Sunday, December 9, 2012

Observations

by  Kate le Roux


"This Happened."

Photo at left and words tweeted by Dan Savage after he and Terry Miller were officially and legally wed in Seattle, Washington earlier today. I don't think I need to add anything.

Sunday Observations 12.9

I'm going to start with a quick warning. The Eagles won a football game today, the Mayan apocalypse is upon us.

For possibly the first time in my life I have three biographies started. Now I've often had three books started but never three bios, I hope I don't get anything mixed up. I guess that isn't possible with these three books; Ted Kennedy's True Compass, Keith Richards's Life, and Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Not sure if it's a sign of the times or what but at the moment one of the more popular quotes on my tumblrs is this from Charles Bukowski, "My soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world."

I don't want to be totally depressing on a Sunday evening but this week I saw a good article in Forbes about sex trafficking which it says is now a $32 billion a year industry worldwide. I'm not going to get into it, the article isn't long if you want to read it, but I wanted to share this line. It's one of those things that is so obviously true but evidently isn't seen that way in this country. "Legally, they cannot consent to sex with an adult, so the use of the term “child prostitution” in the media is misleading. In any other context, this would be considered statutory rape."

A few days ago I said that there was a lot going on in the art world this week but I have yet to finish that post. One of the major things was the ribbon cutting at the new Louvre-Lens museum which will officially open later this week. The museum will contain over 300 works from the Louvre. The other thing was the Art Basel show in Miami. A funny geek thing happened this morning that relates to the Miami show. I was reading a Le Monde article about it and hit the tweet button which than said it was posted. It hadn't so I tried again with the same result. Turned out something in the french name of the culture section was telling twitter it was a direct message so it wouldn't send it.

Finally Ash's line of the week, "If you are going to call yourself a painter you really need to paint."

Truth.