Sophianotloren

I don’t understand how so anyone can be happy belonging to a Christian church… but I don’t have to understand. If someone says they’re happy that way, and they seem to be so, then I can accept that they are, even if it makes no sense.

I don’t understand how anyone can be Republican (or otherwise politically far-right; “America Is Not The World” after all) and say they care about other people… but I don’t have to understand. If they say they care about people, and even sometimes manage to demonstrate that, I can accept, at least, that they mean well and they’re capable of caring. Well, at least capable of sometimes caring.

I don’t understand how anyone can claim to have a fulfilling life while intentionally denying themselves pleasurable and fulfilling things. Whether that’s artificially restricting the categories of foods that they eat, or avoiding specific recreational activities that they might otherwise participate in, or not having sex that they want to have… it makes zero sense to me. But I don’t have to understand. If someone says that avoiding life gives them a fulfilling life, I know better than to insist that they’re wrong.

But I also don’t have to go out of my way to interact with any of those categories of people. I personally have found that spending energy on people who I cannot understand is a waste of my time — that I will spend more energy on silently asking myself “what the fuck is wrong with you?! Why would you do something so completely fucked up and broken?” I won’t say it to them, but I’ll think it, and I’ll end up stressed out and pissed off, and there’s no benefit to anyone in that.

That’s why I need to find a place to live that won’t refuse to have meat in the house, that won’t make rules to prevent people from having sex in the house, that won’t freak out if I’ve been out having a drink and come back anything other than perfectly sober. That’s also why I’m only looking for lovers who eat meat, who embrace and enjoy their sexuality and the pleasures that bodies can create, who don’t mind sharing a drink sometimes — or even potentially other substances.

It’s been frustrating to find plenty of people who can almost offer a place to live, but only if I match my behavior to something that I can’t understand, only if I pretend to be someone I’m not. There are occasionally women who might be a potential girlfriend, if I constantly remind myself to stay silent when I see her doing something that I can’t see as anything but harmful, when she says it makes her life better.

So — in living and in loving: Sorry, but “vegan is a dealbreaker.”

Filed under: General

I slept really well, thanks to my new prescription for Ambien.

I woke up to deal with an almost instant flood of overwhelmed, just-fucking-can’t, anxiety and apathy and “goddamn, the world is full of shit.”

Almost all of my Facebook friends who post regularly are dealing with miserable, painful crap, there’s more killing and tragedy in the current news cycle, and even the few positive posts I’ve seen have been shit on by sarcastic, rude, asshole commenters.

If I didn’t have things I’m supposed to do this afternoon, I think I might just go to sleep again…

Filed under: General

“She said I don’t know if I’ve ever been good enough
I’m a little bit rusty
And I think my head is caving in
And I don’t know if I’ve ever been really loved
By a hand that’s touched me, well I feel like something’s
Gonna give
And I’m a little bit angry”
-Matchbox 20, Push

I always thought I was an argumentative, fiery tempered person. I thought it was just in my nature, something I couldn’t really help but could only manage. A lot of my time was spent trying to avoid saying something really mean, because I was very good at finding someone’s buttons and pressing them in just the right way when I wanted a reaction.  I did a lot of anger management work, and quickly found myself redirecting much of it away from individuals and more at systems, which was slightly more futile but also less volatile in the day to day.

Now I’m in relationships where we don’t really yell at each other at all and it’s kind of weird, if I’m honest. I haven’t slammed a door in a long, long time. I think today was the first time I had ever sworn vaguely at one particular partner during an intense discussion. Most of the time, our conversations that might lead to argument happen via text, email and chat. I think this helps me somewhat, because writing is a communication skillset I get on well with, and the distance of not being right in front of each other is also safer feeling. It’s a lot easier for me to take some time to find compassion when I can be away from the keyboard for a few minutes before I respond!

I’ve realized that I’m sad and hurt more than I’m angry, and that I am at a stage in my life where I’m more of a flight person than a fight person.  It takes a lot of my energy to not say something passive aggressive and just flounce away. It is really, really hard to delve into those areas of hurt while they’re hurting and say “here’s what I need or want from you”. I’m so scared my needs are too overwhelming, that stating them is to draw lines in sand that no one will ever want to cross. I worry that by stating my boundaries I’m trampling other people’s, because I’ve been told that in the past (particularly by my ex.) And more than anything else, I’m scared of being too intense, too much, that I am not meant to be a girlfriend or a friend but free therapy and life coaching.

I can’t count the number of lovers who have gone on to meet their perfect soulmate after me. And it’s hard when I see so many people around me getting fan art, notes of encouragement, writing offers, indicators of worthiness. It’s disheartening to always be the girl who gets called to do the pragmatic stuff.

