OLD NEWS

SORE BUT SAFE by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/5ahbdmxy>
Photographing wildlife, or even signs of wildlife, can include a certain amount of physical risk — it comes with the territory. Some of the encounters I’ve had over the years include being bitten by a coyote, charged by a white-tail buck and falling through the ice on a beaver pond while wearing snowshoes. A far more minor inconvenience occurred recently when I was photographing a porcupine den while on my knees in order to get the perspective I wanted. Upon returning home I noticed a sharp pain in one leg, only to discover a small porcupine quill had lodged itself in my knee.
The tip of a porcupine quill is covered with overlapping one-way barbs, making it extremely easy for the quill to enter a body, but very difficult to extract it, as anyone who has a dog that has encountered a porcupine knows. But the beauty of being the recipient of this sharp, pointed, modified hair is that you (and/or your dog) needn’t worry about infection. The quills of the back and tail of a porcupine have a greasy coating which contains fatty acids which have antibacterial properties.
Examination of museum porcupine skeletons revealed that 35% showed healed fractures (Uldis Rose, The North American Porcupine). A comparison with raccoon skeletons showed only .07% had fractures. One can surmise that porcupines, being fairly heavy and preferring the tender tips of hemlock and other slender twigs often end up falling on the ground and frequently being impaled by their own quills. It makes sense to have evolved this clever means of self-protection. _NaturallyCurious

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SREAK
<https://tinyurl.com/35a6unau>

