Foolish Blood

Go Big or Go Home

2021-07-28T22:47:00.004-06:00

Never bet against someone who is determined to run a book store:

A full quarter-century after shuttering his old store in Bloomington, Indiana, Rick Morgenstern has opened what suddenly becomes the state’s largest independent bookstore. The reboot of the eponymous store has been in the works for years and is reopening in a former Pier 1, of all places—as such, it is huge. According to this Herald-Times story, Morgenstern’s 2.0 will carry an ongoing stock of 50,000 books, employ 25 people at a time, and currently features a licensed café, with plans for a stage in the works.

To go so big so quickly Morgenstern relied on funding from four local investors, along with proceeds from a Morgenstern’s page at Bookshop.org. And to make a nice story even nicer, Morgenstern hired the guy who did renovations on the old place to spruce up the new store.

I don't know why more people aren't willing to take advantage of the fact that most cities are now book store deserts. There is always that moment of shock when I see that Barnes & Noble still exists. And then there's the pleasant surprise of seeing someone running an independent book store or record store and managing to thrive and stay in business. In order to feed and sustain these places, we have to do more than just show up once a year and spend a few bucks. There has to be a regular effort made to go to these places and help these businesses stay afloat.

And, yes. You can go buy some toys at Barnes & Noble and that still helps in the long run.

Old Bay

2021-07-15T21:02:00.003-06:00

You cannot escape from the appeal of Old Bay seasoning. There are places in this world that won't let you leave the regionalism behind--they insist on bringing it with you.

At the King Sooper's, they have oodles of this stuff and the old fart who demanded that they stock it stopped buying it long ago. A normal human being can make one of these plastic tubs last three or four years. On the Eastern Shore, you might get through a holiday weekend with one.

There's nothing in Colorado worth seasoning. Even the dirtbags know that, when the Man brings you a burrito, you wolf it down and go back to getting high.

Colorado at Night

2021-06-04T09:17:00.001-06:00

This was taken haphazardly with the new phone. In the middle is a planet, and I think it is Mars. Picture taken in Littleton, Colorado.

Poorly Practiced Christianity

2021-05-30T23:09:00.003-06:00

This is what I saw in Lawrence, Kansas this past week. I was sitting at the light and I saw this crowd out protesting...something?

Are we all supposed to be fearful and confused about something? Is this how normal people spend their day? This doesn't represent the community of Lawrence in any way, shape, or form because I got to see the rest of the town and it looked like a great place to go to college. There were people out and about, enjoying their day. They were living their lives and going about their business.

When Christianity is practiced in this manner, it poisons the well. It creates more sickness and misery. This is no way to live your life, standing in a front of a CVS on a nice day, spreading this diseased bullshit.

In other news, I guess I can take pictures with this phone now.

Sun Flare

2021-05-16T15:24:00.000-06:00

A little sun flare, taken with my Note 20 phone. Not sure if I am ever going to figure out the camera, though.

Abstract Number Two, March 2021

2021-04-12T14:43:00.003-06:00

A little too much blue, but this one worked up into a few good swirls.

Abstract Number One, March 2021

2021-04-08T12:52:00.000-06:00

This is the raw scan of an abstract I did in March. Here it is with some editing and color balancing.

White Blossoms

2021-04-01T20:42:00.003-06:00

You know, we had good weather for about a minute and then the snow, sleet, and hail hit today and I just said to hell with it.

Blown Glass Installation

2021-03-29T21:28:00.002-06:00

This is a blown glass installation in the Delaware Museum of Art and it reminds me of some really great work that is being done, especially in Wimberley, Texas. I love this stuff.

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes

2021-03-19T11:43:00.001-06:00

The revitalized and updated Nancy comic strip, as done by Olivia Jaimes, is a revelation. It is well worth the time to explore. It's hyperbole-proof genius.

Vain and fussy, yet honest and true to herself, we all have a little bit of Nancy in us. Originally written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy debuted in the newspaper in 1933 as a character in “Fritzi Ritz”. And the comic strip has only been drawn by men up until 2018, where Olivia Jaimes became the latest and first female cartoonist in its history. And she has now given the spiky-haired a new voice to walk the world.

