Star Wars 7 will feature an aging Luke Skywalker who rants about his right to own lightsabers & uses racial slurs to describe Ewoks
— Brian Gaar (@briangaar) December 11, 2014
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‘Tis the season of embarrassing party incidents. Per the NY Post:
An event with Timothy Cardinal Dolan to preserve the art of St. Patrick’s Cathedral came to a crashing end Thursday when an important guest — Republican state chairman Ed Cox — accidentally knocked over a valuable antique vase, smashing it to pieces.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan hosted the breakfast for New York notables including Home Depot billionaire Ken Langone and Blackstone’s John Studzinski in the bank’s swanky, art-filled corporate offices at One Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue…
…[A] witness reports, “the peace was shattered when Ed Cox accidentally knocked over a 4-foot-tall antique vase in the center of the room. It fell to the floor and shattered with a terrible, piercing, sound which stopped the entire room.” The source added, “Ed nervously tried to edge away from the wreckage while the event staff looked mortified. One exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, that was a $70,000 vase!’ ”…
A spokesman for the not-usually clumsy Cox, the son-in-law of President Richard Nixon, told us, “I can confirm that it did happen. The vase was placed on a very small table, and after it broke, Bank of America officials apologized to Mr. Cox. They said this had happened before — other items that were placed on that table had previously been broken.
“No one is ever happy when a vase falls and breaks, especially a nice vase,” Cox’s rep added. “But they did not ask him to pay for the item. They acknowledged the placement of the vase was ill-advised.”
Somewhere in Hell, Tricky Dick is laughing. Guess making your victims apologize has become the new Repub normal.
SiubhanDuinne
Okay, that was weird. I clicked on this new thread and caught a glimpse of something about an “aging Luke Skywalker” and something about light sabers. Then it completely disappeared in a flash in favor of the Cardinal Dolan article.
What happened to aging Luke Skywalker??
Baud
Jesus, they really do destroy everything they touch.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
And now it’s back. How very odd.
PurpleGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I still still the box with the tweet about Star Wars 7.
Text of Tweet from Brian Gaar:
Star Wars 7 will feature an aging Luke Skywalker who rants about his right to own lightsabers & uses racial slurs to describe Ewoks.
raven
Nothing from the big boy about the Stilers and my Birds.
Betty Cracker
Stupid clumsy vase had it coming. It probably expected people to pronounce it as “vaaaahz.”
SiubhanDuinne
@PurpleGirl:
Yes, I do too, now. But a few minutes ago it was doing a merry little now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t dance that was curious.
KG
Then why the fuck were they still using that table to display valuable items? Seriously, put it in the corner with a tray of cocktail weenies
Botsplainer
Why is a public area of a corporate office sporting a vase worth $70,000.00?
Somebody needs a tax increase.
MattF
The vase couldn’t take a joke.
Elizabelle
@KG:
Yuppers. I think whoever put the vase on the “very small table” is going to be looking for a very small new job.
Amusing only because it was Ed Cox — and this is now the third thing people will think of him when he comes to mind — and the vase was owned by BoA. One less piece their “swanky, art-filled corporate office.”
Vase was probably insured. Unlike many of BoA’s clients and Home Depot’s customers.
Elizabelle
Dolan may now have Ed Cox step away from the stained glass windows, should he come to call.
Baud
I hope next time it’s one of the servers hired by the caterer who knocks over the valuable work of art. It would be nice to compare and constrast.
Jim C
America!
America!
Cox breaks your vase for free!
Baud
@raven:
If the Birds lose and the Saints beat Chicago tomorrow night, the Saints are back in first place!
Sad, but true.
BruceFromOhio
This meltdown of the Browns offense is stunning in its vastness.
Jim C
@Jim C:
Cox says, “My bad.”
Bank has a sad,
New fees for you and me!
Baud
I like the title to the linked story.
Art preservation. You’re doing in wrong.
Felonius Monk
So many criminals in the same room at the same time, but no lightning bolts. I guess this proves there is no god.
Josie
I am amused at the description of an item costing $70,000.00 as “a nice vase.”
Baud
$70 K would buy a lot of birth control.
Amir Khalid
The bank apologised to the oaf who knocked over their US$70,000 vase? Why? And why does the Catholic Church have a collection of art and artifacts in New York to raise money for in the first place? Why isn’t that money being spent on Church work?
