Dada in Canada. What do they give high artistic awards for in Canada these days? Well, according to the NYT, Istvan Kantor got $12,000 for doing things like this:

a video showing two performers slashing the throats of two cats and wearing their bleeding bodies as hats (to express his rage at pet lovers who are hardened to their fellow man) and staging the burning of a car filled with white rats.

Good thing he's concerned about humanity. As one prof puts it, he "files a grievance for underdogs, people who are homeless and displaced." Let's kill dogs for the underdogs!

Born in Hungary in 1949, Mr. Kantor is recognized as the founder of Neoism, an international anarchist art movement that some critics liken to an updating of the Dadaism of Marcel Duchamp, who once declared that anything you called art was art.

"What are the limits?" Mr. Kantor asks matter-of-factly. "There are probably no limits. Art is very dangerous."

It should be seen as inherently impossible to "update" Duchamp, whose original insights already implied all the permutations of dadaism and made actually doing them unnecessary. He withdrew from producing more of his own work, because he perceived that, so people who are claiming to build on his work are frauds. Worse, they are boring. They resort to doing shocking things to cover up this boringness. The crimes they commit to attempt to be interesting as artists may be interesting crimes, but we need to realize that our fascination with crime and violence is independent of art. Those who claim credit for themselves as artists because they are producing shock and outrage are engaging in a very old scam.

Kantor has a new video:

[H]e says it exposes "the post-Orwellian technological society in which everyone is under surveillance and everyone is using transmission systems like computers to send information out to everybody."

Well, I'm about to transmit this message out to everybody: that insight of his is too trite to be expressed in casual conversation, let alone to be the subject of a long, pretentious video.

He's some typical artist-blather:

"You have to be an anti-Neoist to be a Neoist," he said in his typically satirical, dialectical sort of way. "It was very important for Neoism to get rid of all the artistic language of space and time and introduce a different language that was more using state and military and religious expressive terms that had been alien to art before, to subvert, to provoke, to ridicule, to make fun of that very used and abused language of art."

Pressed to explain, he added, "There's not just a bit of destructiveness in this. There's a lot."

All right, enough of that. That reminds me of that horrible and idiotic comment someone made after 9/11, calling the attack a great work of art.

Ah, wait, this is familiar: "He started his artistic career in Budapest in the late 1960's, founding a band of musicians who played only instruments they had not been trained to play." Isn't that Throbbing Gristle? No, I guess a lot of people came up with that idea.

Hmm... Googling "Throbbing Gristle" got me to a reference to a Village Voice article from 1988 called "The Triumph of Neoism: The Last of the Old-Fashioned Avant Garde Makes Its Stand"! Yet still it survives and is rewarded in Canada!

Madison, Saturday morning. With my restored iBook, I'm at Espresso Royale, where the cappucino is extra-hard on the nerves, I'm relieved that some people at the next table--who were annoying me for little reason other than the extra-strong coffee--are finally leaving, and I'm happy to have figured out (again!) how to get my photos up for linking. I do too many things by trial and error on my computer, and then when I get something to work, I have to wonder what I did that time, as opposed to the other ten times. But the truth is, the time I got it to work was the time I used the help menu and read the instructions, and all the trial and error efforts were wasted. So after that miniature ordeal, let me give you a look at Madison. It's a lovely Saturday morning, with temperatures in the 50s (which is great for us) and plenty of sun. Walking to the café, I stopped first to photograph the tree in Library Mall that an artist attached lots of little cloth leaves to:

I'm wondering how that is going to look when the real leaves decide to emerge. Near the tree is the Catholic center, which always has something nicely painted on the line of glass doors in front. Here's the Lenten theme, the crown of thorns:

Next to that is the University Bookstore, which really doesn't concentrate so much on books--which is why I shop for books at Borders. It's specialty, as you can see from this window, is Badger-related products. If your monitor is clear enough, you can tell that the reflection is the UW Memorial Library on the other side of the Mall:

On State Street, there are kiosks covered with flyers. These provide endless material for signage photography devotées.