And there you have it. A strip that has existed for most of the last century has been repurposed into an examination of anxiety, loneliness, and technology. It is as if someone said, "let's just throw all of the Humanities in there and see what comes out."

Charles Schulz looked at the way loneliness could be used to connect with people as a recurring theme. He populated Peanuts with a cast of characters who were forever at odds with one another, struggling to make sense of the way the world works. Jaimes has picked up the ball and has run it further.

There's no stopping to see if Nancy and Sluggo are going to have a Charlie Brown and Lucy moment of import. The dialogue is too wry for that. This is how you move past all of that nonsense and live in the modern world. Why are we here and why do we do what it is we do? That's all you need to start with. Glorious fun.

People Need Libraries

2021-03-08T09:22:00.005-07:00

Critical resources can be found at any decent library in this country. Sometimes, the only way for people to get to those resources is through a well-run library that has been closed for the last year. We need to reopen these facilities safely:

The last time I saw the inside of a library was the afternoon of March 12. Crocuses were peeking out of the ground. The neighbors were out for a stroll, the sidewalks strangely dense with pedestrians. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was a holiday.

The looming pandemic had propelled me out of Brooklyn and back to my hometown of Seattle. Mask wearing was underway, though it all still felt a bit hypothetical. It wasn’t until I walked into the library that day—the same stately, brick Carnegie library I grew up around the corner from, a branch I’d been going to since I was in grade school—that it hit me.

I walked inside and smelled the air, the scent of old pages from my childhood. And then it dawned on me—if I could smell the books through my mask, what other particles were also floating in? All of a sudden, paranoia. I sensed germs everywhere. Right next to me, over across the room, on the book of essays I was holding. There was a dispenser of hand sanitizer at the front—a comically puny intervention, when you think about it, against the manifold surfaces of a library book, an object defined by its passage through countless, anonymous fingers. I asked a librarian if I could use the restroom to wash my hands. Sorry, she said. Restrooms are closed. The next day, Seattle’s chief librarian announced the closure of all branches.

If we can reopen restaurants, we should be able to open up libraries. If it takes emergency funds, let's figure out a way to make it happen.

Superman

2021-03-01T18:23:00.002-07:00

This is what you find in the category of, "hey, we have a serious problem here..."

Deadline has just announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates will be writing the screenplay for the latest Superman reboot. J.J. Abrams is producing, and Henry Cavill will reprise his role as the Gap sale section of superheroes.

Though the very subject of Hollywood’s love affair with endless superhero reboots it tedious at this point (so we reboot on, boats against the current, etc., etc.), the idea of what Coates can do with the world’s most vanilla superhero is nevertheless intriguing.

In addition to his widely lauded works of non-fiction and Oprah-approved novel, Coates has previously written both a Black Panther and a Captain America series for Marvel Comics, so he’s no stranger to the genre. As to whether he can breathe life into Superman, the superhero equivalent of those styrofoam cups of vanilla ice cream they used to serve in elementary school cafeterias, remains to be seen—but if anyone can do it, he can.

I can't think of anything else that could be more out of ideas and more irrelevant to our current situation in this country. The problem here is that there's money to make this movie but there's no compelling reason why it has to be made and then seen. It's like a contractual obligation and nothing more. Here, we need to throw shit at the wall. Here's some shit. Now, we can go throw it at the wall in the Summer of next year or the next, cross that off the list.

Did anyone wake up demanding to know if there was anything else that could be wrung out of something that's been done to death? What if we make Superman evil? There you go, reboot it, flip it, kill someone off who you don't care about, got it. On to the next atrocity.

You don't make a Superman movie because you want to tell a story. You do it because there's a market for a blockbuster movie aimed at a certain audience that will earn x amount of dollars in ticket sales. You can do whatever you want and convince yourself that it will be artistic and groundbreaking and fascinating but, really, by the time skittish film company executives get done with it, all of those pieces will be completely sanded off.

