Well, I almost feel as if this post should be titled “Pre Moretm,” simply because my work on this project is far from over. Admittedly, I have not had a fraction of the time that I thought I would have at the beginning of the semester, leaving me with a laundry list of work that still needs to be done on Ingres. For the entirety of this semester, it never ceased to amaze me how even though my class work load (projects, assignments, exams, etc.) kept on getting bigger and busier, but the Ingres team just kept plugging on. I suppose that’s the nature of any large-scale open source project that’s still “alive” and well, if you stop for even one second, it’s going to keep moving and leave you in it’s dust.

There are several factors that contributed to my falling behind on my Ingres course work, but I believe the most significant one to be my inability to properly manage deadlines on a large scale. I’ve found that when it comes to internal project deadlines, I’m usually able to meet them with something close to or exceeding the assignment specifications. On the other hand, managing multiple internal deadlines across multiple projects has become quite difficult for me. As a team manager for a group project in my software engineering class, I usually have some sort of deadline to meet every 3 to 4 days. On top of that, weekly assignments and bi-weekly projects from my media processing class make my academic schedule even more complicated. Finally, if you mix in my exams in for all four of my local classes, you’ll have a schedule that certainly does not lend itself well to yet another work load with semi-frequent deliverables.

Regardless, here are the best and the worst of the experiences that I’ve had while working on UCOSP project:

Pro: I think that the best thing I’ll take away from this semester would have to be the experience of working on a distributed team with such a fine collection of students. Despite the difficult that I’ve had keeping up with Ingres on top of my already busy academic schedule, they seem to be managing their time quite well. Hopefully I can learn something from them!

Con: I believe that one of the larger con’s that I’ve experienced during UCOSP was having to use a blog to create status reports. Some students (such as myself) do not write or follow blogs, which I believe negatively impacted the quality and frequency of my status reports. Rather than posting to a blog, which to me felt like an improper use of time, I believe that more frequent team meetings and teleconferences would produce better work out of all team members. Frequent meeting would keep each team member accountable for their own work, and teleconferences would allow members to interact on a much more personal level than that of a blog. Rather than turning the students participating in UCOSP into yet another voice on the internet with something to say, I believe that it would be more beneficial to turn them into another user with something to do.

A recreation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV was painted on a concrete wall outside of my 4th grade classroom. At some point I had learned it was a work of art, but that concept was meaningless until I went to the Art Institute with my parents on my birthday.  We came across the painting while going down one of the museum’s grand staircases.  Mounted high above my head,  I could not see its brush strokes, imperfections or other indications of “realness.” Nonetheless, it was clearly more exciting than the school mural.  I remember wanting to stay because there seemed to be something to figure out about this painting. But, we had to move on because we were standing in the middle of the museum’s stairs.

Georgia O’Keeffe. Sky Above Clouds IV. 1965. Oil on canvas. 8 x 24 ft. Image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I was not taught how to look at art as much as how to make it until taking a Humanities course in high school, during which we studied art’s masterpieces by flipping between and comparing images in E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art at record speed; there was too much art history to be had for a high school class divided into equal parts between visual art, music and literature, but we did what we could.

I studied Ingres’s Une Odalisque during a college Humanities survey course, but I was not prepared for the way such a work could bring a person to pause.  Visiting the Louvre as an American citizen is typically expected to be a pace-driven experience, as one tries to consume as much art as possible in a single day. The chateau’s daunting, 4-wing layout and shopping list of masterpieces-to-be-seen in the map discourage any sort of intimate experience one might want to have with singular works of art.  Une Odalisque was a painting I happened upon while wandering through the rooms of French Neoclassical paintings.  The preciseness of the technique was so much more stunning and the blue so much more bold than I had expected, I felt like I could stay with this single painting until the institution closed and be content.  But for reasons I can no longer remember, we felt compelled to keep on, the art marathon track guiding us away from any impromptu lingering.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Une Odalisque. 1814.  Image from Musee du Louvre.

In The Story of Art, Gombrich offers warnings against the meandering experience:

“People who have acquired some knowledge of art history are sometimes in danger of falling into a…trap. When they see a work of art they do not stay to look at it, but rather search their memory for the appropriate label. They may have heard that Rembrandt was famous for his chiaroscuro…so they nod wisely when they see a Rembrandt, mumble ‘wonderful chiaroscuro,’ and wander on to the next picture.” (Gombrich 34)

Museums are highly conducive to the empty wandering Gombrich describes; Michael Kimmelman recently discussed the phenomenon  and attributed the problem to a desire for self-improvement. His claim that there is pressure to see everything is certainly true. “Everything” could be everything in the museum, everything in an exhibition, everything famous.

