Blue Beetle #26

Escrito por Jai Nitz
Ilustrado por Mike Norton y Trevor Scott
Rotulo por Rob Leigh
Coloro por Guy Major

One of the benchmarks for good cartooning is that it can tell a story without words. One of the hallmarks of the hallmarks of superhero comics is that they're essentially visual gibberish that can't be understood without words. So I was sort of curious to see how DC would handle Blue Beetle #26, an issue where 85% of the dialogue is in Spanish. Would it be a tour-de-force of cartooning that anyone could follow, or a mess of pin-ups and glamor shots that no one could follow?

Neither, as it turns out.

Now, Blue Beetle #26 has a very simple plot, and one that's pretty clearly communicated by the art. Jamie takes his girlfriend to a family reunion, spends some time talking to his mother and grandmother, flies off to go fight the Parasite, and beats him by hulking out somehow. All very straightforward. But the art is still a failure, unable to communicate overall context and tone to non-Spanish speakers. For discussion purposes, here's an early page where Jaime talks to two of his cousins:

Blue Beetle #26, p. 5

Now ask yourself, what's going on here? Obviously, we've got four people talking to each other, but what are they talking about? More importantly, how are they talking to each other? Is Jamie happy to see them, just being polite, or even condescending to them? Are his cousins angry, sad, jealous? If this were a Mexican film, I'd be able to pick up those emotional undercurrents from body language, line readings, even the mise en scene.

Now, I don't expect to the art to communicate everything - there are some concepts which are just too complex to be expressed exclusively in visual terms. For instance, let's say Jamie was being insulted by his cousins. I might never know whether they insulted his hair or his girlfriend or his political beliefs. But I should at least be able to tell that he was insulted.

In corporate comics, providing these cues is the responsibility of the artist, but it's a responsibility that's been abandoned because corporate comics are being created and developed by people who have little knowledge or respect for the craft of storytelling. Here, the fact that the an unfamiliar language merely exposes these structural weaknesses in the art.

To be fair to Mike Norton, he actually manages to put together a fight scene that has a nice ebb and flow to it. But the real highlight of this issue is Jamie's interaction with his girlfriend and his family, and his inability to inject life into these scenes dooms them from the start.

Tags: DC

Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975

at the National Portrait Gallery through May 26

The Smithsonian American Art Museum at the National Portrait Gallery is currently hosting a major exhibition of color field painting. It's a good exhibition, well worth your time, but I find myself more interested in how it's been presented curatorially.

Most exhibits of this nature tend to lead visitors by the nose via audio tours or extensive on-site documentation. "Color as Field" goes in the opposite direction - the works are presented as-is, with little in the way of contextual information. On one hand, I like this approach - it lets the work speak for itself and allows the viewer to develop his own critical faculties. But it's a strange approach to take for this exhibition. The general public is notoriously ambivalent towards abstraction, and especially this sort of minimalist, post-painterly abstraction. A few gallery cards and a more rigorous timeline might have helped win over some of the patrons I saw listlessly wandering from piece to piece.

Fortunately, there's plenty of sensuous work on hand by Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Gene Davis to win over even the most hardened heart. Hell, the exhibition is worth seeing just for the Morris works alone.

The American Federation of Arts has conducted a series of interviews with Larry Poons to help promote the exhibition. They make for some great viewing.

Photographs after the cut...

Tags: cheap irony, fine art, photography, Washington, DC

Turn Back the Clock

I went down to DC this weekend to visit my brother and to catch a game at shiny new Nationals Park. The theme for the day was a "Salute to the Negro Leagues" and so each time was wearing the colors of its local Negro League franchise instead of its regular uniforms. Pittsburgh was dressed as the Homestead Grays, and Washington was dressed as... the Homestead Grays. (There was a period where the Grays split their home games between Pittsburgh and DC.)

