Friday, September 22, 2006

Aesthetics: Arts: Richard Serra's sculptures question architected work near them, in turn calling themselves into question

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A recent article by Gloria Goodale in Christian Science Monitor, "Redefining sculpture is Richard Serra's goal" (Sep15,2k6) celebrates two new exhibitions of his work in California, one at the Orange Country Performing Arts Center, a second at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at UCLA. Goodale and Serra chatted about the role of public art.

A Richard Serra sculpture is not always an easy experience. Most famous over the nearly half century of his career for the towering, metal shapes that have graced civic spaces from Tokyo to New York to Bilbao, Spain, he specializes in the monumental, the breathtaking, and the surprising. His deceptively unfettered, simple metal walls that cut through public walkways and plazas have confounded some while delighting others. This sheer physicality of his sculptures force passersby to approach the space with a new awareness.

But make no mistake. Like him or detest him, it's impossible to ignore Mr. Serra's work when you are in its presence. ...

"Public sculpture used to have a code," says the San Francisco native, who acquired his early metalworking experience during a stint in a steel factory. "There was a given iconography written into the way we worshiped our heroes. Public sculpture had to do with the depiction of a historical time or event."

As the artists of the 20th century began to challenge that function, Serra says, the concerns began to change. "Once the work came down from its pedestal and became organized in relation to its present time and space, it began to challenge architecture in a way that it hadn't before."
Sculpture, by Archibald

The biggest challenge for artists who work in the public arena today has to do with public expectations, says Serra. "The culture hasn't developed the kind of individual sensibilities in each of us to respond to new aesthetic questions," he says. Art, he says, has less approval than entertainment, which our culture is more comfortable experiencing in public spaces.
Now, an artist's work is not the same as his talk about his/her work, nor the same as a reporter's talk about that work. So, we're not under any more obligation to take as gospel what Serra talktalks about his sculptures, as we mite were we to experience them ourselves/oneself. Still, since most of us will never do so, having a journalist report a chat with the sculptor in this case definitely as its own merit and appeal. At the same time, reading the report is a different kind of experience, a reading experience, and we can ask questions of the text about sculptures as of any text.

In the case of Serra's views, as reported, we notice how often the terms "question" and "questions" arise. This puts us on to the specific ideology of sculpture as an art; Serra reveals himself as a purveyor of an art ideology; one that has public consequences in that the ideology yapyaps about what anyone mite (or mite not experie4nce) in the specific public space upon which each scuplture impacts. Not only is the root term imported from discursive textual writing, known as "critical thawt," but for Serra apparently the critical ideology (criticism raised to an "Ism") is the priority function of art, the art of scupture certainly. Sculpture seems remiss if it doesn't "raise new aesthetic questions."

This stance seems tremendously mentistic, even in its own way rationalistic, where work that is obstructive, challenge-oriented regarding other aesthetics, loud (unignorable), monumental, anti-decorative, redefinitional of a given space, anti-entertaining (there goes Miro into the scrap-pile!), "the walls bearing in on the viewer," has a special standing as "serious art" than can be ascribed to other kinds of sculputure lacking his ideology. Indeed, Serra needs a manual of interpretation, of talktalk, yapyap, to accompany his work in order to render it "the best it could be," rather than the damn nuisance it can as easily be.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Sports: Intercollegiate: Small colleges rush to add football to supported campus activties, helps recruits new male students

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Football has strong social impact on colleges that institute the sport in their athletics programs. Inter-collegiate atheletics where the schools compete is a major draw of new students, especially males, to college campuses, no matter how small the school is. New York Times carries an article, "Small colleges, short of men, embrace football" (Jul 10,2k6) by Bill Pennington reports:

Some small American colleges, eager to attract men to increasingly female campuses, have taken notice of how many students...can be lured to attend by adding football teams. Officials at these colleges say football can bring in more tuition-paying students than any other course or activity - and not just players themselves.

'When you recruit a halfback, you get a few of his male friends, maybe his sister and his sister's boyfriend, too,' said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill University. A 123-year-old former women's institution in Greensburg, Pa., Seton Hill added football last year.

'I could have started a spiffy new major of study, spent a lot of money on lab equipment and hired a few new high-powered professors,' Dr. Boyle said. 'I might have gotten 25 more students for that. And I couldn't have counted on that major still being popular in 15 years.

