Angry White Men.

LOS ANGELES — Judging from the paintings and drawings on view at Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Nicole Eisenman has been thinking a lot about angry white men. They are almost the exclusive population throughout the expansive gallery. There is a large contingent of shooters, each confronting us from behind a firearm aimed directly outward, so that to look at the drawings is to stare down a gun-barrel. These shooter drawings are almost all from 2016, with a few from 2017 and one from 2018, elaborated in ink, charcoal, oil, acrylic, and pencil. This last is the largest, and the only one bearing a title, “The Shooter.” One of the untitled drawings, in pencil and blue ballpoint pen, shows a man pointing his gun at us with one hand while the other grasps his penis. Along the bottom margin Eisenman has written “BAMSPLOOSH.”

Nicole Eisenman, “The Tea Party” (2012–2017), ink on gessoed paper, 40” x 35″ paper size, 52” x 45.50” x 2″ framed (photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

Nicole Eisenman, “The Tea Party” (2012–2017), ink on gessoed paper, 40” x 35″ paper size, 52” x 45.50” x 2″ framed (photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

While there is nothing original about equating guns with penises, the full array of drawings in Dark Light reveals Eisenman’s mind ping-ponging through a number of visual rhymes, adding up to many of the show’s most compelling moments. The circle of the gun barrel becomes the end of a cigarette smoked by impassive men. In one case, smoke billows from a man’s right nostril; in another, a sooty cloud issues from a cigarette belonging to an African American in a drawing titled “A Moment of General Anesthesia” (2018), suggesting this man’s need for relief from pain of America’s continuous police shootings of black men. Further iterations of the black circle appear: in a small 2016 sketch it is a bullet hole in the middle of someone’s face, in others it is a darkened sun. A 2015 ink drawing titled “Black Sun” has the cheerless orb spewing fecal liquid that piles like a mound of pudding below, resembling a pipe depositing sewage in our waterways. Finally and inescapably, the circle is an anus.

Nicole Eisenman, “Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass” (2017), oil on canvas, 127.25” x 105” x 1.75″(all images courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

Nicole Eisenman, “Heading Down River on the USS J-Bone of an Ass” (2017), oil on canvas, 127.25” x 105” x 1.75″(all images courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; photo by Robert Wedemeyer).

Nicole Eisenman: Dark Light continues at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (6006 Washington Blvd, Culver City, Los Angeles) through April 21.

Fascinating viewing and reading, you can do more of both at Hyperallergic.

R Is For RO-RORO-RO.

RO-RORO-RO means roll-on, roll-off. The cruiseferries in these pictures carry passengers as well as cars and trucks to Tallinn and Stockholm. The white ship can carry 3700 passengers and 400 cars or about 60 trucks (tractor-trailer rigs). The red ship can carry 2500 passengers and about 230 cars or 60 trucks. Both are about 30 m wide, the white ship is 200 m long and the red ship 185 m long.

The strait between islands Kustaanmiekka and Vallisaari that the red ship is going through is 81 meters wide. Imagine driving your apartment block through it.

A big part of the business of the cruiseferries has been that they’ve got restaurants and night clubs and people travel in them to get cheap booze, either from Estonia or duty free alcohol and tobacco on the ships to Sweden as they go via Aland (making a quick stop in Mariehamn), which isn’t a part of the EU customs union.

Being the kind of floating hotels and shopping malls with garages that they are, AFAIK, the ships guzzle quite a lot of fuel per passenger kilometer.

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© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.

CC Notes: Almost Back To Life.

Sorry for the abrupt disappearance, I was in very bad shape Tuesday and Wednesday. The chemo pump will be coming off shortly, and hopefully, I’ll start recovering from this last round. First and above all, my thanks to Charly and Voyager, who kept Affinity up and running in fine, interesting style. I can’t say thank you enough for that, and all your posts are so popular. Speaking of, I am so behind in answering emails, I have received them, I will answer! I’ve also gotten all the new submissions, and there are a lot, so it might be a few days before you see your stuff up, but I will get there, I promise.

I did manage to avoid another Neulasta, my neutrophil count was over 10 after the first dose of that nastiness, and it’s hoped it can carry me through the final cycles. If not, I can opt to do the more minor injections over three days, rather than the on body. This time, what knocked me on my arse was…heartburn! Yep. It started while still in the infusion center, but it wasn’t horrible. This was my first Tuesday, and never again. Holy shit, it was stuffed full of extremely talkative old folks, along with a nurse coming back out of retirement temporarily, and one who is a major, loud talker. Two of the older gentleman who had been trading work war stories, and complaining about the current crop of people were concluding their talk next to my chair, as the one gent was getting ready to leave. During his final chat, said gent was burping throughout, quite loudly. Then I heard a woman across the hall talking about her horrible bout of heartburn/acid reflux, which she dealt with by taking “old-fashioned pepto bismal.” I should have taken all that as an omen.

Chemo now exhausts me to the point that walking out of the hospital pretty much eats all my energy. I couldn’t even make it into the store to pick up my dex from the pharmacy. Got home, attended to my bag and all that jazz, then fell over into bed. Rick made me some Malt O’ Meal, which went down well enough. It wasn’t until late in the evening that the heartburn from hell hit. There was pain, there was burping. There was vomiting. I spent the night pretty much chained to the lav, leaking out both ends. Antacids weren’t helping, and I was out of the old-fashioned pink stuff. Rick was in town working on Wednesday, and I asked him to get me all the things, which he did. After taking much more than I should have of the generic prilosec and zantac, I was finally able to get some damn sleep. It still hasn’t gone away, I can feel it lurking in my throat, but here’s hoping I can keep a leash on it.

