Supplying more fun than can reasonably be expected at the optician’s, these intriguing lenses created by Hungarian designer Bence Agoston for a 3D printer enable psychedelic visual experiences while requiring the insertion of round optical lenses into the waiting slots—the effects include “...
I’m a paramedic. My job requires a broad set of skills: interpersonal, medical, and technical skills, as well as the crucial skill of performing under pressure. I often make decisions on my own, in seconds, under chaotic circumstances, that impact people’s health and lives. I make $15/hr.
And these burger flippers think they deserve as much as me?
Good for them.
Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? Fuck those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, fuck these burger flippers.”
And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich assholes who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.
My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the fucking CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they? No one’s making them.
The workers in NY *made* them. They fought for and won a living wage. So how incredibly petty and counterproductive is it to fuss that their pile of crumbs is bigger than ours? Put that energy elsewhere. Organize. Fight. Win.
“If your religion doesn’t challenge you to care for people you might otherwise be dismissive of and, instead, reinforces your negative feeling about them, you don’t have a religion – you have a formalized structure for institutionalizing your biases.”
Last night I was talking to a married poly guy, rather new (1-2 years) to polyamory. I was surprised to see that apparently he could not, for the life of him, discuss himself as an individual! Every sentence was “we, we, we…”
I pointed this out to him, explicitly, three times — for instance, by asking him, “Ok, so what has YOUR experience of polyamory been, as an individual, from your personal perspective?” It totally didn’t register. He’d answer that each time with sentences starting with “We…” (OK, once he did start to say “…I…” — but it so visibly discomforted him that he switched back to the plural before that sentence was over.)
He and his wife apparently do not date as a couple; they date separately and each have their own additional relationships. That’s great. And: If you’re dating as an individual, it generally helps to, you know, be able to present yourself as an individual — even if you’re also partnered. (This was especially relevant since he was seeking insight on how to meet more poly/poly-friendly people outside of polyamory meetups, as well as on how to flirt as a married poly guy.)
Our conversation continued — he was pretty eager to talk. He and his wife practice hierarchical polyamory, and he noted that hierarchy “works for us.”
So I asked him twice if he or his wife had ever asked the people they date whether hierarchy works for them, too. “Of course it does.” “Have you asked them?” “Of course it works for them. They’re like us, they usually have partners too.” “But have you asked them? You might want to actually ask them.” “But it works for us.”
I mentioned nonhierarchy as an option, as a thing that people do. He clearly couldn’t conceive of a relationship network that lacks a “primary.” The closest he got was, “Well it wouldn’t be practical or fair to make another partner equal.” (I’ve seen that before: assuming “no hierarchy” means that all partners must be primary and treated identically.)
He didn’t seem to grasp that in nonhierarchical polyamory, “equal” means that partners have equal negotiating power to each other. That is, the partners all get to have a full say in how their own relationship works — according to their own wishes, needs, priorities, boundaries and constraints. (Everyone has those, including solo poly people.) Ideally this all happens with consideration of others, including metamours — but ultimately it’s the partners, together, who decide how to handle their relationship (and not outside parties, even their spouses).
In contrast, in hierarchical polyamory, partners in a primary relationship are presumed to be entitled to set all the terms for how their secondary relationships will work — or whether they’ll even continue to exist. Secondary partners may (or may not) be free to advocate for their own needs and wishes — but that’s not really a deciding factor in how their relationship will work. Ultimately in hierarchical polyamory, the only “power” that secondary partners have is the Hobson’s choice of whether to stay or leave the relationship.
…Sigh… It’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to educate or convince him about anything. That would have been futile, it appears.
This conversation highlighted how couple privilege and the Relationship Escalator mindset can be such a trap for some people, even in polyamory. These issues can limit what you’re able to perceive and think — like George Orwell’s Newspeak.
To lose the ability to conceive of, or express, yourself as an individual. To develop an allergy to first person singular. Wow. Doubleplusungood.
