Wednesday Reads: Look out open thread

Good Morning

This certainly has been a hellish few days, and while I feel better now…the bacteria infection has taken its toll. I’ve no idea what has happened in the world outside my little sphere in the land of banjos and “friendly” porch folk…so this is going to be a quick post of links I have saved along the way.

Please comment on the big news items today, cause I have a feeling there some busy newsy “thing” that may even be spectacular enough to get MSNBC to drop the Zimmerman trial. (No that won’t happen, but imagine the waiting…for the GZ jury’s verdict and the Royal Baby…what headline sells more?)

First off, the cartoon up top: Muslim Brotherhood – Political Cartoon by Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – 07/09/2013

Perfect!

It is a shame to see things change, little things. I understand money is everything but sometimes it is the tangible memories that tie observations together. I read that The Met is no longer going to use the little round colored metal tags for “tickets” at the museum of art…and it made me so damn sad. Metropolitan Museum Sheds Its Metal Admissions Tags – NYTimes.com

The “French Connection” was in theaters. The Mets and the Yankees finished in fourth place. The city referred to itself as the Big Apple for the first time in advertising campaigns. And that same year, 1971, the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced a colorful piece of metal as its admission ticket, a tiny doodad that came to occupy a large place in the reliquary of New York City, along with Greek-themed coffee cups, I ♥ NY T-shirts and subway tokens.

Now the Met’s admission button will go the way of the token. Citing the rising cost of the tin-plate pieces and the flexibility of a new paper ticket system using detachable stickers, the Met will end the buttons’ 42-year run on Monday, the same time it switches to a seven-day-a-week schedule instead of being closed on Mondays.

That is heartbreaking. I loved to keep my little tags from the times I went to the Met…it was not very often, only a few times, each visit was special to me but not as dramatic as the first time I went to the Met.

My first trip to Manhattan I was 30 years old, I went to visit my husband who was working on Wall St for huge firm, this was before the company transferred him to NYC and we moved there….way before September 11th and the mess that followed.  Anyway, I never lived on my own…hell, I went from my dad filling my car’s tank of gas to having a husband take over the task. So here I was, alone in the City…at the Soho Grand on Canal and West Broadway. Dan was working that week and I could do whatever I wanted…the first place I went was the Met.

I walked the streets to the station. By myself. I rode the subway there. By myself. And I spent the entire day there. Alone. I had never done anything alone before in my life, and here I was in New York City. It was so empowering. I felt so proud. That was such an important trip to me, and that first visit to the Met holds such a special place in my heart…the little pink tag souvenir is my physical connection to that space in time. Something I can touch with my fingers…worn and patina over the years.

So, as you can see…the news that these lovely metal memories will now be replaced with crappy stickers really got me pissed off.

Over the years of its existence, the button became an accidental tourist totem — evidence not only that the city had been visited but also that high culture had been revered. And the button became a kind of art object in its own right, described once by Met curators as a kind of coin with a “multilayered tissue of readings and meanings.” It has been recycled into artworks like Ji Eon Kang’s “Dress,” made from hundreds of the buttons assembled like chain mail. Its design has been incorporated into Met mugs and T-shirts. And it has been collected by the hundreds by a certain kind of Met devotee. (Collecting all 16 colors could also help you slip into the museum without paying the suggested $25 admission price; the colors are changed daily in random order.)

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A guide to the Met’s colored buttons.

The current design, bearing an “M” adapted from a 16th-century woodcut illustration based on a Leonardo drawing, figures in the Met’s sense of its own identity, including the museum’s internal newsletter, which uses the button in its nameplate. Even the announcement that the Met would be open seven days a week borrowed the familiar iconography; it showed a line of six shiny buttons representing the days of the week, with a seventh added for Monday.

The buttons were introduced a year after the Met instituted a suggested-price admission system, replacing paper tickets and stickpins, and they seemed to capture the spirit of the new admissions policy, acting as a souvenir instead of a receipt.

“That badge became the un-ticket,” said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “You weren’t paying to get into the museum; you were making a donation. And in exchange you got this beautiful little thing that also has a control function.”

To keep up with the more than six million people who visit each year, the museum orders 1.6 million of the buttons four times a year, Mr. Holzer said, and they now cost about three cents per button, up from two cents only a few years ago.

The new paper tickets will cost only about a penny each, and they will give the museum the space to promote shows, new and soon to close,

Fuck these only a penny “paper” tickets to be given as a token of remembrance of you visit to the museum…

and, Mr. Holzer added, a space “to sell to corporate sponsors” for advertising.

Ugh…for shits sake…they are’t costing a thing you jackass, they are making money, which is all that matters.

The new ticket-stickers will incorporate a version of the Leonardo “M,” evoking the button. But in an era in which physical objects seem to be rapidly dematerializing into the digital, the loss of a durable little chunk of the Met will undoubtedly be missed.

“It’s sad,” said Monica Mahoney, a 46-year-old fashion designer who recently moved to Los Angeles from New York but was back on Thursday and paying a visit to the museum, as she often does. “Everyone now will keep these, like they keep subway tokens. But it’s just a memory of New York.”

It is a shame, we are loosing touch with so many “real” tiny honest pieces of our past…It is funny that I kept my little pink “Piglet” colored Met badge in my jewelry box all these years…turns out it became a lost treasure after all.

Rest of links in dump fashion…

The End of Car Culture – NYTimes.com

Ancient white man’s skull has Australians reconsidering their origins | The Raw Story

Should the U.S. Have a Secretary of Culture? – Megan Garber – The Atlantic

Seagulls Killing Whales Near Argentina | Geekosystem

Bread in the Middle Ages – Medievalist.net

Someone Invented a Baby Wig, So Your Little Girl Won’t Be Bald- Jezebel

V MAGAZINE / EVERLASTING NOW- Prince!

NEARLY 40 YEARS INTO HIS CAREER, PRINCE IS STILL CHURNING OUT MIND-BLOWING MUSIC. CURRENTLY PLAYING TWO SHOWS A NIGHT WHILE ON TOUR WITH HIS NEW BAND, 3RDEYEGIRL, THE ICON TAKES A MOMENT (AT 2AM) TO SERMONIZE ON SEX, RELIGION, AND ROCK AND ROLL

The last words and final moments of 38 presidents – Mental Floss

And the last link for you….

Soledad O’Brien Is Her Own Boss — and That Means No Jodi Arias Stories | The Wrap Media

I am glad Soledad is getting her own show over at Al Jazeera America…looks like it will be kind of a 60 Minutes thing….Soledad kick ass style.

That is all for this morning. I honestly don’t know if I have enough in me to make any comments today, or even post something tonight. Y’all have a good day, ciao!