A Snowball in Hell…What Chance has it Got?
30 Jan 2009 14 Comments
in Humor, Life, Thoughts Tags: idiom, simile
My father-in-law, a product of the Great Depression and World War II, was a past master of the idiom, profane and humorous, esoteric and insightful. Unfortunately he died before I could capture his many creative expressions. One of his oft-used idioms: “since Hector was a pup.” I never understood its meaning, except that it seemed to refer to times long ago. WorldWideWords.org provides a detailed definition:
“Since Hector was a pup” was in fashion at about the time that Hector really was just a pup. It began to appear in North American newspapers around 1906 and almost immediately became a catchphrase that later spread around the English-speaking world. There’s quite a variety of ideas behind it. “Hector” seems to have been a fairly common name for dogs at the time. This was borrowed from the name of the hero of the Trojan War, the son of Priam and Hecuba, who became a symbol of the consummate warrior. By the early twentieth century, “pup” was also well established as a mildly dismissive name for a young person, particularly an inexperienced beginner. So Hector was a pup a very long time ago indeed. Another expression of the period using his name was “as dead as Hector”, known from the 1860s. Those versed in Greek mythology (there were more then than there are now) would have remembered that in later life Hecuba was turned into a dog for killing Polyxena, the murderer of her son Polydorus, so you might consider Hector to have been a literal pup, perhaps even the original son of a bitch.
A Snowball in Hell...What Chance has it Got? Creator: Udo J. Keppler, American artist, 1872-1956. Created/Published: 12/24/12
There’s a definite artistry to idioms, those “fixed distinctive expressions with nonliteral meanings, whose meanings cannot be deduced from the combined meanings of the actual word.” Take another popular expression: “a snowball’s chance in hell.” Now it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what chance a snowball has in hell’s furnace-like atmosphere: none at all.
Idioms, phrases, and other expressions use words as paintbrush and palette, chisel and stone, to create image & meaning in the viewer’s mind. Editorial cartoonist Udo Keppler offers a fair approximation of what a snowball might experience in the nether regions.
“When Hell freezes over” is another devilish phrase that deals with the probability of an event’s occurrence: no chance whatsoever. Wikipedia offers a “List of idioms of improbability” that include the famous expression “when pigs fly” or, as is said in the German:
“Wenn Schweine Flügel hätten, wäre alles möglich” (if pigs had wings, everything would be possible)
Try saying that with all the umlauts in the right places! Unmöglich! (Impossible!)
British author Charles Dickens was a master of the simile, a “figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by ‘like”" or ‘as.’ ” Take the popular simile, as dead as a doornail, meaning “absolutely dead; devoid of life; finished with; unusable”. How comes the lowly doornail to to be compared with death eternal? Dickens, writing in A Christmas Carol, attempts to improve upon the simile:
Old Marley was as dead as a door–nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door–nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin–nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door–nail.
Marley was indeed dead at the beginning of the Dickens’ Christmas story: “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.“ What a great opening line! And we know that Marley’s generous spirit was mirrored in that of his partner, Ebeneezer Scrooge:
“He was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel has ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
What could be more solitary than an oyster? Living alone within its shell, separated from its fellows, its treasure the pearl hidden away from grasping eyes.
A proverb is a “short pithy saying in frequent and widespread use that expresses a basic truth or practical precept.“ One of my father-in-law’s favorites was the saying, “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.“ A reminder that it’s not over ’till it’s over, and only the final results count.
Do you have a favorite idiom, simile, phrase or expression? Share it with us!
~MadSilence
New Books for a New Year MadMeme!
28 Jan 2009 Leave a Comment
in Books, Literature, On Books & Reading, Reading, Thoughts Tags: MadMeme, meme
I’ve been looking back over 2008 and realized just how many new books I’ve been exposed to this year. Truly I’m a reader of habit – I find series and authors that I like and I read them over and over again – but living in a country with an extreme lack of books in your language forces you to take what you can get, even if it’s completely different from your normal reading fare! I’d like to share with you my favorite of this past year, so if your resolution’s “try new books!” I hope you’ll dig into some of these!
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Marcus Didius Falco Mystery Series (starting with The Silver Pigs)
A fun mystery series by Lindsey Davis. Marcus Didius Falco, handsome, witty informer in Ancient Rome, solves mysteries and murders in the ancient world. Witty, well-written and engaging. How good you ask? I’m still reading after the first 12 books!
