City of Death

The Doctor and Romana are having a lovely time in Paris when a time slip alerts them to a dangerous plot about to unfold. An alien, masquerading as an aristocrat, has been stealing and selling rare historical artifacts in order to fund his experiments in time travel. And he's about to go for his biggest score yet, the Mona Lisa. City of Death might be Douglas Adams' most beloved contribution to Doctor Who. While he wasn't the sole writer on the serial, his fingerprints are all over it. It's filled with clever ideas and witty dialogue. It's well cast too, with Julian Glover playing the aristocrat/alien and Tom Chadbon playing Duggan, the Inspector who never met a problem he couldn't solve with violence.

Rating: Well, you're a beautiful woman, probably%

A Thousand Leaves by Sonic Youth

For a long time I considered this to be my favorite Sonic Youth album, although in retrospect I think I was saying that just to avoid the obvious choice of Daydream Nation. Anyway, it's still a pretty great album, although if I had to characterize it, I'd call it... docile? Well, at least Macaulay Culkin was in one of their videos. Um.

RATING: 89%

Free Verse

What, you want me to use iambs and rhymes and shit? This is poetry, man, it's not supposed to be work. Here's a description of a bird I once saw getting eaten by a smaller bird instead. Also, I don't even like using line breaks so now it's a prose poem.

RATING: Whatever-I-Feel-Like-All-The-Time%

The MS Paint Drawing I Did For MyReview Of "Space Games"

I've done a lot of drawings for R3 in the past year, but probably the "Space Games" review drawing was the best. If you'll look closely, you'll realize that the image is an astronomically correct depiction of the Arcturus mini-cluster. Usually this sort of painstaking attention to detail is overlooked in my drawings, so I felt that I'd draw everybody's attention to it, just this once. Sure, my genius is frequently ignored and my work callously skimmed over on this site, but adding this little amount of effort to everything I do at R3 is just the kind of guy I am.

RATING: 99%

The Poster for Rachel Getting Married

I don't get it - is this a poster for an Academy-Award nominated movie from 2008 or the straight-to-VHS box art for a Tiffani Amber Thiessen dramedy circa 1994?

RATING: 12%

The Creative Class

I can't decide what I love best about Writers and Artists--their maturity, their Herculean attention spans, or their robust psychological health. Maybe it's their insatiable appetite for intellectual conversation, their reverence for the classic works of Western civilization, their hard-nosed political and economic sensibilities, or their uncompromising work ethic. What ever it is, I think they render self-evident the argument for beating your kids more.

RATING: Snowflake%

(Image from redwing.hutman.net.)

Art

Art is totally lame and/or for gaywads. If I had $8,500, I wouldn't give one cent to art it sucks so bad. People are always writing poems that don't rhyme, or painting some dumb picture that looks like it was done by an epileptic three year old, and I'm supposed to hock over my hard earned dough? Hell no this is America. The only things I hock over my money for kill people or blow things up.

RATING: <.000001%, or not-even-$1 million-out-of-almost-$1 trillion

All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna

All Over Coffee is a comic strip published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It consists of short, poem like text often dealing with people and their difficulties interacting with others juxtaposed with barren images of a cityscape in which all the people and vehicles have been removed. There is one hardcover collection that is moving, beautiful, and often funny, but you can also check out the weekly strip by following this link. I can't believe somebody put together comics and poetry so successfully. It's almost like it was custom made for me. Now if only Paul Madonna could find some way to write in Captain Kirk and Darkhawk, I'd be set.

RATING: 91%

Ideological Critique: The Enthusiasms of Political Reduction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the word "nigger" over 200 times. The Merchant of Venice depicts the humiliation and ruin of a Jewish villain at the hands of a Christian majority; Othello, a negro who strangles his perfectly innocent wife. The famous first line of Pride and Prejudice can be read as a blatant formula for prostitution, if one so chooses. The women of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight inspire and manipulate their men, but don't engage in any decapitating contests themselves.