“Everything” never means one work of art.  Yet, a painting as rich as Une Odalisque commands a stop, an opportunity for the viewer’s full attention. I disagree with Kimmelman  in that I think a thorough trip to the museum can be meaningful when objects are viewed more quickly but still thoughtfully and as a whole.  However, there are also works of art that need to be seen entirely on their own, without a “white cube,” placement on a time line or the underlying desire to see anything else.

Charlie White’s 1957 is a work I want to return to see on its own.  The photograph is part of This Old, Weird America, an exhibition currently on view at the Frye (see exhibition reviews by Regina Hackett and Jen Graves) comprised of an interesting, and often unexpected,  grouping of artists. However, 1957 is so fascinating I am tempted to come back to see this photograph only.  A composition of filmic and allegorical images combines with a level of attention to period details seemingly comparable to Mad Men to open a space for considering how the past is created in the mind, amid the fictional representations to which we cling.  Although the intrigue of 1957 can be enhanced by the works around it, the experience of seeing it independently is entirely different.

Charlie White. 1957. 2006. C-print photograph. Image from CCF Artist Gallery.

Sky Above Clouds IV and Une Odalisuqe were early occasions in which  I felt compelled to focus on only on one thing and did not.   Since my experience at the Louvre, I have had several opportunities to go into a museum and see only one thing. The evening I arrived in New Orleans to see Prospect.1*, I could only find one work of art to see, as all of the venues were already closed. Alexandre Arrechea’s Mississippi Bucket was listed as being in the Plaza of Good Fortune at Harrah’s Casino, which seemed like a place that would be open all night.

Alexandre Arrechea. Mississippi Bucket. 2008. Plaza of Good Fortune, Harrah’s Casino, Prospect.1 New Orleans.

Predictably, the Plaza of Good Fortune was difficult to find. The Harrah’s tower dominated the modest New Orleans waterfront, but determining the location of a particular plaza housing a work of art was challenging. After walking through an underground tunnel towards the inside of the casino, I made my  way towards the first human in sight.  When I asked about the Plaza of Good Fortune, she directed me back outside.  After wandering the perimeter of Harrah’s for 20 minutes, searching for something to indicate the plaza I needed (Symbols of luck? Pennies falling from the sky?), I happened to look down to see a sprawling, trough-like sculpture made from wood.  After spending so long in search of the Plaza of Good Fortune, I kept reconsidering this empty, quiet bed of tributaries and what good fortune actually meant to them.

Since this encounter with Mississippi Bucket, I went to SFMOMA to see only Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_LAS VEGAS 05, I went to the Henry to see only Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, and I wandered through the labyrinth of the EMP to find Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean jacket and white glove.  All of these works are highly memorable to me in a way that even standout work in an exhibition is not. One of the reasons for this difference is the individually viewed work of art becomes an experience rather than one object among many.

Creating an “experience” is something museums constantly strive for, and yet the “museum visit” can become so formulaic (get ticket, enter galleries, see special exhibition, see permanent collection, depart) that remembering even a hand-full of works can be challenging by the end of the day. Interacting with a work of art involves both the artwork and the viewer; when a single work is seen alone, the entire context of seeing becomes part of the work.

Although admission fees, large-scale marketing campaigns and highlighted maps may suggest otherwise, seeing one work of art should not be considered a luxury reserved for the admission-less museums in England or the masterpieces of painting in France. The viewing process always under our control, and it is our responsibility to see accordingly.

*For the purposes of this essay, the biennial experience’s qualities of maximum art consumption and presence as a large-scale exhibition make it comparable to the museum experience.

thumbs up: Getting the opportunity to work with so many interacting technologies was a challenge. It forced me to take care with the documentation I have been preparing, and given me some inspiration as to ways that documentation could be organized better.

thumbs down: Meetings were often canceled and it was hard to set attainable personal goals.

All in all, I feel the course has been helpful. It was extremely frustrating at times because I felt like I was spending so much time dealing with installation problems and not always knowing what work was necessary to get to the next step. That frustration, I think, was key to learning how to work with multiple open source communities where everyone is setting their own deadlines and is dealing with other time constraints as well.

Good: I had a real good experience. It was a challenge still because we have not finished yet, but we learned how to solve problems that can apply to real world challenges in the computer science field. Talking with the Ingres community via email and IRC channel was real helpful.

Bad: We should communicate more often via UCOSP. We all work in separate ways with the Ingress community. We should do a written report every week to reinforce the meetings.

Via Andrew Ross, a link to a video showing how to work with maps in Drupal using the Ingres RDBMS—yay team!

One of the most useful ways for me to talk about the making of art is to quote megawatt sculptor, Richard Serra, from an interview I read years ago in (maybe) ArtForum where he said, “I like what I lack.” Me too. I can draw and have taken drawing classes for decades but I will never be able to execute with the grace of Degas or the grandeur of Ingres. You gotta love those French draftsmen.

