Topic: Review
What's in a Name? Plenty, if It's Saddam
Tue Jan 27,10:37 AM ET Reuters
By Dean Yates

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The strapping Iraqi shepherd hardly looks like someone whom people would dare to insult.

But Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) Nasaar, 24, has been taunted and teased ever since American troops toppled the Iraqi dictator last year. Now he's had enough, and plans to change his name.

"I'm finding it difficult to get a full-time job. I've been offered several but they won't take me until I change my name," said Nasaar, as he watched over two dozen sheep owned by his brothers near the outskirts of Baghdad.

"People think I'm associated with him. They start swearing at me, they tease me. Before no one dared to insult me," he said, wearing a red and white headdress and leaning against a tall cane.

For many Iraqi men and boys, being called Saddam no longer carries respect and privilege, and increasing numbers are officially changing their names.

<<>>

Sabah Nori Al-Azawi, manager of a dilapidated government office in Baghdad where Iraqis can change their names, said growing numbers of men and boys were shedding the Saddam tag now that government services had begun to function again.

Azawi said up to 25 men and boys had changed their name at his office in the past month.

"The majority are children. Other children make fun of them at school so their parents bring them here," said Azawi.

Sahar Khalil, head of records at the Al-Alwaiya maternity hospital in Baghdad, said up to five babies each month were named Saddam before the U.S.-led invasion last March.

"Since the fall of Baghdad, we have not had a single Saddam, and we have 300 births a month," she said.

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NB:
I read that there was a distant cousin of Adolf H who lived in the US and actualy fought in WWII (on our side, natch), and had his name legally changed to avoid the stigma, and he was the last know surviving Hitler. After him the known world knew no more Hitlers.

You know the family of the man who invented the guilletine (that would be Dr Guilletine, of France) changed their names after his invention, which incidentally was meant by the good doctor to prevent unnecessary cruelty - more humane than hanging - became the symbol of the Reign of Terror.

A Mooving Violation
Topic: Review
Jury Clears Cow in Car Accident
Mon Jan 26, 8:17 PM ET Associated Press

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - A Linn County jury has cleared a cow and the cow's owner in a car wreck, saying it was a case of mistaken identity.

Ann Sauer of Anamosa hit a cow on Oct. 7, 2000. The animal caved in the windshield and roof of her car.

The cow fled the scene, but Sauer said she knew which one did the damage.

"We briefly looked at each other before she went off in the darkness," Sauer said.

Sauer filed a negligence lawsuit against Justin Kaczinski, the alleged owner of the cow. Her lawsuit also named Alvin Benesh, who allowed Kaczinski to keep four cows and a bull in one of his pastures.

During the trial, which lasted six days, Kaczinski acknowledged that his cows had broken out of a pasture on the night of the accident.

The jury forewoman, Sheila Schmidt, said when Kaczinski's cow was found, its injuries did not match the injuries a cow would have suffered if it were hit in the way Sauer described.

"It's possible it could have been Kaczinski's cow, but it just wasn't proved," Schmidt said.

The jury deliberated for about three hours before returning a verdict last Wednesday in favor of Kaczinski and Benesh.

Topic: Personal
In fact I have not been having a very good week. I came home from work early on Thursday, itself an unusual thing, feeling quite ill, and that night had a fever of 100.2 deg. It was terrible - just lying in bed being delirious at the ceiling. R thought I had strep throat and took me to the doctor to get a throat swab the next day. No strep, but the trip to the doctor wore me out entirely (even though only 5 minutes away) and I was pretty well unconscious the rest of the day. We had dinner with my parents, and I very nearly pitched forward into the soup. Maybe I have SARS?

Or not. The doctor perscribed some horse pills yesterday, and I feel better already. Then again, maybe I'm just full. If these pills were any bigger, they would have to be cookies. It's different from doctor to doctor - I remember the university clinic doctor back at college who would rain 3 kinds of antibiotics on me for a sore throat, and then there was Dr G in Fallbrook, who wouldn't even give me cortisone for poisn oak but instead told me to just stop scratching.

