Thursday, December 10, 2009
December
So far, so nice.
Kyler and I missed our village's Christmas walk, but it's been nice to see the remains of it--there are ice sculptures up and down Main Street. I don't know that I'd ever seen an ice sculpture before, in person. I was surprised to see the one shaped like a sign, with "LGBA" in big letters, until I realized it was an acronym for the local business association.
The weather has finally turned cold. Give Chicago's reputation, it's surprising that it hasn't been colder before. Still, there's something just not right about checking the weather and seeing that the temperature is 1. (Wind chill, -21).
I taught my first class here, on Michigan Avenue, Tuesday evening, when the weather was so spectacularly bad, and sleeting. From the fourteenth floor, I had an excellent view of the backed-up traffic on Lake Shore. It was a nice night to discover that the bus stop is just across the street from where I work, and the bus came quite quickly.
I've been pondering New Year's Resolutions again. This year, it's been a mixed bag. The one that I talked about the most, with the sit-ups, has gone well. In fact, better than expected: when I was getting ready to take a shower yesterday, I saw one of my obliques in the mirror. Up to that point, my relationship with my stomach muscles was based on faith in things unseen, so it was exciting to be able to see the evidence of all my work. There is a six-pack, too, but still hidden under a layer of cooler.
I gave up on my resolution to do 2 pushups per day. I had been hopeful that once my wrist recovered from the accident in January, I'd be able to catch up, but once I started doing them again, particularly once I started doing extra to catch up, it started hurting again. I did, however, do over 400 pushups this year, which is a lot more than I would have done without the resolution. I will likely make the same resolution for next year, and see if I can do better, since two per day shouldn't be too much of a strain.
Another resolution, to get a haircut, can still be accomplished, and needs to be soon. I had also resolved to play the viola more often, which did happen, although not as often as I'd intended. The last resolution was to memorize 12 poems. I have memorized 4, only I'm not very good at it and forget all the little transitional words and some adjectives... so I've been torn between re-memorizing the old ones and starting on new ones.
Kyler and I missed our village's Christmas walk, but it's been nice to see the remains of it--there are ice sculptures up and down Main Street. I don't know that I'd ever seen an ice sculpture before, in person. I was surprised to see the one shaped like a sign, with "LGBA" in big letters, until I realized it was an acronym for the local business association.
The weather has finally turned cold. Give Chicago's reputation, it's surprising that it hasn't been colder before. Still, there's something just not right about checking the weather and seeing that the temperature is 1. (Wind chill, -21).
I taught my first class here, on Michigan Avenue, Tuesday evening, when the weather was so spectacularly bad, and sleeting. From the fourteenth floor, I had an excellent view of the backed-up traffic on Lake Shore. It was a nice night to discover that the bus stop is just across the street from where I work, and the bus came quite quickly.
I've been pondering New Year's Resolutions again. This year, it's been a mixed bag. The one that I talked about the most, with the sit-ups, has gone well. In fact, better than expected: when I was getting ready to take a shower yesterday, I saw one of my obliques in the mirror. Up to that point, my relationship with my stomach muscles was based on faith in things unseen, so it was exciting to be able to see the evidence of all my work. There is a six-pack, too, but still hidden under a layer of cooler.
I gave up on my resolution to do 2 pushups per day. I had been hopeful that once my wrist recovered from the accident in January, I'd be able to catch up, but once I started doing them again, particularly once I started doing extra to catch up, it started hurting again. I did, however, do over 400 pushups this year, which is a lot more than I would have done without the resolution. I will likely make the same resolution for next year, and see if I can do better, since two per day shouldn't be too much of a strain.
Another resolution, to get a haircut, can still be accomplished, and needs to be soon. I had also resolved to play the viola more often, which did happen, although not as often as I'd intended. The last resolution was to memorize 12 poems. I have memorized 4, only I'm not very good at it and forget all the little transitional words and some adjectives... so I've been torn between re-memorizing the old ones and starting on new ones.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Fox News Faked Footage
Evidently it takes a comedian to do the work of the real press anymore. Check it out:
A blog post explaining what happened is here. Basically, Fox took footage from a rally two months ago and tried to pass it off as if it were from the current one.
Embedding the Fox response ("You were right.") seems to be disabled, but if you click here, you can watch the admission of guilt on youtube.com.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Sean Hannity Uses Glenn Beck's Protest Footage | ||||
| ||||
A blog post explaining what happened is here. Basically, Fox took footage from a rally two months ago and tried to pass it off as if it were from the current one.
