More is Less Sometimes

I have three blogs now. Journals, whatever. I'm kind of old school. I guess they are blogs because I use the software instead of making HTML and uploading it myself. I like the dating, labels, tools. Although sometimes I wish I'd chosen WordPress because they seem to have a little calendar widget that is cool. But I digress. And sometimes digressions make things lose their punch. More is less.

Anyway. Besides this rather specialized journal (wherein we examine what happens when we are thinking about something else) I have my classic blah, blah, blah this is my life in too many sentences: The Visible Woman. And my spousal unit really wanted to join the Photo-a-Day family. So we started Austin, Texas Daily Photo. Now we have sleepy conversations of a morning, as we did today.

"Do you want me to put up a picture or do you want to do it?"

He returned an uncaffeinated, puzzled look.

"Austin Daily Photo."

"Oh. I wanted to put up a picture of the Avenue B," says he. (The link is to his original discussion of that place on our old WEB page.

"OK," says I. And I wonder if I will post anything on another space.

So that's where the car comes in. I posted some art cars on the daily photo: here and here. Well one was a truck. Still. I was flipping through photos on the computer and came up with the one shown here. I could 'save' it and exhibit in on the Photo-a-Day site. I specifically set ground rules there that the photos didn't need to be particularly current. (Although I'd try to identify the when and where. This one is from December 2005. Downtown on Second Street.) But I decided to show it here. Because it so clearly illustrates my 'more is less' theme of the day. Notice they had to (or accidentally) painted over a bumper sticker. Change of Heart? Too exuberant with the paint? Notice that the license plate got a bit of paint. That might be a problem, too. See here.

Gee I seem to have come up with a bunch of links for this puppy. So if you aren't convinced that this post just has too many words in service of its thought (more or less) then you are now reeling from following all those links. Do you do that? Do you have ADD? Me, too.

Art and Porcelain

Ninety years ago Marcel Duchamp gave the idea of what one might consider 'art' a radical flushing.

In the latest news of unintended consequences we have art and we have urinals.

First up: art.

OK, this has nothing to do with Duchamp's porcelain. This is Georgia O'Keefe and her cronies. This story is not one for people with attention defcit disorder. See, O'Keefe was married to Alfred Stieglitz. The famous photographer. He collected art. He died. He willed all the art (some hers, some his, some others) to her. She in turn willed it to various institutions. Including Fisk University. An historic black university. However, she left these strings attached. That the collection be kept and exhibited together and not sold. I think the idea was that blacks needed an opportunity to see this work that was denied them elsewhere. Anyway, a couple of the paintings, including one by Ms. O'Keefe herself, are worth a lot of money and Fisk wants to sell to maintain the rest of the collection or maybe keep the institution going. Here is one story. (I read it in The Wall Street Journal. Just as an aside, I think if you subscribe to the paper you ought to get the online stuff, but that's not the way that site works.) If this story doesn't cry out 'unintended consequences' then I don't know what does. What did Ms. O'Keefe and her advisors envision for the year 2007?

Ah, but what about urinals? Well, let's set the scene. It's New Mexico. You have a problem with drunk driving. Someone invents 'talking urninal cakes.' Now the inventor, surely, had motion-induced advertising in mind. But authorities thought, hmmm? Let's make the cakes give a drunk driving warning. After all what's the thing guys do before getting in their cars drunk? They relieve their bladders. Now the other shoe hasn't dropped on this. But I couldn't resist. So many unintended outcomes lurk in this one. Oh, and the voice is a female voice.