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
HOMESTEAD GRAYS	0	1	0	1	3	0	1	2	0	8	14	2
HOMESTEAD GRAYS	2	3	0	0	0	4	0	0	X	9	14	1

• I really like that the Nationals haven't sold the naming rights to their stadium. Nationals Park isn't the most original name, but it's succinct and rolls off the tongue a lot better than, say, "Citizens Bank Park."
• The stadium itself is lovely. Now if only they could do something about the ticket prices... (Hey, I'm from Pittsburgh, we're spoiled in that regard.)
• I was half-hoping that there'd be a diehard French Canadian fan in the front row bitterly yelling "Allez les Expos!" every time there was a rally. No dice.
• But there was a guy in front of us wearing a Kevin Young shirt, and it looked like it was in great condition, to boot. Wonder what was up with that?
• It was a bit disappointing to see Maholm get rocked so early, especially given his last performance. Then again, at times it looked like he was being backed up by the Keystone Kops on the field so it's not entirely his fault.
• They had some Negro Leaguers signing autographs during the game, including Mamie "Peanut" Johnson - a woman who used to pitch for the Indianapolis Clowns in the waning days of the Negro Leagues. Yay gender equality.
• During the Presidents Race, T.R. stopped at a street vendor's cart and was abnormally late getting on to the field. When he finally did show up, he was chasing the Pittsburgh Pierogis with a spork. Funny.

Photographs after the cut...

Tags: baseball, photography, Washington, DC

Before and After

Hellsing v1 & v8

I was at Borders the other day, and since they didn't have any of the new titles I was looking for, I decided to pick up the first volume of Kohta Hirano's Hellsing instead. Plot-wise, it was more or less what I expected - vampires hunting people, vampires hunting vampires, vampires fighting evil Catholics. But what caught my eye was the art.

Hellsing v1, p. 104-5

If you only had this volume to go on, you'd have to say that Hirano isn't a very good artist. A character's clothing and appearance might change wildly from panel to panel. Proportions are wrong - characters will have impossibly long arms, Modiglianiesqe necks, 48 teeth. Poses are tortured, with hands and fingers bending at unnatural angles. There's a tendency to use lots of fiddly non-descriptive details in place of clear drawing. The composition and storytelling are mediocre at best.

And yet, there's still something strangely compelling about it. A misproportioned, misplaced eye leaps out at you - but it can also make a picture creepy and chilling. The tortured poses may be overdone, but they're also extremely dynamic and energetic. The fiddly details may be unnecessary, but they also create an uneasy energy that permeates each page.

Truth be told, it reminded me of early Rob Liefeld, and I mean that as a compliment. He's quite clearly on to something that captivates your imagination, but he hasn't got all the pieces in place yet. At this point in his career, Hirano has an equal chance of developing into a compelling artist or degenerating into a fannish pile of bad habits.

So I went back to the bookstore to pick up a copy of the latest volume, just to see how his style had changed in the intervening years. As volume 8 starts, London has apparently be turned into a battleground between Protestant vampires, Catholic crusaders, and Nazi werewolves. It's mostly gibberish, and almost impossible to follow. But how about the art?

Hellsing v8, p. 162-3

Well, after seven years, Hirano hasn't developed into a "compelling artist" - but neither has he degenerated into a "fannish pile of bad habits." If anything, he's moved sideways.

In some ways, he's improved. His character designs are largely consistent. His characters actually seem to exist in three-dimensional environments. The tortured poses have been replaced with more realistic foreshortening. The random line weights of the earlier volumes have been replaced with a more expressionistic inking style that helps lend the drawings weight and solidity.

In other ways, though, he's degenerated. The storytelling is still impossible to follow. Characters may be solid, but they also seem stiff and less dynamic. Proportions are still off in noticeable ways. Fiddly litle details abound, and they still don't add anything to the overall drawings.

More than anything else, volume 8 of Hellsing reminds me of medieval German woodcuts - obviously done with great technical skill and lavished with great detail, but stiff and unconvincing nonetheless.