I don’t think this is a simple matter of pronoun preference — similar to respecting someone’s choice of gender (or gender neutral) pronouns. Rather, it’s a matter of whether you’re able and willing to see, and present, yourself as a discrete individual. That makes a big difference in how you can engage with other people.
Merging your identity with partners is not necessarily wrong or bad. It’s understandable that people sometimes want to identify strongly as part of a couple, family, community, corporation, etc. — and reflect that by saying “we” in some contexts. (Hell, even the U.K. monarchy deploys the “royal We,” and writers often use the “editorial we.”) However, eclipsing your individual identity in this process has some significant downsides.
The way this fellow talked might make more sense in the context of swinger lifestyle culture, which is generally strongly couple-centric, hierarchical, and highly structured. But in polyamory, even if you’re not solo — if you can’t present yourself as an individual, that makes it really hard for people to engage with you as an individual. Which can undermine your goals.
ADDENDUM: I’ve been getting some pushback to this post for criticizing this guy for doing polyamory differently. Rather than bury that in the comments, I’ll address it here.
Yep, I’m definitely being critical of his approach to how he presented himself and does polyamory. Not that he doesn’t have a right to be different — he absolutely does. But similarly, I am not obliged to approve, or to have no opinion.
Remember, this guy and his wife date people separately — not “as a couple.” In fact, he was specifically seeking input on how to meet more poly-friendly people, and flirt with them, outside of the context of poly community events. Commenting on his inability or unwillingness to present as an individual is warranted in that context.
Also, hierarchy is not inherently wrong or unethical; people are free to choose it. What bugged me here was his apparent unwillingness or inability to even consider that the people he and his wife date might have a different perspective on their hierarchy that really matters. Ignoring or discounting involved parties is a huge ethical quagmire that often leads to really shitty behavior, especially in polyamory. Many solo poly people know too well how that dance works.
Finally, about his inability to grasp that nonhierarchical polyamory might be possible — and that it’s not about treating all partners identically as primaries, but respecting nonprimary partners enough to accept that their voice really counts in their own relationship. That’s not wrong, nor unethical, but just… Classic.
Dutch Room at the Barnes Foundation, northwest corner, c. 1952 (photo by Angelo Pinto, Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA)
PHILADELPHIA — It’s an illuminating mental exercise to ponder: what if Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the pharmaceutical tycoon and physician who assembled an unmatched collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings in Philadelphia, was actually an installation artist before his time? This is the central conceit that inspired The Order of Things, now in its final days at the Barnes Foundation. Curated by Drexel University art history professor Martha Lucy, the exhibition comprises three distinct installations by Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, and Fred Wilson. It also includes a re-creation (with original objects) of the “Dutch Room” from the original Barnes site in Lower Merion as it looked from its inception, in 1925, until it was dismantled to make way for an ADA-mandated elevator in the 1990s.
The paintings that Barnes collected seem quite traditional today, though they were cutting edge at the time. Paired with his array of decorative arts and household objects and arranged in symmetrical tableaux just so, the overall effect is quaint. So it is counterintuitive, but actually quite brilliant, to reconsider Barnes’s artistic activities as a form of art in their own right. He didn’t paint or sculpt, fabricate brass andirons, build furniture, or throw pots by hand; he arranged things he loved according to a passionately specific vision, juxtaposing objects and works of art because they simply ‘worked’, the way we all do at home, and not according to the genre-driven, chronological system of display that has guided most art museums since their inception. Pennsylvania Dutch chests are adorned with American pottery or pewter objects, above which two nearly identical decorative door hinges are suspended on either side of a Cezanne portrait. The Barnes Foundation’s arrangements of art and objects invites visitors to take part in an immersive experience that only works in person, hovering somewhere between the hands-off etiquette of touring a museum and the tantalizing thrill of poking around someone’s house when they aren’t there. Barnes’s creation is not just the organization of his things, but a ritualized experience of viewing them together in a specific place.
