A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran
Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

A robot muses contentedly on the events that led it to its rapidly approaching doom.
A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran
Went yesterday for my annual physical and vaccinations. I’m pleased to report that I’m in better health than I was this time last year! I got my flu and COVID vaccinations, and after drowsing off and on all afternoon and evening yesterday, I'm feeling human again. Most of my labs are within normal limits, and the ones that aren't are much closer to normal that they had been. The only issue that needs any sort of intervention is I got a referral to podiatry for hammertoes. (Sing it with me: "Think it's time to Stop! Hammertoes!")
I hope you're all doing well, and if you have the means to follow up on your healthcare, I hope you're doing it.
A., L., and I are rewatching Brooklyn Nine-Nine. As we were sitting down to watch tonight, L. asked "Do you think there's Brooklyn Nine-Nine fanfic on AO3?" As A. and I assured her that there certainly was, I picked up my phone so I could tell her how many there were. As it turned out, there were 6,999 of them. So of course after we finished watching, I wrote a drabble to bring the totally up to an even 7,000. If you're interested, go check out "Dance the Night Away", in which one Sergeant Terrence Jeffords attends a TWICE concert!
In case you've not heard about yesterday's theft of some of the French Crown Jewels from the Louvre yesterday, CNN has a good article about it. There is one paragraph from the article that I have issues with:
Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International, said that if the thieves are just looking to get cash out as quickly as possible, they might melt down the precious metals or recut the stones with no regard for the piece’s integrity.
I suppose it's technically true that they might do this; I just don't think it's at all likely. I don't think the thieves will be looking to cash out quickly because, given the degree of planning that apparently went into this operation, I think the items were sold before they were even stolen. I think it likely that their new owner, who probably lives in Russia or the Middle East, has already taken possession of them. (And if I were one of the thieves, I'd be extremely worried that said owner might decide that their generous payment for the items wasn't sufficient to ensure my ongoing silence.)
“Exhibitions, like dreams, are temporary phenomena — but, also like dreams, they leave indelible traces in our experiences. Through a dialectical short circuit, exhibitions draw from the material culture of the past, are situated in the present, and anticipate futures.” (Adam Szymczyk, in “Passages: Koyo Kouoh, 1967-2025,” Artforum, Sept. 2025)
This was something I really enjoyed learning about in my museum studies classes. An exhibition tells a story. Sometimes it's a simple story, like people "People like Monet and our museum needs money." (Although hopefully even an exhibition like that can still tell a deep story.) Sometimes its a more complicated story, like "Here are some interesting and/or controversial things that contemporary artists are doing. You may find some of them shocking, but you should see them anyway.". And sometimes, an exhibition tells a story that can totally change the way people things about something, such that the exhibition lives on in peoples minds long after the wall tags have been taken down and the objects have been returned to storage.
For example, I would be very surprised to find someone who'd studied art history or museum studies in the US who had never heard of the 1992 Maryland Historical Society exhibition "Mining the Museum". This exhibition was mentioned in several of my classes, to the point that as soon as we heard "1992" and "Maryland" together, we'd start nodding, knowing what was coming next. In this exhibition, conceptual artist Fred Wilson combined items from the museum's collection that would typically be found in an art exhibition with items that are tied to the state's slave-owning past and would usually be hidden when discussing the art of the era. One photograph from the exhibition has become a shorthand for the whole thing. It's of a case labeled simply "Metalwork, 1793-1880," which contains a number of elaborate silver cups and pitchers as well as a pair of iron slave shackles.
The story that the exhibit designer is trying to tell is generally summarized in the large wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, which I've observed many people to skip over in their rush to get to the "good stuff" (i.e. the objects). If you're someone who skips over the wall text at the beginning of an exhibition, I'd like to urge you to do not do that — the experience of viewing the items will be even richer if you have this story in your mind as you view them. And if you're someone who already reads the wall text (thank you!), try keeping that story further to the front of your mind as you view the exhibition. You'll come to see that not only do the individual items have meaning, but the order in which you encounter them as you move through the exhibition and they ways in which they're juxtaposed spatially will also contribute to telling the story.
Which 2019 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
7 (21.9%)
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
2 (6.2%)
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
24 (75.0%)
Semiosis by Sue Burke
10 (31.2%)
The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
4 (12.5%)
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
1 (3.1%)
OK, I need help from my guitar-playing friends - hopefully one of you will have the answer for this.
Lots of detail here, because I don't know what's relevant and what's not: About 10-12 years ago, I bought one of those Walmart super-cheap guitar and amp combos, then I never got around to learning to play it, devoting my time to learning ukulele instead. Today I remembered I still had that guitar down in the basement, and I realized that if I took off the 1st and 6th strings, then tuned the middle strings to G-C-E-A (from low to high), I would have converted this guitar into an electric ukulele. So I tried it. While I was at it, I moved the peg for the guitar strap to the other side so I could play it left-handed. I also ground 2 extra slots in the nut, so that the strings stayed the same distance apart for the entire length of the neck (like I'm used to on the ukulele). I put on the strings and tuned them with a digital tuner that I know to be accurate. The open strings were all tuned correctly, but any chord I fingered sounded wrong. So I fingered an F chord and played each note, looking at the tuner. On a ukulele, this has 3 open notes: G, C, and A, and 1 fretted note, F (1st fret on the E string). The G, C, and A were right, the F was sharp. Thinking that my changing the path of the strings might have changed their length relative to the placement of the frets enough that it might be throwing the fretted notes off, I tried putting one of the strings through the original slots so that it was the proper length. The open string was fine, but each fretted note was sharp. Oddly, each fretted was sharp by a different amount.
At this point, I've put it aside in hopes that one of you sees what's going on here. I see three possibilities:
There's something wrong in how I'm pressing on the strings, and if I learn the right way, everything will be right.
There's something wrong with the guitar that can be adjusted to make the notes come out right.
There's something wrong with the guitar that's just a side effect of "cheap guitar" and it's really not fixable. (Or at least, not fixable without massive amounts of time and effort.)
Ideas?