'Instead, I started a football team, brought in hundreds of paying students, added a vibrant piece to our campus life and broadened our recognition factor. And in the long history of American higher education, one thing you can count on is football's longevity. Football is here to stay.'
Sports,by Sportikos
Last year's freshman class at Seton Hill was the first with more men than women. Four years ago, when the college became fully co-ed, its undergraduate student body was 18 percent male; last fall it was 41 percent male.

At a time when the image of major college football has been sullied by academic, recruiting and sexual violence scandals - and as some prominent colleges eliminate football to cope with federal gender equity regulations for athletics - many smaller institutions have embraced the sport. Since their football players generally do not receive scholarships and are not blue-chip recruits, officials at small colleges say the players tend to exhibit less of a sense of entitlement, leading to fewer academic and discipline problems.

In the last 10 years, nearly 50 colleges and universities have instituted or re-instituted football, with more than 80 percent in the small college ranks. In the same period, about 25 institutions have dropped football, the majority being scholarship-driven teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top tier, Division I.
One wonders whether a network of small colleges in the USA could join together to lawnch simultaneously teams of soccer players, newly recruited for the purpose, to participate in a new small-college intercollegiate soccer league. The idea here is that football is not so unique that some colleges could greet the rise of interest in soccer ("football" in most other countries). Indeed, these hypothetical small soccer-no-football colleges mite hypothetically compete with larger colleges that alreadey have soccer teams, but don't attract European-level young players.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Aesthetics: Arts: The worst movie ever made in Canada, perhaps, but richly rewarded with grants, apparently.

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A movie appeared a little bit ago. A Canada-made movie. It's got a somewhat bilingual title, Bon Cop, Bad Cop. You simply must read the review by Steve Burgess in the Entertainment section of The Tyee, an online periodical out of Vancouver, British Columbia. What we have here is a review of the mentioned movie, and a meta-review of reviews of the movie. In brief, Burgess doesn't like the flick. But in making his point memorable, he tasks not just the ploys that apparently cobbled together this "crap" (he says) along with the favourable reviews in three Toronto newspapers -- Globe & Mail, Star, and (the formerly conservative) National Post. He even names some of the reviewers.

Movies, by Anaximaximum

The wealth of witticisms in the veritable denunciad make the Burgess metareview a reading pleasure. It should get some kind of award, so refWrite announces that the author wins this year's praise as our Movie Criticism Award 2006. I don't want to give away the bite he adds to the govt-grant system for Canadian film, and how he discerns its operation in this quite suspect work of cinmatic f/art, as Burgess mite say.

Oh yeah, this year's Toronto Film Festival has just concluded with the major news coming forth focussed on Sean Penn's insistence on smoking in a public meeting of a panel discussion. The incident was on TV news for days.

And, oh yeah!, the second of the "Further Resources" below is the website of a govt film agency. Now, the text of most govt websites is impeccably grammatical. Not this one. It moves from an infinitive ("seeks to") to a list of five items ("Reaching," "Reflecting," "Investing," "Harnessing," and "Reaching" again), each beginning with a gerund in bold. This can't be the work of the govt that just came to power nine months ago ... or, it's perhaps the attack of some saboteur of English grammar who has little taste for either the language or film, but has had to become bilingual to get the text-writing job. Or ....

But click up the Burgess write-up of Bon Cop, Bad Cop, and cop a deliteful text about a phantom movie you'll never see. You'll howl!

Further Research:

Canadian film history
Canada's film and video tax credit programs

Tags: The latest worst movie ever made (in Canada)

Monday, September 11, 2006

Aesthetics: Architecture: Remembering 9/11 an atrocity and the question of how to monument it

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Here's a synopsis of 1 among 11 articles on 9/11 made available for reading by Christopher Knight's online article- syndication agency, EzineArticles®. Here's his invitational paragraph:

The Aesthetics of Atrocity: Remembering 9/11

Getting the aesthetics of atrocity right by committee has taken five years with nothing to show for it. Estimated costs of completing the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero is closing in on a billion dollars.

Architecture, by Archibald
It has been our contention from the beginning that the inspiration was always there right in the committee's collective faces, staring back in stark, abject horror at them and anyone who looks back at it: the still standing remnant of shattered dreams and lives in a building once known as the World Trade Center.
Click-up and read the article!

