Give us your tired, your poor, your priceless artifacts.

Look world - if you don't want to foster American arrogance, quit lending us your best stuff.

Yesterday I was able to see probably the greatest one-place collection of Byzantine icons in history - and it was only a train ride (two if you count the subway) away. Do yourself a favor and go.

And when you do - pay less to get in (they let you pay anything) and instead pay the $6 for the audio-tour. It works for anything in the Met with a number on it - you just punch in the number, press play, and hear a brief discussion of the piece. The reason I didn't get one before was because I considered such things for the "uneducated." That was stupid.

millinerd Dreadwatch

First sheep with dreadlocks (make that dreadlock) is forced to get a hair-cut. I am outraged.

The millinerd Grand Tour

First to Pisa, the Colosseum, then the Pantheon. Next comes the Roman Forum, a stop at St. Peter's, and to conclude an examination of the unparalleled masterpieces housed at the MOBA.

That exhibit was horrible... God must exist.

Robert Jenson is a theologian - the good one... I mean a good one, who makes some clarifying comments about the "What?" experience so many of us have when looking at what today passes for art:

Were there no Creator and so no creation, no standard world, artists would need to do no work. It marked the end of high modernism, when the brilliant Marcel Duchamp simply lost faith in painting and sculpting, and picked up a urinal to hang on the exhibition wall. Why labor to sculpt or paint, when the world is full of things that already have interesting and complex shapes... if there is no standard by which to prefer one shape to another? Much sold or exhibited as art in the last thirty years or so is the product of deliberate metaphysical nihilists, who explicitly do not think they need to work to make art, and who, if they can be said to construe an alternative world, construe a void.

Jenson continues:

It may, by the way, be an evidence that this nihilism is false, that is, an evidence that there is God, that this art is so very bad.

In other words, the artist's abandonment of the necessary "work" involved in conveying the natural order results in "art" whose utter banality testifies to the reality of the order it has attempted to subvert... and (one might infer) indirectly to the Creator behind that order. I find it an interesting suggestion. The full article is available from the IJST.

Someone once said "Behind every technological innovation lies a withered human faculty." Can't remember who though - my memory was better before I owned a computer.

Perhaps the quote explains why I feel my faculties withering every time I go to this site. Anyone having studied language will realize the seductive attraction of such a powerful tool. So beware, and remember: The site wants to be found.

The Glen

We all need people who have gone before to test the waters and tell us what to seek or to avoid. We need this because learining it all on our own takes too much time and money.

That being the case I am thankful for someone who developed this list (with addendum), and you should be thankful for millinerd who is able to tell you that if you live in in the Central Northeast, the best campsite around is here. According to the Eastern Waterfalls guide, "The Glen" as it is affectionately known to insiders

"holds perhaps the ultimate waterfall experience in the eastern United States."

But decide for yourself.

Woody Allen and St. Augustine?

Let me explain. Augustine battled a heresy known as Donatism. In short, the Donatists were Christians who believed that the validity of sacraments were based upon just how holy was the priest who presided over them.... Augustine replied that the sacraments were efficacious regardless of the priest's level of sanctity (not to excuse priestly misbehavior -but to keep the accent on God where it belonged). The Latin bumber-sticker to sum up the teaching was ex opere operato. You see where I'm going I'm sure...

Apply Augustine's move to movies, and one is helped to see how a man of such questionable moral credential could make such consistently delightful, witty, beautiful, sometimes even haunting films.

Currently holding the millinerd favorite position is Crimes and Misdemeanors, but oh how many contend for the spot. Familiarity has bred contempt in too many American critics regarding Allen (especially for his newer stuff), so in this department I side with Le Francais.

Nurse your inner Art Historian here.
UPDATE: And your inner old testament scholar here.
UPDATE #2: This site has stolen site #1's thunder. Wow. It never ends.

He is risen. He is risen? He is "risen." He is risen!

If the last one works, the first three don't.

It has been said that there are no good Protestant novelists (and scores of good Catholic ones). Well that may not be entirely the case. Here's a poem of his, Seven Stanzas at Easter - an exquisite rebuke especially to the third of the above options.

UPDATE: Looks like the Easter Poem site is down. Who told John Updike's publicist?

Warhol in the Closet

And Nolde wasn't the only modern artist who "got" Maundy Thursday:


Denise and I stumbled across this Andy Warhol exhibit in New York a few years ago. You know, Warhol - the guy who killed art? My first impression was that he must be making fun of DaVinci's painting - even of Christ... But as we walked past massive canvass after massive canvass the unmistakable impression was conveyed that this subject absolutely enthralled him... more than Mao or Marilyn ever had. I left the exhibit confused: Even though Warhol was supposedly "mocking" a classic Christian image (how else do you interpret brand names plastered over the Last Supper?), it sure didn't feel that way. It was almost as if he was attempting to convey that no matter what you cover the Last Supper with... no matter how you twist it, color it, copy it - Christ's gesture of self-sacrificing love is tirelessly constant. But of course I couldn't run with that conclusion, because the textbooks had taught me that modern/postmodern art had abandoned religious themes, and Andy Warhol was of just that persuasion.

Then I did a little reading, and the plot... I mean canvass thickened:

"Few know that Warhol was a devout Catholic who attended Mass several times a week and prayed daily with his mother... [he] regularly helped to feed the homeless at his church and even had a private audience with Pope John Paul II in 1980..."

As you can imagine... many in the art world aren't all too keen to admit that, the article concludes, "the Last Supper series was Andy Warhol's last will and testament."

But that it was.

Eat your heart out Leonardo

While Matisse was goofing off, Emil Nolde was probing the depths of the human condition. I think he "got" Maundy Thursday... or more precisely was "gotten" by it.

If John is right, then it wasn't a particularly festive affair... and Nolde captured the agony.

millinerd movie review

I felt very much this way during the first half of Jersey Girl. I didn't think Smith was going to pull it off. Time after time Ben Affleck just wasn't anwhere near the strike zone in line-delivery. But half way through there was a rally, and the movie came through. Looks like new blog on the block Tomtastic liked it too.