It's pretty easy to point one's finger at a work of art, especially challenging art, and denounce it as ideologically unsavory in some way. Anyone can (re)apply this or that political formula (e.g. the "Woman in the Refrigerator" or any of the other 3 million ways to reduce a story to who's-doing-what-to-whom) and bandy about the -isms of the day in a denunciatory fashion. There are people with tenure right now who have made entire careers out of doing nothing but. It's a lot harder, however, to make a sincere effort to participate in an artist's world view, to try to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, to make an honest and uncompromising critique that nonetheless adds value to the world rather than merely taking it away.

I'm talking about imaginative generosity, not apologia. And I'm not always great at taking my own advice--I talk more lazy, cheap, snide, cynical shit than a lot of people I know. I'm just saying I'd rather watch Othello than Gothika.

RATING: 8%

(Image from mincer.en.alibaba.com.)

Tahitian Victory Poncho

"Ah, Tahiti. The lush island whose carefree natives the painter Paul Gaughain used as icons of primitive bliss. The serene culture which Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered evidence that humans had been 'noble savages,' peaceful and benign, before their corruption by civilization. Unfortunately, as the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley has noted, Rousseau relied for this conclusion on reports of Tahiti that had omitted relevant parts of its history. For example: the custom in which a victorious warrior would "pound his vanquished foe's corpse flat with his heavy war club, cut a slit through the well-crushed victim and don him as a trophy poncho"" (Robert Wright, Nonzero, italics added).

This may be the most badass thing I've heard in my entire life.

RATING: Off the motherfucking chart.

(Image from www.oceansbridge.com.)

The Nasher Sculpture Center

The Nasher Sculpture Center is right across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art in downtown Dallas. Admission was $10 per person, but it's free on the first Saturday of the month. It was worth the trip just for James Turrell's Tending (Blue), the only site-specific piece at the Nasher and one of the most refreshing things I've seen in a long time. There was also a nice Rodin in the outdoor garden, and an interesting piece by Antony Gormley called Quantum Cloud XX. I didn't really care for much of the other stuff: there were a few tumorous Henry Moores, some Picassos (overrated, if you ask me) and some truly nasty De Koonings. I like modern art and even some modern sculpture, but I'm not a big fan of ugly sculpture.

RATING: 100%--Multiple Rodins and a Turrell installation for $10 is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.

(Image from farm3.static.flickr.com.)

The Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

This novel was quite boring. Also, the overwrought, self-conscious similes and metaphors invoked by Griet, the narrator, seemed to me to reflect a kind of narcissistic wish fulfillment on behalf of the author--a somewhat desperate attempt to prove her aesthetic sensitivity through a heroine fashioned in her own psychological self-image. Many writers do this to some extent, but the good ones succeed in giving their characters a life of their own, while the not-so-good ones come off as painfully insecure. It's too bad, because Vermeer's painting itself is simply gorgeous.

RATING: 45%

(Image from www.flickr.com.)

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a British artist who's famous for installation pieces featuring dead animals floating in formaldehyde that sell for exorbitant amounts of money. He also does "spin paintings," which are created by someone (not Hirst himself, but one of his employees) dripping paint onto a flat, revolving surface. His piece For the Love of God, pictured here, was fashioned from a real human skull to which he affixed 8,601 diamonds. Whenever I think of Damien Hirst, I'm reminded of the painter Rabo Karabekian from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, who "with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid" (Vonnegut 214). Hirst doesn't even paint most of his own pictures, and I think the idea of the mastermind conceptual artist taking all the credit for merely signing his name on the work of others, especially as some sort of "ironic" critique of capitalism and mass production, was fraudulent and boring when Andy Warhol did it 40 years ago.

Damien Hirst's work is smug, nihilistic, and morally and aesthetically repulsive. Moreover, I think his exploitation of dead people and animals for his own financial gain is blasphemous on a level that any thinking, feeling creature should be able to understand. He's not an artist, he's an artiste, and celebrity bullshitters like him are one of the main reasons why average folks don't visit art galleries.

RATING: 9%

(Image from myartspace.com.)