Technics: Info: Wikipedia refuses China censorship

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A refreshing newsbit regarding Wikipedia's refusal of China censorship. kdawson posts this quote from truthsearch on today's Slashdot:

"Jimmy Wales has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive Wikipedia entries. He challenges other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing. Wikipedia has been banned from China since last October.
Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie
Whereas Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo went into the country accepting some restrictions on their online content, Wales believes it must be all or nothing for Wikipedia. 'We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information.'"
For the commentary on the original truthsearch item go to refWrite refBloggers Insert.

Further Info::

In China, it's Wikipedia versus the Internet censors (Oberserve via Taipei Times
Wikipedia defies the censors (The Hindu)

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Sports: Tennis: I watched the US Open Tournament on TV -- ggggggggreat tennis between Federer & Roddick!

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My TV set came in handy today, as I blogged, I kept an eye on the contest between Roger Federer (Swiss) and Andy Roddick (American). But soon I was looking away from the computer to the TV scree, had to look up from my blogging, at the larger screen to my left--because the play of the game was constantly dramatic and even beautiful. Today, this tennis match between two giants reminded me of a conclusion I had reached some time back: sports are somehow aesthetic, they are part of the aesthetics of everyday life. And they are contests, competitions, they are about winning and not winning (at such h+ts as this match today one can't use the word "losing" for Roddick who was greatly outdistanced by "the tennis superstar," because Roddick was consoled by himself walking away $600,000 richer).

The event was graced by a special spectator (can I say "fan"?).

Sports, by Sportikos

Associated Press via Globe&Mail:

There might be one athlete in the world who knows exactly how Roger Federer feels as he dominates his peers and gobbles up Grand Slams, so it was fitting that Tiger Woods was sitting in his guest box Sunday for the U.S Open final.

Federer met Woods for the first time beforehand, then apparently set out to impress the golfer, controlling every facet of play in a 6-2, 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 victory over Andy Roddick for his third major championship this year and ninth of his career.

The Swiss superstar is the first man since Ivan Lendl in 1985-87 to win three consecutive U.S. Open titles — and the only man in tennis history to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open back-to-back three years in a row.

And he did it in such impressive fashion, out-acing the big-serving Roddick 17-7, compiling a 69-33 edge in winners, and making only 19 unforced errors. Federer won eight of the last nine games against Roddick, who won the 2003 U.S. Open but now is 1-11 against the man he once was supposed to rival for supremacy in this sport.
Some facts about Andy from his "Stats" page:

* Birthdate - 8/30/1982
* Birthplace - Omaha, Nebraska
* Current Residence - Austin, TX
* Height - 6 ft, 2 in
* Weight - 190 lbs.
* Plays - Right-handed

* Turned Pro - 2000
* Shoes - Babolat
* Raquet - Babolat Pure Drive
* Clothing - Lacoste
* Watches - Rolex
* Automobile - Lexus

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Roger's factoids:

Born: ......August 08, 1981, (08:40 a.m.) in Basel, Switzerland
Residence: .Oberwil, Switzerland
Plays ......Right-handed (single-handed backhand)
H+t ........6'1'' (186 cm)
Wayt .......187lbs (85 kg)
Hair .......Dark brown
Eues .......Brown
Hobbies ....Sports (golf, soccer, skiing), friends, Playstation, music, playing cards
FormerIdols.Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg

Rank ......................1
Champions Race ............1
Grand Slam Titles .........9
Tournament Titles Singles.41
Tournament Titles Doubles..7

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-- Sporitkos

Further Info

Andy's Stats page
Roger's Profile page


Tags: If Nosferatu dont voodoo you, MPAA will

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Movies: Free legal dwnlds: Yup, Torrentfreak has 5 movie classics in the horrorflick genre, for you!

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If you're rigged technically to receive the p2p file-sharing service of BitTorrent or similars (explained) you can now download legit freebies via that application the following horrorflicks:

* Detour

* House on a Haunted Hill

* Nosferatu (1922)

* The Last Man on Earth

* The Little Shop of Horrors

Says the Torrentfreak website, these "5 movie classics...are in the public domain. Free to download, free to share, free of DRM" -- that's Digital R+ts Management, the mainstream move-industry oligopoly's p2p-wrecking technics to counter digital distribution of cinema and other arts beyond their control and profit.

