I have what you need.

I don't understand.
Feeling adven- turous, I clicked on an ad at nymag.com. (I was looking a business up, okay?) It was for a furniture and accessories store I hadn't heard of...or had forgotten from another life. This purveyor of fine furniture has some of the most amazing traditional fake old fancy tchatkes (for the modern day Marie Antoinette?) I have ever, ever seen. And I have been to an awful lot of furniture show rooms in my time. Really spectacularly tacky, expensive objects like this. And this. And this! One part of me wants to buy it all, bad! It is such a relief from the spare cold modernism we are told is the only expression of "contemporary" living. But then again, isn't Horchow just weird worthless furniture for rich republicans?

I can get my head around the appeal of thousands of glinting crystals, and gilded milled bed posts as thick as your thigh--but the image above represents something much more mysterious; it an object whose capital, value, and purpose I do not begin to understand. The values that the bed, light, etc. are designed to convey, however grotesque and ornate and desperate they seems, are obvious. Tradition, wealth, conservative ideals, "I'm an old lady": all these sentiments are clearly communicated. What's more, those pieces have some sort of utility.

But what is that a pair of in the picture? Why, it's a "Parisian Dormer Window Frame."

Parisian lucarne (dormer window) frame is made of metal with a worn matte patina. Frame has small gaps and spaces between seams due to age and weathering. Sold individually. Measures 18.75"W x 13"D x 35"T. Made in France. Sold individually, originally $3,100.00, now $2,479.90

Was it aged and weathered in France, perhaps on a building for 300 years? Or was it aged and weathered in a shipping yard in France for 6 months after being fabricated in Malaysia? Did it ever hold glass? Can it still? Is it an indoor or outdoor decoration? Most importantly, what will the girls in your bridge club think when you slap this rusted piece of shit on your wall? I guess you're supposed to keep the price tag on and in prominent view.

Problematic Abstraction

A new show at the New Museum featuring small works by Tomma Abts looks very intriguing. While I have not yet seen the show (but will and soon), the images of the works I have seen (at the New Museum's website and on nytimes.com) show Ms. Abts' interest to lie in representing three-dimensional spaces and hinting at photographic techniques (see elaborate use of "focus" at left). Strangely, the New Museum and the New York Times articles both laud the artist as a true abstractionist and assert that her paintings could be indistinguishable from work made in the 50's or 60's.

Are they bonkers? Though the earlier works in the show are more purely abstract (yet could never be confused with work from the mid-20th century), as the works progress they reference depth via shadow, color and focus in more and more direct ways. Which makes me wonder: what is abstraction exactly? I thought I knew but now I don't. Are illusionistic paintings of three dimensional situations abstract if they depict objects in space like paper cut-outs? Or is abstraction merely a lack of people, places and things, and unrelated to depicting spacial relationships?

De(con)struction

The crane collapse on the upper east side this past weekend was morbidly spectacular. I had my fill of gawking on a lunchtime walk past the site. The rescue workers had quite an audience of appreciative, slack-jawed onlookers.

The following morning, my commute through Grand Central was interrupted by red tape barring my usual route through the station. Behind the red tape a group of men was standing and kneeling around a still (lifeless?) body on a stretcher. They had clearly been there for some time. One man was administering defibrillation to the body. They had taken the dead man's shoes off. Is that protocol? In any case, all I remember is the scene illustrated below quite clearly. Lots of people had gathered to gawk but I hurried past. I felt for the guy, thought about him and his death, but I didn't feel that stopping and staring was appropriate.

The Fold, presented not by Deleuze but by the Cooper Hewitt

I am really looking forward to seeing this exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. "Rococo: The Continuuing Curve, 1730-2008" promises to have some breathtaking objects. Make sure you click through to slide #5. It is quite humbling, and thus important, to see objects that are not merely exceptional in our time, but which were standouts in their own time. It makes you remember that people have been fashioning unique and fantastic objects forever, styles and eras be damned.

Can your imagination tell the difference between a 40 ft and a 50 ft reptile?