I was reminded of this when I went to the opening reception of Kirsten Stingle’s stunning ceramic and mixed media show at Clay Scot Artworks last night. Her craft is amazing, her storytelling is captivating and darn it, the artist herself is down to earth and likeable. Google the Facebook page for Clay Scot and prepare to be enchanted.

For gift giving tips this Christmas, Southernness suggests you think about talents you’ve heard your intended recipient say they wish they had, but don’t and covet. I don’t expect a Degas drawing, but I wonder if Kirsten Stingle has drawings from the developmental stages of the pieces I relished at Clay Scot Artworks. I would thrill to unwrap one of those this Christmas. Would someone please call Darrell Ezekial or Philip (the gallery owners) at Clay Scot and check it out. If not for me, then for someone on your own holiday gift list. The question is, “I think you’ll like it. Do you lack it?”

Happy SEMISEPTCENTENNIAL Christmas Y’all,

Ben South

Southernness

Thumbs up: Sponsors, I liked the fact that we were able to get further acquainted with  large businesses in the computer science field such as Ingres, Tucows, Yahoo, and Rogers Communication. I also agree with Greg’s point, and it was a good learning experience to work on projects in a different setting and environment.

Thumbs down: Though this may have  been expensive, I would’ve liked to have a UCOSP meeting like the initial sprint at the end of this experience to wrap up the project. I think this would also be helpful to gauge experiences and follow-up on progress and accomplishments of other teams. Writing about it is good but I think just as in the sprint, face to face communication is essential

As the end of the semester closes in on us students, we will be piecing together or documentation from tweets, blogs, and the like. My project has allowed for many opportunities to actually edit the wiki pages on the Ingres site. While this is probably the most direct way to contribute to the community I have been working with, it ignores a subtle strength we have as new-comers to the projects we are working on: inexperience.

Since I was new to the Ingres community, I hadn’t become used to traversing the wiki pages and other sets of documents that more experienced developers probably had. This meant I was sometimes confused, and ran into conflicting pieces of information. By keeping a separate set of documentation that I can organize in a way that makes most sense to me, I can help to direct where the existing wikis should go. It could also be used as a great tool for introducing students to the same community if the company stays on board for future semesters of UCOSP.

Sometimes it is hard to recognize when a problem can be best solved by starting over. Over the past few days I have been making a lot of configurations on Windows using something called ‘Windows Configuration-By-Forms’. You can start it by going to the command prompt(typing “cmd” in Start->Run) and typing the command “cbf”.

Well, after all was said and done I wasn’t able to load php pages consistently. I previously was able to connect to an Ingres database, but not return any successful queries. Looks like I set something incorrectly.

However, since my role in this is to perform testing and documentation this will offer me the chance to document each step as I start over with my PHP install.

ASIDE:
I have heard that is not advised to use PHP 5.3 with Drupal, but I figure I will stick with what I had for tonight at least and see if I can get back to where I was.

Settings:
Apache v2.2 (running under user, NOT as service)
PHP 5.3
IngresII 9.3

Het is feest in open source database land. De laatste tijd ontstaan er steeds meer alternatieven. MySQL, PostgeSQL en FireBird zijn er al een tijdje, maar nieuwe sterren aan het firmament dienen zich aan. Ik noem er maar een paar: MonetDB (de column-based open source database, een mooi Nederlands product), CouchDB (document georienteerd) en LucidDB (speciaal getarget op DWH en BI).

Het interessante is nu dat  de open source markt zelfs winstgevend wordt; er is klaarblijkelijk steeds meer geld mee te verdienen. Althans, dit is de conclusie die ik trek als ik af ga op de bedrijven die professionele ondersteuning bieden op open source databases. Een paar voorbeelden:

MySQL AB doet dit kunstje al sinds jaren. Inmiddels is MySQL van Sun en Sun van Oracle, maar er is een nieuw bedrijf gesignaleerd dat ook professionele ondersteuning gaat bieden: Monty.

Ingres zelf biedt 24×7 ondersteuning op haar eigen open source database (hoewel voormalig closed source).

En vandaag lees ik dat LucidDB ogenschijnlijk ook volwassen wordt, nu DynamoDB een commerciele versie gaat leveren.

Zijn dit incidenten of lijkt het toch structureel te worden? Wie gebruikt er al open source databases voor DWH’s?

I’m twenty! I had a minor freak-out on my birthday, then a gentleman in my poetry workshop said “You’re just having a quarter-life crisis,” and he gave me chocolate, and everything was uphill from there, really.

Here I am in a birthday gift shirt, looking glam:

And – wait for it – in BIRTHDAY GIFT COWBOY BOOTS!

Now when I tell people (as some ladies can testify I have begun doing lately) that I want to beat myself to death with my own cowboy boots, I’ll have the correct props with which to pantomine!

