Latest Articles by Sarah Canice Funke
Due to an incident involving nail polish remover, one of my dining room chairs has featured a silver dollar size patch of missing varnish. Laura was able to track down some paint at an artist's shop close to where she works, so today I decided to cover up that bald spot with a little paint job. However, the only tool I had was a brush swiped from a $3 water color set (you know, the kind you used when you were 8). And the paint was oil based, meaning that if I tried to clean it off with water, the whole thing would turn into a gooey sticky mess. Normally, I would turn to my dad's gallons of turpentine to solve this problem, but since that option was about 1500 miles away, I decided to see what normal rubbing alcohol would do. After all, they both stink and are obviously not water, so the two substances must have similar chemical properties, right?
Well, despite my less-than-scientific deductions, the rubbing alcohol worked like a charm. Score.
This has been a week of free stuff. We went to the zoo on Tuesday. Along with 20,000 other people. It was, needless to say, a zoo.
But we got to see the white tiger and the baby gorilla. We couldn't find any of the free hot dogs, but it was just as well. When we finally discovered a stand, we found there was a 30 minute wait for a single dog. So Heidi and Laura tried desperately to extract some substance from the vending machine. Which sadly was empty, already pilfered by thousands of hungry zoorists (zoo tourists). We had to wait till we made it through the rain forest house to find another vending machine which provided snickers bars.
Tonight we are going to the Institute of Contemporary Art, which is free on Thursdays from 5-9pm.
To celebrate Evan's safe arrival in Colorado, we drove up to Denver to visit one of my friends, the lovely speech pathologist Mimi Urish. Since we couldn't waste a trip to Denver, we wandered over to the 16th Street Mall, which eventually took us to the Denver Art Museum. Though we decided against coughing up the admissions fee, we nevertheless enjoyed all the free public art surrounding the museum building and visited the restrooms.
If you ever get a chance to visit the DAM, please do properly hydrate yourself prior to the visit. The restroom will be the most worthwhile exhibit you experience. The bathroom sinks serenade you. I had great fun running from sink to sink, trying to get the voices to overlap. Since they start on different pitches, with different timbres of voice, I wished I was fast enough to create some sort of singing sink composition.
And so the moral of the story is that you should always wash your hands.
We also visited the Denver Public Library, which currently features an exhibit on the Presidents of the United States of America (the executives, not the band). For each President elected after the invention of the radio, we were able to hear a snippet of their inaugural address. Curious to see what Calvin Coolidge might have to say, I pushed the button on the recording under his name. Absolute silence.
And so the moral of the story is that if you are going to have defective wiring in your display, make sure to place it in the most appropriate place.
This whole Thanksgiving holiday I have been offline and really didn't miss a moment of cyberly connection. Where have I been, you might ask?
To Lancaster County, PA. A place where one is awakened in the morning to the sound of horses clip-clopping down the street.
Evan's family is not Amish, but they co-exist with the Amish community. And so I enjoyed my time in Pennsylvania, meeting parents, grandfather, and nine million of Evan's friends whom I liked very much and befriended on Facebook in a valiant effort to keep them all straight.
And so I have this to say for myself:
Other shots from our day in Philly:
Trying to find the Art Museum
still elusive
Rocky?
My foot on stair
The Philadelphia Museum of Art was quite an experience. We saw a few of Evan's American landscapes, a few of my Warhol's, and lots of armor, Medieval art, and Mondrian.
We also saw some Ellsworth Kelly, an artist who seemed to paint in pixels before pixels were even invented...
(a sample of Kelly's work, but not among the pieces we saw):
Chesterton had little regard for "modern" attitudes. Here, through the eyes of a villainous character, he describes the monotony of modernity:
You think Victoria* is like the New Jerusalem. We [poets] know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.
~The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton
"Contentment" usually suggests visions of dull doormats. Yet it is the discontent who are eternally bored...the cynical who are never happy....the jaded who cannot be amazed.
*A train station in London
Because some people seem to like White Russians, I am drinking one and watching The Godfather. I liked the merlot I had for dinner better. I am just not cut out for cocktails.
On second thought, the ice just added to the drink has enhanced its quality immensely. Maybe I really do like vodka, kalua, and cream after all.
I saw this today at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center:
It was inspired by Beatles' music. I approve.
Peter Max. Creator of 60s Psychedelia.
One benefit of going to museums in pairs or other groups of assorted sizes all larger than The Individual (besides just being fun) is that multiple instances of humanity can share reactions, discuss a common experience, and come to conclusions that inspire that comfortable feeling that One Really Knows Something. My friend and I confirmed these universally ahistorical truths by engaging in a brisk discussion regarding the importance of Skill in making axiological aesthetic judgments. We both value skill, or the ability to do something better than the average joe, but have slightly different appreciations concerning the manifestations of skill.
To my friend, skill resides in the execution of the art work, in the manipulation of the concrete materials: the arrangement of color, the details of lifelikeness, the layout of space.
I value skill in idea: the ability to think of something that no one else has thought of before. The simpler the idea, the more amazing the fact that So-and-So was actually the first to do it.
Of course, the best paintings incorporate both elements, I think. But arguing over whether Michelangelo was a better artist than Pollack makes any afternoon just a little more exciting.
Yesterday a friend and I went to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center to see Andy Warhol. Well, not Warhol himself, since he's dead, but his art work. We saw soup cans and marilyns and mick jaggers and jackie kennedys and shoes and other items of pop culture adulation. One exhibit consisted merely of a room filled with silver, pillow-shaped balloons, tossed about by air-currents. We sat on the floor and let balloons float over us, cover us, and waft away. The experience was relaxing, mesmerizing, like watching the ocean or the sky. Abbie wanted to decorate her room that way. I thought it would make a striking Carter Hall Christmas Decoration, though I suppose 5th South's M-and-M creation came pretty close to achieving the same effect. After the museum closed, we went to Poor Richard's Bookstore, where I exerted a bad influence over my friend's pocketbook, and convinced her to pick up a couple of books. We both found copies of The Little Prince and commenced to read to each other right there in the store, alternating pages between our two books. I also found Moby Dick (see below) and the rest of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Then we went to Woodman Valley Chapel's evening service. Afterwards, as we ravenously ate dinner at Carrabba's, Abbie asked me what I had thought of the worship music, and I suppose the expression on my face gave everything away. "That bad, huh?" she laughed. I introduced her to Sufjan Stevens' Michigan, since she had recently graduated from Michigan State University. Her enjoyment of this album gave me a slightly evangelistic feeling: I had brought another wayward stray into the Fold of True Aesthetics. Just kidding. But sharing music one loves and discovering that someone else loves it, too, produces a certain thrill in me. Maybe I should go into music advertising. Wait. I am.
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I also have a print of a tomato soup can. Someday, when I have a permenant kitchen, that print will hang there as a social commentary, making statements that perhaps only I will understand, but somehow a Warhol soup can hanging in a kitchen just struck me as deliciously appropriate.
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