I really do count myself as lucky that I made it through half my cycles without feeling terribly bad. I’m not sure I could have carried on if it was like this from the start. I still remember the day of my first infusion, I was full of energy and appetite after. Seems like half a lifetime ago, and that particular me is nowhere in sight. The fatigue is mind-numbing, and the shake is worse than ever. In the good news department, pain has receded a fair amount. In the bad news department, chemo brain keeps getting worse.

I will be sleeping in each day until I’m fully back to life. Even though I get up early for me, around 9am, but that’s okay, as long as I don’t have to set a clock.

Q Is For Quench.

Quench.

This hooded crow was quenching the thirst, drinking from a puddle in the sidewalk, in Hakaniemi, Helsinki, between the round Ympyrätalo and triangular Arena building. I’m guessing the puddle was less salty than the sea (which isn’t all that salty, about 0.5 % salt) and definitely less salty than the water in the puddles on the lanes for motor vehicles.

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© Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.

The Amazing Egg Dance: Peasants to Politics.

Contrast between Carnival and Fasting (ca. 1550–99), artist unknown — Source.

Contrast between Carnival and Fasting (ca. 1550–99), artist unknown — Source. Click for full size.

Whoever the artist of the above piece was, I’d say they had been most impressed with Hieronymus Bosch. The Egg Dance, from village revelry to romance to politics. This is a wonderful piece of history, which demonstrates several cultural shifts throughout the centuries.

The egg dance was a traditional Easter game involving the laying down of eggs on the ground and dancing among them whilst trying to break as few as possible. Another variation (depicted in many of the images featured here) involved tipping an egg from a bowl, and then trying to flip the bowl over on top of it, all with only using one’s feet and staying within a chalk circle drawn on the ground. Although, as shown in many of its depictions in art, the pastime is associated with peasant villages of the 16th and 17th century, one of the earliest references to egg-dancing relates to the marriage of Margaret of Austria and Philibert of Savoy on Easter Monday in 1498.

[…]

This blindfolded version of the egg dance features in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795). … According to some scholars Goethe’s mention gave birth to the phrase “einen wahren Eiertanz aufführen” (to perform a true egg dance) which refers to moving carefully in a difficult situation. This particularly association of the egg dance with navigating danger was expressed time and time again in political cartoons of the 19th-century: various political figures, from Bismarck to Disraeli, precariously trying to make there way about a floor strewn with potential upsets.

Democracy’s Disastrous Egg-dance, (1884), Joseph Keppler. A woman labeled “Democracy” wearing a blindfold labeled “Stupidity” is pushed by Samuel J. Randall toward a chair labeled “Presidenti[al] Chair”, with several eggs in the way on the ground, they are labeled “Honest Naval Appropriation, Civil Service Reform, Honest River – Harbor Appropriation, Economy, Anti-Silver Coinage, National Banking System, Tariff Reform, [and] Prompt Legislation”, two of the eggs are broken; among a group of men laughing, in the background on the right, are John Logan, John Sherman, and William D. Kelley. — Source.

Democracy’s Disastrous Egg-dance, (1884), Joseph Keppler. A woman labeled “Democracy” wearing a blindfold labeled “Stupidity” is pushed by Samuel J. Randall toward a chair labeled “Presidenti[al] Chair”, with several eggs in the way on the ground, they are labeled “Honest Naval Appropriation, Civil Service Reform, Honest River – Harbor Appropriation, Economy, Anti-Silver Coinage, National Banking System, Tariff Reform, [and] Prompt Legislation”, two of the eggs are broken; among a group of men laughing, in the background on the right, are John Logan, John Sherman, and William D. Kelley. — Source.

The Journalistic Egg Dance (ca. 1840), Andreas Geiger. A caricature of press censorship before the 1848 revolution in Austria. During the Restoration after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the European powers, led by Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859), restricted the freedom of speech and expression to contain any kind of critical, nationalist or anti-authoritarian movement — Source.

The Journalistic Egg Dance (ca. 1840), Andreas Geiger. A caricature of press censorship before the 1848 revolution in Austria. During the Restoration after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the European powers, led by Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859), restricted the freedom of speech and expression to contain any kind of critical, nationalist or anti-authoritarian movement — Source.

You read and see much more at The Public Domain Review.

Swedish House-Gymnastics (1913).

These exercises and the photographic illustrations are splendid! Exercises anyone can do, without taking up much time, and can be done conveniently at home.

These wonderful photographs, which make such innovative use of multiple exposure, are from a 1913 German book titled Schwedische Haus-Gymnastik nach dem System P.H. Ling’s by Theodor Bergquist, Director of the Swedish Gymnastic Institute in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wörishofen. As the title tells us, this style of “Swedish house-gymnastics” demonstrated by Bergquist (and his mysterious female colleague) is based on a system developed by Pehr Henrik Ling (1776–1839), a pioneer in the teaching of physical education in Sweden. Inventor of various physical education apparatus including the box horse, wall bars, and beams, Ling is also credited with establishing calisthenics as a distinct discipline and is considered by some as the father of Swedish massage.

I think I could choose a series to do each day from these, without over exertion, and it might really help to be a bit more flexible these days. You can see much more at The Public Domain Review.