I managed to work from home today and even went to an off-campus meeting for an inter-departmental web project. I called my boss after the meeting to tell her what was decided, and she said, "that's not what I wanted this project to do!" and I said, "hey, it's not really my place to tell the deputy director of Engineering what to do with his project, yo." I mean, the man actually waved his hand Jean-Luc Picard style and said, "make it so." One day soon I will have that much power! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Topic: Review
Cocaine Found in Tropical Fish Cargo
Mon Jan 26, 9:42 AM ET

MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. customs officials seized $300,000 worth of liquid cocaine disguised as water in a shipment of live tropical fish from Colombia.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection service said on Friday that 41.7 pounds of cocaine was packaged in plastic bags used to ship the fresh water decorative fish to Miami.

"This appears to be a new trend in smuggling, using an old method which officers have not seen in many years," said the agency, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The fish were packed in bags with three linings. The inner lining, containing the fish, was filled with water but the middle lining held a yellowish liquid that triggered the interest of a drug dog called "Rocky."

In all, six bags in a shipment of the fish sent by cargo plane from Bogota tested positive for cocaine.

There is something...fishy...about this shipment! Was it (drumroll please) BLOWfish?

Topic: Opinion
Sometimes, when I think about it, it is good to be American. There are some benefits to being a citizen of the world's most powerful nation. Not the most popular, but most powerful nonetheless, as the current administration subscribes to the Machiavillian principle of ruling by fear and intimidation rather than love.

Although, to be fair, I think human nature percludes us from being ruled by love. We are essentially greedy bastards, two meals away from moving back into caves and flinging faeces at each other. Left to our own devises without a firm government that has the law grasped firmly in a fist, life would indeed be short, nasty, and brutish. Just like my friend K's ex-boyfriends!

Topic: Personal
Had nearly 6" of hair cut off this past weekend!

Was watching James Bond movie with Sophie Marceau in it (The World is Not Enough) one night last week, when R commented on Sophie hairstyle. When asked if he thinks I should get the same, he said "yes yes! get it!" So the next day I downloaded a photo of Sophie Marceau from the Internet, took it to my hairdresser, and had her copy it on my own head.

Alas, I'm not quite a thin, chic French actress... my brother-in-law, upon seeing me for the first time in my new 'do, said, "hey, you're going for that Cousin Itt look?"

Sophie Marceau	Cousin Itt

I'm afraid the truth is somewhere in between.

Topic: Review
Death imitates art: as reported in The Guardian.

In Romania, local media report that the country's "first" institution of higher learning, the University of Arts, in Iasi, was the scene of an official investigation this month after police removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself on the campus. Builders and students at the university had initially mistaken it for a modern work of art.

According to Reuters, the body hung for a whole day in a sculpture-laden garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers twigged to what it was and called the cops.

Gosh, what happened to the traditional line between Art and Not-Art-But-Dead-Body?

Topic: Review
A television image shows an Argentine man lying with a lion named Quique on top of him, after he leapt over a fence at the Buenos Aires Zoo, in Argentina, on January 11, 2004. Television footage showed Quique the lion sitting on top of 22-year-old Lucas Tomas, padding him with his paw and leaving only superficial injuries to his head, arm and chest, doctors said. The lion was sedated with a tranquilizer dart and Tomas was taken away to be examined by a psychiatrist. (Reuters TV)



He's either on too much drugs or not enough.

Topic: Review
This website is awesome. Finally, an on-line gallery with hi-resolution images for those of us who can't fly to distant art collections.

http://www.artrenewal.org/

Une Vocation, W Bouguereau	God Speed, Edmund Blair-Leighton	Pelt Merchant of Cairo, Jean-Leon Gerome

The Art Renewal Center website has thousands! of images of paintings (and some photos of sculptures) from hundreds of Academic, Classical and Romantic artists. It has a deep commitment to excellence in representational art, and the academic skills necessary to execute them. "Additionally, the Art Renewal Center is a non-profit educational organization committed to reviving standards of craftsmanship and excellence. Only by gaining a full command of the skills of the past Masters can we create the Masters of tomorrow. This is a step forward for our culture. Experimentation and creativity can only succeed and prosper when built on a solid foundation of past accomplishments, with the tools which empower artists to realize their visions.

