bill simmons is always at his best where family and fandom meet. in this column his daughter first tastes the bitterness of failed expectations.
djokovic/federer semifinals at the french open just underway on nbc. nadal blew through ferrer for a spot in the sunday final while maria sharapova regained the number one ranking after four years of struggle and injury. she is the favorite going into tomorrows final against the 21st seeded italian sara errani.
Barbara takenaga images
euro 2012 schedule. kicks off tomorrow with a pair of games every day til next tuesday.
decoy strawberry rocks
im not a huge gladwell fan but he certainly would raise the collective iq of sports columnists were he to make it his lifes work.
he was no richard dawson but...
Gertrude Stein made a lot of people angry when she published her memoirs, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A handful of artists and writers (Henri Matisse and Tristan Tzara, among others) disagreed with a bunch of the events she told; they ended up publishing a line-by-line treatise, Testimony Against Gertrude Stein, about everything she got wrong. UbuWeb just released it. Moral of the story: just because people disagree with you doesn’t mean that you won’t become famous. [UbuWeb]
Windows 8 has the earmarks of being a Wordstar 2000.
Never heard of Wordstar 2000? Exactly.
Take the single most popular program in its category, which was kind of klunky in ways, and replace it with something completely different (but with almost the same name!), thereby inviting your users to re-examine their options. If ya gotta learn something new anyway, why not survey the market?
On the other hand, Windows 8 could just be a more spectacular Vista -- an embarrassing waste, but not a death blow. (XP still works fine!}
Never heard of Wordstar 2000? Exactly.
Take the single most popular program in its category, which was kind of klunky in ways, and replace it with something completely different (but with almost the same name!), thereby inviting your users to re-examine their options. If ya gotta learn something new anyway, why not survey the market?
On the other hand, Windows 8 could just be a more spectacular Vista -- an embarrassing waste, but not a death blow. (XP still works fine!}
Had home made kale chips tonight. 1 bunch of kale. Washed, dried, chopped. Put in two baking pans spread out not overlapping too much. Sprinkled olive oil and salt. Popped in oven at 350 for (?) 10 mins. (keep an eye on it. We didn't and it over cooked slightly but not burnt. Sill real good, perhaps actually a desirable result.) they should crunch. great as veg w diner or snack w drinks!
watching some of the golf on today with tiger in contention. no sound though, its only saturday after all. and i saw something i dont recall ever seeing, the young guy currently in the lead was dragging on a cigarette while sizing up a chip shot before tossing it at his feet. didnt even bother to snuff it out. somewhere jack nicklaus (he designed the course) is grinding his teeth.
broke my self imposed baseball blackout when i saw that mets pitcher johan santana had a no-hitter through seven, now eight, innings. no met pitcher in their fifty year history has ever thrown a no-hitter. only tom seaver has taken a no-hitter into the ninth inning. unfortunatly for santana he has the heart of the cardinals order due up in the ninth and he was only a pitch or two from a career high 125 pitches.
tomorrow is national doughnut day.
Better late than.....
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Michelle Segre
Lost Songs of the Filament
June 1 - June 30, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1, 6-8pm
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculpture by Michelle Segre.
Incorporating a variety of materials including plaster, wire, mesh, and organic matter as well as past works, Segre creates freestanding, singular pieces that transport the viewer into a spindly, off-kilter world of enigmatic presences. An overall state of flux is the driving force in this work, where each piece appears to have evolved through an accumulation of detritus, enmeshed together through the growth process of a creeping fungus. There is a juxtaposition of unexpected materials and motifs - melting blobs of plaster co-habitate with crystalline frozen metal forms. Elements the size of pushpins occupy the same structure as pitchforks and giant metal rings. Some pieces appear to contain weirdly encoded information from a fictional alien culture; in others, remnants of a procedure that has been cut short by some unseen force. An enormous chicken bone becomes a captive specimen in a primitive display apparatus of wires and rods. Strings, yarns, and other linear elements, draw through the space in and around, intersecting with amorphous bodies of papier-mâché and creating dense, web-like structures that evoke the detailed cellular patterns Segre has often used in her drawings. One work seems to be a collector, a gatherer whose tendrils ensnare the matter in its path, a meal of sculptural plankton. In another, skeletal forms encircle a center eye which is perched to receive or transmit information, the energy lines emitting into the space around it. The fat and the skinny, the flat and the bulbous, the plastic and the raw, grind against each other in a noisy, bristly racket. Segre's work hovers at an edge where everything remains fragmentary and incomplete, on the brink of coming apart, refusing to fulfill expectations in any predictable way. The process is improvisational and fluid, resulting in pieces that are both playfully casual and intense.