And here's Expresso Royale, where I am right now, slightly pleased with myself for figuring out how to do it, over-caffeinated, and wondering how much time I just spent on this little display. The red bird in the corner of this picture is a cardinal, and Madisonians will recognize it as part of a "best of" certificate from the student paper The Cardinal. Red is a very big color around here.

The Rainbow Bookstore. A rich source of crude imagery, just off State Street in Madison.

So I did get out to State Street. Why so crowded during Spring Break? Everyone's wearing red and white ... must be something about basketball. Here are some of the local folk near a secondhand store called Gozira that has nice homemade signage. (I've been photographing signage since 1980, so don't think I stole the idea from this terrific site or anywhere else ... Actually, it's an obvious subject, because it stands still, doesn't object, and provides opportunities for word play along with the visuals.)

UPDATE: Here's how the basketball event looked last night.

Lunch plans, diet tips. I'm heading out to lunch. People are saying it's getting a bit springlike, so I think I'll walk up State Street. I want to test out my new camera and have some Madison images for the blog. I'd like to get some lunch, unlike yesterday, when I became so absorbed by my camera that I did not want to take time out to eat and did not eat all day until 7:30 pm. This could be the basis of a new diet: the complete distraction diet. All you need is to be really interested in something. Food is interesting, but it's not that interesting. Just become sufficiently fascinated by something: weight problem solved. (By the way, are the audiences at The Passion of the Christ eating popcorn and drinking soda?)

But I must go out now and get some lunch, take some pictures, and then pick up my iBook at the Do-It Center. Mac lovers will be heartened to learn that the new iBook, which gave me so damn much trouble, was plagued by a bad memory chip--extra memory, not manufactured by Apple.

Courtney Love, Madonna, CivPro, judges. I rewatched the Courtney Love on Letterman performance and am more convinced than before that she was acting. For one thing, she seemed to be performing. In fact, she seemed to be following the script of the famous Madonna Letterman appearance, which was also, obviously, an act, even though people enjoyed believing Madonna was out of control (a really ridiculous idea). Another reason I'm sure Love was acting is that she's promoting a new album and needs the press: she went out afterwards and engaged in various hijinks. She even got arrested, though it doesn't seem that she did anything to deserve it. I don't know how she gets the police to participate in her stunts, but they did. I liked this info about an earlier run in with the law:

[A]fter her 1995 arrest on charges that she punched several fans at an Orlando concert, the judge dismissed the case, ruling that they had been exposed to no more violence than might be reasonably expected at a rock 'n' roll show.

Hmmm ... I have an old civpro exam about rock show violence. Premised on a tort claim, though, not criminal law. Based on the whole stage diving phenomenon and the extent of negligence by the band and the club and some people at the club. How was that civil procedure? You make everyone from different places with different claims against different parties, and there are jurisdiction and joinder issues galore.

Oh, you know, when I saw Love years ago, she dove into the audience and then, afterwards, accused a guy of sexually assaulting her (touching her in the wrong place when she was crowd surfing and therefore had to be touched a lot). She had the guy dragged up on stage, where she proceeded to yell at him. Let's hope that was all staged too.

Love seems to do well with judges. She had a good line about them on Letterman: "Judges are like rock stars." (I'll have to get the whole quote later. It has something to do with being able to do whatever you want and/or running your own show.) I think the fact that she does well with them is one more indication that her public persona is an act. She doesn't act like that in court.

UPDATE: Here's the judge quote: "The thing about judges that's cool is they're a lot like rock stars. They just get their own damn way." She quotes her judge as saying "I will not have a witch hunt in my state," which she then ties to the Martha Stewart case. She appeals to the audience to side with Martha: "Is that fair? Raise your hand if you think that's fair." A second later she's leaping up, yelling "You are sexist!"

The last abstract expressionist has died. The obit in the NYT has this:

Volatile, acerbic, unfailingly blunt, widely read and singularly dedicated to the ideal of the painter's hard, solitary life, [Milton] Resnick was in many ways the popular stereotype of the bohemian angst-ridden artist.

