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!