Not to mention all the Picassos

Went to the Whitney Museum with PS on Sunday.

Two of the four floors of art were open.
Top floor visiting exhibit of Edward Hopper.
He did that painting of a diner at night called "Night Hawks"


from www.assumption.edu

I gotta say. Some of the paintings were kind of awkward or so-so.

But then there were some paintings - my god. There was serious passion in the paints. The light, the colors, the shadows. Wow.

Beyond his artistry and the early paintings, the self portraits, and illustrations they had his sketches.
Sketch after sketch as a preparation for doing the painting.

It was awesome to get a peek into the process, the practice, the choices.
Staircase? No staircase? Curtain? Yes? No? This angle vs. that angle.

It was great to have that evidence of the craft and discipline in art. "Night Hawks" didn't just happen. It did not spring from Hopper's mind fully formed. A process brought it into being.

Ducks look serene floating on the lake but under the surface those legs are a-paddling.

It's fun hearing my roomate converse with her mother by phone.
At points she struggles to get a word in edgewise.
So cute.

it's all in the associations

One of the many irritating things about using microsoft office at work has recent done a 180 degree turn for me.

I hate the Paper Clip. It's irritating to have a Paper Clip with eyeballs hover around you and interrupt you offering unsolicited advice.

In clicking around somehow I got to a menu that allowed me to choose the character of the help icon. Now it's a cute orange kittycat. She purrs and naps and presses her paws against the pane of the monitor. When she has a suggestion she sits patiently with a little lightbulb hovering over her. And what was an irritation is now a cute and helpful pet.

Someone needs to write me a script so I can give her a saucer of cream.

Finishing School

Back in the day families could send their daughters to finishing school where they could learn the womanly arts. And train to be gracious and ladylike. For all the education (and miseducation) I have had, it occurs to me that I might want to find one.


Because I eat like:



from www.designedtoat.com

and


from www.mac.umaine.edu


I laugh like:

from www.myworldfarm.com


I converse like:

from www.wunderground.com


I blow my nose like the mating call of:

from www.nhptv.org


and I party like:

from www.bristolzoo.org.uk


Uh, yeah. So if you have any recommendations I am all ears.

Who wears the pants on this planet?

"The US Trade Representative has been threatening to scuttle Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization if they don't shut down AllOfMP3, but nobody in Russia seems to care much about WTO membership. Sitting on one of the world's largest oil reserves makes membership in the WTO somewhat moot -- Russia will always be able to find trading partners."

Article Posted to Boing Boing

Leads me to wonder if having oil is like being veeery good looking - you can get away with anythyhing.

Maybe it's more like, if you have oil and nuclear weapons you can get away with anything.

*Then imagine if you were veeery good looking on top of all that?*

Things to do in November

1. Write a Novel

Don't lie to me or yourself about this. You know you want to. There is no time like November for doin' it. www.nanowrimo.org So do it.

2. um, what else is there?

Bachelor girl moments

I wandered around the apartment ignoring the mountain of dirty dishes that inhibit food preparation looking for something to eat. My late late brunch was looking like a bottle of orange flavored seltzer water and a box of stale triscuits. Until I thought to myself, "Don't I have a piece of fruit somewhere? In my purse or something?" Et Voila! A lone bruised plum purchased for lunch sometime during the week, placed in the purse, transported all over, forgotten, and rediscovered.

Oh happy day!

Until I finish ... and need to look for more food.

digital or material?

An eternity ago I sent out an email survey to all of my friends:

In the Middle Ages there were monks who devoted their lives to the preservation of the written word.
They spent day after day copying books. They wrote them out by hand.

If a nuclear holocaust (or some other global disaster that would destroy civilization as we know it) happened and the Dark Ages returned, and it was up to you to preserve one book. A book you could only preserve by writing it out by hand. A book that would cease to exist without you - what book would you choose?

I got some really interesting responses and I never sent out the results. I should actually dig them up.

A lot of people said that they would copy the dictionary.

PRC said that he wouldn't have time to copy a book in the event of a global disaster. But he had a list of books that he would hermeticaly seal and store in his basement.

A few people said that they could probably keep up with more than one book. (these were my favorite responses.)
Momvee was committed to preserving "I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith. I think she was interested in preserving a second book by Ms. Smith the title fo which escapes me.

I had never come up with my own answer. It is so hard to choose. I think I might copy "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wind in the Willows" or "Microserfs" because I would enjoy that work. I guilt trip myself thinking that it would be more important to posterity to preserve "The Origin of the Species" or some weightier more meaningful book.

Nobody mentioned the Bible or Aristotle or Plato. Perhaps a very ambitious person might tackle the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or a print out of all of the pages of Wikipedia in the state they are right now.

I ask myself what book has been published in the past 36 years that encompasses what we know, what we have learned, how we felt, what we thought, did and believed and what happened. That book is probably different for each 36 year old on the planet today. In a time where we drown in a sea of information what record do we have of our collective wisdom? What is worth knowing?

Some people at a party some years ago were discussing how digital media have such short lifespans. Systems and machines become outdated, software devices wear out - tapes, diskettes, CD's, DVD's. I don't know how it is now but back in the day a very strong magnet could wipe your hard drive. i was happy to point out that clay tablets the Sumerians had to keep track of grain in the storehouse - they've survived pretty damn long and some of them are still legible as well.

They were not impressed.

The RM (roomate) and I were at the Metropolitan Museum in the Egyptian section and she pointed to a scribe and declared that he was our historical antecedent. Which is so true. And all of those papyrus scrolls covered in writing and drawings are not that different from the kind of work and output that is expected of us at Big Scienceville(TM). Although I wonder if an archaeologist will ever find one of my spreadsheets or her powerpoint presentations. And if she did, could she read it?

It was funny to see that we were the same scribes in a different age.

It doesn't seem like the world is going to end in the near future so I think we can just scan all those books and have them stored as pdf's in a big distributed digital library. At least that's what people tell me about the world of the future. We are spared writer's cramp and can go back to coping with our carpal tunel.