Modern Kicks

the rose

You know, when I sit at the computer to do a last check of email and the headlines before getting ready for bed, I'm not expecting to be punched in the stomach (full story, for the moment, here.)  These days, though, perhaps I should be.  I'm sure in the days to come, starting tomorrow, there will be the usual accounts of ethical and legal wrangling, denunciations and expressions of protest.  And those are all to be expected, even necessary, and perhaps might even do some good.  Perhaps I'll even engage in a bit of them myself.  Right now, though, I'm just numb--numb, and tired of feeling like things are just going to keep getting worse.

waking when it's over

First post of the new year!  That means I should take notice of some of the usual year-end business around the web, I suppose.  So:

- Sebastian Smee in the Globe, praising RISD's new building and Mass MoCA's Sol LeWitt, and lamenting that so many museums closed their doors around the time he came to town.

- Also on the local front, Matt Nash does the review thing, taking stock of the changes (via.)

- For those that like that sort of thing, Sharon Butler had the year in art blogging, a practice that seems very odd and remote to me now--a strange feeling, given how much time I spent over the past few years reading art blogs and writing something like one.

- And from Sharon, a bit of year-end cleverness.  OK, I haven't read them all, so I don't know how clever they actually are, but it's a little different, at least.

- Back to New England, Greg Cook recently collected nominations for the 2008 Boston Art Awards, which you can read here (with the added background info here.)  Greg kindly invited me to make nominations, but I failed to do so, partly because (as this site shows) I saw or did very little in the past year, partly because of general inertia.  I'm trying to work on that.

- Over in that other England, plants in the frost at Black Crag on New Year's Day.  No word if a thrush was also spotted; Bunny remains optimistic anyway, about 2009, at least.

Winter's dregs remain desolate here as the snow and ice falls.  For the coming year, Foreign Policy assembles a cheery crew to chant "Doom, doom, doom," and it's hard to say that they're wrong.  On the other hand, Shepard Fairey's "Hope" portrait of the President-elect is going into the National Portrait Gallery.  So there's that.  Unfortunately, on the proverbial third hand, I had never noticed before how Fairey's foreshortening of Obama's head made him look more like Deval Patrick than himself.  So perhaps I should just prepare myself, as the cool kids say, to get disappointed by someone new.