Joseph of Nazareth

"Joseph of Nazareth" by James Tissot.

I like how realistic this feels. While other painters seem to transform the holy family into characters they could find in their own contemporary context, I like how Tissot seems to see Joseph as a Jew from around the time Jesus was born.

Department of Ugly Puritans: Thomas Watson

woof!

Ross Ching's 'Running on Empty'

Running on Empty from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

from vulture...beautiful!

Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture

Great points:

"The Virtues of Copying:

- Democratization of Fashion

- Faster establishment of global trends

- Induced obsolescence

- Acceleration in creative innovation"

Also really interesting is the graph she shows about how the creative industries that do not have copyright protection have much higher levels of growth than those that do. (fashion vs. music and books)

Tom Waits on -

Q: What’s heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.

Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made $12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

Tom Waits interviewing himself, in Russh Magazine (here).

freelance whales

When I first heard about Freelance Whales I thought they were a slightly less annoying version of Owl City. Then today on 89.1 I heard their song "Hannah" and thought it was great. I looked up the lyrics and lo and behold: freelance whales. surprise! This video shows them to be a super-hipster, and talented. yay!

when I have time...

I will write about the interaction between these two things:

"Why are so many teenage girls so interested in the kind of super-reactionary love stories that would have been perfectly at home during the Eisenhower administration? The answer lies—as does the answer to so much teenage behavior—in the mores and values of the generation (no, of the decade) immediately preceding their own. This tiny unit of time is always at the heart of what adolescents do, because as much as each group imagines itself to be carving new territory out of nothing more than its own inspired creativity, the youngsters don’t have enough experience to make anything new—or even to recognize what might be clichéd. All they know is the world they began to take notice of when they turned 12 or 13; all they can imagine doing to put their mark on that world is to either advance or retreat along the lines that were already drawn for them."

- By Caitlin Flanagan, "Love, Actually" The Atlantic. June 2010.

than from TTBOOK: "Portrait of the Artist"

"Cultural critic David Shields wants to change the way we think about art. His manifesto is called "Reality Hunger." He talks about it with Steve Paulson, making a case for spontaneity and artistic risk."

David Shields, Reality Hunger

from wikipedia: "Several passages from Reality Hunger convey well some of Shields’s major concerns: “When I was seventeen, I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast, because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art—art underwritten by reality hunger—is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art.” Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like—can be—art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.

“The center of the artistic process—for me—is the attempt to transform a particular feeling, insight, sorrow into a metaphor and then make that metaphor ramify so it holds everything, everything in the world.”