How to articulate this? Increasingly, I’m experiencing this problem of knowing so much about people I don’t know that I feel like I do know them. It’s worse than celebrity stalking because the people aren’t really celebrities. Why do I need to know so much about a couple of famous-in-blogland bloggers? But I do. So if I met them it would be odd for me, because I’d be up to speed, and does one pretend not to be? Or does one just jump in? It’s a similar problem to Googling one’s date (definitely not advisable).
But it’s an entirely different type of weirdness to wake up and discover that the rest of the world now knows someone you know. Because how does one react to that? There can be a sort of jealousy in the same way one is upset when a favorite but obscure band is no longer obscure. There’s an entirely undeserved sense of ownership, but that’s not exactly the right word, and the feeling that there’s been a type of theft, which is related to an equally undeserved sense of pride (I found it first!). But when these feelings relate to a person they are obviously different than losing a restaurant or a hidden vacation spot to the unwashed masses.
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So, even though it is called Pop Art, where the pop strands for popular, quite a bit of it still has not found its place in mainstream society. In fact a lot of developing pop art has not found a place in popular culture (which leads to the question, “is it still pop art?”). That is why it is nice to see one of the bigger names in pop art getting recognition in what could be considered one of the biggest popular culture crossover venues around.
Jeff Koons has been making pop art for close to 20 years now. Some of his best known work is taking inflatable toys, and then creating metal sculptures out of them, maintaining the appearance of being inflated, but with a permanence that can only be obtained from casting in metal.
In an odd twist, Koons’ iconic Rabbit sculpture of an inflatable rabbit made of highly polished stainless steel has been turned into a balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yes, you read that correctly: Koon’ steel sculpture of an inflatable rabbit was turned into an inflatable balloon. Someone somewhere is having a great laugh over this
Some consider Charles Bukowski one of the greatest American authors of the the 20th century. In his 30 some odd years of writing he produced somewhere in the range of 100 books, including stories and poetry.
An article from LA Weekly discusses part of the legacy Bukowski left behind: Mostly his writing was about being down and out in and around LA. He also did a great deal of his writing in a little “bungalow” in LA. That same bungalow complex is not up for sale and will probably end up being torn down if not for the efforts of Richard Schave and Lauren Everett. They are working on getting the location recognized as a landmark, the home of Charles Bukowski, maybe even turned into a writers colony in the heart of Hollywood. The current owners have different ideas. They want to see the place purchased and torn down, they figure it is the perfect spot for new condos or a nice fast food restaurant.
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Slow day, eh? Everyone’s already in holiday mode.
I went on a LOOOOONG lunch today and got to talking with a new friend about the follies shows we put on (most recently I posted about the Bloomberg parody video and Gawker picked up on it, too).
She asked how long it took me to write the song parodies we do each year. This year I think I spent a total of five hours, maybe less (for five songs).
But the longest I’ve ever spent on a single song was getting the concept of the housing bubble to work to the tune of O, Fortuna from Carmina Burana. Not that you care, but here were the lyrics to that.
Staccato bursts of words (versus multi-syllable words) are definitely harder to replicate with modern English than one would think.
Wish I had the video of this. It was pretty well done. At the end, we had a journalist come out wielding a huge drum and crashing head first through a cardboard brick “house.”
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Forbes just published an article: America’s Most Obese Cities.
Unfortunately the news in this article isn’t that surprising. Americans tend to be obese, shocking. This obesity is caused, at least in part, by eating poorly and being lazy. Did I mention how shocked I was by this information. High poverty rates also tend to add to obesity which seems counter intuitive (don’t the poor have less to spend on food?) until you consider that fast food restaurants are usually highly concentrated in less affluent neighborhoods.
Though they list 20 cities in the article we’ll only list the top 5 here: Read more »
The staff of American Madness would like to thank the 