when they passed, the banners glowed.
The reviews may have been mixed, but the project had the whole city talking, and art lovers flew in from all over to see it.