Michelle Segre lives and works in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. This will be her fourth solo show with the gallery.
North Room: André Ethier, Kinda French
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Toronto-based artist André Ethier.
In his fifth show at the gallery, André Ethier contests the borders of irony and earnestness, combining self-deprecating humor with sincere appreciation for banalities and everyday strangeness. He approaches each work without a definitive subject in mind, he improvises the content and compositions, employing an array of application techniques to create luscious, painterly surfaces. Evoking art historical precedents from Francis Picabia to Greek black-figure pottery, Ethier conjures intense imagery that is both uncanny and strikingly familiar.
André Ethier has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Torino, Miami, Copenhagen, Toronto, and Madrid. His work was recently featured in Fairy Tales, Monsters, and The Genetic Imagination, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, Portraits: Cabinet de Curiosités, galerie bertrand & gruner, Geneva, Switzerland, and André Ethier and Janet Beckhouse at Neon Parc, Melbourne, Australia.
Derek Eller Gallery is located at 615 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th Avenues. Hours are Tuesday - Saturday from 11am - 6pm. For further information or visuals, please contact the gallery at 212.206.6411 or visit www.derekeller.com.
Bill's new work
having soccer withdrawal? yeah, me neither. but you may be suffering from nba playoff overkilll in which case tonights us v. brasil friendly may be the tonic. 8pm eastern on espn 2.
History Ch running Hillbilly: the real story and a multiple part drama on the hayfields and mccoys.
I have some Carhartt pants that have a special cell phone pocket, about where a hammer loop would be. In my haste to start a load of laundry, I failed to check that pocket.
So now I have a Droid 2 that's an unhappy phone. It powers up, but no display. I moved service back to my Droid 1, which other than the keyboard is a mighty fine phone. Unlike the Droid 2, the basic telephony UI doesn't have the appearance of a UI designed by someone 20 years away from presbyopia. And the speaker phone volume goes all the way up to annoying!
So I check on the Droid 4. Five hundred and forty nine dollars, retail, with no contract renewal. Or $99 for a refurb unit -- but only with a contract renewal. Somewhere in between, perhaps half retail, is a new unit with contract renewal. Contract renewals get rid of the grandfathered "unlimited data". I don't use anywhere near the limit. But goddammit, I might. One day.
To me this pricing is like Safeway, but more insidious. If you ever go in a Safeway, you'll notice the way they do "sale" pricing. Do you want to pay "absolutely fucking ridiculous price" or do you want to pay "discount price that only comes with a discount card." What Safeway is doing is coercing you to submit to data tracking.
VZW is practicing the same sort of coercion, but they're coercing customers into new contracts. And they get to do it by talking about "subsidized price". They're doing you a fucking favor.
So, I'm a Droid 1 user.
So now I have a Droid 2 that's an unhappy phone. It powers up, but no display. I moved service back to my Droid 1, which other than the keyboard is a mighty fine phone. Unlike the Droid 2, the basic telephony UI doesn't have the appearance of a UI designed by someone 20 years away from presbyopia. And the speaker phone volume goes all the way up to annoying!
So I check on the Droid 4. Five hundred and forty nine dollars, retail, with no contract renewal. Or $99 for a refurb unit -- but only with a contract renewal. Somewhere in between, perhaps half retail, is a new unit with contract renewal. Contract renewals get rid of the grandfathered "unlimited data". I don't use anywhere near the limit. But goddammit, I might. One day.
To me this pricing is like Safeway, but more insidious. If you ever go in a Safeway, you'll notice the way they do "sale" pricing. Do you want to pay "absolutely fucking ridiculous price" or do you want to pay "discount price that only comes with a discount card." What Safeway is doing is coercing you to submit to data tracking.
VZW is practicing the same sort of coercion, but they're coercing customers into new contracts. And they get to do it by talking about "subsidized price". They're doing you a fucking favor.
So, I'm a Droid 1 user.
book illustration blog stopping off place. Lots of back posts to riffle through
PEGGY!!!!!!!!
