Sunday, November 24, 2019

What is ugly ... Infinity Mirror Room

Do not judge by appearances; a rich heart may be under a poor coat. 
- Scottish Proverb

It was a coincidence that could not have been more welcome if it had had been planned as Yammerings were born in many organisations in the last few years and they are making a real difference at work 




Every National Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 21st Century 



Every National Book Award for Fiction Winner of the 21st Century | Book Marks



Meet Martha Cooper, the woman who brought street art to the world

Back in 1978, New York photojournalist Martha Cooper began documenting the city's illegal graffiti scene. More than 40 years on, a film documents her story.





Victor Serge was a permanent oppositionist — a committed revolutionary who was a thorn in the side of every movement he supported... Serge 


Tinder is not that efficient for one-night stands


Sydneys most liveable suburbs in 2019 


The blog, “Understanding Society,” which focuses on philosophy of social science and the workings of the social world, turns 12 — it is written by Daniel Little (Michigan-Dearborn

So Joseph takes five of his brothers and goes to Pharaoh, whom they ask to be allowed to live in the land of Goshen because of the famine in Canaan. Pharaoh agrees to the request. Then Joseph presents Jacob to Pharaoh, who asks how old Jacob is. He replies that he is one hundred thirty, but he hasn't reached the age that his fathers did. Jacob gives Pharaoh his blessing. So Joseph takes his brothers out to "the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded.

The famine continues, and Joseph gathers all the money in Egypt and Canaan and buys grain with it. When the money is gone, Joseph tells them that he will accept their cattle in payment for grain. With the money and the cattle gone, people say that they have nothing left but their land and their bodies, so Joseph accepts the land as payment for grain, "so the land became Pharaoh's," except for the land held by the priests. Then Joseph gives them seed to plant, with the agreement that every fifth part belongs to Pharaoh.
Jacob lives in the land of Goshen, in Egypt, for seventeen years. When he is one hundred forty-seven, he has Joseph put his hand under his thigh and swear not to bury him in Egypt but to take him back and entomb him with his ancestors.

 


I think when I have a daughter, I'll teach her to whistle. It could be useful to whistle to each other in case we lost track of each other in the woods. If she doesn't answer, then I'll know she wants to be left alone. If she goes out in The Dinghy, I won't row after her and bring her home if it starts to blow. I won't make her pick blueberries, but she can pick mushrooms because that's fun. My daughter can wear any old trousers she wants to, and she can talk back to me, though not too much. She will look like me but prettier. Autumn is coming, so I won't write any more today.



The only mission for this first day, apart from getting ourselves fed and hydrated and libated, was to soak up some atmosphere and track down a copy of Honest Guide Prague. Which we did! And we also almost got lost! Twice! I'd say the day is a success.  It was weeks after I'd booked the flights that Helena remembered to tell me about this YouTuber she follows. I'm not sure we ever would've made it out of the airport without him. The videos are a treasure trove. And now the team has released a book in time for our trip.


 
VETERAN MENTAL HEALTH CARE: Witness J acknowledges his tweets will deeply concern his former Australian intelligence community colleagues




 Native bush foods Australian bush tucker going global

 Interesting throughout, but most of all see pp.5-6, comparing how men rate women to how women rate men.  Here is half of that story:


Here is the link, by Dan McMurtrie, via David Perell.  The top of p.2 will indicate why friendship may be in decline:


You also can see that meeting on the job peaked in the 1990s, and do I need to tell you about meeting through church and the neighbors?  Recommended.


Encyclopedia Brown and the Problem with the Mona Lisa


posted by Jason Kottke   Nov 12, 2019

Ok, this post doesn’t have anything to do with boy detective Encyclopedia Brown…I just needed him for the title. In the NY Times, art critic Jason Farago argues that in order to improve the visitor experience at the Louvre, the Mona Lisa and her smile have got to go.
Yet the Louvre is being held hostage by the Kim Kardashian of 16th-century Italian portraiture: the handsome but only moderately interesting Lisa Gherardini, better known (after her husband) as La Gioconda, whose renown so eclipses her importance that no one can even remember how she got famous in the first place.
Some 80 percent of visitors, according to the Louvre’s research, are here for the Mona Lisa — and most of them leave unhappy. Content in the 20th century to be merely famous, she has become, in this age of mass tourism and digital narcissism, a black hole of anti-art who has turned the museum inside out.
Enough!
I visited the Louvre back in 2017 and the Mona-driven crowds were very distracting. I wrote a short review for my media diet:
The best-known works are underwhelming and the rest of this massive museum is overwhelming. The massive crowds, constant photo-taking, and selfies make it difficult to actually look at the art. Should have skipped it.
The Louvre is actually not a good place to look at art and if moving the Mona Lisa to a dedicated gallery elsewhere can help solve that problem, they should do it. (via @fimoculous)


It's full of great advice like:

You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't understand a building unless you go inside.

 Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it . . . this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.




Ted Adams Photography



Everything you need to know about Google Reverse Image Search - The Daily Dot: “We’re living in the Instagram age, an era dominated by photos and images, it’s often very hard to determine if the photo you are looking at has been altered or not; image enhancement is almost considered protocol when it comes to creating online content, and photo-editing apps are too plenty to count



McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Is Now Old Enough To Drink Legally



Happy 21st, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. How the heck do you stay so funny over some exceedingly unfunny years? One editor interviews another to find out. – Inside Higher Ed






Shop Dogs, Custom Roasted Coffee, And Other Wild Things On Author Websites



You’d think authors would have things like, oh, the titles of their books, links to buy said books, maybe a list of book tour dates, press contacts, etc. Sure, sure, but there’s so much more. – The New York Times






 Is It Worth Waiting Two Hours In Line For A Few Minutes In A Kusama Infinity Mirrored Room?



OWell: “That depends on how much you value your time — and what you expect of art in the age of Instagram. The smartphone, with its ever-finer cameras and ever-shinier screens, now shapes our experience of art as thoroughly as the church did in 14th-century Italy or the unadorned, white-cube galleries did for midcentury abstract painters.” – The New York Times


Setting Us Up To Fail’: More Than One-Quarter Of Australia’s Arts Organizations To Lose Federal Funding


This week is the application deadline for the next four-year round (2021-24) of Australia Council for the Arts funding for small-to-medium organizations, a category which includes all groups but the largest (such as Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet, and the state capitals’ major symphony orchestras and theatre companies). Hundreds of those organizations have already been eliminated, and of those remaining, the Council says that up to 60% will be unsuccessful. Project-to-project finding will still be available, but it has been slashed in recent years. – The Guardian




The Hate It Or Love It Hitler Joke Of Taika Waititi’s ‘Jojo Rabbit’



Here’s the deal: It’s a movie that laughs at the Nazis and laughs at Hitler. “The controversy — or, at least, the orchestrated illusion of it — is built into the film’s faux outrageous aesthetic, its whole thumb-in-the-eye-of-the-monster, satire-is-resistance! brand. It’s a movie that actually counts on a divided reaction, because the key question Jojo Rabbit is asking its audience isn’t, ‘Are you willing to laugh at hate?’ The key question is, ‘Are you cool enough to get it?'” –Variety




Which words should be banished? “Adorkable,” “YOLO,” and “influencer” are popular suggestions. But policing language is a fraught exercise... Yammer Bear 



| The origin stories of big ideas highlight the eureka moments. But it's the mundane work that is key. Inspiration favors the prepared mind 



| "Liberalism" is a slippery word for Americans, who have no experience of anything else. Now critics are falling over  themselves  



 When the Aztecs met Cortés, they did not think he was a deity. Rather, they scouted his forces and set up a war room. So why does another tale persist?...  AZ 



 | The sad-lady literary sirens are legion: Plath, Woolf, Jean Rhys. What would it mean, wonders Leslie Jamison, to move beyond them?...Sirens  



| “Where man strives for knowledge, the Devil will never be far away.” Knausgaard contemplates the power and temptations of literature...  Devil 



Cave art has been found on nearly every continent. What does it mean? That our Paleolithic ancestors knew something we still strain to imagine... oImagine 



Google has a “chief happiness officer,” a “treat yourself” ethic reigns, and happiness bloggers score viral hits. Yet peak happiness is a noxious goal... Chief Happiness  



Reading Kierkegaard can be dispiriting. He seems so dour, so tortured by inner turmoil. But he was, in some odd way, a happy writer... Kierkegaard  



Education of an architect. Aspiring to greatness is now conflated with aspiring to novelty, bolstering the field's affinity for what’s Ugly