“Summertime,” Ms. Weyant’s portrait of a woman with long, flowing hair that the artist had sold for around $12,000 two years before, resold for $1.5 million, five times its high estimate.
Ms. Weyant’s oeuvre of roughly 50 paintings has already filtered into the hands of top collectors such as investor Glenn Fuhrman and plastic surgeon Stafford Broumand. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently exhibited her work in a group show, and former Venice Biennale curator Francesco Bonami said he predicts she will make her own Biennale appearance soon, which would be another career milestone.
For the past year, the [27-year-old] artist has been dating Larry Gagosian, the 77-year-old founder of arguably the most powerful art gallery network in the world. … Ellie Rines, owner of the New York gallery 56 Henry, which gave Ms. Weyant her first New York solo show three years ago, said anyone who factors the artist’s dating life into her odds of success is being misogynistic.
From the same article:
Readers: How are you celebrating National Arts and Humanities Month?
After Great Smoky Mountain National Park, our family’s next stop on the way to Oshkosh was Indianapolis. We parked at Signature IND and Ubered into town for lunch in a sacred space:
Despite the sanctified-by-2SLGBTQQIA+ nature of the restaurant, it was tough not to notice that workers were unenthusiastic about being there, a sharp contrast to Gatlinburg in which genuine warmth is the usual attitude of a server.
First sightseeing stop, July 22, 2022, the children’s museum:
The museum has an epic dinosaur section with real fossils that visitors can touch. Real paleontology is going on in this museum and visitors can arrange to take part.
The museum reminds children that they can make a difference, but only if they can first be classified as victims (of the Nazis (including Donald Trump), of prejudice against Blacks, of prejudice against those with AIDS, or of the Taliban).
Comic books are available to flip through via touch screen, but only those featuring female superheroes.
Note the two guys wearing surgical masks in their lonely fight against an aerosol virus:
They’re concerned enough about COVID-19 to wear masks, but not concerned enough to refrain from sharing the museum’s indoor air with 100+ other folks nor to refrain from taking a bus ride around the track (I can’t remember if they actually kissed the bricks or not, a seemingly less-than-ideal way to #StopTheSpread).
Next stop was the Eiteljorg Museum, which specializes in Native American and Western art. The museum acknowledges that it is on land that rightfully belongs to others, but it refuses to give the land back:
And then there is the posted DEI “commitment”:
Just a few steps beyond the righteous floor sign, we get the Native American perspective on white say-gooders and their land acknowledgments:
A couple of cloth-masked visitors again raise the question for me… why are they in an indoor public place?
Native-created masks for horses and humans:
Prevent COVID-19 from spreading by shutting down the water fountains:
Will Florida ultimately be the only state left with working water fountains?
If you’ve got kids, don’t miss the basement of this museum, which has a lot of hands-on activities. Back on the main floor, the scale of the Western paintings is literally awesome:
Another museum (Newfields), another pair of masked visitors:
They’re enjoying “THE LUME”, an animated version of the Impressionists set to music. But if they’re worried enough about COVID-19 to wear a mask, why aren’t they worried enough to stay home?
Our kids loved this production (see below; #LoveIsLove) and were reluctant to leave even after two hours. “This is the best place ever,” was the explanation. There is a bar/coffee shop within the exhibit and also bathrooms, so it would actually be possible to stay the whole day.
One idea had been to leave for Oshkosh on Saturday night. The “shelter in place & stay safe” text message was not promising, especially given that it was being sent to people whose shelter options were a 10 lb. tent and a 1500 lb. (empty) airplane.
The next morning was not a lot better for getting to our actual destination of Appleton, Wisconsin:
Southwest Airlines was delayed 3.5 hours getting into Chicago, according to a friend coming into Oshkosh the easy/smart way, so we didn’t feel bad trying to wait out the weather at the Indiana State Museum.
What’s interesting about the U.S.S. Indianapolis? Not that the U.S. Navy failed to heed a distress call from the torpedoed cruiser. Not that the U.S. Navy failed to notice when the massive ship did not show up in port as scheduled. Not that nearly 900 men died, 600 of them unnecessarily (left to float in the water and be attacked by sharks until a PBY crew accidentally discovered them). Not that the tragedy figured prominently in the movie Jaws. See the sign below for what visitors can learn next to the model.
