"An early affection for tossing pots on the wheel led her to graduate school... where she studied both ceramics and sculpture with Peter Voulkos... who believed in subjecting clay to Abstract Expressionist theatrics."

"As Ms. Heilmann later recalled, Mr. Voulkos liked to walk across the classroom holding a homemade pot, then trip (or rather, as she said, 'fake trip'), with the pot smashing on the floor. He would collect the broken shards and assemble them into a surprisingly interesting sculpture. Ms. Heilmann’s own early sculptures, which consisted of ragged-looking objects constructed from inexpensive craft-shop materials like plastic clay, tin foil, cotton balls, bamboo and glitter, similarly sought to foreground the process of their making."

From "Mary Heilmann, Painter of Vividly Wobbly Abstractions, Dies at 86/An emblem of the obstacles faced by women artists of her generation, she was 67 when her first museum retrospective opened to rave reviews in 2007" (NYT gift link).

ADDED: Something about the attitude in the comments here made me remember a line from the movie "Blue Moon":

She’s a college student. Sophomore. Yale. Not the general school; that’s for the guys. This is the School of Fine Arts! Bohemian goddesses in gray smocks mixing paint in morning light. She’s all of twenty years old.

I bought the screenplay so I could quote that. (I highly recommend that movie, by the way. It's the most like "My Dinner with Andre" that I've ever run across: An unusual man talks about theater for a long time. Catch it on Netflix.)

I do appreciate the commenters focusing on the phrase "An emblem of the obstacles."

"It's very beautiful in its shattered state.... Do you see how wonderful it is?"

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by SARAH EYTON (@saraheyton)

"Everything about 'the Claw' feels tawdry, especially when they turn on the lights, which send bolts of blue and white illumination down the 154-foot interlocking steel arches...."

I'm reading "Joe Rogan called the White House UFC event ‘so America.’ He’s right. The 'Claw' bursting out of the White House grounds is the perfect metaphor for the moment, injecting bloody spectacle into the country’s birthday celebration" in the Washington Post

I'm reading that because it's by the Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott. He writes:

[T]he UFC match isn’t about celebrating the foundational myths of American democracy. It inhabits a landscape of darker myths, like the perpetual struggle of the frontier, the faux chivalry and resentments of the Lost Cause, the Darwinian drama of survival in a world of hostile forces, enemies, chaos....

Trump takes pleasure in presiding over conflict. The world comes to him, where he, the perpetual winner, lords over contests, over victories and defeats. You’re fired. You don’t hold any winning cards. You’ve lost the match. For many Americans, there is nothing surreal about this delight in domination. It simply reflects the world they live in, where people are losing all the time, at the gas pump, at dead-end jobs, in marriages that founder on the shoals of stress and poverty....

"The idea that trying too hard is deeply uncool is... nothing new. In the ’90s, it was the central dogma..."

"... of the grunge era.... Similarly, the current just-rolled-out-of-bed look might be seen as a pendulum swing away from looksmaxxing, big blowouts and heavily filtered social media photos. Guido Palau, who styled the windswept ponytails at the Prada show, describes the look as 'weirdly bourgeois' and designed to keep people guessing. 'If you’re wearing the most beautiful cashmere jumper and it costs a fortune, you want people to know but not to know,' he says, and messy hair works the same way. 'There’s a kind of inverted snobbery.'"

From "Want to Stay on Trend? Stop Brushing Your Hair. With messy mops showing up on both runways and red carpets, the key to fashion’s new favorite hairstyle is doing less" (NYT).

I've long been a fan of this kind of hairdo. When I was a teen, in the 1960s, I imagined myself becoming famous as the hairdresser who invented the style called The Mess-Up. How could you get people to rave about your brilliant work when what you were doing is messing up their hair? I don't know, but it's genius if you can make that happen. I had the vision to mess up the hair just the right way, the way that looks so nonchalant and witty. 

Life took me elsewhere, but the inspiration of The Mess-Up must have formed an underlying anti-structure.

You know, I didn't stumble across that link myself. Meade texted it to me, and I'm pretty sure that had to do with my criticism of the hair of the women on the various news commentary TV shows he watches. I loathe the shows, but I sit there, often with noise-cancellation AirPods in while I read my iPad, but I do take in the visuals enough to become annoyed by the messy cocker-spaniel ears that festoon the female heads. Make is sleek! Pin it up! Look professional!

"Tennessee bars journalists from witnessing the intravenous line insertion process, the first major step of the lethal injection protocol."

