Sunday, May 31, 2020

The one thousand dollar teacup




OK technically $975.

I enjoy a nice tea cup as much as the next person, but I thought $25 was plenty for a single teacup.

Please note - **TEACUP ONLY*** - which means you have to buy the saucer separately. It's $750.

Who are the people buying this stuff?

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

RIP Astrid Kirchherr

Astrid and Stu Sutcliff. He died at age 21. She outlived him by 60 years.
Just found out that Astrid Kircherr, the Hamburg photographer and fiancee of Stu Sutcliff died on Friday.



The Beatles met Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann around the same time. According to the NYT obit:
Ms. Kirchherr discovered the Beatles through her boyfriend at the time, Klaus Voormann, a fellow art student. After a quarrel, Mr. Voormann left her house; walking past the Kaiserkeller, he was drawn to the Beatles’ high-energy sound.
Voorman, as any true Beatles fan knows, was responsible for creating the cover of the Beatles album Revolver, one of the greatest album covers of all time.

The only two pieces of art I've ever purchased for myself are two signed prints from Kirchherr's Funfair series. I have the portraits of John and Paul with Sutcliff standing in the background of each:





Side note: in December of this year John Lennon will have been dead for 40 years.

Per the NYT again:
Collecting the musicians and their instruments in her Volkswagen, Ms. Kirchherr brought them to a fairground, where she shot both individual and group portraits in stark black and white...
...“It was early in the morning, because I only used daylight,” Ms. Kirchherr told The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, in 2005. “So the poor guys had to get up very early. They only stopped playing at four o’clock in the morning, and we met about nine or 10.”
Now you can buy her photos from Snap Galleries, but back in 2004 I bought the prints directly from Kirchherr's own company. As the Times notes:
In 1988, she and Ulf Krüger, a German musician, started K & K, a Hamburg shop that sold vintage photography and books.
I couldn't believe how reasonable the prints were back then... around $200 each. Now they've gone up in price to about $1000 each. Not very much for 16 years.

Thanks for the memories, Astrid Kirchherr.


Monday, May 18, 2020

WE ARE ALL MONK NOW

I've been having a Monk marathon and I have been thinking about how the Monk character would react to the pandemic.

And they made it happen.

Someone in the comments on YouTube suggested a Monk movie.

I AM SO READY FOR A MONK MOVIE!!!




At the end of the clip Shalhoub speaks for himself - I'm glad to hear he and his wife survived the corona virus!

He was spared. So he could make a Monk movie.

Do I sound like Marci Maven? I DON'T CARE!

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Pinkerite continues


I juggle so many projects at any given time, I'm always looking for an excuse to drop one. I think most often of dropping my blog Pinkerite.

It's monotonous sometimes to keep writing about the same old race science promoting creeps and to have to occasionally look at the toxic sludge of professional racists like Steve Sailer. Monotonous and depressing to contemplate the stupidity and sheer evil in the world.

And during the coronovirus pandemic Steven Pinker has been quiet about race science. I was beginning to think maybe he was going to drop his support for it - or at least stop talking about it. I thought I might have to drop Pinkerite or at the very least change the name.

Then Pinker joined with other Koch-supported toadies to charge the New York Times with Orwellian free-speech suppression on behalf of a controversy from way back last December.

So I spent the afternoon writing a response, Four Koch toadies defend race science on Pinkerite instead of going to the park with the other mask-wearing social distancers.

Sigh.


Wednesday, May 13, 2020

That's a hell of an outro Steely Dan

There's a genre of Youtube videos out there now that consists entirely of watching people listen to music for the first time.

It's more entertaining than you might think.



It helps of course if you already love the song and the person in the video loves the song.

This dude listening to Steely Dan's "My Old School" is my favorite so far. It's one of my all-time favorite songs - even before I realized the "Daddy G" mentioned in the lyrics was a reference to Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy.

I like it even in spite of the fact that the guy stops the song several times to say how great it is. It's kind of abrupt. But he is saying how much he likes it so it's forgivable. 

And there's also the anticipation - I knew this guy was going to love the outro - Steely Dan's outros often include the best of their very great guitar solos. I turn "My Old School" up at the end every time to get every last bit.

This guy gets it - he says "that's a hell of an outro, Steely Dan."

This Indian couple loves Springsteen, especially Rosalita.


YAH THINK?