Embedding the Fox response ("You were right.") seems to be disabled, but if you click here, you can watch the admission of guilt on youtube.com.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Training
I just went for a 4 mile run!!!!! That's the longest run I've done this year. Plus 2 miles of biking on either side of the run. The biking had the effect of making me go a little too fast for the first half of the run, which in turn had the effect of making me go too slowly in the second half of the run (except the very last 0.2 miles). I do think that if I keep doing these combination workouts it will help me improve my speed overall, though.
I'm still pathetically behind on my situps, and the end of the year is starting to loom. I am en route to failing pretty much every resolution... although there's still a month and a half to go.
I'm still pathetically behind on my situps, and the end of the year is starting to loom. I am en route to failing pretty much every resolution... although there's still a month and a half to go.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
SOFA
Last night, I had the chance to spend a little time at the SOFA Expo at Navy Pier. I wish I had the vocabulary to speak more coherently and meaningfully about what I saw.
My favorite piece was this one by Julius Weiland, "Loop (Blue)", 2009:
It's made of parallel clear glass tubes fused together, and really struck me in part because of its structural similarity to some ice I came across once. When I was living in Buffalo, I went down to the shore of Lake Erie to watch the sunset on evening in the spring. The pancake ice had piled up on the shore, leaving the lake clear, but the ice had been exposed to above-freezing temperatures for some time. The cakes of ice were several feet in diameter, and about four inches thick. However, since they had rotted a bit, so to speak, if you just touched the edge of one of the cakes, the ice disintegrated into hundreds of tiny icicles--somehow the solid cake of ice had been transformed into thousands of parallel splinters of ice. I tried to take photos but naturally they didn't show the detail very well... it just looks like ice.
The piece that surprised me the most was the series by Lauren Kalman
Usually I all but ignore the jewelry, but I've never seen anything quite like this before. The tiny jewels are attached to acupuncture needles, and inserted into the skin. There were large prints of the jewelry being modeled, and it really was striking (although if you looked closely, you could see that it was irritating one model's skin. Perhaps it's supposed to.)
I'd seen Christian Faur's work somewhere before, or perhaps just heard about it, and enjoyed it quite a bit, too.
This last one is called "Forgotten Children Series - Girl." It's basically a box full of crayons (4900 crayons, to be precise) hung on the wall, with the crayons arranged by shade so as to create the image of a girl. The view of hundred of crayons straight on has always been fascinating to me, from the first time I saw the Mr. Rogers "how crayons are made" to my tour of the Crayola factory in Winfield before it closed (perhaps, if I had worked there like my sister, I would have a different view on the matter now). The view gives me a sense of incredible abundance and wealth, like the first musical scene in Willie Wonka's chocolate factory in the movie, with floods of chocolate and fields of candy. Hundreds upon hundreds of crayons, all with nice sharp points to color in corners--what a dream for a kid.
Faur's work, though, is of course interesting for other reasons--the frisson as people realize that they're viewing crayons is in itself fun. And the work is quite lovely. I've often found myself intrigued by this kind of methodical conglomeration work (see above), because it becomes so apparent that there is significant thought behind its beauty: you simply could not just start putting this together without a plan. You need to decide ahead of time precisely which shades of color would go where.
On the sculptural pointillism theme, Veruska Vagen's dot de verre pieces were similarly fascinating. Here is Lady of Shallot (After Waterhouse, 1888)
Each point is a dot of glass. It wasn't until I saw this that I finally put together the nagging feeling I'd been having as I went through the expo: there were a lot of pixelated pieces, in which some object, a dot of glass or a crayon takes the place of a point of light on the computer or television screen. So many images are sets of pixels now, rather than dabs of paint or prints from film, and these pieces are taking off from there, retaining the image but reclaiming the point as a physical object, giving a new depth to the images, different from the original object that was first photographed. Vagen's ekphrastic piece doubles this displacement, by giving a new physicality to Waterhouse's painting, which I presume was originally based on some model. These go beyond tradition mosaics, it seems to me, by their insistence on the grid--we walked through parts of the stained glass museum to get to the expo, and that grid structure is the primary difference between the more recent pieces in the museum and these pieces from this year.
That said, I simply tend toward accretion and conglomeration. It just fascinates me. (Except when I'm trying to scrape it off the bottom of an avon with a spatula.) These vases by Toots Zynsky made of fused glass threads (similar to Weiland's fused glass tubes) simply took my breath away
Their depth of color and richness of texture (which isn't really apparent in the photos) from the myriad threads of glass makes me ache.
