Understated sunrise without the sun.

We were there for this at 5:16:

Later, I continued my practice of sitting in the front-yard and reading an entire book. Sample page:

I showed that photo of the page to my son John, who said, "When I was a kid I loved that kind of understated humor" and sent me Salvador Dali's "Fried Egg on the Plate without the Plate":

Understated humor... and yet when the sun does something like that sunny-side-up egg, I consider it one of the most extravagant sunrises of the year. Like this, from last May:

Feel free to understate or overstate whatever you like in the comments.

And consider supporting this blog by purchasing a readable-in-one-sitting book by Edward Gorey using my Amazon Associates link. The book containing the threatened deviled egg is "The Betrayed Confidence."

"'chunk" and 'chunks' two posts down. Lot of chunk-ing this morning. How often has that word appeared in your posts over the years?"

TML writes in the comments to a post that begins with the Trump quote "So they take over a big chunk of a city called Seattle."

The other post is about a city that "voted to name a park for a 1970 explosion that rained chunks of rotting whale flesh on curious bystanders."

So how often has "chunk" come up over the 16 years of this blog? Oh, maybe 50 or 100, but the most interesting thing is that one time, back in 2015, it came up twice in one day and I made it the word of the day:

"Chunk" is the word of the day here... for no other reason than that it's come up on its own twice: "invented something called the 'Cha-Chunker'" and "pegs in their hubs that can 'take chunks out of' the granite ledge." It's a funny word, isn't it? One thinks of "blowing chunks" or the "Goonies" boy Chunk or — if you're really old — "What a chunk o' chocolate":



The word "chunk" somehow devolved from "chuck" — the squarish cut of meat — and "chuck," like "cluck," is the English speaker's reproduction of the sound a chicken makes.

"Chunk" is a notably American word. Here are some of the quotes collected by the (unlinkable) OED:

1856   E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. i. 15   A chunk of frozen walrus-beef....
1833   J. Hall Legends of West 50   If a man got into a chunk of a fight with his neighbour, a lawyer would clear him for half a dozen muskrat skins....
a1860   New York in Slices, Theatre (Bartl.),   Now and then a small chunk of sentiment or patriotism or philanthropy is thrown in....
1894   Congress. Rec. 13 July 7445/1   Just one moment, my friend. You are a lawyer... Yes, a chunk of a lawyer.
1907   Chicago Tribune 8 May 7 (advt.)    It's really ridiculous the way we've knocked chunks off these Spring overcoat prices.
1923   P. G. Wodehouse Inimitable Jeeves xiii. 148   Eustace and I both spotted that he had dropped a chunk of at least half a dozen pages out of his sermon-case as he was walking up to the pulpit.
1957   T. S. Eliot On Poetry & Poets 49   Crabbe is a poet who has to be read in large chunks, if at all.

As for other uses of "chunk," there's Trump on June 12, 2020, also going on about Seattle: "They took over a city, a city, a big city, Seattle, a chunk of it. A big chunk."

And I myself used the word only yesterday: "We — some of us — prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on the flat surface of the embedded video on Twitter as protesters drag down another stately chunk of metal."

This is also me, on July 5, 2018: "You know, out there in New York, California, and Massachusetts, they may think of the Midwest as a big undifferentiated chunk of flyover country, but to those of us who live here, our state (and even our region within the state) is quite specific."

In 2017, I wrote: "The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate." You can see that I used "chunk" there to create a poetic connection between the estate and the fleshly corpse.

Back in 2014, I had the occasion to parody Bob Dylan:

Well, that wigged art blonde
With his wheel in the gorge
And Turtle, that friend of theirs
With his checks all forged
And his cheeks in a chunk
With his cheese that says "ouch"
They’re all gonna be there
On that 82-million-dollar couch

In October 2008, I said: "The most honest admission in the book, to my ear, was the confession that he spent a huge chunk of his formative years watching TV sitcoms with his (white) grandfather." I had just read Obama's "Dreams From My Father."

