National Brad Pitt Day

Last Sunday may have been a National Brad Pitt Day. Two reviews in the New York Times Book Review included references to the actor. 

https://www.cinemamoderne.com/en/films/details/thelma-louise/

Reviewer Dwight Garner included short summaries of some of the stories in his review of the story collection It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead). "There's a piece about a jostling mother and daughter, and one about a Brad Pitt impersonator. 'Brad' is hired by the adult children of a woman in hospice who is in thrall to the actor. The kids worry that the impersonator will be a sleazeball, a rheumy Elvis type. The story takes a turn when he turns out to be young and achingly beautiful. Nunez is picking at the seams of life."

Garner closes his review with his typically intriguing and illustrative language. "In the lesser stories (none is a flameout), Nunez's descriptive register slips. But 'It Will Come Back to You' is a reminder that she's among the best we have. I'd rather read one of her books than almost anyone else's. Her headlights are on, even in midday."

Ginia Bellafante's review of The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound-Alberti (Grand Central) notes that Brad Pitt is one in the two percent of the population that are affected by prosopagnosia, or face blindness. The review is accompanied by the clickbait of a photo of the achingly beautiful Brad Pitt. That's all she said about Brad Pitt: just the "so does Brad Pitt" in parenthesis and the caption of the photo.

Las Vegas Strip

Today's Connections was not coming easily to me. There were four words that seemed to be somehow associated with Las Vegas. It turned out that they were associated with "strip" as an adjective or noun. So it was kind of Las Vegas but a bit removed. 

(from the Wikipedia page for Las Vegas Strip)

Sorry if I should have warned about this being a potential spoiler. Or perhaps ... you're welcome.

FRBR and slug identifiers

300460205 | expressions | multidisciplinary concepts, … Associated Concepts Facet

300460206 | manifestations | multidisciplinary concepts, … Associated Concepts Facet
300460207 | slug identifiers | identification numbers and codes, identifying artifacts, ... Objects Facet

These three terms were in this order in an email announcement of new records in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus. My first attraction was just to the word "slug" so close to two levels of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Then I looked at the slug identifiers record in AAT and now know what to call the "Strings derived from a title or identifier as used in the trailing part of a URL." So I guess it's more like a typesetter's slug than the mollusk.

(orange slug from Wikipedia page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug

birthed, schooled, thrifted, farmed

Oy, another word has gotten verbed or adjectived. A pet peeve of mine is "gift" and "gifted" when "give" or "gave" would be just fine.

"They home-birthed and home-schooled eight children, wore thrifted clothes, drove a rusty car and farmed." (a homesteading family profiled in "They're living off the land and preparing for disaster" by Anemona Hartocollis in the New York Times, April 12, 2026, page 13 in the national edition)

It's "thrifted" that especially stuck in my craw .... since it rhymes with "gifted"?

Footnote (a couple weeks later): One of the words that Stephen Fry would delete from the English language is "crafted" when "made" would work. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rUDIynm7w0A

piuttosto

Mentioning contrapposto in a post a couple-three days ago reminded me of piuttosto, a word meaning rather or quite in Italian. I had first noted it in a daily word in Italian email list I used to see but haven't paid attention to lately. The message sent you a word every day, in a sentence, audio file at normal pace, slowed-down audio version. It's partly the doubling of the consonants in both contrapposto and piuttosto that tickle me.

When I googled piuttosto, I discovered it was sometimes but not always interchangeable with abbastanza, again with doubled consonant. You can google it yourself or click on piuttosto at the beginning of this post. The bit of text that showed in the search included "piuttosto la morte! = I'd rather die." More words that took me back to Heated Rivalry in which Yuna replies "I'd rather die!" when Shane asks her if she ever lets his dad win at cards. 

contrapposto

Donatello / David / Bargello

By Rabe! - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98318744

Connor Storrie

@rivalryarchive

YouTube

https://youtube.com/shorts/Vehyh19SkGQ?si=Na_HlYjA9zclxyfD

1835-1910

When today's Artle artist biography came up, the life dates -- 1835-1910 -- looked familiar. We catalogers get to recognize life dates of people that come up repeatedly in our work. The artist was pretty well known but I just knew there was some other famous person that also had those life dates. Not only that, the person that popped into my head was Mark Twain. His dates are indeed 1835-1910 but it may be the social media trolling around "markwayne" that prompted thinking of Mark Twain. 

https://www.nga.gov/artworks/72856-lesson-study-jersey-coast

"not even a little"

Kip is working for the caterer at a fundraiser for St Thomas. He literally runs into Scott with a tray of some canapés. Kip and Scott have undoubtedly (Maria says for sure) been flirting with each other at the smoothie shop where Kip works as he plans his graduate studies in art history. Scott invites Kip out for Mexican after the reception and Kip asks if he minds waiting until he's done with the gig. Scott replies "not even a little."

