Foreign Darwinism

What the title means is what happens when tourists travel to a foreign country and then act stupidly — usually with the excuse “But it isn’t a problem back home!” — and are then astonished when they’re arrested, abused or have similar bad things happen to them.  Here’s an excellent example of such stupidity:

Police in Dubai arrested a group of people for public debauchery over a widely-shared video showing naked women posing on a balcony in the city.
Violations of the public decency law in the United Arab Emirates, including for nudity and other ‘lewd behaviour’, carry penalties of up to six months in prison and a 5,000 dirham (£983) fine.
The sharing of pornographic material is also punishable with prison time and a fine of up to 500,000 dirhams under the country’s laws, which are based on Islamic law, or Shariah.

I know, I know;  the airwaves and newspapers are going to be full of cries such as “How ancient and barbaric are their laws!” along with excuses such as “They were only having a little fun!”

Yeah, ancient and barbaric they may be, but let us not think for a moment that these silly tarts didn’t know that what they were doing was illegal in the country they were visiting — I’m willing to bet that this was part of the allure of acting like this — and now they’re going to discover exactly what happens to “whores” and the “debauched” in the oh-so-enlightened UAE, with their swanky hotels, huge shopping malls and international airport.

The “Darwinism” I refer to in the title doesn’t mean Darwinism taken to its extreme, of course.  That’s what happens in little garden spots such as Southeast Asia, where drug smugglers face the death penalty.  By comparison, this is small potatoes:

I would have little problem with this bunch of idiots getting a few light lashes with a cane — a fairly common punishment in those parts for that kind of behavior.  I’m not suggesting this particular punishment, of course, but all in all, it could be worse.

Take it from someone who knows:  after a while, your ass stops tingling after a caning — and given the choice, I’d gladly take that over six months’ imprisonment in an Arab jail.

Monday Funnies

Today, it’s our special Vegetarian Edition:

 

And if get excited by these vegetables, you need help:

 

That’s enough of that filth.  Time for something more wholesome:

And finally, a fruitarian I could get behind, so to speak:

Bonus prize for guessing the band’s name… no?  Here they are.

Power & Beauty

A couple weeks ago, C.W. posted this pic:

It is, of course, one of the earlier offerings from the once-defunct and since-resurrected Wiesmann company, and as lovely as that picture is, it doesn’t do the car justice.  Here are a couple more:

Here’s the interior:

From Wikipedia:

Wiesmann used BMW six-cylinder engines to power its MF models, until the introduction in 2003 of the GT MF4, which used BMW’s 4.8-litre V8, and the MF 5, which used the M5’s 5.0-litre V10.

The cars are all, of course, hand-built and don’t ask about the price.  (Okay, okay:  think new Aston Martin DB11 price for a secondhand Wiesmann MF 5.)

Lottery payout permitting, the MF4 would be on my shortlist of “Outrageously-Overpriced Self-Indulgent Midlife Crisis Cars”:

Come to think of it, it might well be the only car on that list.

Don’t ask me to pick between the Roadster (ragtop) or GT (roof).  Nor between the tan or white leather interior.  As for automatic- vs. manual transmission… that, I could decide.

Disturbing Juxtapositions

Sometimes I wonder if I’m going crazy or if I just see things that aren’t there.

Here’s one example.  I woke up the other day with a song glued into my brain — you know what I mean, right?  Anyway, the song was Pink Floyd at their most wonderfully obscure, i.e.  See Emily Play.

So of course I went onto Ewwwtchoob and watched the thing.  All the way through, though, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that the video was reminiscent of another piece of surreal moviemaking — and then I remembered the final scene  from Antonioni’s Blow Up.

The two scenes are in no way alike, cinematically speaking — one is in black & white and is essentially a music video, while the other is deathly silence played in color.  But both are mimes, and wonderfully executed.  Was it the mimes, or the similar locations in a park which triggered the association?

Or maybe it was just Syd Barrett and Michelangelo Antonionini who were crazy.


Afterthought:  I think Blow-Up was created (1965-66) before See Emily Play was filmed (1967).

And just to drive everybody else crazy (why should I be the only one), Blow Up featured the Yardbirds in the famous (and disturbing) night club scene.  Which is why I sometimes associate Jimmy Page with Antonionini.

