A brilliant programmer / artist has created the ultimate random text generator. Much amusement for the nerdy, wordy, artsy geeks out there. Here is the site. Click on the words “this application” in the middle of the letter provided.
Here is my new bio.
Floozy Snortwrinkle makes conceptual artworks, performances, installations and mixed media artworks. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, Snortwrinkle tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface.
Her conceptual artworks demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By investigating language on a meta-level, she seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life.
Her works sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. By emphasising aesthetics, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her works focus on the inability of communication which is used to visualise reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in the work. Floozy Snortwrinkle currently lives and works in Dubrovnik.
One of my “skills” as a new step parent appears to be introducing sweet innocent children to important songs that they will reference, remember and possibly be damaged by for the rest of their natural lives. This song is on my agenda for this evening – anyone remember this classic?
Great big gobs of greasy grimey gopher guts
Chopped up monkey meat
Perculated birdie’s feet
French Fried eye balls, swimming in a pool of blood
Gee, I forgot my spoon
But I brought my straw
(Slurp) – Ah!
Folks who have been following along with Facebook updates will know that the lovely Knotty Girl’s mother is in hospital, ICU in fact, and struggling. Each day, it seems, brings some new piece of unhappy information or new medical complication of some kind. It is a sad, stressful time and we hope she can turn a corner soon.
Moments of brightness and levity can be few and far between, but there have been a couple. Here is one of my favs: KG and I were texting early on in this saga and, if memory serves, she had just been informed that her mother needed extensive, high-risk surgery. Details were exchanged and, having run out of helpful things to say, I texted, “Be strong!”
Or, I thought I did. Just before I hit “send”, I noted that my iPhone had helpfully corrected this to “Be Stroganoff!”
I left it in. It is a measure of my vegetarian girlfriend’s fortitude that she thought it was funny, too, even in this horrible moment.
So, I encourage my darling readers to adopt this as your rallying cry, in those moments where strength is needed, and humour helpful, simply … Be Stroganoff!
I received the following by e-mail from a Handbasket lurker, a.k.a. Katje’s Auntie:
I am forever amazed at the items that reveal themselves as the snow melts. This week has been a particularly rich experience since the snow melted so quickly that the volume of exposed materials was far greater than usual. Anyway, as we were walking (and sidestepping) I spotted a lemon timidly protruding from a snowbank at about the 3 foot level (can we time deposits like archaeologists?). It was bright enough to catch my attention. Fully 2/3 exposed, I had to have a closer look. The lemon was intact, blemish free, pleasantly plump. I couldn’t help but wonder how it got there. It was too far from the garbage can area of the lawn. It hardly seems the type of thing to jump out of someone’s grocery bag. And I can’t imagine one of the local kids losing it from their lunchbag. (maybe it’s something to do with global warming?)
So, I’m curious as to what’s the strangest thing you or your audience have come across this past week as the snow temporarily recedes? I remember the shoes/food items you photographed last year and can only wait to hear what treasures are discovered this week.
Temporarily recedes? Pshaw! This is spring, my friend!!! 😉
A quick snow melt does reveal lots and and we dog-walkers are front-line witnesses. I can’t say that what Freddie and I have been discovering is always pleasant. For example, there is now clear evidence that other dog owners are not nearly as diligent as some of us are about picking up poo. I don’t know how many times this week I’ve rescued Freddie’s, er, output while staring at many months worth of similar output in the same vicinity. One wonders in these moments if such diligence is worth the effort.
One of my hockey buddies commented the other day about a bicycle that is being slowly revealed from under a massive pile of snow on a street corner. The bike was chained to a street sign and then buried under months of actual fallen snow, topped by snow removal snow. As the snow has started to fade, the bicycle has emerged. It is one of these gorgeous new but old-fashioned “sit up and beg” style bikes with big fat white-walled tires, no gears and a snazzy orange paint job. My friend, a bike-lover, railed against the absentee owner of the bike. “Who would abandon such a beautiful bike to the elements? How irresponsible! If I could pick locks, I’d snag that bike, take it home, clean it up and love it like it deserves to be loved!” I’m thinking about taking bolt cutters to our next game in that neighbourhood.
A fellow walker and I were discussing the mysteries of buried snow treasures in the park the other day. She offered up a story about some winter camping she did a few years ago. A sudden thaw happened mid-trip. The campers decided to go for a hike around a lake on foot/snow-shoe. As they rounded a turn in the path and looked out at a secluded bay, they saw an antler protruding up out of the now-slushy ice surface. A moose had gotten trapped, and subsequently frozen, into the ice at the beginning of the winter.
Personally, I find these early thaws to offer some of the uglier times to live in downtown Toronto. Months worth of discarded wrappers, the aforementioned output, and cigarette butts suddenly appear and I find it almost embarrassing. Especially the cigarette butts which I find distasteful and disturbing at the best of times. I rounded a corner the other day to be confronted with literally thousands of butts on the ground in front of a men’s hostel. That is what it feels like to me, a confrontation. Or, more accurately, an affront. A visual assault. Blech.
What I remember, and what is missing from the urban experience of a quick thaw, is the smell of the earth thawing out. A soft warm breeze that carried the oddly comforting smell of old leaves, now almost humus, and that unmistakeable scent of the earth waking up. It is probably too soon for that now anyway, in spite of my enthusiasm for this thaw.
What I have been enjoying is the enthusiasm of our feathered friends for this weather. Birdsong is everywhere, including in the parking lot on campus. Given that the parking lot is my least favourite location at my place of employment, it is particularly lovely to be welcomed by happy active birds, chasing each other from tree to tree.
They should probably get all the activity in that they can muster … we still have most of February and all of March to weather. So to speak.
In case you missed it on FaceBook, here is a snippet and link to a wonderful tour of Weight Watchers Recipe Cards, circa 1974. These recipe cards, and most particularly the commentary provided by our tour guide, will have you in hysterics. Don the Depends … the Fluffy Mackerel Pudding represents, well, three words I wouldn’t have expected to see in the same sentence. Fluffy. Mackerel. Pudding. However, the one that has me clutching myself, repeatedly, is the commentary/photo for Chicken Liver Bake.
Weight
Watchers recipe cards from 1974
I found them while
helping my parents clean out their basement a few years ago.
They were neatly arranged in their own plastic file box. Plenty
of the dishes seemed normal enough, but as I flipped through
them, some of the recipes began to alarm me. And then I found
the card for the “
I fell over. Like
I Iaughed so hard I started coughing and I fell back on the floor
and I waved the card at my mom, who just rolled her eyes. “Can
I please have these? Please?” I begged. “What
do you want them for?” she asked. “To cook?” “No,”
I said. She let me have them. I think they might have been my
grandma’s, but she never copped to actually buying them. Nobody
else did, either.
Dehydrated onion
flakes are in almost everything here. Apparently Weight Watchers
dieticians depended heavily on dried onion flakes, and pimientos,
too.
They also had a
prop department that was clearly out of control. Oh, you’ll see.