Anyway, these were simply the pieces that caught my eye and had photos up on the internet. Some that I liked: Svetlana Ostapovici had some three dimensional pieces with tiny pieces of bright orange glass with orange grout, Hans Weissflog has some incredibly delicate turned wood spheres, and Joy Saville's quilts were gorgeous (and also incredibly methodical, despite apparent abstractness):
My favorite piece was this one by Julius Weiland, "Loop (Blue)", 2009:
It's made of parallel clear glass tubes fused together, and really struck me in part because of its structural similarity to some ice I came across once. When I was living in Buffalo, I went down to the shore of Lake Erie to watch the sunset on evening in the spring. The pancake ice had piled up on the shore, leaving the lake clear, but the ice had been exposed to above-freezing temperatures for some time. The cakes of ice were several feet in diameter, and about four inches thick. However, since they had rotted a bit, so to speak, if you just touched the edge of one of the cakes, the ice disintegrated into hundreds of tiny icicles--somehow the solid cake of ice had been transformed into thousands of parallel splinters of ice. I tried to take photos but naturally they didn't show the detail very well... it just looks like ice.
The piece that surprised me the most was the series by Lauren Kalman
Usually I all but ignore the jewelry, but I've never seen anything quite like this before. The tiny jewels are attached to acupuncture needles, and inserted into the skin. There were large prints of the jewelry being modeled, and it really was striking (although if you looked closely, you could see that it was irritating one model's skin. Perhaps it's supposed to.)
I'd seen Christian Faur's work somewhere before, or perhaps just heard about it, and enjoyed it quite a bit, too.
This last one is called "Forgotten Children Series - Girl." It's basically a box full of crayons (4900 crayons, to be precise) hung on the wall, with the crayons arranged by shade so as to create the image of a girl. The view of hundred of crayons straight on has always been fascinating to me, from the first time I saw the Mr. Rogers "how crayons are made" to my tour of the Crayola factory in Winfield before it closed (perhaps, if I had worked there like my sister, I would have a different view on the matter now). The view gives me a sense of incredible abundance and wealth, like the first musical scene in Willie Wonka's chocolate factory in the movie, with floods of chocolate and fields of candy. Hundreds upon hundreds of crayons, all with nice sharp points to color in corners--what a dream for a kid.
Faur's work, though, is of course interesting for other reasons--the frisson as people realize that they're viewing crayons is in itself fun. And the work is quite lovely. I've often found myself intrigued by this kind of methodical conglomeration work (see above), because it becomes so apparent that there is significant thought behind its beauty: you simply could not just start putting this together without a plan. You need to decide ahead of time precisely which shades of color would go where.
On the sculptural pointillism theme, Veruska Vagen's dot de verre pieces were similarly fascinating. Here is Lady of Shallot (After Waterhouse, 1888)
Each point is a dot of glass. It wasn't until I saw this that I finally put together the nagging feeling I'd been having as I went through the expo: there were a lot of pixelated pieces, in which some object, a dot of glass or a crayon takes the place of a point of light on the computer or television screen. So many images are sets of pixels now, rather than dabs of paint or prints from film, and these pieces are taking off from there, retaining the image but reclaiming the point as a physical object, giving a new depth to the images, different from the original object that was first photographed. Vagen's ekphrastic piece doubles this displacement, by giving a new physicality to Waterhouse's painting, which I presume was originally based on some model. These go beyond tradition mosaics, it seems to me, by their insistence on the grid--we walked through parts of the stained glass museum to get to the expo, and that grid structure is the primary difference between the more recent pieces in the museum and these pieces from this year.
That said, I simply tend toward accretion and conglomeration. It just fascinates me. (Except when I'm trying to scrape it off the bottom of an avon with a spatula.) These vases by Toots Zynsky made of fused glass threads (similar to Weiland's fused glass tubes) simply took my breath away
Their depth of color and richness of texture (which isn't really apparent in the photos) from the myriad threads of glass makes me ache.
Anyway, these were simply the pieces that caught my eye and had photos up on the internet. Some that I liked: Svetlana Ostapovici had some three dimensional pieces with tiny pieces of bright orange glass with orange grout, Hans Weissflog has some incredibly delicate turned wood spheres, and Joy Saville's quilts were gorgeous (and also incredibly methodical, despite apparent abstractness):
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Hippo suit
Monday, October 26, 2009
Antienvironmentalist couch potato
I am using the dryer today, and am on my third load of laundry. There isn't even a particularly good reason for using the dryer. It's been awhile, though, since I last used it, and I found as I loaded it just now that I couldn't make it turn on. The problem turned out to be that I hadn't closed the door.
Okay, there is a sort of pathetic reason for using the dryer. Our clothes rack is looking quite dilapidated at the moment, and since it's been an object of frustration ever since we got it, I'm planning to pitch it when we move and invest in a better one when we get to Illinois, rather than try to repair it again.