And speaking of "From My Father," I have something from my "Records From My Father" series. I said: "Unfortunately, this record, my 5th choice for this Records From My Father series, has a chunk taken out of it, and so I can't listen to Count Basie's 'One O'Clock Jump' or Dinah Shore singing 'Buttons and Bows.'"



What were all the other things? Mostly "chunk" appeared in quotes. The chunks tend to be of food, of time, of land or rock, and of money. I was pleased to see that in these years, I'd never once used (or even quoted) the trite phrase "chunk of change."

I don't believe that a "Man walks out of San Francisco art gallery with Salvador Dali painting worth $20K."

But that's an NBC headline. I'm just going to guess that NBC doesn't know the difference between a painting a print. A Salvador Dali painting isn't going to cost so little. A Dali print might sell for that. Whether it's worth so much is open to question.

Here's ABC News: "Brazen thief caught on camera with stolen Salvador Dali etching 'Burning Giraffe' from San Francisco gallery." Key word: "etching." It's a print. How many copies of Dali's etching "Burning Giraffe" are there?

And, actually, that print seems to be called "Surrealistic Bullfight — Burning Giraffe."

Dali had a burning giraffe in a painting called "Burning Giraffe," and "Dalí first used the burning giraffe image in his 1930 film L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age). It appears again in 1937 in the painting The Invention of Monsters. Dalí described this image as 'the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster.' He believed it to be a premonition of war."

So let's not get too confused about the burning giraffe.

Here's the original (and incredibly dumb) appearance of Dali's burning giraffe in "L'Âge d'Or":



Here's a 1998 article from the NYT, "Putting Some Order To All the Dali Prints, Both Real and Fake":

The way people act in real life is disgusting compared to the way I behave in my best dreams.

Trump's dreams are lovely compared to reality.



Transcript:

But we have to take steps to harden our schools so that they are less vulnerable to attack. This includes allowing well-trained and certified school personnel to carry concealed firearms. At some point, you need volume. I don’t know that a school is going to be able to hire a hundred security guards that are armed. Plus, you know, I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this week. And they weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners. All right?

The way they performed was, frankly, disgusting. They were listening to what was going on. The one in particular, he was then — he was early. And then you had three others that probably a similar deal a little bit later, but a similar kind of a thing.

You know, I really believe — you don’t know until you test it — but I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t had a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.

And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you.... The delusion that the people you've met are the good people. The disgusting — deplorable — people are farther away.

When other people do something disgusting, you should wonder whether, in the same situation, you'd have been disgusting too.

But he's serving up high hopes of solutions that could work, and like his dream of how he'd run into a stream of bullets for the kids, these solutions are happening now in the realm of the imaginary. You see yourself running toward danger, and you see the "well-trained and certified school personnel" with their concealed firearms "harden[ing] our schools." What fine, brave, competent personnel they are! But they'll be school district employees, just human beings beset by the complicated, unpredictable failings that cause real life to play out in a manner so different from dreams.



That's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening." That title was a clue in today's NYT crossword. The answer is Salvador Dali:

In this "hand-painted dream photograph", as Dalí generally called his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, amidst which [his wife] Gala is the subject of the scene.... In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a Yelloweye rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs....

In 1962, Dalí said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."

An elephant with long flamingo legs. That could be the new symbol of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that dreams.


Detail from "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" by Salvador Dali.

Dreams! They're not just for Democrats anymore.

The Salvador Dali DNA test results are in.

You may remember discussing, back in July, the exhumation of Salvador Dali: "What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?"

You might say, no, it's not surrealistic. There's nothing more down to earth than digging a decayed corpse out of the ground. But Salvador Dali — the surrealist in question — was extracted not from some graveyard, but from a crypt within his own museum.

Here's the NYT article about the exhumation, done according to a court order in a case about whether Pilar Abel, "a 61-year-old Tarot card reader," has a claim to "the worth hundreds of millions of dollars that Dali left to the Spanish state." So it's not as though Dali avoided writing a will. He tried to give all his money to the government....

Ms. Abel wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a “clandestine love affair” that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.

