amusing line from Clement Greenberg

On the origin of modern art in the basically psychotic personalities of Henri Rousseau, Cézanne, and especially Van Gogh:

“Modern art is now practiced by such relatively cold, hard heads as Matisse and Picasso, who produce it out of their sense of contemporary experience. But it needed mental cases to show them the way, to cut through to the ultimate truth of life as it is lived at present.”

Much like the modernists who are his favorites, Greenberg also seems like someone who capitalizes on the condition of his medium. His best skill is the ability to make extremely intricate statements in very compressed paragraphs and still pull it off much of the time. And of course, he was required to do this by his task of writing extremely short pieces.

what it says on the net

When complaining about this or that problem, I often forget that somewhere on the web there is at least a possible solution for almost any problem.

So here’s what I saw about kittens who bite too much, and I will try these things.

*someone said don’t use your hands to play with/wrestle a kitten, because that gets them used to the idea that your hands are toys. Makes sense. Instead, wrestle them with a stuffed animal.

*don’t punish them for biting, because it just confuses them. They instinctively want to attack swiftly moving small objects such as your hands and feet. So, use other techniques.

*as a last resort (and this is weird) stick your finger in the kitten’s mouth and press down on her tongue. For some reason this apparently makes the kitten stop biting your hand. I’ll hold that one in reserve; it sounds not too fun for either of us.

kitten problem of the moment

Every couple of days, one problem is solved but she generates a different one.

The current problem: at this stage you have to lock her out of wherever you’re sleeping. She’s such an aggressive biter now; I’ve had my nose, ear, and cheek bitten pretty hard (though she’s lost the early habit of clawing my lips, thankfully). Those are really sharp little fangs, and she can’t be trusted to treat me well if I’m incapacitated by sleep.

Problem: she seems to sleep during the day while I’m gone, and is in no mood to sleep further while I’m there. So she cries outside the door for 20 or so minutes while one attempts to fall asleep, and it sounds almost as mournful as when she was abandoned in the alley. You just have to steel yourself to it and keep her locked out, because otherwise she’ll bite your face multiple times whenever you start to fall asleep. Luckily, in the morning she never seems resentful, just happy to see you again.

Oh yeah, she hasn’t had rabies shots yet. I’d better arrange for that. It’s the right age. What if I escaped death from an actual rabid dog in 2008, only to catch rabies from my own kitten in 2011?

Incidentally, rabid dogs are pretty scary when you encounter them face-to-face. The one that attacked me wasn’t yet in final-stage mouth foaming, which only happens very near the end when they lose the muscular ability to swallow. But he/she was already in a zombie-like state of mental degeneration, making weird right-angled turns in parking lots and attacking everything that moved for no reason whatsoever, including me. Egypt has quite a lot of rabies, so you can’t mess around with animal bites here.

a more exact link

Here is a more specific LINK to the Egypt show.

And my mistake for not mentioning again that the curator of the show is Aida Eltorie, who took many of my classes during her days as an AUC student. Aida is now an independent curator working internationally, but based in Cairo.

I’m delighted that Egypt is putting on this show in memory of one of its own young artists who lost his life to sheer thuggery. We’ll probably never know the exact person who fired the shot, but investigations are underway into the persons who ordered the use of live ammunition, and that decision seems to extend all the way to the top.

Ahmed Bassiouny exhibit at the Venice Biennale

You may remember the death of the remarkable Egyptian artist/musician Ahmed Bassiouny. (Click HERE to see my previous posts about him.)

At the Research Conference here in early May, his good friend Shady El Noshokaty (who teaches at AUC) showed an extremely moving film about Bassiouny’s life and career, including scenes showing what an electrifying and imaginative teacher he was in the Art Department at Helwan University south of Cairo. Clearly, his students adored him, as any of us would have.

On the first day of the Revolution, Ahmed was severely beaten by police, but insisted on returning to the protests anyway. On the fourth day of the Revolution, he was gunned down by a sniper and his body run over and crushed by a government vehicle. It took his friends and family a number of days to find his body in a morgue elsewhere in the city.

Now, the Egyptian government is helping to fund an Ahmed Bassiouny exhibit at the Egyptian pavilion at the VENICE BIENNALE. Additional funding for the show came from my office, and still further funds from Lisa Anderson, President of AUC.

If you plan to attend the Venice Biennale, please stop by the Egyptian pavilion and learn about the remarkable man who was Ahmed Bassiouny.

I like this job

Make sure to try your hardest to find a job you like. It changes everything for the better.

The only thing I don’t really like about the job is that the bus rides burn me out. Eventually I’ll solve that by moving out to this area; it’s just not developed enough yet in New Cairo to be a place I’d want to live.

Otherwise, I have just the right number of responsibilities to juggle, my office is in a beautiful building, and the people are fantastic. Being happy to come to work every morning is a great sensation.

Bulls lose to fall into 1-1 series tie

Miami simply has too much talent to be swept aside as easily as they were in Game 1. LeBron is like a taller and stronger Jordan, though without the killer instinct, which of course is what made Jordan into Jordan: that willingness to cut your throat.

HERE.