Bloomsday 2012!

Infinite Art Tournament wishes you and yours a episodic and peripatetic Bloomsday, rich in interior experience and external incident!

The action of Ulysses as diagrammed by Nabokov in his lecture notes.

"There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom."

At the Movies: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Werner Herzog, 2010.

Ebert: Three and a half Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 96% Fresh


Werner Herzog goes underground, so to speak, to film the recently discovered paintings on the wall of the Chauvet Cave in southern France. These are truly incredible artifacts. They’re extensive, crisp as if they were made yesterday, and twice as old (30,000 y.a.) as any other human painting that has ever been found. Archeologically and anthropologically, this is an enormously important find; the film will also encourage you to consider the paintings to be great art in their own right -- "Mankind's Lost Masterpiece," urges the poster. They are certainly very striking, and many of them are quite lovely when seen through Herzog's crew's cameras.

This being said, it seems to me a bit blithe to try to assess, or really even to praise, the artistic merit of images for which we have absolutely no cultural context whatsoever. For all we know, the Chauvet Cave paintings could have been intended as something analogous to accounting records, or to a biology textbook, or to territorial tagging, or to party decor, or to a contract, or, they could be a doodle; the resident scholars, as least in the fragments of their interviews that we see, seem singularly unimaginative about the range of possibilities in what they are studying. The Art Historians, in particular, seem bound and determined that they are looking at Art, which is a cultural non sequitor unless your definition of "Art" is so inclusive as to be nearly meaningless. I think that they must surely be a little more alert to this issue than Herzog makes them out to be.

The film is also curiously silent on the question of whether this uniquely sealed and well-preserved cave contains a type of pictorial artifact that might have been common as dirt back in the day, or if it was a unique place even in its time. The movie wants to believe, and wants you to believe, that the latter must surely be true, but the notion that the place with the most remarkable cave art would also be the one that happened to get sealed off for thirty millennia by a freak landslide is very, very, very unlikely. Folks from the culture that created these images might very conceivably have thought that these particular specimens were laughably crude sketches, or the bizarre hobby of a weirdo loner, and we would be none the wiser.

None of the above, however, will keep me from hereby nominating the Chauvet Cave artist(s) for the play-in rounds of the Infinite Art Tournament.

Herzog created Cave of Forgotten Dreams in partnership with the History Channel people. Herzog's imprimatur and cultural clout is visible in the great photography, a terrific original score, and in interviews with scientists and other people associated with the cave that reveal much about their emotional response to and passion for the cave paintings. The History Channel impress is evident, I'm afraid, in the film's description of a historical phenomenon without any real attempt at thinking about its historical meaning, context, or significance.

There's a blurb on the DVD cover to the effect that you owe it to yourself as a human being to see this film. I actually kind of agree with that; this is the best look you are ever going to get, literally speaking, at an almost unimaginable depth of your human past. But don't let the film fool you into thinking you it has given you any answers about what the Chauvet paintings might mean. On that score, it hasn't even really asked the interesting questions.

Two Scrap Quilts for Kiddos

Hey! I made a bunch of little quilts for kids out of scrap materials!  And last weekend I took a stack of six of them, and let two noteworthy little kids pick from among them them.  The first to go was this one:

This one went next:

They were way more excited than I had any right to expect they would be with my gift of Earth-friendly bedding.  I can only assume that their mother was over my shoulder, graphically illustrating the punishments that would ensue if they failed to enthuse adorably.

Process maunderings and technical specs are available at no extra charge at State of the Craft, which is allegedly a blog about quilting that I keep.

The Wednesday Post

Michael5000 Indulges a Quixotic Impulse
Exchange of Email Messages

This time of year, my job involves working with a lot of high school students who are entering a summer internship program.  It involves a lot of hurry-up-and-wait on their end, so the sharp ones tend to check in a lot to make sure that they've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's.

Student to Michael5000, 6/10/12

Hello, Michael,

Here is my updated resume.

Let me know if there is anything more I should work on.

Thank you.

Sincerly,
[Name]


Michael5000 to Student, 6/11/12

Hi, [Name],

Thanks for sending in your resume. It looks great!

Is there anything more you should work on? There are, of course, always more things to work on. I always recommend reading books that are kind of challenging to you. The Great Gatsby is one of the best novels about American life (although I have smart friends who hate it), and although Charles Dickens’ language can be difficult to get through at first, he is still an amazing storyteller. Since you are interested in Japanese, you might want to try some Haruko Murikami; I’d recommend Kafka on the Shore for instance. If you enjoyed your AP European History class, I really recommend George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” books (the ones that the TV show is based on); it’s fantasy fiction, but it is deeply rooted in the politics of medieval Europe.