Dalí died at 84 in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship: Gala moved to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and Dalí could only visit her there if she extended a written invitation....

And now we know, Abel is not the daughter of Salvador Dali, and the embalmed remains of the great artist will be returned to the crypt.

I intentionally wrote 2 posts about Salvador Dali today, and — surrealistically — he made a random appearance in a third post.

The 2 posts that are intentionally about him are "What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?" and "His moustache is still intact, [like clock hands at] 10 past 10, just as he liked it. It’s a miracle."

Those 2 posts happened today as a result of a real-world event: The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate.

In between those 2 posts, there was a post that came into being solely because the word "instigator" popped up in conversation. (And it wasn't a conversation about Salvador Dali.) The word makes me want to hear the old song "Something in the Air," which begins with the line "Call out the instigators," which is the name of the post where I embedded the video. I had not watched the video all the way through, so I hadn't noticed what a commenter — Kassaar — pointed out: "Dali is in the Thunderclap Newman video... Coincidence?"

Let me clip out the precise point:



Either that's a coincidence or the awakened spirit of Salvador Dali is haunting me.

(Interesting lorgnette, by the way, with the handle in the center like a slingshot.)

"His moustache is still intact, [like clock hands at] 10 past 10, just as he liked it. It’s a miracle."

"His face was covered with a silk handkerchief – a magnificent handkerchief. When it was removed, I was delighted to see his moustache was intact … I was quite moved. You could also see his hair."

The exhumation of Salvador Dalí — already discussed in an earlier post today, here — does not respect the dead artist's privacy. Instead, an embalmer named Narcís Bardalet — who also handled the body at the time of the entombment in 1989 — gives the press his eyewitness account. He also said that the body "was like wood," and an electric saw had to be used to desecrate the body (that is, to collect the court-ordered bone samples).

These quotes appear in The Guardian, where there is a photograph of the woman who brought the lawsuit. She does look very much like Dali. Under Spanish law, she would be entitled to a quarter of the estate (though Dali willed everything to the Spanish state). The woman, Maria Pilar Abel, did not learn who her father was from her mother, but from her mother's husband's mother, who told her: "I know you aren’t my son’s daughter and that you are the daughter of a great painter, but I love you all the same."

Via Metafilter, where they are making jokes: "I will now enjoy imagining Dalí's mustache surviving the destruction of the earth, the guttering out of the sun, and even the heat death of the universe. In the end, there will only be the mustache, floating serenely in the void. An unguessable number of eons later, CREATION!"... "His moustache was in excellent shape, but his pocket watch apparently had melted."...

Speaking of Salvador Dali's mustache, here he is on "What's My Line?" in 1959, puzzling the blindfolded panel and cracking up the audience. It's a question about the mustache that identifies him:

Man hands.

A Drudge theme right now:

A topic that came up in the Dali thread, where I'd said "What path did your eye take and how many points of interest did you take in before you saw... the snake around her wrist?" and holdfast said: "before you saw...the creepy man-hands?" Closeup:



Classic "Seinfeld" bit:

What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?

You might say, no, it's not surrealistic. There's nothing more down to earth than digging a decayed corpse out of the ground. But Salvador Dali — the surrealist in question — was extracted not from some graveyard, but from a crypt within his own museum.

Here's the NYT article about the exhumation, done according to a court order in a case about whether Pilar Abel, "a 61-year-old Tarot card reader," has a claim to "the worth hundreds of millions of dollars that Dali left to the Spanish state." So it's not as though Dali avoided writing a will. He tried to give all his money to the government. (Am I wrong?)

The tombstone was lifted with a pulley to allow access to the painter’s coffin below. Forensic experts then collected hair, teeth and nail samples, as well as a couple of bones...

Are they making a collage?!

... which will be replaced once the DNA testing is completed.

Ms. Abel wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a “clandestine love affair” that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.

Dalí died at 84 in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship: Gala moved to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and Dalí could only visit her there if she extended a written invitation....

