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old anatomy. [May. 6th, 2007|02:22 am]
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Apparently you can score some decent bits of public-domain scanned artwork via Google Book Search. That fellow in the hat on the right is Bartolomeo Eustachi, or, in the Latin, Bartolomeus Eustachius, sixteenth-century founder of modern anatomy, who didn't actually discover the Eustachian tube, but did do some very important and painstaking research. If you look at the older anatomy texts, you can see that there's a great deal of artistry in them. The anatomists posed the bodies in their drawings in interesting, allegorical and occasionally horrifying positions. None of my textbooks had much in the way of art in them. The subtle allegory of the portrait went out with the introduction of the photograph. None of the science or engineering buildings were decorated with meaningful public art, like murals describing the history of that discipline; at best, there are a few pieces of bland corporate art hanging in the halls, and a heap of scrap labeled sculpture sitting on the front lawn.

I was going to get the new car registered at the DMV today, but I failed, because the car is old, and I need an emissions test. I have a temp plate for it now, which means that I have ten days--that's one Saturday--in which to do it. Who came up with the bright idea of everyone working at once? How do people who live by themselves receive packages, or register their cars, or bank (in person), or perform any task that involves meeting with people employed by the service industry? Yes, the work week makes a certain level of sense to me, but I don't understand how we're supposed to deal with it.

No comments today; I had nothin' to say.
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our copy of juan de pareja. [Apr. 12th, 2007|01:56 am]
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I'm still working on that object-database-to-report-database converter. I did a lot of work on it, and yet I don't have much to show. Another day at the sausage mill, I suppose; the end product will be much prettier than the process of refactoring my own code on top of Jay's original work, which, to be honest, is a lot prettier than what I wrote.

That copy of Velázquez's Juan de Pareja (the original of which is at left) that Chen was making was finished today, and it was exactly as awesome as I thought it would be. It's black and white, made with charcoal and pencil, and it's positively glorious. Carin stayed in bed sick today, but when I brought it to her, she smiled and just looked at it for a good twenty minutes. It was definitely a good deal; now I just need a 20x24 poster frame to put it in. I wonder which bit of public-domain or otherwise-free imagery I should have Chen do next; it's ridiculously cheap for the level of quality.

A pet peeve of mine is when an opponent will repeat the question back to you as an answer. See the conversation on Telic Thoughts, where we're warned that a dreaded atheistic curriculum will enter our schools if we don't all back intelligent design. (I think that's the point they're making; maybe there's some subtlety there that I'm missing.) I asked what this indoctrination would consist of, and I was told that if I bothered to check the story, I would see that there's an atheistic curriculum that's going to be shoveled into our kids. How do they not know what they're doing?

Comments: Telic Thoughts 1 2 | DailyKos 1 2
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a death a few degrees away. vigée-lebrun. ufc. [Apr. 8th, 2007|02:01 am]
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Carin and I watched Perfume today, but so much else went on today that I think I'll save it for tomorrow.

Carin worked the evening shift; I elected to stay nearby and mill around for the evening. Shortly after I'd dropped her off, I got a call from my brother, saying that Jake and Jake's girlfriend had found Mike--the guy who booked shows for them--in his home, where he'd apparently killed himself about a week ago. The last time they spoke to him, he'd talked about future bookings, but he hadn't been answering his phone for a while, so they decided to stop by. Jeff didn't have anything else to add; Jake and his girlfriend had been spending pretty much the whole day talking with the staties who were there. Three months ago, he was married with two kids and a house; he apparently got separated somewhere along the way. Man, that'll scar you. I went back to the coffee place and told Carin, because I'm an insensitive clod and I needed to tell someone. I suppose I'll learn more about what happened when next I see Jeff.

I read in Borders for the next five hours, or most of it, gradually becoming less shook up. I'd muse on what it means that I got over it so quickly, but I'm too busy getting over it so quickly.

The confident-looking lady in the straw hat to the right is Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, though the LOC authorities file has something like a dozen variants on that name. She was a very highly-regarded painter at a time when women were kept out of art. Marie Antoinette was her patron, until the revolution came and things went all scary. She survived, however, and continued painting, voluminously. I discovered that she wrote a memoir, which I later discovered was scanned into Google Book Search; I think it's about time I submitted another book to Distributed Proofreaders.

As for the painting itself, note that she's displaying cleavage. This is actually (according to the art book I was reading in Borders, from which I got the rest of this) a sign of her power and independence; women at the time had to wear corsets, and she's very clearly not wearing one. So, cleavage is used to denote self-determination here, which is generally not what it signifies today. I like this one; she's depicted herself holding her artists' tools, as a master of her craft.

