SUNDAY SPECIAL

I am not sure what impresses me more, that this is a Budget Best Bets recipe or that it comes from the diet center Weight Watchers! The awe doesn't end there though because the architecture of this Crown Roast of Frankfurters is manufactured to hold a can of beans and some sort of cabbage salad. As elegant as it is inviting for that special Sunday supper. 

INTRODUCING

GÉRICAULT and MUNTEAN/ROSENBLUM

The Raft of the Medusa

DISCO

After the ship struck the reef off the coast of Africa and passengers clung to makeshift rafts. After ropes were cut leaving people adrift at sea eating bits of leather and one another. After 15 out of more than 140 were rescued only 10 survived. Their account of events shocked the world and was carried in the news as the public outrage grew. Fingers were pointed, accusations made against the captain, the crew and the government.

The story and its aftermath could well have been ripped from the headlines today. But the year was 1816 when the shipwreck Medusa grabbed the attention of a disgruntled post-Napoleonic France.

OUR MAN ON THE GROUND: the drawings of Constantin Luser

Drawing by Constantin Luser

...In Graham Green's 1958 novel Our Man in Havana the protagonist attempts to justify his time and job position as an intelligence officer, pre-Cuban Missile Crisis. It is his duty to make himself invaluable to the British Security Service back at home as a sort of under qualified but enthusiastic spy in Havana, ferreting out military secrets, weapons arsenals and troop activities. He is failing grossly in his attempts to find any sort of real military threat. What he does find is a vacuum cleaner (he is a vacuum cleaner salesman). And what he does do is to dissect the vacuum cleaner and draw its parts to a different scale while adding threatening numbers and possibilities—all unknown, but suggested. The imaginations of the head honchos back in the UK are engaged. Our protagonist is encouraged to stay on the job and investigate further. The whole ordeal is a farce but a lovely poetic delving into wartime fear and paranoia, the power of visual suggestion and man's ability to exploit, encourage and persevere. It is about the full potential of the ingenious imagination. There is sympathy in this story to Luser’s own work. Creating a need where none exists—arguably, like all artists—to convey urgent information...

SATURDAY GALLERIES: VIENNA 2

Klaus Auderer, Shark Attack...,Tel Aviv @ Galerie Dana Charkasi

I am listening to two art-world people talk about the Luisa Kasalicky exhibition at the BAWAG. The one says “But what does it mean? It means nothing!” And the other person describes it as “looking like it was made out of all the building materials that can kill you from the 70’s.” I’ll call it Asbestos Aesthetic.

MISSING YOU

Most of the winter my bike has been locked to a pole at the end of my building. I see it there almost everyday and think "I should ride that bike" or "I should move the bike inside." I am not used to having a bike so I half-forget I have one. I sometimes marvalled that the bike wasn't stolen.

COCA-COLA's SECRET FORMULA

Over the weekend National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" released what is believed to be the secret formula for Coca-Cola. Unlike many Americans I was not weened on Coke (or Pepsi) or any sweet drinks. But I have vivid memories of the Pepsi Challange advertising campaign that pitted the two soda giants against one another in blind taste tests across the country. Two forbidden treasures hidden behind a screen in a mall parking lot where woman wobbled over and sipped and screamed "Pepsi! I can't believe it!" I wanted to believe to know the difference. I wanted to be not only a consumer of these products but a connoisseur.  

The secret formula.....