Gala was 10 years older than Dali. From her Wikipedia page:

Due to his purported phobia of female genitalia,* Dalí was said to have been a virgin when they met on the Costa Brava in 1929. Around that time she was found to have uterine fibroids, for which she underwent a hysterectomy in 1936. She was Dalí's muse, directly inspiring and appearing in many of his works.

Here's the most prominent image, "Portrait of Galarina":



What path did your eye take and how many points of interest did you take in before you saw...

"Kevin... placed his Burberry glasses on the floor beneath a placard describing the theme of the gallery."

"He said neither he nor TJ did anything to influence museum visitors, such as standing around and looking at the glasses. Within about three minutes, people appeared to be viewing their handiwork as bona fide art, though Kevin said that without his glasses, he could not see what was happening too well."

Art prank.

I say an art prank is art anyway, so what difference does it make?*

It's nice that some teenagers thought of doing this and pulled it off so quickly and elegantly, but we've seen things like this many times before, perhaps more commonly in the form of someone in a gallery staring at something that's not an artwork and causing others to regard the thing as art. I seem to remember reading about Salvador Dali doing something like that. And of course there are all the stories about some artwork being seen as trash and thrown out.

__________________

*The difference is, you're putting your art in someone else's gallery, without invitation. It's like hanging one of your own paintings on a museum wall. Or... that would damage the wall. It's like making a drawing on a Post-It note and sticking it up next to drawings in a museum.

ADDED: Back in 2011, Meade put his whole-body art in the Milwaukee Art Museum right next to the Duane Hanson sculpture, "Janitor":

The Wall Street Journal worries that Congress is not making enough laws...

... and that it's getting "rusty" because it's "not getting much practice" at the "art of lawmaking."

As if making a lot of laws ever was a way to get good at it.

Moreover, we're about to lose some of our greatest law-artists:

The retirements of Reps. John Dingell (D., Mich.), Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) and George Miller (D., Calif.) at the end of this year represent a huge drain of legislative skill in an institution where such experience is in short supply. Taken together, those three men alone – authors of major health, education and environmental laws of the last quarter century – will leave Capitol Hill with 139 years of experience behind them.

Man, it's like the late 80s when we lost Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali! It's so tough to lose one of the greats....



Art! It's dying!

Top 10 Spanish mustaches.

Beginning with Salvador Dali ("who described his pointy facial hair as 'antennae with which to trap art,' used date sugar to sharpen the ends and also attract 'clean flies'").

Champagne chair...

... contest.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lauderdale Vet said:

I passed that along to my wife, who seems interested :) She'd make a nice chair, I think.

Which made me think of this famous Thurber drawing:

>

There must be a comical drawing of a woman as a chair or an actual chair in the form of a woman. I looked for furniture in human form, and found some stuff in the general neighborhood — the Dali-inspired lips sofa — and this amused me:



And you can unburden yourself here:

"Gilliam... was standing outside a restaurant in Soho when a car backed into him. 'Yes, a man can fly,' observed a bystander as he flew past."

Hilarious assholes they have in England, it seems.

He broke his back, but seems fine now, despite a cracked vertebra and dislodged disc. "Yeah, I'm a lizard," he says, cackling.

From an article on Terry Gilliam's seemingly cursed movie "The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus." Other problems: The producer died suddenly. And so did the star — Heath Ledger.

"It just isn't possible that he's dead," [said Gilliam.] "There's nothing he can't do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn't like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense.... "

We're not all flying men/lizards.

"I ... looked at how to do the remaining scenes without Heath, and realised that, since his character goes through a magic mirror three times, we could get three actors to play the role."

He got Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, who are all donating their compensation to Ledger's 3-year-old child Matilda.

Other interesting things in the linked article:

1. George Harrison believed that the soul of The Beatles transmigrated into Monty Python when The Beatles died.

2. Monty Python broke up because the guys "got bored of each other."

3. "[Gilliam] renounced his American citizenship in 'disillusionment' with the Bush years, but he retains a pigtail which makes him look like an ageing hippy." You know what I don't understand? The role of "but" in that sentence.

