A “spect-op” in Los Angeles

From a New York Times article on Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, a 340-ton boulder delivered to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

The scene on Miracle Mile was reminiscent of the excited and diverse crowd that has come out at night to watch the convoy as it zigged and zagged through the region. There were cameras, baby strollers, folding chairs, politicians and other people of every race and economic class. The was also a surfeit of rock puns: Someone was even playing “We Will Rock You” as the truck passed the La Brea Tar Pits.

In Long Beach the other night, people lined the streets and waited for hours to be rewarded by what Alexis Dragony praised as the “extraordinary and flawless maneuver of the rock” making a turn. “We cheered as it negotiated the corner — just flawless,” she said. “It was truly performance art.”

It was also a “spect-op.”

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All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

Word of the day: wirra

It’s the Oxford English Dictionary ’s word of the day:

Irish English. Expressing sorrow, distress, or regret: “alas!” “woe!” Cf. wirrasthru int. Freq. reduplicated. Chiefly preceded by “Oh”; cf. the etymology. Chiefly in representations of Irish English speech.

The word derives from the Irish Mhuire: “in a Mhuire (broadly) /ə wɪrə/ < a , vocative particle +Muire, the name of the Virgin Mary.” My favorite of the OED ’s six citations, from S.J. Weyman’s Wild Geese (1908): “‘Oh, whirra, whirra, what’ll I do?’ the Irishman exclaimed, helplessly wringing his hands.”

Why is wirra my word of the day? Because after lo these many years, I remember it from a Little Rascals short that I saw in childhood (again and again) on television. Oh, wirra, wirra, wirra, someone said. I think it was Alfalfa in drag.

Separated at birth?

Conductor, organist, and harpsichordist Ton Koopman and neurologist and psychologist Oliver Sacks.

Related posts
Amsterdam Baroque
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
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[Photograph of Ton Koopman by Marco Borggreve, found here. The Oliver Sacks photo seems ubiquitous online.]

Stripes

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

This sign (on the side of a tractor-trailer) reminds me of the Italian cookies I have known from childhood as stripes.

Do these stripes map out what’s packed in the trailer? Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine, can someone explain these stripes?

Amsterdam Baroque

The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, under the direction of Ton Koopman, are on a short American tour, performing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Elaine and I were fortunate to hear them last night performing the Mass in B Minor. Such music, and such musicianship. I have no more words.

If you’re anywhere near Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Newark, New York, or Tucson and can go, go. Here’s a page with the touring schedule.

Media Matters on Limbaugh

Media Matters reports: Who’s Advertising On Rush Limbaugh? As of yesterday, forty-five advertisers had dropped out. Lots of PSAs in their place.

Media Matters also has a timeline of Limbaugh’s remarks re: Sandra Fluke. I think it’s fair to say that the sheer hatefulness of his remarks has been underreported.

3:25 p.m.: Now it’s forty-eight.

March 10: Now it’s ninety-eight.

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Overheard

In a distant grove — or was it hallway? — of academe, a student complaining about an essay assignment:

“I mean, she wants an introduction, a thesis statement. I’m sorry: this is, like, too much.”

What especially strikes me about this complaint: the assumption that an introduction and thesis statement are one despot’s demands, not elements of a college essay, made explicit for a student’s benefit. What will “she” demand next: sentences? paragraphs? a staple in the upper-left corner?

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[Thanks, Michael.]

Beetle Bailey watch

[Beetle Bailey, March 7, 2012.]

I don’t read Beetle Bailey very closely: I already have enough to do monitoring for problematic art and text in Hi and Lois. Today’s Beetle Bailey might be meant to remind us that group-living impinges upon one’s privacy. Or perhaps the Walkers have never seen a urinal. Guys, get it together.

Other Beetle Bailey posts
Beetle Bailey ketchup
Comic strip anachronisms
Missing bathrooms

xkcd: “Compare and Contrast”

Today’s xkcd:

[A secret message to my son: Ben, figurative language!]

Florence Wolfson Howitt (1915-2012)

Florence Wolfson Howitt has died at the age of ninety-six. From the New York Times obituary:

Florence Wolfson, the daughter of well-to-do parents living in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was 14 when she was given a little red diary with gold-edged pages. For the next five years, without skipping a day, she wrote four-line entries that evoked her passions.

“Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven,” she wrote on June 28, 1932. “I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.”

The diary, found years later in a dumpster, became the stuff of a Times article and a book, Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary, which I wrote about in this post.

[What the diarist wrote: “Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven & music & Huysmans — I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.” The Times obituary reproduces the edited text of The Red Leather Diary.]