"On a recent afternoon at the Venice Biennale, I walked into a bright blue portable john and peed for art."

"Just outside the booth, a naked woman was submerged in a huge water tank, breathing through a scuba mouthpiece. My urine was about to pass along a tube from the toilet through several filtration systems, before topping up her glass chamber’s water level. The performer, who would stay in the tank for at least four hours, was essentially living in other people’s waste. And she had plenty of donors. The toilet is part of a presentation called 'Seaworld Venice' by the choreographer and theater-maker Florentina Holzinger that is undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year’s Biennale, which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through Nov. 22."

From "These Toilets in Venice Have the Art World Aflush/Undoubtedly the biggest talker at this year’s Venice Biennale is the Austrian pavilion, where visitors can make their own contributions to the work on show" (NYT).

I clicked on that link for "Seaworld Venice" and was confronted with big red letters saying "I live in your piss."

This is the kind of degradation of women that feminists used to rail against, but, here, the artist is female, so I guess we're not supposed to notice. The message is purportedly environmentalism. Also the artist puts herself out there: "Part of the performance at the pavilion involved Holzinger swinging her body from side to side inside a metal bell attached to a crane to make it ring out." Video at the link. Holzinger is naked. A commenter over there notes that she risks deafness, performing as a bell clapper.

ADDED: I don't remember ever seeing "talker" used to mean the thing being talked about: the show is "undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year's Biennale." I understand "talker" meaning a person doing that talking, but not This show is a big talker, meaning it's what everyone's talking about. I guess it's like the use of "-er" in "looker" used to refer to someone people look at and not the one doing the looking.

The OED defines "talker" only as the one doing the talking. An example from Jane Austen (from "Emma"): "I am rather a talker; and now and then I have let a thing escape me which I should not." 

And then there's that Shakespeare adage, from "Richard III": "Talkers are no good doers." I think we don't use that one too much. We're more likely to go with: "All talk and no action," "Actions speak louder than words," "Talk is cheap," and "Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk." 

"Chinese carmaker Seres has been granted a patent for what it calls an 'in-vehicle toilet' that slides under a passenger's seat for visits to the loo while on the road...."

"Chinese electric vehicles have become increasingly packed with unconventional features, like built-in massage seats, karaoke systems and a fridge, to stand out in a highly competitive market.... The loo will come with a fan and exhaust pipe to channel odours out of the car.... Waste is collected in a tank that has to be emptied manually. The toilet also features a rotating heating element that evaporates urine and dries other waste. When not in use, the toilet is concealed beneath the seat, making full use of the space inside a car without requiring more room."

BBC News reports.

Via Metafilter, where somebody links to this video:

"Pittsburghers take pride in their practical solutions, especially the quirky ones, such as the 'Pittsburgh chair'..."

"... that we use to save the parking space we shoveled out after a snowstorm. There are folding chairs, barstools, even an occasional upholstered chair — whatever your choice. The chairs are sacrosanct, and they help avoid neighborhood disputes. Or the 'Pittsburgh toilet' that stands alone and unobstructed in the basement of many older working-class homes — porcelain artifacts of when the mills were booming. It made practical sense when the men returned from the mills to wash off the grime in the laundry tubs and finish their business in the basement before going upstairs for their meal. But there has been no easy solution for keeping schools open when an expected 500,000 to 700,000 visitors attend events...."

Writes Duquesne lawprof Joseph Sabino Mistick, in "Schools are closing for the NFL draft. What does this teach students? Pittsburgh prides itself on showing up and working hard. Students should, too" (WaPo).

Milestones in Feminism: The question is not what did the woman do, but what did the woman wear.

The retrogression is not really Trump's. It's Breitbart's. Trump is just passing along the publicity received by his wife:

Breitbart's opinion on aesthetics is worthless. Look what an ugly mess it is:

That's my screenshot from the Breitbart article.

Readers are expected to look past the drink this/don't drink this/robot puppy/robot bunny advertising and read what looks like a press release: "Melania Trump chose a gray textured wool bar jacket from Dior for the historic occasion, pairing it with a matching gray textured wool skirt, as well as a thin black leather belt from Dior and patent leather stilettos from Christian Louboutin."