It’s a good idea to develop some kind of regular exercise while you’re young, even for people who don’t see themselves as athletic. I like running, because it’s free and easy to schedule, but there are lots of options there. Also, I think that people who have learned how to appreciate art have more fun in life: an afternoon at the Art Museum would not be wasted. Find a few lists of “Great Movies,” check them out from the library, and see if you can figure out why people think they’re “great.” Also, write a lot – letters, diary, blog that nobody reads, whatever. It’s good practice.

Yes, there are always things to work on.

But in terms of the internship program, you are in good shape. I've got you slated for the position you wanted, and all you really need to do is sit tight and wait for us to call.

: )
Michael

The Infinite Art Tournament, First Elimination Round #4/128

Notice: First Elimination Rounds will be moving to alternate Thursdays this summer to keep the Tournament running at a balanced pace.

Faceoff #1: Baselitz v. Batoni

Georg Baselitz
1938 -
German
Lost to Jean-Michel Basquiat in Round 1.

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Pompeo Batoni
1708 - 1787
Italian
Lost to Jacopo Bassano in Round 1.

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Faceoff #2: Baumeister v. Gentile Bellini

Willi Baumeister
1889 - 1955
German
Lost to Frederic Bazille in Round 1.

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Gentile Bellini
c.1429 - 1507
Venetian
Lost to Max Beckmann in Round 1.

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Vote for the two artists of your choice! Votes generally go in the comments, but have been known to arrive by email, by postcard, or in a sealed envelope.

Please note that you may vote only once in each face-off.  Opining that both of the artists in one of the two face-offs is superior to both of the artists in the other is fine, but casting your votes for two artists in the same face-off is not permissible.

Element of the Month: Calcium!

June's Element of the Month:

Calcium!
Ca
20

Atomic Mass: 40.078  amu
Melting Point: 842 °C
Boiling Point: 1484 °C

You'd think Calcium would be all white and powdery, like an antiacid or bonemeal or chalk or lime, but those are all various compounds of Calcium. You need "Big Ca" (as its pals call it) for your bones, sure, but you need it in tandem with phosphate (which itself is a compound of Phosphorus, Oxygen, and Hydrogen). Lime is Calcium hydroxide, Tums are a form of Calcium carbonate with sugar and flavoring thrown in, and chalk, at least the kind you use on a chalkboard, is Calcium sulfate. No, Calcium itself is neither white nor powdery.  It is, rather -- wait for it -- a silvery-grey metal! Just like almost everything else. It's pretty much a big metal world, except for the enormously more abundant colorless, odorless gasses.

You'd probably also think that Calcium would be a relatively common element here on the surface of Planet Earth, not one of those obscure oddballs that occurs only in certain Chilean clays and that sharp Swedish scientists only managed to isolate during the 1930s. This time around, you'd be quite correct. Calcium is the fifth most abundent element in the Earth's crust (well behind Oxygen, Silicon, and Aluminum, but challenging Iron), and the fifth most abundent element in your body (trailing Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen). So there's plenty of it around, locally. But since it's highly reactive with other common elements, its elemental form doesn't occur in nature. That's why it took the incredibly brainy Sir Humphrey Davy to derive a sample of the pure stuff, back in 1808.

The Centerfold!

There are a zillion industrial Calcium compounds, but the raw stuff isn't used for much outside of alloys plus the manufacture of cement and, um, cheese. And frankly, I'm not sure I'm buying that anybody puts actual elemental Calcium metal into either cement or cheese. (Elizabeth?)  In fact, I don't get the impression that there's much elemental Calcium produced at all.  If you want to use some Calcium carbonate, say, I bet you refine Calcium carbonate directly from minerals (like gypsum, say) rather than going all the way down to elemental Calcium and Carbon and Oxygen and building it back up. That's the way ~I'd~ try it if I had to come up with a system from scratch, anyway.

Here's an interesting thing: when Calcium is weathered out of exposed minerals and carried down to the ocean, it reacts with seawater to form limestone in a way that removes one molecule of Carbon Dioxide from the sea per atom of Calcium. So if it started to look like Earth was in danger of annihilation by Venus-style runaway CO₂ atmosphere change, a last-ditch attempt to forestall the end might be to grind up all the limestone we could find into the finest powder possible and to dump it by the superfreighter into the world's oceans.

Warning: Talk to your marine scientist and one or more real geochemists before deciding if superfreighters of powdered limestone are right for you. Side effects may include a wide variety of multiple unintended consequences, potentially including alternative routes to accidental terracide.

Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Caro v. Carpaccio

Sir Anthony Caro
Born 1924
English

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Vittore Carpaccio
died 1526
Venetian

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.