daily reference

pay no attention to the glacier behind the curtain

Nova – Car of the Future – Click and Clack go to a geothermal field in Iceland: “where are we? I don’t know, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

” I just came back from a trip to Oz”, Meshach Taylor as Hollywood Montrose in “Mannequin: On the Move”, after wearing the mannequin’s necklace for a few moments.

Myth in Material

from today’s NYT

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102438008

Kelsey Grammer in the episode ‘Fortysomething’: “I’m sort of like the Wizard of Oz.” (1994)

wizard of oz quiz

Obama’s Gift to Brown Irks Media
... go to timecode 1:53 …

from e-flux:
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Thomas Bayrle.
I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
6 February – 19 April 2009

Under the title I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona not only presents, for the first time, a large array of Thomas Bayrle’s works, but also highlights the artist’s ability to take us to a different place in his work, a place far from what has become familiar, where we can consider how humans and the technology they invent can create or destroy the meaning of things.

This exhibition offers an overall vision of the praxis of German artist Thomas Bayrle (Berlin, 1937) from the end of the 1960s until now. The beginnings of his work were conceived in a key historical, political and social moment in the recent history of Europe, at the end of the ‘60s. This was a moment defined by the need to create a new conception of the cultural identity and aesthetic sensibility of a country in a state of upheaval, Germany. Frankfurt, the city Thomas Bayrle was living and working in, became one of the most important centres of protest. The economic miracle following the Second World War had reached its end, and the need to completely revise the ideological bases and structure of existing hierarchies had become urgent for a generation that felt the need to write history in other terms, and to create cultural alliances different from those of preceding generations. The atmosphere generated by the American presence in Germany, the crisis in the Middle East an d the war in Vietnam undoubtedly marked the starting point of an œuvre that has remained attentive to the possibility that change can be produced in the world we know, and that from this, another new and different world might emerge.

This exhibition provides a thematic and chronological tour through his work as a whole, from the photographic collages of the 1950s; the ‘machines’, as the artist calls them (oil paintings that turn out to be mechanical toys in which the figures can be activated by the spectator); to his 16 mm film collages and the digital animation work created in the nineties. A vision of the whole leads to another reading of the relationship between popular and high culture in a moment and a context – Europe – in which modernity sees the possibility of reaching the general public via the culture industry.

...
Bayrle’s work grows out of that we might call ‘conceptual enthusiasm’: the belief that the real is just as susceptible to being mythified as the mythical is capable of engendering strong effects of reality.

I’m very excited to have been alerted by Jennifer Geigel Mikulay about this Super Bowl ad

by Niall Ferguson
Home-owning Democracy
“An Englishman’s home is his castle, or so the saying goes. Americans, too, know that (as Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz) there’s no place like home – even if the homes do all look rather similar. But the origins of the Anglo-American model of the highly geared home-owning family lie as much in the realm of government policy as in the realm of culture.” page 241

No Time for Poetry

By FRANK RICH
NYT, January 24, 2009

PRESIDENT Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett’s. He did not recreate J.F.K.’s inaugural, or Lincoln’s second, or F.D.R.’s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Wicked Witch of the West. more

From “Mirror Reflections on Time’s Dualities” by By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 31, 2008
“It’s always best to start at the beginning,” Glinda the good witch tells Dorothy as she waves her wand at the Yellow Brick Road, which of course really starts back in Kansas with three farmhands, a witchy neighbor and a song about somewhere over the rainbow.

“He had a secret formula, kind of like no one could look. Like the man behind the curtain.”
ABC news, 11:00pm

Pillsbury Crescent commercial: everybody clicks their heels 3 times …

NYT, This Economy does not compute, By MARK BUCHANAN, October 1, 2008
“Something of the attitude of economic traditionalists spilled out a number of years ago at a conference where economists and physicists met to discuss new approaches to economics. As one physicist who was there tells me, a prominent economist objected that the use of computational models amounted to “cheating” or “peeping behind the curtain,” and that respectable economics, by contrast, had to be pursued through the proof of infallible mathematical theorems.”

“There’s no place like home. We’re going to drop a house on some really bad politicians.” Description of Mardi Gras Float, American Experience: New Orleans.

Rothenberg, Ryman, and Johns? Oh my!
from: http://anaba.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_archive.html

It’s a very windy day at the golf course. “Murph, we are not in Kansas anymore.”“Well, thank you, Dottie.”

...for no particular reason…

the miniseries

Jason Castro sings a VERY nice version of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow”.

.... Hillary sunnily riposted that she likes long movies. Her favorite as a girl was “The Wizard of Oz,” so surely she spots the “Surrender Dorothy” sign in the sky and the bad portent of the ladies of “The View” burbling to Obama about how sexy he is …..

by Maureen Dowd

http://www.flowgo.com/funny/13147_ding-dong-castros-dead.html