Buying New Shoes from Joan Miró in Silent Hill, Aged 22

What’s on my mind today? Certainly not succinct titling. At the moment I’m reeling from the discovery that Jill at Feministe is the same age as me. Personally I think that this is ridiculous. In the future I hope she will consider being older.

This morning I went on the modern mystical journey known as shoe shopping, where I bought two new pairs of shoes. I really like buying new shoes, but I don’t think that I like the actual shoe shopping bit very much. This is probably why I hadn’t been shoe shopping for two years.

This blog is probably going to be rather silly for the foreseeable future. For a start I have the scariest deadline in the course of my degree looming over me. Much as I might like to be posting seriously about all sorts of relevant and heated political stuff, I am perhaps more in the mood to be avoiding reality and writing comically unwieldy prose.

I should just post a couple of things that have garnered my interest. First, the advanced critics’ screening of Silent Hill was cancelled. Ominous black birds have been seen circling overhead, but I’m still going to go see it tomorrow. I am considering taking a pair of goggles, lest they try to peck out my eyes. Hopefully that will not turn out to be preferable to watching the movie.

Secondly, you may have noticed the Google logo change the other day celebrating the birthday of artist Joan Miró. I for one was very interested, especially since I’d never heard of him before. However the “Artists Rights Society” have objected to Google’s use of an image emulating Miró’s style (even though they have done similar logo changes for Escher and Van Gogh among others). Sunbelt Blog has a nice post on it. Above all else I have to wonder how exactly this is serving the interests of Miró’s estate.

Paperghost has written an angry defence of Google claiming that this kind of behaviour is against the spirit of art itself. And two consecutive comments in a thread he links to express two further opinions:

A fellow called CelticCowboy writes:

Google wasn't selling unauthorized Miro prints, it was paying tribute to an artist likely to be forgotten or unknown by younger generations.

*cough* Yes, those ignorant youths... *ahem* Another poster, dclowd9901, answers:

[C]ould it be possible that Miro's family simply didn't want Joan's work to be bastardized into something as corporate as Google?

Finally P.Z. Myers has a post here, which I find particularly amusing having recently been exposed for the first time to the idiocy of anti-contraception advocates. And that’s one hell of an ugly final sentence on my part.