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LUCIA DI LUCIANO, ABSTRACTIONS ANTICIPATED DIGITAL FUTURES, DIES AT 93 by
Alex Greenberger
<https://tinyurl.com/4afypv8w>
Lucia Di Luciano, an Italian painter associated with the Arte Programmata movement of the 1960s who only recently gained wider recognition, died this past weekend Many Italian publications reported that she was 93 years old.
Di Luciano is known mainly for her abstractions of the 1960s, which are often composed of gridded black and white patterns. She made them entirely by hand, but she worked with such precision that they appear today as though they were made using computers, which were not yet widely available to the public during the 1960s. Only when standing up close to these works does one notice the areas where Di Luciano’s paint diverges ever so slightly from her predetermined compositions.
Unlike many artists of her era, Di Luciano did not only work in oil. She embraced house paint and acrylic, both of which were considered “low” or délcassé at the time.
Her paintings of the mid-’60s made her one of the leading figures associated with Arte Programmata, a movement that has often been positioned as an Italian response to the Op art pouring in from the US and England. The movement’s purveyors used the aesthetics of computers to consider how systems of orderliness are formed and broken down. Lindsay Caplan, an art historian who wrote a book on the movement in 2022, has written that the Arte Programmata was inherently political because it was about “individual freedom in relation to systematic constraints.”
Born in 1933 in Syracuse, Italy, Di Luciano attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome during the ’50s. While she was a student there, she met the artist Giovanni Pizzo, who later became her husband. Together, they took part in avant-garde groups such as Gruppo 63. They remained together, living in Rome until 2022, when Pizzo died.\
Di Luciano described her career during the ’60s as an uphill battle, for she had chosen a profession that was still unkind to women. To supplement her artistic practice, she also opened a clothing store called Mondo Giovane, where she sold Perspex purses and plastic miniskirts that she designed.
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Though she painted for nearly eight decades, the international art world did not take note until 2022, when Di Luciano figured in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, She appeared in a section called “Technologies of Enchantment,” which focused on how Italian women active during the postwar era had looked to computers as a means of envisioning other worlds.
After the Biennale, Di Luciano figured in “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet,” a Tate Modern exhibition that opened in 2024. Her art began to appear in fairs, and at galleries While Di Luciano remains best known for her austere abstractions of the 1960s, she wound up introducing color to her gridded paintings during the 1970s. By the end of her career, she had begun working in a very different mode altogether. Recent works featured rows of brushy swoops of paint, evincing an embrace of entropy that was not always present in her earlier work.
Whether or not the rest of the world was looking, Di Luciano continued to paint daily. “My thoughts are all
on the surfaces of my paintings,” Di Luciano said in 2022 in an interview which reported that she was 89 at the time. “To stop working would have brought my mind to a halt and probably my life as well.” _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/5ef8fham> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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THE ART OF THE HOLZHAUSEN
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<https://tinyurl.com/5bbcmycj>
Of the several things the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami loves including in his books—cats, spaghetti, Blue Note jazz albums—wood-burning stoves always seemed to me to be a bit of an outlier, the one rustic note in an otherwise urbane assortment of faves. Then I got a wood-burning stove of my own, and now I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t have one. Fireplaces may be more charming and atmospheric, but the humble cast-iron woodstove (invented, more or less, by Benjamin Franklin) is much more efficient. Instead of sending its heat up a chimney, the wood burner absorbs and radiates it into the room. It exists to keep you warm, and it’s great at that job, something I’ve learned to treasure living in Maine.
<https://tinyurl.com/ycy4ewtm>
<https://tinyurl.com/enn9dkyf>
This triumph, however, only whetted my appetite for more ambitious stacking. Firewood stacking can be a folk art, with master stackers using different-colored or -sized pieces to make patterns on the side of a straight stack <https://tinyurl.com/3b2shabx> . There’s even an annual contest in Norway—one of the world capitals of wood stacking—for the most artful woodpiles. I, however, just wanted to get my firewood off the porch, where it was overly sheltered for anything but fully dried wood, and didn’t have a viable spot for a long straight stack, let alone the expertise to make patterns in it. Instead, I dreamed of building a holzhausen.
<https://tinyurl.com/52p4e7mb>
Nevertheless, a wood-burning stove is a lot more work than just turning up the thermostat. Sometime in the spring—if you’re smart—you have to order at least a cord of unseasoned split firewood, which in these parts arrives on the back of a dump truck and gets deposited in a huge mound in your front yard. Then you’ve got to stack the wood, which will help it dry out enough to become seasoned. (You can pay more for seasoned wood if you procrastinate on this until the fall, but the best suppliers often run out.) There’s an old saying about firewood warming you three times: when you cut it, when you stack it, and when you burn it, but although my house came with a dull old maul, or splitting axe, I would rather let someone else get warmed by mine on that first stage. Stacking, though—nothing prepared me for the addictive nature of this chore, or for my growing obsession with building the picturesque freestanding Scandinavian-style woodpile, the iconic holzhausen.
<https://tinyurl.com/4feh76h7>
I had my quest but no clear idea how to proceed, so I did what everyone does when they want to learn a practical skill these days: I turned to YouTube. There, I found some key advice: The bigger the diameter of the ring, the more stable the holzhausen. The smaller the circle, the wider the spaces between the outward-facing ends of the splits, making slippage more likely and more catastrophic. I have a friend who built an adorable but diminutive holzhausen that collapsed within a couple of weeks. Because wood shrinks as it dries, pieces in the upper layers can fall into the expanding spaces between the pieces below.
