Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Fun with Polaroids


Remember when "instant" photography meant pulling the picture out of the camera, waiting a minute or two, peeling off the print, then trying to find a garbage can for the gooey negative?

Polaroids. Your Polaroid camera produced what we simply called "Polaroids."


We went to a lot of trouble to produce what, truth be told, were really crappy pictures. Exposure was a crapshoot, and even the most exactingly focused shots came out fuzzy.

Young folks with no memory of Polaroids and Instamatics (the take-the film-to-the-drug-store version of fuzzy photography) have no idea how spoiled they have been by their smartphone cameras.

The Polaroid Colorpack II of my childhood is long lost. But the Colorpack II and the fancy-schmancy Polaroid 320 Land camera of someone else's long-ago now are part of my present, thanks to estate sales.

And the pictures still are "Meh." Fun as hell, but decidedly "Meh."

THERE'S JUST something satisfying about snapping a picture, then physically pulling the undeveloped picture out of the camera. The photos on your phone can seem like an abstraction. Your Polaroid shots are anything but.

They're real. They're physical. The experience is tactile. And what you're gonna come out with is a mystery -- at least for 90 seconds or a couple minutes, depending on the temperature.

What I came out with is a little dark. That's what happens when the bloody flash doesn't work. And by "flash," I mean a flash attachment that takes a flash bulb, which you must replace after every flash picture.

Kids cannot fathom this. But I am here to tell them this, to us old people, was the stuff of science fiction at the time. Before Polaroid and flash bulbs, we had to illuminate our subject with a torch to do our cave paintings.

You try it sometime.


But one fun, artsy thing you can do with your wet, gooey Polaroid negative after you've pulled off the print is to carefully place it on a sheet of copy paper -- wet side down -- and roll the hell out of it with a hard rubber roller. What you get is an instant print -- a funky bonus artwork from the throwaway part of your Polaroid snapshot.

Scan it, then enlarge and enhance it on your computer, and you just might have created something artistic. Like this.

It's digital magic. But first, you have to go old school.


Is what grandpa is sayin'.

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

All you need is paint

Nothing you can know that isn't known
Nothing you can see that isn't shown
Nowhere you can be that isn't
where you're meant to be
It's easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
THE FUN of going to estate sales often lies in the surprises you find amid the artifacts of people's lives that are being sold off one item at a time.

Sunday in Omaha, this was what we found in the onetime bedroom of a onetime teenager who now must be around the same age I am.

Speaking as a Baby Boomer . . . wow!

As I recall, the house has been sold, and who knows what the fate of this teenage tribute to the Fab Four might be. You'd hope the new owner would lack the heart -- or the nerve -- to paint over this or, God forbid, to turn this house that once was a home into yet another tear-down on a street that has seen a few older houses razed so that newer, bigger ones might replace them. 

If that's to be the fate of this house, being yet another demolition job or the new owner merely painting over a teenage masterpiece, I just wanted folks to know that Jay Dandy's room had the awesomest wall ever back in 1977.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

It's always 1939 in Ponchatoula


Because the South, because Louisiana, because rural Tangipahoa Parish, because the fraught racial history of the South, and of Louisiana, and of rural Tangipahoa Parish, I am pretty much speechless that this is the poster for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival.

But here it is, going to a place Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima have never gone before. That place is Pickaninnyville.

According to a story in the Advocate, the south Louisiana daily newspaper, the creator of the poster drew upon the work of a late Ponchatoula artist known for his stylistic portrayals of rural blacks in the Deep South.
The festival board’s publicist Shelley Matherne told WBRZ that the painting for the poster was selected in an open contest in which two entries were submitted.

“Art is subjective; there was no intent other than to pay tribute to the festival and the strawberry industry,” she said in a statement. “This is Kalle’s interpretation of a similar world-renowned local Ponchatoula artist, now deceased, who he drew his inspiration from.”
WELL, THAT'S fair enough, and it would be pure knee-jerk speculation to say there was any malevolent intent on the part of the artist, Kalle Siekkinen, but I think it does show an abject cluelessness on the part of Siekkinen and festival organizers about the minefield that is race in the South.

From what I can see of the late artist Bill Hemmerling's original work, the style of the poster is pitch-perfect in representing Hemmerling's style, but managed to hit all the wrong chords with the execution. It's rather like when Yosemite Sam tries to blow up Bugs Bunny with a booby-trapped piano.