"The movies are hosted by publicdomaintorrents, the great resource for movie addicts we discussed earlier." [Here's the earlier:]

Public Domain Torrents offers an extensive collection of Classic and B-Movie torrents [794 titles altogether]. The copyright of these movies has expired so you are free to share them.

They currently have a collection of 531 movies which are available in different formats (including iPod). For example, you can download the christmas classic “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” (awfull movie by the way). Or perhaps the real classic “Nosferatu“, based on the Dracula story.
Movies/P2Ptechnics,by Anaximander & OwlieScowlie
This site is pretty much heaven for both torrent and moviefreaks. New content is added on a daily basis, take a look.
I also found this site: DownloadAnyMovie.com, the name of which I suspect is a come-on, rather than a so-called "mass-piracy" site. The site's subtitle clarifies: "Your Movie Downloading Review Source." It seems to be a kind of hub for the real "piratical" thing. You can go to other movie p2p-download sites from a link in each of DownloadAnyMovie's site reviews. However, the foregoing characterizations are my compromise with the prevailing lingo of the "legit" side (as against the "pirate" side, which binomial polarity of terms expresses the relationship exclusively in the "legit" side's lingo) -- that is to say, in the USA jurisdiction. But, despite lingo, nothing is legally settled in the USA. Europe perhaps is has settled the legalities in favour of the oligarchs.

In Canada, on the other hand, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed classical Canadian legal definitions of copiable material that permit file-sharing where there is no use of the copied movies for commercial purposes. That's the one restriction, as I understand the current situation. The owner of a digitally-recorded movie has the r+t to share it with others, as long as there's no sale or rental, again, as I understand the matter.

I used to follow the Canada-legal practice of p2p file-sharing with regard to music and spoken poetry, again quite legal in the jurisdiction where I am a Permanent Resident, while remaining a citizen of the US; for that purpose of free music downloading, I used LimeWire. However, I long ago lost interest, since most of the downloads were scratchy or ticky. These days, I can listen to free music on the net from WMFU radio music out of Newark, New Jersey (as I recall); and iTunes free radio channels over the Net.

About BitTorrent legality: Paul Gil states the US/Canada difference this way:
Copyright warning. Unless you live in Canada, you must understand that copyright laws are commonly violated by P2P sharing. If you download a song, movie, or TV show, you do risk a civil lawsuit. Canadians are protected from these lawsuits because of a Canadian Supreme Court ruling, but not residents of the USA or most parts of Europe and Asia. This lawsuit risk is a reality, and you must accept this risk if you choose to download P2P files.
And more:
Warning: while P2P file sharing technology is completely legal, many of the files traded through P2P are copyrighted. Unless you live in Canada where citizens are shielded from P2P copyright lawsuits, downloading music, movie, and TV files will put you at risk for a civil lawsuit in any other country. These lawsuits usually take the form of class-action suits, filed against groups of users who are logged as blatantly copying and distributing copyrighted materials. Recently, the MPAA [Moving Picture Association of America] and RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America - music], along with the governments of England and Australia, took several thousand users to court, demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in copyright infringement penalties. Please keep this lawsuit risk in mind when you install and use any BitTorrent software in the USA, Europe, or Asia.
All this is to say, if you can master the technical application (BitTorrents or uTorrent, Azureus, ABC, TurboBit, BitComet), you can legally and free-of-charge indulge the history of film by downloading free and legally the silent flick Nosferatu. You'll need lots of harddisk space for these lengthy files.

Further Info:

BitTorrent application site
torrents-related Google Search results

Friday, September 08, 2006

Aesthetics: Arts: Why architecture matters and the quality of Christian discourse in saying how it does so

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An article with many interesting thawts of criticism and norm-directive discourse that add sparkle to a long ariticle with a long introductory passage using the Bible all too biblistically on the subject of architecture, has appeared in the latest issue of Comment magazine, in both print (Sep2k6 - Volume 32,I:4) and online editions (by email notification Sep7,2k6. The Bible is indeed interesting as to what and how it touches upon architecture, but the experienced artichitect-author here, David Greusel, falters in his task regarding that particular pisteutic aspect of dwellings and buildings. He wants to critique another writer on the theme Why architecture matters. Greusel may have done better here than the other guy, but I don't find his answer of very h+ quality as to the implied question regarding what matters architecturally.