Suppose that a visitor wonders about the merits of low-skill immigration. He/she/ze/they will learn that “Securing the rights of all Hoosiers has been fought by many. Individuals and communities rally together to fight against hate and social injustices.” A migrant who shows up on a Monday morning is a “Hoosier” by lunchtime and, certainly, it would be “hate” and “injustice” if anyone were to regard the migrant as illegal somehow.
There’s a hands-on cardboard engineering lab on the top floor. Here a 2-year-old learns to build a park that is welcoming to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:
Is there room in Indianapolis for every American who identifies as 2SLGBTQQIA+ and for the entire populations of Haiti (11 million) and Honduras (10 million) to become Hoosiers? It sure feels as though there is! Downtown, at least on the weekend, feels empty.
James Caan has died. I’m wondering if we should watch some of his lesser-known movies to celebrate his achievements. From Wikipedia:
In 1977, Caan rated several of his movies out of ten – The Godfather (10), Freebie and the Bean (4), Cinderella Liberty (8), The Gambler (8), Funny Lady (9), Rollerball (8), The Killer Elite (5), Harry and Walter Go to New York (0), Slither (4), A Bridge Too Far (7), and Another Man Another Chance (10).
Should we try to see that last one, a French Western(!)? It is available streaming on Amazon “ScreenPix”.
And, of course, we can’t mention anything related to The Godfather without reminding ourselves “A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns.” (from the book, not the movies?)
A post-1977 film that seems like a good candidate is Misery, about a strong independent woman. For me, the movie is tainted by its association with Stephen King (I’m not a fan of the horror genre to begin with), but it features Kathy Bates and she won an Oscar for her performance.
What other James Caan movies are essential (like marijuana in California and Massachusetts)?
My general rule is that if an activity is dangerous enough to require wearing a mask then it is dangerous enough to avoid altogether. I wouldn’t go to a Broadway show, for example, because they’re telling me that it isn’t safe (masks are required as well as vaccine paper checks) and nothing stops me from staying home to watch Hamiltonover and over and over and over again.
On April 23, 2022, however, my general policy was superseded by a directive from Extremely Senior Management (Mom, almost 88 years old). Off to the Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland, for a vaccine-and-mask-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variant spreading event. The show was “We declare you a terrorist…” concerning the Second Chechen War and jihadi takeover of a theater in Moscow. (In the best American tradition, the playwright Tim J. Lord who tackles this complex subject seems to have no background in Russian language, Russian culture, Islamic religion, history of Chechnya, etc.)
Anyone in Bethesda can tell you that checking photo ID for voters is racist. According to the Righteous, People of Color are too stupid to obtain photo IDs. Tending to confirm this theory, the Bethesda theater experience begins with an ID and vaccine paper check and there were no People of Color in the audience (unless Asians count).
Throughout the theater, there are numerous signs demanding mask-wearing:
As with the airlines in the Science-following pre-Mizelle era, COVID-19-suppression is enhanced by filling the lobby with unmasked people who are eating and drinking.
We acknowledge that we’re on land stolen from Native Americans, but we will neither give it back nor pay them rent:
No matter a person’s gender ID, he/she/ze/they will will find bathroom to suit him/her/zir/theirself:
Remember to fight COVID-19 by washing your hands:
This was made more challenging by the fact that the theater staff were too busy checking vaccine papers, photo IDs, and mask compliance to refill the soap dispensers.
I still can’t figure out why the people who printed up all of these signs and designed these protocols didn’t ask “Wouldn’t it make more epidemiological sense if we shut down our COVID-spreading theater altogether?”
I visited the National Gallery of Art recently, trying to figure out when the Hunter Biden wing will open, and was impressed by the extensive collection of animal sculpture by Barye. I thought that it would be fun to get reproductions of the works that include crocodilians for the kids to enjoy back in Florida. Yet, in fact, these aren’t for sale. Now that we have 3D scanners and 3D printers, shouldn’t every sculpture in every museum be available at any size that a visitor wants? The 3D scan could be sent to some hard-working folks over in Asia where a mold would be printed and, eventually, a resin or bronze version shipped to the happy consumer (add a “replica” stamp underneath so that authenticity cannot be falsified). The profit would be shared by the craftspeople and the museum.
This doesn’t happen in the marketplace, so I know that the above idea is defective. But why? The Louvre offers a feeble 7 choices for replica Baryes and they have a huge collection.
This article makes it sound as though there is still a lot of work to be done by hand in making a bronze cast of a 3D-scanned object. So maybe the dream of on-demand replicas in any size is unrealistic with present technology, but surely there is a sufficient market for one or two sizes of each sculpture worthy of being displayed in a museum.