Bugs hits the wrong note and lives. A frustrated Yosemite Sam, angrily showing Bugs how to correctly play the melody, hits the right note . . . and blows himself to bits.



WHO KNEW Yosemite Sam was from Ponchatoula?

I don't think it's the poster's use of African-American children is necessarily problematic,  per se. It's just the little things in the artwork that turned it into something close to the perfect stereotype, and it's troubling that no one involved could see that. And that may well speak to deep-seated problems of culture and race that would merit a post unto itself . . . if not a very, very thick book.

If only the poster had depicted the kids in a different pose. If only the kids' skin wasn't absolutely, positively coal black -- which wasn't necessary to mimic a significant portion of Hemmerling's work. If only the little girl had a different hairstyle -- even just a little different, which might have been truer to Hemmerling's originals. If only the kids had been wearing hats, which would have been even truer to much of Hemmerling's paintings.

If only, if only, if only.


Even so, some folks still might have been offended. But it wouldn't have been so condescendingly, head-shakingly, "Holy crap!" stereotypical.

As it stands, the poster for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival only could have been worse if it were for the Ponchatoula Watermelon Festival.

It says nothing good for Louisiana, or for the state of racial understanding in the South, that one is rather relieved that Ponchatoula doesn't have a watermelon festival.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

I. Need. This.


Treffen George Jetson . . . .

Electronics today come in basically one style -- black plastic crap. If you're lucky, you might find some various-color plastic crap. In the heyday of mid-century modern, that's not how radio- and TV manufacturers did business.

Especially not the Germans.


http://www.earlytelevision.org/index.htmlThis is a Kuba Komet console TV-radio-phonograph. This is art.

If there is a holy grail in mid-century modern design, this might be a contender for the title. I want this. I may need this.


I know I can't afford this. Word is that if you find one today -- and the Kuba Komet was insanely pricey in West Germany when it was new (from 1957-62) -- it'll set you back about $10,000.

And that's enough to make your bank account go kaput.

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Summer's last gasp


 Iowa State Fair, August 2014

 
The state fair season is winding down and football has returned to the prairies, fields and Norman Rockwell towns of the Midwest. The rituals of its people point to the changing of its seasons, and we know the trees and shrubbery will, soon enough, will break out into a riotous festival of color, as if the Almighty were looking down upon his Technicolor palette and saying to LeRoy Neiman "You never could top me, could you?"

Then the leaves will exhaust the last of their color and blanket the earth for nature's long winter slumber. And we will settle in, bundle up and dream dreams of springtime.

Thus is the circle game of life.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Radio as objet d'art

How do you wake up in the AM?

This how we rise and shine à la maison de Favog. It's a 1951 Stromberg-Carlson clock radio I found on eBay.

Once upon a time, beauty in the things we use every day wasn't unusual. Televisions and radios were pieces of furniture that commanded attention, things that stood out whether they were in use at the moment or not.

Now, unless you pay a premium for the privilege, not so much. A TV is little more than a screen; a radio -- You remember those, right? -- is a plastic box with a digital display.

A CLOCK RADIO is your smartphone . . . or one of those unadorned little thingies you stick your smartphone or iPod into. And the sound quality is such that your low-bit rate MP3 file sounds the same as a high-bit rate MP3 file that sounds like a low-bit rate MP3 file.

Yecch.

No, I am a proud anachronism. I love beautiful anachronisms, and I use them whenever I can. AM radio. Vacuum tubes. Analog clock dials. Young people still can tell time on analog clock dials, right?

If the power goes out, I can reset the clock in a snap on this thing. Try that on your digital clock radio -- assuming you have one of those and not a little box into which you shove a smartwhatever. When I was a little kid, my parents used this for a clock radio.

YOU BETTER damn believe everybody woke up. WLCS PLAAAAAAAYS the hits!

If only I could get the new-old clock radio to pull in the Big Win 910 all the way from Baton Rouge, circa 1967. Or 1971 -- I'm not picky. I'd settle for Omaha's Mighty 1290 KOIL from the same time.

Unfortunately, it's just a great old AM clock radio, not a great old AM clock radio time machine. So KHUB in Fremont, Neb., it is . . . the only station on that venerable old amplitude-modulated band that has both music and news hereabouts.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

Louisiana: What doesn't kill you. . . .


If you are really good at something and really want to test yourself, move to Louisiana.