But I’m trying to practice being radically vulnerable in spite of all that, letting those walls come down. By saying where I’m actually at, even when it’s illogical or feels embarrassing to admit, and offering what action points I want to see that might relieve some of the pain, I’ve actually been able to silence some of my anxiety. I’ve gotten what I’ve advocated to get, which has led me to move away from passive aggressive statements as I’ll likely get what I ask for. I’ve learned to accept there will be a period of defensiveness as our fur raises, but after some time, if we haven’t stormed away from each other and practice patience, more often than not a resolution happens that makes us feel better.

I still feel hypervigilant. I worry that if I don’t maintain near constant control over my emotions and communication, I will end up sabotaging my relationships in times of duress. It may surprise you all (not really) to know that I am a control freak about things like schedules and plans and things fitting neatly as much as possible. And I work hard at compartmentalizing my feelings into easily digestible chunks. As I grow to trust people, I’m sure I’ll not feel this weight in my gut like I’m about to be stabbed constantly while I’m awake… maybe I’ll learn how to relax a little. I think trying to remind myself that people are typically not trying to hurt me, and those who are generally make it really obvious, has been useful in this process. It reminds me to keep my defenses lowered, because I want diplomacy, not war.

As each argument comes and goes, and as I abandon feeling angry all the time to accepting my wounded self and communicate that tenderness rather than protective rage, I feel a little more honest and a little more relieved. I still have a long way to go but for now, just practicing compassion even when I’m upset is a huge step.

Some things I’ve read about arguing compassionately/dealing with feelings that have been helpful:

Captain Awkward- How do I fight with my partner without ruining everything?

Captain Awkward- How to train your rageasaurus

Ask Polly: How do I make my boyfriend listen?

Ask Polly: My anxiety is ruining my life

Medium: Against Chill

piecomic:

Got a little guest strip today from John Sutton over at the Petri Dish. Thanks John. 

“It is better to remain ignorant and be thought a fool, than to wade through the comments and remove all doubt.”

– Mark “Lincoln the Einstein” Twain

The Last Guardian

Already doing the rounds online, but this is far too special to pass by - the next game from the team behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus arrives next year. If it is as good as the previous games, this will be one of the best examples of entertainment this decade, regardless of medium:

Link

On a quest to determine if Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes died of cirrhosis of the liver, a Spanish forensic team uncovered seventeen bodies buried between 1612 and 1630 in Madrid’s Church of the Trinity, one of which was believed to be that of Cervantes.

However, they were unable to conclusively identify any of the remains as belonging to Cervantes, so whether or not he died from drinking too much is still a mystery.

Last Thursday Madrid’s mayor held a formal burial for Cervantes (nearly 400 years after his actual death), complete with huge memorial plaque.

Related Posts:

• A Literary Bone Hunt
• Missing Bones Found
• The Rumpus Interview with Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
• The Original Copycat
• Searching for Cervantes

The majority of our universe is energy and matter that we cannot see. The dark matter that overwhelms our earthly objects emits no light, and is therefore a nebulous thing to represent, something that is more an idea than a vision. French artist Abdelkader Benchamma is fascinated with these cosmic mysteries, and in an installation at the Drawing Center called Representation of Dark Matter, he sketched in tiny pen and India ink lines, shaded with charcoal, a huge drawing of what, to our eyes, is nothing.

“I really liked the challenge of giving form to something that’s so arcane and cannot be seen by the naked eye,” curator Joanna Kleinberg Romanow told Hyperallergic. “The result is a drawing that segues from representation, with imagery inspired by encyclopedia renderings of the Milky Way and the Big Bang, to pure fantasy: ideas and imagery conjured in Abdelkader’s imagination.”

Representation of Dark Matter is the first in a new series at the Drawing Center where artists are invited to fill the stairwell with site-specific installations. Benchamma’s drawing opened in April, and after 12 months will be painted over white to prepare for a new interpretation of the space.

Romanow explained that as the Drawing Center’s first on-site wall drawing, there were a lot of unforeseen challenges when working in the narrow stairwell with a scaffold. “Abdelkader was incredibly resourceful in finding ways to gain access to all of the area’s surfaces, especially those inaccessible by the scaffold,” she said. “Aside from a lot of acrobatics, at one point he created a ‘drawing instrument’ comprised of a long measuring stick with a marker attached to it in order to reach those impervious surfaces. As a result, he was able to achieve a fully immersive constellation.”

Benchamma said in an interview with Studio 360 that “the spectator can really go inside to feel the drawing” and “it’s like a paradox between the precision of the drawing, everything is very precise, but at the end you can’t say what it is.” The completed work is a vortex of moving lines, the details emerging as you climb the stairs, representing in a way how all matter has this gravitational pull, even if we can’t see it. Benchamma often approaches huge ideas of astrophysics in his art, such as in his 2011 monograph Dark Matter published in conjunction with an exhibition at Galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris. In those monochromatic, densely drawn black lines, shown in the time-lapse video provided by the Drawing Center below, is an attempt to unravel and connect with this almost unfathomable power in our universe.