Abstract expressionists were the people who made painting so godawful serious, and I want to give them credit for helping make Pop Art so very much fun. They are also the people who allow you to get more exercise in museums, because you can walk past their huge canvases so quickly. That's easy to do now, but there was a time when you went to the museum and felt you were supposed to have a religious experience with these rectangles. I can still remember how I felt seeing Robert Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings in the 1960s. There were so many of them and they were so huge and presented with such reverence that I just felt manipulated and resentful of the self-importance and grandiosity and sheer, crashing humorlessness of it all. Here's a Motherwell quote:

Making an Elegy is like building a temple, an altar, a ritual place … Unlike the rest of my work, the Elegies are, for the most part, public statements. The Elegies reflect the internationalist in me, interested in the historical forces of the twentieth century, with strong feelings about the conflicting forces in it … The Elegies use a basic pictorial language, in which I seem to have hit on an 'archetypal' image. Even people who are actively hostile to abstract art are, on occasion, moved by them, but do not know 'why'. I think perhaps it is because the Elegies use an essential component of pictorial language…

See? You better be moved and have a deep experience or you're lumped together with every loser who's "actively hostile" to all abstract art, the laughable idiots who say their child could have painted it. Well, the Abstract Expressionists were humorless, but that made them a great source of humor. My personal favorite (to bring up Woody Allen a second time today), is this exchange in "Play It Again Sam":

WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.

WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

WOODY ALLEN: What are you doing Saturday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Committing suicide.

WOODY ALLEN: What about Friday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: [leaves silently]

"I felt thick inside with happiness." Here's an immensely touching article about children whose gay parents obtained marriage licenses. Some kid quotes to make you cry:

"It was so cool ... I always accepted that `Yeah, they're my moms,' but they were actually getting married. I felt thick inside with happiness. Just thick."

"Before it was, `Oh, your parents are just partners,' ... Now, they're spouses. So it's a bigger way of thinking about them."

"It is something I always wanted. I've always been around people saying, `Oh, my parents anniversary is this week.' It's always been the sight of two parents, married, with rings. And knowing I'd probably never experience it ever."

"I don't think they can take it away ... Maybe they can go into the Hall of Marriages and rip up the papers. But emotionally, they can never take away the feeling that my parents are married."

At first, I thought, how can anyone read this and be opposed to gay marriage? How can anyone not want these children to be happy? A bit later, I realized that a hardcore opponent of gay marriage would have to say that the parents themselves had wronged these children by getting them involved in the concept that their parents were married before the legality of gay marriage had been established. They set their children up for a fall, like, say, a parent who told a child that someone he loved was getting out of prison, even though the parole board hadn't made a decision yet. Or worse, one could say that gay marriage proponents were using their own children to further a political agenda, by letting the kids think there could be a marriage and exposing the kids to reporters who would print charming, innocent words that make newspaper readers cry and cave in to that political agenda. But I think non-hardcore types — AKA most Americans — are going to be influenced by the realities of families that already exist and the interests of the children who are already living in them.

Woody Allen in tights. This is sweet--a quote from Diane Keaton in today's NYT:

""We used to hang out, like, when I was going out with him, we had this thing we called 'The Kitchen Follies.'

And we would just sort of pretend, like, we were, you know, SPENCER TRACY and KATHARINE HEPBURN. And then at one time he had this idea that maybe we could be dancers in a movie. And we took dancing lessons.

"We went to MARTHA GRAHAM and took dancing lessons. It was so pathetic. And he wore those tights! And it was, like, neither of us could dance. But he thought he had a great idea for a movie where we could be dancers."

Learning about faster-loading image files. Sorry about the slow-loading files earlier. I am figuring out how to do some things with these digital images. I had a drawing on a back page (in the February archive), that was an insanely huge file, which turned out to be a good thing, because it drove home that I was doing this wrong. There's no point in providing detail that never appears on the screen. Anyway, I'm going to provide some new kinds of illustrations, as I learn how to do some things properly. I realized I could photograph TiVo stills, so I'm going to have some unique content here soon, in appropriately small files, to go with my usual nattering about television.