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Nazi Germany. A small girl’s escape from death and the beginning of an adventure with words of all kinds, narrated by Death himself. A breathtaking story of life, death, kindness and cruelty.
MFK Fisher’s Serve It Forth
MFK Fisher is one of the staples of the food writing world. She wrote many books on food, eating, and cooking starting in the 1920′s. A strong character with her own ideas of freedom of lifestyle and freedom of cuisine. Her books are usually collections of short essays about her life around the world and the foods that she discovers while traveling. I love her introspective, almost melancholy writing style, which covers the iron will she had as a self-motivated woman in the early years of women’s independence like a velvet glove. Serve it Forth is a brief food history interspersed with other interesting stories.
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
Highly-placed writer/editor Bill Buford decides to take some time off from his desk job to do research for an article about Mario Batali – from behind the front lines. He takes his place as a kitchen slave in the three star restaurant and the transformations begin. A slightly disturbing (soup from garbage?!) but unusual look at what really happens behind kitchen doors, spiced up with lots of wry wit and a twist of personal transformation.
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So now the big question is, what have you been reading? Post this meme on your blog with a link back!
~MS the Younger
Still searching
26 Jan 2009 7 Comments
in Art, art criticism, Art History, Outsider art Tags: New York City
I promised myself I’d pass on Manhattan’s Outsider Art Fair this year. After all, there was little more the venue could offer me, and my internal debate on the nature of art was getting old. Apparently my feet disagreed, and as I left Penn Station I found myself once again transported to this affair of outsiders.
The 2009 fair was held at a new location: 7 West 34th Street, near the intersection of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, opposite the Empire State Building. A far distance from SoHo’s Puck Building, the fair’s location for the past 16 years, in more than just geography. I missed the informal “Puck-ishness” of the Puck building, what Roberta Smith terms its “outsiderish rusticity.” The Puck Building exhibition space, cramped and ostensibly half-finished, the street outside lined with itinerant and wanna-be outsider artists, seemed just the thing.
The new location, just a few blocks from Penn Station, is on the 11th floor, past a service desk with uniformed staff pointing the way to the elevator. The exhibition space is carpeted, well lit, with roomy and hard-walled exhibition booths. The outsiders moving on up in the world.
Upon entering, a sign encourages visitors to check their coats, bags and satchels, all subject to inspection. Explicit warnings forbid bringing “outside” art into the fair, that is to say unsanctioned outside art. There will be no works sold without dealer approval. There are no artists lining the curb, selling their works in a gloriously informal trunk sale. Ross Brodar’s 24-foot rental truck, loaded up with paintings, is missing. Now Brodar is found in Booth 27, Olof Art Gallery.
Outsider artist Ross Brodar
Where is outsider art positioned in today’s art world? Does the new fair location imply that outsider artists are now insider artists, having entered the “circle of art,” and come in from the cold?
Art is a circle, You’re either in or out. –Edouard Manet
Three years after my first visit to the fair I’m still debating the answers to these and other questions: What is the meaning and import of outsider art? What can be learned from the works of untrained artists?
Fortunately I was able to join up with Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of The Contemporary Center of the American Folk Art Museum, as she led a small group of visitors on a tour through the fair, speaking knowingly and passionately on Henry Darger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Martin Ramirez, all artists represented in the Museum’s permanent collection. First on the agenda: to define “outsider art.” Apparently the terminology itself has evolved over the past 60 years. What was once called raw, visionary, intuitive, naive, marginal or outsider art, is now simply labeled “art created by untrained and self-taught artists”.
Beyond the issue of definition, Anderson painted a picture of outsider art that is very much part of the contemporary art world, art that shares many of the attributes of insider or mainstream art. The value of outsider art is not derived from any inherent aesthetic value, to be valued for its workmanship or material. Rather value can be attributed to a variety of non-aesthetic factors. Foremost is the story or narrative that accompanies the artist. Ramirez’s immigrant story includes residence in a mental institution. Von Bruenchenhein’s dietary history includes consumption of buckets of fast food chicken. These stories add value to their creations.
Untitled Bone Chair (Pink and Green) by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Chicken bone, paint. 6 ½ x 4 x 4 inches. Hammer Gallery.
Evidently the artistic medium and technology used do have some value. In an interesting aside, Anderson spoke admiringly of the skilled technique of artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, whose sculptures constructed out of painted chicken bones where held together not by wire, screw or glue, but by the paint itself. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was any virtue left in Von Bruenchenhein’s chicken & turkey bones that could be brought out with a liberal application of boiling water and vegetables.