This has always been the Barnes Foundation’s best and most challenging attribute: all the pottery, candlesticks, and paintings cannot be moved, even a fraction of an inch, from their present location. The question naturally arises, then, of what to do in terms of contemporary programming — because the irony, at least in terms of the permanent collection, is that the institution can’t actually do anything. Unlike other large museums, the Barnes cannot rotate objects in and out of active display or organize special shows using these works to bring particular artists or styles to light. Each piece must remain exactly where it is, forever.
In its new location in Philadelphia (following a much-debated move in 2012), the Barnes has in fact found a way to make a virtue of this odd limitation by devoting space — housed adjacent to the permanent collection galleries within the same building — to a rotating series of temporary exhibitions and commissioning original projects by contemporary artists, something it could not do at the old site. It now finds itself with the ability to dive seamlessly into a very current mode of artistic practice: artists’ responses to complex historic sites. The Order of Things, more so than its recent predecessor, Yinka Shonibare’s lovely 2014 installation Magic Ladders, engages primarily with the way objects at the Barnes are arranged, barely touching on the substance of those objects themselves. If we are to understand Barnes’s collection as an historic site, these artists have created responses in which the specific content and cultural context of the works — the painters of 1910s France or a workshop in late 18th-century Pennsylvania — seem to matter little. What matters most, manifested across three very different installations, is the way the collection represents a love of things.
Viewing the massive installation of filing cabinets, butterfly nets, magnifying glasses, and microscopes that comprise Mark Dion’s “The Incomplete Naturalist,” one gets the impression that if Dion didn’t exist, Dr. Barnes would have had to invent him. Dion’s work over the years has found him creating contemporary cabinets of curiosity, assembling large collections of everyday objects, or taxidermied animals, or dead trees supporting living ecosystems of moss and fungi. He evokes the mise en scène of the gentlemen naturalists of the Enlightenment and Victorian eras with elegant wood cases and glass-covered drawers.
In a profound way, Dion gets Barnes the scientist (Barnes developed the drug as Argyrol, which was used as a treatment for gonorrhea prior to the advent of antibiotics). His title is probably a nod to a 2002 biography of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, The Compleat Naturalist, by Wilfrid Blunt. Linneaus was the founder of modern taxonomy, the system of classifying organisms by species. In an interview about the exhibition on the Barnes’s website, Dion poses the question that inspired his installation: “What would Dr. Barnes be like if he were a naturalist?” The resulting assemblage is to the history of science what Barnes’s assemblages are to the history of art: a grouping of scientific equipment and supplies that suggests an eccentric way of organizing knowledge through objects, absent the classically “Linnean” drive to organize them by artist, region, or indeed species. Like Barnes’s door hinges and pottery, everyday things are being used here aesthetically, rather than functionally. Dion’s nets imply a hypothetical butterfly hunt, but they are busy doing something else on the wall.
In her catalogue essay, curator Martha Lucy notes that although they were controversial, Barnes’s arrangements garnered their share of praise in their day: Henri Matisse liked the “promiscuity” with which objects and paintings were mixed, and an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer that appeared in 1924, the year before the foundation opened, praised it for being free of the “gloomy atmosphere” that seemed to hang over more traditional museums. Lucy points out that this was very likely a reference to “The Gloom of the Museum,” a 1917 essay by John Cotton Dana, philanthropist and founder of the Newark Museum, which sharply criticized what he saw as an elitist presentation of works of art in a way that made the experience opaque to visitors who lacked art historical knowledge. By this logic, what Barnes did, and what Dion celebrates in his installation, was to decouple the content of the taxonomy of art history from the objects he arranged, but to harness its impulse to impose structure, so that his assemblages would elicit a new way of viewing.
Barnes, who grew up working class in Philadelphia, wished to make the appreciation and study of art widely accessible by using universal qualities like shape and color to make connections — one need not know anything about Modigliani or Pennsylvania Dutch furniture to approach them. The joyful juxtapositions are an invitation to come inside and play. The evident absurdity (and undeniable beauty) of Dion’s sunburst array of butterfly nets against a kelly green wall resonates with this impulse.