Sadly, the way Hirano develops between these volumes doesn't interest me as a fellow artist. I'd much rather deal with the loose, haphazard potentialities of the first volume than the stiff realities of the final volume.

On the subject of translation...

The translated Hellsing has some of the most obvious cultural mistakes I've ever seen in a manga, including...

"The Protestant Church." You will encounter this phrase over and over and over again through Hellsing. And yet, no one ever refers to themselves in real life as a Protestant - they're Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and so on. Clearly, Hirano has done enough homework to know that England is not a Catholic country - but not enough to know that "Protestant" is a category and not an actual religion.

"Sir" Integra Hellsing. Of course, a female peer would be "Dame" Integra Hellsing.

The most awful Scottish accent you'll ever see. Seriously, it makes Chris Claremont's worst attempts at dialect read like the Queen's English. Half the time I just try to guess what Father Anderson's said from the way the other characters respond to it.

Now, it wouldn't be too difficult to go through the script and replace "Protestant" with "Anglican", replace "Sir" with "Dame", and tone down the accent, but this raises the question - is it more important to be a literal translation of the original work, or to capture its spirit? Personally, I'm a big fan of cleaning up the rough edges, especially when they don't affect the plot all that much. But a case could be made for both, and I'm kind of curious as to where you would draw the line.

Tags: manga

If they don't win, it's the same...

I'll be backfilling my Annihilation entries over the next day or two, but until then...

Friday, April 25th

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES	2	0	2	2	0	0	0	0	0	6	10	0
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	0	0	0	3	2	0	0	0	0	5	8	0

Saturday, April 26th

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES	5	1	0	0	0	2	0	0	0	8	9	1
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	0	0	2	0	0	0	1	1	0	4	8	3

Sunday, April 27th

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	2	0
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	1	0	0	1	2	1	0	0	X	5	12	0

Man, let me tell you, Paul Maholm throwing a two-hit complete game really helped take the sting out of seeing Matt Morris put on one of the worst pitching performances I've ever seen in the majors. Having Nate McClouth bang two homers right over my head helped too.

• When announcing the Phillies' line-up they used the theme music from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (They usually use the "Imperial March" from Star Wars).
• There were an awful lot of Philadelphia fans at the stadium all weekend - maybe a quarter to a third of the fans in the stands were cheering for the Phillies. Strangely, they were all well-behaved, which seems odd for Phillies fans.
• I hate to say it, but every now and then it really looks like Jason Bay is dogging it in left field. I don't necessarily think he needs to be sliding and diving at every ball but it wouldn't hurt for him to show a little more hustle than he usually does.
• Riding the T after the Friday game was nuts. The Pirates and Pens game let out not too long after each other, and then you had additional traffic from people who'd been hanging around after the Gallery Crawl and the other performances going on in the Cultural District. Game was over at 10:00, and I didn't get home until almost midnight.
• The Pirates have great video packages and scoreboard entertainment. And yet, sometimes I find myself wondering how many minor league scouts they could hire if they cut out all that crap.
• So Taguchi has an enormous face. Really. It takes up way too much of his head.
• Got my first sunburn of the year on Sunday. Usually I get that during the home opener but it just hasn't been bright enough until today.

Photographs after the cut...

Tags: baseball, photography, Pittsburgh

Annihilation: Conquest

Wraith #1-4

Written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach
Illustrated by Kyle Hotz
Colored by Gina Going
Lettered by Cory Petit
Cover art by Clint Langley

On the edge of Kree space an entire Phalanx armada is defeated by a single man with no name. This mysterious stranger is possessed by the Exolon, alien parasites that feed on his soul and grant him strange powers that the techno-organic alients just can't cope with. Will the Phalanx be destroyed by this unholy wraith, or will his secrets be discovered their newest servant - Ronan the Accuser?