Abdelkader Benchamma: Representation of Dark Matter continues at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan) through March 1, 2016.

Emoji have been widely praised for the way they can foster better communication. But what if they could also make it easier to remember things — for instance, the password to your bank account?

Today, the UK information technology company Intelligent Environments unveiled the world’s first “emoji security technology.” As reported by Mashable, the software lets you replace your old-fashioned pin number with a four-symbol passcode selected from 44 emoji that include penguins, aliens, and fried chicken drumsticks.

In a promotional video for the program, memory expert and Mind Mapping inventor Tony Buzan explained that people tend to forget passwords because the brain works “imagistically” rather than mathematically or linguistically. “Images are the prime way of remembering anything you want to remember,” he said.

So instead of clicking on “Forgot Password” every time, you could instead retrieve a string of emoji associated with a memorable story of your own creation. “I might choose to remember: [baby emoji], wakes me up in the morning; [bicycle emoji] to work; have an [apple emoji] at lunchtime; and then have a [beer emoji] in the evening,” explained product development manager Alan Brown.

And, as it turns out, emoji might not just be a boon to memory but also to security. The company claims its emoji can be arranged in about 3.5 million different ways, as opposed to the mere 7,290 possible permutations for real numbers — making an emoji passcode 480 times more secure than a four-digit pin number (especially for those of us who lazily use our birth dates). “When technology is used intelligently,” Buzan said, “utopia beckons on the horizon.”

So, in a perfect world, we’ll all withdraw money using hearts and poop swirls and sign our student loan promissory notes with fried panko shrimp. Is that the future? Would people really ditch an ancient, sophisticated numbering system in favor of 21st century pictorial characters?

Maybe. Out of the 1,300 people polled by Intelligent Environments during their research phase, a third admitted to having forgotten their pin numbers at some point, and a full 64% of millennials claimed to “regularly communicate only using emoji.” For them, an emoji passcode should be more than cause to rejoice.

Art authenticators can finally breathe a sigh of relief: on Monday, the New York State Senate passed much-anticipated legislation that protects them from frivolous libel lawsuits. Act S1229A states that only “valid, verifiable claims” against authenticators will be allowed to proceed in court. It also stipulates that they be compensated financially for their legal expenses should they win. Though the bill has cleared one major hurdle with the State Senate’s approval, it still needs to be voted on by the State Assembly before it passes into law.

The bill amends the existing Arts and Cultural Affairs law to address an enormous problem. In recent years, art authenticators have increasingly become victims of some of the art world’s biggest bullies. Those who formulate opinions about artworks that collectors disagree with have found themselves served with bogus libel lawsuits, forced to bear the financial burden of crippling lawyers’ fees even when the suits get thrown out.

It’s also been detrimental to art historical scholarship. In 2012, for instance, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat stopped providing certificates or opinions of authenticity in order to avoid any legal repercussions. That same year, researchers at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art cancelled a conference about a group of alleged Francis Bacon drawings for the same reason.

Thanks to the new law, that sad era in contemporary art may finally be relegated to the history books. The legislation covers any “person or entity recognized in the visual arts community as having expertise regarding the artist, work of fine art, or visual art multiple, or a person or entity recognized in the visual arts or scientific community as having expertise in uncovering facts that serve as a direct basis, in whole or in part, for an opinion as to the authenticity, attribution, or authorship of a work of fine art or visual art multiple.”

That includes authors of catalogue raisonnés or other texts wherein an opinion about an artwork is expressed or implied. It excludes anyone who doesn’t practice the trade in “good faith” — that is, anyone who stands to gain financially from evaluating an artwork (besides the standard authentication fees).

“Our art galleries and museums are an integral part of a successful
tourism industry throughout New York State,” Senator Betty Little, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement. “A key component of the industry are highly skilled experts who provide opinions about the authenticity of works of art.”

I guess it’s September now. I hate, hate, hate these markers of the passage of time — reminders of how little has changed, how stagnant life still is, how dreadfully hopeless my prospects still are for finding anything stable, anything functional.

7 and a half months I’ve been homeless (this time around)
10 months I’ve been single.
13 months I’ve been trying to find a place to live (again, this last time around.)
10 different addresses I’ve had since I moved out of my parents’ place.
5 and a half years since I “left the nest.”
Too many sleepless nights, too many days I don’t eat enough food, too much stressing out and worrying about everything, and so little control over any of it…

Letters I’ve needed to write for years. Items that I ended up with that need to go back to their rightful owners. Money I still get hounded by debt collectors over, going on 4 years later.