More and more, art’s real value, whether insider or outsider, is in its ideas, its ability to convey originality of concept, and other undefinable qualities. Or so the art world would have us believe. To these factors I would add two more:
1. The affirmations of art world aficionados, the dealers, collectors, gallery owners and curators, that this is good art, and
2. The marketability and sale of the artwork.
Anderson moved with fluidity and easy familiarity through the fair, greeting with a smile and by name dealers and gallery owners, part of an intimate community of art world denizens brought together by the idea that outsider art is good art, that is has value to society. These cultural gatekeepers define value, controlling access to the market, granting success to artists like Brodar and failure to others through the application of measures of quality that are consensual even if often undefinable.
One measure of value is easily quantifiable: The marketability and sale of the artwork. Consumers of outsider art, whether collectors, dealers, or museum curators, are willing to vote with their dollars that outsider art is indeed good art.
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” –Andy Warhol
I’d like to believe that outsider art is not fashion art, the flavor of the moment, the current fad, championed by cynical producers and consumers to create a profit, to be discarded once the market fails. But I’m not sure I can. Von Bruenchenhein’s throne of bones is not in the same league as the art of Monet and Van Gogh, of Manship and Saint-Gaudens. But it is art. One must respect the creative energy the artist put into his work. It just isn’t great art. And that may have to be enough.
Related MadSilence posts:
Worlds Colliding: Bringing the outsider artists in
Liking It Raw
Inside Out – NYC’s Outsider Art Fair
~MadSilence
Six Tips to Preserve Your Election Collectibles
23 Jan 2009 4 Comments
in Collecting, News, politics Tags: campaign memorabilia, collection preservation, election collectibles, preservation
Across the nation, Americans are saving newspapers, posters, buttons, and bumper stickers to commemorate the historic election and inauguration of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president. Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Director of the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), encourages citizen-collectors to make sure that their presidential inauguration collections will be preserved long into the future.
“The election day newspaper – cared for properly — will still be there years from now to remind us and future generations of this singular moment in American history,” Radice said. “This is a great time to raise awareness of the need to protect election and inauguration-related items from common threats such as high temperature, humidity, and light exposure.”
Follow these simple preventive steps to keep your treasures safe and sound for the next generation…
Via ResourceShelf
To learn more about election collectibles and political campaign memorabilia, go here.
For more advice on managing your collections and preserving your collectibles, including Books, Ceramics & Glass, Paintings, and Paper and Ephemera, go here.
Myartspace Blog offers an interesting discussion of copyright issues surrounding Shepard Fairey’s image of President Barack Obama titled ’Hope’ (above) at: Shepard Fairey: Obey Copyright.
~MadSilence
A Belated Happy New Year ^^;;
21 Jan 2009 4 Comments
in Travel
Hey all! Happy New Year! I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I hope Dad’s been keeping you all amused ^^ I was in Australia for 2 weeks, experiencing my first Christmas in summer. I had an amazing time, and hopefully I’ll be sharing some highlights from the trip with you soon. Here’s a sample:
Christmas tree at Darling Harbor - who needs reindeer when you've got 6 white 'roos?
Cranes dance in Darling Harbor - a beautiful scene after a light rainstorm.
My new year’s resolution, you ask? Not getting in shape, not eating healthier, a more important one! To remember to write more here, if you can take more MS the Younger and Not as Suave or Intellectual as MS The Elder! XD Hope you all had wonderful holidays! What are your new year’s resolutions? Feel like sharing?
~MS the Younger
Andrew Wyeth, American artist, died Friday
19 Jan 2009 2 Comments
in Art, art criticism, Art History, Culture, Life, News, Popular Culture, Thoughts Tags: Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth, American artist, died Friday at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was 91.
Andrew Wyeth. (American, 1917-2009). Christina's World. 1948. Tempera on gessoed panel, 32 1/4 x 47 3/4" (81.9 x 121.3 cm). MoMA.
To my mind, Wyeth was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Meticulously trained by his father, the illustrator N. C. Wyeth, in the foundation skills of sketching and illustration, Andrew Wyeth would later work in the meticulous techniques of egg tempera and dry brush watercolor to achieve extremes of light, clarity and detail. Wyeth painted what he saw, painstakingly organizing his compositions in ways which made them tell a story, narratives that the viewer is drawn into. I first viewed Wyeth’s paining, Christina’s World (1948, MoMA), over forty years ago, and am still drawn to that compelling image, finding new content and meaning as my eye evolves.
