Ramblin' with Roger

Jackie Kennedy and falling apples

During our Berkshires vacation in June, we went to a place called MASS MoCA, which is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, located in North Adams, MA. Actually, we went there twice. On a Monday afternoon, we drove towards there, but , following one of those ad maps that were not to scale, thought that we had passed it, when in fact we had not. The direction “drive through a cemetery” was correct; the way we came, we passed a graveyard that was on one side of us, then another cemetery that was on one side, then on BOTH sides of us. So, by the time we got there on Monday, it was really too late to go in and get our money’s worth; the hours were 11-5 that week, though they would change to 10-6 for the summer the following week. We did, however, consume some of the ice cream made on location.

The idea of MASS MoCA really appeals to me: a bunch of old factory buildings converted into an art museum. So we returned on Wednesday, eavesdropped as a trainee described some Dutch fabric artist’s work, then went on our own.

The bulk of the time, we looked at the works of Spencer Finch, which will be on exhibit through Spring 2008, not so incidentally. The display was called Spencer Finch: What Time Is It On the Sun? Most of the pieces are very, mechanical, and I would not have “gotten” them had I not read the brochure.

For instance, for Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), Finch mixed a variety of paints to match the color of the night sky. After weighing the physical mass of each pigment…the artist calculated the molecular ratio of each color in the combination. With 401 incandescent bulbs of various sizes, each bulb represents a particular atom… Well, all right, then.

Here’s a paragraph from this New York Times article, that described one piece for me:
Often the work promises poetry but doesn’t deliver it, as in “Two Hours, Two Minutes, Two Seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007),” a bank of ordinary white window fans stacked on top of one another. Arranged in a semicircle, the fans emit a steady breeze and an occasional gust over the time period specified by the work’s title. Mr. Finch experienced and measured these winds, using a weathervane and an anemometer, at the famous pond. It’s an interesting idea that falls flat in realization.

Lydia was getting bored. The one piece that might have been her, and thus our, salvation was the piece described here:
you first saw a square piece of green AstroTurf on the floor, upon which were scattered several red apples. Every five minutes, an apple thudded to the floor from an overhead apparatus, to make a vivid red-and-green sculpture that had a distinctly painterly appeal. Each night the apples were cleared away, so that the next day yielded a new chance pattern. Call Finch’s Composition in Red and Green a Newton machine or a mechanized rendition of an orchard in the fall, but it was surprisingly appealing to the eye. This would have captured Lydia’s attention for at least a little while, but the apple-dropping mechanism failed to drop the apples!

The one piece that worked best for both Carol and me, in spite of the impatient three-year-old, was Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat. Described here, it was in one small room, 100 paintings of ovals of varying hues of pink. The whole perception and memory thing came out with just the art and the title.

It wasn’t a terrible experience, as many of the pieces were intriguing. And we had ice cream again. Perhaps the adults should try to visit it again.
ROG

Next Post QUESTION

I’m curious how you folks who look at other blogs actually find them. Initially, I went through the links of the handful of bloggers I knew then, but I soon found a certain redundancy of common sites.

So, my favorite thing to do became using the Next Blog feature on the Blogger sites. However, I’ve been trying it recently and finding it increasingly unsatisfactory. I keep finding, every fourth or fifth hit, a sex site. And not just a sex site, but one site nearly identical in spite of mild permutations. It’s always a white background with a title of the video, which may be fairly innocuous – “David Beckham’s first MLS goal”. But on the right is a list of:
Related Top Posts that include – and I’ve eliminated more than a few:
# PAMELA ANDERSON AND JENNA JAMESON BOTH IN ONE SCENE!!!!(772)
# Sexy Chopper Biker Girls Naked(708)
# hot girls part 3 – the russian(445)

Of course, the non-sex sites I find are uneven. Either, I can’t understand the language or it contains information such as: “Well let me just say this, Zac Efron totally hotty! Danngg!” What’s a Zac Efron? (OK, I DO know about High School Musical.)

I do find some interesting places, but, where it used to take me about 10 minutes to find three commentable sites via Next Blog, now it takes a half hour, because among other things, the porn sites have disabled the Next Post button, so I have to go back before going forward. (They’ve also taken out the Flag Blog feature, not surprisingly – is there a way to report them to Blogger some other way?)

So, as I asked initially, what do YOU do to seek out new sites?
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And speaking of Disney and sex, Mark Evanier, writing about the demise of a Disney digest, writes: Once upon a time, Playboy sold seven million copies per issue and now it sells three million. This is not because of a declining male interest in beautiful nude women or because the women aren’t as beautiful or as nude as they used to be. The phraseology, for whatever reason, cracked me up.
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Geico Uncovers Secrets About Flintstones, Clampetts – the commercials will almost certainly be better than the upcoming Caveman series.
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Starting this Monday: Changes in the comic strip For Better or Worse.
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Two guys named Ken:
Levine – and his readers – on movie theater etiquette (or the lack of same)
Jennings (August 30) on separated at birth
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I had asked who won the Democratic debate in Iowa on ABC-TV’s This week a couple weeks ago. I got five voters, four of whom picked Dennis Kucinich, and one who selected Barack Obama.
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Karl Rove and now Alberto Gonzalez are both gone, and I’m not feeling the happiness I thought I would. It’s like the letdown I got when I would rehearse for a choir piece or a play; the event would go off well, but I’d be left with a mild melancholy. At least now I know why they left when they did.

ROG

Chuck and Di and Teresa

Like many people, I was up early the morning of July 29, 1981 to watch at least part of the royal wedding. I wasn’t much of a monarchist, but it was one of those world events I felt I should watch.

