Dear y’all,

I’ve posted some review problems in the Documentz tab. The solutions to hw 10 are also there. Also, I have posted a drawing of a giant squid battling a sperm whale, with a couple of sharks swimming about nearby. Do with that what you will.

I will go over some of the review problems on Tuesday, but bring any other questions or concerns you have about any of the material from this part of the course. If we have extra time I’ll probably just rap the first verse from “Get Down” by Nas, so come prepared to prevent that eventuality.

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Speaking of squids and whales, Noah Baumbach’s film The Squid and the Whale is a pretty great film from 2005 about a family in 1980s Brooklyn going through a divorce. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels play the parents, and Jesse Eisenberg has one of his first big roles as a pretentious teenager (and stand-in for the writer-director, who based the story on his own experience). It’s quite a funny movie, but also rather sad. Daniels plays the arrogant intellectual very well (as exemplified in these scenes), and the two sons emulate him in different ways, to their detriment.

I mentioned the Nigerian musician William Onyeabor today in class; he gets awfully funky. Another funky dude I mentioned was David Byrne, through whose label Luaka Bop the compilation album Who Is William Onyeabor? was released. Byrne used to wear an extra-funky big suit:

He wore it in the great concert film Stop Making Sense, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, who won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs and also directed Philadelphia. One time I invited Demme over to my crib for dinner and I made steamed spaghetti with black beans and rhubarb purée. It was terrible, but luckily I had some Milk Duds in the freezer so we just ate those instead.

Richard Serra makes some of the biggest and coolest sculptures in the game. He has a new sculpture in the Qatari desert, which isn’t surprising when you think about how ridiculously wealthy Qatar is. Apparently the Qatari Museums Authority has an annual purchasing budget of A BILLION DOLLARS! Holy Cats! That’s more than I make in a year! Luckily you don’t have to go around the world to see what Serra is all about. I first saw his work at Dia:Beacon, which is a pretty dope, enormous museum in a converted Nabisco factory on the Hudson River. He has these huge structures that you can walk around inside and I remember really wishing I had a gigantic house that I could put something like that in and just have them be the living spaces:

I don’t know, I just think it would be really cool to have a shape like that be a dining room or bedroom or something. You’d definitely need a skylight, though.

Dia:Beacon also has these negative sculptures by Michael Heizer that I think are pretty cool:

And this amazing piece called “Spaghetti and Meatballs” by Ricardo Montalbán:

Okay, you got me, that last one is just a picture of spaghetti and meatballs that I found from Google Images. And Ricardo Montalbán is an actor who played the villain in The Naked Gun:

Damn, you guys are sharp.