Month: September 2006

Hope in Dope

Mmmm, EPO-licious:

To this day, she blames Armstrong for what she said was pressure on teammates to use drugs. Her husband, she said, “didn’t use EPO for himself, because as a domestique, he was never going to win that race.”

“It was for Lance,” she said.

Hierarchy of genres, hierarchy of materials

I’ve been thinking about the old-fashioned rules for art materials this week, but I can’t quite remember the list from art history, nor can I quite seem to find the right search terms for it. I did manage to find the hierarchy of genres on Wikipedia. The idea is that the best paintings are of allegorical and historical scenes. Lesser subject matters are portraiture, landscape, and finally still life.

But there’s a parallel set of rules for what you make the art from: bronze or marble is the best for sculpture, followed by other stones, followed by plaster or wax or wood. Oil painting is better than watercolor, ink is better than charcoal.

Like the white-after-labor-day rule, the art hierarchy rules barely matter now they go back to the 18th century French academy and the formation of the discpline of art history, and they’ve been toppled and challenged and explored by every generation of artists since 1850. Besides, they fail to take into account things like video art, electronic prints, lithographs…

But on the other hand, the old rules still matter at least a little. And without being formalized, they’re still part of the air and they still influence the way people feel about art. A handmade photo print with silver emulsion is somehow better than a computer print, even if they appear identical. You’ll find acrylic paint in the official canon (that is, H. W. Janson’s History of Art— see Barnett Newman, for one) but oils are still the tool for most “serious” painting. And you certainly won’t find a lot of airbrush or spraypaint art in galleries, a few representatives of street culture notwithstanding. If your drawing is pencil instead of loose charcoal, it might not look different, but it’s different. And when you say pen-and-ink, you better not mean ballpoint.

I’m not sure why I’m saying this or where I’m going with it so I’ll stop now.

The Early Days of Nascar

As far as I can tell, Baltimore is the center of a Roller Derby resurgence. Maybe not– I mean, there’s defintely a resurgence. And it’s happening in Baltimore and New York and Boston and Philly and San Francisco.

It seems a lot like the early days of stock car racing: hard-drinkin’ rough-and-tumble folks with slapped-together equipment and sponsors like “the nice guy from the coffee shop” and “Ray from the gas station” build a small competition into a national sport. They discover drafting and supercharging and find ways to overcome a restrictor plate, a bad bearing, a hangover.

This is awesome. I want TV coverage.

It’s a Dirty Job That Won’t Make it to TV

I love the Discovery TV show Dirty Jobs. The premise is that buff, avuncular Mike Rowe goes around to help various regular joes out on dirty jobs: coal mining, crawfish hunting, disaster cleanup, whale autopsies, that kind of thing. At the end of every show, they ask viewers for their suggestions of new dirty jobs. None of my ideas, however, would be suitable for television:

  • Stripper
  • Fluffer
  • Marketing copywriter
  • Porn theater janitor
  • Doula
  • Lindsay Lohan
  • Drug mule

Save the ponies! Won’t you think of the ponies?

House of Reps opposed to killing horses for food.

I don’t see why killing and eating horses is any different from killing and eating cows, chickens, goats, llamas, or buffalo.

““They’re as close to human as any animal you can get,” said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C.”

No, that’d be chimps, dumbass.

“Added Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.: “The way a society treats its animals, particularly horses, speaks to the core values and morals of its citizens.”

I agree that treating animals well speaks well of a society, but we kill and eat a lot of animals in this country. We also have secret prisons, export people to be tortured, and execute our retarded criminals.

And unlike the oil bills and agricultural bills so forth, I don’t even understand what possible constituents reps could be pandering to. How many six-to-twelve-year-old female voters could there possibly be?

You’re Dead to Me

My grandmother’s eldest sister took up with goyim. Married a Catholic or something. Grandma remembers being not very old when she came by one day and Poppa wouldn’t let her in the door. He said, “You’re dead to me. Never come back.” He came to regret it later, but that’s another story.

Say it once or twice: “you’re dead to me.” It’s an odd phrase. It almost makes you feel dead.


[Photo: Flickr, DashingYankee]

Are you dead to anyone? I know I am, but I’m not entirely sure to whom. When you’re dead to someone, you don’t always get a formal statement, a doorway confrontation, a goodbye ceremony with bell, book and candle. I’d say, rarely. You just stop calling and they stop calling and nobody picks up the friendship and it dies.

No bedside vigil. No funeral. No sobbing relatives, no memorial service. Just… gone.