This week's sign of the apocalypse

Holy crap people. George Bush is an excellent artist.

Really!

Those are amazing and there are more here.

He's already better than Lucian Freud and that's saying something.

People, if crap like this can happen, why do we even have art schools at all?

Epic Modern Paintings

This summer I re-visited MOMA, the Hirschhorn, and the East wing of the National Gallery. Mostly it reminded me why I've turned to folk art and outsider art and tribal art for my pleasure, but there were 4 epic modern paintings I'd like to share with you.

First is from MOMA and it's an El-Anatsui:

The guy is just tremendous!

The second was in the Hirshhorn. A Richter:

I love the whole range of Richter's work but his abstract paintings are my favorites.





The last two were from the National Gallery East Wing:





















































The first is Lavender Mist. One of the greatest modern paintings ever.

The second is by Howard Hodgkin, another of my favorite painters.

The NG also had a good Anslem Kiefer out, but it didn't photograph very well.

All in all, the National Gallery is somehow getting worse over time. Fewer Jasper Johns, Fewer Rothkos, more dumb special exhibits, including one on the costumes of the Russian Ballet!!

Funky days are back again

People, Cornershop is back! Sweet! Here is a video from their new album (available for sale at cornershop.com) 

Hell is too far to go

Freaky video from Beck!

Old wine in less old bottles

And by wine I mean the Kadane brothers, Matt and Bubba.  Bedhead was one of my favorite bands in the 1990s. I highly recommend them and was sad when they quit putting out music. 

However, I somehow missed the memo that the Kadane's re-formed, calling themselves The New Year. I just found this out and got two of their recordings, "The End is Near", and "Newness Ends". Both are very good, with The End is Near being my favorite and borderline fantastic. It still seems like Bedhead, but with a bit more variety and a bit faster paced.

By the way, my favorite Bedhead albums are "Transaction de Nova" and "Macha Loved Bedhead".

Munich

I am going to try to find more time to write about Munich soon. But today is my big teaching day. Some squibs:

1. The EYM pointed out that every city in the U.S. now has a Martin Luther King Blvd. He posed the question, "Does every city in Germany have a Martin Luther Strasse (Platz, Bahn, something). The answer appears to be "yes," since there certainly is one in Munich, the most Catholic city in the most Catholic region of Germany.

2. The train ride to Munich and back was uneventful and mostly on time. Boring, like it should be. I have had enough of exciting.

3. We did visit Haus Der Kunst museum, as suggest by recreational genius Angus. Gerhard Richter was in fact one of the exhibitions. I have not seen much modern art. But in terms of my own reaction, both emotionally and intellectually, this was clearly the best exhibit I have ever seen. One odd thing, however: the little speaker jobbie you get at exhibitions, to listen to some otherwise unemployed art historian tell you what it all means? Well, you go from number to number, press the button, and learn. And I have to say the CONTENT of these recordings, which were available in many languages, including English, was very good. But the pieces being exhibited were in RANDOM order, or nearly so. 1 was outside; fair enough. 2 was just inside the door. 3 was in another room, though 5 and 6 were in the same room as 2. 4 I didn't find until nearly the end; it was in another room. And so on: 8 was next to 14, then 15 (good), then you finally come to 9 and 10, in the next room. It is just possible, of course, that this was intentional. My own insistence that the numbers should develop in a logical, orderly also meant that time is linear, and patterns are revealed in a sequence required by physics. So, if the curators intentionally partly scrambled the order (only partly, not really random, but hard to tell what comes next, and the viewer has to CHOOSE what comes next, without knowing the consequences), then ....well played, Haus der Kunst.

4. Next post: Two much more lengthy descriptions of important questions. A. What is the best beer in Munich? B. What happens when fat Americans from Ohio go on a tour of Munich, following the development of the Third Reich in its home city, led by a French-Tunisian named Schadlich? Answers: A: Ha! You have to wait. B: Nothing good. They certainly embarrass the Americans from North Carolina, who are not easily embarrassed.

Wow

Very nice. First cutting across conventions, and then jumping outside the conventions.

Nod to ML

Funky Cold Medina

I am back from a doubleheader family visit (mine in Michigan and a bunch of Mrs. Angus' in Ohio). Our last stop was Medina Ohio where I never tired of asking "Where's Tone Loc?" However, in a case of karmic justice, a very very bad thing happened to me there. Mrs. Angus asked her 88 year old grandfather (who downloads and listens to Econtalk podcasts by the way) what kind of movies he liked. "Musicals" he said. After I ran out of breath singing a few bars of "Surrey with the fringe on top" at the top of my lungs, I found myself in a local multiplex with the two of them watching (though I mostly had my eyes closed) Mamma Mia!

Holy Crap people. It will be months before I will have any testosterone back flowing through my body. The singing is bad. The dancing worse. The acting still worse. The camera work worser still. I am serious. Here you can check an actual professional review by the best movie reviewer in the world if you don't believe me.

If you told me this was a vanity project by Meryl Streep who had personally paid all the production and distribution costs and then was committed to an asylum immediately after its filming, I would easily believe you. That and she had some kind of photos of Pierce Brosnan with several goats that she used to convince him to humiliate himself the way he did in this film.

Recommended Reading

1. J. Chait takes Naomi Klein apart. A truly excellent piece.

2. I've seen the needle and the damage done.

3. Pleasurable writing.

The movies come to Angus

Thanks to on demand cable, we get to see a wider range of movies at Chez Angus than what shows in the local multiplex (though with a lag of course). We just watched "Lars and the Real Girl" and I have to say based on his performance there and in "Half Nelson" that Ryan Gosling is an incredibly talented actor. Both movies required his character to do really strange things and he was amazingly believable and compelling at all times.

On the face of it, the plot of "Lars" is untenable, but Gosling (along with the actors playing his sister-in-law and his doctor) really pulls it off. If you haven't seen it, you should (Half Nelson too!).

My favorite actor used to be Guy Pierce, but while "Memento" is a better movie than any in which Gosling has appeared, I gotta give Ryan the nod at this point (Guy will no doubt be devastated to hear this news).

What I do in my spare time

Collect art.

Here are the artists we are currently collecting at Chez Angus:

Souther Salazar
Billy Woolway
Joe Garcia
Manuel Castro Leñero
Floyd Kuptana
Maudie Ohiktook
Antoine Oleyant
Lynda Barry

Here is the latest piece we got; it's by Joe Garcia:



Here is how I collect art:

"hey honey, have you seen this piece? It's only $XXX. What do you think? What if I could get them down to .8*$XXX? Well what about this one? Who do you like better? Shouldn't we get them both? What do you think?"