Miscellany

Errol Morris responds to some of the letters he received about his characteristically excellent seven-part piece "Bamboozling Ourselves" (scroll to the bottom to start at the beginning), about the Vermeer forgeries of Han van Meegeren during the World War II era. The whole thing is full of provocative ideas and well worth your time, but this caught my eye:

Who hasn't had this reaction before one famous piece of art or another?

From Julia Child’s New York Times’ obituary in 2004:

After World War II broke out, she signed up for intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services, hoping to become a spy, but was sent off as a file clerk to Ceylon. There she met Paul Child, the head of a chart-making division who was 10 years older and several inches shorter. He was also an artist, a poet and a serious food lover who opened up her taste horizons on their travels in China.

From today’s Washington Post story about information in newly declassified records:

Before Julia Child became known to the world as a leading chef, she admitted at least one failing when applying for a job as a spy: impulsiveness.

At 28 as an advertising manager at W&J Sloane furniture store in Beverly Hills, Calif., Child clashed with new store managers and left her job abruptly.

"I made a tactical error and was out," she explained in a handwritten note attached to her application to join the Office of Strategic Services, a World War II-era spy agency. "However, I learned a lot about advertising and wish I had been older and more experienced so that I could have handled the situation, as it was a most interesting position."

Child was not yet married and was applying for the job under her maiden name, McWilliams, according to previously top-secret records released by the National Archives on Thursday. She was hired in the summer of 1942 for clerical work with the intelligence agency and later worked directly for OSS Director William Donovan, the personnel records show.

The NYT currently features a fascinating piece that documentarian Errol Morris put together about the power of images and the ease of faking them and what that might mean in the larger cultural context. It’s mostly a conversation with a couple of experts in digital photography and fakery. Here’s an excerpt from part featuring professor Hany Farid:

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. There’s a remarkable story about the forging of the Hitler diaries. The forger was so prolific, he created so many forgeries — letters, watercolors, diaries, etc. — that handwriting analysts (charged with the task of authenticating the diaries) took writing examples done by the forger thinking they were genuine examples of Hitler’s handwriting and compared them to the diaries.  They authenticated the diaries on that basis.[10]  Often we make a comparison between something that we believe is real and something that we believe is fake. I guess the moral of the story is we should always consider the possibility that we may be comparing something fake with something else that is fake.

HANY FARID: It’s sort of like Rembrandt, right? His body of work has been shrinking for decades now, right? And so what’s considered to be his body of work is completely different now, cause he was faked so heavily. It’s a good question. The reason why we believe that the one with the four missiles is fake is that there is pretty strong, at least circumstantial, evidence that the cloning was there. The plumes of smoke look very, very similar. There are a lot of little pieces. But also, when you clone with a standard clone tool, there’s like a soft cloning, so it does a little bit of like alpha matting, so that it’s not a hard edge. And you see along the rocks, there’s definitely some funny business going on. Again, visually it’s not a certainty. But it certainly looks more suspicious.

The whole piece is well worth reading. And makes me want to revisit the First Person series, which I adored when it was on. I still vividly recall the episode about the little gray man.

The New York Times has a fun little slideshow in celebration of the number 8 (in honor of today’s date – 8/8/08), featuring the kind of lists miscellanies are famous for.

That would be Emma the Dog investigating an interloper in our backyard yesterday. This turtle doesn’t seem anywhere near as talented as this guy in D.C., but all he’d find in our back yard is extra yellow bikes and they’re pretty easy to spot.

(Poor college student in that story, huh? Bummer, dude.)

There is but one cure for a slight summer cold: sushi and Batman.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

I’m sure this circulated ages ago, but I just saw it courtesy of the lovely Erin — the Amazon user comments on Tuscan Whole Milk by the gallon.

The NYT has an interesting story about archeologists digging into the work-a-day world of ancient Egypt, as opposed to the traditional big money pyramids and the like:

"This is a really amazing site, at the cutting-edge of recent Egypt archaeology," said Stuart Tyson Smith of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the project. "Digging into towns, you get the full range of life, not the very narrow view of society as seen from the top, from the rich and elite."

Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist who uncovered remains of settlements for workers who built the pyramids at Giza, said that at Dr. Moeller’s site he inspected layers of sediments showing occupation extending back 5,000 years to the dawn of Egyptian civilization and forward to the early Islamic period in the first millennium A.D. The silos are near temple ruins from about 300 B.C.

And I want a pangolin. Unrelated, I know, but so cute.

Oh, and while I’m being random, the NYT also has this story on Jamaican jerk, with the following quote from Zora Neale Hurston:

The American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston chronicled an overnight boar hunt with the Maroons in 1939. "Towards morning we ate our fill of jerk pork," she wrote. "It is better than our American barbecue. It is hard to imagine anything better than pork the way the Maroons jerk it."

Said story made me want to go back to Jake’s and ask around to find the closest roadside jerk that weekend…

My favorite citizen campaign site yet. (Via Ed.)

The NYT has a story about a trunk of junk bought at a yard sale in Kentucky that turned out to be full of correspondence and prints by Weegee, the (in)famous New York photog. One letter sent from Munich reads:

"Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time," the letter explains. "It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks."

Still mysterious is how the trunk ended up in Kentucky in the first place.