Luckily for you and me, dear reader, the Tuesday Science Times has become even more visually enticing. The newish Science in Pictures combines an extremely concise format with useless and bizarre information. And pretty pretty pictures, which was the only part I liked anyway. A fun picture or illustration is matched with a title, and an explanatory paragraph of two to four sentences. But don't worry; there is still plenty of room for fun!

Here are my two favorite tidbits.

I have actually devoted a significant amount of time-um, let's say minutes--wondering about the origins of domesticated farm animals, notably sheep and cows. But I had not yet given any thought to chickens. Luckily, the Times always anticipates my burning intellectual desires. So, Darwin believed modern chicken to be descended from red jungle fowl. Boy, is the joke on him. Turns out, chickens are descended from gray jungle fowl AS WELL as red jungle fowl. What on earth is a jungle fowl? Is it a specific species? Or just a genus? Could I have a pet jungle fowl? Would it (either color) get along with my jungle reptile? Goddammit, they always leave me wanting more...

In other earth shattering discoveries, a ferocious Jurassic reptile previously believed to have reached lengths of 40 feet is now thought to perhaps maybe one time a billion years ago to have reached lengths of 50 feet. And inspired the most awesome illustration ever! One question: How big is that sea gull?

Amazon has me all figured out. Can it help me figure me out?

All Categories Arts & Photography Astronomy Classics Composers & Musicians Contemporary Art Criticism Culture Drawing Electronica Ethnic Studies European Geography German History History of Science Indie & Lo Fi Lo-Fi Modern Music Nonfiction Philosophy Renaissance Rock Social History Urban

During a recent visit to my "personalized" amazon home page, I was startled by its new format. In addition to suggestions, the new style presents a list of categories culled from past purchases with the font size adjusted for relevance! (I assume that it is frequency of purchase from each category that determines relevancy.)

This page could be a useful tool for self-reflection. One could mine their personalized amazon page for cheap psychological advice, or better yet, career counseling. Looks like I should have gone for my Ph.D. in philosophy after all. Damn. Why didn't I have this page senior year of college? Oh yeah, I was too busy studying philosophy to conduct elaborate shopping sprees on Amazon.

Perhaps instead of allowing participants on social networking sites to choose their own likes, influences, etc., one should have the option of submitting an objective summary, courtesy of Amazon.

However, there are a couple of flaws in this system. For instance, these categories are presented as equal concepts when they are actually wildly irrelevant types of classification. Surely, inserting Lo-Fi and History into the same hierarchy can be done by an algorithm but makes no sense to a human being. Second, the above list of my favorite categories includes Ethnic Studies; this can only have been included due to a purchase of textbooks I made for a friend. Also, every time I log on Amazon tries to sell me pastel ruffled baby socks, similar to a set that I purchased once for an acquaintance's baby shower. I feel like these items have nothing to do with me. And yet it is a true and unavoidable fact that I purchased them through Amazon. And so they must!

Art Fair Adventures

I attended the ADAA's "The Art Show" on Monday. While my cartoon at right is pretty damning, I actually enjoyed my visit immensely. On a weekday at noon, no one was around except for me! The booth attendants were bored of the art and each other (it was the last day of the fair) so were happy to answer all my questions. And I did discover a few young artists making interesting work.

Art History Lesson: Pierre Bonnard

I spent the President's Day weekend in Washington, DC. I saw the Pierre Bonnard painting on the left in a small show of high lights from the National Gallery's collection, "Small French Paintings." You could say that the subject of this work makes it the Frenchiest of all the works in the exhibition; it was definitely one of the best. This is a great painting for a number of reasons.

This type of oblique perspective draws you into the painting immediately. It makes you feel as if have just thrown open your shutters to hang out of your third story window and join in the festivities.
The color in this work is also magnificent. The washed-out street and sidewalk force all the brightly colored objects forward. It is hard to see at this scale (and through a computer screen) but every color is a solid, flat, confident plane. The orange-red of the flags on the right is the most saturated color in the painting and positively glows in person.