Incidentally, Liverpool FC’s unbelievably shitty season continues with a 3-0 loss at Manchester United. Woe is me.
BBA
“Oh my God, that was a $70,000 vase!”
“Not anymore.”
KG
@BruceFromOhio: how the flying fuck do you manage not to have the right personel out after the two minute warning?
Redshift
@KG: I think it’s more likely that was a lie made up to make sure no one would blame the one percenter who was actually at fault, and spare his delicate fee-fees.
OnkelFritze
Hell no. I actually sympathize with the guy (don’t know anything else about him, though). My wife does that all the time, placing breakable items somewhere in the way. Everything that I value I have practically in lockdown, because if she places it it’s not a question of if it breaks, it’s just a question of when. ‘Oh honey, but it looks so nice over there’. Yeah, right.
oldster
This is pretty much what happened the last time that the Republicans invoked the “Pottery Barn Rule,” right?
They broke it, they did not own it, they left it in pieces, and made other people pick up the mess?
RareSanity
@raven:
What’s up?
Missed you in the last thread…coaching my son’s flag football team, and they had a make up game today.
srv
@Baud: Real artists believe in creative destruction. Cox was clearly expressing Schumpeter’s principles and teaching us a lesson in RBC.
@top
You people are always stuck in your old paradigms – JJ is hip with the times. All the stormtroopers are minorities in white armor.
Karen in GA
Hey, at least nobody got shot.
We put up our tree. Iggy reacts.
JDM
Has anyone checked the vase yet to see if it was holding cigarillos?
Roger Moore
@KG:
Because casually writing off items that cost more than most families will earn in a year is a way of showing how rich and powerful you are.
kc
Where’s a small meteor when you need one?
Violet
Seriously? Someone wrote that? How do we know he’s not usually clumsy? Because he said so? Oh! Okay then! Part of just making him look like the victim in this scenario, I guess.
What other things can we just make up out of whole cloth about Mr. Cox? The “not-usually thieving Cox.” “The not-usually vomiting Cox.” “The not-usually drunk Cox.” The not-usually high on meth Cox.” Hey, this is fun!
raven
@kc: Arthur Blank is in the pressbox of the Georgia Dome right now!
Elizabelle
@kc:
I know.
Swankosaureses out power networking, to benefit another powerful institution. Spare me.
Mnemosyne
Is there a better breakfast than cold leftover BBQ ribs? I would have to say no.
Kathleen
@BruceFromOhio: Well, wait until the second half when the Bengals have their usual meltdown.
BGinCHI
This is also a scene in “Trading Places,” but it’s funnier there.
Booger
@BGinCHI: Fortunately, we had insured it for $140,000…
Mnemosyne
Also, regarding the Cox story, I’m guessing that part of the reason this happened is that corporations generally don’t hire art experts to maintain their corporate art collections. It’s usually someone who got promoted from within who doesn’t know much about how to safely exhibit or store artwork, and they frequently get overridden by corporate bigshots who really want to show off what they’ve got and damn the consequences.
Some poor drone in the collections department is probably going to get fired over this, no matter who ordered him/her to put the vase there.
ETA: The Giant Evil Corporation is an exception to this, but we stand out because we’re an exception in the corporate world. But we’re mostly protecting art that was created by our artists at our company, so we have more of a vested interest in it than pretty pieces that were bought at auction because the company had too much money.
srv
God Bless America
mai naem mobile
If the vase isn’t appropriately insured I’m sure any of.the three 0.1 percenters would pony up the $70k being that I’m certain each ofnthe three make more than $70k a day!
skerry
Video shows John Crawford’s girlfriend aggressively questioned after Ohio police shot him dead in Walmart
Amir Khalid
@srv:
Not so different from the approach in Saudi Arabia, where it’s a crime to be a rape victim.
MattF
@Karen in GA: Yeah, but that’s only because the vase wasn’t armed. Next time, it’ll be different.
Baud
Yay! There’s going to be a Taken 3!
Elizabelle
Andy Borowitz:
Did anyone watch MTP (poor you). Did Cheney or anyone else on the show call it “torture”?
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
It works, Amir. I bet the number of rapes reported in Saudi Arabia is much lower than in the U.S.
ThresherK
@KG: I was waiting for that. But in my ear the sound was “Neht ennymehr.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Will life imitate art?