Yellow place. I've written before that my office is quite yellow. Now it can be seen:

UPDATE: Slow-loading picture removed. You can see it if you go here. It's the third picture.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Don't look there. Here it is:

The morning paper. Yesterday, I got a digital camera, my first one. I set it up to charge overnight, and this morning as I was about to read the NYT, I read enough of the instruction booklet to take my first picture.

UPDATE: Slow-loading picture removed, but you can still see it if you go here. It's the second picture.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tech problems solved. Here's the picture, the first digital picture I ever took:



It means a lot to me. The book is "Strong Opinions."

Life metaphors of the great authors. Here's a Q&A from an old BBC interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

[Q] Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a "tartine de merde" which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?

[A] I've never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn't he? My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.

Courtney Love ... Richard Perle ... Jessica Simpson. It was fun clicking from Letterman to Nightline to Leno and back again last night. Courtney was certainly energized. Simpson was funny, telling the story about meeting the Secretary of the Interior at the White House and saying to her, "You've done a nice job decorating the White House." Perle--I don't know--I just found it amusing that he was the meat in that sandwich.

Courtney Love performed in Madison some years ago (at the Paramount, which no longer exists). She didn't like the sound system and kept complaining about it, in elevating stages, ending with her taking off her top, and also throwing food from a deli tray at the audience. We kept some of the food wrapped up in the freezer for a while, thinking it somewhat historic, but it isn't there any more. Not that I think anyone ate it. In a sandwich.

Anyway, breast-baring is a very old routine for Courtney Love. I'm thinking she feels it's not fair that Janet Jackson got so much attention recently for baring a breast and that she's the one who's entitled to the publicity. Hence the Letterman antics. Personally, I think she knows what she's doing, as opposed to being out of her mind. When she had her on-stage freak out at the Paramount, there was a break in the middle, where supposedly people were trying to get her to come back out on stage, and later she did come back out. But during that break, we stepped outside for some air, and she was out there talking to the management, perfectly rationally, about how to deal with the sound problem. That was maybe a decade ago, so who knows? I still am going to guess that she has chosen a role and is playing a part.

UPDATE: Cka3n doesn't want to believe Courtney Love was just acting, but he perceptively realizes the reason he doesn't want to believe she was is that it's only funny if you think she's out of control. The material wasn't really that good. It wasn't as good as Jessica Simpson's Leno material quoted above, and I think that was scripted, by the way, because it's just too good. Simpson may be dumb, but she's not that dumb, and if she were that dumb, she just wouldn't get lucky enough to say the great lines she's famous for. Simpson has writers. Love is doing her own material, improvising, and she's a terrific actress and she's smart, so it works. She may seem a bit old for the crazy punk girl role, but like (Whatever Happened to) Baby Jane, she can entertainingly play crazy punk girl into extreme old age. And if she survives to extreme old age, that's how you'll know it's all been an act. And of course I hope it is. (Oh, and yeah, I TiVoed it. But here's a recap if you didn't. Recap link courtesy of Gawker.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Let me explain the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane reference. In that film, Bette Davis plays a character who had been a successful child star, and who, though quite old, continues to trounce about in baby dresses, acting all cute and coy. No longer the little girl, she's become a really interestingly deluded old lady. So Courtney Love can continue in her punk girl role and, as she ages, let it become wild and outrageous in new ways, like Bette Davis's character. And in fact, Love might do well generally to have Bette Davis as a role model. Just play a raving old hag and grow old in style. Nicole and Drew can't do that. Bette didn't have to be the prettiest or the cutest to be the best actress of them all, and neither do you. And, readers, if you haven't seen that film, you really must. And by the way, it's another one of the great things about one of my all time favorite years, 1962.

TiVo lifestyle.The TiVo website also provides officially downloadable "lifestyle images," and here's one of them. Possible first reactions to the picture:

Let the kid go! ("Son, I'm going to teach you how to really watch TV.")

Why does the man always have to have the remote control?

Would those people really have a sofa like that? Hey, that should be my sofa!