Anybody can be good at something if they have the right tools and institutional support. But only the
crème de la crème can be good at something in Louisiana, where you'll be looked upon with suspicion for your uppityness and be consigned to toil in decrepitude while officialdom spends taxpayer dollars on more important things than, say, education.

Like, say, graft.

Or, say, an archive in Franklinton dedicated to a former two-term Republican governor. Who happened to be the political mentor of the present two-term Republican governor, Bobby Brady Jindal.

I'm pretty sure of two things: First, that my home state has serious problems with priorities and, second, that the best ceramics artists in the universe are found at Louisiana State University. I know this about the LSU art school because its ceramics program is ranked ninth in the country, and the students and professors have managed to achieve that level of notoriety as they dodge falling concrete ceilings while fighting off rats, raccoons and fleas in the Studio Arts Building. That's no easy feat as you struggle not to inhale asbestos particles or ingest lead-paint chips.

And then there's the electrical wiring next to ceiling leaks.

And the broken windows, some of which won't lock.


And the flood-prone basement.

And the lack of climate control like, say, heating and air conditioning. Ever been to south Louisiana in  August and September? An art student fainted during class last fall -- the temperature inside was nearly 100 degrees, the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reports:
Emily Seba/Facebook

Gleason said while she’s at the building she forces herself to take five-minute breaks outside. She spends about 26 hours a week there between class and work, and she worries the mold, asbestos and lead paint that LSU’s own facilities department confirmed is on most every surface might be harmful to her health. “It’s a concern,” she said.

When maintenance crews worked over the Christmas break to scrape asbestos off of steam pipes in the building, they removed some insulation, too. The steam got so hot, it ruined a student’s artwork nearby, Gleason said. These type of maintenance efforts occur regularly, costing a “couple hundred thousand dollars” a year, LSU Office of Facility Services Planning, Design and Construction Director Roger Husser estimated. His department, too, is eager to permanently solve the building’s problems rather than continue the Band-Aid method that’s driving up maintenance costs. But it’s not his call.
As the building’s conditions worsen, maintenance costs grow and students question their safety, renovation plans sit on the shelf, awaiting $15 million from the state needed for renovations. To show they won’t sit idly by as their needs get trumped by programs with big donors or lucrative ticket sales, students have planned protests on Thursday (April 3) at LSU’s campus and Tuesday (April 8) at the steps of the Capitol to ask for better working conditions and a safe environment.
But unless what’s sure to be creatively designed picket signs inspire a change in the political will of the Louisiana Legislature and Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration -- their protests this week and next, according to one lawmaker, will be in vain.

Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, a self-proclaimed cheerleader for the arts who toured conditions of the Studio Arts building last fall, said if it were up to him the project would get the needed funding, but “a handful of legislators are not going to be able to (get enough support) to fund it on their own.”

Without private funding matches, the arts building simply doesn’t rise to the priority level of other donor-backed projects, which tend to get bumped up the list much faster. Though Husser said the Studio Arts building has been in the capital outlay queue for “a very long time,” if the state sees an opportunity to take advantage of private match, it will usually take it. But that means projects without donor support will keep slipping down rungs of the ladder as privately aided ones climb up. “The pie is not unlimited,” Claitor said. “The budget is tapped out.”




I WOULDN'T say the budget is "tapped out," exactly. It's just that everything else in the budget -- from Medicaid to masking tape -- has been deemed more important than giving art students at Louisiana's flagship university facilities fit for human habitation . . . as opposed to that of rats, raccoons and fleas.

Still, LSU's School of Art is fielding nationally noted programs. It's rather like winning Olympic medals in the 100-meter dash while dragging a boat anchor.

For three straight Olympics.


Writes columnist Stephanie Riegel in the Baton Rouge Business Report:
Since the early 2000s, the building has been slated for renovation. Several times, the project was designated as Priority One in the state capital outlay bill, meaning it was at the top of the list to receive construction dollars. One spring, it appeared so imminent the faculty was told to pack up their offices.

But, as so often happens, other needs took priority. This year, the project—now estimated to cost $15.3 million—isn't even included in the capital outlay bill, much less specified as an item likely to see a single dime.

"It's depressing," says professor Kelli Scott Kelley, whose critically acclaimed paintings hang in galleries around the country. "It affects morale. It affects the ability to attract good faculty and good graduate students."

Which gets to the heart of why this matters beyond, of course, concern for the well-being of students and faculty. There is a connection between a thriving art school at the state's flagship university and the community in which that school is located.