Judy Pfaff’s “Scene 1: The Garden. Enter Mrs. Barnes, 2015” is a visual feast devoted to reimagining Laura Barnes’s arboretum. Mrs. Barnes was responsible for creating the elaborate gardens, referred to as the Plant Collection, at the Lower Merion site (and which still exist, despite the institution’s move.) Pfaff has created a symmetrical and grid-like system of metal frames and fluorescent lights, which is submerged under brightly colored epoxy, some of which is imprinted with the pattern of a beehive. A large, white chandelier hangs overhead, and photographs of flowers that have been manipulated digitally line the walls and floors. The feeling of disrupted order is palpable in a way that clearly evokes the controlled chaos of a well-manicured garden, though visually it’s less immediately evident how the installation connects with the Barneses’ worldview.
Fred Wilson’s installation, “Trace,” is a lighthearted response to the ‘Barnes Logic’ of object assemblage, using the office furniture and ephemera from the original site in Lower Merion to create mini assemblages, along with copies of Barnes’s paintings mounted on the walls just behind the objects. The rolling desk chairs and coat racks are immediately familiar to anyone who has worked in an office with somewhat older furniture. “Trace” is a witty iteration of Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” practice: here, instead of artistic treasures from the basement, we see the very guts of the old Barnes Foundation flipped inside out. Wilson may be drawing an analogy here to the provocative way in which Barnes placed his paintings alongside “everyday things” like door hinges, plates, and bowls, taking this high/low juxtaposition a step further by adding new everyday things, like staplers and umbrellas, to the mix. This is not Wilson’s most affecting installation; something about the choice of material feels less serious than past works, such as “Metalwork 1793-1880” (1992), which pairs antique silver tableware with slave shackles, drawing a powerful connection between the material luxuries of 18th- and 19th-century America and the slave labor that made possible that wealth. But the comparative lack of gravitas in “Trace” also makes it one of Wilson’s most wry and amusing works, and it’s refreshing to see this side of his practice.
The Order of Things is a smartly conceived step in a very exciting direction for the Barnes Foundation. Issues of social class, accessibility, cultural relevance, and the educational ‘usefulness’ of art are all pressing concerns for museums, and it’s fascinating that an institution whose collection is quite literally a thing of the past should program such a creative response to it.
Look, it’s the paperback version of Lock In, which arrived here at the Scalzi Compound just yesterday. It looks great, feels great, and while I can’t legally promise anything, anecdotal evidence shows that when you hold it, you are three to five percent more attractive to those you wish to appear attractive to (and also, to dragonflies. We haven’t figured out the science on that one). This edition is officially out in exactly one week, although, as I am not JK Rowling, I’m sure that release date will be leaky and you will find copies available before then.
This is the “virtuous cycle,” incidentally — release the previous hardcover as a paperback on or near the release date of the new hardcover in order to take advantage of the publicity and excitement around the hardcover release. And then next year, repeat, with a new hardcover and the old one in paperback. Easy! Simple! Fun. And useful for book tours, curious new readers, and so on.
This also means the hardcover release of The End of All Things, not to mention my tour, is just two weeks away. Those of you coming to the tour will be happy to know that I will, as is my custom, be reading something new and exclusive on tour, which you won’t be able to read or hear anywhere else. Plus other stuff! So it will be worth your time to show up, I promise.
Nearly everything Gould ever held in his hands slipped away. He lost his glasses; he lost his teeth. “I keep losing fountain pens, change, and even manuscripts,” he wrote. “I lost my diary in the toilet,” he reported one day. He himself appeared and disappeared.
Joe Gould “was a toothless madman who slept in the street” and attempted to write “The Oral History of Our Time,” jotting down whatever he was told by anyone in countless notebooks. Though only a few of his manuscripts didn’t get lost over the years, Jill Lepore profiles Gould and his unbelievable story over at the New Yorker.
The sun never sets on the literature of the British Empire, does it?
Last year the estate of P. G. Wodehouse gave its blessing to Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, a new installment in the beloved series, written 40 years after the author’s death. The extensive works of Kingsley Amis are being reissued in handsome paperback editions by New York Review Books—the literary equivalent of cryogenically freezing someone for a long trip to the outer space of historical significance. Grove Press is re-publishing The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy, a 1955 picaresque novel about life at Trinity College in Dublin.
