A gift for Mykala.

Tuesday, 1 January 2008

Well, I guess this will about do it for 2007. Mykala and I are baking a cake and watching Comcast channel 107 “CURNT,” which is broadcasting the entire Radiohead In Rainbows album, entitled “Scotch_Mist: a film with Radiohead in it”. It’s really fun to see them (Radiohead) record in these video vignettes. Right now, they are performing “Faust Arp” on a hill in front of a sunset. It’s cooler than my adjective-poor description would have you imagine.

Anyhow.

It’s been a quite a year. Didn’t get into school, graduated, studied for the DAT during a rather relaxing summer (lots of 10 mile runs this summer), took the DAT, got a job at 3M, moved into an awesome apartment in Saint Paul, got into school, and tried to tease out the meaning of life as it relates to my puny existence. High five to 2007. High hopes for 2008.

Now is as good a time as any to share my future plans for tumbledry. Dental school = four years of not very much free time to work on tumbledry. Therefore, in the next sixth months I have to work towards something to stabilize the site re:hosting, code, etc. I simply will not have time to move the site to another server in the middle of school, so I need to take steps now to ensure that tumble service continues uninterrupted throughout my professional education. Regardless, the feature set of tumbledry is such that it can go into low maintenance mode where comments are all turned off… however, since we don’t usually get a lot of comments here from random people, I may not turn off all comments. Besides, the feedback from you guys is one of my favorite parts about tumbledry. Also, with regard to pictures… I don’t think I’ll be able to continue a daily picture. It’s looking as though the pictures will be posted on a weekly basis instead. Special events, holidays, etc. will get more pictures… but I think the photographic component I so cherish will have to go into a low-power mode for a while. Furthermore, the ratio of links to posts (such as this one) will change — I expect to focus solely on documenting humorous anecdotes, life situations, life events, and so on, instead of the endless “hey look at this cool thing” that is so common on the site right now.

Happy New Year!

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1.1.08

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12.31.07

Hazelnut flavored liquor. Half of a chocolate cake shot.

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12.30.07

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12.29.07

Art & the Redeeming Web of the Internet

Friday, 28 December 2007

Originally intended to be simply a link, this little piece has evolved into an account of a typical internet browsing pattern of mine… which has somehow been incorporated with an attempt at art commentary. Here it is:

A microcosm of my web-browsing experience reveals my natural curiosity about many things. You see, I browsed from kottke.org to I Did Not Know That Yesterday! via random clicking. At this (quite interesting, actually) website, I saw a post about the real estate value of Central Park in New York (for the curious, it is over 528 billion dollars). I then looked up Central Park on Google Maps, and noticed that one building interrupted the park’s solid green border. That building is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I then visited the Wikipedia page about the Met in order to learn when such a building had managed to negotiate with the city of New York to build on the precious grounds of Central Park (turns out it opened at its current location in the year 1880). After this, I began reading about the museum’s deaccessioning policy, intended to allow the museum to acquire “world class” art objects.

Finally, I found what I originally meant to link in this space — a painting by Marie-Denise Villers entitled “Young Woman Drawing.” I’m no art critic, but I think it’s a very interesting piece of art/painting for a variety of reasons. First, it may not be true for all viewers, but there’s an intensity in the image that speaks to me; you know how some pictures just jump out at you? Also, the unadorned background seems more akin to something you would find in the 20th century than in 1801, when the painting was made. Furthermore, the glow around the figure really highlights the attention paid to the sunlight. Rembrandt, an artist so famous he apparently only needs one name, used and advanced this lighting technique known by the Italian word chiaroscuro. I find myself drawn to the glowing, elevated reality in these types of paintings. I wonder if they sell this painting on a poster website.

So, what was a seemingly random walk around Internet-town left me with a slightly tenuous, certainly interesting, culturally enriching thread of connections… simply because I started randomly clicking. How can you not love the internet?

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12.28.07