After her shift was over, we drove directly up to Ben's for his birthday and UFC. (I got him a copy of GEB, which generally makes a good present... for dorks.) She'd had a long, frustrating shift, but we made a go of it anyway. It was late in the UFC when we arrived, and my idea of the order of events is probably lacking. In no particular order, I saw Eric, who suddenly remembered that he's defending his dissertation on Monday morning, and had forgotten to invite me. I'll have to clear it with Brian now, but I'll make sure I can make it in. How often does this kind of thing happen, honestly?

I'd been looking forward to seeing Diego Sanchez fight again, but he spent three rounds doing nothing. It was as though he was waiting to start fighting, but he never did. And that was the end of his 19-0 winning streak. It was depressing. On the other hand, we got to see Matt Serra defeat Georges St. Pierre in an upset, becoming the first guy who won The Ultimate Fighter to win a UFC title. He just knocked the guy down and pressed his advantage until he got full mount and just started raining down shots. It was very, very impressive. All this, despite the Cat citing him as having "little T. rex arms".

After the Cats and Eric had left, and we were about to leave, Hillary declared shirtless o'clock, and Carin decided to join in. I noticed that she was the only one wearing one of those fashionable black bras; apparently those off-white nearly-flesh-toned ones are quite popular. I was just ridiculously happy to see Carin cavorting around shirtless. It makes me happy to see her with enough body confidence to do that--not to mention that she looked good. (I should note that as she's on the hormone pills this week, she wasn't drinking; she came by shirtless o'clock honestly.) And on that note, we rolled out.

Carin finished reading Matilda to me on the car ride back. I'd forgotten quite how visceral Roald Dahl's writings can be--there's child abuse, offscreen murder, and plenty of unfairness and oppression. I remember it as being a fun read, but it's certainly not weightless.

No comments today; I was doing a whole batch of awesome things.
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an art deco poster. [Mar. 29th, 2007|01:29 am]
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The picture at left depicts a very Art Nouveau poster by an artist named T. Privat-Livemont, who I've been able to discover rather little about... except that he died in 1936, and because of that, his art, like that poster on the left, entered the public domain as of January 1 of this year. I wouldn't have gone to the effort to have made that page and found some of his works if I hadn't seen the date in that little book of Art Nouveau that Carin had. Here we see an excellent example of absinthe culture. Drugs back then were so much more interesting, y'know?

After work, I pretty much lounged around all evening. Carin had a biology exam, and was very, very stressed out about it (she did fine), but I was still soaking up that vacation-week vibe, and was able to wait on her a bit, which helped. It's a small thing for me, but it makes a big difference between the two of us. I should be nice more often.

No comments today; I was abusing Google Image search into finding me obscure turn of the century posters instead of being thoughtful and insightful.
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i can no longer see forever. [Mar. 13th, 2007|12:40 am]
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People at work were surprisingly nice to me today. I found a bug earlier in the day, of the type (cleaned up to make it look obvious)
if (special condition valid)
 results = query(special)
results = query(generic)
which should have read
if (special condition valid)
 results = query(special)
else
 results = query(generic)
which meant there was something accidentally left in from earlier testing. I was pretty surprised that I'd managed to find it, in retrospect--this is the kind of thing I usually throw my hands up at and consult Jay for. The office was in a pretty upbeat mood. I guess the big release really did go well.

I was supposed to work on that review of literature... but I glazed over, and barely got any more of it done. I read and highlighted another paper, but that was about all. I took a break to go out with Carin to get some buffet, since we hadn't been there in a while. It was nearly deserted there, and we stayed out far longer than we needed to to eat, and had one heck of a good talk--about family, about what we got from our parents, and about how neither of us grew up with authoritarian religion. It was good stuff, and absolutely worth staying out late for.

Today's art, to the left, is The Accolade (1901) by Edmund Blair Leighton, seen at every single gosh-darn on-campus poster sale in history. The artist had a thing for painting women with long, reddish, flowing hair, and he was quite good at it. This one isn't unique in depicting a nostalgic piece of medieval imagery; it was his particular schtick. They had the same kind of romantic nostalgia back then that we do now; after all, the Victorian era is much closer to today than it was to the High Middle Ages. It's all very stately, very solemn, very courtly. Also, I notice that Steve the photographer was right: we read left to right, so the women are, looking toward the painting, to the left of the men in all of his paintings of his I've seen save one (Alain Chartier), in which she's kind of above him.

My visual acuity is back down. I don't know if it's because I'm used to the new glasses, or because my eyes are intent on maintaining a ceiling of usefulness, but I can't quite see as clearly as I could a few days ago. Being reminded of my own frailties makes me sad.