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Firewood, for those unaware, should be stacked outdoors, where it will be exposed to sun and wind during the warmer months. You can cover the top of the stack, but the sides need to take plenty of abuse from the elements. The classic, but rather basic, method involves making a long and sometimes tall row of split wood supported at the ends by a rack or a pillarlike end stack made of splits arranged in alternating directions. As a friend who recently moved from Brooklyn to a nearby town noted, even this most elementary form of wood stacking is “strangely satisfying.” And it is not without technique. The pillars can be either quite stable or pretty rickety, depending on how carefully you construct them. Last year, I was absurdly proud of my pillar-stacking game, as exhibited on the porch that I use as a makeshift woodshed.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc2f6n7p>
Although holzhausen is German for “wood houses” (the word is often used as a singular noun by many English speakers), this wood-stacking method is usually regarded as a Scandinavian specialty. It involves constructing a cylindrical, hollow stack, often with a closed top made of pieces arranged bark-up to look like a roof. Holzhausen range from modest beehive-style piles to truly impressive edifices, like the towering structures <https://tinyurl.com/2vc4usjx> built by the nuns in the Pühtitsa Convent, in Estonia. I wanted something big enough to impress anyone driving past my front yard (yes, I admit it), but not so tall that I couldn’t easily fetch splits from it during the winter.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc3nm9yz>
I had two cords of wood to stack, and I knew it would take me forever to finish the job without help, so I invited over some friends—lured by curiosity and the promise of garden tomato sandwiches—to pitch in. The first ring of splits went down, and we were off to the races. A task that would have taken me a week or more was nearly done in less than a day. My friend Dave, who maintains that splitting wood is his favorite exercise, brought his maul and broke down the bigger and more unwieldy pieces. This proved a bit of a disappointment to another friend, Donald, who seemed taken with the notion that some holzhausen builders fill the center of the cylinder with the twisted and odd-sized pieces of wood that don’t stack well.
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We ended up with very few stray pieces in the middle, and later, when I noticed how the wind whistled through the stack on a blustery day, I could see why many stackers claim that the holzhausen is one of the best structures for drying wood, since a maximum of surface area is exposed to the air. That’s provided you don’t fill the center. Some would claim that filling it makes the holzhausen more stable, but mine is still standing without fill. I’d long wondered how much wood it takes to build a holzhausen. It turns out that a stack 6 feet in diameter and 6 feet tall uses just a cord of wood, so we ended up making two.
<https://tinyurl.com/mphfewtj>
We soon discovered that the wider gaps between the outward-facing ends of the splits caused a relentless outward-tilting tendency that had to be corrected by inserting slivers of wood—the kind typically used for kindling—sideways at intervals. We called these “shims”; some accomplished stackers will assemble their holzhausen so that the shims form a spiral pattern along the sides of the cylinder <https://tinyurl.com/3ke2sfwc>. Ours were not so artful (next year!), but the end result was nevertheless a pair of holzhausen that we were proud of and that earned me some compliments from the neighbors.
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One of those neighbors, Chris, has a wood stack that’s much admired around town. He builds it under the eaves of his woodshed, which has open sides, as all respectable woodsheds should. Chris worked in a logging operation in central Maine for 24 years, first cutting wood, then in various supervisorial roles. That’s where he met his wife, 43 years ago. She is a forester, and the many Norway maples—an invasive species—growing in a gully on their property dismay her. Chris cuts them down, saws them into rounds, splits them, and stacks the splits in his woodshed using a method he landed upon after substitute teaching a sixth grade social studies class on ancient Roman architecture.
<https://tinyurl.com/y3ur6a2w>
We talked about the particular pleasure we get from all this labor. People often place their wood stacks outside a window, where they can see them every day. I can attest that I never get tired of looking at mine. “When you spend all day cutting, splitting, and stacking wood,” Chris observed, “you have something to look at that shows what you’ve accomplished.” The product of so much of today’s work is immaterial, but a wood stack is the physical manifestation not only of what you’ve achieved but also of how warm it will keep you through the winter. A blizzard may strike and the power may go out, but with a good pile of dry splits and a wood-burning stove, you will get by and stay cozy.
<https://tinyurl.com/r6vnmbfc>
For years, I marveled at the keyhole arch in Chris’ wood stack and wondered how he does it. Recently, he demonstrated the method he adapted from the Roman technique for making stone arches. First, he builds the arch out of Norway maple splits, using another variety of wood as support. Then, when it’s complete, he gently taps out the support pieces, a few at a time.
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Of course, eventually we have to disassemble our wood stacks, something the ancient Romans never had to face with their arches, some of which still stand today. For our wood to warm us that final time, it’s got to be burned. This, it turns out, is the hardest part of the holzhausen process: destroying our creations to bring the pieces inside to the stove. In cold climates, the wood we burn is the stuff of life, and life is inherently temporary. Even the most beautiful wood stack will someday be reduced to ashes. During these, the darkest days of the year, when sun goes down at 3:30 p.m., this leads to somber thoughts. But then the days slowly begin to lengthen, and I start to think about my spring wood order and how I’ll stack it. And the cycle starts all over again.
<https://tinyurl.com/43m96dp3> _ Laura Miller_Slate