Wraith is a bit of a mixed bag. I like the character - essentially a sci-fi version of "The Man With No Name" with some neat slithery visuals - but revealing most of his origins and resolving all of his long-term goals in his first appearance sort of ruins his uniqueness and long-term viability. The story is also a bit rushed, with plot points rushed out, characters not given sufficient space to develop, and expository speeches taking the place of well-timed reveals.

It's not a good sign that major continuity problems start to pop up in the first miniseries. Assimilation by the Phalanx is presented as a process that takes days, if not weeks or months and can be shut off by the destruction of an outside entity, when in the prologue (and previous Technarchy appearances) it's a near-instantaneous infection that can be transmitted by touch and can only be thrown off from within. Hala appears to be the only world that's been direclty conquered by the Phalanx, when the prologue makes their influence clearly felt across the entire Kree galaxy. Large swaths of the population appear to be uninfected, though the prologue also clearly showed huge masses of infected Kree. The Supreme Intelligence, killed off at the end of Annihilation, is brought back to life just so he could be killed again.

Plus, there are some weird mystic things going on here that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Sure, Marvel's cosmic characters have always had a bit of a mystic side to them, but Wraith features creatures that feast on souls, vllains who try to conquer the universe from the "psychic plane" and a hero who absorbs the "Kree godhead" into himself. It feels less like science fiction and more like Warhammer 40K.

On the plus side, I like the concept of "selection," where the Phalanx allow assimilated creatures a degree of autonomy that increases their effectiveness as tools. It allows the villains to have a degree of individuality that the Technarchy really haven't had in previous appearances. It's half collaboration and half enslavement, which raises the question of where the Select's true loyalties lie. It also raises some additional questions about why the Phalanx are acting differently than usual...

And I really like the work Kyle Hotz is doing here. He's able to make Exolon and the Phalanx seem genuinely alien and unsettling. Plus, he's got a weird sort of Jack Davis thing going on which I enjoy. Plus, he's an effective storyteller.

Annihilation: Conquest - Wraith #1, p. 19

This is a simple but effective way to make a talking heads sequence more interesting. Typically, when drawing a face, it's best to leave more space in front of the eyes than behind them. It prevents things from feeling claustrophobic or alienating. Hotz does the opposite here, to good effect as the odd compositions help drive home the mutual suspicion between Wraith and Ra-Venn.

While I'm at it, here's an annoying technique I've seen in a lot of Marvel comics lately...

Annihilation: Conquest - Wraith #3, p. 8

A scene like this cries out for a sound effect, but there isn't really any way to slap a normal sound effect over top of the picture witout obliterating the original art, so they use the outline sound effect. You get your sound effect, and you can still see the art through it. Problem solved, right? Except the sound effect is barely readable. And those extra lines run counter to the shapes and thrust of the original image, which totally torpedoes the image comprhenension.

Now, this isn't a terrible technique - it actually works for simpler panels where a solid sound effect would still obscure important parts of the image. But the letterers have a bad habit of slapping it on top of complicated images like this one. Of course, if the original art left room for sound effects, the letters wouldn't have to resort to tricks like this...

Tags: Annihilation: Conquest, Marvel

Annihilation: Conquest

Prologue

Written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Illustrated by Mike Perkins
Colored by Guru EFX
Lettered by Cory Petit
Cover art by Aleksi Briclot

The original Annihilation was one of the few enjoyable comics that Marvel has released in the last few years. It was off the editorial radar and featured characters the licensing department honestly didn't care about - which gave the creators free reign to screw around with the status quo in a way that even Marvel's golden boys can't. The results were genuinely interesting, a little bit exhilarating, and blissfully liberated from the continuity quagmire of Marvel's Earth-bound heroes. And it sold pretty well, too, so now we have a sequel. Of course this time, editorial and licensing are paying attention, so the creators weren't going to have the same sort of free reign they had before, but if the new series is half as good as the original it'd still be worth checking out.

So is Annihilation: Conquest any good? Let's find out.

