Headlights on the Highway

"[T]o the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents [...] literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them."
~ George Bernard Shaw, Afterword to Pygmalion, 1916
(as seen at Nervous Unto Thirst)

O===O

"When you eavesdrop on cell-phone conversations, you learn who people are by what they are saying to their friends: 'I am now doing one thing. I am now doing another. I will report them all and notice none.' And in effect this mode of constant self-report can be summed up in a single phrase: 'I am on the phone. I am on the phone. I am on the phone.'"
~ n+1, Issue 5, "Whatever Minutes"

O===O

"Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours, no feet but yours;
yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion looks out on the world,
yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good
and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now."
~ Teresa of Ávila
(as seen at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish)

O===O

How can you learn to create pictorial space?
"If you succeed the canvas will be alive: the flat surface will be activated by the spatial effect."
~ from Maxson J. McDowell's remarkable e-book Cézanne and Hans Hofmann on Pictorial Space

Who Knew?

"Late-stage Baby Boomer" or "early Gen-X"? It turns out my borderline cohort (I was born in 1963) has a name of its own: Generation Jones. "The birth years typically used in the U.S. are 1954-1965, but tend to vary slightly in other countries [U.K., Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand], usually starting no earlier than 1953, and ending no later than 1968."

Dirty Found: "We collect DIRTY FOUND stuff: pervy Polaroids, sleazy birthday cards, raunchy to-do lists, nasty poetry on napkins, illustrations--anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's sex life. It's just like our sister, FOUND Magazine, only sleazier."
Oddly, not as interesting as the blurb suggests.
Even more oddly, Ohio (Columbus and Cincinnatti) seems to be disproportionately represented on the "Dirty Finds" page...

Far more interesting is PassiveAggressiveNotes.com: "passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers"

Spot The Fake Smile
I got 18 out of 20 correct -- but only one really fooled me. The other I missed due to overconfident haste. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! :-)

Three Quotes to Ponder by R. D. Laing & Derrick Jensen

Peroration

per·o·ra·tion [per-uh-rey-shuhn], noun
1. a long speech characterized by lofty and often pompous language.
2. Rhetoric. the concluding part of a speech or discourse, in which the speaker or writer recapitulates the principal points and urges them with greater earnestness and force.

[from Latin perorationem (nom. peroratio) "the ending of a speech or argument of a case," from peroratus, pp. of perorare "argue a case to the end, bring a speech to a close," from per- "to the end" + orare "to speak, plead"]

"[Robert] Olsen's small quiet painting, a wry observation on the misguided and futile efforts of the public works department, is in fact a sonorous peroration." ~ Jacques de Beaufort

The Invisible

"To sense the invisible and to be able to create it: that is art."
~ Hans Hofmann














"Memoria in Aeternum" (1962), Hans Hofmann

Links:
Hans Hofmann website
Clement Greenberg on Hofmann
Walter Darby Bannard on Hofmann

Truth! Information! Relevance! Clarity!

Gricean maxims
source: philosopher Paul Grice

• Maxim of Quality: Truth
• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Maxim of Quantity: Information
• Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• Maxim of Relation: Relevance
• Be relevant.
• Maxim of Manner: Clarity
• Avoid obscurity of expression. ("Eschew obfuscation")
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief ("avoid unnecessary prolixity").
• Be orderly.

Politics On Tap -- with a White Trash Chaser

Who is Mae Brussell? Steven LaRose explains by posting Paul Krassner's "Lee Harvey Oswald Meets Suzanne Somers" (from Spin magazine, February 1989):

So maybe some day, perhaps in Bull Durham II, Kevin Costner will say to Susan Sarandon, "I believe in carrying condoms with me at all times and I believe that the military-industrial complex took over the country on November 22, 1963."

Then: follow Steven's link to shit your pants reading Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps" (from The Guardian, 24 April 2007).

Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, was released yesterday. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes:

Gore, to his credit, won't talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

Ah, what might have been... If there's any silver lining to be found at all behind the grim cloud of the November 2000 election, it's that Silly McSmileyface hasn't been our nation's vice president.

I remain happily TV-free (for almost a year now!), but I've found a fun way to keep up with the Sunday afternoon political shows: The Bobblespeak Translations, "What They're Really Saying When They're Saying What They're Saying." It's a hoot.

And now for something completely different: Matt Wray examines the history of "White Trash" in American Sexuality Magazine (via 3 Quarks Daily).

What Is Hidden

"A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us."
~ Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)

Giorgio de Chirico, "Les Vexations du Penseur"
("The Vexations of the Thinker")