"'In that studio, I met a lot of people that help me feel safe and feel able to create whatever I want without thinking: Am I going to sell this or is this going to be something that people are going to want in their stores?' said Ms. Muñoz, who now lives in El Paso and has a studio in Guadalajara, Mexico."
I'm expending one of my 10 gift links on this one because I want you to see some of the godawful pottery the NYT is promoting for artists and empowerers of people of color. I found this article at the top of the NYT home page, right next to "Trump Favors Blunt Force in Dealing With Foreign Allies and Enemies Alike." No pun intended, I'm sure.
I'm old enough to remember the kind of gigantic atrocious ashtray that was regarded as an "art piece on your coffee table," back in the heyday of tobacco smoking.
Smoking paraphernalia "joined the world of home decor" a long time ago.
By the way, did you ever look and look and finally find a place where people helped you feel safe and feel able to create whatever you want without thinking and then you relocated to Mexico?
Now, get out there and be creative. Creative for the people. Of color. Perhaps orange. Or avocado....
"In a few short days, supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, memed chartreuse into an unusually potent political symbol.... 'I will aspire to be Brat,' Jake Tapper said on CNN to one of his correspondents, who had been holding up a slime-green meme printed out on a sheet of paper."
I used the last of this month's NYT gift link allowance on that article. Why? Because I knew it was hard to understand without more explanation, but I didn't want to do the explanation.
And you'll need to go over there anyway to see the particular green in question. It's a color that's connected to this word "brat," which reminds me of a word from many years ago when I was a teenager: "groovy." It was new and cool and precisely expressive of youth for a very short time before it got seized upon by everyone old and it became embarrassing.
From the golden moment before the collapse of "groovy":
Once the TV talking heads and political candidates start using your word, they've stolen it from you. You have to move on or use it ironically or do whatever it is you kids do today when the adults are annoying you.
As for you political candidates, be careful using the word "brat" in Wisconsin. I remember when John Kerry screwed up.
"Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colors in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, 'It’s too bright for me to tell you what color it is.' That’s why the sun looks white to us... 'Essentially, it’s a green star that looks white because it’s too bright, and it can also appear yellow, orange or red because of how our atmosphere works.... 'The sun is at its midlife, and it still has quite a lot of years before it changes colors.... It still hasn’t dimmed out one bit.... When astronomers say color, they really mean temperature.... But to anyone in the public, color just means the color you see and how you make sense of the world."
The second photo shows the scorched ground from the prescribed burn a couple weeks ago. It's interesting how some of the regrowth is coming up in circles.
I love James Taylor and the referenced song, and I'm not saying the whole humor piece is great, but it's there and it might amuse you if your quirky sense of humor aligns. I'm blogging it because I can imagine feeling so bonded to James Taylor that deep greens and blues would be the colors you choose, and because I've been thinking about the trend these days to drain color out of everything. Here's a TikTok I ran into yesterday, from Interstellar Isabellar, complaining about chromophobia in interior design:
ADDED: My theory is that they adjusted the color until Arabella was dressed in the shade of blue associated with Tiffany & Co. — see it here — and the other clothing (and the sky) went along for the ride. It came out so cute and hilarious that they put it up on Instagram, and the haters made it viral.
BUT: I looked through her Instagram but didn't see the picture. Others dug all the way back to last year — I didn't go that far — and found it:
"... carpets the floors of the State Capitol 'in a pleasing shade of green,' Didion writes. (What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been 'pleasing'?) Didion’s understated tone registers the nuances obscured by the quotidian: the stiff neutrality between mother and son ('The Skipper’s arrival is, I have been told, the pivotal point of Nancy Reagan’s day'), Nancy’s preference for little choreographies... As [Didion] puts it in her 1976 essay 'Why I Write': 'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. … What is going on in these pictures in my mind?'"
[Purple] wasn't the only color to avoid. Scarlet could push you into a murderous rage, while blue “excites the imagination and gives a craving for music and stagecraft, but it has a reaction that wrecks the nerves.” Meanwhile, “Solitary confinement in a yellow cell … will weaken any system and produce chronic hysteria,” and “sheer dead white, unbroken, will destroy your eyesight.”
Sounds like the key is to vary your colors. What drives you mad is the monotone. Do we really know the effect of one-intense-color interiors on people who stay inside all the time?
This question makes me think of Monet's all-yellow (almost) dining room at Giverny:
Elizabeth Warren sets off the fairly traditional dark blue and red in her palette with an unexpected mint green to freshen things up. The overall impression gives off a fitting academic activist vibe.
Kamala Harris’s branding features a blueish purple, a desaturated red, and a joyful, buttery yellow. The choice of yellow is an homage to Shirley Chisholm’s historic candidacy launched 47 years to the day before her own candidacy. Harris is half Jamaican and half Indian, and the palette of her branding comes across as an authentic celebration of both her identity and America’s multiracial and multicultural society.
Mint green? Joyful, buttery yellow?? That made me laugh. These colors are not fresh-looking at all. They look like they came from the 70s.
And think about doing a little shopping at Amazon through The Althouse Portal.
I love the mural, by the way. Such a weird wall to begin with, then a striking, simple design. The style reminds me of one of my favorite artists, Victor Brauner.
Should you want to be the guy Bret Easton Ellis wants to write a novel about?
If you don't know what he's talking about, here's the hilarious/painful interchange between Miller (the Trump adviser) and Acosta (of CNN):
Selected quotes:
Acosta: “What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”
Miller: “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
Aside from his suitability as a character in a novel, Miller is certainly right that Acosta is conflating the Emma Lazarus poem with the Statue and that the original historical meaning of the statue precedes and is not the same as those famous lines in the poem. WaPo points that out:
“New Colossus” was not part of the original statue built by the French and given to the American people as a gift to celebrate the country’s centennial. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to compose the poem in 1883 as part of a fundraising effort to build the statue’s base.... In 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’ death, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s base, just as millions of immigrants were streaming into New York harbor....
Earlier this year Rush Limbaugh blamed Lazarus for the false connection. “The Statue of Liberty had absolutely nothing to do with immigration,” Limbaugh said on a January 31 broadcast. “So why do people think that it does? Well, there was a socialist poet.”...
It was originally intended to be delivered to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration, the American Revolution.... The statue was not intended to recognize immigration. It was intended to recognize liberty and freedom. If you think they’re intertwined, don’t be misled.
Rush proceeds to mock Madeleine Albright for saying that Trump's immigration policy is making the Statue of Liberty cry:
The statue doesn’t cry. The statue is a statue. It’s made out of bronze. It doesn’t cry. There aren’t any tears coming from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty ’cause there aren’t any eyes, and the Statue of Liberty is not welcoming immigrants. What it represents is the beacon of liberty and freedom!
Yeah, well, maybe, but it's not made out of bronze. It's pure copper. We're just all misreading everything. But there's a continuum from misreading to interpretation. I can say for a fact that the statue is made out of copper, but the meaning of the statue is cultural, and it means what it has come to mean in the hearts of Americans. What the French had specifically in mind when they sent it to us is relevant if that's what's in our hearts.
"American Psycho"/I tried reading that a few months ago, and speaking of run-on sentences and that silly "grade" metric, I stopped reading after a two-page sentence which painfully detailed all the products and actions the guy used in his morning routine.
And yet, it you gave me 2 pages right now of Bret Easton Ellis's description of what he imagines Stephen Miller does and uses in his morning routine, I'd eagerly, happily read every word of it. I assume it would be... completely compelling.
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