I skipped my run this morning. My reason was as brilliant as my reason for using the dryer: I didn't feel like going. I did spend the day packing and cleaning, which entailed a lot of going up and down stairs. I also dumpster dove at Barnes and Noble to get some nice cardboard boxes for the books. Maybe tomorrow.
Sailing yesterday was fun. It was the last day of racing this season, and all the trees along the reservoir were yellow, orange, red, or bare. The wind was relatively stable, and we had a high of 62, with warm sunshine, so even though the bailers were leaking and my feet were soaked, I didn't get cold.
Church was a little funny. I went to the 11:15 service, except yesterday was confirmation Sunday, so actually I arrived an hour late for the special 10 a.m. service, which lasted until 11:30. I'd barely found a seat when an older woman came and sat next to me and asked what was going on, whispering questions loudly and requiring fairly loud answers through the choir's quiet song. Why did church start early? When did it start? Had she missed the sermon? (That one took some rifling through the bulletin to figure out).
Okay, there is a sort of pathetic reason for using the dryer. Our clothes rack is looking quite dilapidated at the moment, and since it's been an object of frustration ever since we got it, I'm planning to pitch it when we move and invest in a better one when we get to Illinois, rather than try to repair it again.
I skipped my run this morning. My reason was as brilliant as my reason for using the dryer: I didn't feel like going. I did spend the day packing and cleaning, which entailed a lot of going up and down stairs. I also dumpster dove at Barnes and Noble to get some nice cardboard boxes for the books. Maybe tomorrow.
Sailing yesterday was fun. It was the last day of racing this season, and all the trees along the reservoir were yellow, orange, red, or bare. The wind was relatively stable, and we had a high of 62, with warm sunshine, so even though the bailers were leaking and my feet were soaked, I didn't get cold.
Church was a little funny. I went to the 11:15 service, except yesterday was confirmation Sunday, so actually I arrived an hour late for the special 10 a.m. service, which lasted until 11:30. I'd barely found a seat when an older woman came and sat next to me and asked what was going on, whispering questions loudly and requiring fairly loud answers through the choir's quiet song. Why did church start early? When did it start? Had she missed the sermon? (That one took some rifling through the bulletin to figure out).
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Moving
Our roommate is moving out today. There are boxes everywhere. Plans for our move remain quite uncertain, to my thorough dismay.
Today's run went well, though. The bike path was full of OSU fans walking toward the stadium. I was wearing a Chicago Cubs ballcap that I'd found in the basement, and a number of people stared quite hard at my head. Either the Cubs are not popular around here, or else people were mistaking it for a Minnesota cap... that or anything not clearly OSU is verboten. Today, again, I wasn't too interested in my pace, because it took a lot of willpower just to get out the door. You know, one of those days when you ought to do something (my muscles were still sore) but really you'd rather curl up on the couch with cocoa.
I also was ready to break my new vow to make my short runs at least 3 miles, except that by the first time I checked the GPS, I was already more than a mile from the house. Evidently, I wasn't asking too much of myself. According to the GPS, I went 3 miles in 27:02, for an average pace of 9:01 min/mile.
Anyway, since the moving company said not to pack anything (!!!) and I have nothing else to do, I suppose today is a good day to take care of Merle's various problems. That way, in case the moving company comes around to tell us we do need to pack our stuff, Merle will be all ready to go. He needs a new air filter, and either a whole slew of light bulbs or else some new fuses.
Today's run went well, though. The bike path was full of OSU fans walking toward the stadium. I was wearing a Chicago Cubs ballcap that I'd found in the basement, and a number of people stared quite hard at my head. Either the Cubs are not popular around here, or else people were mistaking it for a Minnesota cap... that or anything not clearly OSU is verboten. Today, again, I wasn't too interested in my pace, because it took a lot of willpower just to get out the door. You know, one of those days when you ought to do something (my muscles were still sore) but really you'd rather curl up on the couch with cocoa.
I also was ready to break my new vow to make my short runs at least 3 miles, except that by the first time I checked the GPS, I was already more than a mile from the house. Evidently, I wasn't asking too much of myself. According to the GPS, I went 3 miles in 27:02, for an average pace of 9:01 min/mile.
Anyway, since the moving company said not to pack anything (!!!) and I have nothing else to do, I suppose today is a good day to take care of Merle's various problems. That way, in case the moving company comes around to tell us we do need to pack our stuff, Merle will be all ready to go. He needs a new air filter, and either a whole slew of light bulbs or else some new fuses.