4. Gilliam has never taken drugs, out of sheer fear of losing the distinction "between fantasy and reality." "It was only 15 years ago that I discovered I couldn't fly. I have such a 'sense memory' of flying around the world at the height of a table that when someone asked me to show them, I really thought I could do it."

5. In lieu of drugs: Dali, Ernst, Breughel, Bosch, and Mad magazine.

On being bored watching movies.

We were talking about movies last night, and Henry said:

I hate movies.

It's not the movies, so much. It's how long they are.

After one hour of predictable complication, the second hour of predictable resolution is unbearable.

I sympathized, mostly. Not that I find everything predictable. Actually, I don't. My boredom takes the form of viewing each scene as something to be gotten through, to be tolerated. I have the feeling that nothing will happen, even though I constantly tell myself, it's a movie, something always happens, in every scene. But it's just going to be one of those movie things, that happen because something always has to happen to make it a movie. Two characters are having an ordinary time, and my usual boredom kicks in: Nothing will ever happen. I realize: But this is a movie, so it must. I reach a new level of bored: Yes, something violent will happen or be revealed or someone will get very concerned or upset for some reason.

For example, "Spellbound," which I watched last night: People would be sitting around talking about a swimming pool, and Ingrid Bergman would draw the shape of the pool on the tablecloth with a fork, and Gregory Peck would get all upset. That's not a good example of the way movies bore me though, because there's a cool little mystery about why parallel lines freak him out, which is what you remember if you haven't seen the film in a long time and decide to give it another go. But there are many unspiffy scenes with actors pretending to be psychiatrists, gliding along gloomily through a shadowy house that you're supposed to believe is a mental hospital.

Ingrid Bergman is either in her glasses, with her hair pinned back, and icily fending off what today we'd call sexual harassment but was apparently the daily norm at this place, or she's got the glasses off, her hair is mussed, and she's hot for her new boss -- Gregory Peck -- so that she'll get up in the middle of the night, put on a gorgeous bathrobe, and glide on up the shadowy stairway and right into his bedroom, in search of sexual harassment. I'm complaining about movies, but I loved that scene. Not only did icy Ingrid's sexuality emerge, depicted by a surreal sequence of opening doors that really felt like emerging sexuality, but her bathrobe had parallel lines on it, so Gregory Peck got another chance to subtly freak out. And poor icy Ingrid wasn't going to get to float through the doors quite yet.

And on to more scenes, scene after scene, with shadowy stairways and fusty, harass-y psychiatrist/actors and windblown outdoor shots to get your hopes up about Ingrid's sexuality and Gregory getting all worried again and when is that Dali dream sequence going to show up so we can turn this off and go to bed?

Al Pacino will play the part of Salvador Dali.

How surreal!



I can see it. Al can do what he wants.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 12.

It's Day 12 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) Today's page shows my fascination with language, both Dutch and English as seen by the Dutch. With a little Salvador Dali barrette to go with the fashion theme on the second side of the page.

"How did you prepare for the role?"

Merv Griffin reveals that when a talk show host asks that question, he's "in terrible trouble." Griffin's proud of never asking that. But he did, he reveals, deliberately ply guests with drink to get better interviews.

He also reminisces about "his chat with Salvador Dalí, who brought along paintings to Mr. Griffin's show":

"I said, 'Mr. Dalí, I don't understand your work,' " he recalled, "and he said: 'Yes, that is it! Dalí is confusion!' "

Hmmm... that reminds me of my stock response to law students who say they've found a case confusing. That confusion ... that is understanding! Because the case is confused!

And did you know Merv Griffin wrote that thinking music that's played during the final question on "Jeopardy!"? He's made "probably close to $70-80 million" from that little snippet. Fair enough! Much of the charm of "Jeopardy!" comes from the feeling you get from that music -- happy and nervous! -- at the end of the show.

I see that DVDs of his old shows are coming out. I'm eager to see these. I watched the show back in the 60s and especially remember how funny and appealing regular guest Richard Pryor was back then.