This happens in episode 3 of Heated Rivalry. Like many, I have been rather obsessed with the series from Crave, a Canadian streaming service, and it's carried in the U.S. by HBO Max.

I took a bit of a break from that rom com to read The Guncle by Steven Rowley. Imagine my surprise and delight when Grant asks his Gay Uncle Patrick, or GUP, if they are "famouth" (he lisps). Patrick responds "not even a little bit" which I definitely heard in the voice of François Arnaud who plays Scott in Heated Rivalry.

There are oodles of websters who are making parallels in something like Heated Rivalry so I'm just joining the crowd and going from one medium to another.

obsessions

In case you were wondering, Downton Abbey: A New Era has a credit for both Loop Group and Crowd ADR. The Loop Group again was Sync or Swim. But that's all I'll say here. No plot spoilers.

separated at birth: index / indexing

I was looking at the Times book announcements and reviews yesterday. One of the reviews was of Index, A history of the: a bookish adventure from medieval manuscripts to the digital age by Dennis Duncan (W.W. Norton). Just my kind of book. I love my indexing gig and the book is about books (&c) and the title is inverted like a subject heading string might be. It's got a pretty zippy cover.

When I think of indexes aesthetically, I generally wander over to the work of Alejandro Cesarco who was often on exhibit at Murray Guy, a favorite gallery on West 17th Street. He has done these wonderful pages of index entries where the indicated mentions may be interlocked though many stand alone. He has also done other book-related art and was matched with John Baldessari in the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. 

You can see more of Cesarco's work on his web page, linked under his name.

gerundickal or gerundical

I have long enjoyed how some words like picnic or panic get a "k" when you get to the gerund or present participle. That is, Édouard Manet and his friends were picnicking on the grass. You wouldn't want it to be picnicing because that would rhyme with the icing on a cake, not picnicking by a lake.

And then I came across havocked which I really liked. It's the past tense of havoc as in wreaking havoc or "The parade really havocked my trip through town but it was fun to watch."

This morning, I was reading the review by Robert Rubin of Shutdown: how Covid shook the world's economy, by Adam Tooze (Viking), in yesterday's New York times book review. Rubin says "The best we can hope for, [Tooze] argues, is what we in the United States got: disjointed 'subnational' action, crisis management by 'ad-hockery.' (Europe, Tooze writes, is even less capable.)." One does feel like they were havocked by the ad hoc over the past year and a half. But you can take pleasure in twisting words. Without the k, I guess ad-hockery would rhyme with grocery and not with mockery.

sink or swim: words, words, words

Some years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled "rhymes and homonyms" about watching film credits and the marvelous things you can find there. I specifically noted the credit in the movie "Being Julia" for Loop Group to Sync or Swim. The rhyme in the credit caption and the homophone in the company name were just delightful. I now watch for loop group credits and don't see them very often. Just a handful in the ten years since that cited blogpost. The loop group, by the way, creates the crowd sounds in post-production on a film.

I was rewatching the "Downton Abbey" movie last night. Fade out. Cue the credits. Imagine my surprise to see there, there, was the Crowd ADR credit for Sync or Swim. It will not surprise you to learn that I had to look up what ADR meant: automated dialogue replacement.

This little revisit to Sync or Swim led me to study the distinction between homonym, homophone, and homograph. "Sync" is a homophone but not a homonym. And, besides, "homophony" is apparently only used in music. I was going to use "homophony" in the third sentence of the first paragraph.

P.S. Of course, the next day, I saw a Loop Group credit for The Loop Squad, in season 1, episode 1 of "The Chair" on Netflix. And 38 drivers!

P.P.S. Two months later, I decided to watch the final episode of "Downton Abbey" again (season 6, episode 9) and guess what. The Crowd Artists were Sync or Swim.

