Observations from the Edge 7.9

Hubris, the characteristic of excessive confidence or arrogance, which leads a person to believe that he or she may do no wrong.
Person, or movement.

When I said the Occupy movement was in for a big summer I may have been wrong, yes I can be wrong sometimes. I could blame the relentless heat but I made that prediction in what felt like spring but was in fact winter. I like to think I'm politically knowledgeable but, caught up in the events of fall, I glossed over in my mind the movements major failing which in the end would start it down the road to the dustbin. Occupy has no plan other than being occupy. Protest is good but it can't be sustained without some sort of end game like the end of the Vietnam War or equal rights for minorities.

The movement bragged endlessly about its lack of centralized leadership or goal but the lack of that has finally caught up with it. Somebody needs to be out there talking every day, talking to the press, talking to anybody that will listen. They seemed to have forgotten, or never really knew, how to generate publicity. Looking back maybe the NYPD generated more Occupy news than the movement itself did.

A good example of the fall of Occupy can be found in last week's news from Philadelphia. Or I should say lack there of. Occupy held a convention in Philadelphia last week which you probably don't know about because it wasn't widely reported. The convention drew hundreds of protesters from around the nation, a far cry from the tens of thousands I once saw in the streets of New York. The only first hand knowledge I have of this event is from my sister. According to her it just added to the annual 4^th of July traffic debacle that is Philadelphia and pretty much just irritated her to no end as she tried to get to Penn's Landing. After the convention Occupy Wall Street marched back to New York in temperatures approaching 100°. For all I know they could still be marching across Jersey.

When I think of all the excitement and optimism of last year, of Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square, I hope I  am as wrong in writing this as I was in my original prediction. Otherwise it really is a sad world we live in.

I was ready to post this when I decided to add something. It really doesn't matter if an official Occupy slowly fades away. Occupy's lasting achievement is that it showed that the status quo can't be sustained indefinitely and it changed the national discussion to the massive economic inequalities in this country. It's now up to the rest of us to continue that fight in November and beyond.

Also, I may just be venting. 

Observations on Art 7.7

Due to the astounding number of magazine subscriptions I have I've become the unofficial gallery librarian. I'm always throwing new ones on the table figuring somebody should read them if not me so it wasn't surprising one of our friends picked up an old issue of The New York Times Magazine yesterday. What was surprising is that it was one I never read so when he said "I bet you loved this article" I had no clue what he was talking about.

It was an article about Edward Conrad, one time Bain Capital founder and Willard Romney employee, (The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy), who also happens to be one of the largest donors to Willard's campaign. What follows is the paragraph that got his attention and than mine.

"At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life."

I get so effing tired of people who equate studying art history with something like basket weaving. As for competitive, it seems the man doesn't know much about the art world. He may have made a fortune with a company that destroyed lives in the name of profit but he has never dealt with Larry Gagosian, unless he has bought something from him. At a certain level I may despise everything Gagosian stands for but he is very, very, good at what he does.

What can you do with an art history degree? Let me see, curate museums and galleries, manage auction houses, value art and other antiques, work for a historic trust, be an administrator, a journalist, picture editor, exhibition organizer, or you can
just teach something you love.

I'm sure a man of Conrad's wealth has an impressive art collection. I'm also quite sure he paid a tidy sum to somebody with an art history degree to tell him what to buy, another to handle the transactions, and yet another to take care of his most awesome collection.

For the record Kate Middleton has an art history degree from St. Andrews University, I know who I would rather do lunch with.

Vent over, for now.

Observations on the 2012 Election

A video that needs no introduction or commentary from me. 

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Observations on Art 7.5

Court has been a bit lax of late, she has been too busy with her own film editing to send me any new time lapses. She more than made up for it today with this video. I swear as I watch the swirling water and stars I feel just a little bit cooler. These days I'll take even the thought
of cool air and water. 

