Do you think that famous singer (whoever) is coasting on just her looks and good PR?
Check out this video of Jewel, singing karaoke in disguise, and see how the crowd responds to an ugly duckling conventioneer. Watch to the end, where one of the crowd thinks that “Karen” performed even better than Jewel.
I loved this, and it looks like Jewel really enjoyed doing it too.
Okay, I realize I said there wouldn’t be a lot of pictures of artwork. Well, sometimes the artwork tickles me just right and I feel the need to share.
I had brunch with Deb and Abbie, and although we’d planned to see a movie, the power went out at the building with both restaurant and theatre, so we went for a walk (in the heat) on the Mall. We visited the Sculpture Gardens at both the National Gallery and the Hirschhorn Museum. (Annoyingly, the Hirschhorn doesn’t have a section of its website devoted to the Sculpture Garden and showing the art therein. It would have helped me identify this sculpture/installation later. If anyone knows whose it is, please leave a comment.)
If you’ve been following along, you already know how I love images that are layered, and that feature spacial ambiguity. So: who’s in and who’s out in this picture? (The young woman peeking through the grid here was another visitor, not someone I know.) This sculptural installation is a permeable enclosed space of glass and wood, with a stone tile floor, an open ceiling and a door. It is triangular in shape, but one of the glass walls is parabolic, which makes for some fascinating optical effects. The confusion of outside and inside is pretty thorough, which I really like.
Here’s what it looks like as you approach the lower level of the Sculpture Garden. Abbie is standing at the entrance, and you can see Deb and me reflected in the parabolic glass wall. The young woman from the main picture is at the far left.
Here’s a view from inside the piece. It’s an interesting place to be.
Today, Something Beautiful LLC was brought to life. The company was technically born on July 6th, but since capital is the life-blood of a business, I didn’t consider it really alive in the world until it was funded. I spent about an hour setting things up at a local bank this afternoon, and walked out feeling more enthusiastic about, committed to, and grateful for my creative life than I have in a long, long while.
There’s something profoundly energizing about having brought this entity into existence. While I hold no truck with the concept of corporations as persons (and LLCs aren’t actually corporations by the IRS’s lights anyway), nonetheless there’s something profoundly exciting about having this separate, self-contained thing that I must now tend and grow. I suppose, in some vaguely analogous way, I feel like a new parent: scared and very, very excited.
What will become of Something Beautiful?
Stick around with me and find out. The next few months are going to be a wild ride!
It’s a city.
You get cigarette butts on the sidewalk, and random blobs of tar or chewing gum. You get buses and bus-stops. You get five extra degrees of heat in the summer. You get concentrations of wealth and poverty.
You get motion, vitality, and public works.
You get glass decoration that transforms itself into appealing patterns as the afternoon light passes through on its way to the pavement’s checkerboard.
You get 25 people who pass by without noticing, and one who stops and takes delight.
Fair enough.
In general, you’re not going to see a lot of photographs of works of art here. Works of art are wonderful, and to be appreciated in their own right of course, but I’m trying to feature things that we might not otherwise presume to think of as beautiful or might overlook in the ordinary course of things.
No one is going to overlook Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. It is a renowned and astonishing masterpiece that memorializes unheroic-looking heroism. (This detail is of the version in the Sculpture Garden at the Hirschhorn Museum here in DC.) I have seen this piece numerous times: here, in Paris, and in London. It is brilliant in design and execution, and it had a significant impact on our understanding of what monumental sculpture could and should be. My parents, both sculptors, were huge fans of Rodin and their own work was significantly influenced by his style.
Today, however, this sculpture had an unexpectedly personal effect upon me. The central figure of the grouping, shown here, bears a striking resemblance to my father toward the end of his life. Thanks to this work of art, I now have this icon of sacrificial nobility overlaid and superimposed upon my memories of my father, whose last years were sad and difficult. Rodin is helping me to mourn in a new and more gracious way, and for that I’m grateful.
This is the gift that great art can give to hearts and minds: to see the world in a different, richer, and more beautiful way.
No, this was not posted from the Department of Redundancy Department.
This image documents a building that plays upon hallowed architectural norms of inside/outside, facade/interior, transparent/opaque, upstairs/downstairs, and I suppose even freedom and control. Those who descend to Apple’s underworld (if they can get by that Charon of an elevator operator) may return like Persephone to the daylight bearing with them the pomegranate-apple of knowledge. It tickles me that we see through the Apple store’s entrance to that bastion of old school wealth and privilege, The Ritz, which seems strangely superseded.
