If you're not on Twitter, and if you're old enough to know me you probably aren't, then you wouldn't know that today the site has been won by the formerly obscure Nicole Najafi, who posted a thread she introduced, "I went on a date with every presidential candidate so you don't have to." Nine installments, one for each of nine candidates, only the Democrats—I'm guessing that her imagination, though fertile, balks at contemplating a date with Trump. The thread is brief and, assuming you enjoy it half as much as I did, well worth five minutes. Here's a teaser, the one for Joe Biden:
He takes you to dinner in the Meatpacking District. He orders you a cosmo before you arrive, like on that "new show Sex and the City." He talks all night about a hot nightclub where his friend Barack has a table and can "get us in." Barack never shows up.
Whole thing is here. Maybe it helps to know that there is a genre of Twitter threads in which hip young single women describe the nightmarish dates they've been on.
I read Ms. Najafi's work while again sipping a coffee in the atrium of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I think I'm making progress in my art education. For example, there is now an outside chance that I'd be able to distinguish a famous work by Edouard Manet (French, 1832-83) from one by Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926).Honestly, till about a month ago I wasn’t sure whether there were two artists or maybe just one whose last name is sometimes spelled wrong. Claude Monet is famous for the water lilies. Also, his painting, "Impression, Sunrise," gave a name to an artistic movement and makes him perhaps the quintessential impressionist. I prefer Edouard Manet, possibly because I like bars: one of his more famous paintings, "A Bar at the Folies-Bergères," is at the top of this post.
I think I might be making similar progress differentiating the two Pauls, Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Gauguin (French, 1848-1903). The former is best known for the still lifes of fruit, etc., while the latter is the one who went to Tahiti, where he painted, for example, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" I learned of an interesting connection between the two in a college text I still have:
[Gauguin] began as a prosperous stockbroker in Paris and an amateur painter and collector of modern pictures (he once owned Cezanne's "Fruit Bowl, Glass, and Apples").
But Gauguin gave up on the rich collector life:
At the age of thirty-five, however, he became convinced that he must devote himself entirely to art; he abandoned his business career, separated from his family, and by 1889 was the central figure of a new movement called Synthetism or Symbolism. His style, though less intensely personal than Van Gogh's, was in some ways an even bolder advance beyond Impressionism. Gauguin believed that Western civilization was "out of joint," that industrial society had forced men into an incomplete life dedicated to material gain, while their emotions lay neglected. To rediscover for himself this hidden world of feeling, Gauguin left Paris for western France to live among the peasants of Brittany . . . .
And, eventually, to Tahiti. A better painter than husband.
It's sort of weird how the French seem to make the best painters, the Germans the best philosophers, the English and the Russians the best novelists, while here, in the USA, we have the best country-western artists.
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