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

"At a star party in August 2009 I took my first long exposure photograph of the night sky. I was so thrilled with the results that I dedicated most moonless weekends since then to photographing two things I love the most in nature - the night sky and the Ocean.
Taking a series of images and combining them into a time lapse video sequence made it even more interesting. I have since experimented with all-night time lapses, panning motion, etc. But most importantly I've enjoyed the journey immensely.
This time lapse video is the result of almost 1.5 years of work, 31 hours of taking images during six nights on Southern Ocean Coast in Australia. Ocean Sky was awarded the overall winner prize at
the STARMUS astrophotography competition. Alex Cherney"

Observations from the Window 7.4

One of my favorite columnists, Eugene Robinson, ended his column in the Washington Post with this observation. "As repair crews struggle to get the lights back on, it happens to be another sunny day. Critics have blasted the Obama administration’s unfruitful investment in solar energy. But if government-funded research had managed to lower the price of solar panels to the point where it became economical to install them on residential roofs, all you global-warming skeptics would have air conditioning right now. I’m just sayin’."

A thought for all those wingnuts out there. You think global warming is a hoax, you want no government in your life, you don't want to pay any taxes, well this is what you get. Roads fall apart, bridges fall down, and big ass storms take out the power grid. Now if the grid were underground a storm couldn't take it out but that would take government help and money. Better to live in a hot broken world. Tards.

On a lighter note I give you my current snack food of choice. The Snyder's Sea Salt and Cracked Pepper Pretzel Pieces my dad sent me. We are talking awesomeness here.

I totally need to mention Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise now. I really couldn't care less about their divorce other than that it makes Katie available again. Grabbing her child and running from Scientology may be the smartest thing she has done since signing a prenup with Cruise who has made an estimated $500 million over the five years of their marriage. What I do care about is Cruise's new movie Rock of Ages which has to be one of the great bad casting decisions of all time. Cruise turned 50 years old yesterday but you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the plastic man as he hasn't changed much in the 25 years since he made Top Gun. I leave it to you to decide how many of those millions he spent on silicone.

Finally, have I mentioned I may be in Paris next month?
I may have neglected that.

And so it goes.

Happy 4th of July

This video has nothing at all to do with the 4^th of July or even the United States for that matter. What does matter is that it contains the best display of pyrotechnics you are going to find on screen and what is the 4^th if not things going boom? Today I'll be fabricating my famous chili, enjoying cold beverages, and partaking of live pyrotechnics in the city.
I hope you are doing something similar wherever you are
but for now have an awesome 4^th and enjoy my little show.

I apologize in advance to any English readers.


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Observations 7.1

An update on the weekend's weather and yesterday's post.

Over the last week over 2,000 high temperature records were set and fifteen cities set all-time, all-time, heat records over the weekend. This is a list of those set Friday before the derecho storm. It was 109° in Nashville, TN, 109° in Columbia, SC, 109°in Cairo, IL, 108° in Paducah, KY , 106° in Chattanooga, TN, 105° Raleigh, NC, 105° in Greenville, SC, 104° in Charlotte, NC, 102° in Bristol, TN, and 109°in Athens, GA.
With the hottest months of the year yet to come the number of records falling is dwarfing even the Dust Bowl era.

As of Sunday millions of people were still without power as temperatures again approach 100° all along the east coast. Utility companies from Ohio, Maryland, and Virginia described the damage to the power grids as catastrophic and all three states, along with West Virginia and Washington D.C., declared states of emergency on Saturday. Meanwhile Atlanta declared a code-purple meaning the air over the city was very unhealthy. Friday night's storm, which at times reached hurricane force, killed a dozen people with two boaters still missing.

I did hear from my friend and she was hit by the storm and lost power. It may be a week until she gets it back so she plans on haunting malls, movie houses, and work.

"Unlike a polite hurricane that gives you three days of warning, this storm gave us all the impact of a hurricane without any of the warning of a hurricane," Maryland Govenor Martin O'Malley.

In the city of New York, which was unaffected by the storm, temperatures are again in the mid-nineties today. To make things more interesting at 2 AM Sunday morning Consolidated Edison, the power utility, locked out its unionized workers after contract negotiations broke down. Con Ed replaced 8,500 skilled union workers with 5,000 management personnel raising the possibility of power cuts. The dispute centers on the pension plans of older workers
which the company wants to cut.