This prologue starts off by showing us the post-Annihilation state of the galaxy by through the eyes of two protagonists. On one side we have Phyla-Vell, who's helping the Priests of Pama distribute aid to to the downtrodden and needy. Thing is, she's on a backwater world that's not representative of the galaxy at large (and for that matter the temple she's supposed to be rebuilding doesn't seem to be damaged at all). On the other side we've got Star-Lord, who's helping the Kree upgrade their ruined defensive grid. Thing is, he's on Hala, which seems to have been completely untouched by the Annihilation Wave. Effectively, Abnett and Lanning are telling us the galaxy is in ruins rather than showing us. Strangely, their first issue of Nova did a much better job of setting the stage by showing us a harried Nova, hopping from one bombed-out planet to the next, putting out fires as fast as he could in the hopes that they wouldn't spread.

Anyway, back on Hala, Star-Lord has made a deal to update the Kree War-Net with Space Knight technology. Unfortunately, the Galadorians prove to be less than trustworthy, and Sentries start to run amok, destroying ships in orbit and bulding a big tower that somehow manages to seal off all of Kree space from the rest of the universe. One Sentry even makes it to the backwater planet that Phyla is living on and attacks her.¹ As Phyla defeats the Sentry and gets a mystic vision commanding her to seek out "Kree savior," Star-Lord gets pushed off a skyscraper and the true villain stands revealed as the techno-organic Phalanx. Who look a lot different, and yet somehow familiar.

This part of Conquest actually works pretty well. There's some effective confusion as the main characters try to figure out just what's going on. There's a nice bit of misdirection with the Galadorians, and the closing sequence will be genuinely shocking to new readers but containis enough clues to tip off long-time readers. There's a definite direction - Phyla needs to go find the "savior" before the rest of the empire is assimilated. There are even a few mysteries - who's sending these visions to Phyla? Why are the Phalanx deviating from their usual M.O.?³

No, it's not Shakespeare, or even Lost. But it's enjoyable enough for disposable entertainment and intriguing enough to bring you back for more.

As for the art... well, you're going to notice a common thread over the next couple of days, which is that I think the artists are tremendous draftsmen and terrible storytellers.⁴ Here's a good example from the beginning of Prologue.

Annihilation: Conquest - Prologue p. 2

Now, the art team has rendered the holy living heck out of that temple. The perspective is spot on, and the inking and coloring help give the building substantial weight and volume. The coloring is suitably out-of-this world, soft and familiar yet alien, and the added detail doesn't overwhelm the pencils. There are lots of little details and imperfections that help particularize the structure - heck, there are even little snow shovels crammed off into one corner, though you can't see them at this size - and yet there's not so much detail that you're overwhelmed by it. The figures actually feel like they're standing in the space instead of just floating over top of it.

And yet this spectacular drawing is situated in the lower left-hand corner of an awkward two-page spread with no clear focal point. And that's the pattern the book follows - every time Perkins wows me with his drafstmanship he makes some awful storytelling decisions that confuse me. Here's another example from near the end of the book.

Annihilation: Conquest - Prologue p. 39

I get what that bottom tier is trying to do - our camera view remains unchanged as Star Lord plummets out of a window to his doom. But it doesn't read well, for a few reasons. First, The diagonal panels are cut at weird angles that make them seem strange rather than dynamic. The brown gutters don't sufficiently separate the individual panels. The shattered struts complicate things, because they're almost the same color as the gutters and run counter to the diagonal of the panel, which further confuses things. And there are just too many panels - you could probably get the same effect with three panels instead of five.

(Interestingly, that bottom tier works at better at screen resolution than it does at actual size, because there's less room to get lost in the details.)