The new stuff is even more fun. From Bloomsbury Press comes The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills, an irresistibly charmingly novel about London bus drivers, who are charged with keeping an equal distance between each bus along the route. “The maintenance of headway was sacrosanct. Any violation threatened to undermine an entire ideology. Hence, they feared if all the buses came at once, the walls of their citadel would tumble.”
Topping them all, in a way, New Vessel Press has published an absolutely outrageous novel called On the Run with Mary by Jonathan Barrow, in which a young English boy escapes from his boarding school and gets into all manner of sexual and scatological trouble. From page one:
Mr. Prente leaves tomorrow. The bursar raided his study and found three hundred pairs of soiled boys’ underwear in a chest under his bed. And hidden in a laundry bag, he found 12 lemonade bottles: each overflowing with boys’ urine that was still warm. Next morning these bottles were put on display in the assembly hall as a warning to all other members of the staff. Then, after the hymn, each boy filed past and those responsible had to claim their urine. I refused and was thrashed by Mr. Kille before the entire school. (Judging by the wet patch, I guessed that he had an orgasm whilst administering the punishment. Fourteen years later, when we both shared cells at Parkhurst he admitted to me that this was correct.)
Yes, now is a great time to be an old white man who scribbles about the glorious curiosities of the United Kingdom. But I suppose that has always been the case, hasn’t it?
How Microsoft records Holographic video content for the HoloLens
Video explains Microsoft’s method of producing high definition Volumentric Video which can be observed in future tech:
For those interested, the company is recording these Holographic videos
at its newly created TV studio in Redmond. This TV studio has roughly
100 cameras capture a performance from many different angles and their
algorithms create a highly accurate 3-D model of the person performing,
resulting in a photo-real appearance.
MFP said to me last night, “It’s nice to be able to say ‘I need a drawer or box to put all my sex toys in,’ and nobody thinks it’s a big deal.” I followed her comment with my own: “And even nicer to have that statement met with approval and understanding… Well, what else are you going to do with ’em?’ Gotta put them somewhere!”
It is nice. I forget sometimes just how wonderful it is to be generally surrounded by folks who are comfortable with sex, with their own sexuality, with honest and frank discussions about fucking…
…Until I’m smacked by an encounter with someone who reminds me that the mere mention of having sex is “OMG, TMI!” and prompts me with the stunned question “why would you tell me that?”
I mean, when I think about it, “Hey, I didn’t pick up or respond to your text messages because I was busy having sex” is — to most people — an incredible overshare. But for me, sex is just one of many things I do with my body. If I tell you “Oops, I missed your call — I was on the treadmill at the gym,” or “hey, it took me a bit to get back to your email, since I was in the middle of an online game with friends,” the thing I’m conveying is that I was occupied for a length of time.
It still boggles my mind that sex is somehow such a distinct and different thing from every other possible human endeavor, in the minds of so many. It’s something that We Do Not Discuss because Such Things Are Not Done. ~sigh~ I would love a world in which fucking was as freely discussed as football or fall fashion; where conversations about how the silliness of the “no white after Labor Day” rule were as common as conversations about the ridiculously small variety of vibrator motors; where chatting with a stranger at the bar on statistics about the clitoris, and speculating on future knowledge to be had was as valid a topic as — and one no less assumed to be culturally familiar than — the statistics of the starting lineup of the local sports team, their past performance, and speculations about what may yet happen.
‘Constellation’ by Melissa McGill on Bannerman Island (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless noted)
For the next two years, a constellation built by human hands over the ruins of a Hudson River castle is mingling with the stars. Constellationby Melissa McGill launched last month and continues through 2017. Each night after sunset, 17 lights illuminate Bannerman Island for two hours before fading back to dark.