Consider what the arts have done for the revitalization of downtown and the role the Shaw Center for the Arts has played in bringing about that renaissance.

Think, too, about the near-obsessive fixation in this community for all things purple and gold—about the glowing headlines that follow when graduation rates inch up to 69%, or about the time and energy the university spends trying to earn a spot in the top quadrant of U.S. News & World Report's rankings.

Do top-flight schools have chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling? Are students at Duke or Vanderbilt or even the University of Alabama forced to paint in sub-freezing studios? Do you attract the best and brightest students by building a lazy river at the rec center while ignoring critical capital needs?
THE ANSWERS to Riegel's questions are an obvious no, no and no. Yet. . . .

As I said at the outset, if you are really good at something and really want to test yourself, move to Louisiana. Compete against the best. Do it while dragging a boat anchor. Win anyway. Come home victorious to the non cheers of the non-existent hometown throng of non-existent well-wishers.

If it's acclaim you want in the Gret Stet, be an LSU football player. That or an 86-year-old, ex-con ex-governor with a granddaughterly trophy wife, a new baby and an ego overdue for its 2 o'clock feeding.



Baton Rouge High, 2007
Kelli Scott Kelley, the LSU art professor, was in my graduating class at Baton Rouge Magnet High. And where she finds herself now resembles, and eerily so,  our alma mater before the parish school board was left with just two choices: Tear down the whole school and rebuild it somewhere else . . . or tear down and rebuild most of the campus, renovate the main building and keep BRHS where it was.

Thankfully, the board chose the second option. Baton Rouge High, after 30-something years of abject neglect, now has facilities worthy of the world-class teachers and students within its rebuilt walls. Our old school has shed its boat anchor -- for now.

In Louisiana, sadly, there's always another boat anchor to weigh you down. In Louisiana, fortunately, some folks find a way to stay afloat regardless.

Unfortunately for the state that forgot to care, however, many of those survivors soon enough will weigh anchor one last time before setting sail for a distant shore.


Guess what. A state that cares so little for its children . . . for higher education . . . for the arts . . . for its future . . . deserves exactly what it's going to get. Or not get, as the case may be.

Ask not upon whom the anchor weighs.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/659369154122784/?ref=br_tf

Monday, August 15, 2011

Nebraska, explained


















Sometimes, words are wholly insufficient in explaining a place and a people.

Sometimes, only art will do.


Consider this sculpture garden in downtown Omaha -- Pioneer Courage, it is called -- as good an explanation of this city, of this state, as any you will find in history texts.

When the white man fanned out across the Plains, as Willa Cather wrote in My Antonia, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

In 1854, the year Omaha was incorporated, there weren't even trees to be found on this vast prairie. The pioneers . . . the homesteaders planted them all.


I love this park. It's where the pioneers silently and eternally press on through our past -- and headlong into the future they bequeathed us.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

The 3rd I yi yi


Sometimes, having 20/20/20 vision isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Ask that Iraqi-born professor at New York University -- the one with a camera in the back of his head. Actually, make that the art professor and performance artist who used to have a camera implanted in the back of his head as part of a little something he's calling "The 3rd I."

Like I said, sometimes 20/20/20 vision isn't all that.


HERE'S THE LATEST on the trials of being a performance artist, as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education the other day:
An NYU professor triggered a debate about campus privacy in November when he decided to implant a camera in the back of his head for a year-long art project.

Now the professor, Wafaa Bilal, faces a much bigger obstacle than students who might not want their pictures taken. His body is rejecting part of the implanted device.

The Iraqi-born artist underwent surgery on Friday to remove a section of the camera apparatus, which is rigged to snap a picture every 60 seconds and publish the image on a Web site set up for the project. The pictures are also displayed on monitors in a physical exhibit at a museum in Doha, Qatar.

“I’m determined to continue with it,” Mr. Bilal, an assistant arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, said on Monday.

Under its initial configuration, the camera was mounted on three posts. Each led to a titanium base that was implanted between Mr. Bilal’s skin and skull. The procedure was done by a body-modification artist at a tattoo shop in Los Angeles. But the setup caused constant pain, because his body rejected one of the posts, despite treatment with antibiotics and steroids. So Mr. Bilal had that post surgically removed, leaving the other two intact.


THE COMPLICATIONS involved in attaching a camera to one's head have been well known for at least five decades, though miniaturization and advanced technology have made the procedure more and more feasible.