1. I understand that space opera often depends on unrealistic superluminal communication, but having a Sentry a) instantly show up on a planet that the Kree empire has supposedly abandoned and b) immediately attack the only two named characters on said planet is just lazy writing.²
2. Strangely, though, I don't have a problem with the equally-unrealistic concept of a single spire instantly generating a completely impenetrable force field capable of sealing off a galaxy light-years across, which would require not only superluminal communications but also more power than a single star could possibly generate.
3. The Phalanx's usual M.O.: a) Assimilate everything in sight. b) Build Babel Spire. c) Get eaten.
4. Which is actually pretty close to the Marvel house style these days - beautifully drawn, totally unreadable.

Tags: Annihilation: Conquest, Marvel

Random Thoughts

Thought #17

I'm always sort of surprised that there's not more intergender competition in sports. While men and women aren't physically equal, there's a lot of overlap in their abilities, and a lot of low-contact sports that reward both power and finesse. While I don't expect to see men and women facing off on the gridiron any time soon, I can't think of a single good reason why they don't regularly compete in tennis and golf. Or baseball.

I'm always surprised that there aren't more women in baseball at any level. Yes, they may not be capable of developing the same upper body strength as their male counterparts, but speed, finesse, and instinct are also a large part of baseball and there's nothing stopping women from having any of those qualities. In some ways, they're in a similar position to Asian players, who used to be dismissed as no-power shrimps. And conceivably, they could break in the same way as Asian players - by proving their value as pitchers before producing a few outstanding position players. So why haven't they?

I blame softball.

Asian players may face an uphill climb, but at least they're playing the same game as the rest of the world. Most women, on the other hand, wind up going into fast pitch softball - bigger balls, under-arm throwing motions, smaller fields, shorter games. So right from the bat a female pitcher is automatically a conversion project, and, Rick Ankiel aside, those almost never pan out. So any break-through female player would have to be a freak case - someone who doesn't give up on baseball after Little League, who keeps going through high school and maybe college in spite of some tough opposition, and who has all the tools to catch they eye of some chauvinistic major-league scout.

I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.

Thought #18

I somehow wound up with a Canadian quarter today. Before, when this happened, I'd usually try to see if I could trick a vending machine into taking it, or set it aside to buy a newspaper with next time I wound up in Canada. Today, I found myself wondering if I could buy something cheap with it and demand some change.

Thought #19

I am apparently the Death of Headphones. Last year I went through ten sets - the longest of which lasted just over two months, and the shortest of which lasted just under a week. I managed to yank wires out, get wires wrapped around doorknobs and almost strangle myself in the process, dunk earpieces in coffee, roll earbuds over with an office chair, and even bend the plug. So in a way I'm glad that I just managed to make a pair of headphones last nearly four months.

Thought #20

One of the most wonderful times of day is the hour before dawn, when all the birds are out and about claiming their territory. I've been waking up early the last several days, and I've spent a few minutes just sitting there listening to the birdsong as I drink my coffee. It's just beautiful.

Tags: baseball, random thoughts

Quick Hits

Okay. Here's a quick attempt to clear a small pile of paperbacks off my desk. They're in the order from least-liked to most liked, if you care.

Kon Kon Kokon

Wild Ones

Stand-By Youth

The Palette of 12 Secret Colors

Tags: manga

And Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Program

Sorry to drop of the face of the earth there. My brother was in town last week, performing at the Pittsburgh Funny Bone, and a lot of this week was spent either whipping my apartment into shape for his visit or hanging out with him when he had a free moment.

The Mattress Factory

On Saturday, we'd originally planned to go visit Fort Necessity, but the (mildly) inclement weather forced us to change our plans. Instead we decided to go visit the Mattress Factory, since my brother had never been there. And, as much as I hate to say it, I haven't been to the Mattress Factory in over a decade - not since they first installed Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Dots Mirrored Room and Repetitive Vision - so another visit was long overdue.

On our way to the museum, we were wowed by Huang Xiang's "House Poem", which is made all the more memorable for being located in the middle of an ordinary residential zone. Alas, I only had my point-and-shoot on me so I couldn't get a great shot...