Museums already do this with 2D works. You can order custom prints of works from the Metropolitan Museum, for example (don’t forget to wear a mask if you go into the museum to place the order; they still require all visitors 2 years and up to wear masks). Why aren’t we ready to go 3D?
What can be purchased in the gift shop, you might wonder, if not reproduction alligator sculptures?
Suppose that we had to summarize that last book, What would Frida Kahlo do? How about “When trying to become successful in a career, have sex with a married much older guy who is already very successful in that career”?
The latest Enemy of the Truth, a dangerous spreader of misinformation and hate, is Joe Rogan. I haven’t watched or listened to this guy, however, and I’ve heard dark tales of three-hour-long episodes. I don’t want to wade through 100 hours of content to figure out what is intolerable about this person.
I’m therefore appealing to readers. Which Joe Rogan episodes and, preferably, at which in/out points, should be listened to be someone who has no experience with this form of hatred? (URLs pointing directly to these episodes would be most welcome)
In the latest installment of the Spotify-Rogan saga, CEO Daniel Ek sent out a company memo on Sunday addressing Joe Rogan’s use of harmful racial slurs in past episodes of his podcast. Over 70 of these past episodes have now been removed from Spotify. In the memo, which was published by The Hollywood Reporter, Ek declared that Spotify will invest $100 million in the licensing, development and marketing of music and audio content from historically marginalized groups. This is the same amount of money that Spotify paid to Joe Rogan for his exclusive content deal.
Tensions escalated recently when 270 medical professionals signed an open letter to Spotify urging the company to implement rules around misinformation after Rogan, who is one of the most-listened to podcasters in the industry, hosted Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. High-profile figures like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and author Roxane Gay pulled their content from Spotify in protest of the company’s inaction against Rogan’s platforming of false public health information.
“One of the things I am thinking about is what additional steps we can take to further balance creator expression with user safety,” Ek wrote. “I’ve asked our teams to expand the number of outside experts we consult with on these efforts and look forward to sharing more details.”
Note that, according to the journalists, it is a fact that what Dr. Malone was saying (“give COVID-19 vaccines to old people, not to young people”) was wrong (“misinformation”). The Science is settled and there is no possibility that Malone will turn out to have been correct, e.g., if universal vaccination pressures SARS-CoV-2 to evolve in unwanted ways (see Marek’s disease). Also, users cannot feel or be safe without those 70 episodes having been removed (is there a samizdat server somewhere in a free speech country where the 70 banned episodes can be evaluated by users who don’t mind feeling/being unsafe?).
From a purely practical point of view, what is a “marginalized group”? Vietnam is not well-represented in hip hop currently, as far as I know. Will Spotify fund Vietnamese rappers rapping in Vietnamese?
Leaving HBO Max in a few days… Black Death, a 2010 film that is perfect for “these times.” I don’t want to spoil the movie, but one critical element is attempts by people whose understanding of The Science is imperfect to explain a geographical variation in death rate. At the very least, you’ll be grateful for central heat, indoor plumbing, and telecommunications.
One unusual aspect of the movie is that, though it is set in the Middle Ages, it is not about the nobility. We see the lives of ordinary folks who are typically ignored in books and movies.
Related:
“Black Death should be burned at the stake” (Guardian): “this uneven and silly film is plagued by historical inaccuracies” (maybe Facebook and Twitter will ban references to it as dangerous misinformation?)
The heart-warming story of the movie Encantobegins with Latinx migrants fleeing violence (in Colombia) and almost immediately getting a free house (created by a magic candle).
This was a hit with the elementary schoolers in our household, though it lacks a villain (there are no white non-Latinx characters and therefore nobody can be truly bad). Without a villain, a traditional element of drama is missing. The virtuous Latinx characters are essentially fighting with themselves.
It doesn’t seem as though anyone Colombian worked in a senior role on the film and therefore the work is solidly in the Hollywood tradition of cultural appropriation. Partial redemption for this sin is achieved by having the physically strongest character, able to lift an entire church due to a magic gift of strength, be someone who identifies as a young woman.
Students of zoology and geography will be pleased to see that one of the South American animals that is included in a menagerie is identified in the dialog as a “leopard” (i.e., not a jaguar). Loyal reader Toucan Sam will, no doubt, be willing to overlook this issue…
I stumbled on Closed for Storm in Amazon Prime (it is wedged into a corner of the app behind “Black voices” and “Hispanic & Latino voices” (no “Latinx voices” category?)). It covers Jazzland, which opened in 2000 and was converted into Six Flags New Orleans in 2003. Katrina hit in 2005.