On a very cold Saturday, January 16, 1982, my friend Jessica, who was a performance artist, poet, and from England, herded her friends to Emmanuel Baptist Church in Albany to do a mock re-enactment. A number of frigid people played members of the royal family and the Spencers. Jessie played Di, I played the Archbishop of Canterbury. Many pictures were being taken and most of us had no real idea to what end.

A month or two later, at the 8th Step Coffee House, then located in the basement of the church I now attend, Jessie did a slide show of the royal wedding, complete with biting narration. It was amazingly funny! In fact, it was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Of course, the real royals got very weird, Chuck and Di split and, 10 years ago, Diana and two others died in Paris.

Not only did I watch the funeral, I got my wife the soundtrack to the funeral – she and Diana were very close in age, and she related to her death largely on that basis.

I’m reminded, too, that Mother Teresa, a Friend of Diana, also died 10 years ago this very week. Her death was practically lost in the headlines over the royal funeral controversy so well played out in the movie The Queen, which I enjoyed last year. Teresa made headlines recently when papers that were released revealed her doubts about her faith. Yet, she did her good works anyway.

Two women, seemingly quite disparate, both of whom had enormous impact in their own way, died a decade ago, and I feel the need to note this, surprisingly to me in the case of the younger one, who I helped to mock years earlier.
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Richard Jewell died Wednesday, and I was IMMEDIATELY reminded about what one of the, well, accused Duke rapists said: that in HIS obituary, he will be described as “One of the accused Duke rapists”.

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: Spider-Man 2

That’s right, the middle movie. I could hardly see the third film without having seen the second. And I saw it in a theater. Sort of.

At our vacation place in the Berkshires, there is a 40-seat theater in one of the buildings, showing some interesting-sounding films. As I mentioned, early in the week, Carol took Lydia to see Charlotte’s Web, but Lydia found the darkened theater experience too intense and so they bailed. The first Fantastic Four film was also showing that week, but it seemed that I should pick the movie I most wanted to see. I liked the first Spidey film and own it on VHS (pre-ownership of the DVD player), so on June 28, I head over to the movie theater.

In retrospect, it seemed almost predestined that I see the film on that day. The day before (June 27), it was Tobey Maguire’s 32nd birthday, and he appeared on Live with Regis and Kelly. I didn’t see that, but I did see the next day’s trivia question, which was asking for the name of Spider-Man’s alter ego. The contestant on the show muffed it, but anyone who’s worked in a comic book store, or has collected the four-color item MUST know Peter Parker. Moreover, the movie was showing on cable that week. TWICE I saw the scene when Mary Jane Watson says to Peter, “Don’t disappoint me.”

So, I get a tiny bag of free popcorn and sit in the theater with maybe a dozen people. And I’m liking the movie until six older people come into the room. It IS pitch black, except for the light from the screen, and they loudly make it known that it’s dark, all through that birthday party scene. I didn’t mind it so much when they were seeking their seats -though GETTING THERE ON TIME would have alleviated the problem – but their recapping (“Boy, it sure is dark in here – I had trouble finding my seat” AFTER they were all in place was REALLY annoying. I mean, SHUT. UP. ALREADY. I thought that, didn’t say it.

The rest of the film went down easy, with a very credible villain in Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, the right amount of personal tension in Peter Parker’s life, especially vis a vis Mary Jane, great action sequences, and the continuing Harry Osborn thread. Great balance, great pacing.

Roger Ebert gave this film four stars. Entertainment Weekly gave the DVD release an A-, and put it on its list of Top 25 action films. Despite the early distraction, a very enjoyable film.

(And there was popcorn left at the end, so I took another tiny bag to go.)

ROG

Underplayed Vinyl: Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s 1979 album, Off the Wall, is better than Michael Jackson’s 1982 album, Thriller.

OFF THE WALL
1. Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
2. Rock With You
3. Workin’ Day And Night
4. Get On The Floor
5. Off The Wall
6. Girlfriend
7. She’s Out Of My Life
8. I Can’t Help It
9. It’s The Falling In Love
10. Burn This Disco Out

THRILLER
1. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
2. Baby Be Mine
3. The Girl Is Mine
4. Thriller
5. Beat It
6. Billie Jean
7. Human Nature
8. P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)
9. The Lady in My Life

Actually, they are, in some ways, similar albums. Both start with my favorite groove on the album, followed by a more midtempo sound, though I prefer Rock with You. Both have ballads that are OK, though She’s Out of My Life is more appealing to me.

Now, Thriller does have Beat It and Billie Jean, both of which appear on some Rolling Stone list of top 500 tunes. But I will contend that the popularity and import of those songs (and of the title song as well) was fueled as much by the videos as the music.

Where the older album has the great Workin’ song in the third slot, Thriller has This Girl Is Mine. One can argue about the quality of the song – I don’t think much of the dopey dialogue between Paul McCartney and Michael – but listening to it, it just has a whole different feel from what goes on before or after. (The Macca-penned Girlfriend may be the weakest track on Off the Wall.)

And the title tune Thriller is great theater, but is it a great song?

Ultimately, Off the Wall is better because it ends stronger. Instead of the sappy ballad, I’m burning that disco out. There may be better songs on Thriller, but Off the Wall is more consistently solid.

Incidentally, Off the Wall was not a piker of an album commercially, as it sold 7 million copies in the U.S. alone; Thriller was just a monster album, selling 3.5 times as many in this country.

Today is MJ’s 49th birthday.
ROG