Category Archives: Aesthetics

Tasteful Vs. Teletart

When everywhere, on TV and in real life, badly dressed, over-exposed women and girls assault the eye—it doesn’t hurt to be reminded what class looks like. Fifty three seconds into this touching interview conducted with Kim Campbell, wife of Alzheimer’s-stricken musician Glenn Cambell, the camera pans out to reveal Mrs. Campbell’s elegant attire. She is wearing black, knee-high boots, and a long, grey, well-tailored skirt nipped in high at the waist.

Opposite Mrs. Campbell sits Fox News’ coarse-looking Gretchen Carlson. She is dressed in a cheap-looking turquoise slip hitched almost as high as her thighs. This is the standard-issue outfit (and behavior) on Fox News. Too awful.

On BBC News and RT one can still find the odd intellectual, who knows a thing or two about a topic. But in markets catering to American tastes—that includes Al Jazeera America—it’s teletarts all the way.

‘Outnumbered’ But Not Outfoxed

Aesthetics, Conservatism, Gender, Intelligence, Media

“Outnumbered” (but not outfoxed): It’s “Red Eye” without the humor and The One Fun Girl (Joanne Nosuchinsky). It’s “The Five” on estrogen and with infertile cross-fertilization (as some characters make appearances on both shows). It’s “The View” (which I’ve never watched but know is G-d awful) with legs, cleavage, big hair and mouthy overbites. “Outnumbered” is Fox News’ new parade of self-congratulatory cyphers in short skirts. It sucks. The views are hackneyed and uninformed (what’s new?). And the single, tolerable, true beauty is Harris Faulkner (what a proud surname!).

Mass Murderer Exhibits Barren Art

Aesthetics, Art, Bush, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Media, Republicans, War

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Not quite murderabilia, but certainly the “artwork” of a mass murderer. George Bush is exhibiting his hideous, Socialist-realism style art. Dana Perino waxed orgasmic about the Bush art on that vapid program called “The Five.” From where Dana Ditz is perched, it’s fine to worship Bush and his puke paintings, but not Obama.

Bush’s art has a “Pogo the Clown” quality to it. The allusion is to the art of another mass murderer, John Wayne Gacy Jr. The boxy lines and the dead quality of the art of both men makes it difficult to tell the difference; the art of Bush Jr. has the same turgid quality as that of John Wayne Gacy Jr.

See if you can differentiate:

Bush even had the audacity to paint the faces of men he sent into an unethical, unconstitutional war, in violation of Just War Theory.

Bush and Gacy are not the first butchers to paint, if you can call it that. Ulysses S. Grant smeared paint around too. Grant’s muse was murder:

Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant (commanding general of the federal army) in 1866, “even to their extermination, men, women and children.” The Sioux must “feel the superior power of the Government.” Sherman vowed to remain in the West” till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.”

“During an assault,” he instructed his troops, “the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” He chillingly referred to this policy in an 1867 letter to Grant as “the final solution to the Indian problem,” a phrase Hitler invoked some 70 years later.

I must concede that Ulysses S. Grant was a lot more talented than the two other mass murderers. This poor horse, snout buried in a nose bag, has a long-suffering quality to it, almost like its illustrator had feelings for his subject.

*Bloodbath image here

Will Microsoft’s New CEO Kill Surface?

Aesthetics, Business, Internet, Technology, The Zeitgeist

Forbes’s Gene Marks contends that Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s New CEO—whom Marks thinks is way cool because, wait for this, Nadella is a “decade younger than his predecessor and looks young for his age”—has effectively killed the Microsoft Surface.

Let me unpack Marks’ “logic”:

Even though The Surface is “a powerful little laptop, lightweight with a Windows 8 touchscreen and a long battery life”; and though this product is “both tablet and laptop and integrates tightly with other Microsoft applications”—Cool-Because-He’s-Young Nadella is to be hailed as brilliant too for sabotaging the future of a magnificent product. It is alleged that Nadella wishes to end Microsoft’s foray into hardware (Surface), and take the company back to the business of software.

“A Windows First policy,” argues Marks, “was the reason behind products like the Surface.”

If, as I understood this terribly hip article, The Surface is more than the software it runs—why reduce the best Tablet in the business to its bits? What about the “Big Idea”?

Not being a techie, I have no idea if Forbes’s Gene Marks is being plain silly, or if silly is the new norm in the media’s tech coverage. I suspect the two are not mutually exclusive. (“A silly society is a youth-obsessed society.” Youth-obsessed U.S is silly.)

In its hipness, the Forbes article reminds me of that grating, pretentious Cisco ad, in which a female with a deceptively soft voice waffles about the Internet of All Things (WTF?!).

But I guess I’m still from the Book Age. Behold a throwback: a wall-to-wall library, or half of it, as I could not get the entire thing in the frame. Sean made this solid maple thing to my mid-century American, Heywood-Wakefield design specs (more):