33 years old, over halfway to 34, and all I see is day after day of uncertainty and fear and chaos.

“What do you see yourself doing one year from now? What about 5 years?  What about 10 years?”

I can’t see myself one year from now. I don’t have the capacity. I don’t have the framework to begin to conceptualize what a year ahead might look like, or even what a month ahead might be.  I can’t make plans because I can’t grind against the gears of this enormous machine that is rolling the opposite direction and always threatening to crush me underneath. And so rarely has something I’ve planned actually worked the way it was supposed to — the  trip to meet DE-B, or the one for my miserable birthday with Lime, or the one that didn’t even end up happening due to circumstances (and people) beyond either of our control when I thought I was going to visit Shine (whose name I don’t think I’ve mentioned here before) earlier this summer to celebrate Independence Day.  Things haven’t gone the way I’ve planned with simple things or big ones, and I have such limited power to accomplish things on my own, so little power to wield…

Where is my home? Where do I go? I don’t know what to do, and I’m scared. I keep posting my “looking for housing” craigslist ad, I keep checking out every single notification from PadMapper that comes in from my saved search (and there’s really not much) but there’s just nothing that I can possibly afford that’s also safe, that has any chance of lasting or being even remotely stable.

I don’t know what to do.

Filed under: General

(The Rude Pundit is reviewing The Silencing, which is not the title of a serial killer movie but is columnist/commentator Kirsten Powers' new book, subtitled, "How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.")

As mentioned yesterday, the biggest problem of The Silencing is the incredible lack of anyone actually being silenced. Challenged, annoyed, harassed, insulted, debated, yeah, sure. But someone being denied the ability to speak or someone losing a job? Not so much.

In fact, here's a list of a bunch of examples in the book where the end result is not silence:

Page 29: Alec Baldwin tweets racist things about conservative pundit Michelle Malkin. Others tweet racism, too. Malkin did not lose her column.

(Side note: Powers relies a great deal on things people tweet. If you rely on Twitter for examples of ugliness, you may as well just say, "Yeah, most of Twitter" and be done with it. Just because Twitchy and Huffington Post think tweets are important doesn't mean they are.)

Page 31: Ed Schultz, Bill Maher, and Keith Olbermann said sexist things about S.E. Cupp and Sarah Palin. And we never heard from them again.

Page 34: Chris Matthews and others say that people who oppose Obama are racist. Then Matthews had them all killed, as is his way.

Page 36: Paul Krugman and others say that Rep. Paul Ryan was racist in what he said about "inner city" men and women.

Page 39: Some feminists think women who are against abortion rights are not feminists. Some feminists believe there is a GOP War on Women.

Page 46: Some blogs thought that National Journal editor Ron Fournier, late of AP, was unfair in his criticism of Barack Obama in 2008.

Page 59: Some religious organizations wanted to opt out of requirements that they not discriminate against LGBT people if the organization wants government contracts. Liberal blogs thought that was discrimination.

Page 107: The entire chapter is about how President Obama and his administration seek to discredit Fox "news," which, as we know, was totally taken off the air. (Really, was Powers under some kind of contractual obligation to defend Fox? Because there is a "doth protest too much" feel to this whole part.)

Page 123: Media Matters says mean things about Fox. (Indeed, Powers seems to believe that David Brock is the King of Liberal Media, which, as far as the Rude Pundit has heard in his secret underground cabal meetings with every other lefty blogger, is not the case.)

Page 142: Only Fox covered the story of killer abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, which would be totally true if it wasn't completely false.

Page 154: Some women writers accused Mitt Romney of "mansplaining" things. Obviously, that's why Romney lost the 2012 election.

You get the idea. Time and again, Powers' examples are ludicrous, like the worst whining of right-wing blogs and Newsbusters. She invokes Joseph McCarthy several times, but when she does, it's just shorthand for "people said shit that was unfair," not "someone lost everything because of their beliefs."

To be fair, the section on college campuses does contain real, genuine, disturbing censorship by the left. Like Powers, the Rude Pundit found the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis somewhat appalling. Even if he disagrees with her, an angry mob shouldn't determine who gets to speak. And he couldn't agree more that the UC-Santa Barbara incident where a professor tore up the signs of an anti-choice protester on campus is messed up. These are acts of silencing. Women being mean to Mitt Romney is not.

Powers believes that liberals should"know better" than to attack people with language more befitting, one assumes, conservatives. But this grasping at every time liberals - the phrase that Powers coins and uses endlessly is "illiberal left," which is about as meaningless as it sounds - say something bad means that Powers ignores actual silencing that is done repeatedly by the right, aided and abetted by Fox "news."