The technique is very reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec; this may be why I am so fond of this painting. Strong pencil lines show between planes of color (see between the street and sidewalk) and on the whole this painting is so modern I am not sure if it is finished at all. Perhaps it is just an advanced under painting; I must confess I don't know much about Bonnard. Other works by this artist have a lot more color- swirliness (a techinical term) rather than these flat bold shapes and support this hypothesis. In any case, the creator is long dead. It is now displayed on a wall in a fancy museum and thus available for me to criticize and adore regardless of painterly intention.
(Pierre Bonnard, Paris, Rue de Parme on Bastille Day, 1890, oil on canvas,)

How to fashion realistic male genitalia with everyday household items.

Science Times rarely disappoints. This week's section does include a cute article about animals but I'd like to call your attention to another article "Building Organs Even the Prudish Can Handle."

Who are these prudes? Doctors! I always assumed that a prerequisite for joining the medical profession was a lack of squeamishness and an ability to not be embarrassed by examining a stranger's body. You've got a chicken you need gutted ASAP? Great! Five foot long guinea worm tangled in your intestines that needs to be threaded out through your thigh? Ooh, can you send me video footage? But a lump in your balls? Hold on, that's disgusting. I don't want to see that shit; put it back. Put it back! Disappointingly, even the old gal you thought was happy to squeeze your cervix, isn't.

Dr Carla Pugh wants to change all that. Rather, she was doctors to become better surgeons and diagnosticians but training them on lifelike simulators. She's invented life-like body parts (see the "vagina vault") out of inexpensive materials that can be found in the grocery store or, more rarely, local sex shop. Endlessly creative, "she has also constructed a scrotum using two wood balls linked by a rubber band (vas deferens) and suspended in an extra-large condom filled with oil and peanut butter."

I don't know about you, but I kind of feel like trying to make one at home...

Too early, no coffee=headline confusion fun.

When I first sat down to my computer this morning, I was shocked and thrilled by this headline,
"I love you, you love manmeat."
I thought it was going to be some sweet Valentine's Day article about couples' amiable separations after finding out that the male partner is gay...but it turns out I was wrong. It is just some annoying oh-so-Time-sy article about couples with divergent bourgeoisie eating affectations. Too bad.
"I love you, you love Meat"

Have you ever seen a staid old gentleman in an expensive suite...

...walk a dog in a fancy hotel lounge filled with woodshavings and miniature plastic fire hydrant replicas? Or a dog dressed up like an old lady about to go skiing? Now you can.
Check out pictures #8 and #13.

Crime and Punishment

My official New Yorker recommendation this week is "Letter from Poland: True Crime" (February 11 & 18 issue).   It is a fascinating study of a man who commits a murder of passion and then writes a splashy transgressive novel about it.  The work frames the crime as part of the novel's amoralistic  philosophical implications. The text and the author's philosophical views play a starring role during the police investigation and murder trial.

Before the the trial commences, the alleged murderer accuses the Polish police of kidnapping and torturing him when he was first taken into police custody.  He then commences a suit against the Polish government.  He claims that he is being prosecuted for writing offensive and controversial material.  The author has a longstanding hobby, well known locally, of spreading outright lies about himself to challenge language and reality--he calls these "mytho-creations".  Despite this, he is able to spread his story via the internet and convince thousands of strangers that he is being persecuted by a reactionary government for penning a controversial text.  Despite a public outcry by supporters around the globe who condemn the Polish government's "persecution" of the author, his suit against the government is dismissed.  

During the trial itself, roles become reversed between the judicial system and the post-structuralist philosopher/murderer.  The trial turns into an exercise in literary theory and criticism, with witnesses, lawyers and judges interpreting the text while the defendant challenges the legitimacy of their factual evidence.  The defendant, who subscribes to radical relativism in intellectual as well as moral matters, declares that as the author he has the sole privilege to interpret his work! He also insists that there are subtle flaws in the prosecution's chain of evidence, and ends up using language as a meaningful tool to determine fact. It is a real coup for reality, and a swift kick in the boot to all the countless know-it-all uber-mensch freaks I had to deal with as an undergraduate philosophy major (who will now think twice before putting their ideas into practice).

Due to the case's generous publicity, the novel has become a bestseller in Poland and is being published in other languages.  In addition to literary immortality, the author also secured for himself 25 years in jail.

Hogwash? Not the best wash, apparently.