No one reboots a film that has been rebooted three times already and then deludes themselves into thinking that everyone has to see it, right? Can you imagine the mentality of someone who is shitting themselves with excitement over something that will roll into the popular culture and take up the space that five or six legitimately original but smaller films would have taken up? There's a reason why everything sucks and that's because you're not seeing any gems out there anymore. The oxygen has already been consumed. That great script that so-and-so wrote that has a promising story in it? Not getting made because you can't explain the plot to a teenager in such-and-such place.

We've seen eight or nine or twenty versions of this already. No one is interested in it for the story at this point. It's been done.

You don't hire J.J. Abrams to make a new movie. You hire him to make a new version of the old movie you really liked. Let's not kid ourselves.

Don't hate on Coates for wanting to make a living as a writer. Some gigs you take because they'll support the fifty other things you want to do.

Oh, it'll be the greatest thing ever. You'll see it on free cable and you'll really feel bad that you missed it. Can't wait to see how they market this. Maybe there will be a fake controversy about how it's your fault no one cares.

Honestly, a Superman movie is like waking up to find someone didn't shovel the walk after a snowstorm. You can't even get mad about it. All you can do is pick of a shovel and try to clear a path through something you didn't want to see.

Hilma af Klint

2021-02-24T11:10:00.002-07:00

Her work was done in secret but now you know who she is:

If you are a regular Open Culture reader, you’ve probably seen our many posts on Hilma af Klint, the Swedish abstract painter who might have been recognized, before Wassily Kandinsky, as the first 20th century abstractionist; that is, if she had shown any of her work before her death in obscurity in 1944 (the same year that Kandinsky died, it happens). Instead, af Klint instructed that her paintings not be exhibited until twenty years after her death. Then, another 22 years went by before anyone would see her enigmatic canvases. They first went on display in a 1986 Los Angeles show called, after Kandinsky, “The Spiritual in Art.”

Comparisons seem inevitable, but where the great Russian abstractionist theorized about art and spirit, af Klint encountered it in person, she claimed in her Theosophical accounts, in which she writes of meeting five “high masters” in a séance and receiving instructions for her new style. She was a channel, a vessel, and a medium for the spirits, as she saw it.

There will be seven volumes published that will feature her work. She is absolutely remarkable and should be celebrated for her achievements.

Moonlighting

2021-02-15T14:08:00.001-07:00

You could argue that this was the very early beginning of prestige television, a show so good it rivaled feature films in quality and substance:

It’s impossible to say all the ways in which Moonlighting influenced television that came after it. Its wacky breaking-the-fourth wall, mile-a-minute jokes, throwaway references that not all audience members might even understand place it in a lineage of television’s smartest, most sophisticated situation comedies. And its particular, zany take on the “lighthearted detective show” gambit was new, too—whenever I watch a show like Psych, I am overcome by the debt owed to Moonlighting. But Moonlighting’s impact was also extremely personal. One of these days I’ll launch an essay contest, a “what Moonlighting means to me” sort of deal. It made an enormous impact. The television critic Howard Rosenberg, who had panned the show upon its release, wrote a correction a few weeks later to apologize for not having understood Moonlighting and to confirm that he had since seen the light. After its startling first season, it had become such an enormous sensation that (according to people who were alive in the 80s) Moonlighting became the ubiquitous conversation topic on Wednesday mornings at work. Two years after it aired, sixty million viewers tuned in to watch the protagonists finally hook up, in a passionate (edgy for prime-time) sex-scene that involved destroying every nearby prop. (Anyone who wants to read about this, more in-depth, should pre-order Scott Ryan’s official book on the series, which is due out in June 2021.)

In terms of being a romance, procedural, mystery, or comedy show, Moonlighting was really a screwball workplace program. It did sexual tension and chemistry better than Cheers and was so good it burned out and fell off the schedule before most people knew it was even there.

Maybe White People Need to Stop Being So Bigoted and Racist

2021-02-08T22:10:00.003-07:00

Bruce Springsteen has surprised me in recent years by being very much an advocate for defeating Republicans who espouse bigotry and hatred and racism. He is very much against what Trump did to this country for the last four years. And so, we now have his ad for Jeep.