‘Constellation’ with the night sky (photo by John Huba) (click to enlarge)
As McGill explained on a recent visit to the island by boat from Beacon, New York, she’s interested in exploring “fragments and presence” and “thinking about what’s missing.” With Bannerman Island, also known as Pollepel Island, there are gaps throughout the structures which appear like a collapsed medieval fortress — something impossible for a place just 50 miles north of New York City.
Like this terrestrial constellation of LED lights, held aloft by aluminum poles between 40 and 80 feet tall, Bannerman Castle is an illusion. It dates to 1901 when a Scottish-born New Yorker named Francis Bannerman relocated his armories out of Brooklyn, where residents weren’t too thrilled about living by live ammunition, to a tiny island on the Hudson. Proud of his heritage, he constructed an old world castle, an impulse not dissimilar from the Gilded Age mansions all around New York, where residents were styling their homes after French estates and Irish castles. However, Bannerman’s creation was an extravagance built on a shoestring budget, where a lack of right angles and tiny windows made his castle appear larger than it is, and bedsprings and bayonets filled in the shabby brick and concrete that now a century later is crumbling. A 1920 explosion, a 1969 fire, and weather-related collapses in 2009 and 2012 further encouraged the disappearance of parts of the structures.
Viewing Bannerman Castle from the island
Bannerman Castle with its supports, and a ‘Constellation’ pole at left
Enough remains of Bannerman Castle to give it an air of mystery, mostly glanced at from Metro-North trains as they move alongside the river. “A lot of our relationship to the island is from the train,” McGill said. She added that Constellation is “a way for people to have some connection with the site. As a public artwork they see it from the train and the shore and it opens to more people.” By keeping it to two brief hours, the experience also encourages it to be a community gathering event.
Light poles for ‘Constellation’ (photo by Rob Penner) (click to enlarge)
Bannerman Castle Trust, Inc. is holding evening boat viewing tours on Friday and Saturday nights through October, which include a short island exploration. Kayaking visits are also available. Like Bannerman Castle itself, the illusion is evident from the island, where supports holding up the decaying castle mingle with McGill’s aluminum lights. Yet this doesn’t make viewing the sunset and subsequent human-made stars any less transformative. As with a magician who reveals how a trick works, if you let yourself fall into the experience there are moments when the aluminum poles disappear and the lights hover like fallen stars.
“It’s always an evolving experience as you see it,” McGill stated, adding that Constellation is always different depending on the clouds or a clear sky where stars join the artificial lights, and the installation was designed to sustain all weather — during summers when the surrounding hills contrast their greenery, and winters when snow will fall over the skeletal ruins. She worked closely with preservation and conservation groups, including Bannerman Castle Trust Inc. and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, to assure that the ruins weren’t damaged and the ecology wasn’t impacted, with the scaffolding poles installed by hand and the lights’ glass orbs colored blue to prevent bird collisions.
“Constellations are different in different cultures,” she explained, noting that a major inspiration was the tradition of the indigenous Lenape who viewed the Milky Way as a “White Road,” a pathway between the land of the living and the great beyond. She added that the experience requires a viewer to complete the image of the lights “in your mind’s eye,” engaging in the magic of a night’s moment when the stars come out, and a glimpse of the heavens comes down to Earth.
‘Constellation’ by Melissa McGill on Bannerman Island
‘Constellation’ by Melissa McGill on Bannerman Island
The boat for Bannerman Island with poles for ‘Constellation’
George Simolaris is a member of the Board of Selectmen (the town council) in Billerica, Massachusetts. According to him, some of the crosswalks around town have become unsafe because the paint has faded, and it's been taking forever to get the town manager and/or Board to repaint them. After more than six months of waiting, he says, he decided to help, so he went out last week and painted several of the crosswalks himself, at no cost to the city. He even used his own paint. Then they looked nice and were easy to see.
For this, he will be prosecuted.