LCSH, literary warrant, heading deprecation, today's news

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging held its semi-annual meeting last week. It would normally be held in conjunction with ALA Midwinter or Annual but was virtual again this time around. Judith Cannan, the head of the Policy, Training and Cooperative Programs Division at the Library of Congress, gave a very interesting thought piece called "Emerging thoughts on LCSH" (the link is to my notes on the meeting) which she cautioned was purposefully unpublished (not even lecture slides) but was to encourage thinking about the future of LCSH.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings originated in 1898 though I'm sure LC did subject access in their catalogs before that. It was maintained for LC and by LC. In the century and more since then, it has expanded far beyond LC and many other libraries contribute subject headings, most through the Subject Authority Coooperative Program or SACO.

Cannan's thoughts focused on four areas: the support of LCSH as an international standard is not sustainable with LC resources; the current model is built on literary warrant in published resources and a possible expansion to newspapers, TV, magazines as terminology sources; deprecation of terms which are outdated or offensive; and pre- or post-coordination of terms. How to handle deprecated terms has generally been handled by making a reference from the old term to the new term. There is significant effort going on with revision of headings as the U.S. and the whole world are dealing with systemic racism, social injustice, and other issues. The old terminology is important for some research and may appear in transcribed and descriptive portions of the bibliographic record. Much to think about and the chat box in the iCohere software was very busy.

I was listening to Weekend Edition as I drove to Wegmans for my Sunday morning fix: the Sunday New York Times and the week's groceries. One of the stories was "Newsrooms revisit past coverage as editors offer a fresh start" by David Folkenflik. One phrase he said really stood out in light of thinking about literary warrant from newspapers. He called news reporting "the first draft of history." This so lined up with Judith Cannan's thoughts on the role of history in how we catalog. One of our intentions is that our cataloging can be as objective as possible and therefore last, if not forever, a long time. But words cannot be objective. They are loaded with cultural significance and that changes over time.

without wax

Alex Wisniewski was a good and dear friend when I lived in Ithaca in the 1980s. He was an MFA student in painting at Cornell. His lover, Vic Cardell, was the assistant music librarian at Cornell. Alex did wonderful things in his art, graphically and literally, with words and statements. We would sit and talk for hours, drink gin (straight), and smoke cigarettes (unfiltered), listen to Philip Glass or David Byrne (loud).

The poster for his MFA show was graphically busy with letters and numbers along with the information about the time and space of the show. Alex was interested in etymology of the words too and somehow got it into his brain that "sincere" came from "without wax." The "sin" was without in Spanish; the "cere" was like the "cire" in French for wax. You know, as in "cire perdue" or lost-wax casting. "Without wax" started appearing in his work. He may have mentioned it to me but somehow it became a thing in our conversations. He gave me a copy of his show poster with the words "without wax" in pink acrylic across it, like graffiti.

There's a bar in Alfred called Alex's. It happens to be owned and managed by a fellow whose surname is Wisniewski. I have to work hard to come up with his first name since Wisniewski is so associated in my memory with Alex the artist. Alas, Alex is one of those gay men that were taken from us too soon by AIDS. So I cannot invite him to come visit and we'd go to Alex's and meet Stan Wisniewski.

Back to without wax. It came up again this week during a virtual artist talk with Roberto Lugo. He started his talk with a short video and I about fell off my chair when he said the docudrama was entitled "Without Wax." He credited the phrase to sculptors who sometimes would inscribe the two words on their work to indicate that they had fully sculpted it without going through the wax model phase. The video is very moving and personal but I was sure set up for an emotional ride when he announced the title. Lugo's catchphrase is "ghetto potter and activist" so that all resonated at this moment.

We've all had some disappointments because of Covid restrictions of various sorts. Rob Lugo was supposed to have spent this year as a Rome Fellow at the American Academy.

telltale sentences, telltale words

The New York Times published a special DealBook section on September 13, 2020, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman's seminal essay in the magazine in September 1970. The essay was entitled "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." The 2020 anniversary section presents short reflections on sentences in the Friedman article, including descriptions of how Friedman's prognosis has played out and what the future might hold as we reflect in a time of reckoning on racial justice, economic imbalance, climate change, and pandemic. I recommend looking at the section but there was one sequence of Friedman sentences that just shouted at me with relevance for something that has been troubling me.