Yet here's a quote worth meditating upon:

Architecture provides a framework for meaningful community — or not. As we have seen, architecture is besieged by two opposing trends: the nihilism of the avant-garde on the one hand, and the banality of the strip mall on the other. Both these trends augur toward alienation, despair, loneliness, isolation, and antisocial behavior. Nevertheless, the two opposing trends are generalizations; they don't determine what any particular work of architexture achieves (despite its place partically in any negative trend.
Architecture, by Archibald
That these consequences are mainly temporal does not mean that they are not also spiritual. Even James Howard Kunstler, an author who is outspokenly non-religious, has commented repeatedly on the soul-killing qualities of bad architecture and suburban sprawl. If a committed secularist like Kunstler can see it, why can't we?
The "we" here is Christians of the author's kind, but that way of being among the Christian kind of persons shoulders out those who read the Bible differently and reformationally, in my judgment. Still, there's enuff good architectural stuff among the bad uses of the Bible and the zeitgeisting of trends in reductive overgeneralizations about actual buildings, a blanket dismissal of every school and feature of modernist architecture, and an anti-reformational refusal to search also to affirm the kernels of truth that a given criticized movement in the arts has contributed. As a whole, the article deifies tradition and sneers at the common-grace that is inescapably present also in modernism, postmodern, and mavericks today.

As to the Bible, you can't dwell singly on the Temples--which have always been treasuries (banks, storage locations for very expensive items before money currencies existed, and structures that were easily defended in most circumstances). It was the Temples of Israel (and its enemies at times) that God had torn down. You can't read the Bible well and yet simply by-pass the tents that figure from Genesis to Acts (and which latter book frames his Epistles). Among other things, tents leave a small footprint on the planet's ecolaic surface. To your tents, O Christians!

Futher Research:

Avoiding Biblicism: The Bible and Christian Education
Biblicism--Dooyeweerd's definition

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Satire: Kids unintentional: The Bible gets delitedlly twisted in the understanding of youngsters, but what a howl!

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GRADING PAPERS

Can you imagine yourself to be the nun who is sitting at her desk grading these papers, all the while trying to keep a straight face and maintain her composure!

You may want to pay special attention to the wording and spelling. If you know the Bible even a little, you'll find this hilarious! It comes from a Catholic elementary school test where kids were asked questions about the Old and New Testaments. The following statements were written by the children being tested. Incorrect spelling has been left in place (except caps).


1. In the first book of the Bible, Guinnessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the Sabbath off.

2. Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. Noah's wife was Joan of Ark. Noah built the ark and the animals came on in pears.

3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.

4. The Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had trouble with unsympathetic genitals.

5. Sampson was a strongman who left himself be led astray by a Jezebel like Delilah.

6. Samson slayed the Philistines with the axe of the Apostles.

7. Moses led the Jews to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.

8, The Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments.

9. The first commandments was when Eve told Adam to eat the apple.

10. The Seventh Commandment is Thou shalt not admit adultery.

11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada. Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the Battle of Geritol.

12. The greatest miracle in the Bible is when Joshua told his own son to stand still and he obeyed him.

Satire Now

13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. He fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times.

14. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 100 wives and 700 porcupines.

15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.

16. When the three wise guys from the East Side arrived they found Jesus in the manager.

17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.

18. St. John the Blacksmith dumped water on his head.

19. Jesus enunciated the Golden Rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. He also explained a man doth not live by sweat alone.

20. It was a miracle when Jesus rose from the Dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.

21. The people who followed the Lord were called the 12 decibels.

22. The Epistels were the wives of the Apostles.

23. One of the opposums was St. Matthew who was also a taxman.

24. St. Paul cavorted to Christianity, he preached Holy Acrimony which is another name for marriage.

25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

-- I got this thru former h+school classmates, Rick Spurlin via Alan Ault. I couldn't stand the all-caps format, so re-wrote the piece in that respect. That's why the capitalizations are probably correct, but otherwise I copied the text as received. Maybe it's widespread online and in email forwards.

-- Anaximaximum