Author: Aaron Weber

Sick at heart

I’m running the Hillary Clinton site for Top 10 Sources in our new format — very editor-intensive, updated constantly with the best of the web’s content, etc.

That means reading a lot of things about Hillary Clinton, some of which are just plain awful.

It’s not like she’s Paris Hilton (yes, we have a Paris Hilton site done the same way). Paris Hilton’s job is to go out in public and act silly. Hillary’s trying to do something useful and all the public has to say about it is that she looked ugly in her prom picture?

American political discourse makes me want to vomit. Or maybe that’s the leftover barbecue I had for breakfast. Not sure.

Dumbassery

The following t-shirt was on display at Jasmine Sola, a trendy boutique in Harvard Square:
Simpatico por El Diablo
The words mean “friendly for the devil.” If I were generous, I might translate them to “friendly on behalf of the devil” and interpret them to mean that the wearer is acting nice to promote the interests of Satan– “Hi, I’m Satan’s PR agent.” But I’m not generous.

I’ve seen western misuse of eastern languages on Hanzi Smatter and eastern misuse of western languages on Engrish. But I’ve rarely seen someone try to be cool by using Spanish in a gothic font to look like some kind of cholo badass.

PS, while searching for “cholo” links I found Han Cholo and his store. Not sure what to say about that.

PPS, update 7PM: The point of this post is that the word for “sympathy” in Spanish is not “simpatico” but “condolencia” and that this shirt is a mis-translation of the English phrase “Sympathy for the Devil.”

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