And I quote Friedman:

"The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned 'merely' with profit but also with promoting desirable 'social' ends; that business has a 'social conscience' and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or any one else took them seriously— preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

We have been hearing statements, often accusatory, that the Democrats are preaching socialism, as well as communism and Marxism, in this election season. I do not have a problem with socialism and hate to see it as a slam, especially an overly simplistic slam. But it was reading the last sentence in the quotation above that made me realize how bald the accusations are. I grew up in a solid anti-FDR anti-state household. My parents (and their parents, etc.) generally didn't support big government. They lived mostly in small towns and were active in church, relying on neighbors and church members for support when needed.

I worked in the ceramics library during summers and vacations in my undergrad years, the mid-late 1960s, when social-political action and anti-war discussions were common among college kids whether or not they were active protestors or building occupiers. (Of course, now they'd be thugs and terrorists.) In a discussion, one of my coworkers (Lynne Sootheran) said if people don't take care of people, the state has to take care of people. It was a Damascene moment for me, the moment when my socio-political leanings shifted from what I had inherited. Being small town folks, we were mostly oblivious to the world beyond our small worlds.

Reading the sentences from the Friedman article clarified for me how socialism could be a dirty word in some camps. I still wonder how my folks would have reacted to the takeover of the Republican Party by fundamental thinking. They had already suffered the fundamentalist takeover of their beloved Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. It would not surprise me if they had shifted to the Libertarian Party.

I am also very glad that my life since college has mostly been spent in cities. Even in little Alfred, I appreciate the ability to do most of my daily business by walking rather than driving and parking.

P.S. For Brett Stephens's take on traditional conservatism, this article from last week's Sunday Review on "What We've Lost" might be of interest.

Jasper Johns in the snow

It's not like I was hoping for another round of snow in the middle of April but that's what we got overnight. It was glorious in the early morning sun under a nearly cloudless sky. The sun was beginning to melt the snow on utility wires and the snow was falling to the ground in random patterns of stripes a few inches long. I was reminded of works by Jasper Johns from the 1970s and 1980s.

Jasper Johns: Usuyuki (1981)

(screenprint, Simca Print Artists)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

As it happens, "usuyuki" means "light snow" in Japanese.

"Random patterns" may be an oxymoron. Lest you think that yesterday's obsession with Schitt's Creek has passed, "random" is a favorite adjective of Alexis Rose. She uses it to describe just about anything. The Met's page on this print uses "cross-hatching motif" in describing the work.

what did we use to say?

I was looking at the January 2020 issue of Art in America which is a theme issue on "Generative art: the history and future of creative machines." I wasn't familiar with the term in art and started investigating. The "Generative art" article in Wikipedia is quite mature and traces the history of the term in the arts back to the 1960s. A keyword search in the Library of Congress catalog yielded about 100 hits and about a dozen of them seemed to be relevant, that is, the phrase "generative art" appeared in the title/subtitle. I looked at some of the records and several had the subject heading "Computer art" along with other headings.

The Wikipedia article starts "Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist." It's a little like social practice with a machine. You give it a situation and it proceeds as it can. Wikipedia also compared it with algorithmic art ("algorithmically determined computer generated work") but generative art doesn't need to be based in an algorithm, I guess.

It definitely seemed like it was time to work on a subject proposal for LCSH. I checked the Art & Architecture Thesaurus and they have a record for generative art. The scope note defines it as "electronic art that incorporates process in the creation of the work. The work itself is usually experienced through time and space, and may include sound, motion, animated graphics, sculptural elements, or any combination of these. Generative art has a performative aspect. For visual art that incorporates algorithms to produce static visual works, use 'algorithmic art.'"

And then the word "generative" started leaping into my life: right, left, and center. Not as part of "generative art" but, for example, to describe the origin of an idea. Sam and I talked around it after an artist talk a couple weeks ago. I was at the College Art conference last week and heard at least a half dozen speakers include the word generative in their paper. I was reading the January 24th New York Times after I got home and this sentence appeared in a review of a book entitled The longing for less by Kyle Chayka: "More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term." What word would have been used a while ago? Not generative, I don't think. Maybe I'm just noticing a word that's been out there all along. Whatever, it's good to have an expanding vocabulary.