You may have photoshopped smaller feet on that big guy to try to keep me from worrying that he's going to kick the TV off that little table but I'm still worried.

Is that Meryl Streep? What if seven of Meryl Streep's favorite shows were all on at the same time?

"Approachable ... Friendly ... Simple ... Fun ... Clean ... Vibrant ... Playful ... " Searching for a copiable TiVo logo, I came across TiVo's own guidelines for using its logo, which include rules about how you need to set the feet into any horizon line in your drawing so that li'l TiVo guy looks well-grounded. There's also this explanation of li'l TiVo guy's personality:

Simple, friendly and memorable ... with a nod toward TV. It's easy & approachable. It does not suggest technology. ... In as much as subscribers relate to TiVo as a life-changing experience, our vibrant color scheme helps express the enthusiasm of our subscriber base and differentiate TiVo at retail and in communications.

Energizing the base, corporate-style.

TiVo made me an A student! TiVo saved my marriage! The NYT finds the world's biggest TiVo enthusiasts. There's one guy ...

He has a TiVo and a ReplayTV hooked up to satellite receivers with each of his two TV's, and a fifth recorder hooked up to a third, TV-less satellite receiver in his garage. Since each TiVo unit can record two satellite channels at once, [he] can record seven of his and his wife's favorite shows if they are on at the same time.

Good luck with that marriage, TiVo man.

Searching ... not finding. It's hard not to find it funny when people come to your site after searching for something that has so completely nothing to do with the site. Today, somebody searched for "mickey mouse magnetic pages photo album," and I sure hope she (he?) found it. But really, why would you click here, when the snippet that appeared in your search results was:

... is a good folky album--and were dismayed to see ... John Kerry the "Best Photo Op" honor for his appearance ... motifs like skulls with Mickey Mouse ears, marijuana plants or ...

You want a Mickey Mouse photo album. What are the chances that skulls with Mickey Mouse ears could possibly take you in the right direction? Or did I lead some innocent soul astray? She just wanted a Mickey Mouse photo album and then she got all fascinated by the idea of skulls allied with her darling Mickey. And nothing was the same ever after. Good luck, o websearching Mickey fan!

The party of love, the party of fear. Prof. Yin is surprised by the nice, signed photo he received in the mail from the Bush campaign. They laid it on thick thanking him for his grassroots leadership, even though he is a registered Democrat. I get tons of stuff like this from both parties, presumably because I subscribe to a wide range of magazines. I always find it weird that they assume you're a hardcore supporter, but they must find that the assumption helps make people feel needed and willing to chip in. I even receive membership cards to things I've never joined and letters inquiring why I haven't "renewed" my membership, letters full of wacky self-examination, mulling about what they could have done wrong to turn me away, like some needy old lover. Those last few things are all Republican moves. The Democratic letters are always trying to scare me about things that are about to happen, how I'm about to lose all my rights and so forth. I would have thought the Democrats would be more about love and the Republicans more about fear, but not so, at least when speaking to people they think might have some money to hand over. The Democrats try to scare me about the Republicans, and the Republicans just want to be loved.

Infinitely cooler devices await us. It's been a day of petty nuisances, but I think I've gotten through them okay now. I even managed to order a cable modem for home use and got a really nice deal that included "SVOD," something I'd never heard of before. For some reason, it cost $10 a month less than just getting the cable modem. Apparently, it's some desperate attempt to hook people on something really cool before something infinitely cooler arrives, which is what TiVo is also doing. I remember seeing a Sony Betamax in the 1970s, one of the original type, which was huge and incredibly expensive. It seemed mindbogglingly amazing. So for now, I guess, TiVo is normal and SVOD is amazing. But frankly, there's a limit to how much stuff you actually want to watch. Having more control can make you realize you don't really want to watch much of anything. In the old days, if something was on, you had to decide if you ever wanted to watch it, and watch it now or never. Today, you can leave some recorded show festering on the TiVo, never waste any time watching it, and then just delete it. Being empowered to do more helps you do less. What a timesaver!