Think about that. Instead of sending its workers south to help with the cleanup Con Ed locked them out. Corporate responsibility at its best.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 6.30

If you ever want to argue against the existence of 'global warming' talk to my brother. What art is to me the environment is to him and he takes it very personally. He will start by telling you global warming is perhaps the worst choice of words ever. He prefers some version of global climate change which he says is much more to the point and less political. Than he will take you to school like you never have been until you slip away with whatever tail you have left between your legs.

I think at the moment nature itself has decided to teach us a slight lesson of its own. Yesterday started with Sean trying to explain to me what a heat dome is. It ended with me googling derecho to find out what the hell kind of storm it was that swept through the mid-Atlantic region.

Turns out a heat dome is a sort of perfect storm of, well, heat. Unlike last summer's heatmageddon heat dome is a real term. The National Weather Service describes it as "when a high pressure system develops in the upper atmosphere, causing the air below it to sink and compress because there's more weight on top. That raises temperatures in the lower atmosphere." What that means is it's effing hot and is going to stay hot. The southeastern United States is at the start of what may be one of the worst heat waves on record, ever. It's only June.

Last night I got home and thought I would see what was new on Netflix before I crawled to bed. Turned out Netflix was down along with many other sites all because Amazon's cloud was having issues related to the derecho storm. Even though I had been drinking I realized I had never heard of a derecho storm, I thought it was something out of a Roland Emmerich movie (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, etc.), and I still don't quite understand what it is so I'll leave the description to Wikipedia. Whatever a derecho is one swept through Maryland and Virginia Friday night with wind gusts estimated as high as 80 mph and knocking out power to 1.5 million people. Most of them, possibly including a friend of mine, will face today's continued record heat without air conditioning.

"For years, we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet's natural resources, without consequence. We were wrong." Fictional Vice-President Raymond Becker
near the end of The Day After Tomorrow.

For the record, as I write this it is 85° in the Village, at 9 AM.

Observations from the Window 6.29

I did a small photo job yesterday morning, nothing spectacular, somebody I know needed some shots of Times Square relatively empty which means relatively early. I said I would help out which was something I slightly regretted as I dragged myself down the steps around 6 AM. It turned into a rather interesting morning as I've never been to Times Square quite that early, I've been there rather late but never quite that early.

Obviously Manhattan isn't a blue collar town in any way which makes it surprisingly quiet in the early morning. The vendors are just beginning to set up, the homeless haven't been shooed away yet, and the multitudes of tourists are busily having their donuts. Sorry, I meant to say having their free continental breakfast. Artistically speaking it makes for a strange almost surreal sight. It seems like a long continuous sunrise as the light flows up the canyons of buildings, plays off those same buildings, and reflects off the glass. On a clear morning like yesterday light is the star of the morning show here. So different from the afternoon when unadulterated sound takes center stage. Later in the day it's far from one of my favorite spots in the city, in fact I try to stay away, but empty in the early morning it really has a totally different personality. It's almost anti-social, I like it.

In the end I spent most of the morning in the area taking pics, having breakfast at the Europa Cafe, and shopping for a possible upcoming trip. If I post any of the pics on Flickr I'll update this later with a link.

Later in the day I also had news from my sis and she told me she was doing some advertising shots for the restaurant/bar she works at.

Small world.

Observations from the Window 6.26

It was a strange feeling not having the VQs hovering about over the weekend. It was pride weekend but that wasn't the reason, it's a strange feeling any weekend but a feeling I'm just going to have to get used to. With the girls, not to mention Mitch, spending so much time in Boston I may need to start some sort of VQ junior apprentice program. Something to think about, maybe get my own TV deal. "You're asleep!"

All of a sudden that whirlwind of change I loath is swirling around all of us and I do mean all of us. I touched on Chloe's job and Ash's business a bit ago now the change is swirling around the kids too,
again in a good way.

The sis changed her major, for the third time, to graphic design and has been keeping up with her photography. She is even a step ahead of me as she started a very professional looking Facebook page just for her photos. Meanwhile the page I briefly toyed with languishes without even one photo. Her page drew the eye of a major greeting card company that offered to buy some of her photos. She hasn't decided one way or the other but there is a chance she will because the sis may have once been my mini-me but she isn't nearly as anti-establishment as her older sister. Or as anti-authority, or anti-social for that matter. Who is this girl?