Houdon Paul-Louis

I've enjoyed playing here with name mashing, e.g., Olafur di Paolo, Albrecht Gonzalez-Torres, Palermo Springs. Kehinde Wiley likes to do it too. This bronze portrait bust by Wiley is in the recently-opened "Jacques-Louis David meets Kehinde Wiley" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is focused on "Bonaparte crossing the Alps" by David and the Wiley painting "Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps" that it inspired. Also on display is this bronze portrait bust by Wiley entitled "Houdon Paul-Louis" after the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, a contemporary of David. The bust is in the Brooklyn Museum collection.

maker, thinker, viewer

Julian Stair, potter, gave a compelling and thought-provoking talk on Tuesday night here at Alfred. He decided, early on, that he would call himself a potter rather than a ceramicist or ceramic artist. He did admit that he might have picked "maker" but it wasn't invented yet as a descriptive term for artist. The picture above is from his website. I liked that he considered something like this as one work with five pieces. He talked about the plinth as working like a frame for a painting.

But then he dismissed conceptual art because all art has a concept. I started gallery- and museum-hopping in the 1960s so conceptual art has long been part of my world. How could he? Back to the maker business, can a maker do conceptual art? Must a maker make some thing? Can a maker do social practice?

Those thoughts filled my head for quite a while after the talk and I was glad to run into Michelle Illuminato and Laurel Jay Carpenter at the Collegiate. They can probably say maker, conceptual art, performance art, and social practice in the same sentence and not have a problem. Thursdays are one of my work days at the ceramics library so I was upstairs, looking at the current art journals and noticed the title "Conceptual art and the acquaintance principle" in the summer 2015 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, by Louise Hanson. I hadn't heard of the acquaintance principle, the coining of which is credited to Richard Wollheim. "Judgments of aesthetic value, unlike judgments of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissable from one person to another." (from his Art and its objects, 1980, p. 233)

So it's back to objects. Things. Makers. Winckelmann said to Clérisseau: Write as much as possible in the presence of the actual object and return to it if you have second thoughts. (quoted in Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 62) Kind of the acquaintance principle, applied to you and yourself.

Just a couple days ago, a good friend was describing a wonderful moonrise she'd seen the night before. She went on and on. On one hand, you indeed had to be there; on the other, I have often been dumbstruck by a view of the moon and don't mind reliving such an experience while an acquaintance is carrying on about her moonrise view.

Caspar David Friedrich

Northern Sea in the Moonlight

art and agriculture ... and life and liberal arts

The weekly Bergren Forum at Alfred University is usually held in the Nevins Auditorium in Powell Campus Center. It was displaced to Seidlin Hall 114 this week, for "131: Endeavors in Art & Agriculture" by Cassandra Bull who is working on a bachelor's degree in the School of Art and Design as well as an associate degree in agricultural technology at Alfred State College.

Seidlin 114 is where I had physics in my freshman year of college (1964-1965) with George Towe. He gave us a lot of pop quizzes. One day, he asked us to describe something that related to a campus lecture the evening before. The lecture was unrelated to physics but Professor Towe had been struck by the fact that none of us had been at the lecture. He taught me a lesson about the value of a broad liberal arts education and diverse interests.

It was therefore fitting that Bull's project mixed art and science. For one of her agriculture classes, she had to live with a cow for 24 hours. The hours did not have to be consecutive. At the same time, she had an assignment in an art class to pick 25 words and turn them into a project. Her words:

Watching cows strap into milking machines
I see all the injustice we're told is necessity
As I shovel shit for something I don't believe in

She turned her horror at the dairy industry into a thought-piece on how you live with your concerns, how calves are taken from their mothers, how you mix aesthetics and content, how art and science influence and need each other. Bull made a pair of coveralls from Japanese mulberry stalks (kozo) to wear while she lived with her cow whose "name" was 131. The coveralls quickly became dirty and torn. When the professor Diane Cox encouraged her to continue, she wrote her field notes and statements about her experience and feelings about industrial agriculture on the coveralls. She then did a performance for her class in which she took off her street clothes, put on the coveralls and read the text, and then returned to her street clothes. She showed a video of the performance as part of her presentation today. What a powerful statement it was, picturing her description of the project.

I also could not help but think about some of the things I saw on my March road trip: the feedlots near Dalhart, Texas; the long barns in central Arkansas, presumably for chickens; the cattle and bison in fields in Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Arkansas; the varying landscapes of the U.S. Lots to think about, mostly about how there is no absolute good, that art is mixed with life, that experience is important.