A "bar jacket," I was curious enough to learn, is the kind of jacket Christian Dior thought perfect for women drinking cocktails in the afternoon at the bar at the Plaza Athénée hotel in in 1947. Did they have "bladder issues"? Did they dream of electric rabbits?

How dare they put a stereotypically old woman sitting on a toilet right next to the news of the First Lady's appearance at the U.N. doing whatever it was she was doing while wearing some very specific items of clothing!

"During my second pregnancy, rats began clawing their way up our sewage pipes. For months, we found them in our toilet bowl."

"When I began peeing in the bathtub, my husband insisted it was time to move to Providence. He had grown up there — and he’d be able to run his family business. 'The kids will have more space,' he said. 'And if we don’t like it, we can always come back.'... As soon as we purchased the 'beautiful Dutch Colonial,' I was seized with panic. My husband already knew about, and barely tolerated, my penchant for returning things. The most Thoreauvian person I know, he purchased almost nothing in the first place. We were all burdened by our possessions; like Thoreau, he believed we had become 'the tools of our tools.'... [W]hat was it that made me want to reverse our decision...?... It was because the neighborhood wasn’t walkable and I, a New-Orleanian-turned-New-Yorker, didn’t know how to drive well.... [T]he nearest playground or coffee shop a mile away...."

Writes Jackie Delamatre, in "I Had Buyer’s Remorse. It Almost Ended My Marriage. When you can’t agree on the right city to live in, home can be more hell than haven" (NYT).

The way to avoid buyer's remorse is not to buy anything new. But you can't be peeing in the bathtub because of the rats in the toilet.

"What I said this when when we came in and I said I don't care what happens I'm going to a meeting every day... I said I'm not scared of a germ."

"You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats and.. this disease will kill me, right?... Um it's uh it's just bad for my life. So for me it was it was survival. And then you know that the opportunity to help another alcoholic that's the secret sauce of the meetings and that's what keeps us all sober and keeps us um you know from from uh self-will...."

"To easy LoL."

From "10 New Orleans Inmates Escape Jail Through Cell Wall Where Toilet Was Removed/Three escapees had been captured by Friday night. The Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office said the inmates might have had help from jail workers" (NYT): "A civilian employee of the sheriff’s office who was the only person monitoring security systems in the part of the jail where the escape occurred had left his station at the time to get food...."

"There’d be a cell-like capsule to provide for some basic human needs, from which one could emerge into a big, semipublic space that was open to the sky."

"This was a vision less of a home than of a refuge within a striking concrete art work.... Ye sent... various drawings showing an arrangement of amenities within a small space. One image contained spherical and ovoid objects—'cooker,' 'pump,' 'fridge'—but no mattress. Another included three crates, a 'flat pack shower,' and a 'robot platform.'... There were... desultory exchanges about recycling rainwater and cutting a hole in the floor to make a toilet. Ye remained adamant about disconnecting the house from the grid; he also opposed installing solar panels...."

Writes Ian Parker, in "Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix/How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin" (The New Yorker).

"Too much choice is not a good thing. The anxious person is the one who doesn’t know what to do because..."

"... she can do so many things. The neurotic individual is paralysed by the sense that he can’t make the right decision because another one is always available to him. The apparently limitless options afforded to us by dating apps and social media has not made us more content; it has merely intensified our longing."

From "Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness/Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days is on to something with its depiction of main character Hirayama’s calm, habitual life" (The Guardian).

From The Guardian review of the movie:

What would it take to get us to notice this once much-talked-about topic that had fallen entirely out of the news?

The topic is NFTs.

I'm reading "More Than 20 Report Burning Eyes After NFT Festival in Hong Kong/Bored Ape Yacht Club, the collective that hosted the three-day event, said it was investigating possible causes, including UV lights used at a party on Saturday night" (NYT)

"Because for the Burning Man episode we spent so much money, so much time out there. And we can’t use any frame of it."

"And that was just, like, so annoying. But I felt like we still needed to include it, because it ultimately made the episodes stronger that we couldn’t get access to Burning Man because the whole episode is kind of about gatekeeping.... I didn’t know how abnormal it was to have such a devastating dust storm and the heat and all that stuff. Like, I could barely do anything during the day because of how fucked up it was outside.... [F]or the most part, I was shadowing the sewage-treatment people. So I was just in these porta potties that were 115 degrees, studying the infrastructure of Burning Man, in a way—like, the lost and found and all this other stuff...."

