Legless love and spider love
Webless love and fragrant mud
Caked in birds, cased in words
I buried your hair in a bed of swords


Jeff McMillan, Cautionary Tale, 2005

Jeff McMillan is not a typical painter. In many ways, he is not a painter at all. For his first solo exhibition in Austria, the US-born, London-based artist presents a series of small-scale figurative paintings found in thrift stores and antiques markets around the world that he has dipped, literally, into a pool of oil paint. What persuades about this simple act is the precision with which the artist has decided to stop immersing the canvases in his large basins filled with bright pigment. In each painting, a wall of intense color rises or drops (depending on the orientation) to a quarter, a half, or more of the height of the picture. Strategically, it stops at an invisible line within the image, covering up details and transfiguring parts of a genre scene, landscape, or portrait, thus overturning its mysterious origin and inscribing a new meaning in it. (via artforum)

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

8. Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Another McCain economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, was riding shotgun aboard the gaffewagon.

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."

Apparently Mr. Holtz-Eakin was in a coma during the 2000 presidential election.

* In DC? Tonight at the Black Cat, The Caribbean, with The Jet Age. Doors at 8, show at 8:30. $8.

* Sarah Palin's flash cards.

* "Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable." -- Brian Eno