The Apple Stores, at least the ones outside malls at landmark locations, are designed as temples for the worship of beautiful technology. The acolytes come and go, leave their tribute, learn from and venerate the priests within. I admire Apple because it is a company that is built on a real understanding of the power of aesthetics.
Real beauty is not only skin deep. It goes all the way to the core.
Western civilization owes a lot to the metaphor of shadows on the wall, the shallow illusion cast in front of us by the light of truth behind our backs. The speckled, flawed, distorting glass in this lamp just cries out for analogizing. How are we to see clearly when the very light itself is bent all out of shape? (Also, by the way, that whole “seeing through a glass, darkly” thing doesn’t mean what most people think it means… i.e., glass=mirror, not a window-pane, or ~ as in this image ~ a sconce).
We say “I see” when we understand, and sight is often the guarantor of credibility, which is why we put such stock in eye-witnesses despite their documented unreliability, and why we aver that “seeing is believing.” More often, though, it’s the other we around: we see what we believe we’ll see. And when we blindly follow a leader, we’re likely to say “YOU!” when he asks: “Who are you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”
This fixture doesn’t shed any real light on one of the thorniest subjects of metaphysics, but at least it’s stylish while failing to do so.
I’m introducing a new category of posts today. In addition to offering up my discovery of the visual loveliness around me and my own efforts to make beautiful things, I’m going to share with you some of the things that adorn my life that you can easily get too. I guess I’m a bit of a curator by nature, and I really enjoy hyping things I’m enthusiastic about.
The item pictured above is probably my single favorite possession. Yes, you read that right. I like it better than my 27″ iMac and the magnificent, deeply meaningful sculpture made by my mother than adorns my living room.* That said, I’d give it up in a heartbeat if forced to surrender something at gunpoint. Why? Because I could pick up another one for nine bucks any time I want.
It is the incredibly useful Flip & Tumble 24-7 Bag
I welcome your nanny-state plastic bag tax, because I ALWAYS HAVE AN EXTRA BAG WITH ME!
Seriously, just buy one of these things. You can thank me later.
*Okay, maybe slight hyperbole.
It’s insanely hot. (The weatherman says 102; maybe IN THE SHADE.)
I had to run an errand this afternoon that involved the DMV. (This is foreshadowing. More on this topic later.) First, I had to find the service center, which is NOT where the inspections take place, but around the corner. Then I parked many blocks away, only to discover that free parking was available on the premises… which turned out to be a good thing, since I was there for an unreasonably long period of time. I trekked back and retrieved the car as the sun’s furnace shriveled my soul into a black raisin of despair.
I will save the details of the many aggravations, inconveniences, and seemingly impossible obstacles associated with this task. Suffice it to say that each and every one of them was made exponentially more annoying by the ridiculously oppressive heat. After getting as much done at the DMV as I could, I was supposed to do a bunch of other stuff that involved schlepping hither and yon in my car.
I revised my plans and came home instead. Blessedly, my delightful building maintenance had replaced the broken knob on my air-conditioning unit, so I did not have to repeat last night’s cuss-filled plier dance.
Now the best I can do is sit here and figure out how I’m ever going to do much-needed laundry. Our laundry room is not cooled, and the prospect of being in the same space as a bunch of heat-pumping clothes-dryers is, uh ~ well, let’s just say it’s not happening.
Given the state of heightened irascibility I was in when I got home, I find myself amazed that this heat wave has not set off a proportionate tidal wave of homicides. Well, maybe it has, and the bodies won’t be discovered until it cools off a little. Or maybe murdering someone just takes too damn much effort.
I am going to sit here and do as little as possible for as long as it takes for this to be over.
Virtual reconstruction (by microtomography) of the external morphology (on the left) and internal morphology (on the right) of a fossil specimen from the Gabonese site. (Credit: Copyright CNRS Photo Library / A. El Albani & A. Mazurier)
Really, really ancient.
And we’re not talking little blobby cells with no nucleus. We’re talking two-billion-year-old multi-cellular critters. Read all about it at Science Daily.
If that isn’t beautiful, I don’t know what is.