I recommend this for anyone considering a business investment. It is a great reminder that failure is always an option.
Separately, it is unclear why the park couldn’t be reopened. The metro area population was about 1.34 million in 2000 and today is 1.27 million. Americans love theme parks. Why do they generate infinite money in Orlando, but are risky elsewhere?
Don’t Look Up is a cautionary tale of what could happen if Trump-supporters were a majority in the U.S. It is an update, to some extent of the 2006 film Idiocracy, whose underlying message is that Nobel-winning transistor developer William Shockley was correct, i.e., that America’s destiny is a nation of low-skill people because means-tested welfare programs enable higher fertility for no-income and low-income Americans compared to middle-income Americans (Idiocracy did not cover low-skill immigration, but presumably it can be viewed as an argument against it). Fertility versus household income:
Don’t Look Up doesn’t address how Americans became stupid enough to vote for a Trump-like president, but reminds us of the terrible costs of denying Science (capitalized like “God”) and not trusting Scientists. The entire movie is a not-very-subtle mocking of the Trumpkins for their stupidity in not believing “the Science”.
Here’s a sample tweet from the writer/director, whose brief Twitter profile includes the phrase “Climate Emergency is NOW“.
The shock, horror and absurdity of Donald Trump being President is just as fresh as the day it happened. Maybe even fresher if that’s possible.
It’s really hard to imagine it will ever be considered “history.”
Related Facebook posts from my friends who vote for Democrats:
It’s the most useful movie, because now you can explain how tech works, and journalism and politics, etc.
The movie is sexy and true. Yes, we had everything, and we blew it — in the movie and in real life. It’s a critique of our response to climate change, and Covid, and even has a dig at Trump (the president’s chief of staff played by Jonah Hill is her son)
… it’s [arguably] both the greatest and the most important movie ever made.
If this were a Michael Bay movie, it would make sense to ignore anything incompatible with Physics 101 under the rubric of “artistic license”. But Don’t Look Up is a political statement, not a work of art, and it is specifically about what could happen if don’t deport and/or suppress those who refuse to follow the science.
The Science delivered by this climate change expert-turned-screenwriter starts with a female-identifying astronomer finding a new comet from the Oort cloud. The movie is somewhat, um, retrograde in that she does not explicitly identify as “of color” or 2SLGBTQQIA+. She reports her observation to a male-identifying astronomy professor, played by climate change activist Leo DeCaprio. Within a day, he has calculated that the comet will strike the Earth in 6 months. The rest of the movie explores what would happen if the morons who deny the settled climate change models (and/or assume that some improved tech for dealing with climate change will be developed within the next 100 years, e.g., a solar-powered carbon vacuum) were also to deny orbital mechanics.
In movies about the impending end of the world due to a comet impact, one thing is certain: Detecting the comet and computing its orbit are dead easy. … Computer programs are started, and people frantically hack away at keyboards. In no time at all, they will have identified the fuzzy blob as a comet that is hurtling in from the frozen recesses of space. What’s more, in no time at all, they will have determined the comet’s trajectory and they can categorically state that it will hit Earth. A few more frantic calculations and they also know the date and time of impact – Quick, call Bruce Willis!
In actual fact, one single picture of a comet is just that: a single picture of a comet. … From one picture, you can’t tell where it’s heading; you don’t know how close it will get to the Sun, nor if or when a close encounter with any other planet is due. To find out these things, you need more observations – many more of images that were taken at different dates, ideally spanning a long time frame. … So you have to make an educated guess at the parameters that describe the comet’s trajectory, also known – unsurprisingly – as its ‘orbital parameters’. This initial guess (as even the mathematicians rather candidly refer to it) in all likelihood will be quite far off.
This procedure is known as ‘orbit determination’. It is very time-consuming and involves a lot of complicated and repetitive mathematical calculations, which is why nowadays we let a computer handle most of it. The entire process is known as ‘parametric optimisation’ and each step is referred to as an ‘iteration’. As the optimisation process goes on and many iterations have been performed, you will see that for the epochs at which the images were taken, the computed locations, based on the current estimate of the orbital parameters, will move quite close to what you can see in the actual images.
