heres a link to some info on
ESG following our disco conversation of last friday evening.
Saw Spider Man last night. This would have been a great movie if they just took out the embarassingly crappy love story, and the overlong sappy back story. Of course the movie would have only been 10 minutes then. But it would be an amazing 10 minutes!
As is, this should be a big hit with 11 year old girls.
how deadicated are you? got a spare half
mil?
an independent web designer is hired to design, build, host and maintain a commercial website which has mainly photo and video content. relationship continues for three years.
then the website company says, thanks for all your great work, but i now have someone who is going to take over maintenance of the site for free, please hand everything over. independent contractor says no way, this is my work, i own it. here's all your original content back, good luck.
should he have to hand everything over or does he have ownership rights on the site?
And if he doesn't want a Max Bill wristwatch, get him that
robot spider kit he's always dreamed of...
Adding to the games of May, our friend Michelle Segre has a show opening at
Murray Guy on 5/11. Unfortunately, I don't have the browser to view the site, but
here's a drawing. I think this show will be full-blown sculpture. In the past she's created oversize renderings of things you might find in a dark corner: mushrooms; moldy bread; chicken bones, with a sort of natural history museum flavor. Not sure what's up this time, but it ought to be interesting.
From NY Mag: Cold Comfort
The Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory opened last fall with a streamlined assortment of classic, all-natural flavors, a spectacular location in a twenties fireboat house on the Brooklyn waterfront, and the financial backing of the River Café next door, where, unbeknownst to many, pastry chef Ellen Sternau concocts all the factory's toppings and syrups. The only thing missing, until recently, was hot fudge, a glaring omission for certain sundae enthusiasts. "It's one of the hardest things to get right," says perfectionist ice-cream maker Mark Thompson, who tasted the store-bought competition and charged Sternau with improving on it. She rose to the challenge, using high-grade Michel Cluizel chocolate with a 72 percent cacao content for deep, dark fudge that's worth the wait -- and a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory
Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn
absolutly sensational new dish at 71CFF, full flavored ramp etc soup with squab--ROCKS!!
anybody familiar with eric
drooker?
Thousands more
cute pictures like this one await you at the
VCL Anthropomorphic Image Library. The image I selected is Mulonica, a dragon created by Krystal Ishida (aka Mystica), which reminds me of Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy. I have to say, as an artist, Krystal has got it goin' on. (Check out her page at VCL
here.) She works in Paintshop Pro, and I love the "watercolor" textures she uses, in combination with her pixelated line. Her drawings of Pokemon and other anime-type characters have real punch and verve, and she sneaks in a lot of autobiography under the guise of these cuddly critters (VCL guidelines dictate that drawings be "furry/anthropomorphic"). If she wants a character to look angry, it looks angry. Ditto sad, lonely, sprightly... In other words, she's a "natural," and it's quite unfair to read her post that "my dad said that if my art was for sale, no one would buy it off me any way." Dad, you are so wrong!
"Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but 'Mortimer' ...." -- Henry IV
The story goes that some guy released in Central Park all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. The European
starling , released in 1890, now occurs throughout much of North America. The English house sparrow, like the house fly, house mouse, and Norwegian rat, followed Europeans throughout the world, currently occupying a greater range of habitat than any other bird on earth. Some claim exotic species should be welcomed due to their ability to occupy habitat so disturbed that native species are struggling, but the most successfull invaders are known to outcompete and displace native species. One year i cleared out some starlings nesting in cavities in an old box elder tree in the front yard, and some northern flickers nested there instead, succesfully hatching out two chicks. I felt pretty proud watching over them with an air rifle. The monk parakeet though .....
The ballad of
John Henry came up the other night. We dated it to the late 1800's since it involves railroads, but it seems to be more freighted than that (sorry). It's not a railroad song the way
Casey Jones is, though it relates to the building of the railroads. It's not really a work song, either, though it bears some similarity to
Take This Hammer (both songs sung by Lead Belly). TTH would have been sung while actually swinging a hammer, with an appropriate exclamation for each strike, even as the singer dreams of walking away from the job. John Henry is more of a story song, and a complex one at that. Man versus machine is the main theme, and man wins, but kills himself in the process. Seems like a theme that would appear earlier in the Industrial Revolution, but I'm not coming up with any examples off hand. Anybody know any tales of weavers outpacing the new mills, or suchlike? Beyond that, there are racial and sexual angles that have sometimes been bowdlerized.
This page goes over some of the ground. Apparently there's some basis in fact, and the West Virginia
tunnel in question is certainly real, but the truth gets harder to discern
over time (oh wait, that's a work of fiction?). Although JH is almost always assumed to be a black man, the song seems to have had more resonance in the 30s than the 60s. Perhaps his noble victory in defeat was more appealing to the labor unionizers than to the civil rights movement?
another reason to hate
IRWIN
Dud of the Month
THE LANGLEY SCHOOLS MUSIC PROJECT Innocence and Despair (Bar/None)
Hans Fenger was a gifted teacher on a mission. Cutting keepsake vinyl for his kiddie choir was a great way for him to reward past involvement while inspiring more. Irwin Chusid is a tedious ideologue with a hustle. Turning that vinyl into a collectible CD is the latest way for him to remind the converted that artistic intention is reserved for the beholder in these postmodern times—especially if the beholder has a hustle. A few of these songs were great, a few of them sucked, and every one was more innocent and/or desperate in its original version except Barry Manilow's (but not the Bay City Rollers'). A special annoyance is the reportedly tear-jerking "Desperado" by a 10-year-old who doesn't seem to have any idea what the song means, which is to her credit as a human being but not as a singer. The sole revelation is Brian Wilson, whose six songs still sound like themselves. C MINUS
-christgau
Per my pal with a Belgium wife, the hot new restaurant in Brussels is Belga Queen, i saw on a Brussels site its a 4 out of 5 star spot for food, my buddy said its delish w/ fab design....the bathrooms are uni-sex and all the stalls are clear glass, he was alone in there with two girls at the sink, he went into one and as he entered the glass darkened and he just saw silouettes(sp?) outside and inside others....
Quick but delish bite's at Picholine was better than ever....
Finally made it to the infamous
Berta's Chateau in rural N.J., and Tommaso's in Brooklyn after at least a 5 year break...
"
One was a species of falcon called the Eurasian kestrel (
Falco tinnunculus), a long-tailed, swift-flying bird about a foot long or longer. The other was a shorebird called a Pacific golden plover (
Pluvialis fulva), a plump creature about 10 inches long, with a black belly and golden highlights in its feathers."
Jacques Yves Cousteau with some interesting views on population, envioronmental activism, dolphins, global warming and an optimistic statement about the world's fish populations.