So, what am I doing now that I’m twenty? Well, the same things I’ve always been doing, really. Today I went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to see Ingres’ Comtesse d’Haussonville and to hear a lecture by costume scholar Aileen Ribeiro about Ingres’ relationship to fashion. The lecture was incredible, and deserves its own post, which I’ll perhaps write tomorrow. Today, content yourselves with some sketches I did at the museum.

First, of a small Degas statue, Dancer Looking at The Sole of Her Right Foot:

And then, of the Comtesse herself:

They’re not perfect, but as my artist pa is always telling me, museum sketches aren’t for perfection, they’re just reminders – somewhat better than photos, somewhat worse than owning the piece of art yourself. They’re so you’ll come on your little sketchbook in a couple of years and say “Oh, yeah. I remember that day. I remember that painting. Cool.”

TWENTY YEARS OLD IN COWBOY BOOTS LOOKING AT ART! IT COULD BE WORSE, BABY!

The Geospatial Information System industry is over $4B in size and growing rapidly. Perhaps more interesting is that geospatial (think maps) technology is being integrated into mainstream technology. For example, how may people have not used Google Maps or a GPS at some point? Technology change has made what was impossible a decade ago not only possible, but perhaps practical for firms that could not use geospatial technology in the past. Driving this along with technology change are new standards and a non-profit foundation called the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

GeoTools is a geospatial toolkit developed in Java that is used by GeoServer, a standards-based web mapping engine under the banner of OSGeo. It is feature rich and very competitive in terms of performance with other web mapping software available today. There is government, industry, and community interest in this project. This project therefore has the potential to enable a consortium of smaller firms to rally together and bid on geospatial projects tendered by larger firms and governments. This in turn has a high likelihood of creating jobs, saving the government and industry firms money, strengthen the open source geospatial community, and enable the scientific teams to be more productive.

This is a great opportunity for students to learn a lot about Java, Java web programming, geospatial technologies, and databases, and to work with teams from Ingres, OpenGeo, OSGeo, and roughly half a dozen other companies. This project could launch a very successful career for students with the organizations involved. Many of these firms are recruiting in anticipation of baby boomer retirements coming in the next decade.

Mentor: Andrew Ross (Ingres)

“Ahora bien, los ataques de naturaleza política – y no sólo en el caso de este libro – suelen caracterizarse por una ceguera total y absoluta a las cualidades literarias y humanas de su blanco y, curiosamente, los iniciadores de las vendettas políticas son casi siempre personas de escaso talento que no se limitan a poner sus dotes a prueba en un panfleto, sino que tienen pretensiones de dominar otros géneros.”

Adam Zagajeweski, prólogo a Mi siglo de Aleksander Wat.

Osvaldo Lamborghini era un animal de escritura – su gran problema social fue la falta de talento. La gente de talento puede hacer cualquier cosa para ganarse el respeto social, cosas decentes, por supuesto, no hablo de tejes y manejes balzacianos, no, hablo de un trabajo: psicoanalista, profesor, periodista. Empleado es más difícil. En el mundo de la literatura no es bien visto. Les bastó con Kafka, que no era exactamente un empleado, era abogado en una empresa. Osvaldo Lamborghini era un animal de escritura, sólo era bueno para eso, sólo servía para eso. Su pecado social. Su falta de talento era notoria. Osvaldo Lamborghini tenía genio: hacía lo que podía. Lo dice Ingres, que separaba a la gente de talento, los talentosos, gente que podía hacer lo que quería, de los genios, gente que sólo hace lo que puede. Osvaldo Lamborghini sólo podía hacer lo que podía, escribir. Sólo era bueno para eso. La lista gente sin talento es larga (pero menos, mucho menos, que la de los talentosos): para mí la encabeza Joyce. Santo patrono de los escritores sin talento. Cuando Osvaldo Lamborghini se fue a España tenía una fama ultra secreta. Ricardo Strafacce cuenta la epopeya de la escritura Lamborghini en su biografía. Justamente, tal vez sin proponérselo, muestra las diferencias entre el talento y el genio. Ahí está. En este pequeño panfleto sólo quiero hacer notar el efecto linchamiento post-morten que desencadenó la biografía de Osvaldo Lamborghini.

