formless function follows

I got all excited remembering a Get Fuzzy comic strip that touched upon architecture, yesterday.  I had a copy of it printed out and tacked to the outside of my cubicle in Columbus, where it befuddled many an IT guy.  Confronted with the drawing of a scraggly cat named Stank Lloyd Wrong (LOL, right?), one guy scratched his head and told me he didn't get it.  To which my inner dialogue replied, "Of course you don't."

Now the end to this story is sad...because I can't find that printed copy, and when I found the archives online, it was strangely underwhelming.  I don't like it when things that used to amuse me so much are no longer amusing.  It makes me feel like I've lost something important.

The amusement can only be momentary, I suppose, when it comes from a cartoon cat shouting "Skidmore, Owings and Merrill!"  I thought it was so neat, that a comic about a spoiled cat (my favorite animal) would include architectural tidbits, like an homage to those first quarters at Ohio State.  Like the strip was drawn for me.

I don't think that way about anything, not these days.  Nothing seems particularly symbolic or mystical, like so many things that made me feel I was in the right place at the right time.  I do not feel like I am in the right place.  I do not feel like I belong.  The loss of seeing signs in everything might be good for me (in the sense that I'm officially not delusional), but it takes a little romance out of living.  I guess this is just something else I'll have to "get over."  Is that what my life is about now?  "Getting over" all the disappointment?  I thought that wasn't until I turned at least 40.

Where I am right now, both literally and figuratively, seems to be both the cause and the effect.  I couldn't find fabulous work in the arts, so I moved here.  Now, because I am here, I most likely will not find fabulous work in the arts.

Some guy in New York once asked me, about growing up on a farm, "Are you proud?"  I thought to myself, what a strange question!  Unless I, in my socially awkward glory, have once again failed to follow the conversation carefully enough and I just don't get it...but if memory serves, it was a strange thing to ask.  I answered, "Yeah, I guess."  But if being proud of living on a farm means being satisfied with all the life provides, the answer is no.  If being proud of living on a farm means I have to conform to all the rural stereotypes a New Yorker can dream up, the answer is also no.

Just now I used the same sentence structure (or close to it) as Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, as quoted in the documentary Mugabe and the White African.  It makes me a little squeamish, but at least I've not been compared to Hitler.

How's that for stream-of-consciousness writing?

art outside the museum

After a mediocre attempt to generate some excitement in the community about art (I failed to reel in any new fish, just the usual suspects), I was massively entertained by the art historical references in some unusual places.  Namely Futurama and The Simpsons.  Now, of course the Futurama episode in which the gang goes to "Future Roma" (haha), is a spoof of The Da Vinci Code, so it's indirectly art historical, but still.  In fact, the more I think about that show, which has wormed its way into my brain via a certain man's obsessive zeal, it's an incredible example of cartoon culture analyzing our own cultural identity.  Flipping the story of Leonardo Da Vinci on its head is only one instance in which those crazy writers and animators nerd out and inject history into the comedy. 

And really, if we could just blame all the art thefts and general badness on Mr. Burns, wouldn't life be swell?

Aside from playing "Twister" on a bunch of animated oil paintings--"Left hand Rembrandt!"--The Simpsons has always thrown a wrench in the typical lower class identity of Homer and Co. by revealing tiny moments of cultural awareness on the part of their characters.  I for one wouldn't mind having one of those characters come to an ArTalk.  But there are some real life people who just can't open their minds far enough.

Funny how you can find art on television.  Maybe that's why all the big museums now have LCD screens, and there are so many video installations.  That seems to be this century's current medium of choice.  And bridging the gap between oils and animation are a bunch of occasionally vulgar, fictional characters.  But how to use this for the benefit of this particular community, I have no idea...