Hyde Park Blvd

How do we perceive art?  How do we value art? In case you missed the original, Pulitizer-prize winning article, it’s all here in the Washington Post’s piece by Gene Weingarten.

Flachbild, a Danish company puts a more modern spin on modern Danish furniture with a line of carpets that reimagine beloved sausage.  The line, Worsttepich, includes Salami, Blutwurst, and my personal favorite, Mortadella.  Via Big Fun.

“Gang up on the Quakers; play for the Lakers…”

Because the lyrics go by so fast, and because I just enjoy it.

Christmastime for the Jews
by Robert Smigel, Matt O’Brien, Eric Drysdale, Julie Klausner

On Christmas eve the Gentiles gather ‘round the Christmas tree.
They stay at home and party with their goyishe family.
They disappear one day each year and pass the eggnog ‘round,
but it’s all right, ‘cause that’s the night the Jews control the town.

Well it happens every year on Christmas eve.
All the happy Christian people take their leave.
Yeah, the streets are deserted and that’s big news:
It’s Christmastime for the Jews.

Yeah, the Holiday party starts ‘bout 6 PM.
Ain’t nobody re-creating Bethlehem.
Yeah, the three wise men, that’s a big old snooze.
Christmastime for the Jews.

They can finally see King Kong without waiting in line.
They can eat in Chinatown and drink their sweet-ass wine.
They can crank Barbara Streisand on the streets they cruise.
Christmastime for the Jews.

They can gang up on the Quakers, play for the Lakers,
[they can do what they wanna, even blow off Madonna,
Get a chance to drive a tractor, win on Fear Factor,
See Fiddler on the Roof with actual Jewish actors.

Now they really get the party going after dark,
Circumcising grateful squirrels in the city park,
Picking fights in the bars, knowing they can’t lose.
Christmastime for the Jews.

Now it’s nearly 10:30. Yes, it’s time for bed,
Daily Show reruns dancing in their heads.
Maybe next year they’ll learn how to hold their booze.
Christmastime for the Jews.
Have some water…
Christmastime for the Jews.
Don’t get sick now…
Christmastime for the Jews.
Sleep it off, yeah.
Christmastime for the Jews.

Thanks to Tom Alexander for making my Xmas especially happy!!!!

Don’t know exactly why, but these are great.  Via Inspire Me Now! Made by the design team of R&E Praspaliauskas, you can see the whole line at DeZeen and the sold-out sign at dadadastudios.

Amazing video collaboration called Combo by Blu and David Ellis via MH.

Myoung Ho Lee redefines tree.  Via Frango.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked
readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding,
subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the 2009 winners (thanks to reader RS for tip):

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts
until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all
these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes
and it’s like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n..): The frantic dance performed just
after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets
into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a
worm in the fruit you’re eating.

I write about Citroen more than I should.  Innovative and maddening, beautiful and disappointing.  But this is a great ad done by someone who knows a lot about the cars DNA — and how to make a great video.  Bon apetit!

Thoroughly enjoyed Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls.  I bought the whole package,  Appreciating the concept and the execution, the Russian literature overlay, the wintry objective correlative, the Brighton/Beach and Gogol/Allen connections, the symbolism, the conflation of Dead Souls and Sleeper, the angst that eventually goes down the drain of one person’s life.  Even the un-movielike connections of three women and their linkages across time and space and the final theme of empathy and solitude on the Brighton Beach as we rearrive at Gogol.

If you couldn’t tell, I liked it.  A lot.

I wake up this morning to find that NYT writers provide two glosses on the movie.  A.O. Scott uses the Coen’s A Serious Man and its Gopnik (as opposed to the New Yorker writer Adam) to write about Jews; though Giammatti isn’t MOT, he’s a fellow-traveler; his tweed jackets and shoulder-forward walk harkens back beyond the Coens and Happy Gilmore to the primordial schlump who was old when Bellow resuscitated him from the Yiddish (probably with a piece flanken).

Then there’s Understanding the Anxious Mind, Robin Henig’s summary of Jerome Kagan’s forty years of research into people like the character played by Paul Giamatti, whose character in Cold Souls is yclept Paul Giamatti.  There are lovely moments in the movie that describe that moment when anesthesia kicks in and the amygdala loosens its stranglehold, that moment of curiosity, empathy, openness that belies the character beneath.  It’s at the heart of the movie’s deeper understanding, and at the heart of the struggles of productivity — and creativity.  From Henig:

In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities…

People with a high-reactive temperament — as long as it doesn’t show itself as a clinical disorder — are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.

Kagan told me that in the 40 years he worked at Harvard, he hired at least 200 research assistants, “and I always looked for high-reactives. They’re compulsive, they don’t make errors, they’re careful when they’re coding data.”

An anxious temperament might serve a more exalted function too. “Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety, and that biographies indicate that he was a typical high-reactive baby. “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.

It all talks to the same issues, why we (at post-20th century lit/crit types) feel so familiar with the New York anxious Paul — and so moved by his links to not only to the Russian poet, but to Dina (Nina Korzun), the responsible ‘mule,’ and it raises questions about the pursuit of art, why it’s easy (and, perhaps, wrong)  to reject the glittery Sveta (Katheryn Winnick), who desires the soul of De Niro.  She wants to be a great actor, as does Paul, but we somehow rationalize Paul’s decision (and the Jewish stereotype) because of the legitimacy conferred by its familiarity, and the pain that Paul claims as the decision’s source, as opposed to the superficial, illegitimate nouveau-Russian stereotype and Sveta’s ambition.

The schlump has become part of the cultural mainstream?   Now we’re clucking about the recent arrivals?  Now we’re answering questions with questions?  Hmmmm.

Talk amongst yourselves.