Pequeño recorrido para la gente que por motivos difamatorios necesita no leer la biografía, otros no la leen porque no quieren, y está bien, no hay obligaciones de lectura. Se puede amar a un escritor sin leer su biografía. Esos no me interesan, acá. Me interesan los que no la leen deliberadamente porque de lo contrario todas las acusaciones que levantan contra Osvaldo Lamborghini se caerían como el albergue Warnes. O como el Muro de Berlín. Castillo de naipes. Osvaldo Lamborghini se fue a España con tres libros editados. Casi todos apostaron a su sequía “creadora”. No se dieron cuenta de que sólo se secan los talentosos. Después de su muerte, se publicaron Novelas y cuentos y Tadeys. Empezó la lectura, y la fama. La Universidad empezó a ocuparse. Los primeros gritos se escucharon en esa dirección. La impresión fue que lo querían proteger de la Universidad. Del famoso discurso universitario. El pobre y maltratadísimo discurso universitario. ¿Por qué? Beckett tiene una caterva de universitarios y filósofos que escriben dislates sobre él, y nadie quiere protegerlo. Hasta Adorno, sordo notorio para la literatura, publicó ese bodoque sobre Beckett que es la matriz de todas esas horripilantes lecturas repetidas indefinidamente. Beckett le murmuró al oído a Siegfried Unseld, editor de ambos, cuando terminó de escuchar pacientemente la conferencia de Adorno sobre Fin de partida: “Es eso el progreso de la ciencia: que los profesores puedan obstinarse en sus errores”. Viene un período de relativa calma. Después a un editor se le ocurrió sacar las Obras completas de Osvaldo Lamborghini, cuatro tomos. Escándalo. Los angustiados apostaron a la no venta. Se vendieron. Hubo un suplemento de cultura que le dedicó un número. Ahí, algunos se esmeraron en mostrar que su fama era inmerecida. Gritos, enojos, como si se tratara de Paul Claudel. Hablo de casos. Como quien dice el caso Cézanne, pongamos. O el caso Claudel. Osvaldo Lamborghini rompió el círculo de la fama secreta. Empezó el resentimiento y la venganza. Strafface pone todas las acusaciones. Al que le interesa, están ahí. Es interesante ver cómo el resentimiento se venga de un escritor de genio. Ya sé que lo dijo Nietzche, pero no basta, hay que ver el trabajo de zapa de la rabia celosa en acción. Mandelstam lo dijo mejor: “en la poesía, se trata de la guerra”. Después vino la biografía y se redobló el malestar. Algunos insisten en mostrar todos los defectos de Osvaldo Lamborghini como persona. La biografía muestra que no son tan extraordinarios. Tan fuera de lo común. Lo extraordinario en esta biografía es la epopeya de un tipo que escribe contra la cultura, o mejor: escribe porque es animal de fraseo. Como Albert Ayler un animal de música. Ese es el gran escándalo. Un escándalo de literatura. Como el de Reinaldo Arenas. Pero insisten. Algunos preparan trabajos definitivos donde van a mostrar lo equivocado que estamos los que amamos la obra de Osvaldo Lamborghini. Pero hay algo sin retorno: Osvaldo Lamborghini rompió el círculo estrecho, podrido, policíaco y ridículo de la familia literaria. Hay lectores sueltos, lo leen porque se enamoran de su fraseo, sí, no de sus palabras, de su fraseo, Osvaldo Lamborghini no era un escritor de palabras, amaba el lenguaje, o sea, amaba las frases, sí, su fraseo, se puede leerlo sin hacer una tesis, sin escribir trabajos definitivos sobre su persona o su vanguardismo, yo no podría, no lo conocí, me hubiera encantado, no, leerlo para uno, usarlo, citarlo. Otros se la agarran con su Niño proletario para deschavar algún desviacionismo ideológico. ¿Cuál sería? Pero este panfleto no es para denunciar nada, ni a nadie. No. Tampoco busca conciliaciones o acuerdos. No. Es una respuesta a la lectura de la biografía, que me prestaron. Ningún lector en serio acuerda o concilia una lectura con otro. Eso es para buenos alumnos. Para tipos que siguen esa maldición escolar sarmientina. Yo, por ejemplo, no quiero que nadie me enseñe a leer. Eso se aprende en el primario. Leo solo. Muchos amigos a los que respeto, leen solos. A mí me gusta leer a Osvaldo Lamborghini, no me interesa saber cuáles fueron sus opiniones políticas, o estéticas, creo que con algunos de sus puntos de vista acerca de la estética disiento, con las opiniones ideológicas, no sé, no las conozco y es un asunto privado, o las que conozco me vienen de sus difamadores, firmadas sus difamadores, es suficiente para no entrarlas, que se desgañiten en los cafés, de rabia, pero lo que es muy obvio, es que las opiniones políticas de Osvaldo Lamborghini no tuvieron ninguna influencia perniciosa, me corrijo: no tuvieron ninguna influencia. Lo que sí tiene influencia es su literatura, su posición frente al lenguaje. Sus puntos de vista acerca de lo que hace el lenguaje. Eso sí. Y mucha influencia. Hay muchos