Less than one hundred yards from my house

Even though the artist is friends with Sting and Robin Williams*,

I dig this painting by something called Stephen Hannock:












* per a cursory glance at the internet - maybe he's stopped liking them and hangs out with Adam Duritz, the singer for Maroon 5 and Tim Allen.

W.A.B.B.? (Would Andy Be Bummed?)

Was at the ye olde crafte shoppe on Sunday getting some picture frames for the last three itmes which needed to be framed (I told the Bride last night that, two years in, the house is almost habitable!). Saw this:














Wondered if Andy Warhol would be bummed or into this. I mean the use of one of his paintings to sell shite frames in a strip mall. Or would he be "Oh, oh! It's fabulous!"?

This is where it gets pathetic:

The one thing I really remembered, and that has stuck with me, was the 14-year old me seeing this thing and, as the band's train wends its way through Europe, being entranced by the views of suburban France out a train window...like, it's just dusk, and old Martin is looking out at the passing scenery and there is a brief view of a sort of train-track side cafe/station and the stuff around it. I can recall thinking "What are those people doing in those buildings on some French, autumnal [please, God!] night in 1982? Smoking, definitely. Deciding to divorce. Coming home from a day's work in a butcher's shop, with a stained apron folded under one arm!" This is how I remembered it, anyway.

Well, look!

Now, a couple of things:

1. This feeling described above is about the same as that evoked when in Hannah and Her Sisters, old Babs Hershey is walking on a sort of dock by the water and looks across at distant lights across the way...I always wondered what was going on where those lights were, only in a more New York/New Jersey way...imagine the daughter of the deli owner trying to get over a breakup, say.

2. If I were a real artist, I would take cell phone pictures of ALL the scenes from movies/tv that I could find that evoked this same wistfulness, then have some art kids PAINT these scenes in a hyper-realistic Gerhard Richter way (including requisite out-of-focusness and video strobing, etc) and exhibit them! You know I fucking should!

Art?

Was at a new local coffee shop and liked this sort-of 3D sculpture:

Thought it was just swell right up the point I read the title card that said: "Rasta Tunnel." Lame sauce!

Speaking, my parents did this painting in about 1962 and it hung at Aunt Nola's until she moved to Columbus in 2009. Oddly misshapen Amish kids! Shout it! Don did the whole thing, then Fran did the faces. The Bride was suitably mortified when it found its way home with me and tried to bury it under the limestone basement floor; however, Gabe and li'l Cait took pity and stuck it up in their swank digs, where it takes on a creepy John Waters-ish aspect. Dig!

Too much

A correspondent calls this "over the top":

"Stay afraid, America!" he says.

This is sort of Whitney biennial worthy, though:

and this: