Washington Post, By Jeremy Borden, May 25

Woodbridge, VA - Before she was 2, her mother recalls, Lori Anne Madison was reading her first book — Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop.” At age 3, she competed in her first spelling bee.

Now 6, Lori Anne is the youngest contestant on record to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Her ticket to the competition that begins Tuesday was the word “vaquero,” meaning cowboy, which she spelled correctly to win the Prince William County bee.

It will get tougher onstage at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center when the home-schooled girl from Woodbridge faces 277 opponents, most of whom are at least twice her age. Last year, the winning word was “cymotrichous,” which means having wavy hair. The previous winner spelled “stromuhr,” which is a medical instrument.

But Speller 269, who will compete for $30,000, among other prizes, reports that she isn’t particularly nervous and isn’t cramming.

ART HANDLERS

So I was in New York City last weekend to play a jazz gig (I'm a drummer) and a friend took me into Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to show me two famous sculptures: Fernando Botero's "Adam" and "Eve," which are 12 feet tall, naked, and massively, bulbously erotic in Botero's style. Turns out, though, that Adam's protruding penis looks way more worn than the rest of him -- because it has become popular for passersby to grab his johnson and pose for photos. Some say it's good luck, although I'm guessing it has more to do with plain old sex play. A similar thing might have happened with the companion Eve statue except that her breasts are beyond the reach of anyone who doesn't play in the NBA. (Interesting to ponder why a woman statue's vulva does not attract public fondling in the way a penis does.) Anyway, my quick photo of a woman posing with penis in hand (guys do it, too, by the way) was out of focus, so above is a NY Post photo of the oft-repeated ritual act. Full pics of both the Adam and Eve sculptures are after the jump.

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The incomparable Annie Lennox.

Join in with your Saturday sounds.

The results of this poll sort of reflect my own feelings and experiences with Facebook:

According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.

While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.

Adrienne Rich died March 27th. Her righteously deep-sea impact as a poet is bottomless. Here is one of the poems that made her famous for breaking through silences about gender, among other things.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

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The song in my head today is, in my opinion, one of the best blues-rock pieces ever. Play it loud.

Open Thread: post news, views and especially the song in your head this weekend.

The sudden death last month of American landscape artist Thomas Kinkade, at age 54, left the art world perplexed at the loss of one of its most ridiculed yet successful practitioners. A coroner’s report released yesterday showed that Kinkade died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and the anti-anxiety drug Valium. His brother’s response to this report indicated that Kinkade suffered from alcoholism, and depression over his divorce, substantial financial problems, and the incessant criticism of his art by professionals.

This last point is rather surprising, since throughout his career Kinkade showed scorn for the critics, and claimed to be crying all the way to the bank. Apparently all those millions of dollars he made mass-producing his art didn’t really assuage his inner need for critical approbation. Or, to put this another way, maybe it really was about the art after all. His art did have an immediate emotional pull, and had he chosen just to do oil paintings without all the reproductions and marketing hype, the emotional pull would still be there. The fact that critics didn’t like the nature of that emotional connection to the viewer – that it was too coy, too 19th century, too deliberate – apparently offended Thomas Kinkade. After all, he said, he was only giving the public what it wanted.

PHOTOS FROM THE 2012 BALTIMORE KINETIC SCULPTURE RACE

It's back. The 2012 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race – a 15-mile race of human-powered sculptures over a course of streets, water, and mud and sand pits – was Saturday. Here are photos from the race website, where you'll find more pics as well as a link to additional photos uploaded by spectators. I've also posted more photos after the jump.

"The 1%"

"Lickety Split"

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The song in my head today. Enjoy.

Post 'em if you got 'em.

BLACK MOSES BARBIE

What if Harriet Tubman were marketed as a Barbie? What if Ken and another Barbie were marketed as escaped Barbie slaves she was leading to freedom? What would the TV commercial look like? And what would it mean? Watch and see. Here is the first in a series of 3 "Black Moses Barbie" mock commercials by filmmaker, artist, and social activist Pierre Bennu. (Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Bennu, who lives in my town of Baltimore.)

What is your favorite Willie song?

The song in my head today is possibly the greatest of all nerd anthems.

The New York Times, By Stanley Fish, April 23

Early on in his new book, “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University quotes the economist Richard Vedder and the former university president William Brody to the effect that little has changed in higher education despite enormous changes in technology, demographics, funding models, and student habits and attitudes. Vedder notes that “with the possible exception of prostitution, teaching is the only profession that has had absolutely no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.” Brody is less wry, but the point is the same: “If you went to a [college] class circa 1900, and you went today, it would look exactly the same.”