lectores. Y tipos que escriben y se inspiran, y sueñan con ese estilo. Lo imitan. Se quieren contagiar, lo estudian. Hablan en los bares. Algunos son medio religiosos. Eso sí, eso no lo niego, y genera malestar. Porque es incontrolable. Y ese malestar se disfraza de justicia, de objetividad, pero en realidad, es una rabia silenciosa, estragante, que los vuelve repetitivos y machacones, y no pueden aceptar que Osvaldo Lamborghini los venció en el tiempo. Imperdonable. Es curioso ver cómo se juntan en el territorio de la aprobación todos los resentidos que tienen que dar su opinión sobre Osvaldo Lamborghini. ¿Por qué hay que dar opiniones? ¿Qué es ese concepto ruinoso, mediocre y lastimero de la justicia literaria? ¿Quién la dicta? Leer Sale el espectro de Philip Roth. Amy Bellette lo dice en una carta al Times. Estos tipos corren presurosos a dar testimonio, más que testimonios, son denuncias. Osvaldo Lamborghini era un arquitecto de lo sonoro. Amaba el lenguaje. Pasaba las palabras por la boca. Las sacaba en frases. Masticaba sus frases. Se deleitaba en Mansilla: “Mansilla se demora, espera, / al doctor Macías. Hasta que no puede esperar / esperar más. / Parten… / los caballos…”, que bello, por favor, y amaba a Eduardo Wilde. Amaba la precisión de Kafka. Y a Horacio Quiroga. Nada grave, socialmente hablando. Gustos propios. Su condena es el animal de escritura que llevaba adentro. No lo podía controlar. Los contemporáneos son la mala leche. Se denuncian mutuamente. En nombre de alguna justicia ejecutan genios si el poder político se los permite. Pero no vayamos tan lejos. Como dijo Lorenzo García Vega en una conferencia, que escuché con un amigo, él es testigo, dijo algo así, si mal no recuerdo: “hagan de cuenta que no dije nada de esto.” Así que hagan de cuenta que esto último no lo escribí. La corporación de escritores, cada tanto, se higieniza ideológicamente. Exige cada tanto la higiene ideológica. Van de todas las corrientes y géneros al mismo juzgado. Sobre todos la corriente estudio de géneros. Para salvar lo cultural. Es obvio que lo cultural no era el proyecto de Osvaldo Lamborghini. Ni su destrucción. Tampoco se veía en la gran cultura. Lo digo por lo que escribió. Pero como parece que sus viejos colegas destripan sus sueños diurnos, sus pequeños delirios de grandeza o de gloria, la biografía deja claro que tenía una vida, también iba al café, alguna vez fue joven en la edad, se soñó algo, alguna gloria, más o menos como todos, la gloria, ¿quién no?, vamos, un esfuerzo de reconocimiento, a recordar. Sólo que por esas cosas del genio, salió de la estrechez de la familia literaria. Imperdonable. Tampoco iba por las causas. Sólo era bueno para escribir. La biografía de Strafacce muestra esa epopeya, un tipo que se va convenciendo a los golpes de su falta de talento. Todos le dicen que es talentoso, que puede, por ejemplo, ganarse la vida como psicoanalista, entrando en alguna escuelita, pongamos, o que era un brillante periodista -¿acaso una mesa de periodistas no lo aplaudió cuando entró a la Giralda de Constitución con Sergio Rondan?-, pero Osvaldo Lamborghini duda de su talento, siempre en el sentido Ingres. Busca trabajo. Lo va a ver a César Contino. Él mismo llamaba a eso su proyecto kafkiano. Servir sólo para escribir no se paga bien. No se paga ni un peso por eso. Ningún dinero alcanza. Ya se teorizó mucho al respecto. Casi todos los filósofos de instituto se ocuparon del tema, bien pagados. Cada uno de esos tipos tiene su Barthes bien aprendido. Pero no leen a Simon Leys. Otra vez: hagan de cuenta que no escribí esto. No hay como ellos (los filósofos de instituto) para hablar de lo mal que vivieron los escritores. Es conmovedor. Amy Bellete, la viuda de E.I. Lonoff le escribe al Times una carta: “Hubo un tiempo en que las personas inteligentes usaban la literatura para pensar. Ese tiempo pronto llegará a su fin. Durante los años de la guerra fría en la Unión Soviética y sus satélites de Europa del Este, los escritores dignos de ese nombre fueron proscritos: hoy, en los Estados Unidos, es la literatura la que está proscrita, como capaz de ejercer una una influencia efectiva sobre la manera que se tiene de aprehender la vida.” Es notable la insistencia de algunos autores en querer desempeñar todavía un papel, y algunos apoyándose en la justicia literaria. Como chivo expiatorio: el genio de algunos otros. Los talentosos se quejan de que el salario no les alcanza. Y buscan el pelo en la leche. Simon Leys me ayuda más que Barthes para leer a Osvaldo Lamborghini, yo no leo textos, leo libros, por eso Simon Leys. En un libro que se llama La Felicidad de los pececitos, si traduzco bien, en el artículo Marginales, dice algo sobre la manía de analizar retrospectivamente la conducta de los escritores que me viene anillo al dedo:

