Month: May 2004

Definitions

Today at the Museum of Contemporary Photography I saw some really neat images described as “C-Prints.” I imagined this was some sort of fancy process. Nope: any enlargement of a color photo. Some of the other good images turned out to be inkjet printouts. Fancy inkjets to be sure, but inkjets nonetheless.

My grandmother insists that photography isn’t art, and I’m sure she’d hate the digital photomanipulation artists, but I love it, especially the unnatural landscapes that a lot of contemporary artists assemble or find… the supersaturated color of schoolbuses in a flooded parking lot, the stark intensity of a highway interchange, lights blurred from long exposure. It’s as pure a mechanism of conveying emotion and image as, say, drypoint etching, or formal oil painting, or sculpture in bronze.

After the MCP visit, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and reminded myself why I really really really dislike 18th and 19th century painting, especially French and English. That extends to the 17th century in many cases. I know it’s saying a lot to write off three centuries of art, but dammit, it’s all so overblown and melodramatic and… well… foofy. Rococo, Romanticism… I don’t even like impressionists, although I did see a nice etching by Mary Cassat, which, since it was a study for something else, had a sense of immediacy and focus that her more ‘completed’ works didn’t.

I cannot spell

I’ve always been good at spelling, but I can never remember how to spell Apparel. As in “Don we now our gay” or American Apparel, maker of very nice t-shirts and other knitwear, who pay living wages, who offer after-work English classes and day-care for their employees. Although they’re not unionized, but whatever.

I’ve always felt that unions are a necessary friction, but that ethically avoiding them is probably good for all involved. The US auto industry is now seeing just how much it’s continuing to pay for its worker exploitation of fifty and sixty years ago and more: spiralling pension costs, concessions, inability to close a plant or exit a product line, inefficiencies, ossification. Unions help workers, but they don’t help The Company, and the company needs to survive to employ the worker who’s helped by the union… ideally it’s symbiotic but in practice it’s as imperfect as… well, it’s often still better than anything else.

Going Places

OK, I’m out for the weekend, back part of Sunday, out til Thursday, back for Friday, out Saturday and Sunday, and back in June. Expect intermittent posting. Also, expect me to get around to posting some pictures.

Nautilus Spatialus

Great article on ByteBot about the latest Nautilus, which seems to actually understand the point of the past year or so of GNOME development:

So rather than posting to the mailing lists, or writing factually incorrect articles, it seems that the time has come to move on from the fact that Nautilus by default, has become spatial. The GNOME Desktop has started breaking down the myth of the “average user” and the “power user” and instead focusing on “good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience”, and drastic changes like this is only going to push the open source desktop further.

Debt

I owe props to Daniel Gross, whose articles on Slate I’ve been reading while I spill last night’s leftovers onto my keyboard. I’ve been learning about recent Geenspan and Bush nonsense and how Bush owes what little credibility he has to Greenspan, while Greenspan owes his credibility to his interest-rate-related power to soften economic pain. That power will be sorely tested if the general consensus grows that we really are in a housing bubble that’s going to collapse any day now.

Then there’s one by Michelle Leder about really depressing high-interest short-term debt, a.k.a. “payday loans,” with a link to one about the legal grey areas surrounding loan sharking and usury.

Non-debt-related is one on gas prices and their effect on convenience stores, with a link to The National Association of Convenience Stores Fact Sheet on Gasoline Theft.

(Jackpot! Not only a trade magazine, but a trade magazine’s report on a weird crime whose frequency is affected by international relations! Obviously designed just to tickle my bizarre-data fetish.)

Sucker

Via Low Culture, the following quotation from a shining example of the trade magazine, Broadcasting and Cable:

“I’m not gonna get suckered into voting again,” she says. “Why should we sit here and waste two hours of our time when our votes aren’t going to be counted?”

As the snark notes, “The article, subtitled ‘An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed voting system,’ might have better read, ‘An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed America.'”

For more bitchiness, look for reviews of the latest from Ken Haruf and David Brooks, both of whom have committed the mortal sin of producing more of what worked so well last time.