Remember the story of Shirley Sherrod? She was viciously attacked and hounded out of her job at the Department of Agriculture by right wing blogs and Fox for something she said, purely and simply and totally reported wrongly, as even Fox had to admit.

Or how about how ACORN, an organization devoted to helping poor people, was destroyed by the same bad actors (with scumsucking piglet James O'Keefe) who put out lie after lie, all based on falsely represented speech. How many people lost their jobs? How many voices of advocates were silenced?

There is this myth that conservatives like to tell, about intolerance on the left. To be sure, there are excesses. To be sure, speech codes and trigger warnings deserve examination and criticism. And there is a debate to be had over balancing religious freedom with non-discrimination, a debate that the Rude Pundit would be happy to have with Powers.

But, looking at the history of speech in this country, including McCarthyism, the victims of genuine silencing are usually the ones who Powers tries to make the villains.

Happy Captain Picard Day!!!

Wallpapers, Series 3

Latest installment of online project curated by nicolassassoon features a series of artists who use computers to make their work, which is then exhibited in real world exhibitions.

The latest series features works by Nicolas himself, Sara Ludy, and Sylvain Sailly.

You can view the collection and find out more here

Hovertext: He's actually an adjunct professor of literature.

New comic!
Today's News:

In These Times published an excerpt of Out of Sight. If you’ve been wondering what it’s about it, you can read a chunk of it at the link. A bit of it:

Women make up the vast majority of the workforce, but men make up the supervisors. Sexual harassment is endemic. A 2006 report by Mexican labor and feminist organizations detailed massive sexual harassment in maquiladoras. Labor authorities ignore or downplay this harassment, not wanting to anger the corporations who could move again at a moment’s notice. A Human Rights Watch survey from 2002 found widespread unreported sexual harassment and intimidation at Guatemalan maquiladoras, where women made up 80 percent of the eighty thousand workers. Forty-six percent of these factory workers had experienced mistreatment from their boss, and five percent had been subjected to sexual advances. Analysts consider these numbers underestimates, arguing that many women naturalize sexual harassment and refuse to report it or admit that it is happening to them.

Employers also discriminate against pregnant women. This has a long history: RCA fired pregnant electronics workers in its Bloomington, Indiana, plant in the 1940s. Preemployment pregnancy examinations are common today, as contractors do not want to give pregnant workers paid leave. Kimberly Estrada, a worker at a Dong Bang Fashions factory in Chimaltenango, reported that she had to undergo a gynecological exam by a company doctor at the factory before she could work. If workers became pregnant while employed, their bosses would not give them time off to go to the doctor nor the maternity leave mandated by the Guatemalan labor code. Women have miscarried at work, unable to get the medical treatment they needed to save their babies.

Human rights groups in the United States and Mexico filed a complaint in 1997 over what they called “state-tolerated sex discrimination against prospective and actual female workers in the maquiladora sector along the U.S.-Mexico border,” focusing on pregnancy testing and discrimination against pregnant workers. This pressure led to American companies announcing the end of pregnancy testing in the maquiladoras and Mexico issuing new directives to labor officials to stop it. Members of Congress introduced legislation to make pregnancy testing in American-owned factories illegal, suggesting that in fact American politicians could do much more to regulate the conditions of work overseas than they usually claim. But the textile companies found Mexican wages too high anyway, and they simply moved the jobs to Central America and Southeast Asia, forcing the struggle to start anew.

Low wages, sexual harassment, and poor working conditions continue to plague women in the garment industry. Today, women in Bangladesh toil in apparel factories for the national minimum wage of $37 a month. In one factory, women were forced to work 100 hours a week during peak production periods, and supervisors punched and slapped them. The victims included pregnant women, and at least one miscarried because of the treatment. Other pregnant women were forced to quit or denied their legally mandated maternity leave. Women in Cambodia and Indonesia fare little better, making $75 a month in the former and as low as $80 a month in the latter. In all these countries, women are fighting back through labor unions. In Indonesia, Nike had to pay 4,500 workers a $1 million settlement after having not paid them for more than 600,000 hours of overtime over a two-year period—a decision that came only after Indonesia’s labor federation pressed a lawsuit.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government contributes to these problems through its purchasing practices. The U.S. Marine Corps contracts its shirt production with DK Knitwear in Bangladesh. A 2010 report showed that one-third of DK workers were children, mostly young girls, and that the plant had no fire alarms despite previous fires in the facility. Women at Zongtex Garment Manufacturing in Cambodia soiled themselves at machines making clothes for the U.S. Army and Air Force. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) signed a contract with a Mexican company in February 2013; the same company had previously treated uniforms with chemicals that caused rashes in TSA agents. Yet Republicans attacked TSA for paying too much to the Mexican workers. Like the rest of the apparel industry, the government relies on subcontractors, pays no attention to the working conditions in plants, and pushes for the cheapest price regardless of the social cost.

