Maggie's Farm

We mentioned the above notion in the post about Kimball's essay on art yesterday.

How is this quote, from a piece at Right Wing nation on Green sex toys, to illustrate the concept?

Also, note: inflatable sheep can easily be repaired with a bicycle patch kit if popped.

Is it legal to marry an inflatable sheep in Denmark yet?

A number of folks have linked to Roger Kimball's piece, Why the Art World is a Disaster. Kimball's ideas have been said before by others, but he is one of our favorite essayists, and it's definitely worth reading.

His point is not a curmudgeonly critique that "modern" art products are ugly, or not really art. His point is that art designed to shock the middle class is predictable, boring, and old hat. Political art, conceptual art, art that attempts "the domestication of deviance" is a tired idea, and was already tired in the 1940s when Orwell wrote:

(The artist) is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

.I learned a few things from Kimball's piece, including the tidbit that Duchamp made art of urinals to mock the avant garde, and found that they took it seriously. At that point, he quit art. Read the piece.

Image: Kandinsky's House in Munich, 1908. Yes, I do love Kandinsky. Maybe my favorite, if I had to pick one artist.

Her choreography renounces gravity. Great fun to watch. Two videos of her stuff here. 

(Thanks, Nathan. Mrs. Bird Dog says she knows Elizabeth from NYC, and says her work reminds her of the Multigravitational Dance Company which shared a space with the Alwin Nikolai Dance Company in the good old days. "Nik" was Mrs. Bird Dog's role model, mentor, and friend - and a good guy who is missed.)

Who is Elizabeth Streb?

In 1997 Elizabeth Streb was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' award. She is currently the 'Dean's Special Scholar' at New York University at the Draper Program working towards an M.A. in Time and Space studying Physics, Philosophy and Architecture.

Streb's choreography, (she calls it POPACTION) intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, extreme-sports, and Hollywood stunt work into a bristling muscle and motion vocabulary that combines daring and strict precision in the pursuit of attempting to display publicly the aggressive and deep effect of 'pure movement.'

An MA in Time and Space? Hmmm. Well, OK. Whatever. Looks like pure, wonderful physicality to me which blurs the arbitrary lines between dance, gymnastics, and sport.

Mukesh Ambani is building a 60-story house in Mumbai. It puts our American hedge fund guys to shame.

It has room to house 600 servants. I could definitely use 600 servants around here, if only for a few days. Yard work, closet cleaning, straightening out the attic, weeding the garden, polishing the silver, sorting out the pantries, a bit of painting, spreading mulch, moving shrubs, carpet cleaning, gun cleaning, etc. I could keep 'em busy for a couple of days, and would want them back for a visit next June

MIT prof Alex Byrne takes on the subject of meta-ethics in the Boston Review. Byrne is of the view that moral law is built into the structure of nature itself (which I would hear translated as "the Creator made it that way"). One quote:

Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts.

But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.

Is pleading "nature" a cop-out, or profound? The piece is a heck of a good summary of the current and past basic thinking about meta-ethics, but you have to put your Thinking Cap on before reading.

Half the county was at Home Depot this morning. We aren't into buying Hostas at Home Depot, but their tomatoes are good, and mine are in the ground now. And I have 20 more bags of black mulch to carry around.

But getting back to Hostas, Mrs. BD found this site.

Long-time readers know that we have rules about Hostas - never anywhere near the sun and never less than 5-20 plants of the same type en masse. Done right, they can be wonderful, but done wrong, they can be tacky.

One of their downsides is that they take a few years to fully establish themselves. One of their upsides, besides their preference for dense shade, is the astonishing variety of sizes and colors of foliage available these days.

Here's our previous piece on Hostas.

Photo from The Tennessean.com, which I hope will forgive the use of this photo. The story of 8 year-old Christian Golcynski accepting the flag from his father's casket is at The Tennessean, here.

We linked this piece at Flares titled Facing the Market last week, but I thought it so usefully clear and succinct that I'd re-post it with a quote. Every kid in high school or college should read this to inject some reality into the romantic psychobabble about self-actualization which is endemic in our pampered society.

Some people have a "calling," but most do not. Some people have ego-driven compulsions to achieve to compensate for feelings of inadequacy. Some lucky people find work plain fun. But while work offers many rewards including money, social contact, dignity, and a variety of challenges, most people would not do their jobs if they won the Powerball. Otherwise, why is everyone planning for retirement?

For most folks, work is not recreation. A quote from the piece at Flares about the labor market:

The sad fact of life in a market economy is that you have to do what somebody else wants in order to get paid. You don't generally get paid for what is fun for you or for what you want to do; you get paid for what somebody else wants you to do, and usually that's something they themselves don't want to do for some reason. Maybe the work is tedious, maybe it requires high levels of responsibility, maybe it is dirty or dangerous. One thing you can be guaranteed is that it's something somebody else doesn't want to do themselves.

Now this is contrary to what most of us learn in school and in our cultural role models. We learn that we should be "free". We learn that we should be self-actualizing. We learn that we should break the rules and make things better and in the end everyone will reward us for "doing the right thing". Don't bet on it.

Ask your kids to read the whole thing.

The Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria's Old Town was saved from the wrecker's ball as the dock area of Old Town was about to be destroyed by urban planners.

Now, the saving of the Torpedo Factory (the building was a WWl-era torpedo factory) is considered to have been one of the triggers for the preservation and rejuvenation of Alexandria.

I get a kick out of those old factories that were built in monumental style. Temples to manufacturing, industry, invention, and the American work ethic.

