woobiquity

Why even tattoo artists need a dictionary

Or perhaps I should say especially tattoo artists:

 

HuffPost rounds up the funniest misspelled tattoos they could find, including one seriously unfortunate variation on the phrase 'sweet pea'. Oops.

Cloud art

Obviously, it's all around us. All you have to do is look up. But these wispy specimens, seen from a quiet Greenwich street a couple of weeks ago, struck me as being particularly artsy and profound. 

A hotel that's a good view

   

I liked this new hotel building in Athens, Georgia. Workers were putting the finishing touches on it when I passed by recently. Designed by Atlanta-based architects Surber Barber Choate & Hertlein, it's LEED certified and all of the materials used (including nice wood and stone features at ground level) were sourced within 500 miles of the site. Lovely. 

Self-portrait as a salvaged mannequin

Outside Abstriacticus, which often has something thought-provoking on display, Deptford Broadway, London, this afternoon.

Going, going, gone

'Display model', Greenwich, London, this afternoon

Part of the closing-down sales at the rough-and-ready weekend outdoor market in Greenwich, London. The market is due to close next month to make way for 129 residential units, offices, retail spaces and an arcade. Another victim of the global eBay cartel? No, just 'progress'.

UPDATE: Actually, scratch that. The developers have pulled out because of the credit crunch.  What goes around...

The new verbal literacy?

On the campus of Goldsmiths College, London, this afternoon

The filmmaker Peter Greenaway gave a talk last night at the ICA. At least, it was billed as a talk. It ended up being more of a MacBook Pro video demonstration. But before all that, Greenaway, who is very articulate indeed, laid out an argument that words are no longer the bedrock of our culture. He quoted the philosopher Derrida: 'The image always has the last word'. Adding his own twist: 'The written word is also an image'.

The talk was entitled 'The New Visual Literacy', so hearing language get a licking came as no big surprise.

What was surprising, at least to me, was how far the director of feature-length provocations like 'The Pillow Book' and 'The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover' has taken these ideas into his own work. He's given up making feature films. It's all about New Media now. It's about freeing the image from the prison of the cinema screen and the script. We saw video clips of museum installations, of an opera with avatars, of looped film fragments used for 'VJ-ing' in arenas with DJs who have only one name ('Wonderboy').

If some of what he showed us looked to the untrained eye like high-tech versions of those kitsch, back-lit photographs of 'moving' waterfalls (so common in American restaurants of a certain class), this may have been our imaginative failure rather than his. This animation, for example, probably had an altogether different resonance when projected onto The Last Supper itself. Only a few Italian dignitaries will ever know for sure.

By the end of it all, my head hurt. 'Madam,' Gore Vidal said once on a different London stage, 'I've told you things here tonight that you have never heard before in your life.' And maybe this was the thing. Too much, too fast of stuff I've never heard -- I mean, seen -- in  my life. But as I fled before the Q&A could start, my head brimming over with split screens and classical statuary madness, I wanted soooo much to close my eyes and just listen to simple voices on the radio for a while.

What does any of this have to do with the above (ahem) image of Barack Obama? Everything.

That paratactic speech

That's what Stanley Fish is calling it anyway. Parataxis being “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.” In other words, Obama's inauguration address didn't flow like the sermony, 'hypotactic' speeches he is known for (and which many Japanese people are now apparently using as the basis for their English lessons -- yes they can!).

Fish suggests the speech is best appreciated on paper, and apparently the publishers Penguin agree (as they're printing it as a booklet of about the same size and shape as the Bushisms novelty books that proliferated pre-Obama). I agree too. It has many elegant and thought provoking phrases that really only blossom on the second or third read. It has wisdom and grace.

Where did we ever get the idea that it should also have a three-second catch-phrase that could be played on an endless loop in our tin ears until it became a timeless truth, then a cliche? No speechwriter can guarantee that. Besides, it's Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address that everyone remembers. Not his first.

Hmmm...

Thought for a cold day

My new gloves don't fit me like a glove.

'Anybody want to buy a used F?'

When I was in school, certain high-minded teachers were always asking us why we would want to use a 25-cent word (like, say, "fart", as in "that fart rocked") when we could use a four-dollar word to make the same point (like, say, "onomonpoeia"... "the onomonopoeia he came out with was extraordinary").

They never told us about the 325,000-dollar words.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently debating the fate of, as they've been putting it in their high-minded discourse, "the f-word" and "the s-word" on network TV. At question is the FCC's ability to level huge fines, as high as $325,000, against networks that allow celebrities to say things like "It's really, really fucking brilliant" (-Bono).

As usual, there's an element of conspiracy. The solicitor-general, who is arguing the case for censorship, is clearly in cahoots with the teachers of America, joining those who would deny young people access to the high-value words that could ensure their future.

He's arguing that loosening indecency standards could result in "Big Bird dropping the F-bomb on Sesame Street."

Fricassee-bomb? Flocculation-bomb? Oh... Yes, because that's going to happen, isn't it.

And now, without any further ado: a carnival of F-words on Sesame Street:

One word, America

A house in New Orleans' Faubourg Marigny, summer 2008.