I, like many of you readers, am often disappointed by much of what gets reported in The New York Times. Many are the mornings when, after reading some new trend piece (on the "significant" number of Americans who are building sound-proof snoring chambers or enrolling their fetuses in uterine college-prep courses), I declare I will cancel my subscription. But then Tuesday's Science Times rolls around and the paper wins my heart all over again.

The Science Times is not nerdy or technologically sophisticated. It features cute animals, quirky physicists, and fun medical facts, tempered with the occasional global warming wrist slap or exotic disease caveat. Yet more often than not, buried within the saccharine mire is a really neat article.

Today's subject, "A Medical Mystery unfolds in Minnesota," has a cute alliterative quality to the title, and yet I almost skipped over it in favor of "Quantum Teleporting, Yes; the Rest is Movie Magic." Imagine, Hollywood is trying to fool us again with those tricky CGI thingamabobs. Luckily we have the Times to set us straight.

But I digress. Let's get to the meat of the matter! You see, a significant number of people (specifically, a dozen) got sick in Austin, MN. And they all worked at the same factory, Quality Pork Processors ( a supplier of and direct next door neighbor to Hormel, maker of Spam). After a few people came down with severe symptoms of an unknown neurological disorder,

“We put our heads together and said, ‘Something is out of sorts,’ ” said Carole Bower, the department head.

But it turns out that heads were exactly what the problem was! The processing plant's "head table," to be exact.

As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.

I really don't want to ruin the article for you, but I'll give you a hint about the cause of the disease: it MAY have something to do with the fact that each person who got sick spent every working day of their lives with hog brains splattered over their bare arms and faces, even "swallowing or inhaling the mist of brain tissue!" Luckily, the man in charge had a good head on his shoulders:

Dr. Lynfield asked Mr. Wadding, “Kelly, what do you think is going on?”
The plant owner watched for a while and said, “Let’s stop harvesting brains.”

The factory has since changed their brain harvesting technique, and all the people who were sick have gotten better. No one died (except for a shitload of hogs). But this article has left me a little confused. I can't figure out if learning about what the goes on at Quality Pork Processing is comforting: isn't it nice to know that pockets of our nation still have robust blue collar manufacturing opportunities? Or is it horrifying: good god, why haven't they invented machines to do this shit yet? I mean, shouldn't somebody get on that?

In any case, it has been another fascinating Tuesday, spent filling my brain with completely useless knowledge gleaned from the Science Times. More to come next week!

Restaurant week reality check

Lunch at Cafe Boulud on the Upper East Side is exactly as you would imagine. It's got impeccable and heinously expensive food, like $5 dollar coffees and soup categories neither you nor the waiter can pronounce. And with your pre fixe dessert, you get FREE offensive commentary on your ass from the Italian-suited, Florida-tanned septuagenarians at the next table. Yay restaurant week!

What's black and white and red all over?

A blushing zorse! It’s nice to know that in this day and age, when so many species (thousands?) disappear each year, there are some dedicated people out there working to create new ones—like the zorse featured in this video. (Why not hebra? Sounds like a slur?)

Simulacrum schmimulacrum

In this film, a member of the paparazzi pretends to hide from Britney Spears and "catches" her pretending to accidentally bare her breast while she pretends that she is dancing alone as she desperately hopes the world is watching. It's been suggested that the public's insatiable appetite for drama has fueled her breakdown. I say that we're keeping her alive...she'll expire the second we stop watching!

Dear Gentle Reader,

This blog is a new project. It will be evolving rapidly over the next few weeks.

This blog will be informed by my own tastes, preferences and interactions. However, it is my hope that the content will be compelling to an audience greater than my immediate friends and acquaintances.

The words and images I've been feeding myself on the internet are 90% drivel. Why not create my own content? I am hopeful that the act of creation will ward off idiotic blog-induced mental stagnation.

I also predict this endeavor will help me share information in a more concise manner than I am able to use when I speak. Perhaps I can replace time spent on watered down chattering with concentrated written ideas that have more meaning. If I am lucky, the care I shall apply to my posts will re-mold my verbal habits.

I have yet to delineate a set program of content. Right now, I will include photos of my work and other pieces of art, links to news articles of particular interest, and reviews of restaurants, bars and museums. If I'm feeling generous, I may post video clips of my top secret cooking show pilot.