Category Archives: art

science: cocaine-fueled Hollywood-quantum matchup?

Posted on 2021-01-09 by skierpage

Don’t you love those Hollywood-excess parties, where Spiros Michalakis (research professor and manager of outreach at Caltech) is doing cocaine with a bunch of industry heavyweights and remarks “I have a lot of grant money from the National Science Foundation … Continue reading →

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computers generating art

Posted on 2020-06-19 by skierpage

First came text GPT-2 and other AI (Artificial Intelligence) Transformer models are impressive. After you hand the AI an enormous corpus of text, you give it some text and it continues, generating character after character that make up recognizable, even … Continue reading →

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Hamilton musical beyond outstanding

Posted on 2019-08-30 by skierpage

Before seeing “Hamilton” I listened to its soundtrack while reading through most of its lyrics and some of the excellent annotations on the Genius site, stopping before I learned too many of the reveals in Act 2. So I knew … Continue reading →

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art: Jhane Barnes inspires

Posted on 2019-01-18 by skierpage

I’ll pull out a Jhane Barnes shirt I haven’t worn in a while and I’m Ricky Fitts in American Beauty: “I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it.” (This … Continue reading →

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art: the greatest walks away from her canvas

Posted on 2013-08-03 by skierpage

This is like Morris Louis, Agnes Martin, or Piet Mondrian putting away their brushes. (And Jhane Barnes is way better at geometric abstraction than every capital ‘A’ artist who’s practiced it.) Jhane Barnes’ blog post is frank and clear, in … Continue reading →

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a retrospective as Grand Theft Auto V nears

Posted on 2012-10-28 by skierpage

The approach of Grand Theft Auto V makes me reflect on the series. Highest and purest style: GTA: Vice City Ridiculously gargantuan sandbox: GTA: San Andreas[*] Best damn radio patter: GTA: Liberty City Stories (Dan Houser and Lazlow’s finest moments) … Continue reading →

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Anthony Lane, funniest writer at The New Yorker (more!)

Posted on 2012-05-01 by skierpage

Irrepressibly droll. On 20-kilometer walk competitors at the Beijing Olympics: They will continue to propel themselves, year in, year out, as if learning to moonwalk too soon after a hip replacement. On Yoda  (Space Case, “Star Wars: Episode III”): Also, … Continue reading →

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architecture: fixing SFMOMA

Posted on 2012-01-09 by skierpage

It looks like up-and-coming starchitects Snøhetta have figured out how to fix the bad Mario Botta design with their massive planned expansion. They junk that stupid ugly staircase peering out on the cheap siding lining the dull box of the original atrium.
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movies: recent Woody Allen

Posted on 2011-08-19 by skierpage

Woody Allen’s recent Midnight in Paris is a fun trifle, stroking the audience’s ego with its 1920s Paris fantasy imagined by an intellectually lightweight author. Literally nothing’s at stake in this well-fed easygoing fantasy. It’s an echo of the far … Continue reading →

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art: Deborah Butterfield K.O.s AbEx at ART MRKT

Posted on 2011-05-23 by skierpage

It was interesting to go to ART MRKT and see the work that high-end galleries and organizations pay to present. I couldn’t discern any theme to it all. One gallery was hawking Damien Hirst prints, such as a 2-D diamond-dusted … Continue reading →

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