Above, we see a photo of an early attempt at what Bilal is attempting. Unfortunately, this late-1950s subject did not survive the surgery to remove this RCA TK-41 color camera.

Kinescopes at 11.

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Cleanse your brain here


Politics is awful.

It's often hateful. The bullshit is so deep that you'll contract something nasty if you don't wear hip waders and occasionally spray yourself down with disinfectant.

And then there's Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Nancy Pelosi, talk-radio screamers . . . and Steve King. The tea party is outraged -- and largely victorious.

People are still talking big about "watering the tree of liberty" with the blood of tyrants. I am reminded, however, of Gov. Earl Long's question of the arch-segregationist boss of Plaquemines Parish, Leander Perez:
"What are you going to do now, Leander? The Feds have got the atom bomb."

THAT'S WHY, today of all days, we need a palate cleanser. That would be this video, I Met the Walrus, based on an interview then 14-year-old Jerry Levitan recorded with John Lennon in a Toronto hotel room as he and Yoko Ono prepared to head to Montréal for their second 1969 "bed-in for peace."



THEN, in Montréal. . . .

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Because there's enough ugly in the world . . .


. . . we need to cherish -- and cling to -- the beauty all the more.

Some people hear God in dour denunciations from culture warriors who belong more to the realm of politics than to the realm of the sacred. Me, I'm more likely to hear the quiet voice of the Almighty when I put the needle to the groove of an Otis Redding record.

Or in what Jake Shimabukuro does with a ukulele.

SOME MIGHT dismiss this as the squishy rhetoric of someone who is "spiritual, not religious." That is not true. I know full well that God requires we accept a lot of "hard sayings."

But I also know that truth is beauty, and beauty is among the highest expressions of truth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says as much:
Created "in the image of God," man also expresses the truth of his relationship with God the Creator by the beauty of his artistic works. Indeed, art is a distinctively human form of expression; beyond the search for the necessities of life which is common to all living creatures, art is a freely given superabundance of the human being's inner riches. Arising from talent given by the Creator and from man's own effort, art is a form of practical wisdom, uniting knowledge and skill, to give form to the truth of reality in a language accessible to sight or hearing. To the extent that it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art bears a certain likeness to God's activity in what he has created. Like any other human activity, art is not an absolute end in itself, but is ordered to and ennobled by the ultimate end of man.
NEVER TRUST any "religious" person who discounts this. And never trust any Christian who treats music -- or any artistic pursuit -- as a mere utilitarian gimmick for "making converts."

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

An extra shot of quirkiness with my brevé


Here's a slice of life from our favorite Omaha coffee emporium, Caffeine Dreams.

Oh . . . the painting? Yeah, there's a story behind that bit of artwork -- which is among the works on display, and for sale, at the shop.

Unfortunately, I don't know what it is.


I DO KNOW that it once lacked the coffee-shop version of a fig leaf. Pig Boy, though, left full frontal nudity behind one night when some high-school kids were playing a gig at Caffeine Dreams . . . and parents in the audience complained.

It wasn't about the music.

The first fig leaf -- quickly applied by the barista, who knew better than to mess with PO'd parental units -- was a bit of newspaper just big enough to mask the pig-man's shame. This later morphed into a sticky note . . . and now the added protection of a paper-napkin loincloth.

This is overkill, admittedly. Pig Boy wasn't that well endowed.

This, however, is the Midwest. And Mother knows best that edginess has its limits.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Fun with software


Hi, boys and girls! I'm Cap'n Favog, and this is the Revolution 21 Show.

We're going to have a great show today, and we'll get it started with today's Popeye cartoon right after this message from our sponsor, Twice as Sweet cereal. Have some tomorrow! It goes great with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

In other words . . . there is absolutely no point to this post whatsoever. Just felt like showing off what you can do with a freeware "paint" program while I wait for the Spybot to quit running.

The TV, by the way, is ours. They just don't make sets with character anymore . . . says the original steam punk.

Monday, May 04, 2009

The virtual photog . . . yet again


See what I mean? The virtual photography possibilities are virtually endless . . . and Omaha offers a lot to photograph.

VIRTUALLY, of course. Or tangibly, if you roll "old school."

With Google's 360/180-degree photographic bubble on its "street view" function, you get to pick your own virtual "shot." Just like the "real" thing. Sort of.

Above is a shot of downtown's Gene Leahy Mall, facing westward, taken from the 10th Street bridge over the park's central lagoon.