Frankensteinbeck
Relevant to @skerry congress just passed a bill taking a small step towards curbing police excess, with supposedly more coming. I don’t know what to think. Whether or not more is coming, this is one of the last issues I expected congress to take action on, however small. The GOP base loves cops killing unarmed blacks, and donates lots of money to them to prove it.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
Have a friend whose wife used to be a flight attendant 20-40 yrs ago for a major international airline. They would take trips all over the world for a very small cost, something like $12. They once went to Italy and were given an insider tour of the Vatican. He said there were gold and jewel incrusted things like crosses just laying about, millions and millions of dollars worth.
Why not NY, they have to put it somewhere.
Tree With Water
What I’d say if I were Pope: “Don’t give me any of that “very small table” shit, Cox. You owe the Church $70 grand”.
SRW1
@Amir Khalid:
Amir, given your football deity status and the influence you claimed to wield over results during the WC, the fact that Liverpool is also
affected by this runner up curse actually is your saving grace. Cause while Liverpools season is miserable, would you want to be held responsible for what is going on in Dortmund?
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I want to know why in hell these companies have expensive art collections in the first place. I can understand your employer which actually creates them keeping a few around, but spending company money on ludicrously expensive decorations for the C-level offices seems like the worst kind of corporate kleptocrat bullshit.
Botsplainer
@Roger Moore:
Its supposed to be a retail bank. “Live frugally, spend less than your means” is how their risk douche assholes choke down the credit markets for small businesses and consumers when they shuffle people into shit rate, onerous term notes.
Pogonip
Also, Yoda makes a sparkly, semi-transparent guest appearance: “Off my lawn, you kids get.”
Amir Khalid
@SRW1:
Didn’t you hear? I relinquished my deity status after the World Cup.
Another Holocene Human
You know, I used to scoff at the Enquirer’s notion that GWB and Condi Rice were having an affair and the whole freudian slip thing. So stupid.
But then I was listening to Nice Polite Republicans I guess two days ago (got so fed up I switched to classic (southern) rock and I don’t even like classic (southern) rock, sorry Skinnard fans) and they rolled the tape of GWB saying he called Condi immediately to tell him what to think about the torture report … what a maroon.
And I suddenly realized that the two of them have some sort of intellectual relationship going on that is totally not present between George and frozen face Laura. Intellectual partnership (is that unfair to Condi? she’s smarter and more accomplished than him but also completely heedless of her massive Dunning Kruger on all things ME and therefore, I think somewhat intellectually overrated–whereas GWB is strong on social intelligence, exactly where she is weak, most of his other superloyal soldiers are just as dumb as he is, making her different). Emotional affair?
Condileeza Rice is a terrible person who did terrible things and W even more so, times eleventy, but this revelation kind of bowled me over. It’s almost humanizing :P
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer: shit rates and onerous terms mean more money for them!
this is how the civil rights movement got into community banking and kissing the asses of business leaders and even national banks who agreed to engage in fair lending
just some context, doesn’t mean Tavis Smiley still isn’t a contemptible douchebag
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
spending company money on ludicrously expensive decorations for the C-level offices seems like the worst kind of corporate kleptocrat bullshit.
It is.
But how can they rub your face in it if they did anything else?
Anne Laurie
@Tree With Water:
It’s the Bank of America’s vase — they’re just holding the rent party for Timmy Dolan. Cardinal Tim is said to be on the outs with the current Pope, because Dolan is more than ready to support Wall Street over the outer-borough parochial schools, so I guessing this is Jamie Dimon’s public demonstration of affection for “his guy”.
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: There were some hair-raising stories when the economy crashed and we found out who was swimming naked.
It used to be that organizations acquired art which was displayed in public areas, in fact that 50’s “international” building style (idk, Modernist?) favored really boring lines and big vaulted lobbies with low furniture where you pretty much had to hang ginormous abstract art. There’s a nefarious side to this as it turns out that the CIA had a slush fund for modern art to fight communism and their social realist art (Stalin moved on, though, so jokes on them).
Just a few years ago somebody STOLE a large and very valuable artwork from Riker’s (the NYC jail) which had been donated by the artist, back in those quaint days when they thought of jails and prisons as reformatory institutions.