Exactly why the rest of the board and the town manager are so unhappy with this is not clear to me. Pictures posted by local news (right, courtesy of Karen Twomey/WBZ News) seemed to confirm that the paint had in fact faded. This, at least, is what one crosswalk looked like after town workers got done power-washing Simolaris's paint off the street. It's possible it didn't look quite this bad beforehand, if the workers stripped off some of the old paint in the process. But it looks that way now. Simolaris used green paint instead of yellow, and he may have used the wrong kind of paint. Supposedly, a resident has complained that some of his paint got onto his or her car, but no details of why or how have been published yet. But even if both those points are valid, I'm not sure why they wouldn't just go paint over the green with the officially approved traffic yellow.
Instead of doing that, they sent out the power-washing crew, which cost the town $4,200 and would appear to have made the streets less safe again, at least temporarily. (As of the most recent report, the crosswalks remained unpainted, or maybe de-painted would be more accurate.) They are demanding that Simolaris pay the $4,200 and resign from the board, and they are also pressing charges against Simolaris for "defacing public property."
At the board meeting last week, Simolaris refused to resign and according to this report, citizens who attended the meeting were mostly in his camp. Actually, the report says that "the backlash at the other selectmen was hard to contain." For now, the board is standing its ground. I'll try to update this breaking story in the near future.
Over at Huffington Post, Colton Valentine has curated a collection of Simone De Beauvoir’s archetypes for people in accordance with their loss of childhood from her Ethics of Ambiguity—and applied them to our dating lives. From those too focused on the careers they hate to those who can’t sit still and demand to go hiking or base-jumping, and the mystical one who saw the meaningless of life and became humanist perfection, these archetypes are more accurate than we want them to be, and beg the question: Oh god which one am I?
Pablo Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger” sold for $180 million in May (image via Wikimedia)
You can lose a lot of money with the wrong art buy — especially if you’re young, naive, and really, really rich.
According to Bloomberg, Citigroup is hoping to prevent such losses by teaching the heirs of its wealthiest bank customers how to invest in art. “You don’t have the birthright to the next generation’s wealth,” Citi Private Bank Managing Director Money Kanagasabapathy explained. “We want to continue to have the relationship with the family.”
In the class, staff from Christie’s guide students through a fake auction catalogue filled with everything from an Andy Warhol polaroid print to a Björk album cover photograph. They learn how to note things like quality, rarity, condition, and provenance. Afterward, they’re able to bid in a mock auction with fake money and have an expert tell them how well they did. At the most recent class, held in Manhattan, attendees from 18 countries engaged in a bidding war for a portrait of Kate Moss by Chuck Close. After it sold for $95,000, Christie’s Vice President Tash Perrin revealed that it didn’t get any bites at its last real auction in 2013.
The session sounds more like a parody of the art world than the real thing, but it reflects just how huge the art market has become. Last year, Artprice reported that $15.2 billion worth of art was sold at auction — a 300% increase from 2004, and a 26% from 2013. In one week alone last November, less than 1,000 collectors spent about $1.5 billion on art. Individual artworks are also fetching higher prices than ever before; last year 125 artworks sold for $10 million or more compared to just 18 in 2005. And in May, a painting by Pablo Picasso sold for roughly $180 million.
Jonah the Whale Show, Rugby Fair (1954) (photo by Jack Leeson)
In researching her new art project, Fiona Tan discovered an odd pamphlet advertising “The Exhibition of Jonah, the Giant Whale caught off Trondheim, Norway.” She soon found Jonah was one of three huge whales preserved in formaldehyde and toured around Europe in semi-trucks from the 1950s to ’70s as fairground exhibits.
“Not much information about the three — Jonas, Goliath, and Hercules — remains,” Tan told Hyperallergic. “A lot of people who have memories of the spectacle saw the whale when they were very small children, so it actually belongs to one of their very first memories. It remains a fascinating idea to me that quite a few people saw this, and that it then became something that they’re not quite sure whether they actually did see or whether it became something of their imagination, something that they thought they might have dreamed.”
Bertram Mills Circus (1957) (photo by George Tucker)
Depot, Tan’s installation which opened this month at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, recreates one of these trucks — but instead of a rotting whale inside, viewers discover a film and display of natural history objects exploring our connection with the ocean. One side of the truck reads “THE GIANT WHALE ‘JONAH'” while the back warns “CAUTION: 76 FEET LONG JONAH the WHALE.” The invitations to Depot even took on some of the promised sideshow curiosity of an 18th-century advertisement, with an illustration of “THE MONSTER WHALE.”