It's Super Bowl Sunday and the stars are out, showing up in big budget commercials for the big game. Bruce Springsteen, who has never let his music be used in an ad, let alone appeared in one, decided to appear in a two-minute ad from Jeep titled "The Middle" that isn't so much about selling cars as it is about the idea of America and a need to find common ground. The ad was shot at U.S. Center Chapel in Kansas which is the geographic center point of the Lower 48 states.

"It's no secret the middle has been a hard place to get to lately,' Bruce says in voiceover narration set against scenes of Bruce driving around and visiting the church and other heartland locales. "Between red and blue, servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear. Now fear has never been the best of who we are. And as for freedom, it not the property of just the fortunate few. It belongs to us all. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, it's what connects us, and we need that connection. We need the middle." He later adds "We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground" and that "We will cross this divide." The commercial ends with the tagline, "To the ReUnited States of America."

Those of us who did not vote for Trump did not "disunite" the United States. Trump being a completely and utter troll and jackass did that. I'm not sure who I need to tolerate and unite with. I'm not sure who I'm supposed to meet "in the middle" when the middle doesn't even exist in the minds of Trump supporters.

These people have literally killed people who disagree with them politically. They don't accept the votes of African-Americans and they threw babies in cages.

Sorry, Bruce. Fuck that shit.

Austerlitz

2021-01-27T08:10:00.002-07:00

I don't understand why this wouldn't be in a museum rather than in the hands of a private collector:

Napoleon Bonaparte’s account of his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, dictated and annotated during his exile on the island of St Helena, has gone on sale in Paris for €1m (£880,000).

The description of the battle, the strategy behind which is still taught in military schools, is viewed by historians as evidence of Napoleon’s desire to record his hour of glory for posterity after his 1815 humiliation at Waterloo and subsequent capture by the British.

It was dictated to his loyal aide-de-camp Gen Henri-Gatien Bertrand, who remained with him in exile on the volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

Densely written over 74 pages, the manuscript recounts the December 1805 “day of the three emperors” clash with Russo-Austrian forces, which is considered the Napolean’s greatest military victory. It takes readers through preparations for battle and the fighting itself, and is completed by a battle plan drawn on tracing paper by Bertrand.

You could put it in a display about megalomania or revisionist history.

Bimbling

2021-01-25T15:06:00.004-07:00

In another universe, I'm trying to do what Iain Welch does without hesitation. Every day, he puts out something amazing.

The Milam Building

2021-01-25T14:36:00.004-07:00

At one time, this was one of the few air conditioned office buildings in the whole country. I can't believe I used to walk by the Milam Building every day.

It's true, I never went in.

Graveyard of Old Broken Bottles

2021-01-25T14:34:00.004-07:00

Oh, sure. It looks like a fun lake. I'm telling you, it's a graveyard for broken bottles and old tires.

The Beauty of Thinking About Other Things

2021-01-23T07:40:00.001-07:00

See how it is when you can finally have nice things again?

Each one of the world’s 317 land borders is defined and agreed to, formalized as a result of agreements between those countries that abut each other, as neighbors; and each has been surveyed with, in most cases, a mutually agreed level of precision. To read a table of these boundaries and their history is to learn much, in the same way that stamp collecting, now in popular disfavor, used to teach much about the world’s historical geography.

One can derive great pleasure in picking at random from the United Nations list: learning of how, for instance, the Albanian border with Montenegro was first agreed to by a delegation of Turkish pashas who went to Germany and signed the Treaty of Berlin in 1878; that the northwestern border of Myanmar, separating it from the Indian state of Manipur, was the result of a victory over the Arakanese by the Burmese army back in 1558; that in 1821 an entity called the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves annexed a free-spirited confection of small states gathered around the Río de la Plata’s estuary and known at the time as the Liga Federal, and in doing so set up a line still recognized today as the border between the modern countries of Argentina and Uruguay; and that the border between Ireland and Britain came about in 1921 when the 26 southern counties of the Irish Republic, all with a majority population of Roman Catholics, declared an independence from Britain which the six mostly Protestant-majority counties of the northeast of the island could not and would not accept, and who thus remained loyal, if troubled, and protected behind what would become a highly militarized border, for much of the century beyond.

