things to say instead of "climate change"

Instead of the bland, Frank Luntz-ian term "Climate change," try:

Climate disruption
Oil company-caused climate disruption [source]

Instead of "Climate change denier," try:

Atmospheric carbon pusher
Air poisoner
Corporate air poisoner
Icecap melter
Institutional icecap-melter
Venusians (after our planetary neighbor baked to cinders by greenhouse gases)
Vulcans (death cult worshipping volcano-like impacts on the air)

On the topic of counter-propaganda responding to the carbon pushers, see also:

Coen Brothers' "Clean Coal" advertisement [hooktube]

Duly noted: the futility of using fossil-derived power to link to an anti-hydrocarbon video, causing more fuel-burning.

exhibition diary: the new CRT

One of the cathode-ray TVs I was using for GIF display in my Honey Ramka show failed shortly after the opening, emitting, as the gallery described it via email, "a distressing high-pitch sound from the back & a nasty burning smell."

A quick eBay search for a replacement uncovered this gem:

magnavox600

New in box, under $100. One thing I learned in my research is that many sellers of unwanted CRTs describe them as "perfect for retro gaming."
That makes sense for me, since I am using them to show looping animated GIFs with a strong "pixel art" component.
On unboxing the Magnavox (no, I didn't do an unboxing video) and connecting a DVD player I discovered this TV cropped about 5 percent off the left side of my perfectly-centered looping GIF. Not acceptable. This necessitated burning a new DVD with a slight offset to the right. My video editing software is too primitive to do this, so I had to do a Rube Goldberg sequence of: resizing the GIF "canvas" and overlaying the GIF slightly off-center; screen-capturing 2 minutes of the GIF looping as an .avi file; exporting the .avi in lossless mode to keep the pixels sharp (especially since the conversion to DVD muddies them slightly); loading the .avi into a Windows 7 DVD-authoring program called "DVD Flick" (hat tip Paul Slocum); burning to disc. Voila, a centered GIF on the Magnavox.

eloquent list of pop and "art" music combinations

Jonathan D. Kramer, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening (Bloomsbury, 2016), Chapter 4:

Questioning, or even attacking, the previously all but unassailable barrier between pop and art music has energized postmodern music. Whereas there have certainly been modernist composers who enjoy vernacular music, only under the influence of postmodernism have art-music composers invited pop music into ostensibly art-music compositions. In the case of conservative postmodernists, the motivation may have been to reach out to an audience increasingly alienated from the world of serious concert music; in the case of radical postmodernists, the reason may have been to create unsettling and challenging contexts in which different styles confront each other. Despite the rhetoric of some composers and critics, most such crossover music does not cross completely freely from one musical world to another. Postmodernism thrives on otherness, on the recognition that something foreign is being embraced.

Footnote (no. 46) to the above passage:

John Rea offers a wonderfully varied list of postmodernist crossover music. Notice how, in most instances, the composer or performer’s stylistic or aesthetic affinity is on clearly one side of the divide, with foreign elements welcomed in precisely for their otherness, their exoticism: “Yehudi Menuhin playing ragas with Ravi Shankar or improvising hot jazz with Stéphane Grappelli; the Swingle Singers interpreting Bach by scat singing; the Beatles using a sitär in the Sergeant Pepper album; the settings of Folk Songs by Berio; Switched-on Bach for synthesizers, where the arranger/transcriber would change sex by the time he/she had completed the recording project; any one of the innumerable happenings organized by John Cage; the second movement of György Ligeti’s Three Pieces for Two Pianos entitled Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei); almost any ensemble in the Early Music movement that, in performing to extremely fast tempi, always leaves the impression that it might as well have played music to accompany a cartoon; jazz pianist Keith Jarrett performing Shostakovich or playing the harpsichord; the Kronos String Quartet, dressed in costume and exploiting rock-’n’-roll theatrical lighting, performing "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix; the Koto Ensemble of Tokyo playing Vivaldi; Pavarotti singing with Dalla and Sting; the symphonies of Philip Glass; the Liverpool Oratorio by Paul McCartney; Itzahk Perlman playing klezmer music; Gidon Kremer playing tangos; the Shanghai Film Orchestra playing In C by Terry Riley on traditional Chinese instruments; the symphonies of Krzysztof Penderecki; Bobby McFerrin conducting and Chick Corea playing a Mozart piano concerto where the cadenzas are jazz-like improvisations; Belgian singer Helmut Lotti singing classical songs and arias but sounding like Mario Lanza’s operatic persona-manqué; American pop singer Neil Diamond singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah; jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek playing in a church while the Hilliard Ensemble sings Lasso and Palestrina; the English pop music group Oasis, feebly copying the Beatles, including their haircuts; the celebratory Symphony 1997 -- Heaven, Earth, Mankind by Tan Dun, written to mark the transfer of power in Hong Kong from Great Britain to China; the very long symphonic poem, Standing Stone, by Sir Paul McCartney, which sounds as if it had been written by Rachmaninoff after having taken LSD; and, finally, cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing tangos,” John Rea, “Postmodernisms.”

press release questions (Mark Sheinkman exhibit)

A press release from Von Lintel Gallery (LA, formerly New York) announces a new Mark Sheinkman show. Sheinkman makes swirly black and white marks with a 3D spatial illusion. The release begs for some interrogation, so here goes:

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Mark Sheinkman; the artist’s eleventh solo show with the gallery spanning a twenty plus year history.

Sheinkman has expanded the role of additive mark-making in his latest paintings which no longer include graphite.

Shouldn't removing one of the materials make the work subtractive, rather than additive? Also, why mention this at the outset? Was the graphite causing the canvases to be more archivally fragile -- shedding off the surfaces, staining collectors' floors? It reads like a product blurb ("now graphite-free!")

The direct application of oil and alkyd paint and a more clearly evident brushwork has resulted in gestures with a wider range of characteristics.

So, removing the graphite from canvases previously made with "oil, alkyd and graphite" was not due to archival considerations but to widen the characteristics of the brushwork and make the markings "more clearly evident." How -- or why -- was the graphite retarding the paint application, so that it was dropped as a material after 20 years of use? Inquiring minds want to know.

In many of these paintings, he has so entirely entangled the marks that the layering is ambiguous. This complicates the implied depth and introduces a snap of tension between spatial illusion and the painted surface, opening up a range of potential for formal exploration and art historical associations.

Sheinkman’s process is flexible and fluid, and allows him considerable leeway to react and change course, Sheinkman says, “the process is what’s engaging because you’re paying attention all the time. Restrictions open up all kinds of possibilities.”

If the process is flexible and fluid, how is this a "restriction"? Possibly the restriction refers to the removal of graphite from the painter's arsenal. One could still wonder how this makes for a more open-ended process. The artist's page at Von Lintel hasn't been modified yet and mentions the graphite aspect: "Sheinkman builds up his canvases and drawings in layers, working into graphite to create a visual effect of curvilinear forms moving through space." So the graphite was part of the ground, and somehow important in the creation of the 3D illusion. Yet the paintings with no graphite also have these depth illusions. Something in the material held the artist back -- was it more abrasive? Absorbing? By removing it, he can now make qualitatively better 3D illusions. Good to know, if still somewhat obscure.