Crimes of the Art is a weekly survey of artless criminals’ cultural misdeeds. Crimes are rated on a highly subjective scale from one “Scream” emoji — the equivalent of a vandal tagging the exterior of a local history museum in a remote part of the US — to five “Scream” emojis — the equivalent of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.

Bardot Attacks Artist Behind Appropriative Merch

French screen star-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot is threatening to sue the artist Sasha de Saint Tropez for selling all manner of Bardot-branded baubles in her Saint Tropez shop. “Exploitation has its limits! We’re used to seeing depictions of BB everywhere but this is too much,” said Bardot’s husband Bernard d’Ormale. “In the shop, there are candles, watches, espadrilles, plates, loads of things.”

Verdict: Can we get those Brigitte Bardot espadrilles shipped to Brooklyn?

Trash Jesus Crucified

A 9.8-foot-tall statue of Jesus that artists Maria Shinkevich and Alyona Pozhilenko made from trash in the Siberian city of Omsk has been destroyed at the request of the Russian Orthodox Church’s anti-extremism center.

Verdict: Just wait until the Russians find out about “Piss Christ.”

Bankrupt, but for the Turner

Former banker and property developer Jonathan Weal is accused of hiding the fact that he owns a recently authenticated £20 million (~$31.3 million) JMW Turner painting when he went through bankruptcy proceedings. He was only caught because the receiver who assessed his assets at the time of his bankruptcy was watching TV when Weal appeared on a program boasting that the painting he’d bought for just £3,700 (~$5,800) would soon be authenticated.

Verdict: Give the Turner to the Tate and turn him loose.

Tourists Pose Naked on Sacred Mountain, Earthquake Ensues

Two Canadians, a Brit, and a Dutch person were given three-day jail terms and fined 5,000 Malaysian ringgit (~$1,330) for posing naked for a photo on Malaysia’s Mount Kinabalu, which is considered sacred. Some have blamed the tourists for the deadly, 5.9-magnitude earthquake that struck shortly after they snapped their pants-less pic.

Verdict: Five-year international travel bans all around.

$1,050 Chagall Too Good to Be True

Art collector Roy Berlin bought what he believed to be a signed Marc Chagall print for $1,050 from what was advertised as an “Urgent Divorce Auction” held by the New Jersey-based Estate Liquidators Inc., only to discover that it was little more than a poster. He claims the liquidators may be deliberately misleading buyers with promises of authentic works at bargain prices.

Verdict: Buyers beware, but estate liquidators be shady.

Art Forger Back on eBay

Though he was banned from the site last year, master forger David Henty is back on eBay selling his fake versions of artworks by Sir Winston Churchill, Noël Coward, Ronnie Kray, and others. He has sold some 130 paintings so far this year, netting at least £15,000 (~$23,500) from the sales. “Don’t tell eBay but it’s very simple to get back on,” Henty told the Telegraph. “You don’t even need to buy a new computer.”

Verdict: Good luck getting back on eBay again after the imminent second banishing.

Aussies Make Off with Meteorite

A meteorite the size of a soccer ball and worth approximately 16,000 Australian dollars (~$12,400) was stolen from the Crystal Caves, a museum in the town of Atherton, Queensland. Police are looking for two men who, in security footage, can be seen smashing the front door of the museum the night the meteorite disappeared.

Verdict: Maybe the dingo stole your meteorite?

Artist’s Autovandalism in Belgium

After claiming in a Facebook post that two works featured in an exhibition at the Project in Brussels were not actually his own despite being listed as such, French artist Bernard Rancillac turned up at the opening marker in hand and wrote “Ceci est un faux, B. R.” (“This is a fake, B.R.”) on one of the paintings. The police were summoned, arrested Rancillac, and released him seven hours later. The exhibition’s organizer, Constantin Chariot, has since removed the tagged canvas and will press charges against its ostensible creator.

Verdict: Belgian police apparently mistook Rancillac’s obvious homage to René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” for vandalism.

Bank-Robbing Artist Pleads Guilty

Joseph Gibbons, the former MIT professor, artist, and experimental filmmaker who filmed himself robbing a Capital One bank branch in New York City as part of an art project, has pleaded guilty to third-degree robbery.

Verdict: We already knew that crime doesn’t pay and that art doesn’t pay; thanks to Gibbons’s heroic work, we now also know that crime art doesn’t pay.

Outdoor Artworks Wrecked in Worcester

Vandals damaged or destroyed six outdoor sculptures featured in Art in the Park, a public art exhibition in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Verdict: Instead of fines or community service, the vandals should be sentenced to be unpaid studio assistants for the artists whose works they trashed.