The luxury of being able to distract yourself with things like this is a welcome relief from four years of outrage and terror.

Abstract Painting, End of 2020

2021-01-06T21:05:00.003-07:00

Throughout the end of 2020, I went through a brief period of creating abstracts and landscapes, bouncing back and forth between tempera paints and watercolors and not really coming up with much in terms of inspiration. Too much discord, too much strife, whatever you want to call it. Never really settled, never really into a groove.

This one turned out okay, so here it is. I might get to a better scan of this or a better appraisal of last year's work, but very little of it seems to have jumped out at me. I did a far better job cartooning, and supporting the Combined Federal Campaign.

Landscape Watercolor December 2020

2020-12-21T10:49:00.005-07:00

Slightly retouched for color:

Not much else turned out. I guess I wasn't feeling it. The watercolor pens are a great idea, and that's mainly what went into this attempt.

John le Carré 1931-2020

2020-12-16T05:58:00.009-07:00

What's all this about spies? John le Carré wrote about human rights, plain and simple.

John le Carré, whose given name was David Cornwell, died on Saturday, December 12, at the age of 89. The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, announced in a statement on Sunday.

The best-selling author and onetime actual British spy is widely known as perhaps the world’s greatest spy novelist, and his most famous creation, George Smiley, the best loved literary spy (save perhaps for James Bond). He has been remarkably productive and consistently good since the 60s, writing iconic works like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which Graham Greene called “the best spy story I have ever read,” Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Night Manager, and The Constant Gardener; his most recent novel, Agent Running in the Field, was published just last year.

His agent Jonny Geller described le Carré as “an undisputed giant of English literature. He defined the cold war era and fearlessly spoke truth to power in the decades that followed . . . I have lost a mentor, an inspiration and most importantly, a friend. We will not see his like again.”

Earlier this year, he was awarded the Olof Palme Prize, an award given for “an outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security.” He donated the $100,000 prize to international humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.

Watercolor by Shibasaki

2020-12-10T13:56:00.003-07:00

If this leads to a renaissance of watercolor painting, then I'm all for it:

A 73-year-old grandfather may seem like an unlikely social media sensation, but Japan's Harumichi Shibasaki is defying stereotypes.
The painter's YouTube channel, Watercolor by Shibasaki, features a series of how-to art videos and has amassed more than 700,000 subscribers. His most popular video, a tree painting tutorial, has been watched more than five million times.
"When it comes to drawing a tree, people generally focus on the fact that there are many leaves. But I advise them to observe not individual leaves but the bigger silhouette of the tree," Shibasaki tells CNN.

Shibasaki is building up quite a following, and with good reason.

He creates videos to show how his techniques can be used and, by making them with state of the art social media tools, he can bring in followers and viewers who might not otherwise pick up a brush. And you don't have to paint to be entertained.

One of my favorite watercolor artists is Iain Welch. You should follow his work here.

David Chase Has Another Opportunity to Ruin the Sopranos Ending

2020-12-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

Every time I turn around, someone is giving David Chase another chance to ruin the way that he ended the Sopranos by killing Tony Soprano.

The streaming premiere, set for a one-night-only event on December 27 at 7pm GMT, will include two bonus features: the first being a reunion of key cast members at Il Cortile, a Little Italy restaurant the actors would go after their characters had been killed off.

The second bonus will offer fans a rare interview with creator David Chase, reminiscing on his childhood memories of Newark and his plans to take The Sopranos to the big screen next year.

Here's to a whole new round of Sopranos related interviews and documentaries where Chase inadvertently tells people what he really meant when he had those hitmen shoot Tony in the face in front of his family, which maybe didn't happen now that we know that Chase changed his mind about that years ago.