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LATELY I'M NOT SURE I HAVE MUCH TO ADD
to the general discourse on what ails the world,
so maybe I'll just become an "artists & their pets" fan account..?
Here's Andy Warhol with his beloved dachshund Archie in 1976
<https://tinyurl.com/yf2ettkn>
Jed Johnson, Warhol's sometime companion,
with Archie and their other dachshund, Amos.
Archie, who was named after the TV character Archie Bunker,
has his own Wikipedia page just in case you want to read more on him
<https://tinyurl.com/4j4r4rk2>
Lou Reed with Archie & Amos at Warhol's Factory, around 1976 or 1977
<https://tinyurl.com/ym6m5nnf> _MichaelLobel

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LONESOME GUN by Carolina A. Miranda
<https://tinyurl.com/388tzufv>
Introduce a gun in the first act of a play, and it should go off by the third. That’s a very crude way of articulating the narrative principle of Chekhov’s Gun, inspired by the Russian playwright, who once advised a fellow writer to keep his narratives lean. His exact words: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
I couldn’t help but think of Chekhov’s Gun while absorbing Salomón Huerta’s remarkable show which, quite literally, brings the gun into the room — and then leaves it there for the viewer to ponder. Unspoken Ritual, features almost a dozen enigmatic still lifes that each depict fruit or some other foodstuff alongside an old .38.
These are not sensational paintings. They do not celebrate guns or violence. Instead, Huerta has created taut scenes set against muted backgrounds, showing, for example, a luscious sliced plum next to the gun on a plain white surface. The gun’s barrel is angled towards the viewer; its owner and purpose, a mystery.
<https://tinyurl.com/2jvedj2m>
The paintings, interestingly, were inspired by events from the artist’s childhood. Huerta, 60, was born in Tijuana and raised in Los Angeles, where his family lived in the Ramona Gardens public housing project in Boyle Heights — during a particularly intense wave of violence. (A 1984 report in the Los Angeles Times described an open drug market in a parking lot known as “The Square,” where customers from as far away as San Diego would arrive to score PCP.) For protection, Huerta’s father carried the revolver. “He flashed it at people in the projects,” recalls the artist, “to let them know that we were not the family to play with.”
When his father was home, the gun would rest on his night table. Huerta recalls that he would often be enlisted to take his father a snack — perhaps an apricot or a sandwich — which he would gingerly place next to the firearm. “I didn’t care for it,” says Huerta of the gun. “I wanted to paint it as quietly as possible. It was this quiet object I knew not to play with.”
Huerta first rose to prominence in the 1990s for other equally enigmatic works — a series of figurative paintings that depicted the backs of his sitters’ heads,. (“It was another way of looking at a portrait,” he explains.) When he began the gun series in 2012, he was looking for a way to express the strange juxtapositions he had seen on his father’s nightstand. He studied still lifes by painters like Cezanne, Matisse, and Manet, but he found his greatest inspiration in the works of the Italian Giorgio Morandi <https://tinyurl.com/4565aeam> , who was known for his tidy compositions of vases, bowls, and geometric forms rendered in neutral colors. Says Huerta: “They have this beautiful, dead quiet quality to them.”
That serene tone is what gives Huerta’s paintings their curious magnetism. He neither celebrates the gun nor condemns it — he simply places it before us to observe, to consider its form and its applications. The food offers contrast and contradiction: a lethal weapon next to provisions that offer sustenance. In one canvas, the gun lies next to a wholesome glass of milk. Life and death.
<https://tinyurl.com/4w7ydxv2>
For Huerta, who studied at Art Center College of Design and UCLA, this exhibition marks a comeback of sorts. In January, he and his wife, Ana Morales-Huerta <https://tinyurl.com/452sux8j> (who is also a painter), lost their Altadena home in the Eaton Fire. His studio, located in Westwood, remained untouched. But his archives, as well as his collection of books and works by other artists, were lost to the flames. “One day everything is there and the next day everything is gone,” says Huerta. “It’s surreal. It’s hard to put another word to it.”
Since then, he has thrown himself into his work.
“When my dad passed away, all his belongings were in a suitcase,” he says. “Besides his belt and his hat, the gun was the only thing he left behind. He was very minimal.” He was also quite taciturn. “There was no talking,” adds Huerta. “During the 35 years I knew my dad, we only had one conversation.” The paintings capture this spirit — simple scenes that nonetheless communicate with quiet force. KCRW

