UNREMITTING FAILURE

Art Expert Unremitting Failure Squints Pruriently at: Diego Velázquez's "The Drunks"

Or as it's also known, "Prelude to Fellatio."  Velázquez was the leading painter of the Spanish Golden Age, and took advantage of the fact by wearing a baseball cap inscribed with the words, "I'm the Shit."  He is perhaps best known for his portrait of Pope Innocent X; the Pope's unhappy expression is explained by the fact that he's holding a parking ticket.  He parked the Popemobile in front of a fire hydrant, and thought he'd get away with it.  Velázquez was the leading artist in the court of Philip IV, and painted over 40 portraits of that egotistical sovereign.  Perhaps the most famous is Philip IV in Brown and Silver.  The King is also holding a parking ticket.  You can say lots of negative things about the 1600s--sanitation was bad, and there were no Taco Bells--but the meter maids were definitely on the ball.   

Art Expert Unremitting Failure Squints at: Salvador Dali!

Dali is one of our least favorite painters, but boy did he give good quote.  "I don't do drugs: I am drugs."  But his art; if we have to look at those floppy clocks one more time, we'll scream.  One thing we do like about Dali, besides his mustache; he was nakedly ambitious when it came to making a buck.  "Liking money like  I like it," he wrote, "is nothing less than mysticism.  Money is a glory." If forced to pick a favorite Dali, we'll go with "The Temptation of St. Anthony."  Those skinny legged elephants tickle our funny bone.  And it has tits!  But there are more important things than tits when it comes to modern art.  It's hard to believe, but it's true. 

"The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."

Partial Hiatus

First the good news: A major New York publishing house likes our blog and would like to see us (the details are sketchy) turn it into a book.  No fooling.  The bad news: For the next month or so we're going to have to turn our attention to writing a proposal for said book.  So we won't be posting as frequently as we'd like.  We have the terrible feeling we're going to blow it, in keeping with our blog name, so that despite the fact this is a dream come true for us we're a nervous wreck.  We ask for your prayers, so long as you don't pray to God.  He takes great pleasure in turning prayers on their head. For instance, if you pray for a pony, he gives you rickets.  Believe us, this exact thing happened to us when we were a kid. 

Happy Birthday to Our Brother David

David, our oldest brother, is the truly creative one in our family.  Jeffers is the genius poet, we labor anonymously as a blogger cum fake art expert, but David has hands and he can make anything with them.  He could have been an expert forger, but he took a wrong turn into antiques. 

In our late teens David's apartment was the headquarters of a notorious pot-smoking ring, of which we were a member.  We'd get high then go wander the Gettysburg battlefield, or go to the Lincoln Diner and laugh for no reason at the eggs. 

Then he got married and had a kid, Meghan, whom we love dearly.  She's the junior lesbian in our family (her aunt's one too) and as such is denied the benefits that would accrue to her as the senior lesbian. 

Anyway, David is a genius in the medium of wood, and a heckuva fine brother.  He didn't hold it against us when we broke into his apartment in Littlestown to steal his bottle of melon liqueur, because he understood that we were a drunken asshole.  He accepted us, and still accepts us, and the only grudge we hold against him is that once, when we were young and he was left in charge of the household, he made us eat a watery meal of Chef Boyardee's Ravioli. 

The bastard!

 

David, laughing, during a traipse on the G-Burg Battlefield. We're at the far left with our ever-present beer.

Concrete Hat

The dada poet Jacques Rival wore a concrete hat.  This is not true.  We just made Jacques Rival up.  But here's our point.  Our point is that somebody should have invented a concrete hat, and it should have been a French dada poet.  Or a German dada poet maybe.  We would like to be the dada poet who wears a concrete hat, but it's really too late.  The Surrealists got hold of Dada and shook the whimsical out of it.  They went all Communist party and shit.  No real dada poet believes in politics.  They were ipso facto futilists who understood that the only Utopia is in the head, which is why you need a concrete hat--which has yet to be invented--to protect it. 

this is not the kind of concrete hat we're talking about

Musical Expert Unremitting Failure Squints His Ears at: Lou Reed's Berlin!

"Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony." Lou Reed

The first thing to be said about "Berlin" is that Lou was extremely fucked up when he recorded it.  He named it Berlin because he thought he was recording it in Berlin.  He was actually in London.  This explains why Lou told a reporter at the time, "I thought it would be hard to pick up German. But it sounds just like English with a funny accent to me.  I guess I'm just a genius at languages." 

The second thing to be said about "Berlin" is it's possibly the most depressing album ever recorded.  There isn't a single cut on this "concept album" that doesn't make you want to slit your wrists.  The pretty "Sad Song" includes the inspirational line "Somebody else would have broken both of her arms."  It's a real bummer.

You have to hand it to Lou, who once said, "I'm an artist, and that means I can be as egotistical as I want to be," though.  He thought this mopefest would be a hit.  Instead songs like "The Bed" and "The Kids" sent an entire generation of listeners, conditioned by "Transformer" to expect upbeat glam, into a mass funk.  We can only listen to it once a year, after taking triple our normal dose of Prozac.   

  

“I like to think of us as Clearasil on the face of the nation. Jim Morrison would have said that if he was smart, but he's dead.”

Musical Expert Unremitting Failure Squints his Ears at: Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen!

What a monumental work! It's almost as epic as "Stairway to Heaven!"  Wagner wrote it in a weekend, after accidentally ingesting a triple espresso from Starbucks.  We prefer the Symphonie Orchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks version, because it's German.  You don't send an American to annex the Sudetenland, and you don't send an American to interpret Wagner either.  The Germans have Wagner in their invasion-happy bones. 

Anyway, there's lots of wonderful bellowing, much of it done by a guy named Wotan.  Who wears a helmet with wings!  Wonder why that never caught on?  There's a Wotan Pharmacy in our hometown of Littlestown Pennsylvania, but we don't think it's the same guy.  There are also lots of big swelling sections, and a part called, "He da! He da! He do!"  How are you going to top that?  And there's no gainsaying "The Flight of the Valkyries", which Rich (as his friends referred to him) wrote especially for Apocalypse Now but stuck in the Ring Cycle after the fact.  And don't even get us started on Brunnhilde, who is played by the inimitable Eva Marton, or as she's known to opera buffs, "The Teutonic Foghorn."  Her photo's in the little booklet that comes along with the CD, and she looks like a female concentration camp guard.  Very intense looking.  She looks at you like she's wondering how you'd look as a lampshade.  And the conductor is Bernard Haitink, whose bald head shines in the photo booklet like the sun.  You have to be bald to conduct Der Ring des Nibelungen, because otherwise the titanic horns will blow all the hair off your head. 

 

"He da! He do! He heidi heidi ho!" 

Musical Expert Unremitting Failure Squints His Ears at: Glenn Gould!

The conductor George Szell said it best when said of Gould: "That nut's a genius."  A child prodigy, Gould is as well known for his eccentricities as he is for his bravura performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations.  A confirmed coldophobe, he was once arrested as a vagrant in balmy Sarasota Florida for sitting on a parch bench in a winter coat and mittens.   He could not be stopped from humming loudly as he played, a habit that drove recording engineers mad.  He also wrote music criticism under the amusing pen name Thomas Slutz. 

We listen to the Goldberg Variations with immense pleasure, usually with the sound turned all the way down because we don't really like classical music.   We like Beethoven's Ninth, and a few other things, but as a classical music expert our tastes really run to the southern baroque of Black Oak Arkansas.  We have written an entire book on their Jim Dandy Variations, and the definitive biography of Jim Dandy Mangrum.  An eccentric himself, he liked to perform without a shirt. 

Art Expert Unremitting Failure Squints at the Work of: Jeff Koons!

What can we say about this classic work of art? Other than, We want to be the monkey!  We want to be the monkey!

 
 

Our Dog Rudi

 Look at him. He looks so innocent.  You wouldn't know he's Stalin with a tail.