The Errant Æsthete

Wonderful. Compelling. Addictive. A new favorite way to waste time. Mr.Picassohead. [via link]

 

Much has been written following the death of George Carlin a few weeks ago. But I came across a few of the several thousands of profundities Carlin himself made in his lifetime; these in May, 2001, when he agreed to do the brilliantly insightful Proust Questionnaire for Vanity Fair. And for those of you wondering what George might be doing in heaven, there’s this.

Taking ‘Place’ as its theme, this year’s PhotoEspaña festival in Madrid had an array of varied and interesting exhibitions scattered throughout the city. See Slide Show for exhibits. Featured here in what was the real “standout show” was a major W Eugene Smith retrospective.

SLIDE SHOW

For the notably nostalgic, witness the truth behind SF’s most famous/geographically fanciful chase scene ever, as Steve McQueen’s ‘68 Mustang route is juxtaposed against a “map”. Beginning in Potrero, the action jumps through 7 ‘hoods before the bad guys crash and burn down by Monster Park — a stadium where, if we’re being accurate, it’s mainly the good guys who crash and burn. Daredevils, start your engines! [via link]

VIEW

Hillary Clinton’s campaign had it all: near-death moments, hard-won triumphs, dysfunctional relationships—and a staff consumed with infighting over how to sell their candidate. It was a battle that revealed why she came so close to victory, as well as why she didn’t make it. The race may be over for Hillary Clinton, but the blame game has just begun. Gail Sheehy intereviews the infighting insiders in the upcoming Vanity Fair.

An unusual list of foods that probably aren’t in your shopping cart. This list is generating a lot of commentary.

Continue reading ‘The Eleven Best Foods You Aren’t Eating’

Secret lives at the thrift shop: pornographic Polaroids in hidden in hollowed-out used books.[via designobserver]

This wonderfully funny, and, uncannily, accurate rendering is making the blog rounds. It’s a parody on one of the most famous covers ever done for The New Yorker by illustrator, Saul Steinberg, entitled View of the World from 9th Avenue, (March 29, 1976), sometimes referred to as A Parochial New Yorker’s View of the World or A New Yorker’s View of the World, which depicts a map of the world as seen by self-absorbed New Yorkers.

A wistful collection of Penny Postcards from every city and state. These postcards cost 1¢ to mail. There really was such a time. [thnx Kris]

Everyone seems to have an opinion on Wall-E. While Pixar’s latest release debuted at No. 1, this weekend, earning $65 million at the box office and is being hailed by critics with a whopping 97 percent “Fresh” rating, there is serious rancor from the right.

For those not familiar with the story, the film portrays a lonely robot’s quest for love, as he is left to clean up a trashed earth. Meanwhile, the over-indulged humans wait it out aboard gigantic spaceships run by a monolithic corporation-turned-government that “resemble spas for the fat and lazy.”

Would love to hear what you think, particularly after you take a glance at what the righteously right are saying: … MORE…

Continue reading ‘Opinion: Pixar’s Wall-E’

Ben Brantley reviews the London theater’s summer of love.

When lovers meet on London’s stages this summer, the odds are it’s not violins they’re hearing. It’s alarm bells.

Consider the strange, sad case of the Norwegian minister and the freethinking new woman, natural soul mates who find each other, only to destroy each other. Or the kindhearted Chinese prostitute whose affair with a pilot drives him to heroin addiction. Or the middle-class man and woman who consign themselves to lives of loneliness with the wrong people because that is what good people do. And that’s not to mention the passion-addled barrister’s wife, who, having left her husband for a younger man, is first seen trying to gas herself to death.

These typically tabloidish tales, which I’ve seen enacted quite compellingly during the past 10 days, were written by Ibsen, Brecht, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. And the new work I’ve sampled — including Anthony Weigh’s “2,000 Feet Away,” a symbol-heavy play at the Bush Theater about pedophilia in the American heartlands, starring Joseph Fiennes — suggests that the contemporary outlook for romance is, if anything, less rosy. If one pattern has emerged from my theatergoing here, it’s that the course of true love runs straight off a cliff.

