Tuesday, April 7. 2009
This is a 4x10 "Cloudband" Kazak, 70-100 years old. I think it's a knockout. Asking $6000:
Our friend Nathan thought some of our readers might be interested in "Unspoken (Or What is Said After Death)" by Naftali Moshe.
Nathan says "The basic idea is what do you wish you could have said to someone after you have left; some unspoken words that resonate in your head and it is too late to speak them. Then, imagine the ultimate leaving - death; what if you could speak those words after death. What if you could tell someone whom you loved dearly what you had not been able to say before."
It's the reverse of what people usually talk about - what they wished they had told someone who died. The story is written in the voice of a Kosher butcher who has commited suicide. A quote from Chapter 1:
My last breath, my last precious breath, was the freest breath since I was twelve. I stood in Ulysses' and Aeneas' waters. Like the Baal Shem Tov, I test the Wusthoff's edge with a finger; drew a drop of blood; shed a tear of joy and sadness.
Brief pain as the knife drew across the skin, my throat slipping slightly beneath its edge until the knife could catch, bite. Then through the trachea for that final, but decades delayed fresh breath. The carotids bathe the knife, then my hands in last warmth. The Mediterranean took me.
My son, unlike Abraham over Isaac, unlike God over Jesus, I will not sacrifice you. But through you I, I could breath again.
And now I can speak to you from this dream-ether.
The story is serialized in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Here's Chapter 1.
Here's Chapter 2.
Mad about it. Mini DSLR with a fabulous Leica lens which is electronically stabilized and goes from (35mm equiv.) 27mm wide to 486mm telephoto (826.2mm with 1.7x add-on lens). The wide angle and telephoto shots of San Simeon illustrate the power of this lens (the box in the wide-angle outlines the telephoto). At 27mm, it is also f2.8 – very fast for a point-and-shoot. The other photos are of a walnut & wine operation in Paso Robles CA.
This camera will not replace our Canon EOS XTi, but that beauty and its lenses weigh 27 pounds, and are a bit difficult hiking or traveling! Oh, and Abe’s of Maine which we love offers it for $287.95!!!
Here's the Cameralabs review.
Here's the cnet review.
Photo I used it for in San Simeon last week. Go below the fold for more - and to see inside the box:
Continue reading "My new camera - Panasonic DMC-FZ28 from COSTCO"
Monday, April 6. 2009
No, this was not our local Ducks Unlimited banquet. We posted the invitations for this little cocktail party, but (fortunately) not too many guys showed up for the little shindig Theo and I hosted on Saturday night. Right Wing Prof would never attend such a thing, and I know Sippican's wife wouldn't let him come, nor would Tigerhawk's or Gwynnie's - but I was sure Vanderleun would show. He didn't. It was good wholesome fun, but a bit exhausting due to the guy-to-gal ratio. Yes, that is me in the center front, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, reluctantly yielding to dissolute feminine charms:
Thursday, April 2. 2009
Jean-Honore Fragonard's Psyche showing her sisters her gifts from Cupid (1753). This is what I call "French." The remarkable Jean-Honore died broke and forgotten, of course. Artists are supposed to do that.
Wednesday, April 1. 2009
 Simon pointed out that a lot of our (legal) economy depends on heroin, and explains how they do it in Switzerland. (It's the way it used to be done here.)
Related: We are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail. I agree. I want non-violent crims off the public payroll, and paying for their crimes with $ fines. Last I heard it costs us taxpayers around $70,000/year per jailbird.
I would prefer that they pay us for their crimes - with money.
Tuesday, March 31. 2009
 Norm's wife Adele found this good new book site, The Second Pass. She says:
The Second Pass is a new American books blog edited by John Williams. In his introductory message to readers John explains that the loss of book reviews from the pages of the print media and the possible disappearance of many newspapers has prompted him to go online to create a space where many voices can come together to talk about books old and new.
There's a section for new publications, and one for books that have been around for some time, and a brilliant feature called The Shelf which asks readers who come to the website to recommend books in 75-125 words. I am already considering what I might recommend there myself, and I have noted down a George Pelecanos novel called The Turnaround to go on my wish list.