"I noted the time we entered the chamber. After about seven minutes of searching for a vein, they were able to insert an IV into his right arm. Then, following protocol, they also tried to set an IV in his left arm. That failed, so they moved on to his left hand, poking him over and over again. Cycling through needles, the executioners communicated mostly through tense glances and head shakes.... About 30 minutes in, a doctor entered and... told the executioners to remove Mr. Carruthers’s socks and search for veins in his feet.... After that didn’t work, the doctor asked whether anyone in the room knew how to gain access to Mr. Carruthers’s jugular vein. Then, the doctor decided to attempt to establish a central line... puncturing the neck, chest or groin.... Eventually, the doctor said he was not able to set a central line.... By then, an hour had passed. Still, the execution team continued probing his body for another access point....The state’s constructed illusion of precision had collapsed, revealing something far more chaotic and brutal...."

Writes Maria DeLiberato, in "In a Tennessee Execution Chamber, I Saw Chaos" (NYT).

The chaos ended because the governor acted, delaying the execution for another year. It's already been a long time. Carruthers was sentenced to death in 1996. 

Paris.

Problems in Paris pic.twitter.com/KOU8r5UF4S

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2026

Out of the blue, Spotify decided to celebrate my first day of Spotify with the news of the first song I ever played there.

And it's something that's a complete mystery to me. I can't remember ever hearing of it. Can't think of a reason I'd have stumbled across it and gone to Spotify to start up with it so I could hear this thing. Is Spotify pulling my leg?

I asked Grok what the hell it was and got: "'Chatty Cats' is likely some super-obscure or random kids'/background track that got logged as your very first play. It's extremely common for Spotify's 'first song ever' to be something you don't recognize at all." 

"What a welcome and much-needed reminder of a President who valued art, beauty, and decency. A glaring contrast to the garish, self-serving chaos of the current one."

Says one commenter at the NYT article "The Audacity of Art at the Obama Presidential Center/Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned 30 artists to create work for their campus, which starts visitor previews next week on the South Side of Chicago."

That's a gift link so you can see the photos of the artwork inside the building, which I think is quite good, and so you can gaze at the "View from the Sky Room" photograph that shows a view from the building, looking out through one of the letters of the text from an Obama speech that you can attempt to read if you stand on the ground and gaze upward at the building.

The view from the Sky Room is garish chaos, but the chaos seems designed to give ordinary citizens a place to play, that is, it's not trying to look good, it's trying to offer what can be used. Included in the play equipment is an N.B.A.-size basketball court and a "sledding hill." We'll see how much freewheeling tomfoolery unfolds in this space. The message is casual playfulness for the people, and it is in distinct contrast to the design ideas Trump has been imposing on the White House and elsewhere. His message is grandeur and elegance.

Sunrise hubbub.

Video by Meade, this morning, on Lake Mendota.

It's a hubbub, to my ear, but I noticed that if I left the subtitles on, the computer was able to discern words that were chaotic noise to me, no more articulate than the nonsense of the geese. 

"President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands."

Said a White House spokesman, quoted in "Trump’s Ballroom Design Has Barely Been Scrutinized/Architects Say It Shows" (NYT)(gift link because there are some detailed graphics).

Also quoted is Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is suing over the ballroom. She says: "Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us."

Have you ever paused to contemplate the meaningfulness of red tape? Maybe the deliberation and drawn-out procedure is subtly, secretly the very best part of what we do together, the very heart of democracy. 

"Your need for approval is like a sickness."

A gem of meaning at 3:14 in this video of the opening of the Oscars show last night.

Not having seen the movies, I experienced this noisy cluttered barrage of vignettes as ugly chaos. It reminded me — with jarring pokes and jabs — why I don't want to see new movies anymore. Why was Conan in overdone makeup that made him look like a very ugly woman? Why did animated Conan develop stars in his eyes for 3 adolescent girls? Why were children screaming and chasing him? He stops for a moment to speak Norwegian and examine whether his need for approval is like a sickness and then the children screaming chase him out of the psychoanalytic dark Norwegian room. It's back to the noisy cluttered barrage that is Hollywood as Conan runs into the theater. I don't know what movie those children were supposed to represent, so I was just thinking generically of Hollywood's exploitation of children. How did the children become the monsters? Or were they running from monsters and Conan running with them, not away from them? At least tell a clear story. But no, I think this years stories were about chaos and raw fear and uncomprehended monsters. 

"Corinthian is the highest order, and that’s what our other two branches of government have."

"Why the White House didn’t originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me."

Said Rodney Mims Cook Jr., "the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel charged with advising the president on design matters, said in an interview last week," quoted in "Appointee wants to replace White House columns with the ones Trump prefers/The head of a federal arts commission is proposing the more ornate Corinthian style for the nearly 200-year-old columns at the building’s front entrance" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can see the drawings showing the number and location of the longstanding Ionic columns and the Corinthian columns to be built in the new East Wing).

We're told that Trump prefers Corinthian columns but also that, according to a White House spokesperson, "there are no plans to change the existing Ionic columns outside the White House." It's just Cook spreading the alarm about redoing the scroll-y tops into those leafy tops.

