wizardry, torture
through december 20, connelly will be showing "the giving tree," a collaboration between jonah freeman and rising artist michael phelan featuring stuffed penguins and a rotisserie chicken in the temporarily linoleum-lined space. january will bring another group show, centering on wizardry, torture, and parallel universes. "i think i'm going to paint the gallery really dark," says connelly, "like a dungeon."
- alex mar, "the new dealers: john connelly presents," new york december 1, 2003
posted November 30, 2003 in art, performance, printtubthumping remix by flaming lips
y'nev
y'nev
y'nev
y'nev
y'never gonna keep me down
by "chivalry" they mean nipples
the cover of the christmas issue promises "280 pages of moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex & more." there wasn't a whole lot of ice hockey or chivalry, unless, by "ice hockey" they mean bare asses, and by "chivalry" they mean nipples ... [according to an abercrombie & fitch board member,] most of the ideas come from the models themselves. "they have a great time and we don't do anything that they don't want to." the "kids," as he refers to them— almost parentally—pair up, form friendships, and sometimes have tears in their eyes at the end of the shoot. but maybe that's because they can't find their clothes. in the catalog, the first sweater doesn't show up until page 122 and by then, you're too tired from masturbating to shop.
- cole kazdin, "have yourself a horny little christmas," salon november 26, 2003
posted November 26, 2003 in crap, print, sexantebellum
a west coast last samurai premiere party asked for "beautiful asian women" to "dress as village women ... and mingle 'in character,' helping to create the ambience of ancient japan circa 1870s." for no money! this caused a ruckus, some asian americans wondering if a movie studio would liven up a bash for an antebellum flick by having black people running around in chains.
- michael musto, "la dolce musto," village voice november 26, 2003
posted November 26, 2003 in film, printart belongs to the unconscious!
art belongs to the unconscious! one must express oneself! express oneself directly! not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.
- arnold schoenberg quoted in "schoenberg, kandinsky, and the blue rider," jewish museum
posted November 25, 2003 in art, music, print, speechashton's ass
just last weekend i saw the preview for the new steve martin movie, cheaper by the dozen, and there was a 15-second clip of a dog sinking his teeth into ashton's ass. the dog refuses to let go, and you can hear it chewing and chomping as ashton, sprawled out on his stomach, howls in pain. a year ago i would've given anything to be that dog.
- dan savage, "savage love," village voice november 26, 2003
posted November 25, 2003 in film, printi'm applying to grad skool (journalism). everything is due 12/15. yes, quietly freaking out.
posted November 23, 2003 in deliverywhen ludacris gets excited, you'd better hide your vagina
barry white is dead. the rolling stones are ugly. elvis presley is a novelty techno act, and jennifer lopez is an idiot. popular music, alas, isn't very sexy anymore. ever tried boinking your lover to the sound of modern top 40 radio? no? me neither. i'd rather fuck to paul harvey.
but i don't really listen to much radio anymore, so in the interest of fairness, i decided to give the record industry a second chance ...
"holidae in" by chingy (featuring ludacris and snoop dogg)
... i don't know who the fuck chingy is, but the guy knows how to throw a party. even ludacris is excited about it—"for shizzle dizzle, i'm on a track with the big snoop dizzle!"—and when ludacris gets excited, you'd better hide your vagina. this is paint-by-numbers hip-hop, but it's still sexier than anything white people are doing.
- adam kinesis, "sexy singles!", knot magazine november 12, 2003
posted November 17, 2003 in music, print, sexa sucking chest wound
"this is a band-aid on a sucking chest wound," o'donnell called the five-hour training block.
- pfc thomas day, "customs agents help guards on iraqi border," army news service november 12, 2003
posted November 14, 2003 in politics, printeverything explained
jewish people are funnier than all but the most depraved catholics, and catholics are funnier than most of those from the protestant faiths, unless they're canadian or british. southern baptists can be funny, but sometimes it's not intentional. the only exception is unitarians, who are incredibly funny, particularly when they stand up and sing "we are the world" and everyone has to hold clammy hands and you can smell the failure of your neighbor's rock deodorant ... why are women in expensive shoes so rarely funny, and does that completely explain this past season of "sex and the city"?
- heather havrilesky, "i like to watch," salon november 13, 2003
posted November 13, 2003 in printinner longshoreman
lots of americans like to buy products that shout, "i'm large. i'm loud. i'm ready for anything," such as army assault vehicles lightly disguised as cars, or outdoor grills the size of small kitchens, or arnold schwarzenegger. david brooks, a new york times columnist, calls this "getting in touch with your inner longshoreman" ... in 1999, gertrude himmelfarb, a social historian, argued that america is becoming "one nation, two cultures." one is religious, puritanical, family-centred and somewhat conformist. the other is tolerant, hedonistic, secular, predominantly single and celebrates multiculturalism. these value judgments are the best predictor of political affiliation, far better than wealth or income ... as pete du pont, a former governor of delaware, pointed out, a map showing the sales and rentals of porn movies bore an eerie resemblance to the map of the 2000 election results. america, it is said, can live together because americans live apart. the two cultures occupy different worlds. traditionalists are concentrated in a great l-shape on the map, the spine of the rockies forming its vertical arm, its horizontal one cutting a swathe through the south.
- "survey: america: us versus us," economist november 6, 2003
posted November 12, 2003 in politicswe are very graphic
but l.a. weekly, part of the village voice newspaper chain, believes its sex ads are performing a public service. "we are an alternative weekly," said snookie stoddard, the paper's classified advertising director. "we are free thinkers. we tell the truth. we are very graphic. we don't have to hide our bumps and warts."
- allan wolper, sex classifieds tied to crime (but publishers take the money), editor and publisher november 11, 2003
provider
someday, this'll be over
someday, all the war, it'll be over
someday, the war will be over
someday, the war will be over
someday, the war will be over
someday, the war will be over
someday, the war will be over
someday, the war will be over
- pharrell, n.e.r.d., provider (video/live version)
posted November 11, 2003 in musicstraight plan for the gay man
u.s. cable network comedy central is planning to turn the american make-over hit "queer eye for the straight guy" upside down with a new show called "straight plan for the gay man" ... the make-overs include lessons in such areas as spartan home decorating, oafish manners, less-than-fashionable wardrobes, and an overdeveloped ego to mask all personal failings.
- "tv comedians 'turn' gay men straight," reuters uk november 11, 2003
posted November 11, 2003 in crapneed to rip provider video
hit me if you know how to rip an mpeg into an mp3, please.
posted November 10, 2003 in deliverygreasetank
mix equal parts "fight club" and tom of finland and you'll start to get a sense of what's going on at greasetank: the intense and often violent imagery isn't for everyone, but it's worth checking out if you're interested in exploring the further reaches of gay erotic poser art.
posted November 10, 2003 in art, sexkimmelman on serra
[richard] serra remembers bringing his students from the school of visual arts to the met in the late sixties and early seventies ... "here you're supposed to discriminate but the museum is actually working against this. it dissipates the amount of attention you give to any one object unless you really come with a directed idea and say, 'i want to focus on this painting and really see it.' so you have to find a way of isolating yourself to make value judgments ... it's like going from the art museum to the kmart when you move from the pollock to the tomlin. the pattern in the tomlin is so flatfooted and sterile. it's decorative. decorativeness is a tradition in american painting, and it has produced mediocre art and also great art. joseph cornell used a certain decoration to pull of his fantasies. jasper johns's terrific flag paintings are, in some ways, decorative. decoration means pattern, geometry, and repetition as the content of the work. pollock's intention wasn’t to decorate, to pattern, to use a repetitive model" ... he compares one richter image of a dead gang member to goya, then to late rembrandt: "at the end, rembrandt painted himself as meat. it was about him confronting his own mortality, and the paintings became smelly and foul and really great."
- michael kimmelman, portraits: talking with artists at the met, the modern, the louvre, and elsewhere
posted November 10, 2003 in art, printcarpet-like
in his painting villa on the attersee, klimt again resorts to this drawing technique by outlining the objects in black, and in the precise way he depicts the structure of the objects, such as the shingles on the roof or the flowers on the shrubs. this carpet-like structure, which uniformly covers the surface of the painting with colored speckles, makes the objects appear incorporeal. however, the various green, yellow, and red tones provide coloristic unanimity, and the evenness of the colored texture gives an impression of complete harmony.
- stephan koja, gustav klimt: landscapes, quoted in sotheby's impressionist and modern art part one, november 5, 2003
posted November 10, 2003 in art, printreal tomatoes
mayes's book is only one example of a flourishing publishing phenomenon: the many volumes devoted to the upper-middle-class american dream of getting away to a primal paradise of sunshine, sex, love, terra-cotta tiles, and huge salads with real tomatoes.