In many of the books on higher education now flooding the market, statements like those would be preliminary either to a denial of the point (everything is not the same; here are the new things we’re doing), or to an affirmation of it followed by detailed recommendations (here’s what we should do to catch up). Delbanco, however, not only accepts the fact that little has changed in the classroom — “most of what we see in the past looks a lot like the present” — he celebrates it in the course of answering his title’s question. College, he tells us, “is a hedge against utilitarian values” that “slakes the human craving for contacts with works of art that somehow register one’s longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself.”

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the central public library in downtown Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement. – Joseph Ross

I'll add here that Emmett Till wasn't just beaten. He was tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. I'll also add that a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

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I've got a special treat for y'all this weekend. The complete Pink Floyd "Pulse" live concert. Enjoy.

What to say about Dick Clark that hasn't been echoed and amplified over the past 60 years.

If The Ed Sullivan Show was the major leagues of rock and roll, then Dick Clark's American Bandstand was the entry draft. And in many ways, his was the better show for musicphiles.

Not that his taste was perfect: in 1963, he was offered the American rights to The Beatles' music and turned it down, saying they'd never amount to much. In case you were wondering why the Beatles never appeared on AB except in videos and a solitary taped telephone interview, that's why. Heck, even She Loves You scored badly on his segment Rate-A-Record, but it was undanceable, to be sure.

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU CROSS A POEM WITH GUNTER GRASS, DAVE EGGERS, GERMANY, ISRAEL, AND IRAN?

This: Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the Israeli regime, since its birth, has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand. (Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.) Further, Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned his shame and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obediently self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in Israeli policy. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

The full text of Grass's poem is after the jump.

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BAD HEMINGWAY! BAD AUSTEN! BAD FAULKNER!

I knew there was a Bad Faulkner contest. I took second place in it one year. But I never knew until I looked that there were also Bad Hemingway and Bad Austen contests. And God knows what others. The idea is always the same: to do the best possible awful parody of the style of The Master. It's an honor, really, for an artist to have such an idiosyncratic style that people will compete to try to outdo it. Faulkner has always been one of my writer gods, and spoofing him is one hell of a party. I virtually never quote my own work in this space, but in this case it might amuse you. Here is my second-place-winning Bad Faulkner entry from way back in 1993, a parody of his novella The Bear:

The Hare

There was just the man this time, not the dog too, it of ears flopping and incongruous, howling in the unrequited fervor of one who must hunt and who must fail, the hound’s voice doomed but immutable in its comical inveterate reverberation, lost on each hunt in a forest of unseen laughter, ever thwarted and outdone before its frantic task but never, nonetheless, possessed to draw wisdom from its collaboration in its own caricature; not the dog too but just the man, Elmer, the hunter, bearing his rifle in a ritual older than any hanging moss or serpentine sycamore seeming to loom in the unreal half light of these impossible woods, older even than the old man himself, known only as Mel throughout the steaming conformations of this wilderness, his (the old man Mel’s) true hidden self a blank, forever incarnate in a voice said by legend to be that of this land and all of the creatures within it;

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Apostoli Fotiadis | Athens | Apr 9

IPS - The broken display cases at Greece’s Museum of Olympia, the site where the first Olympic Games were held thousand of years ago, have stunned members of the Archaeological Service who have been registering a stream of missing cultural artefacts.

Despina Koutsouba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), says treasure dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods has disappeared from the museum, including "a golden ring stamp, copper sculptures from the eighth century BC, coins and clay vases".

The burglaries in the National and Municipal Galleries during February, as well as the armed robbery at the Museum in Olympia on Mar. 5, have exposed weaknesses in the protection of cultural heritage sites around the country, made worse by the so-called austerity programme that is slashing all national public service budgets.

To add insult to injury, the Greek Minister of Culture has decided to cut funding for museum security by 20 percent. According to a new law, the Greek government is also planning personnel cuts of 30-50 percent at the Ministry of Culture.

Some of my favorite found art:



Parking lot at a highway rest stop



Wall outside the employee break room at a big-box store

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Toulouse, France | March 31

RFI - Over 20,000 people demonstrated in the south-western French city of Toulouse in defence of the local language, Occitan, on Saturday. Supporters of Socialist François Hollande pledged that he would act to endorse Europe-wide actions in defence of regional languages if he becomes president in May.

Green presidential candidate Eva Joly and MEP José Bové joined the demonstrators, as did the Socialists Senate president Jean-Pierre Bel and Toulouse mayor Pierre Cohen.

“In many places regional languages are threatened,” Joly said, calling for them to be taught in junior schools.

A great philosopher once wrote: "Naughty naughty very naughty".

The song in my head this morning is the quirky classic by the Shamen. What a fun way to begin the weekend.

Got a song in your head? Post it in comments. Also - open thread.