I don't know much about art, but I know what I like...

...and what I don't.  And what I don't like so much that it ends up coming all the way around to me liking it again.  Anyway, rather than prejudicing you with any further opinions, here are some finds from a trip into town last Friday.  I'll let you sort out which ones work for you on your own...

Foreground/Background

Half and half

(Green on top, grey on the bottom)


(Yellow on the left, blue on the right)

People in your neighborhood, part I

Transects

Right after college, I volunteered as an archaeological assistant for a summer in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.  A lot of what we did was field survey work, which meant running transects of a given area of the forest.  We'd spread our group out in a line with everyone 20 feet apart, following our compasses as close to due north as possible, and watching the ground for artifacts.  Mostly, we found flakes of chert or obsidian left behind from someone making a spear point about 800 years earlier - the Archaic Tewa Indian equivalent of pencil shavings.  Every once in a while, one of us would find an actual arrowhead.  Or an empty whiskey bottle from the 1920s, or an elk skull, which was always fun.

So now, if you can, imagine the top of a dusty mesa in Rio Arriba county, covered with piñon pine and juniper scrub on the top, and only reachable by a three hours' bouncing drive up a deeply rutted four-wheel Forest Service road.  The sky overhead is eyeball-achingly blue, and the nearest house is about 50 miles away as the crow flies, except that you're not a crow.  Smell the red dirt and the sage yet?  Okay, good.  That experience has Absolutely Nothing to do with the part of China that I'm living in.

For a taste of that, why not take a look through the slide show below.  The photos were all taken on October 1st, which is National Day (the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic) here in China.  It's a bit long, so you may want to make yourself comfortable.  Grab a beer (or tea, to be more authentic) and settle down for a bit.  On our photo walk last Saturday, I took almost 300 photos, and the slide show has about 130 of them.  They don't all work equally well as perfect photos, but taken together, they make for an interesting sampling of the culture that I've been lucky enough to call home for the past two years.



Oh, and make sure you watch in full screen mode.  (should be a button on the bottom right.)  Happy transecting!

Both Sides Now

Front:


Back:

Explaining things, continued (the kid's turn)

From the Slow Boat family video archives, the Xander and Zekey Electricity Show!  (First aired sometime last spring; global syndication rights now negotiable...)

Stuff we all should know by now - Doing the numbers

So then, class, let's get back to my posts about consensus, numbers, and Cookie Monster proclaiming the end of the world, shall we...?

To review a bit:

A:  We humans in general, and we Americans in particular, have a few problems that we need to figure out.
B:  An important step in solving these problems is coming to a consensus on what, exactly, these problems are.

To which I now will add... 

C:  It would be very helpful if everyone started with the same facts, then, wouldn't it?

Or, put in to question format:  What can be proven?  What do the facts suggest, versus what is merely commonly held opinion?  Put scientifically, then, what is actually observable in the world around us?

Let's take, as an example, the huge income disparity that now exists in America between its wealthiest citizens and everyone else.  This can be represented in any number of ways, but let's simply take one statistic: today, the top 1% of Americans earn almost 25% of the income every year.  Okay, big deal, big deal - what we need is more context, so let's compare it historically.  Twenty five years ago, the figure was about half as much, at 12%. Turns out the last time this particular number was this high was in 1929.

Now, this is America, right?  (Or, more globally speaking the internet.  Readers from other countries, please bear with me for a bit...)  You're free to think this is a good thing, or a bad thing.  You can argue about the causes of the inequality, or its possible results.  You can rephrase it, as in "Hey, the richest top ten percent pay 60% of the taxes."  (Well, yeah, that's still saying the same thing, but less directly.)  And, if all else fails, you can start to yell "Class Warfare" whenever someone who may vote you out of office brings it up.

What you can't do, however, is pretend otherwise, which is what it seems that many of us are doing.  Here is a video of people taking a look at another statistic - the distribution of wealth in America.



For those of you with slow internet connections (or those with aversions to Warren Buffet for whatever reason), skip ahead to around 1:15.  To sum up: here is the chart that most Americans surveyed selected when asked to chose one that  shows what wealth distribution in America looks like (yellow representing the share of wealth held by the top 20%):

Nope!  Sorry, that's Sweden.  Here's a chart that shows the actual distribution of wealth in the US:

Good thing?  Bad thing?  I've got my opinions on the subject, and I hope that you've got yours.  What we can't do, however, is pretend like it's otherwise, or tell ourselves that it really doesn't matter.  Unless you live in Sweden*.




*in which case, you may want to feel smug for a moment or two, and then start looking at statistics for wealth distribution globally...

15,790. And shrinking.

What is 15,790?  Why, the number of digital photos on our laptop's hard drive, of course.  That's 28.8 gigabytes of pixelly goodness, or over one third of this old Macbook's available storage space.  It's hard to believe that 80 GB was more memory than we could use when we bought this thing five years ago- now I feel like we've got the computer equivalent of the house with twelve cats and rooms full of stacks of old newspapers. It doesn't help matters much that the hard drive is now making a sound that sounds like a mix between an 1956 Vespa scooter in dire need of a tuneup, a foot-powered dentist drill, and, well, a MacBook hard drive that may fail at any minute.