Most of the main building was off limits so they could install the upcoming "Inner and Outer Space" exhibition, but the permanent collection was still on display and it's well-worth checking out. My brother and I were particularly impressed by the work of James Turrell, whose work was instantly accessible and entertaining, but raised fascinating questions about perception and presentation that kept us discussing his work for hours. It's hard to imagine now that we spent 25 minutes sitting in a pitch black room, trying to see if we could eventually perceive the difference between reality and bio-optical phenomena caused by the near-total darkness.

There was also a temporary exhibit on display at 1414 Monterey.

Gestures: Illustrations of Catastrophe and Remote Times

at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh through May 11

Despite the grandiose title (and the nonsensical assertions of an essay by the guest curator), there's nothing particularly apocalyptic, visionary, or metaphorical about the work on display in this exhibition. Truth be told, it's just an excuse to spotlight work by Pittsburgh-based installation and performance artists - and there's nothing wrong with that.

Much of the work on display seems facile but fleeting. Fabrizio Gerbino's lead-coated wooden objects bring to mind the aesthetic of Scandinavian, design divorced from form-follows-function considerations; Jenny Lee manages to playfully combine Aztec and Scottish motifs; Ladyboy's "wall drawing" of fluorescent tape reminds one of Jim Lambie having a '80s flashback; John Carson's photos of car accidents reveal his highly-developed design sense. And yet, none of these works really seems to grab a hold of the psyche or beg for further interpretation, making them momentary pleasures at best.

A few of the works on display feel like overblown art school projects. Christiane Leach and the members of Black Moth Super Rainbow present installations that reveal a highly developed aesthetic but also one that completely fails to communicate with the viewer. Michael Ferrucci's elaborate tableau is about as subtle as a bag of hammers.

The exhibition does feature two works which stand out as exceptional. Jennifer Howson's "lost" features tiny Fisher Price people wandering in a world constructed from meticulously painted bowling pins, and features an appealing design-y aesthetic as well as several repeating motifs that beg for further consideration. Laurie Mancuso's "Aging a Decaying Mill Town" turns one of the rooms at 1414 Monterey into a rotting husk composed entirely of paint, a technical masterpiece that brings to minds questions of perception vs. reality.

The success of those two works sparked a vigorous discussion on our drive home. Increasingly, artists are trying to present ideas that are just too complex to be communicated dthrough purely visual means. Many works are dependent on highly personal symbolism and motifs that require a detailed knowledge of the artist's history and thought processes to unscramble. It strikes me, then, that one of the most valuable criteria you can use to judge a work of contemporary art is its ability to inspire a disinterested viewer who knows nothing about the artist and his work to learn more.

Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.

Then again, when I got home yesterday I googled "Jennifer Howson" and "Laurie Mancuso," not "Fabrizio Gerbino" or "Black Moth Super Rainbow." Make of that what you will.

Cincinnati Reds vs. Pitsburgh Pirates

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
CINCINNATI REDS	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	1	6	0
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	0	1	1	0	0	3	4	0	X	9	9	1

This wound up being a quick game in spite of a brief rain delay at the beginning. The rain kept coming down throughout the game, but it never really amounted to more than a drizzle - just enough to dampen your spirits without dampening your shirt. Reds rookie phenom Johnny Cueto gave up his first walk of the year, but still looked pretty sharp. The Pirates had some tense moments but for once they weren't overwhelmed by them and made the most out of the hits they got. Good times were had by all.

I'd also like to give some respect to the Reds fans who were seated in the row behind us. They had fun heckling the players on the field, but they clearly knew their baseball, they weren't obnoxious about it, and they kept it clean in front of the kids. They were the sort of bleacher bums every stadium needs more of.

One Final Photo

This is the current state of the new offices/condos going up at Fifth and Liberty. I like the way that the elevator shafts tower over the rest of the construction like some sort of grim watchtower or gun emplacement. Strangely, I don't think that's what the architects were going for.

Tags: baseball, fine art, photography, Pittsburgh