I know their view is not a popular one - how can it be when fashionable and snobby art world fawns all over a toilet seat covered in cheese and called art because the artist claimed it is so? But how can a person call themselves an artist when they can't convincingly draw a human figure, or reproduce perspective, or give the illusion of texture with only one medium?

When I go to art museums I tend to skip over the "modern" wings - where someone has nailed a shellaqued car tyre to the ceiling, for example - and spend my limited time in the exhibits that move me - a finely painted lace collar in a portrait, the almost touchable "pearling" of a new-born lamb's wool. I can stand all day before a finely executed portrait of a woman, and wonder who she was, what she liked, what life she led. This special sense of wonder hardly ever comes to me when I'm looking at modernist non-representational works. It's always been the way I felt about art, and now I am old enough to understand that I needn't feel inferior because the trendies tell me I "just don't understand."

I do not understand modernism, but I know clever trend-driven marketing when I see it.

This is not to say that I turn away from all "installations". For example, at the San Diego Mingei Museum, I have frequently enjoyed excellent exhibits of room-size installations full of texture, color, and movement - such as ART THAT SOARS - Kites and Tails by Jackie Matisse. However, the Mingei is not really a place for modern art - "Mingei is a special word increasingly used throughout the world for "arts of the people." It was coined by the revered scholar, the late Dr. Soetsu Yanagi, through combining the Japanese words for all people (min) and art (gei). His keen eye observed that many useful, pre-industrial articles made by unknown craftsmen were of a beauty seldom equaled by artists of modern societies.

"Within these timeless arts of the people (Mingei), he recognized a quality of expression in which there was no fragmentation of body, mind and spirit. He realized that to balance the weight of increasing technology there is a growing urgency for man to continue to make and use objects that express his whole being."

For me, this is very different than the modernist movement of the trendy art world. Objects that are beautiful because they are used, have a grace all their own, and because they were obviously made and used by people. When I look at a Shaker chair on display in the museum I can close my eyes and imagine the straight-backed black-clad woman who may have sat in it with her prayer-book at one time, and almost feel like I'm with her standing behind me and with every other person who have ever looked upon this object. How can anyone get this feeling of connectedness, of humanity, when all there is to look at is a wall of paint splatters?

Shaker chairs as displayed in the exhibition From Mt. Lebanon to the World, at the Shaker Museum and Library in the main gallery.

Topic: Opinion
Realism-Only Policy at Hirschl & Adler Galleries


Lord Frederick Leighton, 1877, "The Music Lesson"

http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2003/Hirschl_and_Adler/hirschladler1.asp

I never liked non-representational art, and have had to defend it against some of my friends in college who snobbed it. HAH! H&A is a respected art gallery who have seen the light. I can't believe we as a society has been bamboozled into believing that dipping a cat in blue paint and hurling it at policemen is art.It's funny, but it's not art.

Maybe soon poems that rhyme will make a come-back?

Excerpted from reviewer Sherry Lazarus Ross: "Inherent to Hirschl & Adler's recognition of realism is their understanding that artists of stature must now be dedicated to the kind of training and skill acquisition that was expected of an artist in pervious centuries. In other words, the hard work of learning how to draw and paint.

"The modernist ideologies are no longer convincing this new generation of collectors and art enthusiasts, i.e. that abstract art is art, simply because they are told so. Hirschl and Adler see this so clearly, that they have now made it their policy to no longer represent abstract artists. They now represent a wide range of Realist artists who have obviously made the commitment to mastering the skills of drawing and painting in the Realist Tradition. It was the only form of art that truly mattered throughout history - for the language of Realism is not fashionable, it is universal, and will still be the visual language of the human race in the distant future, as it always has been."