- david denby, "heart of the country," new yorker september 29, 2003
posted November 10, 2003 in film, printtarantino is literally a bloody genius.
tarantino is literally a bloody genius.
- ebert and roeper
posted November 08, 2003 in film, printcontrary
the social reality—to be a player in the media is to be among the most powerful people of the age—belies a contrary business reality, that the business barely supports itself.
- michael wolff, autumn of the moguls: my misadventures with the titans, poseurs and money guys who mastered and messed up big media
posted November 07, 2003 in print87 percent
a recent poll by the ipsos polling agency for galeries lafayette concluded that 87 percent of french men and women believe that lingerie is an important part of life.
- elaine sciolino, "paris journal: to sell lingerie, inhibitions, and much more, are falling," new york times november 6, 2003
posted November 06, 2003 in print, sexwhat messages will go to which audiences and which media will carry it
times white house reporter david sanger has a direct line to rice. she gives him the lead on stories; the times then carries her spin ... "this white house has decided what messages will go to which audiences and which media will carry it," says a white house correspondent for a major daily. "it would be foolish not to think the new york times is not part of that media strategy. it is the daily bible for the foreign-policy establishment and the shortest path to that readership."
- harry jaffe, the new york times and the nsc: good reporting by david sanger or "the pravda tendency" of the times?, washingtonian october 24, 2003
posted November 04, 2003 in politics, print, speechon authorship
oxford insists that one must write 80 percent of a book to qualify as its author; anything less, you're an editor.
- alan davidson, "the know-it-all," interview by jonathan reynolds, new york times november 2, 2003
posted November 02, 2003 in printthey haven't been thinking
any person who is intellectually alive changes his ideas. if anyone at a university is teaching the same thing they were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead, or they haven't been thinking.
- noam chomsky, "the professorial provocateur," interview by deborah solomon, new york times november 2, 2003
posted November 02, 2003 in printasking (and nagging and negotiating)
in her new book, unequal childhoods, annette lareau, a sociologist at temple university, argues that middle- to upper-middle-class families today tend to practice a child-rearing strategy she calls "concerted cultivation," which involves, among other things, frequent interventions at school on behalf of your children, active (and often opinionated) monitoring of homework and the organizing of family time around children's extensive schedules of team sports, lessons and performances. (one of the more striking documented changes in how children spend their time is the increase in hours spent watching siblings perform.) children in working-class and poor families, by contrast, are more likely to be raised in a spirit of "natural growth," meaning they spend less time in the company of adults like teachers and coaches and more with other children in the kind of self-directed, open-ended play for which affluent parents often profess nostalgia these days. the effects of these differing strategies—which are not only a matter of resources but also of beliefs and habits—are to reinforce class divisions, helping to prepare middle- and upper-middle-class children for life in the middle and upper classes by accustoming them to asking (and nagging and negotiating) for what they want, and giving them the sense of entitlement that comes from having so much of the family's life formatted around their activities.
- margaret talbot, "too much," new york times november 2, 2003
posted November 02, 2003 in printsociometrics
issue no. 3: are you the center of the social universe or just a satellite? one sociometric issue is centrality (or, as we might have said in high school, popularity). degree centrality is simply the number of people you interact with. betweenness centrality is the contact you're making with people whose only connection is through you. prestige centrality, the most coveted, is the extent to which you interact with those who are most in demand.
"because gwen stefani was the official center of attention, she interacted with a lot of people, and thus had high-degree centrality," gibson observes. "if we set some minimum time requirement on an exchange before we call it interacting, her degree centrality would drop substantially, for while she exchanged kisses with a lot of people, she had time to speak meaningfully with perhaps none of them." try not to become a sociometric butterfly, flitting but not truly connected.
- william middleton, "popular mechanics," new york times november 2, 2003
[mark] granovetter argues that when it comes to finding out about new jobs—or, for that matter, gaining new information, or looking for new ideas—weak ties tend to be more important than strong ties. your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. they work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools, or parties. how much, then, do they know that you don't know? mere acquaintances, on the other hand, are much more likely to know something that you don't. to capture this apparent paradox, granovetter coined a marvellous phrase: "the strength of weak ties." the most important people in your life are, in certain critical realms, the people who aren't closest to you, and the more people you know who aren't close to you the stronger your position becomes.
- malcolm gladwell, "six degrees of lois weisberg," new yorker january 11, 1999
posted November 02, 2003 in crap, music, print