Tenant Farmer by Andrew Wyeth (1961)
Wyeth put the lie to the idea that worthwhile modern art cannot be representational. He combined meticulous execution, memorable imagery, and meaning in a way that surprises the senses. Tenant Farmer captures this well. Meticulously wrought, there’s an intensity, an appealing bleakness, to this image of a deer carcass, hung up to cure, near a desolate farm house. Death and winter, food and life, and an imminent human presence combine to create a narrative in the viewer’s mind. Such is the power of Wyeth’s representational artistry.
Related links from The New York Times:
Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91, by Michael Kimmelman, January 16, 2009
For Wyeth, Both Praise and Doubt, by Larry Rohter, January 16, 2009
Slide Show: A Populist’s Legacy
~MadSilence
The Art of Spoonflower: crowd sourced fabric design
14 Jan 2009 5 Comments
in Art, design, News Tags: design, diy, fabric, fabric contest, Spoonflower
Sara D. Davis for The New York Times
Check out Spoonflower.com, a website where you can design and print your own fabric. What’s more, there’s a Fabric of the Week Contest in which the community votes on a design that they’d like to be able to buy. Only designs submitted specifically for the contest will be eligible and each winner will get five yards of free fabric. Spoonflower will then offer the winning design for sale for exactly a week – no longer – to anyone and everyone through its Etsy shop. Customer-made design where everyone benefits!
According to The New York Times:
“You don’t have to be a crafter to appreciate Spoonflower.com, a Web site for designing and printing custom fabric. Anyone with a dream and access to the Internet can upload an image, decide how it should be arranged (repeated, centered, tiled, etc.) and have it printed on combed cotton. Although do-it-yourselfers and professional textile designers are flocking to the site — printers at the company’s headquarters in North Carolina are churning out 40 to 60 yards of fabric a day — Stephen Fraser, who founded the site in May with his wife, Kim, and Gart and Anne Davis, said Spoonflower would be in beta, or test, mode until there were more fabric options (upholstery-weight canvas should be available soon, he said). Until then, the winner of each “fabric-of-the-week” contest on the site’s blog, written by Ms. Fraser, can be purchased, for seven days, at Spoonflower’s Etsy store (etsy.com). Information: spoonflower.com.”
To learn more, check out the post, Spoonflower in the NYT + a brief overview, from the Spoonflower blog.
Stay tuned for future posts on the phenomena of “crowd sourced fabric design,” “crowd sourced innovation,” and “customer-made design.” It’s the latest trend: the Wisdom of the Crowd!
Spoonflower Fabric of the Week Contest
~MadSilence
Cold days and icy nights
13 Jan 2009 4 Comments
in Art, Ephemera, Ice Sculpture, Japan, News, Sculpture Tags: Alaska, China, Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, Sapporo Snow Festival, World Ice Art Championships
Cold days and icy nights are in the forecast for Long Island over the next few days, with Friday bringing a high of 14° Fahrenheit and a low of 1°. Perfect weather for the ice follies or the World Ice Art Championships held in Fairbanks, Alaska. When the temperature is just right ice can be sculpted into amazing shapes. The annual ice sculpture competition is held in February and March and features single block and multi-block sculptures. Pictures from past events can be found here and here:
The Birth of the Blue Bird, Realistic. Junichi Nakamura of Japan, Daniel Reboltz, USA, Shinichi Sawamura, Hitoshi Shimmoto Photo by: Unknown
Animal Parade, Realistic,1st Place - 2005 Multi-Block Classic. Artists: Heather Brown, Steve Brice, Tajana Raukar all of USA and Mario Amegee of France. Photo by: Pat Healy-Golembe
StarBurst, Abstract, - 2005 Multi-Block Classic. Klaus Ebeling, Dominique Colell, Phillip Hunter all of USA; Ronnie Daanen of Netherlands Photo by: Pat Healy-Golembe
January 5th marked the opening of the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, held in Harbin, China. The festival lasts for one month, and features large ice and snow sculptures, ice lanterns, swimming in the icy Songhua River and more.
Image source.
For more photos of the Harbin Festival, as well as a collection of recent photographs of all things frozen, go to Boston.com’s The Big Picture.
Finally, there’s the Sapporo Snow Festival, held from February 5th to February 11th 2009 at Odori Park, Susukino and Sapporo Satoland, Japan. The festival is best known for the ice sculpture competition attracting artists from around the world, competing to create the largest and most elaborate artworks from ice and snow.