From "John Wilson walks us through the series finale of How To With John Wilson/The filmmaker discusses why he identifies more with 'the self-castration guy' than Ryan Seacrest, how his HBO show will finally pay off in 100 years, and more" (AV Club).

"How To With John Wilson" was my favorite TV show, and now it's over, after 3 seasons. Earlier this season, there was an episode — "How to Find a Public Restroom" — where he traveled to Burning Man but then he couldn't use any of the footage he shot. It was the devastating dust storm year. This year, of course, we're seeing it's the devastating rainstorm year. 

"Parks Canada's Most Memorable Public Toilets Of 2022."

From National Parks Traveler, via Metafilter.

What does the NYT know about me?

I was scanning the front page of the NYT, looking for headlines to click, and I noticed that the Times had picked out a set of things recommended for me. I was pleased for an instant and genuinely ready to to share Penn Jillett's love for hot baths and cold watermelon, but...

 

... I don't like the implications of the rest of it. The kiosk and the toilet are okay — lowly and functional — but don't push Jeffrey Dahmer at me, and don't juxtapose him with a person with a mysteriously drooping face.

I go to read the Penn Jillette article and the word editing slows me way down:

Here are 7 TikTok videos I've selected as right for just now. Let me know what you like best.

1. The "squirrel" is crazy about the trampoline.

2. Yeah, I'll back you up on that.

3. Joni Mitchell, in 1970, telling the audience they're "really a drag."

4. Orson Welles saying he puts loyalty to friends above art.

5. He just happened to find everything he was looking for at World Market.

6. The rigors of Chinese womanhood.

7. How to write about characters who are not autistic.

"At first, it’s hard to fathom how a public restroom with transparent walls could possibly help ease toilet anxiety..."

"... but a counterintuitive design by one of Japan’s most innovative architects aims to do just that.... Even in Japan... residents harbor a fear that public toilets are dark, dirty, smelly and scary. To cure the public’s phobia, the non-profit Nippon Foundation launched 'The Tokyo Toilet Project'.... 'There are two concerns with public toilets... The first is whether it is clean inside, and the second is that no one is secretly waiting inside.' The design relies on a new smartglass technology that turns the walls opaque when the door is locked. 'At night, they light up the parks like a beautiful lantern'...."

Forbes reports.

"I'll share with you my urinal — swing-out urinal. In England, they call it the your-RYE-nall..."

Says the eminent filmmaker David Lynch, speaking from his L.A. workshop:



More David Lynch theater here.

"On Twitter, people appear to identify objects and phenomena with 'cursed energy' every hour of every day."

"It’s not just creepy images: the word has acquired new valences, has come to signify increasingly generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise. 'The way I use "cursed" has a connotation of being trapped, i.e. a sort of Greek Mythology Ironic Eternal Punishment vibe,' Alex Pareene, a writer for The New Republic, told me....  The cursedness that has come to be incessantly invoked online... may be connected to a sense that the very relationship between direct cause and effect has grown weaker. Americans are regularly dying in mass shootings but Congress won’t pass basic gun legislation; the President has been racking up impeachable offenses since the Inauguration but momentum for impeachment is only building now, as we approach the end of 2019 (and, really, who knows for sure). At the same time, our sense of indirect, complex cause and effect may be tightening. We see Caribbean islands destroyed by hurricanes and look guiltily at our air-conditioning units; the Supreme Court ruled one way in Bush v. Gore and now Ivanka Trump is acting as a diplomat in North Korea’s demilitarized zone. I have never been able to interest myself too much in the idea that we are living in a simulation, and yet the idea of cursed energy does evoke a feeling that the simulation is breaking, and that something terrible is emerging from the breach...."

From a Jia Tolentino essay (in The New Yorker) about the social-media concept "cursed."

She doesn't mention Reddit, but I've been following the subreddit r/cursedimages. Tolentino goes so political in her essay. The subreddit  r/cursedimages isn't at all political. That's why I subscribe to it. I've got my Reddit setup to give me endless interesting material that's nearly 100% devoid of politics. That's the way I like it!

