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“I didn’t marry a horn, I married a man”
This (from an article by Alec Wilkinson) is amazing: Did Louis Armstrong and his wife really have this conversation? This is just too much!
View ArticleRipping off a ripoff
I opened the newspaper today (recall that this blog is on an approximately one-month delay) to see a moderately horrifying story about art appraisers who are deterred by fear of lawsuits from...
View ArticleSpecial effects
I just saw L’Age de Glace 4 and boy are my eyes tired. I’m just glad it wasn’t in 3-D or I probably would’ve thrown up. The special effects were amazing, way beyond George of the Jungle and that ilk....
View ArticleReal rothko, fake rothko
Jay Livingston writes: I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things. Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3...
View ArticleLife as a blogger: the emails just get weirder and weirder
In the email the other day, subject line “Casting blogger, writer, journalist to host cable series”: Hi there Andrew, I’m casting a male journalist, writer, blogger, documentary filmmaker or comedian...
View ArticleArt/math
This seems like the sort of thing I would like: Drawing from My Mind’s Eye: Dorothea Rockburne in Conversation with David Cohen Introduced by Nina Samuel Thursday, November 29 6 pm BGC, 38 West 86th...
View ArticleConfusing headline and capitalization leads to hopes raised, then dashed
I read the following under the headline, Behind a Flop, a Play(wright) Within a Play”: A stroll down West 45th Street in the theater district is all it takes to understand the contradictory fortunes...
View ArticleImpersonators
This story of a Cindy Sherman impersonator reminded me of some graffiti I saw in a bathroom of the Whitney Museum many years ago. My friend Kenny and I had gone there for the Biennial which had an...
View ArticleBack when fifty years was a long time ago
New Year’s Day is an excellent time to look back at changes, not just in the past year, but in the past half-century. Mark Palko has an interesting post on the pace of changes in everyday life. We’ve...
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So much artistic talent
I saw this excellent art show the other day, and it reminded me how much artistic talent is out there. I really have no idea whassup with those all-black canvases and the other stuff you see at modern...
View Article“Proposition and experiment”
Anna Lena Phillips writes: I. Many people will not, of their own accord, look at a poem. II. Millions of people will, of their own accord, spend lots and lots of time looking at photographs of cats....
View Article“How big is your chance of dying in an ordinary play?”
At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking. I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln...
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Give me a ticket for an aeroplane
How long are songs? Gabriel Rossman discusses the two peaks, one at just under 3 minutes and one at just under 4 minutes. He quotes musician Jacob Slichter: In anticipation of “crossing over” the...
View ArticleData visualizations gone beautifully wrong
Jeremy Fox points us to this compilation of data visualizations in R that went wrong, in a way that ended up making them look like art. They are indeed wonderful.
View ArticleObjects of the class “Objects of the class”
Objects of the class “Foghorn Leghorn”: parodies that are more famous than the original. (“It would be as if everybody were familiar with Duchamp’s Mona-Lisa-with-a-moustache while never having heard...
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Measuring Beauty
Anaface analysis of Michelangelo’s David I’ve come across a paper that was using “beauty” as one of the predictors. To measure beauty, the authors used Anaface.com I don’t trust metrics without trying...
View ArticlePeabody here.
I saw the trailer for the new Mr. Peabody movie and it looked terrible. They used that weird animation where everything looks round, also the voice had none of the intonations of the “real” Peabody...
View ArticleWhat happened to the world we knew?
I was unlocking my bike, with music turned on low, and a couple of high school kids were lounging around nearby. One of them walked over and asked, « Qui est-ce qui chante? ». I responded, “Stevie...
View ArticleMy short career as a Freud expert
I received the following email the other day (well, actually it was the other month, as we’re still on blog-delay): Dear Prof. Andrew Gelman, The ** Broadcasting Authority, together with ** – a...
View ArticleWow—this is much more impressive than anything Frank Flynn ever did!
This is what I call a rogue sociologist.
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