“EMERSON TIENE RAZÓN: “Dante era un invitado desagradable, y por eso nadie lo invitaba a cenar”.

Recuerdo estas palabras cuando leo la reseña idiota de una biografía de Solyenitzin. El crítico del que se trata parece chocado cuando descubre que Solyenitzin tenía pocas pulgas. Un poco lo sospechábamos: si hubiese sido modesto, conciliador, complaciente, diplomático y fácil de tratar, habría sido un agradable vecino de campo – pero ¿cómo diablos se habría convertido en Solyenitzin?”

Este Simon Leys para Osvaldo Lamborghini, para que se vea mejor el odio y molestia que se armó con la salida de la biografía que escribió Ricardo Strafacce. Porque la escribió. Hay que recordarlo. Están los que dicen que la literatura de Osvaldo Lamborghini es un invento, en el sentido más porteño, y también en el de la teoría del complot: ¿un grupo de amigos? ¿inescrupulosos que aprovechan la fama de Osvaldo Lamborghini para construir su propia fama? ¿el lobby universitario? ¿el lobby editorial? ¿el lobby de los suplementos? ¿el de los jóvenes irresponsables? Muchos lobbys, que mutan. Que viven en paralelo como en las novelas de Philip Dick. No puedo privarme de citar otra vez a Simon Leys –lectura no apta para almas bellas, abstenerse almas bellas, ya que citamos la figura de Dante. “Cuando Sartre declaró que Mauriac no era novelista, la víctima habría podido consolarse pensando que este mismo juez había descubierto igualmente que Orson Welles no era cineasta.” Con Simon Leys se pueden multiplicar las citas. Es realmente un autor pernicioso para la maldición escolar que gobierna la crítica literaria. Pero no es el asunto, aquí. Tampoco la crítica. Borren lo que escribí. Mucha gente hecha en el sartrismo todavía hoy es juez importantísimo en la distribución de jerarquías en la Argentina, jueces de literatura. Pero Osvaldo Lamborghini escribió esto, que nunca veo citado: “Mi conclusión es que la literatura no les interesa, es el pretexto; el ´texto´ es algo demasiado elevado –sagrado- para dejarlo en manos de irresponsables como Joyce o Artaud. El texto es cosa de la Universidad, institución a la que le importa un pepino volverse musulmana o marxista-leninista-pictogramática con tal de conservar intacto su propio poder. Esto lo sabemos desde hace tiempo. Sabemos que lo único que quieren estos profesores es hablar de ellos mismos”.

Nunca la veo citada, a esta frase, otra vez, por favor, un esfuerzo de sinceridad, aunque a la sinceridad no se la pueda decir toda, porque parece que siempre falta en algún lugar. Pero bueno, y la última vez: Simon Leys: “Hay obras que ganan cuando no son entendidas”. Osvaldo Lamborghini fracasó en el talento, eso le hizo creer a sus rabiosos contradictores que apenas eran esos tres libros y un poco más. Nunca contaron con el aspecto Ingres.

Pablo Brameri

Undoing the dupe: A way out of your Big Software contracts

By Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres

(Last month Burkhardt wrote about how Big Software companies lock customers into restrictive software licensing agreements and continue to raise prices, even during tough economic times. Here Burkhardt offers some tips for effectively renegotiating contracts with your current Big Software suppliers.)

Burkhardt tells how to untangle your company from Big Software. Photo: Ingres

For decades now many of us in corporations have been paying loads of money to work with Big Software companies like Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP). Our information technology employees are familiar with these software vendors and their technologies (and their proprietary licensing models) and may even identify their careers with them. So, while we may suspect we are being overcharged, and could spend millions less running our IT departments, we have remained comfortably, and expensively, locked-in.

But we want to be back in charge. And we deserve to be; we’re the customers that line the pockets of all Big Software companies. Without us, who would buy all that software?

But we question whether it is even possible to break away from this perverse reality where software leviathans dictate both economic terms and the technology road maps that are critical to our business.

Is there a way to move towards an alternative model, where IT costs are variable and aligned with actual business needs? Yes, but we just don’t like change. And perhaps we lack 100 percent confidence in the ability of new, alternatives to perform the mission-critical processes that must run our companies 24×7, reliably and securely.

I understand these requirements well. In my former role, I was responsible for the New York Stock Exchange’s technology, and the continuous availability of our trading systems was paramount. My team showed me a better way to deliver that reliability by using innovative Open Source software and open standards. This gave me the tools to combat the hardball negotiating tactics of Big Software and to substantially drive down costs.