Unpaid Endorsements

For those who haven’t yet seen it, do yourselves a favor and try to find the Brit TV show The Last Detective, starring the brilliant Peter Davison as “Dangerous” Davies.

It’s a funny, gentle show about a lovable loser (who is mocked, abused and ill-treated by his boss and colleagues in a police station, not to mention his bitch of an estranged wife), but who somehow comes out on top because he just will not give up an investigation, or anything else for that matter.  (I have to say that his meekness irritated me at first;  but stick to it and you’ll be joyfully surprised when you learn that sometimes, nice guys don’t finish last.)

I may just buy the DVD set when I have a few spare pennies dug out of the sofa, because Dangerous is one of my favorite TV characters of all time.  (Yes, my DVD player can handle PAL format.)

In similar vein, there’s Vexed  (on Netflix), which in the first episode has the funniest opening scene ever.  Season 1 also stars the unbelievable Lucy Punch (Dinner With Schmucks  and Doc Martin, also only Season 1).  Funny and occasionally surreal situations.

Fakes & Phonies

Lat night I watched an interesting movie on Netflix called Made You Look, about a string of art forgeries sold for unbelievable sums of money from the late 1980s till 2018.

Actually, I have only one quibble with the show, in that it should have been entitled Made You Look Foolish — because not only were art collectors taken in by the fakes, but art authenticators, catalog printers, auction houses and of course, art dealers (who are to the art business what agents and managers are to the music world — i.e. a bunch of venal rogues, thieves and manipulators).

Spoiler alert (although anyone with a brain could see this coming):  when works of art sell for bajillions of dollars, the incentive for forgery increases exponentially.  In the case above, all the forgeries were created by one man — some little old Chinese (quelle surprise ) artist living in Long Island NY — who had a real talent for painting in the style of most of the American abstract artists of the 20th century.  He handed them over to a guy who faked the paintings’ condition (so they’d look as though they were painted in the 1950s, say, instead of 1986).  Then the paintings were given to a shady art dealer with absolutely no history of art dealing (!!!!!) who then told a gullible art dealer in (where else?) Manhattan that the paintings came from an anonymous collector of unknown name and no history (!!!!) — and then the fun ensued, when the dealer purchased a painting by Jackson Pollock for, say, $950,000 (!!!!) who then turned around and sold it to some rich asshole for… $9.1 million (!!!!!!!!).

What astonished me is that this didn’t happen back in the 18th century, when nobody knew nothin’ about art authentication;  no, this happened during a time when a paint’s age (and even the age of the canvas) could be determined by chemical- or spectrographic analysis.  Even when this was done and the forgery exposed, nobody did anything, because there were so many reputations at stake:  those of the collectors, of the art dealers, of the art critics, and so on.  Nobody likes to look a fool, but untold hundreds of people were.

I’m going to make one statement here that was never mentioned in the movie.  Frankly, the abstract style of art is such that I’m amazed that there haven’t been millions of forgeries, all done in middle-school art classes.  Think I’m joking?  Take a look:

(Longtime Readers will know of my utter loathing for Pollock’s art, for all sorts of aesthetic reasons, but the others are no less awful.)

Never mind the sneers you get when you say that your 4-year-old granddaughter could paint a Rothko;  maybe she can, and maybe she can’t — but a 70-year-old Chinese artist of no particular artistic merit could, and did:  fooling all the above pretentious assholes into going into raptures about this kind of dreck, and paying lots of moolah for it.

By the way, I have no problem with people owning copies — even great copies — of masterpieces.  I happen to have a dozen or so scattered around my house myself.  Here are some, for example:  Monet’s Blue House At Zaandam :

…Winslow Homer’s A Wall, Nassau :

…and Childe Hassam’s Lower Fifth Avenue :

The big — giant — difference between me and those rich suckers is that I paid about $80 (eighty) each for my copies (including shipping), and I cheerfully admit that they’re not originals.  (They come from iCanvas.com, by the way, and they’re created by machines using acrylic paints which look so like the original oils that it makes little difference.)

They’re also Impressionist paintings (none of that abstract splashing and daubing for me, no thank you).

I have to tell you that even if I won a huge lottery, there is no way I would ever pay millions for an original, no matter how much I may love the artist.

Especially when the “original” may turn out to be a fake, painted by a little old Chinese guy in Long Island.