Category: Cultural Trends

  • Nothing if not critical …

    • “The Art Critic”, by Normal Rockwell

    The death of writer and television personality Robert Hughes in 2012 was an event that did not exactly shake western civilization to its roots. His television shows “The Shock of the New” (1980) and “American Visions” (1997) had brought him some fame in the rarefied air of the BBC/PBS universe, but despite a long and wide-ranging career – he penned an  overview of the early European colonization of his native Australia, he contributed to an array of newspapers and magazines, and he even hosted (for one week, before being replaced by Hugh Downs) the ABC television news magazine “20/20” – to most people outside the art world he was almost unknown at the time of his death.

    With or without fame, in his views on art Robert Hughes was passionate, pompous, often obnoxious, but he was also unfailingly erudite and articulate, and he left us more aware and better-informed than he found us.

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  • An insane pronouncement

    Let’s suppose you’re doing last Sunday’s crossword puzzle.

    You’re stumped on seven down: a five-letter word for “indistinct”. There are a couple of possibilities here, but the one that pops into your mind first is “fuzzy”, so you drop that in, very faintly, in pencil.

    Okay, now what? Fifteen across, a six-letter word for “mystery”, is now coming up “enizma”, which is obviously wrong. A moment’s thought gives us a 99.9% certainty that we should be seeing “enigma” in that slot, but that gives us “fugzy” for seven down, our original problem clue: once again, it’s safe to assume that something’s not clicking.

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  • The Loudest Voice

    • Rafael Edward Cruz

    The ruler of the Aztec empire was called the “tlatoani”, which roughly translates to “the one who talks the loudest”. From the founding of Gran Tenochtitlan in 1325 to the final collapse in 1521, the Aztec civilization survived for a grand total of 196 years, during which time they had become so hated by all of their neighbors that even the rapacious Spanish invaders were embraced as the lesser of two evils.

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  • What looks nice over naugahyde …?

    • Some eateries need all the help they can get.Vincent van Gogh, “The Night Cafe”, 1888
       

    At the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, our local temple of culture, an odious sculpture from the generally delightful Claes Oldenburg was replaced over the holidays by a delightful sculpture from the generally odious Jeff Koons.

    Oldenburg, a icon of the sixties and seventies, has always been champion of a kind of oversized, over-the-top whimsy, taking such commonplace items as badminton birdies and clothespins and blowing them up to the size of Atlas rockets: the piece at Crystal Bridges, “Alphabet/Good Humor”, is a giant popsicle composed of letters of the alphabet melting together like fatty entrails, all painted a horribly suggestive band-aid beige.

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  • Truth and lies.

    • My copy is somewhat more up to date than this one.

    I was poking around among the bookshelves a day or so ago, looking for something to entertain me as the first cool weather of the season settles in, when I spotted my rather tattered Penguin Classics copy of the Histories of Herodotus.

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  • The shape of words.

    • William Tyndale, c. 1490 – 1536.

    Anyone who knows me may be surprised to learn that I own three Bibles (the Revised Standard, the New English, and the King James), as well as the Book of Mormon, the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the Apocrypha, and an English translation of the Qur’an. I know the difference between an Apostle and an Epistle, I can list the twelve sons of Jacob*, and I can whip out a quote from the four Gospels for just about any occasion.

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  • When in danger, When in doubt

    • The appropriate protective gear makes all the difference in the world.

    In the year 2000, the first full reporting year after West Nile Virus in the US was first identified, two people in the New York City area (total population just over 8 million) died from illnesses associated with the disease. News outlets went a little crazy: dead blue jays became more popular as establishing video on the nightly news than the Empire State Building or Rudy Giuliani or even the standard crowd-of-people-hurrying-down-the-sidewalk video that had been the staple of news stories about NYC since the invention of television.

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  • The Wild Blue

    • Jerrie Mock, 1925-2024

    Jerrie Mock died yesterday, at the age of 88.

    Don’t know who that is? Join the club: unlike Amelia Earhart, Mock has never acheived mythic status in American life.  This is an unfortunate statement about what captures our attention, since she, in 1964, succeeded in doing what Earhart had tried and failed to do 27 years previously: She became the first woman to fly around the world solo.

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  • Bam. Pow. Kablooie.

    • How to spot the bad guys? Great vocabulary. Terrible fashion sense.

    Anguish. Antagonist. Annihilate. Adept.

    What do all these words have in common?

    Venerable. Veritable. Volcanic. Variable.

    I’ll give you a hint: I had learned to use all of them in a sentence by the time I reached the third grade.

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  • The price of pretty

    • No, it’s not what you think.

    Until the Church removed her from the calendar in 1969, July 20 long had the distinction of being the feast day of Saint Wilgefortis the Liberator, the protector and patroness of women suffering in relationships with abusive husbands.

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