Flickr has compiled a set of the cover designs for the third installment of Penguin’s “Great Ideas” series of books. Unanimous approval is heavily weighted to the cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as the gem of the collection [featured above. And for the dubious, that IS the cover you're looking at). [via link]

This season’s political blockbuster brings us a mediated brawl fought with logos, banners, websites, email spam, online videos and doctored images. Amused by the strivings of the righteous and desperate, we already know the campaign catchphrase will be something akin to, “It’s the YouTube, stupid.” We also know that no one will ever know for sure whether or not anyone else knows for sure about anything.

Barack Obama said something or stood too close to someone else who said something. He wore something or didn’t wear something. He went somewhere or didn’t go somewhere else. His wife also said something. She might also have gone somewhere.

John McCain said something and then said something different. He stood apart from someone and then stood next to someone. He is this old or else he is that old. He called his wife something. She might also have called him something.

Who has time to triple-check the counter-claims? It’s far more expedient to be political fans the way we’re sports fans—mindless, rabid—and we have the logos and T-shirts to prove it.

Full essay at Voice. [via link]

In a recent study, scientists contend that watermelon, that iconic staple of summer fare, possesses ingredients that have Viagra-like effects on blood vessels and libido. Ever the natural enhancer, watermelon possesses a long list of healthful ingredients, including lycopene, beta carotene, and, a new one, citrulline. While its benefits are not organ specific like it’s smaller and bluer friend, watermelon can still treat, and possibly prevent, erectile dysfunction through significantly increasing blood flow. Which explains why you might see a long line of middle-aged men waiting for produce for the upcoming holiday weekend.

The NY Times travel section this week is a lure to aesthetes and consummate seekers who thrive and flourish amidst beauty and nature. Elaine Siolino guides us through an undiscovered treasure: the hidden gardens of Paris.

The Swiss Valley is one of the most unusual of Paris’s more than 400 gardens and parks, woods and squares. Much grander showcases include wooded spaces like the Bois de Vincennes on the east of the city and the Bois de Boulogne on the west, and celebrations of symmetry in the heart of Paris like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg.

But I prefer the squares and parks in quiet corners and out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Many are the legacy of former President Jacques Chirac. In the 18 years he served as mayor of Paris, he put his personal stamp on his city by painting its hidden corners green.

“He took some of the pathetic, shabby squares and gardens and transformed and adorned them,” said Claude Bureau, one of the city’s great garden historians who was chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes for more than two decades. “He appreciated beauty — of women, of nature.”

SLIDE SHOW

Obviously, this post bears repeating [EA 06/10/08] since I just learned via designobserver that everybody’s talking about it. Anyone care to venture a guess? ANSWER

A wonderful piece by the caustic, and almost always, irritatingly correct Christopher Hitchens on the miraculous sightings (most notably, the rainbow) surrounding the death of Tim Russert.

“I remain unshakably certain on two points. The first is that no benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their desks in the prime of life and then hastily compensates their friends and family by displays of irradiated droplets in the sky. (I bet you now that it won’t happen for Brokaw or Williams or Olbermann, even if they all convert to Catholicism, and you know I am right.) My second bet is that Tim Russert, a man of firm but modest faith, would reject this foolish superstition and the silly cult of celebrity. This latter cult belongs to the material world, which, in the absence of a supernatural one, is the only world we have.” [Link]

As his legendary 24-hour French diner closes for the first time, it is being mourned as the sad passing of an era. But Florent Morellet regrets nothing. See EA’s earlier post [EA 05/23/08]

“Until a few weeks ago, a tiny map of Liechtenstein, the world’s sixth-smallest country, hung in the back of Florent, the 24-hour French diner that opened in 1985 at what was then one of the more improbable locations in Manhattan: 69 Gansevoort Street, along the southern edge of the meatpacking district. The map was one of dozens mounted on the walls by the owner, a charismatic 54-year-old Frenchman named Florent Morellet, who thinks of maps as accidental works of art, still portraits of places that are constantly changing. Little Liechtenstein had seen a lot in its day.