Comments: Pharyngula | Feministe 1 2 | Ilyka Damen 1 2 | Pandagon
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half a paper. [Mar. 12th, 2007|02:59 am]
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Well, that was surprisingly productive. I wrote half of my review of literature paper today. I'd actually read my sources ahead of time, underlining passages which referred to interesting facts or referenced common themes I'd seen elsewhere and wanted to point out different aspects of. I'm still utterly uninterested in my subject, and I usually skim for the parts I need rather than actually read my sources, but it's actually getting done--I have five pages and seven cited sources (I need ten and ten), though not all of the sources are explained in depth. I'm a bit surprised that I can actually understand research papers. These aren't very complicated research papers, but still, either the jargon is kept to a minimum, or I've somehow absorbed said jargon over the last few months.

To the right, you'll notice one of those paintings I had mentioned a few days ago, this one by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who the Art Renewal Center has a tremendous hard-on for. I've been trying to think of how to explain what I like about this piece, and I've come up with absolutely nothing. It's... real pretty. It's like he painted the material world, but even prettier. That doesn't say much, but there you have it. He also had a habit of painting little girls, which I read as deeply creepy, but maybe it was something utterly un-creepy that we don't have in our culture nowadays. As I've said before, I know just about nothing about art, and the ARC's essays confuse me.

Carin and I went up to Rick's this evening. We got Indian food (Rick got something which looked like a miniature peat bog, but tasted quite good), sat around and shot the breeze before going back to his place and watching the first half of The Mask of Zorro. I thought I'd seen it before, but all the good clean swashbuckling fun was quite new to me. I'd spent too much time writing my paper, and then we'd spent too much time talking, to finish it, but isn't that worlds better than doing it the other way 'round?

Comments: Telic Thoughts 1 2 3
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the art renewal center. [Mar. 9th, 2007|12:41 am]
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Even more testing today. Carin's feeling a bit better, well enough to go to work. She got sent back home shortly thereafter, having left her breakfast there. An insensitive coworker told her she was probably pregnant, and had morning sickness. (She's not, and some cursory research tells me that morning sickness is primarily nausea. Carin is having dizziness, which is leading to nausea if it gets too intense.)

Normally, I think of any anti-Modernist movement as a uniformly bad thing, attached to the trappings of modernity as I am. On the other hand, Modernism as an art movement is something I never really got. It all seems like an endless rehash of a moderately clever joke Marcel Duchamp told once. I've recently become rather fascinated by the Art Renewal Center (Wikipedia article), which is all about art prior to modernity, which is, come to think of it, the sort of thing that art types go nuts over, but only if it was made more than a hundred and fifty years ago. It's as though photography put the kibosh on realistic art.

That's Dante and Virgil in Hell on the left, there. Now, I know almost nothing about art. I know strikes me as beautiful, and that's about it. I've tried to read some of the posted essays on the ARC site, but they come off as impenetrable--written in another language. But the art, to me, speaks for itself.

When I took a drawing class (I learned that I don't have the patience to draw well), we took a field trip down the hall to see some visiting art. It consisted of a set of vertical lines, evenly spaced. Well, we thought, at lest they're evenly spaced. It turned out that the artist had engineered some racks to which multiple paintbrushes could be attached. She gave a long and confusing talk about what her art meant, and on the way back, we asked our instructor if perhaps we could be bullshit artists instead of trying to draw that damned heap of cloth again. He replied that no, we couldn't do that until we reached graduate school.

This art--it's the sort of thing Concrete would have on his walls. Of course, because it's public domain, I can actually afford to hang it on my walls in poster form, if I so desire.

Of course, what none of the glowing exegeses on the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (the fellow responsible for the piece posted here) mention is the incredible unabashed sexism that drips from these works. (Darn you, "Women's Studies in the Arts"; now I can't un-notice it!) It's not so evident in this one here (no women), but in something like Hylas and the Nymphs or Nymphs and Satyr, consisting of dewy, idealized, eager-looking women throwing themselves harem-style at one guy, or perhaps just sitting around looking ornamentally accessible... it's absolutely ridiculous; it's like the eight hundred pound elephant in the room, that nobody writing about the artists notices. I can't be the only one, here.

Of course, I remember seeing that re-gendered version of The Turkish bath and all, but it amazes me that people can write about the art and not notice how painfully sexist it is. Real pretty, though. I do appreciate quality craftsmanship, and these guys are all about that.

Comments: Feministe 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | PunkAssBlog | Slashdot 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
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