Thieves Hook Fish Sculpture

A stainless steel sculpture of a fish was stolen from the Michigan Legacy Art Park. Administrators at the art park say that if those responsible return the fish unharmed, there will be no questions asked.

Verdict: Art theft is rarely a catch-and-release pursuit.

Human Remains from Children’s Museum Found in Backyard

Two human skeletons that are believed to be Native American remains and were thought to be in the collection of the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo were recently found in a steel bucket in a backyard in Atherton, California.

Verdict: While we applaud the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo for its very liberal loan policy, they have clearly gone too far.

As part of an exhibition last December at the Maison Des Jonglages (House of Juggling) in La Courneuve, France, magician and juggler Antoine Terrieux created this series of kinetic artworks using different arrangements of hair dryers. The dryers were positioned in such a way as to create an updraft for a paper airplane to fly around, a spinning vortex of water vapor, and other unexpected configurations. Terrieux also incorporates hair dryers into his performances. (via La boite verte)

Belgium's privacy watchdog has sued Facebook, making good on a threat it made last month. It claimed at the time that the social network "tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws," and demanded that it make changes to avoid legal action. Its mai...

(photo by majorbcurtains)

More Pun Dog. (images via genralkaos)

Que sí, que hay navajas multiusos con muchas más opciones que el Halcón Milenario, pero ninguna de ellas llega al hiperespacio con la soltura con la que él llega. Un poco cuando quiere, eso es cierto. Normalmente no se lo tenemos en cuenta porque lo compensa con su adorabilidad.

Las once funciones del Halcón Milenario incluyen destornillador y abridor, que son las únicas que sirven de algo cuando se te cala la nave y te quedas tirado en lo más profundo del espacio. Eso es todo lo que hace falta: destornillador para arreglar y abridor para tomárselo con calma. Y los años luz pasan volando.

Visto en Geekologie

Ver más: Halcón Milenario, multiusos, Star Wars
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Although it’s legal under state law to use marijuana, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled today that employers can fire workers who smoke/ingest/otherwise partake in pot when they’re off the clock.

A former employee of Dish Network who had a medical marijuana card and consumed marijuana while off-duty to control muscle spasms was fired in 2010, reports the Denver Post. He then challenged Dish and its policy, claiming because his use was legal under state law, he shouldn’t be fired.

But the firing was upheld in both trial court and the Colorado Court of Appeals before today’s 6-0 decision [PDF] from the state Supremes.

While using medical marijuana is in compliance with Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Amendment, the justices had to consider whether it’s still lawful under the state’s Lawful Off-Duty Activities Statute. That term includes activities lawful under both state and federal law, the justices said.

“Therefore, employees who engage in an activity such as medical marijuana use that is permitted by state law but unlawful under federal law are not protected by the statute,” Justice Allison H. Eid wrote in the opinion.

It’s up to employers in Colorado to set their own policies on drug use, so this means that anyone using marijuana legally under state law could still find themselves in trouble with their bosses under federal law. This could have implications for other states that allow marijuana use, as well, as companies figure out what to do when facing both state laws and federal law.

Everything could be different in the future, however, if the federal law regarding marijuana use ever changes. Until then, better check that employee handbook.

Colorado Supreme Court: Employers can fire workers for off-duty marijuana use [Denver Post]

I remember when I lost my contract writing marketing posts for Canadian cop show Rookie Blue, a job that was a large part of my survival. I was freaking out about how hard it was for me to find another gig outside of my writing, which wasn’t sustainable yet. Then Courtney Trouble offered I start working for them doing social media, marketing newsletters, and mailouts.

Soon they began training me on how to set up lights on set, how to work a camera, how to edit photos and upload to the FTP and make animated gifs. I began to come in twice a week and take more hours working from home. I bought my own camera so I could start filming my own porn, and Courtney patiently began to teach me how to edit my shoots. I began to shoot my own ideas, had a gallery show at Sidequest Gallery, conceptualized Ban This Sick Filth, and am now wrapping up my first DVD, “Here Kitty Kitty”.

I never identified as an artist. I don’t know if I do even now, honestly, but Courtney taught me to trust in my vision as well as how to manage the pragmatic side of the company. Now, I’m the programming and production manager for TROUBLEfilms while Courtney is in grad school, learning tons of new skills that will be useful for me for the rest of my life. I am so lucky to call Courtney not just my coworker but my friend. If you like the work I do, give Courtney a thank you, because they’ve helped build me up into the person I am today. They have given me the stability I desperately needed, and a career I can feel truly proud of.

I owe a lot to Courtney. If you can donate a little something to their fundraiser, you’re not only helping them move away from porn production, and me move into porn production, but also TROUBLEfilms as we continue to move forward on making the company a place that funds budding directors realizing their visions.