Hey! If nothing else, just say I've discovered a great -- and creative -- time waster.

16th and Douglas: the Googledy view


Here, in the Googledy view of Omaha, we have the old refusing to be intimidated by the towering hulk of the new.

ON THE LEFT is the Brandeis building, constructed in 1906 and added to in 1921. Originally the city's largest department store -- 10 whole floors of everything you ever needed -- the building now houses condominiums and apartments.

Meanwhile, on the right, is the new kid in town -- the First National Tower, opened in 2002 and the city's tallest building at 40 stories. It's the corporate headquarters of First National Bank.

17th and Douglas . . . by Google

17th and Douglas Streets, Omaha.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

More Google art


The other day, I was doing a virtual drive through my hometown, during which I discovered the artistic -- the virtual photographic -- possibilities of the "street view" option on Google Maps.

Tonight, I thought I'd do the same with my present home, Omaha., Neb. Likewise, I thought I'd try the same subject matter -- the original transmission tower outside the studios of one of the city's venerable television stations.

So, here's the "street view," artistically selected, of KETV, Channel 7, at 27th and Douglas Street in downtown Omaha. I call this photography for the Facebook age.

AND I DO THINK there are possibilities in this for developing students' "artistic eye" in the classroom . . . and for photographers planning cityscape shoots before they get to the city and have to shoot "scapes."

On a personal level, though, I find I can just go to Google maps and virtually do what my late father-in-law did tangibly more than half a century ago when crews were erecting the Channel 7 tower, now the station's auxiliary transmission site.

OMAHA was a smaller place in 1957, television still had a large element of the whiz-bang to it and -- face it -- pleasures largely were of the "simple" variety. At least comparatively.

Back then, as a promotional thing, the future Channel 7 started the KETV Tower Watchers Club, and Dad was "hereby admitted to the circle of those who regularly observe the rise at 27th and Douglas Streets of this newest addition to Omaha's skyline."

I probably would have joined, too.

After all, I am the guy coaxing virtual art photography out of the functional, "how the hell to I get there" world of Google's "street view" gizmo.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Oh, Mandy . . . well you came and you raged
without reading, so I sent you away, oh Mandy


I'm not sure how a person with an alleged college education can get out of my April 17 post on Aliza Shvarts -- Yale's "abortion artist" -- what blog bigot Amanda Marcotte got out of it . . . but OK.

WHAT, THEN, I need from you, dear reader, is a good -- well, less bad, actually -- way of breaking to my wife of 25 years that I believe women are subhuman. And what I mean by "less bad" is a way to gild the lily so that a cast-iron skillet does not make forcible contact with my skull.

Those subhuman types go right for the kill, don't you know?

Really, to be honest, I didn't know I thought women were subhuman . . . or that I had likened Ms. Shvarts to a devil . . . or that women needed to be second-class citizens, lest the devil make them do it. But if someone who had to quit the John Edwards campaign said it, then,
it must be true.

Or not:

The belief that women are subhuman. Rod Dreher called Shvarts a "monster". Mighty Favog likened her to a devil, invoking a history of belief that women need to be second class citizens because Satan has more sway.
FIRST, I did not liken Aliza Shvarts to the devil. That is sloppy reportage, and I would sue if I gave a flying fug about Amanda Marcotte's inability to keep anything straight -- including her slurs. Besides, she's gettin' me hits, baby.

And I didn't have to stoop to "creative fiction," like a certain demented Yale coed.

What I did was liken Ms. Shvarts to Nazi slimebags from the Third Reich. That's a whole rank lower in the Army of Abject Evil.

And second . . . huh????????

Really, I can't tell you what Mandy thinks, because I have yet to ascertain that she does think. But I can tell you what I think of my wife, who is both a woman and a far better human being than myself.

And I can tell you about the great tragedy of our lives -- something precious we were denied, and which monstrously deluded individuals like Shvarts and Marcotte (let's call them S&M for short) have devalued utterly.

IN THE WORLD of S&M, everything precious is regarded as dung, and dung is lovingly embraced like a pearl of great price. In the world of S&M, though, the pearl of great price is death.

Who -- or what -- in the world would want to do that . . . rejoice in doing that . . . be absolutely desperate to do that? The S&M gals would. In full cooperation with a certain someone's agenda for world domination.

All right -- ahem -- ladies. Now I've just likened you to the devil.