Golden Adele

Time ran this article about the recently purchased Klimt painting, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. They are calling the painting the "Golden Adele." Though I do like the painting - it is certainly beautiful - I am very suspicious.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1562173,00.html

Let me explain. In June, the painting was purchased by the New York based Neue Galerie for $135 million. It has been since eclipsed by two modernist paintings, one by Jackson Pollock and one by Willem de Kooning, as the most expensive sale in visual arts history. That's right, one early European modernist followed by two giants of the New York School. In New York. Over $400 million in one year alone.

I certainly do not disaprove of the decisively culturally-minded investment of capital. Nor do I completely disagree with the institution of the museum as an idea. I simply hope that the museum does not become such an institution that its financial girth comes to rival that of, say, the defense budget of the United States. We hope for living art spaces, not over-priced hospitals for dying cultural artifacts.

Atleast, at 4 1/2 feet square, we can appreciate that the painting is bigger than the rather tiny (and in my opinion, horribly uninteresting) Mona Lisa. Although I do prefer the Portrait of Adele to the Mona Lisa, it is only a very minor compliment. Is "Too Much Being Made On Nazi Art?" I think so.

List of Most Expensive Paintings

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Rock

Wiki discussions on Stephen Colbert at the White House

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gradually approaching,

slowly sense the terrible entrance
into the True Sphere of Sagittarius
staring into the lunatic deep

centaurs understand.

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Political record and platforms

This line appeared on the Wikipedia entry for Nancy Pelosi sometime on November 13th. It did not exist 5 days earlier:

Pelosi is generally considered to be a far leftliberal in American politics.^[5]

Notice the lack of space-age between "left" and "liberal." Wikipedia has quarantined the article on the count of what it calls "weasel words."

My theory is that alcohol and perhaps a dose of rage were possibly involved. I love Wikipedia, because it completely changes every single month.

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On The Metamorphosis

In the past, I've felt more or less indifferent towards "vampire chronicler" Anne Rice. I was impressed, however, when I read her foreword (it's in the Schocken Books edition) to Kafka's wonderfully painful short story:

I was sure that before the end, the story would veer back toward the commonplace. Gregor would turn out to be "dreaming." The rules of realism would ultimately prevail.

Oh, I had a lot to learn about Franz Kafka. With a courage unparalleled in my experience, Kafka forced us to follow Gregor Samsa day to day, in the family home, in his loathsome insect body. The conventional pacing made it all the more harrowing. The solid context in which Gregor expires from contempt, petty cruelty, and finally indifference made it unendurable, yet crucial. Here was a story that defied logic completely and with complete conviction and it meant something.

Well, well... I think Rice might have hit a bull'seye with that one.

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Stupidity can be forgiven

But it must be corrected, right-the-fuck-now. Even the Dalai Lama believes that.

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Yay Demo(cracy) !!!

and she slowly realized

the many subtle ways that this Age of Visual Culture
forces upon us its terrible, kaleidoscopic reality.

the only acceptable

and live-able form of life must be
something like a continuous

and sustained act
of colorful, ever-flowing
Butterfly-
Godzilla-
Stomp.

(Butterfly-Godzilla-Stomp is the name of a dancestep I will create in 2007. It will kill horses, yuppies, and entire platoons of skeleton-ninja shocktroopers.)

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Please Vote for God'ssake !

they say politics comes from polis which meant something like "your fucking city, right now."

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What is the secret hidden beneath the Harlequin's smile?

It must be the ancient mystery of eternal servitude and mastery.


*( listen to track number 2 on Silent Shout -- from the Clairmont Lounge to Capital City Country Club, I hear the city cry out the perpetual enslavement of humankind. ethnic-and-otherwise. )

I refuse to go see Spiderman 3

nor will I go see any other Marvel comics movie in the near future, because Marvel comics is cancelling Nextwave. Nextwave is an extremely smart, good-looking, and funny (really funny) series by writer Warren Ellis. One might say it is a highly stylish parody of every other Marvel comic. Furthermore, it is a timely parody that openly pokes fun at our all-too-familiar "war on terror."

Danse macabre

A quote from Frederic Jameson related to the "dance of death." It's all a little over my head, but I find it quite entertaining:

The thought gives new and exemplary meaning to a haunting moment in Renoir's La Regle du jeu, when, at the climax of the costume ball in the chateau, now infiltrated by skeletons waving their lamps and celebrating mortality to the tune of Sain-Saens's Danse macabre, the fat lady pianist, hands in her lap, can be glimpsed staring with rapt melancholia at the skeletal autonomy of the keyboard itself, behind which the piano rolls have taken charge with a vengeance. It is a fable of the work of art at that particular stage of its mechanical reproducibility, gazing at its own alienated power with morbid fascination.

I'm no film expert, but I do at least know that the English title of the movie is The Rules of the Game. It's a black-and-white picture about this extravagant party on some over-sized estate that goes terribly wrong. And then people die.

The Harlequin

(Just some notes. Nothing serious.)

I dreamed of the Harlequin. She came to reset the wheels of history.

Spanish rhythms fuel her Dionysiac stampede. High-fructose Indian corn scattered like eulogy-garlands. Sugarcane-laced manufactories sacrificed to the tropical night. Her carousers embody an eclectic psychomachia, one at once agrarian and cosmopolitan. The city groans and delightfully clatters into a heap, laying down its cruelty-arms for the day. Aquarius painted everywhere in a hauntingly familiar teal-and-maroon Latin glow.

And yet the cigar smoke lingers on the plantation balcony.

Skeletons attacked Mankind in 1958

If you cannot see this photo, go vistit my website.











Click here for uncontestable, videographic proof that skeletons attacked the mortal named "Jason" in 1958. He had argonauts, and, curiously, he was still alive in 50's. And he was in color.

Skeletons will not fuck around.

Photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin

Skeletons are way more awesome than Ninjas. Seriously.

I was discussing Halloween costumes with my buddy, Jon Carll, and a certain revelation occurred to me:

“Skeletons are way awesome-er than Ninjas.”

Yes, I think I see quite clearly now. I must deliver this delicious skeleton-Gospel to the good people of this planet. Before it is too late.

I have been hired

to write "light" legislation, starting December 16th. I will wear a tie, and I will commute to the capitol building down next to Georgia State. I will be a cog. A well-paid cog, but a cog nonetheless.

It's a funny job - I will basically take over a lot of bulk-paperwork that technically falls beneath the qualifications of your average attorney. Here's a paraphrased example:

Commending Prophetess Michelle Johansson; and for other purposes.

WHEREAS, Prophetess Dr. Michelle Johansson is an internationally acclaimed Bible teacher, prophet, psalmist, and media personality; and

WHEREAS, she is the best selling author of Why the Universe Loves Me, selling more than 600,00 copies in less than a year, From Capricorn to Solomon, and several other ground breaking books . . .

(names have been changed for legality reasons. otherwise, this is real. yep.)

New to Me: Warren Ellis

Though I realize the book started back in '97, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan struck me as some of some of the best writing I have seen - comics, novels, anything. The prose is aggressive: seething, violent, and dirty with occasional moments of radiant lucidity. Additionally, the book is intensely political. Art does not have to be socially disengaged.

A passage from trade paperback volume 5:

Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything- depends-on-it first-week- of- being- madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere wile DAddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there ... Time was this place didn't make sense and I would live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.

There's all the good things on this ticket and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.

Wooster Collective

Word, check it.

Wooster Collective is a little hotspot community for street artists and street art enthusiasts. This piece was assembled entirely out of rubik's cubes. Tons of excellent images.