Related MadSilence posts:
Chill Seekers, or the art of ice
Ephemeral ice art
Auto on Ice: The Frozen Car Project
~MadSilence
Art Bloggers, Rejoice! It’s official
10 Jan 2009 2 Comments
in Art, Blogging, Blogroll, Culture, Life, News, Popular Culture, Thoughts Tags: Wikipedia
Art Bloggers, Rejoice! It’s official: Wikipedia has published an article on “Art blogs.” Here’s what the collaboratively written, free encyclopedia has to say on the subject:
An art blog is a common type of blog that comments on art. Art bloggers cover a wide range of topics, from art reviews and commentary to insider art world gossip, auction results, museum news, personal essays, and artists’ journals. Participants from all areas of the art world maintain art blogs: artists, critics, dealers, students, journalists, art historians, and collectors. The popularity of art blogs by independent bloggers has led to their adoption by mainstream media companies, museums and other organizations, but these corporate attempts are not considered “proper” blogs by many in the independent blogging community.
Wikipedia refers to Peter Plagens’ article published in the November 2007 issue of Art in America, “Report from the Blogosphere: The New Grass Roots,” as well as Martha Schwendener’s recent article in The Village Voice, “What Crisis? Some Promising Futures for Art Criticis,” for further discussion.
Schwendener believes that art blogs have helped shape a more laissez-faire climate for art writing.
Art blogs have created a new, largely unedited, admirably ‘unprofessional’—hence, democratic—venue for people to speak their minds, gossip, or theorize about art.
Wikipedia provides a list of 17 Notable art blogs. Check them out. Several are listed on MadSilence’s Blogroll, including CultureGrrl, Edward Winkleman, Modern Art Notes, Modern Art Obsession, and Two Coats of Paint.
~MadSilence
How Web is different from Print
08 Jan 2009 5 Comments
in Blogging, Thoughts, Writing
Blogs, or weblogs, are electronic extensions of traditional print journals and diaries. We blog to share our thoughts with others in the “virtual realm”, to seek out those who believe as we do: The art of one human relating to another.
How does this new electronic medium affect the nature of our writing? In moving from a print and hardcopy environment to an electronic one, What is lost? What is gained?
There is a difference. Blog posts are usually shorter, less detailed, perhaps more frequent than their hardcopy equivalents. And blog posts are permanent. A print diary page can be torn out and destroyed, journal writings crossed out and erased. The method of distribution also differentiates Web from print. Blog posts can be distributed to a potentially infinite audience, while a print journal entry can be shared with an individual or small group.
Linking, and especially deep linking, is a Web-unique activity that distinguishes Web from print, and transforms the nature of Web-based writing. A link is a powerful tool that immediately brings in content from an external source, information that can color and affect our writing, altering the reader’s experience.
Author Gerry McGovern addresses the question, What makes the Web different from print?
We need to carefully answer this last question because otherwise we are in danger of approaching the Web with our print-thinking and print-techniques. We are in danger of saying: ‘This is what quality writing is,’ when really what we are saying is: ‘This is what quality print writ1ing is.’
Here are some of the ways the Web is different from print:
—The Web is about links. Print is about units of content. A 500-word article, a book, a magazine, a report. Print writing is often a solitary task. The Web is about linking. We’re linking one piece of content to another. We’re linking the consumer of the content with its producer.
—The Web is a functional, task-oriented place. We come to the Web to do, and we already have the context when we get to the website. Print lends itself to length and because print is physically going out to the reader, it tends to have lots of contextual language. The Web is bare, hermetic, pared-down-an ugly but useful place.
—The Web is about the customer trying to find the content, rather than the content trying to find the customer. The Web turns much of advertising and marketing on its head. You must know the words your customers use when they search. Otherwise you are lost.
—The Web is about permanence. Over time, most print content degrades, dissolves, disappears. Try finding that brochure you published in print in 2003. But if you put it up on your website, it’s still there. This is the great blind spot of web teams. Review and remove.
—The Web is a process. Print is an event. You get it all together and then you publish. And then it’s over. Job done. On the Web it’s job begun. The print and IT culture of launch and leave is a ruinous strategy on the Web. Great websites involve continuous improvement of your top tasks.
—The Web is about the customer. It is not about the control of elites. It is about the wisdom of crowds, the collective intelligence. At the center of the Web is the customer, not the organization. It is about the things the customer wants to do, not the things the organization wants to do to the customer.
~MadSilence
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