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Chris Ashley has been posting scans of old children's book covers amid his regular weblog entries. More intriguing design ideas than you can shake a frisket at. The hand-rendered photographic style of A Pony for Linda, above, resembles the high contrast still images of the Cartoon Network show Tom Goes to the Mayor. What doesn't work in an animated cartoon looks great on a kid's book. Also in Ashley's compendium, be sure to check out the endearingly Henry Darger-ish What's Inside of Me?
The image below just hit my email inbox, from Marvelli Gallery in Chelsea. Haven't seen the work in person and know nothing about the artist, but this jpeg, at least, strikes a good bad painting chord. Paging through other work we see a distinct Dana Schutz vibe, but also Judith Linhares with a bit lighter touch, or Laura Owens, if the latter had an ounce of finesse as a painter. Anyway, I'm getting my virtual tasty brushstroke (and nature panic) fixes for the day: Janine Iversen, "Open Longer," 2006, Oil on Canvas, 60 X 78 inches |
Two posts from libertarian blogger Jim Henley crack me up. First, about the Iranian surprise attacks the scaremongers were predicting for August 22, he writes:
And earlier, about ex-CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, author of the unfortunately influential 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq:As you know, today was the day that, as predicted by respected Muslim World Experts TM, the apocalyptic regime of Iranian terror masters attacked the West in the name of hastening the coming of the Twelfth Imam. I experienced the carnage first-hand. This morning on the Washington Beltway a guy drove really slow in the left lane - right in front of me. Couldn’t have been going over 50.
I was as resolute in refusing to be cowed by this unprovoked Iranian aggression as I was enraged at the fecklessness of our leaders, who failed to preempt the outrage by launching a major and of course purely defensive war on the Islamic Republic.
But where the craven Bush Administration and its puppeteers on the decadent Left fail America, the blogosphere can fill the void. We are fighting this war too, no less than the meeting planners at the think tanks and the guests on talk shows and the dumpers of fluids into airport bins. So I’m offering this blog item as a sharing - and yes, healing - place. Each of you, please tell us how you coped with the Day of Dodecahedral Doom. Whether acolytes of the Twelfth Imam cut in front of you at Au Bon Pain or put you on hold without asking or failed to note that your blog linked something before any other blogs you happened to notice, no enormity is too, well, enormous, for us to bear, together.
Great stuff.Kenneth Fucking Pollack writes to tell us that civil war in Iraq is a very bad thing. Honest to god, this kind of thing is all the explanation this blog’s frequent resort to profanity requires. Ken baby, it’s your civil war as much as anyone’s. Pollack did more than anyone to encourage the famous “liberal hawks” to provide the bipartisan patina so useful in getting the Iraq invasion started. In the Army, someone would have long since left him alone in the study with a pistol and the discreet interval required to make the only appropriate gesture of regret, genuine atonement being impossible under the circumstances. In Japan he’d be a picture of the different ways light reflects off entrails and cutlery. In Washington, he gets to write new articles, as if he were an epidemiologist and not Typhoid Mary.