Courtney has 5 days left to make $8000- totally doable, but only with your help!

 
 

Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, a deconstructed retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, had just come out when I entered the novelist’s late-90s writing workshop in “experimental narratives.” The students were full of ideas: One insisted on giving public readings of cereal boxes. Another decided to write a novel from the perspective of a person lacking skin. Over the reading of an early draft, Coover held up his hand. “No,” he said, and proceeded to question the student, not unkindly, about what it would be like to go about with organs on the outside of one’s body. What would it feel like to walk up the stairs, your nerves scraping against carpet fibers? To have someone who loves you touch your lungs, your intestines?

My own project came about late in the term: a room-by-room tour of an old Victorian in Providence. Classmates wandered through the house with borrowed walkmans, listening to dubbed cassettes that offered competing first-hand accounts of a fictional family I insisted had lived there. Things fell apart quickly: rooms had closed for renovation, items I’d detailed had been removed, and a graduate student got locked in the basement for almost an hour. His cassette clicked off in the damp dark.

Coover, of course, loved the whole disaster—not for anything I had (so poorly) engineered, but for the serendipity of human error, for the triumph of wildness over artifice. Narrative, that cornerstone of traditional storytelling, might suit our psychological or artistic needs, but doesn’t it also refuse the illogic, the senseless repetition, and the dead ends that at least partly define us? The perpetual motion of plot is perhaps literature’s greatest fiction.

Hypertext, to Coover, offered a chance to challenge our most basic linear thinking. And wasn’t it time? Cervantes, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and James Joyce had all worked to transcend “the tyranny of the line.” Joyce’s Ulysses in particular has become the poster-child for challenging the literary status quo.

Ulysses is celebrated for so many reasons: its scope, its mastery over language, its genre-bending, its scandal. But Joyce, as a modernist or just as Joyce, understood that all art is hypertext, and that any fiction is necessarily interactive. His decision to base Ulysses on Homer’s Odyssey—itself a composite of myths from the oral tradition—and to incorporate contorted references from midwife slang to high-mass hymns was Joyce’s vote for multivocality, for what would become hypertext.

This week the world will celebrate Bloomsday, the crowded twenty-four hours of James Joyce’s intertextual epic. In the spirit of Joycean experimentation, my collaborator Christopher Boucher and I wanted to shake things up a bit with our interview of contemporary novelist Maya Lang. Lang’s The Sixteenth of June reimagines Joyce’s classic—and therefore the work of Homer, and of those who came before him—as a single day in 2004 Philadelphia. Rather than offering a linear record of a single conversation, this interactive interview asks you, the reader, to decide when and how to move behind the text: clicking on highlighted passages leads to more information about Lang’s writing process, the evolution of literary themes, and the sometimes surprising voices that influenced her novel.

Wander where you will, and if you find yourself locked in a basement, remember these words from Ulysses, from Joyce, and—in a distant sort of way—from Homer, too: Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

—Allison Adair

Technical note: To experience the interactive features of this interview fully, please turn on your device’s audio. We recommend that you close popup windows as you finish viewing them.

***

 

From The Sixteenth of June:

A few guests wander into the room. It is that first trickle, the droplets before the downpour. The early birds are always the same, nervous types with damp armpits who arrive precisely at the stated time on the invite, standing on Delancey’s stoop at the stroke of seven. They jam their hands out before you fully open the door, so eager to please.

Nora was like that once. She’d set out to read Ulysses for her first party, treating it like homework. “Don’t bother,” Stephen told her dismissively. But Leo found it sweet, his girl trying to please his folks. She got a little awkward with it (“I’m still trying to make sense of that Oxen of the Sun episode, where the language gets so strange,” she had said to a startled June, not realizing that this was the last thing his mom wanted to discuss), but it was touching that she wanted to fit in. It was touching that she cared.

He shakes the ice in his drink. What happened to that Nora? He looks around the room, at the polite circles of small talk. What happened to the Nora who would never have been late to the party? Who would have been right by his side? The ice clinks softly, echoing his questions.

Grief is […] its own strange animal. If only Nora stayed up late crying or wanting to be held, if only she had quit her job or yelled at him or decided to camp out and watch TV, stuffing her face with potato chips—if only she had done something, lashed out, thrown a fit. Then he would have known that this was the time to see her through. How easily he could have stepped into that role, reassuring and solid, comforting her. Instead there has been nothing for him. She resumed giving lessons after a week, not wanting to let her students down. She attended rehearsals and performed. She was there in every way, except that she wasn’t.

How do you get someone back if you don’t know where she’s gone? How long do you stand on that bridge, your hand outstretched, waiting?

***

Excerpted from The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang Copyright © 2014. Reprinted with permission from Scribner.

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