“We often forget that the sea is not our natural habitat; we can’t breath underwater,” Tan stated. “Perhaps this is why the sea is at once both fascinating and frightening to us. And so for the majority of us, we only come to know whales, sharks, and other marine creatures via a mediated experience.”
The Amsterdam-based artist often explores collecting in her film and photography work, such as the 2012 “Inventory” set in the 19th-century Sir John Soane Museum in London with its mix of artifacts and oddities, and her new “Depot” exploring natural history collections. She points out that our depictions of whales in media vary wildly, from the Middle Ages when their perceived savagery was sometimes connected with the devil, to today when they’re an endangered creature of ecological concern, singing sad songs out in the sea. “But what we really know is not these creatures, but instead the feeling of sitting behind the screen or in the exhibition,” she added, noting that it’s only since the 1970s with Jacques Cousteau that filming in the ocean has been a frequent occurrence.
Fiona Tan, “Depot” (2015) (still from the film) (courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery)
Fiona Tan, “Depot” (2015) (still) (courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery)
The truck in Depot is set up as a wunderkammer, with a narwhal tusk on the wall and 19th-century glass marine animal specimens by Leopold & Rudolf Blaschka. Through the forgotten, strange spectacle of Jonah and the other decomposing whales hauled around Europe as sorts of sideshows, Tan considers specimen collecting, natural history, and our changing popular perception of whales. The exhibition also examines the often overlooked whaling history of Newcastle in which the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art is located, an area that from 1752 to 1849 was a major whaling port for England.
“Simultaneously, the amassing of specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries became the basis for all natural history museums,” Tan said. “This term ‘natural history’ somehow encapsulates the troubled complexities of mankind’s relationship to the natural world. Ironically, in order for these institutions to collect specimens, one must first kill and destroy that which one wishes to preserve. This new commission builds upon a number of my recent works researching collections and archives, calling into question the ways in which they are used to represent and interpret history and mankind’s place in the world.”
The protest was part of a demonstration by the National Convening of the Movement for Black Lives, which met at Cleveland State University for a weekend conference on police brutality. Protests turned nasty, however, after the city’s Regional Transit Authority reportedly detained a 14-year-old for a seemingly minor reason.
You're looking at what could be not just one of the smallest semiconductor parts ever, but one of the smallest semiconductor parts possible. A worldwide research team has built a transistor that consists of a single copper phthalocyanine molecule, a ...
The coin above wasn't enlarged to make the pincer-like device look extremely small -- it's really that tiny. That "pincer" is a two-millimeter-thin instrument designed and built by a group of researchers from Vanderbilt University for incredibly prec...
Last night I was talking to a married poly guy, rather new (1-2 years) to polyamory. I was surprised to see that apparently he could not, for the life of him, discuss himself as an individual! Every sentence was “we, we, we…”
In the class, staff from Christie’s guide students through a fake auction catalogue filled with everything from an Andy Warhol polaroid print to a Björk album cover photograph. They learn how to note things like quality, rarity, condition, and provenance. Afterward, they’re able to bid in a mock auction with fake money and have an expert tell them how well they did. At the most recent class, held in Manhattan, attendees from 18 countries engaged in a bidding war for a portrait of Kate Moss by Chuck Close. After it sold for $95,000, Christie’s Vice President Tash Perrin revealed that it didn’t get any bites at its last real auction in 2013.
You're looking at what could be not just one of the smallest semiconductor parts ever, but one of the smallest semiconductor parts possible. A worldwide research team has built a transistor that consists of a single copper phthalocyanine molecule, a ...
The coin above wasn't enlarged to make the pincer-like device look extremely small -- it's really that tiny. That "pincer" is a two-millimeter-thin instrument designed and built by a group of researchers from Vanderbilt University for incredibly prec...
