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Weak XIV

3 April 2020

No. 1,086 (cartoon)

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

4 April 2020

Shootout at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Anniversary

My love/hate relationship with the San Francisco Museum of Modern [sic] Art has evolved over the decades into a loathe/despise relationship. The change began with Puppies.

Jeff Koons, the Donald Trump of the “art” world, saw an Art Rogers photograph of a couple holding several puppies, Puppies, and commissioned fabricators to make three sculptures based on the image. Rogers sued Koons for plagiarism and won, but I’m getting ahead of the purported plot.

One of the museum’s trustees bought one of Koons’ commodities which the institution duly exhibited. (Anyone who likes three-way incest would love the relationship between museums, galleries, and collectors.) I was writing an article about Koons’ aesthetic theft at the time, and museum guards stopped me from photographing the decorative schlock.

The hypocrisy of an institution promoting a sculpture made from a photograph while simultaneously banning the opposite was just too stupid not to ridicule, so I did. I put up posters and sent out press releases for Shootout at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which the city’s major newspaper reported. (That was a back in a time when information was disseminated on dead trees instead of bits and bytes.)

Thirty years ago today twenty photographers and I converged on the sculpture, pulled out our cameras, and snapped away. The museum administraitors told the guards to stand down during the shootout, and a jolly time was had by all.

My stunt changed nothing; I never hallucinated that it would. The next day it was business as usual in the “art” world, with museums, galleries, and collectors all feeding off each other, a lucrative practice that I safely predict will never change.

In an equally unsurprising dénouement, I’ve enjoyed thirty years of art and the world in a different universe than the “art” world.

5 April 2020

The Global Hazelnut Crisis

“This is some biblical shit right here,” Cecelia announced. “Babylon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the whole damn works.”

Her alarmism is premature. Things are indeed dire all over the world; they always have been and always will be. And then there’s the matter of innumeracy: I only counted only one horseman.

Having just scanned the headlines, I see that there may now be two: the coronavirus and the brown marmorated stinkbug. Here’s the relevant headline: Stinkbug invasion in Turkey threatens world hazelnut supplies.

I’m relieved by today’s tragedy du jour. Not only are the humble stinkbugs not killing tens of thousands of people, they may be doing the world a favor by eradicating hazelnuts.

I wonder if I’ve ever even seen a hazelnut? I have had the misfortune of smelling hazelnut-flavored coffee, but I have no idea whether that involved real hazelnuts or some hideous hazelnut-scented chemical concoction.

I hate to get my toe dirty by dipping it in theological waters, but I’m sure one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is not a stinkbug. And if Halyomorpha halys eradicates the noxious hazelnut crop, they just might be some odoriferous flavor of cherubim or seraphim.

6 April 2020

Tilapia on the Range

Strange times call for peculiar responses, and I’ve lowered myself to the challenge by taking up ranching. Or maybe that’s not unconventional at all; there aren’t a lot of options out here in the New Mexican desert.

I’m not like everyone else, though. You can say that again and so can I: I’m not like everyone else. And it goes without saying that I’m not riding the range with a flock of persnickety alpacas, so that I won’t say.

I’m a tilapia rancher; I got me a herd of them. There are only two of ’em at the moment, and that’s fine. Any fishpoke who has a neurosis about the size of their operation should see a shrink, or better yet, an enlarger.

I’m quite pleased to be the rare fishboy among a gaggle of cowboys. I’ve been raising creatures from the briny deep since I knee-high to a coelacanth, so I’m taking to it like a fish to water. I encased my tilapia in plastic; that solved the problem of filtration.

Tilapia Pond; or, Life in the Desert is the logical successor to Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Fortunately, I developed immunity to logic a long time ago. If one more person calls me the intellectual heir to Henry David Thoreau, s/he’ll be the first.

7 April 2020

I Know About Bill Withers

Cedric reported that he’s been listening to a lot of Bill Withers’ recordings recently.

“Did you hear that he died recently?” he asked.

“I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know,” I replied.

What else could I say?

8 April 2020

My Father’s Hundredth Birthday

My father would have been a hundred years old today except for a technicality: he died almost three decades ago. As usual, I’m celebrating his birthday, as well as his deathday and every other day of the year as well.

This year something is different: the triple-digit number. I just can’t imagine my father being a century old. Every time I start to think about it I stop. If he was clinically alive today, he’d no doubt be frail, feeble, infirm, and probably much worse.

“I hope I die before I get old,” sounded downright silly when twenty-year-old Roger Harry Daltrey sang that, even it was 1965. On the other hand, my wish not to live until I’m a hundred makes perfect sense, but only because I’m talkin’ ’bout my generation.

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart