Erwin Wurm "Fat Car" (2005)Just discovered this sculptor today and I love the stuff I can find on google - really playing with form, texture and absurd ideas. That said, I couldn't help but think of Pixar's film Cars after seeing this piece...
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Chop Sue
This morning I read an interesting article about the history of Chinese food in America. Atop the text sat this painting by Edward Hopper:
Edward Hopper (born Nyack, NY, 1882-1967), Chop Suey, 1929.The painting brought me back to an American Art course I took a few years ago. In it, the Professor highlighted an odd fascination of early American artists (working before Ab-Ex in the years of 1900-1950) with the Chinese Restauarant. Most of these artists were working in New York, where, according to the article above, the first whiteys took a stab at eating the exotic cuisine. Here are some of the other works that revolved around the developing love for Chinese chow:
Justice John Paul Stevens - ain't he cute?
This octogenarian with a bow-tie and some original, now-hipster frames (see below) is one bad-ass mother. As leader of the Supreme Court's liberal wing, Stevens has forged delicate majorities in areas of the law such as the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, allowing them to get hearings before federal judges. Stevens has had a knack for working with centrist conservatives such as former justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the swing vote on cases.The self-effacing man who is rarely recognized beyond the court's marble walls is a powerhouse behind the scenes — and this might finally be his last term. Stevens' retirement would leave a major gap among liberals and shake up a court already in transition with a new justice this term. Stevens has not hired his usual set of law clerks for the session beginning next October. He says he is surprised by media attention to a signal he might retire soon.
"That can't be news," he says, declining to reveal his plans. "I'm not exactly a kid."
"We're getting to a point that our cases are revisiting issues that I wrote on 10, 20, 30 years ago," he says. "I really have felt pretty good about re-reading the opinions I wrote many years ago. I have to confess that."
Harvard University law professor Richard Fallon says Stevens' retirement would leave a significant void, especially given the role he took on after liberals William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall retired in the 1990s.
"Justice Stevens became the strongest, most articulate voice on the court defending the rights of criminal defendants and racial, religious, and other minorities," Fallon says. He describes Stevens as "a wily practitioner of coalition politics, who has cobbled together liberal majorities for a number of important decisions in a generally conservative era."
Yet Stevens has one of the lowest profiles.
Unlike Justice Antonin Scalia on the right or Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the left, Stevens avoids the speaking circuit. A recent C-SPAN survey found Stevens and Justices Kennedy and Stephen Breyer tied in last place for public recognition among the justices. Only 1% of those polled in a June survey could name them.
The Chicago native who sported one of his signature bow ties in the interview — red plaid — complimented his colleagues even as he acknowledged disagreements. "Sometimes I'm disappointed in the decisions they reach," he says, "but I respect every one of them."
Gimme That!
Diana Schimmel strings fabric circles on clear wire to produce her whimsical line of jewelry.
Schimmel, Dos Riberas' founder, belongs to a French family and was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She graduated as an architect in Buenos Aires, exerting her profession both in Argentina and Uruguay and also teaching at Buenos Aires Architecture and City Planning School. In 2001, she got involved in art related objects, her second passion. Her first developments were inspired in her motto "from art to the object", bringing together art and artisan-like mass production.
Who is this Nora Roberts woman?
Nora Roberts, a romance novelist who also writes futuristic police procedurals under the name J.D. Robb, is certainly prodigious. She has published a hundred and eighty-two novels. In a typical year, she publishes five “new Noras”: two installments of a paperback original trilogy; two J.D. Robb books; and each summer, the “big Nora”—a hardcover standalone romance novel. Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute. Roberts grosses sixty million dollars a year, Forbes estimated in 2004, more than John Grisham or Stephen King.
“You know, writing’s creative and all this, certainly, but you don’t just wander around dreaming,” Roberts says. “That’s not what you’re getting paid for.” Describes Roberts interacting with readers at a bookstore signing. Roberts is not a hugger or a crier. She has a dirty mouth, a smoker’s voice, and a closet full of Armani. Shopping is her main form of self-indulgence. Listening to the give-and-take between Roberts and her fans is like eavesdropping on the collective unconscious of American women. A self-taught writer, and an irreverent one, Roberts was not, at first, an easy sell. Nancy Jackson, the editor of Roberts’s first novel, notes that Roberts “didn’t follow the formula as strictly as others.” Roberts is as uninterested in the literary establishment as she is unloved by it.
Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1950. She married Ronald Aufdem-Brinke upon graduating from high school and settled in Keedysville. She had two children. She began to write in1979 while housebound during a snowstorm. In 1980, Silhouette accepted her novel “Irish Thoroughbred.” In her choice of milieu, if nothing else, Roberts is the Raymond Carver of romance. Her characters thirst for cold beers on the porch, not Daquiris by the pool. The engine of the romance genre, according to Roberts, is not escapism, but identification. “Character is plot. Make them accessible to the reader.”
“Sex is important in the books because, without it, it would be like eating a rice cake instead of a cupcake,” Roberts says.
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