Monday, March 30. 2009
We know that you have been too busy to post much lately. Despite that disappointment, we want to note and celebrate the numerous wonderful career and personal things going on in your life this year.
Everything's coming up daffodils. You are indeed one blessed and fortunate Dylanologist.
Friday, March 27. 2009
Discovery's Mike Rowe on work. 20 minutes. Just wonderful. (h/t, Synthstuff):
Picasso biographer John Richardson discusses the new show of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery. Multimedia.
Wednesday, March 25. 2009
 Mr. Free Market offers the contents of the Ladybird Easy-Reading series on People at Work: The Policeman.
Sadly, we do not have the contents of the Ladybird "How it Works" book pictured here.
Stolen from Dr. X:
Monday, March 23. 2009
It's not your parents' humanism. Scruton never disappoints. His main point is that the Old Humanism was about building up mankind's strengths and virtues, while the New is negative, and stands for nothing worthy. A quote from The New Humanism:
Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling. Having shaken off their shackles and discovered that they have not obtained contentment, human beings have a lamentable tendency to believe that they are victims of some alien force, be it aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the priesthood, or simply the belief in God. And the feeling arises that they need only destroy this alien force, and happiness will be served up on a plate, in a garden of pleasures. That, in my view, is why the Enlightenment, which promised the reign of freedom and justice, issued in an unending series of wars.
That is, I think, a profound observation.
Saturday, March 21. 2009
Smith is a member of Montana's Flathead Nation. Like so many artists, as long as she steers clear of politics she makes nifty pictures to look at. Here are some of her works.
(I think I first became aware of her work in Jamake Highwater's The Sweet Grass Lives On; 50 Contemporary North American Indian Artists. Highwater himself has an interesting story. Born Jake Marks, he was a choreographer, critic and writer who worked in San Francisco and NYC and who, like Ward Churchill, wore a ponytail and passed himself off as an Indian. A fraud. In some areas of society, of course, being a member of an "oppressed group" lends mucho cachet and sex appeal. His Indian art book was pretty good, though. Lots of pictures.)
Twenty years ago she was making American Indian/Chagall-type mythic dream stuff. Ghosts and monks and coyotes and firebirds and petroglyphs. Here are two of her pastels:
Friday, March 20. 2009
A sad story. If he had been a candidate for Obama's Cabinet, this would never have happened. Come to think of it, I would have supported him for a Cabinet post, or at least for head of ATF.
Thursday, March 19. 2009
 I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.
When I picture the pile of mendacity this chart represents, and then season it with the images of the LUGS gettin' it on under the watchful eyes of their Sauron, Obama, and Che posters, the desolate furtive groping interspersed with the endless acts of contrition and permission necessary to disrobe a feminist toward the center of the chart, and the beautiful frosting of a vision of the bell curve ends getting together by accident during an all night trance party, I forgive Wellesley everything. You finally came across. You're checkbox comedians after all.
I've read that a Wellesley student once reported that she switched her iPod to Bach while waiting at crosswalks, because she didn't want anyone to know she was listening to the Spice Girls if she got hit by a bus when the light changed. I bet that girl's off the charts, baby.
The reviewer of a new definitive bio of Chagall at NY Review of Books says, snarkily, "I don't think his art deserves a biography this good."
This is Marketplace at Vitebsk, 1917:
Wednesday, March 18. 2009
Photo: 1st Class stateroom, Queen Mary.
I remember, as a lad, passing the Queen Mary in mid-Atlantic on a clear day. Built in 1934, she was an old lady by that time. Yes, she did blow her 1-ton whistles. She sits in Long Beach, CA today.
They don't make em like they usta.
The website Lost Liners has it all. (h/t, Theo)
Monday, March 16. 2009
Charles Murray at The American. One quote:
...do we want the United States to be like Europe?
I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.
My argument is drawn from Federalist Paper No. 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.” Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.
and another
What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
Perhaps we already linked Voegli's essay of the above title, but, if we did, it bears repeating. Here's one quote:
Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces.... The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them." Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents' religion. Instead, wrote Doctorow, a "third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."
We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans, and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk, and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.
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