I had never banged around Alexandria, Virginia until this past weekend. Since we have been touching on one of our pet hates, urban renewal, in Old Town Alexandria we have a perfect example of how the absence of urban renewal has make it possible to have a downtown that everyone wants to go to to shop, to eat, to hear music, to see galleries, to maybe meet a new girl- or boy-friend, and to hang out on the street or on the piers with an ice cream cone.

People like to go to places which are crowded, have a human scale, have some history and a touch of shabbiness or at least randomness. In other words, real places. Tiny Greenwich Village in NYC is crowded every night, but it cannot hold a candle to Georgetown for quaintness or size (but it has way better music). Why so many people seem to enjoy totally phony, manufactured places like Disney World is another topic for another day.

Wikipedia has a nice little piece on the town's history, which of course includes its history as a major American port, its slave trade, and its role as a supply center for the Civil War. Washington considered it to be his home town.

My lame photo, as usual, does no justice to what a hoppin' and pleasant place the Old Town is.

The ten principles of economics, simplified, with more humor than enlightenment...I think. It's from standupeconomist.com, at YouTube. (h/t, Jules).

Best profound quote: "People are motivated by things which motivate them to action."

I challenge anyone to name a quainter, cozier town than Georgetown (which also has 15-minute access to a city) - or one in which it is more difficult to park a car. It might be worth it to be a politician just to live there for a while. Georgetown beats Cambridge Mass. hands down as a place to live.

Every city in America which destroyed their 19th century factories, train stations, town houses etc. during the 70s government-funded frenzy for "urban renewal" is crying today.

Case in point, as our Dylanologist keeps reminding us, is Nashville which would be packed with pubs, shops, tourists, and million-dollar townhouses today if they had not bulldozed the old downtown to "modernize" it, to sterilize it, and to erase its history along with every human-scale building. So people go to the disgusting malls, which are, happily, a dying fad.

Like Bridgeport and Hartford, CT, the urban renewalist Stalin-inspired and highly-educated planning geniuses removed every reason a person might want to go, or to live, downtown. Only the backwater cities escaped that assault. Lucky for them. The supremely elegant and lovely Savannah, Georgia is my prime example, but we will do Alexandria, VA in a couple of days - same story but without the aristocratic flavor of Savannah.

God bless Jane Jacobs. I was fortunate to hear her speak once in New York on the subject of Harlem.

This morning, in lovely Georgetown  with unseasonably cool and comfortable weather for that swamp  (figuratively and literally) of a city, Washington, DC.

The first Roman Catholic church in DC, built in 1789.

I did not intend to cut off the steeple in my photo. The building is now renovated as The Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola as part of Holy Trinity Parish, which now has a new sanctuary on the corner of N St. built in 1851.

The parish was started by Archbishop Carroll, who was also the founder of Georgetown University. We cannot underestimate the role of the Jesuits in this nation's history.

My graduating child, who is Protestant, of a more-or-less evangelical flavor, told me that Georgetown holds an outdoor Mass in front of Healy any time something wonderful, or anything disturbing (including things like not winning in basketball) happens. As an approach to both the grim and the joyful vicissitudes of life, I find that wonderful and rational.

Go Hoyas! 

Harold Brodkey, from The State of Grace in a collection of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows:

I had read too many books by Englishmen and New Englanders to want to know anything but graceful things and erudite things and the look of white frame houses on green lawns. I could always console myself by thinking my brains would make me famous (brains were good for something, weren't they?), but then my children would have good childhoods - not me. I was irrevocably deprived, and it was the irrevocableness that hurt, that finally drove me away from any sensible adjustment to life to the position that dreams had to come true or there was no sense in living at all. If dreams came true, then I would have my childhood in one form or another, someday.

...

I was fierce and solitary and acrid, marching off the little mile from school, past the post office, all yellow brick and chrome, and my two locust trees, and there was no one who loved me first. I could see a hundred cravennesses in the people I knew, a thousand flaws, a million weaknesses. If I had to love first, I would love only perfection. Of course, I could help heal the people I knew if I loved them. No, I said to myself, why should I give them everything when they give me nothing?

Image: Brodkey, drawn for The New Yorker in 1995.

It is now widely believed that essentially all 6000 world languages evolved, by geographical separation, from one proto-language. (This theory tends to undermine Chomsky's claim to fame for theorizing an internal hard-wired grammar - Chomsky's sole interesting idea, in my opinion.)

However, languages are dropping like flies, as the planet shrinks. McWhorter in the NYSun argues that this is a good thing, but he hopes hobbyists will keep the old ways alive.

Will the universal language be English? I hope so. It's a pretty good language, but Italian is far more musical, and I'd be happy to have an excuse to learn it. Would no longer need a translated libretto for the operas I love.

By Dorothy Fields / Jimmy McHugh, and famously sung by Billie Holiday

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street

Can't you hear a pitter-pat
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street

I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But now I'm not afraid
This rover crossed over
If I'd never have a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Going to set my feet
On the sunny side of the street

Excellent youtube of the song as sung by Marie Bryant  - good photography. Woops - youtube cancelled that one. Here's Cyndi Lauper.

There is a Harvard study of life success and health. A quote:

Early wealth and privilege did not predict life success and health of the study subjects nearly as well as the original investigators thought it would. What did separate successful subjects from failures was their level of maturity and their optimism.

The assertion that "Character is destiny" is attributed to Heraclitus, around 500 BC. Read the whole thing.

Lightning strikes the Empire State Building on May 15. Photo from The Daily Mail.