The article includes a chart showing that it took 450 days to determine the orbit for a 2013 comet:
Regarding the above chart:
In the diagram above, it took almost 200 days to find out that comet Siding Spring would not hit Mars. At that time, the uncertainty in the predicted encounter distance still ran into hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Though the most probable encounter distance was established fairly early, the uncertainty was still significant after more than a year of observation. It took 44 days of observation to achieve even a semblance of an orbit determination – one that was still all over the place, with a predicted mean Mars distance at flyby 900,000 km, with a high guess of 3.6 million!
It took seven years of additional observations to identify an object found with one of the world’s best telescopes as a (huge) comet (National Geographic).
(I emailed a friend who has spent a few decades working with orbital mechanics. To the European Space Agency’s “take it slow” point of view, he added the following:
One problem is that comets, unlike asteroids, have significant non-gravitational forces acting on them: They outgas directionally, producing random small thrusts. Thus their orbits are not as precisely determinable as planets or even asteroids.
)
Another aspect of Science presented by the Trump-hating writer/director is that people sitting on Earth are able to figure out that the rock part of the comet is packed with $trillions in valuable minerals. They do this with a “spectrometer“, but that instrument would work only on the tail of a comet, not on the rocky core. Although Science could predict that Peru, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia would escape COVID-19 deaths due to mask orders and lockdowns and Science plainly has no difficulty predicting Earth’s temperature 100 years from now, I am not aware of Science being able to determine, via remote sensing, the composition of a rock in space. NASA has (easily-found-with-Google) some concepts for doing this, but they involve physical contact with the comet or other space rock. There is no instrument that you can set up in your house to determine the composition of a rock in the neighbor’s yard, right? Why would you imagine that you can set up an instrument in the Atacama Desert and determine the composition of a rock in space?
[Update: see comments for a potential correction to the above from an astronomer.]
In other words, the screenwriter who purports to educate Americans on how stupid Republicans are was apparently unable to use Google to find these written-for-laypeople articles on orbital mechanics and comets. Nor was he/she/ze/they able to read a NASA org chart. All of the scientists at NASA work at the “Kennedy Space Center” (not at Goddard or JPL). They refer to each other as “Dr. X” and “Dr. Y” rather than by first name or first and last names.
One of the elite accusations about the Trumpkins is that only the elites understand that we share our beautiful planet with a veritable rainbow of other nations (though don’t wave that rainbow flag anywhere that it might interfere with elite profits!). Yet the movie makes sense only if we accept that the U.S. is the only country that can act to deflect an incoming comet. If Americans did not exist, the remaining 96 percent of the world’s population would take no action in response to scientifically proven impending species-ending doom. The people who invented rockets and who recently landed a robot on Mars wouldn’t do anything. The people who kicked off the Space Race and who currently operate their own satellite navigation system wouldn’t do anything. The Europeans wouldn’t dispatch any Ariane rockets (this last one is more believable since the EU seems to be 100% occupied with coronapanic!).
(Pravda reports that Russia actually has been working on asteroid deflection since at least 2009. China is a comparative newcomer to this specific area (LiveScience 2021). The Europeans have been working in this area since at least 2005 (ScienceDaily).)
Although the movie cannot be recommended as a tutorial on #Science, it does have some fun parts. Ariana Grande appears (and sings) in the role of pop singer whose romantic life is more interesting to a stupefied and stupid population than an impending extinction event. One of the greatest characters, played by English actor Mark Rylance, is kind of a cross between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. The unwashed Science-deniers are also fun, e.g., with a range of beliefs from “the comet doesn’t exist” to “the orbital mechanics calculations handed down by Science are wrong.” They gather in huge rallies in support of their Trump-style president. Some of the comedy is provided by the screenwriter trying to figure out how non-elite Americans speak. For example, he/she/ze/they has a young skateboarder say, “Dr. Mindy, Can I be vulnerable in your car?” (Our apartment in Jupiter, Florida is right near a skateboard park and “vulnerable” is not one of the words we hear from the denizens.)
Don’t Look Up is definitely worth watching if you’re already a Netflix subscriber, mostly to see just how wrong someone can get all of the science while making a movie about the dangers of letting people who don’t understand and respect science vote.
Project Hail Mary, by the author behind The Martian. This book tackles much tougher scientific challenges than orbital mechanics calculations and the non-scientist author doesn’t make too many mistakes, according to a NASA post-doc. The man whom Elon Musk called a “knucklehead” enjoyed it too (GatesNotes).
Alternate theory about why Republicans are so stupid: they’re distracted by lust for the Democrats’ thought-leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Daily Mail)
