Infographic: easy, medium, and hard languages to learn for an English speaker. Spanish is easiest, Arabic and Oriental languages the hardest.
Two bikes down on MacArthur
Traffic to the beach was crazy backed up late this morning, with rumors flying around Twitter that a cyclist was killed. When I reached the Fisher Island ferry terminal, there was a lane blocked, and two mangled bikes down just at the spot where traffic for the terminal cuts through the bike lane. A little way up, a lightly mangled silver Mazda 3 sat, the position of its wheels marked by Miami Beach police.
While I don’t yet have confirmation about whether the accident was fatal, it’s not difficult to reconstruct what happened. A jerk motorist heading for the ferry changed lanes to turn, cutting through the bike lane without looking. Maybe we need to rethink having those lane markers suddenly turn dashed there. But what we really need to do is not convict this driver of negligence or reckless driving or something. If there’s a fatality here, the crime is simple vehicular manslaughter. And until we start to loudly and consistently enforce the law this way, cyclists will continue to be an afterthought in the minds of drivers. A couple more photos after the jump.
Update: Both the cyclists survived, tho one is in critical condition.
April artwalk
The gallery walk has become a completely different thing over the last couple of years. As more and more people show up each month, it’s become a positive street fair, where the majority of the people have minimal interest in the actual art, and the galleries are almost just along for the ride. Stores have begun to open up along N.E. 2nd, and the food truck / street vendor thing has positively exploded. Some of the art is responding by reaching for out-sized dimensions and spectacle, while other galleries determinedly stay on course. The number of galleries has also expanded — seems that every space near the Wynwood nexus is open and displaying art these days (with the exception of die-hard Harold’s Body Shop). But nevermind all that—let’s look at some art.
Finally the Jillian Mayer show at Castillo, which was unexpected and wonderful. In particular the grandma video, which you need to not miss.
Across the street, there was lots of interesting stuff happening at the O, Miami space, including performances and a number of audience-participation writing projects. Applaudable, with the possible exception of the booklet titled “a modern anthology of miami poets” which contained exactly 13 poems?
Over in the UM space, Sean Smith’s paintings, created by serving meat with sauces. Delicious, delicious meat. The end result gets a coat of varnish and goes on the wall. There were a few completed smaller pieces (which were pretty interesting), and some of his “regular” paintings (which, not so much).
As always, a rockabilly band in front of Harold Golden.
Peggy Levison Nolan’s show at Dina Mitrani is a must-see. Here’s walking the photography walk rather then talking the photography talk. You can see a few photos at the website, but try to catch it in person.
Across the street, a tres fancy plant store, with air plants quite literally stuck up a horse’s ass. Future Plants, indeed.
Miguel Paredes, seen previously, has moved into an even larger and more ostentatious spot. This is Britto for guys with wallet chains.
No over-the-toppedness is spared—the space is replete with one painting velvet-ropped off and a “wet paint” sign, two free bars (when most galleries have done away with booze), and this crazy installation with real stairs and dioramas inside the windows. I looked for a single work that’d be memorable on its own unsuccessfully, but the overall effect was something.
At Dorsch, Paul Myoda shows a large group of chandelier-like objects, many animated, motion-sensitive, and sound-making.
In another part of the gallery, Brookhart Jonquil reflects an entire room.
A solo show by the consistently great Agustina Woodgate at Spinello. Remember the hopscotch game painted all around Wynwood? Yep, that was her. Here are pieces made out of human hair (that huge tower!), videos, a gigant quilt made out of teddy bears, and a new piece from the fruit stickers. Along the wall is a nondescript row of boxes — the contents of Woodgate’s studio, which will be available for trade(!). Information should be available soon at a special website, which though is not live as I write this.
Finally, my pal Catalina Jaramillo’s fantastic installation at Dimensions Variable. She collected every single object her mother owned when she died of cancer. Poignant and quite lovely.
