Peeking into the rock

By way of Abi at Making Light -- it's an addictive game. You can be a painting tagger!

The Public Catalogue Foundation has a vast online treasury of publicly-owed art in the UK (It's called Your Paintings, but it's not all paintings).. They're asking for people to come in and help tag the work. It's really fun. I spent more time than I should trying to track down a term I couldn't remember (I failed: it's that board piece that Elizabethans put into their pairs-of-bodies to make the front of the dress be stiff and flat),

In the interest of economy, I'm tagging this citizen science. What? History is a science. Or ought to be.

When I was a kid my mother had almost all of William Steig's collected cartoon books. Somewhere along the way I let them go, alas. My favorite was The Agony in the Kindergarten, which depicted entirely too familiar situations in children's lives. (there was one of a perplexed, embarrassed, and mostly miserable boy, with the quote along the lines of "give him a toy and he'll be quiet for hours" which I remember whenever I give a baby a thing to mess with and they zone out for a long time with it)

He's the guy younger people remember for Dr. deSoto (mouse dentist), The Amazing Bone, the one about the mouse and the whale -- and Shrek (the book, not the movie). He started out as a New Yorker cartoonist, and his earliest cartoons look sort of derivative of Charles Addams, but it's possible that they were both responding to the same influences. His later New Yorker work, the stuff that got collected into the books I knew, was more reminiscent of Picasso than Addams.

Anyway, if you're in New York, you can trundle along to the Jewish Museum to see an exhibition of his life's work. Or you could buy the new retrospective book. Or you can click over to the online exhibition. Be sure to go all the way to the end and play the five lines game.

And two more chapters before that's finished. I don't expect to do any real writing today: I got back from the City at about one in the morning, and I have errands to run on behalf of the kids. I realized recently that if Frank is to be a caregiver 16 hours a day four days a week, and he is also to get into medical school and have his other needs taken care of, I must do things for him: it's not hoverymother or smotherymother for me to do this. It's part of my contribution to the whole system of our family. He just can't go to University offices and places like that -- he's somewhere else when they're open. Currently, the only thing standing between him and an interview at Wash U is a "dean's certificate" which is a checkoff the college is supposed to do that asserts he's done nothing bad. Only UCSC doesn't have dean's certificates, so his residency college (UCSC has ten colleges which are subunits of the campus and terribly confusing to explain to people: Frank went to Crown (Zellerbach), the nice fellow and I were at Stevenson (Adlai)and Emma is at Porter (Five, to us old folks). Crown is a science nerd college and Porter is an art wank college. Stevenson is -- liberal guilt college, I guess)

Moher wants to give my father's old Ford Escort to Frank. When my father got it clear what she was talking about he said "God help him." I don't think the car is that bad. But it's also possibly not a good idea for him to own a car when he has no income. We'll work this out over time.

Oh, the thing about Wash U -- that's the medical school my friend Sharon went to about the same time that Frank was born. It's in St. Louis. One of my father's compilations is juat a whole raft of renditions of "St. Louis Blues:" I hate to see that evening sun go down.


Moher is much better. She's taking charge of things now, and helping to direct my father's care. I'm not sure about my father, because I've only seen him at bedtime the last couple weeks.

On another front, if you ever have a chance to go to the San Jose Museum of Art, it's free, and while it is small, it is very well curated. It's wisely oriented towards modern art, and in both the exhibits I saw (a ceramics one and a political art one) the information cards on the wall frequently showed the older art work that "informs" the newer, which helps a lot in understanding the artist's intentions, like having read the Odyssey helps in understanding James Joyce or the Coen Brothers.