Here's the r/cursedimage elaborate explanation of what is and is not "cursed" for the purposes of that subreddit. They're looking for images that produce "confusion, eerieness, or dread." And they quite emphatically do not want "random gross/weird food... [a]ny illustrated/animated character, especially Minions and Spongebob... [y]ou or your friend doing random poses in the dark...  r/mildlypenis or mildly sexual things... Hitler/Nazi/KKK/ Antifa Posts," etc. etc.

By the way, I also follow r/mildlypenis. It's the kind of relaxing entertainment I look to Reddit for.

Here are a few examples from r/cursedimages (which actually I don't recommend looking at a lot of them in a row):

The notion that detained migrants were told to drink out of toilets.

Looks like fake news to me.

"When you look at social media feeds of people who visit the Sahara Desert you see beautiful images of sand dunes, camels, and sunsets."

"This was not even close to what we experienced on our Moroccan desert tour.... We paid for a tour that (supposedly) provided a proper bathroom, but upon arrival, we were told that in order to use the bathroom you had to dig a hole in the sand. We were then advised to look for pieces of toilet paper sticking out of the sand to avoid using the same 'toilet' as another guest; oddly, we were also not told to bring any toilet paper...."

From "Bad Travel Experiences – Travellers Tell Their Worst Travel Tales."

"Under current case law, he has no case. Under New York law, you better put your blinds down. He’s lucky he wasn’t standing there buck naked."

Said a lawyer quoted in "Alex Rodriguez may have a tough time pursuing legal action over viral toilet pic" (NY Post). The photograph — taken of the retired baseball star when he was sitting on the toilet (which the NYT Post calls "turd base") was taken from the window of a Park Avenue office building that has a view into his apartment (where he lives with Jennifer Lopez).

I remember blogging about the case the lawyer is referring to. There was an art photographer who'd caught images of people through windows. Ah, yes, here's the old post, from 2013:

"But maybe he should have asked before the gallery opens. Everybody’s talking about it."

Well, if "everybody's talking about it," then the artist made a great decision.

[T]he residents of a glass-walled luxury residential building across the street had no idea they were being photographed and never consented to being subjects for the works of art that are now on display — and for sale — in a Manhattan gallery.

Key word: luxury.

A middle-class value — privacy — is challenged. But it's built into the scheme that only the rich have had their privacy invaded. The artist — Arne Svenson — gets his publicity in the major media. And to top it all off:

Svenson’s apartment is directly across the street, just to the south, giving him a clear view of his neighbors by simply looking out his window.

Easiest art project ever.

“For my subjects there is no question of privacy; they are performing behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the curtain raised high,” Svenson says in the gallery notes.  “The Neighbors don’t know they are being photographed; I carefully shoot from the shadows of my home into theirs.”

Here, you can see the kinds of images Swenson chose. And here's Denver Post art critic Mark Rinaldi, writing in 2016, after Swenson won a lawsuit with a First Amendment defense:

Like a lot of people, I find Arne Svenson’s photographs deeply offensive.... Maybe it’s because enough time has passed to really consider the psychological damage to the folks whose privacy was stolen. You can’t, for the most part, recognize Svenson’s subjects as individuals, but you understand they’re actual humans and their sense of personal concealment has been wrecked....

Or maybe it’s because two dozen Svenson photos are now staring us in the face at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which has taken the controversial step of legitimizing them as high art....

Is the A-Rod photographer less able to claim First Amendment protection because: 1. The person is identifiable (so the privacy stake is greater), and 2. The photographer probably did not have any high-art aspirations? Or is the A-Rod photographer more deserving of First Amendment protection because: 1. This wasn't commercial photography, 2. A-Rod is a public figure, 3. A-Rod seems to have used the toilet in a bathroom with the blinds open on a window that looked out on lots of windows?

How many people who didn't even want to see a baseball star on the toilet were subjected to that view? At some point, wouldn't office workers be exclaiming I can't believe he uses the toilet right in front of us like that! The viewers might feel offended (or amused) and are they not allowed to memorialize their experience with an iPhone photo that they text around?

ADDED: There's a 2013 New Yorker article about Swenson (the art photographer):