Nextwave-Zombies !

Warren Ellis' parody hero creations, the Nextwave Squad, make a cameo appearance in Marvel Zombies vs Army of Darkness #3. I've never heard of the book, but it sounds appropriately absurd.

Kudos to Benjamin, aka Stephen Hero, for the timely info.

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Francis Bacon's Trash

Francis Bacon's trash sold for almost 1 million pounds. Sketches, mutilated paintings, and old check stubs (as in checks for the gas bill, etc.) that some fellow pulled from Bacon's garbage went on auction this week.

Another article by Charlotte Higgins opens with the title, "Artists' ephemera is a load of old rubbish." She continues:

Ulysses is not going to be cracked wide open because one has beheld a pair of James Joyce's spectacles. And yet that did not stop Sotheby's from auctioning them off a few years back, along with a medal he once won in a singing competition

You've gotta love those Guardian writers and their deliciously scathing honesty.

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"Unmodern" Architecture

The Helicon Building, The Hague

Soeters of Amsterdam challenges boring architecture with aggressive ziggurat-inpsired designs. He calls it "unmodern" architecture.

Worth 100

Tracking Neo-populism

On a lark, my history major buddies have been throwing around a number of absurd arguments about "neo-populism" for the past two weeks. We were all still jazzed-up by the spectacular televised exchanges between Bill O'Reilly and Stephen Colbert. At the time, neo-populism was just another made-up term that described the type of "thinking from the gut" anti-intellectualism espoused by media pundits.

The thing is, neo-populism turned out to be a *real* movement in Latin America and possibly even in the United States. South American leaders Alberto Fujimori and Carlos Menem are cited by scholars as neo-populists, and the Midwest Populist Party has used the same term to describe Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester. Their website is kind of scary.

Naturally, Wikipedia had to be updated.

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Ceci n'est pas une jello shot

this is not a jello shot

it is an allusion made in bad taste.

------
See you later, Ben.
Au revoir, bon voyage, and all that shit.

On Blogging

Guardian ran these two articles on the art of criticism and the new role of bloggers in the journalistic process. Food for thought:

Getting down and dirty in the blogosphere brawl by Dorian Lynskey

"This is just one front in a wide-ranging battle between the blogosphere and so-called old media. In an ideal world, there should be room for both print critics and online ones, with plenty of overlap between them. Good writing is good writing, wherever it appears. But the campaign is in its early days and there are several years' worth of grievances to thrash out before a peace treaty can be agreed."

Getting down and dirty in the blogosphere brawl - part 2 by Peter Bradshaw

"Part of what's happening is that newspapers have, for hundreds of years, been a one-party state, and the net has brought that state to an end. Before the web, there was no serious opposition to the press in the press. Newspapers might express the most virulent opposition to every other institution in British public life: to the Church of England, political parties, the monarchy - anything but the press. Our media sections have nothing like the full-throttle, uncensored criticism of the press routinely expressed in blogs."

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Secular Conspiracy part I: Plans for Saving the World

It's educational

like Sesame Street, even.

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Chávez / Chomsky: Hugo Chávez is wacky

Goofy story:

Hugo Chávez boosted Amazon.com sales back in September by plugging Noam Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance at the United Nations in New York. After publically calling out President Bush as an "ex-alchohlic," a "John Wayne" impersonator, and "the Devil," the Venezuelan president applauded Chomsky for his sustained criticism of American foreign policy since Vietnam. The book instantaneously rose to the top ten after Chávez expressed regret for not having met the scholar before he died.

Chávez, however, was mistaken - Chomsky is not dead. He was alive enough, at least, to submit to an interview later that same week. Although Chomsky may have enjoyed the boosted book sales, he was not flattered.

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May '68

I've been taking some time as of late to read about history and politics, i.e. - "useful" knowledge of interest to people besides myself. The French seem to like a good riot. I particularly enjoyed these slogans from the May '68 protests:

L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

Je t'aime ! Oh ! dites-le avec des pavés !

I love you! Oh, say it with paving stones!

Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho.

I am a Marxist of the Groucho tendency.

That's right - Groucho Marx was a political genius. New Years: we should do wild ghost dances 'till dawn in hopes that he'll return from the grave.

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Sagittarius

So it's my birthday in Mississippi and my anthropologist buddy, Jacob, is talking to me about linguistics and digging up human bones as a life-long profession, and I presently get the sense that the dame we're talking to has secretly decided that we're bad news (since I've openly described myself as a Democrat) and then Jacob sez' to me,

"So, where were we?"

"Oh, we were saying something like 'Human beings don't know Shit from Shinola.'"

"That's right! ...err Hey, watch out with that drink out here. We don't want no trouble from the Boys in Blue."

"...Gotcha': I guess we're looking out for Monsieur Po-po?"

"Yep. At any rate, it looks like we've Agreed to disagree about Disagreeing."

A raucous erupts from the bar as the blues band steps outside for cigarettes. Cars honking. The smell of BBQ and Budweiser. Your typical Oxford nightlife confusion.

"Nope. I'd have to disagree."

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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.