The case for charter cities
Directly, each charter city would allow millions of people to better their lives by integration with the world economy. While critics often belittle this achievement as mere “cream-skimming,” the sad truth is that much if not most of the world’s cream now curdles in backwards farms and dysfunctional slums. If the native entrepreneurs who built Hong Kong had been trapped in mainland China, most would have wasted their lives in dead-end jobs on Maoist communes or joined the Communist elite. Hong Kong gave them opportunities to use talents that otherwise would have gone to waste.
The case for charter cities as a effective way to fight third-world poverty (based on the example of Hong Kong). Interesting? From this list of “40 things I’ve learned” by Bryan Kaplan, which is actually mostly right-wing free-market dogma. (E.g., here is the republican strategy for reducing the size of government laid out as nakedly as you’re likely to find.)
Review of The Clock
A fantastic review of The Clock by Christian Marclay, a 24-hour film of movie excerpts of clocks, each lining up exactly with the actual time. The more I hear about this the more desperately I want to see it, and this essay by Zadie Smith is the best thing on it I’ve read yet. (Note that there are some skeptics, though.)
people have no idea what’s happening inside their brains
Yet another example of how people have no idea what’s happening inside their brains. You “prefer” an uncluttered store, but you buy more in a cluttered one.
Overthrow the banks?
Overthrow the banks? “If America can reform its banking sector, it has a fighting chance at a prosperous future. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” Umair Haque argues for the bottom-up ‘overthrow’ of the biggest banks. “Banks are highly leveraged institutions. Were a relatively small percentage of deposits to shift to, for example, community banks or credit unions, megabanks would find it very difficult indeed to sustain the profit margins or market power they currently enjoy.”
my next computer
My mind’s made up: I’m buying a Mac mini. Apple has a serious problem with their lineup: their middle of the road computers, the iMacs, only come with monitors built in. I already own a monitor, so I’m forced to choose between the underpowered minis and the outrageously expensive Pros. (I’ve never felt the need to own a laptop.) Well, it’s settled; with the next update, I’m going to get a mini.
Richard Prince finally looses a lawsuit
Richard Prince, famous for re-photographing Marlboro cigarette ads and selling them as high-concept artwork, recently lost a lawsuit about yet more flagrant appropriation. He took photos made by Patrick Cariou of Rastafarians, and manipulated them and painted over them and just generally had a grand time. In court records, Prince was incredulous, claiming fair use and citing the history of appropriation in contemporary art.
Defendants [Prince et al.] assert that Cariou’s Photos are mere compilations of facts concerning Rastafarians and the Jamaican landscape, arranged with minimum creativity in a manner typical of their genre, and that the Photos are therefore not protectable as a matter of law, despite Plaintiff’s extensive testimony about the creative choices he made in taking, processing, developing, and selecting them.
It’s tough to know how serious Prince was with all this. The man is a prankster. He’s said of himself, “I am a liar. And I cheat too. I make things up and I can’t be trusted. It’s not my fault.” Obviously taking the work of another artist, and taking multiple pieces from the same body of work, is a new level of appropriation (and plenty of people were pretty pissed off about that). But given the way the ruling is worded, it by extension implicates a whole tradition of appropriation-based work.
I note all this mainly for its amusement value. Prince is out a lot of money, but it seems that everyone involved benefits from the notoriety, including collectors who bought the paintings which can now “not be legally displayed.” If anything, we can take it as another signal of how screwed up our copyright/fair-use law is: that sampling/appropriation, so widely practiced in so many different practices, can be so curtailed by one aggrieved party.
Google recipe search not so great
Google has added recipe search. Should food fans rejoice? Not so fast.
Other biases – these having to do with Google’s idea of what people should be cooking and eating – are also at work. In setting up parameters for refining results based on cooking time and calories, Google explicitly, if subtly, gives privilege to low-calorie recipes that can be cooked quickly, as shown in the options it allows for refining a recipe search: