Two Dishes But To One Table

Being Abstract is Something Profoundly Different from Being Vague

A computer programmer and a painter both with the same understanding of abstraction!

That's abstractionist Georgia OKeefe on the right.  Her great quote about abstraction is "Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. " 

Edsger Dijkstra quote on left is from Linfo.    For the photo on the right, I meant to put an example of GOK doing her abstract painting but how great was it to find an abstraction of the woman herself that proves the sentiment of her quote, above.  So we have instead Stiglitz taking the photo of her abstracted neck (from here).   A painting by O'Keefe at her abstract extreme is  here  inspired by a view from her window.

 

9-11 Google Referrals

Because I have NYC in my tag-cloud at the right of this page Two Dishes got a huge traffic spike on September 11th:

 

The "Music" that Last.FM knows I like

I have no secrets from the web server at www.last.fm; it uploads my iPod usage each week.  So I was amused but not surprised when the web page for Last serenaded me with a 3 minute clip of Nixon's Vietnam is Over speech from 1973.  Here's the web page, suggesting I might also enjoy similar artists, like Spiro Agnew for example, and asking me whether I would like to start a radio station called Richard Nixon Radio.

Off Broadway Review: Welcome to Lapsburgh

I ended up at the opening weekend of The Lapsburgh Layover only by the strong solicitation of a sidewalk barker earlier in the summer -- probably the best sidewalk promoter ever.


Less play than immersive dinner theater [though few in the audience ate the bizarre food] Welcome to Lapsburgh takes at least two surprising turns in the course of the evening.  First, in the 'Arrivals Area' on the way to our seats we had to pass through an immigration  & customs line  where the customs officer presided over a bag of siezed hand tools, handguns, handbags, a bag of marijuana, and a shrink-wrapped piano. 

Later, in the airport lounge the play itself, initially threatening to be a mildly amusing Guy Noir type of Garrison Keillor corny play, became very funny, proving itself closer to the skill of The Firesign Theater in writing and delivery.  There was also a later twist involving a plague of frogs that I won't reveal here.

The two scenes that made me feel like I got my money's 'worth  were Mickey with the bartender (right before he dies) and Mickey with Mr Bigshot Mayor (before he dies and after he dies, if that makes any sense -- see the play!).

It's a play with no neuroses or avarice.  The characters are silly but also have a simple wide-eyed sincerity that make you like all of them and so at the end of the night we left the theater feeling like we'd spent the evening with some interesting new third world Lapsburghian friends.

The only reason we knew about the play was that weeks before I had been given a flyer on the street in the Lower East Side during Fringe Festival and the flyer was so unusually shaped that for the rest of the evening I kept it and everyone kept commenting on it.  It looked just like a boarding pass for an airline.  At home the flyer got put up on the fridge where the boarding pass appearance commanded so much attention that we eventually bought tickets for the play.