Art as a private good for the very wealthy is a value that returns with income inequality. During the days of boring business when CEOs made less than surgeons, some of the better known art buyers were, well, surgeons. And of course there were institutions. But with greed is good, the top blown off of progressive taxation, the blowup in C-level salaries and wall street bonuses (and into this period dump tech millionaires and billionaires on the left coast) art is again private and for the wealthy, and art for the masses endangered.
LePage wanted to paint over the labor mural at the Maine state house.
In Gainesville a greedy developer (who went broke–ha ha!) with the help of the UF-controlled city commission demolished some historic buildings and with it a Keith Haring mural on an exterior wall which they claimed wasn’t authentic … but it was.
Oops.
Another Holocene Human
@Frankensteinbeck: PBA check didn’t clear and libertarians checks did? (Thinking Radley Balko, not the rest of that lot.)
Maybe it was Wall St donors, Occupy WS coming back holding “I Can’t Breathe” signs may have made them piss their pants enough to try to cut this shit off at the pass. You’ll notice even asshole Cuomo was trying to do something about Garner and you know it wasn’t out of tender human feelings.
Another Holocene Human
@skerry: Man’s inhumanity to man, caught on tape.
Baud
@Another Holocene Human:
If I had to guess, I would guess that it was part of the back-room deal-cutting that was going on in the last few days.
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer:
That’s it, right there.
Anonymous
By the time that vase was owned by those assholes, it was already effectively dead. Though in some ways if it was made just for people like that, the whole time, was it ever even an artwork or was it cash on the hoof the whole time? Tempted to say smash all the vases and be done with it.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: I’m really pissed about hours of service, but unfortunately USDOT by screwing crew drivers and ignoring reality had the majority of CDL drivers against the regs anyway so I guess this is more on USDOT. You can legislate it all you want and it won’t change the fact that a regular night shift driver can haul loads more quickly and more safely from 1-5am any day of the week than a day shift driver stuck in mid-afternoon traffic when … whew … guess what … turns out diurnal cycle ZAPS you in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe you should make all trucks on the road pull over from 230p-430p. What? You say that would be ridiculous? So is grounding all overnight loads. Come on.
It’s driving days and nights in the same week and also driving too many fucking hours for too many fucking days that causes severe fatigue and fatigue induced crashes. The companies do this, HOS is the way to stop them, so write HOS that limits this bullshit and stop trying to craft regs for a laboratory and not the real world. Ugh.
/i must stop ranting, i must stop ranting, i must stop ranting
Baud
@Another Holocene Human:
I can testify that that!
Another Holocene Human
@Anonymous: I know, right?
It’s like those galleries of portraits from the early modern through maybe early industrial period, sure some of the artists were really talented, but it’s utterly mind-numbing, these are all commercial transactions for rich people who didn’t have cell phone cameras yet. Art is so much more interesting and rich than that, but some galleries are just overflowing with this stuff. It’s no wonder that the masses showed far more interest in modern art which wasn’t just portrait after portrait of “Richina, daughter of the 5th earl of Richeldorf”. The enduring appeal of Monet for the mass audience is in part the high relatability of his subjects. (Except for his shock value paintings which are likely more interesting to art students, if canvas tote bag sales are anything to go by.)
I’m not defending the excesses of modern art and abstract art* but without a doubt the traditional art world had its own excesses and was driven by commercial concerns in a world of great social and income inequality.
*-abstract art had a great deal of popular enmity as well, not surprising as it was bankrolled as “anti-communist” and consciously replaced social realist style public art, if you were conditioned by the beautiful and aspirational of 1930s public art and mass media to land in the 50s and 60s with ugly art and abstract art, often a public cost in public places, while you experience all kinds of pareidolia trying to make sense of what you’re seeing, I think stressed might be the mildest of one’s responses to it
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human:
Ultra-wealthy collectors have always been a big part of the art market. I’m intensely conscious of this, since I live within walking (for me) distance of both The Huntington and The Norton Simon, both outstanding museums built around the personal collections of ultra-wealthy private collectors, one from the tail end of the Gilded Age and one from the high tax post-War era. I see that kind of museum as the one upside of those ultra-rich collectors: many of them truly love art and wind up making their collections public, either during or after their lives. One of the reasons I distruct corporate collecting is because the same thing isn’t going to happen to a corporate collection.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Roger Moore: And the National Gallery also too, even.
Cheers,
Scott.