Do you have any preference with regard to the tops of Greek columns? Do you care what it meant to the Greeks or even understand the notion of "the highest order"?

"With the Epstein files, searching for almost any word can lead to some interesting or weird or confusing or awful or misleading insight."

"It could also lead to some random person’s lunch order. Any single file, deciphered and placed in the right context, could be some important something no one else has yet brought to light. It could also just be spam from Epstein’s junk folder, or cryptic inside-joke gibberish that will soon become fodder for a conspiracy theory no one will ever be able to debunk. Even an AI-powered dissertation on what’s in all this bulk data might be volume length. It took years to get ahold of just more than half of the millions of known Epstein files. It may take just as long, or longer, to fully understand what they mean."

From "Making Sense of the Epstein Files, One Disturbing Search at a Time" (NY Magazine).

"The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party..."

"... that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault. Federal law enforcement and immigration agents have a tough job. But Americans expect them to carry out their duties in a lawful, accountable way, and to work with, rather than against, state and local officials to ensure public safety. That's not what we're seeing in Minnesota. In fact, we're seeing the opposite."

So reads the "Statement by President Obama and Mrs. Obama," posted on X by Barack Obama.

A lynch mob? A crowd chants "Kristi Noem will Hang!" in New York City.

NOW: "Kristi Noem will Hang!" Huge crowd chants in Foley Square NYC, also "Save a life, kill an ICE" as they gather to protest the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Some in the crowd condemn the talk of killing. pic.twitter.com/ifrXNZB0dz

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) January 8, 2026

Democrats who hope to win back power need to act now to reconnect with peace and good order. They seem to have encouraged the chaos yesterday, and they need something quite different today lest they be seen as they wanted us to see Trump after January 6th, as having incited insurrection.

Stephen Miller goes into a long Trumpish "weave," and the reporters don't turn and walk away.

I guess they're still waiting and hoping that they'll be the one to wedge in a question that will somehow stymie the man who's never going to stop:

I am SO GLAD the Trump administration decided to completely UNLEASH Stephen Miller on the media.

He regularly displays a masterclass in debunking their lies.

"Guys - do you know the difference between a deportation order and a withholding order? Do you know the difference? Any… pic.twitter.com/sDmzpLtiyu

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 14, 2025

What a dysfunctional relationship! Miller will take any question and return to the tortured, raped, and murdered women and girls who rule his world. The reporters cling to the hope that the plight of the deportees will seize the hearts of America. If only Miller would say something sufficiently inhumane about them, but every answer is the same: Think of their victims — the women and girls!

"One day I saw this camera room, and nobody was in there, and I took one and tested it, walked ou,t and they never noticed that a camera was missing."

Said Werner Herzog to Anderson Cooper, who injected flatly: "That's a stolen camera."

Herzog: "It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."

And I like this, about Klaus Kinski: "I had a a mad man as a leading character. He had a temper as demented as it gets. You had to contain him, and I made his madness — his explosive destructiveness —productive for the screen.... Every gray hair on my head I call Kinsky."

"All this gray — it’s so dark, it’s so gloomy, so ugly. It’s like seeing creativity and art and the colors of my community disappear right in front of my eyes."

Said Richard Segovia, 71, a longtime resident of the Mission District of San Francisco, quoted in "The house color that tells you when a neighborhood is gentrifying/A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found shades of gray permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased" (WaPo)(free-access link).

But what does gray mean?

A white woman who owns a home decor company asserts: "It all comes down to this perception of wealth and luxury, this idea that neutrals indicate status.... Black homeownership in D.C. has been shrinking for years, which means the very culture of these neighborhoods has been changing. When we see house flippers try to take color out of a house, or a neighborhood, they’re making it more palatable to mostly White people."

But what's behind all this gray?

The order of orders: chronological order.

I found — with kind help — a way to get rid of the reply function in the comments. I hope you, like me, enjoy the return to chronological order. I never liked comments jumping the line, displaying above comments that had gone up earlier. It was especially bad because my browser still displayed the comments in chronological order and therefore had many comments that were replying to who knows what.

Anyway, I've said it before and I like to repeat it: the greatest order of all time is chronological order:

In the previous post, I wrote: "[Chronological order is] the most obvious order, used by lovers of order all over the world and through the grand course of time. There are other orders — alphabetical order, order of importance...."

This made me want to put order... in order.

"Trump to call for a 'revolution' in common sense."

Says the crawl at CNN, which I'm watching with the sound off. Lots of reporters in heavy jackets and scarves standing in front of various inauguration scenes — the Episcopal church, the line for humble citizens to get into the outdoor space for witnessing the indoor swearing in, etc. 

That "'revolution' in common sense" language refers to the inaugural address, and it sounds like an interesting mix of order and disorder... and also like a reference to the Revolutionary War pamphlet titled "Common Sense."