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RECREATION HALL PLAIN DEALING, LA
<https://tinyurl.com/3b2fku4e> _RuralIndexingProject

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3. LYDA NEWMAN’S HAIRBRUSH by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7vwmzc>
The most commonplace objects can profoundly impact the way people carry themselves through the world. Consider the hairbrush. This intimate, everyday object touches the body, brush against scalp, affecting one’s appearance, one’s whole sense of self, influencing how the day begins.
In the late 19th century, the New York-based hairdresser and suffrage activist Lyda Newman was frustrated with traditional hairbrush design. Hairbrushes had existed for thousands of years with very little change: animal bristles attached to wooden, ivory, or metal bases were used to clean and style hair. But the traditional design didn’t work well for the thick, textured hair of Black women who were Newman’s clients. So she designed a better hairbrush, with an innovative bristle plate that detached from the back of the brush. This allowed the entire bristle assembly to be removed, rinsed, and shaken free of accumulated matter, an improvement over brushes with close-packed or solid bristle beds.
In 1898, Newman received U.S. Patent #614,335 for her hairbrush design. She filed the application independently, without co-inventors or assignees, and was only the third Black woman ever to receive a patent. Her brush is a precursor to the “self-cleaning” brushes with retractable bristles that are common today.
That she received a patent matters not because the object was revolutionary, but because the gesture was. It was an act of expansive and enterprising imagination, a solution to a problem that need no longer be tolerated. Life operates through the everyday. Change the everyday, and you change life itself.
_TheImpatientReader

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THE GREAT MARSDEN HARTLEY WAS BORN ON THIS DATE IN 1877
(!). Lobster, 1940-41. A very late work!
<https://tinyurl.com/c4j4pwyr> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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BIRKIN BAN by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/rrpup92j>
I misremembered the connection, and thought that Jane Birkin had originally sold her original Hermès bag to benefit Médecins du Monde. But no.
I just looked it up, and Birkin put Médecins du Monde stickers on her Birkin to show her support. But she donated her original 1985 Birkin to an auction in 1994, “Les Encheres de l’Espoir,” to benefit Association Solidarité Sida, the leading French AIDS support charity. Whoever bought it sold it in 2000, and whoever bought it in 2000 sold it last year at Sotheby’s for EUR8.6 million, all proceeds to them.
It came up because Médecins du Monde is one of 37 international aid groups Israel has now banned from operating in Gaza. _greg.org

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PIETRO LONGHI, THE MEETING, 1746
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<https://tinyurl.com/34sp62e3>
<https://tinyurl.com/2verkdn2> _JesseLocker

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STAIRWAY TO GEFFEN by William Poundstone
Are the stairways to the David Geffen Galleries too unwelcoming, too overwhelming? In a post Christopher Knight reports that there are 60 steps ("It was like the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.") This draws numerous comments, nearly all negative. ("Nothing says 'welcome to our museum' like a Medieval wall of steep stairs.")
Some commenters are confused by the photo Knight chose to illustrate his post. It appears to be a telephoto view from ground level that really flattens the perspective. Side views show the steps have a shallow pitch and large landings. In short, the Geffen steps are not steep but there are a lot of them. Sixty steps is the equivalent of four flights of stairs. Thomas Frick points out one irony: "I remember Govan saying—pre-Swiss architect—that every flight of stairs lost X% of audience."
("Stairway to Geffen" is thanks to The Dark Bob.)
<http://tiny.cc/7u8x001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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WAYNE THIEBAUD, RESERVOIR, 2014
<https://tinyurl.com/yrj284ey> _RabihAlameddine

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STILL CANNOT PROCESS THAT RONALD LAUDER,
the honorary chairman of the museum of modern art
is stealth buying up greenlandic companies
to facilitate trump's invasion and takeover of greenland. _‪gregorg

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ALIENS: THE SPREAD OF INVASIVE PLANTS AND ANIMALS ACROSS EUROPE – IN PICTURES
<https://tinyurl.com/37my9had> _GuardianUK