Meanwhile the kid finds himself in charge of a new field team after not even a year at his new job. The environmental company he works for found itself swamped with expected but sudden work which necessitated the new team. Each team contains a wetlands expert and the company only employees three, Sean being the third. Seems he will be spending the summer tooling around the Susquehanna wilderness in his jeep, new team in tow.

Chance et la richesse to both.

And than there is me, but that's for another time.

Observations on Art 6.25

You may know by now that Vincent van Gogh is my favorite painter and his The Starry Night is one of my favorite paintings.
That being said I have never seen anything quite like this before, simply amazing. The video was posted two days ago and has over 170,000 views as of now.

For the full effect turn the volume way up ....


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"I recreated Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" from just over 7,000 dominos. The second attempt took about 11 hours total to build.
The first attempt failed, when I dropped a screw from the camera rig onto it. I was able to improve the swirling clouds better in the second attempt as a result though. I do not know how long the first attempt took, but I did not have any accidents building like I did in the second attempt!

There were 2 small breaks in the fall of this project. I did not complete the leading grey line and left out a domino which stopped the reaction in the bottom. The star that is left standing was very close to falling, but the first dominos held in place."
FlippyCat

Guilty

AP Photo/Centre Daily Times, Nabil K. Mark

Tonight at 9:57, five months to the day after Joe Paterno passed away, Jerry Sandusky was found guilty of 45 of the 48 child abuse charges he faced. Fourteen of the charges are first degree felonies with a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, each. The combined maximum penalty
for all the charges is 442 years. Sentencing must take place
within 90 days.

You can rest in peace now JoePa.

Observations from the Window 6.21

The Jerry Sandusky child perversion trial went to the jury today but it hasn't yet reached a verdict. Quite understandable when you consider that, even after the judge dropped 3 charges today, the jurors have 51 charges to go over. If convicted of just half of them Sandusky will likely spend the rest of his days in prison. Given the nature of the charges I don't think he would be coaching a football team of convicts à la Adam Sandler. Maybe some other type of team not proper to discuss in a public blog.

I spent some time following the closing arguments and also saw when the story began to leak about why Sandusky didn't take the stand in his own defense. After the trial began Sandusky's adopted son Matt had told prosecutors that he too had been abused and had offered to testify against his father. NBC News reported that Jerry Sandusky's lawyers decided against having the former coach testify after they learned that prosecutors planned to call a new witness if he did take the stand and they believed it to be Matt Sandusky.

The makeup of the jury has been the subject of debate in the national media because so many of its members are either graduates, employees, or former employees of Penn State. What the msm doesn't seem to understand is that central Pennsylvania is Penn State. During the main school year State College is the third largest city in the state and the University is the second largest employer in the state. There isn't a county between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh where the jury makeup would have been much different.

I don't think the jury makeup is a factor in the verdict at all and in my opinion if anything it works against him. I don't know the details of the trial itself or the testimony but I do know this. If my family and personal contacts are any gauge at all Sandusky will spend the rest of his life in Graterford. Well probably not Graterford itself but one can always dream.

I don't believe in the death penalty, it would probably be too easy on Sandusky in any case, but I am so tempted to change my mind in his case.

Hopefully Friday will bring a verdict because now I just want it over. If for no other selfish reason than the sight of Jerry Sandusky, for a time second only to JoePa in the pantheon of Penn State sports, the sight of the man just makes me sick.

And than there are the kids ....

Observations on Art 6.21

One of the ageless questions is one variation or another of what constitutes art. It's something that will be debated till the end of time as it has been since the beginning. I'll not bore you by pretending to know the answer to that but I found something yesterday that I most assuredly know is not art. Thailand may have talent, that in itself is debatable, but this sure as hell is most definitely not it.

"BANGKOK -- An episode of "Thailand's Got Talent" has stirred a morality debate after a contestant painted a canvas using her bare breasts, drawing a rebuke from the culture minister who called it 'very shocking.'"


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By the look of the comments viewers agreed.
Okay, I have no idea what it says, and he/she/it gave it a thumbs up.
The only explanation for that is the viewer thought it was some sort of porn. But than again,
porn is art ....

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