Althouse |
- "I’m floored. I’m thrilled to hear President Biden would call out the Claiborne Expressway as a racist highway."
- At the Midday Café...
- "For a while now, I’ve been talking about art objects as 'machines for thinking': Our job as viewers is..."
- "No mention of the perps race in the headline. That is weirdly the most obvious clue to their race nowadays. #JouralismDiesInWokeness."
- "But it may have been Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who coaches his daughter’s basketball team and who tried out unsuccessfully for the basketball team at Yale..."
- This is the kind of writing about painting that you used to see everywhere half a century ago.
- Isn't this how to do Critical Race Theory? You always ask — about anything — Isn't it racist? That's the method.
- "The FBI had an elegant term for G. Gordon Liddy, and that term was 'super-klutz.' As with so many self-professed paragons of strategy and masculinity..."
- Facebook bans "content posted in the voice of Donald Trump."
- At the Sunrise Café...
| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 01:19 PM PDT Said Amy Stelly, an architectural designer, who is "part of a growing movement across the country to take down highways bored through neighborhoods predominantly home to people of color." From "A woman called for a highway's removal in a Black neighborhood. The White House singled it out in its infrastructure plan" (WaPo). |
| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 08:56 AM PDT
... you can write about anything. That's a panorama view that shows the sun and the moon. Click and click again to get a big enough picture.  |
| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 08:59 AM PDT "... to switch them on, and it's almost impossible to do that when all you're getting is a glimpse through the gaps in a crowd." Writes Blake Gopnik in "Experiencing Museums as They Should Be: Gloriously Empty/A critic discovers the joy of visiting Covid-restricted art collections, which lets him commune with van Gogh and the gang" (NYT). This essay belongs in the transgressive literary genre, The Blessings of Covid. Have you spent much time gazing at museum art, anticipating lofty thoughts and emotional transport? It's hard to experience the contemplative level of awareness needed when there are always other people shifting around you, taking too little time, shattering your meditation with pointless little comments. Like reading the title of the painting out loud. Ever notice how many museum-goers do that? Or flatly stating the same factoid about the artist — the cut-off ear, the penchant for young girls...? They'll take a gander and pronounce the artist good at details. They'll opine on the looks of the person in the portrait as if it were a TikTok makeup video. The word "gorgeous" will recur so much that your meditation shifts to predicting the next time someone will say "gorgeous." And God forbid that painting you wanted as your own personal thinking machine is the next target of the wandering docent....   |
| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 07:10 AM PDT Says one of the commenters on the Washington Post article "New York authorities file hate-crime charges in attack on Asian American woman." There isn't even an attacker in the headline. The only human beings in the headline are the "authorities" and the "Asian American woman." The evildoer disappears. There's no attacker, only an "attack." But if there are hate crime charges, then the human mind is all important. "Attack" stresses the outward action. "Hate" requires a hater. There is a shadow of a person in the word "hate," the gesture at a mind. But this person is depersonalized — depersonalized because he is black. If a white man had stomped on an old Asian-American lady, he'd get full recognition in the headline. Is that racist?  |
| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 06:50 AM PDT "... when he was an undergraduate there, whose questions and comments were most hostile to the NCAA. Kavanaugh told [NCAA lawyer Seth] Waxman that he was starting from the premise that U.S. antitrust laws 'should not be a cover for exploitation of the student-athletes.' Kavanaugh then summarized the case as one in which the schools were conspiring with their competitors 'to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing.' Such a scenario, Kavanaugh concluded, 'seems entirely circular and even somewhat disturbing.'" From "Justices employ full-court press in dispute over college athlete compensation" (SCOTUSblog).  |
| This is the kind of writing about painting that you used to see everywhere half a century ago. Posted: 01 Apr 2021 06:32 AM PDT I'm have twitchy twinges of nostalgia reading this from Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post: Twombly's restive, twitchy marks are cryptic, conjuring both the fog of battle and an atmosphere of human and creative fade-out. The "math" part of "aftermath" is old German for "mowing." And there's a sense in which Twombly's work relates to the Old Masters as a field of stubble relates to a golden wheat field in high summer. Even the headline is a throwback to the distant past: "Yes, your kid could (probably) do this. But it might still be great art." That was the cartoon of the time: Ordinary people looking at "modern art" and saying "My kid could do that." It's kind of sad that the headline writer drew from that long-faded meme. Who has cared in the last quarter century about the shock of "modern art" in the form of paintings that have messy-looking drips and scrawls and blotches? There are things in art that can still shock people, but it would need to involve hurting a living creature or destroying something of value, not merely the chaotic application of paint to a canvas. But I am touched by Smee's writerly efforts in an archaic style.  |
| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 05:48 AM PDT
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| Posted: 01 Apr 2021 05:38 AM PDT "... the man who advertised himself routinely as 'virile, vigorous and potent' was most famous for underperforming. He was brilliant at scheming but lousy at pulling off schemes.... A week after the [Watergate] break-in, Nixon said privately of Liddy: 'He just isn't well screwed-on, is he?' Liddy may have died Tuesday at 90, but he lives on in any number of characters afflicting our politics with their theatrical machismo or numbskulled shenanigans. There's a little Liddy in the Republican senators who dressed in safari gear to visit the border last week in armed riverboats. There's a little Liddy in New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his hatchet men, who aren't subtle about conducting loyalty tests or smearing opponents. TrumpWorld teemed with little Liddys trying to outdo one another with displays of bravado, running off cliffs like Wile E. Coyotes, rigging political bombs that detonated in their faces. Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rudolph Giuliani. Absent-minded masterminds, all of them, tripping on their own cloaks, daggering their own shanks..." From "Little Liddys everywhere: The legacy of a political 'super-klutz'" by Dan Zak (WaPo).  |
| Facebook bans "content posted in the voice of Donald Trump." Posted: 01 Apr 2021 04:10 AM PDT
It's possible that Facebook only means to block Trump from directly using another person to bypass the ban, but the phrasing — "content posted in the voice of Donald Trump" — seems to rope in everyone who writes about Trump in a way that passes along his words and ideas. What is "the voice of Donald Trump"? If I put up a video of Trump talking, am I posting "in the voice of Donald Trump"? Notice the threat of "additional limitations" on one's account. It's not just Lara Trump who is threatened. It's anyone who's pro-Trump and even anyone who wants to write about what Trump is saying. Is it Facebook's agenda to stop Trump family and associates from passing along his video or is it to create an enclave in which Trump does not exist — to render Trump a nonperson?  |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2021 05:55 PM PDT
... you can talk all night. And please think of supporting this blog by doing your shopping through the Althouse portal to Amazon, which is always right there in the sidebar. Thanks!  |
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