MaxMary
@Roger Moore: Part of the reason for the art collections is that they can be used as collateral for loans. Their value is highly “fluid” and thus can help with the bookkeeping.
Another weird art dodge is that you can donate art to a charitable institution and take the deduction at the purchase price, which may be a better deal than selling it at a loss. I remember seeing a vault full of really bad art by former next hot young artists. Apparently this kept the alumni happy and made the endowment look larger.
grandpa john
@srv: Because they are much more concerned with protecting this<a href="Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery
https://www.bjumg.org/
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: But the rich guy’s tastes drive what art is produced, very different from public art driven by popular tastes or even a democratic process or even made by the community … in the 80s when you entered the biggest cities in the US you were greeted with all kinds of murals, some of them amazing trompe de l’oeil, some inept, some astounding, very temporary art that is all but gone and mostly unrecorded. (For some reason graffiti was sexy even though it overall is like ratcheting up the reverb in your visual environment, so there’s been a lot of documentation of graffiti even though it’s 90%+ tags, the paint equivalent of pissing on a lamppost.)
Who really needs warehouses full of trite, repetitive neo-classical statuary, unless you are an uptight upperclass twit who finds it titillating and flattering to your since of self worth? Govts bought truckloads of this shit too for city halls, libraries, etc.
It’s not authenticity so much as the dull sameness … in some ways community art (sidewalks and walls with tiles and concrete) can be kind of dull and same too but being vernacular art it tends to speak to place and culture in a way that mass produced shit can’t. Ironically, they were imitating what was originally vernacular and public (but came to be mass produced for rich peoples’ homes over time).
I’m not nostalgic for the 1980s city but I’m not going to be nostalgic for the grand collector either–that’s kind of what I’m objecting to–I think it drives art in detrimental ways.
I wonder also if the utter and criminal obsession with antiquities isn’t just about dick swinging but also the appeal of a more primitive, caricatured reflection of the human face being more intriguing and appealing than the sort of insipid, overly perfect yet utterly impersonal form of visual art that the West inculcated for centuries. There is probably something about the human brain and visual perception that is drawn to distorted faces just as we are drawn to distorted columns on a building, something the Greeks understood very well …
Roger Moore
@MaxMary:
Sure, but if they had kept the cash instead of spending it on art objects, they wouldn’t need to borrow against it in the first place. Those may be ways of rationalizing buying the art, but they’re really just rationalizations.
Another Holocene Human
This guy here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_of_Quirinal) is utterly astounding. Both in technique and in expression. Makes you think of late 19th early 20th American art depicting the ring.
The photos do not do this statue justice.
Compare that with late antiquity marbles made for private homes, dull, trite, a lot of oo la la stuff (peekabo statue of a “hermaphrodite”, for example). There’s certainly competence but it hardly moves the emotions or engages any other part of the brain.
I’m of the opinion that most of the cultic statues are pretty terrible art-wise as well, very rigid, repetitive, I think because the subject was indeed sacred authoritarian forces take over and you get these frozen bodies and faces. Depictions of famous athletes were allowed to be more human…
Jamey
BoA apologized to Republican scion after he broke a priceless artifact. Republicans earlier apologized to BoA and their ilk after they ratfucked the economy, when some Democrats wanted to hold the Banksters accountable. Professional courtesy…
Another Holocene Human
@grandpa john: Have they purchased the complete Jon McNaughton collection yet? If it’s the biggest collection of religious art I assume they are buying without respect to doctrinal purity of the artists and original patrons.
WASPs were very into old Catholic churches in Southern Europe at one time, especially anything medieval, and carted off boatloads of ‘treasures’ from Spain and elsewhere during the early 20th century. That would really be frowned on now. I wondered why such things were not more valuable in situ and why Catholic altarpieces and such fascinated these WASPs so.
Jamey
Also, the broken vase is just a continuation of a longstanding comedic tradition.
JDM
@Jamey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWEnqC1uPu0
Origuy
@Another Holocene Human:
In some cases, the churches that held them had been bombed during one of the wars.
When I was in Moscow, I went to a gallery of the works of Alexander Shilov, a portrait painter. He mostly painted Soviet and Russian politicians and other notables, Heroes of the Soviet Union, that sort of thing. Not much different from the portraits of Lord and Lady Such-and-so that you find in the West.
brantl
This guy’s married to Nixon’s daughter, he’s already suffered enough.