March 1st 2012
by Kate Micucci of Garfunkel & Oates fame. Dig the ukelele licks!
Archive for the 'art' Category
January 18th 2012
Posted under American history & art & fluff
It’s the first day of classes in the second term for me, folks. Keep yourselves out of trouble. Continue Reading »
January 13th 2012
Posted under art & European history & fluff
“It was not the strongest idea for a Rutles film: four Oxford History professors on a tour of tea shops in the Rutland area, and it was slammed mercilessly by the press.”
January 11th 2012
Posted under American history & art & fluff
He Might Be Giant!
Woman wonders who’s your itchy friend?
Woman says I thought he was with you.
Woman says I though he was with you!
They slowly back away from him.
At last, he’s very interesting
His brushes with success were just an accident.
January 5th 2012
Posted under American history & art & Dolls & unhappy endings
detail from Carrie M. Becker's "Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse"
Via Susie at Suburban Guerilla, we learn of “Barbie Trashes Her Dream House” by artist Carrie M. Becker. Be sure to click the previous link and marvel at the level of detail and layers of junk that Becker meticulously crafted, including an extremely disgusting toilet in the Dream House bathroom. (I’m only slightly ashamed that my office looks a bit like this detail, at right, only with many more books and many fewer cardboard file boxes.) If you live in or near Witchita, you can go see the installation yourself in September 2012, when Becker takes hoarder Barbie to the Riney Fine Arts Center Gallery at Friends University.
Speaking of real life in miniature: remember that miniseries about the Kennedys that was protested by Kennedy loyalists and then dropped by the History Channel? I’ve watched 6 episodes so far, and it’s really quite entertaining. Continue Reading »
December 17th 2011
Posted under American history & art & fluff & unhappy endings
The Violent Femmes, from sometime in the 80s, judging by the cut of the trousers, the wife-beater tees, and the style of Gordon Gano’s dress.
December 16th 2011
Posted under American history & art & European history & fluff
December 15th 2011
Posted under American history & art & book reviews & childhood & fluff & weirdness
Today’s post is brought to you by the letter Z. Before the era of big game hunting in Africa gave us Z for Zebra, a “zany” was frequently used to illustrate or exemplify the use of the letter Z in children’s alphabet primers. This beautiful colored illustration is from The Child’s Colored Gift Book, with one hundred illustrations (London and New York: George Routledge and Sons), by Edward and George Dalziel. I found this image originally at Eek She Cried, but you can see the whole book with two different illustrated children’s alphabets, and more, at Archive.org. Isn’t it just perfect (for American political history purposes) that it’s riding one exasperated-looking ass? Continue Reading »
December 13th 2011
So much better than the original, which sounds like a flippin’ suicide note. (I always wondered, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? Feedback and methodone: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!”) The retro sound stylings of JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound:
December 12th 2011
Posted under American history & art & bad language & book reviews & race & weirdness & women's history
Have you all followed the Helen Vendler-Rita Dove smackdown lately in the New York Review of Books? Long story short: Helen Vendler reviewed Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and slammed it for being too inclusive, too multicultural, and too “peppy.” Dove responded with a lengthy defense of her work, explaining her methods and goals.
What struck me about this melee is the nakedly racial ressentiment of Vendler’s critique. (Vendler is a white Harvard professor of poetry, Dove is a black poet and scholar at the University of Virginia.) Although Vendler doesn’t say so, she is a Wallace Stevens scholar, and she’s apparently outraged that Dove’s choices meant that Stevens must share space in this volume with unworthy “multicultural” poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and others of the Black Arts movement. Here’s Vendler:
Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets with hyperbole. It is legitimate to recognize the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest. Language quails when it overreaches.
What is this, a flashback to 1988 and the Western Front of the Culture Wars: Battle of the Poetry Canon? Continue Reading »