big chunce

the salamander woods jacket sample came in today and i just had to share with all of you!! 💖🌿🦎

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

so yves klein was a color field painter, also known as those guys who just paint a canvas blue, all blue, all the same color of blue, and sell it for a shitton of money. actually when it came to blue, yves klein was kind of The Guy. 

BLUE

but back before all the fame and the blue, he made “yves peintures,” which was a catalog of his monochromes, pictured here:

the joke is that it’s bullshit! it’s just squares of construction paper glued on the page with little titles written below them. even the preface isn’t a preface – it’s just horizontal lines that he had a buddy of his sign with his name. one time yves klein and his art pals all hyped up a big big gallery show that he was opening. a solo exhibition! very exciting! all the critics and fancy motherfuckers showed up – three thousand people came. with great drama, they were led into a completely empty gallery. “welcome,” yves klein said. “I call it THE SPECIALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY IN THE RAW MATERIAL STAT INTO STABILIZED PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY, LE VIDE (THE VOID).” he was, in every way, a total fucker who loved bright colors and pranking the art world.

meanwhile, ad reinhardt – what’s ad reinhardt’s gig?

ad reinhardt’s gig is BLACK

more specifically, black-on-black grids of very slightly varying shades of black, applied in a very matte, powdery way that left the paintings with almost no sheen. it’s a pretty cool effect in person (if vantablack 2.0 had been a thing in the 50s, ad reinhardt would have busted a nut)

unfortunately, the way he did the paint makes the paintings incredibly difficult to maintain. if you touch one, the oils on your hands will immediately stain the painting, and it can’t be cleaned or repaired.

“no prob, bob,” ad reinhardt said to the flustered museum curators and collectors. “if you mess it up i’ll just replace it.”

“but what about our original ad reinhardt!” said the curators and collectors

“yeah i’ll replace it,” ad reinhardt said, “with the same original painting but not fucked up.” this caused some consternation

incidentally, he also made this small comic, which never fails to tickle me:

YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE TOO!

one of my real favorite artworks in this vein is by robert rauschenberg, and i’m going to include the story of it because it makes me very happy. rauschenberg was an insane post-modernist – one of his most famous pieces includes a taxidermy goat with paint thrown all over it and a car tire around its neck, that kind of thing – and i love his piece titled “erased de kooning drawing”

so willem de kooning was the husband of elaine de kooning, who painted sick abstract expressionist portraits and was slamming hot

wow

willem was also an artist, and kind of a big deal in his own right, and friends with rauschenberg

one day rauschenberg calls him up like “hey i have an idea for a collaboration between us two art bastards. i need you to do me a drawing, in pencil”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “wouldn’t you like to know”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “because i’m gay, give it”

and willem said “that’s not a reason”

and rauschenberg said “fine, i wanna make a commentary on the value of art even after it’s destroyed and palimpsests and ephemerality and shit i guess, so i need a drawing by a famous dude to erase, and you’re famous”

willem de kooning said “okay” and proceeded to find the wettest, most difficult to erase grease pencil in his studio, which he then used to make several drawings until he came up with one he liked and sent it to rauschenberg

and to his credit, rauschenberg erased that motherfucker. he put in the effort. in a spectacular show of spite countering spite, he very nearly got rid of it all. look at this shit:

It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.

The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.

But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.

It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.

Bluntly: Standards.

Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.

But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.

All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap. 

Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.

...Hear me out.

If I say "Nooooo don't kill me!!!" while LARPing, my friend is still gonna whack me on the head with their foam battle axe bc that's what I want them to do. If I actually didn't want to get hit on the head, I'd say "WHOA WHOA WHOA TIME OUT TIME OUT" so they'd know I'm serious.

In the same way, if I say "Nooooo don't spank me!!!" and my partner still spanks me, THAT'S FINE. I want to get spanked, and I'm just playing along. It would only be a real problem if I were to say the agreed-upon safe word, the word that actually means no, and still get spanked.

Your friend enjoying pretending to kill you in a safe and consensual enviroment where they know you are also having a good time does not mean they actually want to axe murder people.