The map was there back when the neighborhood was a forlorn tangle of cobblestones where slaughterhouse workers hacked apart bovine carcasses and transvestite hookers prowled outside unsubtly named sex clubs like the Manhole and the Mineshaft. Little Liechtenstein was there, too, as the slaughterhouses were taken over by Helmut Lang and Stella McCartney and Apple and as restaurants serving lobster fra diavolo opened in buildings where, as John Waters puts it, “I remember watching men pay good money to get pissed on.” And Liechtenstein was still there, quietly minding its business, on the day two months ago when Morellet told his staff that his lease was up, that the new rent was far out of reach, and that Florent, the establishment that established the neighborhood, would be closing after 23 delightfully wild years.”

Death is often a good career move in poetry. No sooner are the obsequies over and the baked meats eaten than the publisher warms up the presses for a definitive edition of the collected poems, solemnly proofread down to the last querulous comma. Yet not all poets are well served by such an exhaustive volume, which may seal up a reputation forever — indeed, such a book has sometimes been called a tombstone. A collected poems may be cruelest to a poet whose genius shone as intermittently as a firefly.

So begins a wonderful review by William Logan out of the Times on Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara.

“The poet’s genius in these “I do this I do that” poems, as [O'Hara] called them, was to stop trying to have a point — the off-course thinking that was normally the means to a poem became the heady, helter-skelter end. He wrote compulsively about what moved him — his lovers, and avant-garde painting, and ballet and of course the movies (few poets have invoked Googie Withers and meant it). Wilde might have said that such things were too important not to write trivially about them; but O’Hara almost never faces up to the emptiness beneath this high life and low desire — if there’s a subconscious revealed, it’s very hard to detect. The poems describe an urban pastoral where no one has a real job, where martinis flow like nectar and where the days of Elysium are marked by the arrival of a new issue of New World Writing.”

This post in the NY Times explaining the autopsy findings behind Tim Russert’s sudden death is essentially crucial to understanding why heart disease, oftentimes, has no prior warning signs and is aptly called “the Silent Killer.”

If there is any lesson in his death, his doctors said, it is a reminder that heart disease can be silent, and that people, especially those with known risk factors, should pay attention to diet, blood pressure, weight and exercise — even if they are feeling fine.

“If there’s one number that’s a predictor of mortality, it’s waist circumference” … MORE …

Fashion forward’s auteur, Bill Cunningham of the Times snaps street fashion photography that make their way into slideshows. Each week, Cunningham goes out on the streets of NYC to find out what people are wearing. His commentary is as colorful as his photography.

This week he looks at women’s handbags, which he calls “the engine carrying the fashion world”. Cunningham finds that bags are growing almost “cartoonishly large” and discovers a unique glove/bag combo. Last week, he looked at the glittery belts that some men are wearing with their saggy jeans with the mistaken notion that they actually look fabulous. [via link]

For those who like their heads sandwiched in the sand, read no further. And for those who have lived long enough to witness with their own eyes the obvious differences between the weather as it is and as it once was, this out of Newsweek:

Global warming has left its clearest fingerprint on heat waves. Since the record scorcher of 1998, the average annual temperatures in the United States in six of the past 10 years have been among the hottest 10 percent on record. Climatologists predict that days so hot they now arrive only once every 20 years will, by midcentury, hit the continental United States once every three years. Scientists also discern a greenhouse fingerprint in downpours, which in the continental United States have increased 20 percent over the past century.

In a warmer world, air holds more water vapor, so when cloud conditions are right for that vapor to form droplets, more precipitation falls. Man-made climate change is also causing more droughts on top of those that occur naturally: attribution studies trace droughts such as that gripping the Southwest to higher sea-surface temperatures, especially in the Pacific. Those can fluctuate naturally, as they did when they caused the severe droughts of the 1930s and 1950s. But they are also rising due to global warming, causing a complicated cascade of changes in air circulation that shuts down rainfall.