Or maybe that will get better once I install the latest two direly needed software updates.  I've heard that can sometimes be the case.  (Please be the case, please be the case...)  Oh, but I need more space on my hard drive to install said updates, so back to the 15,970 photos that I'm in the process of weeding out.  I mean, Lordy, 15,970 photos?? I don't know why anyone in their right mind would have more than 13, 476...



This all just to say that several forces in the universe, chiefly being my need to delete a couple of thousand photos or so (don't worry, they're backed up onto the external drive), but also including the fact that my camera is in the United States right now, have conspired to send me back in time to re-examine the far distant past of 2010.  And wow, nothing like a year or so gone by to give you a fresh eye on your photos.  And Jane's photos, I might add.  The picture at the top of the post is hers, as is the one below, and several more on the way.



So yeah, I've been cropping like a Banshee, and sending all the results to Flickr.  Which is why you may see a few more things that are out of sequence coming up, but, you're not expecting chronology from me anyway, right?

Oh, and yes, you heard correctly:  Banshees crop their photographs.  All the time.  It's what they do when they're not screaming.

Henri Cartier-Bresson?  Not a Banshee.

Art, Scribbles, and Cy Twombly

From my distracted grazing through the internet this morning comes the news that the artist Cy Twombly died today at age 83. As quoted in the Washington Post -

One of his leading proponents, Kirk Varnedoe, a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a 1994 essay that “Twombly is the original ‘My kid could do this’ sculptor and painter.”

When I started out studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, I suppose I found myself agreeing with that statement, though I was a bit too intimidated by the world of High Modern Art to say so. However, over time, I found myself warming up to his work - not necessarily because I had now acquired properly academic Good Taste (though that may have been a part of it), but mostly because Cy seemed to be having so much fun doing what he was doing, and it became contagious.



And because he did it so well! If you've ever worked with oil paint on big canvasses, you'll know that it's not so easy to move around the surface like he did. Doing large gestures like that, you run the risk of having your line looking boring and meaningless on one end of the spectrum, or like a self-indulgent puddle of vomit on the other. Twombly never let his paintings run to either extreme. He slung paint around like Zorro, and his gestures and scribbles turned from heroic to comic and back again.

The thing about abstraction like Twombly's is that once you start to appreciate it, things start to reverse in your mind. Instead of scoffing and saying, "Humph, my kid can do that!", you start to say, "Wow, my kid can do that, too!"



A wall becomes more than a wall. You start to see traces of time, history, and the hands and energy that made it.



(Of course, in this case, it helps that this particular wall was hand plastered and exposed to the elements for quite a while, but you can see my point, right...?)

You start to see art everywhere, even if it doesn't have a recognizable form as such. We all like to look at fireworks and fountains, right? They're simply moving versions of the same principle at work.





I'm not saying that makes me particularly cultured or insightful, but it does mean that I'm often easily amused...


(Look! Some kid built a shelf in the middle of this one!)

And am I the only dad that has a secret urge to join in with his kids in the competition for the window seat on the plane? I hope not...



You mean all along, we've been flying over abstract artworks? Shucks, they told me it was mountains...



Happy noticing, everyone!

the iPad and us (part 4 - the outside scoop)

As the recent explosion at the local Foxconn factory slowly marches its way into the territory that is Yesterday's News, I thought I'd show some pictures I took while biking around the plant on the Sunday after the accident. There's been a lot of coverage of the conditions inside the factory, which I can't really add to, but not so much on what's outside. Herewith, then, some local context...


The Foxconn plant from afar. Note the piles of rubble from construction (or more accurately, destruction of a previous building) in the foreground - a prominent feature in the local landscape.


Another distant view of the plant with the new high speed train in the foreground, and the employee entrance close up. From the outside, I couldn't see any obvious damage to the plant.


That Sunday, there were maybe 100-150 workers gathered around the factory entrance. I was getting some stares from security guards, so I just snapped a few pictures on the sly as I biked by, feeling a bit like a spy...


A construction site that's presumably a new section of the Foxconn factory being built.


Landscaping surrounding the plant, with the new high speed train in the background. Note the ubiquitous double colored hedges, which are all trimmed by workers with orange safety vests and hand shears.


A rice field that's been recently burned off, with what I think are some of Foxconn's worker dorms in the background.


The dorms again with - you guessed it - another pile of rubble, this one also serving as a local garbage dump from the look of it.

If all this strikes you as fairly mundane and boring, it's because - well, it is. The whole area from here to Chengdu, which used to be mostly villages and rice fields as recently as five years ago, looks more or less like this now. I'm guessing that the only thing makes the Foxconn plant significantly different from the hundreds of factories and warehouses that now surround it is that it makes parts for a high-profile American company, and thus gets in the news when something bad happens.

Texture Tuesday (Get'cher Multicolors Here!)

Next up, Picasso's Orange Period...

Speaking of history, now might be a good time to throw in some Rembrandt. More specifically, a copy of the Night Watch, seen in a storefront in the faux antiques market section of Chengdu. Except it's a little more like the Day Watch, isn't it..?

Fashion Sense

Spotted on a recent outing to Chengdu.

Texture Tuesday (Bloose)