Over the last decade, alternative IT models have matured across a broad range of software technologies and a growing number of customer success stories demonstrate that it is eminently feasible for well-lead IT organizations to move to this better model. And in doing so, gain substantial cost savings and rapid innovation benefits of a New Economics of IT.

You don’t need to continue signing over your business’ bottom line to Big Software companies that keep you locked-in to contracts with no end to escalating costs.

A way out

If you’re ready to embrace change and begin looking at more cost efficient and innovative ways to run your IT infrastructure, here are five tips to help you extract yourself from expensive Big Software contracts that are holding your company hostage:

1. Introduce real competition to the software license cartel. We know that introducing real competition for any product or service is the key to avoiding expensive and inflexible contracts.  The key in software is to introduce competition from companies with a disruptive and competitive business model. Consolidation in the proprietary software industry has created an oligopoly of proprietary players which demonstrate their power by raising prices in the middle of a recession. In fact, the software leviathans such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle compete with each other about as vigorously as OPEC members and we need new business models to provide real competition.

The proven alternatives are Open Source software from companies such as Ingres and Red Hat (RHT) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings from players like Salesforce.com (CRM). Both models provide low and variable costs and create real competition to the proprietary software model. By adopting these models for at least 10-15% of your software you can negotiate better prices on the other 85%.

2. Understand and adopt the new software business models.. Open Source software has no license fee and support is provided under an annual software subscription that is substantially less than the annual maintenance fee charged in the proprietary model. The subscription includes product usage rights, support services, access to new features and goes up or down year to year depending on your actual business usage. This subscription model is used by both Open Source and SaaS providers and aligns costs directly with the value the software provides in actual use. Another benefit: the end of Big Software shelfware. Consider donating your remaining unused software to not-for-profit organizations that could surely use it.

3. Strategically avoid technology lock-in. For competition to work, you need to be able to switch vendors over time and this requires an IT strategy that mandates open standards and so won’t lock your company into a particular vendor. This is true of proprietary software and Open Source and SaaS alike. Remember, having a low cost and variable cost model isn’t sufficient in itself; over time you may still want to switch technologies to support new business strategies. The good news is that mature open standards are available for the full range of software technologies and they bridge both proprietary and Open Source worlds. For example, half of all programmers use the open Java language and Ingres customers are running critical financial systems written in Java that process billions of dollars a day on a completely open source infrastructure.

4. Demonstrate an open competitive environment. In order to drive down your software costs, you need to adopt mature alternatives for a significant portion of your software and use this leverage to negotiate better terms overall. Proven alternatives to Big Software are available at virtually all levels of IT – from the operating system up to the application layers. You won’t eliminate proprietary software overnight – you are often dealing with multi-year contracts after all – but by eliminating 10% to 15 %, you will save up to 95 % in those areas and will be empowered to negotiate substantial cost reductions for the remaining 85% of your environment.

5. Re-read your software contracts and plan your escape from Big Software. Check the fine-print of your Big Software contracts to make sure there is a cap on the maintenance costs after the license deal ends. If not, ask for one well in advance of the renewal date and if you don’t get it (surprise!), re-double your efforts to build your negotiating leverage by bringing in open subscription-based software technologies for 10-15% of your portfolio.

Software subscription models make it easy to prove the value of software before you make significant investments. They reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating expensive license fees and a whole range of subsequent “gotchas”. It’s simply a better, smarter way to buy, one that finally puts the customer back in charge.

No duping involved.

Burkhardt is president and CEO of Ingres. He previously spent six years as CTO and executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, where he and his team transformed  the NYSE to a fully electronic model.

Jedes aktuelle Erlebnis ist mit gleichartigen Erlebnissen verknüpft. Die grafische Struktur, die ich hier gewählt habe, orientiert sich an den lebensreformerischen Bewegungen im späten neunzehnten und frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, woher auch der heute leicht anthroposophisch anmutende Beiklang rührt. Eine Skizze von Ingres bildet den Ausgangspunkt, von dem aus der weite Bogen bis heute gezogen wird. Der spitzkieselige Weg, den das Emanzipation genannte Projekt der geschlechtsspezifischen Aufklärung bis heute zurückgelegt hat, ist noch in vielen Werthaltungen und Erkenntnisweisen präsent – bis in die unmittelbarste Bewegung hinein.

Thematisch liegt hier das Öffnungsmotiv zugrunde, das ich bereits in der Gestalt der Pandora in der Erzählung EINLASS ausgearbeitet habe. Dies ist ein Hauptmotiv sowohl der klassischen Aufklärung als auch einiger – in der oberflächlichen Betrachtung gegenläufiger – lebensreformerischer Bewegungen. Der anscheinende Gegensatz basiert auf der mystischen Verankerung dieses Motivs, das in vielen Erlebnisweisen religiös besetzt ist. Tatsächlich aber ist das Ablegen der Schleier Salomes oder das Öffnen der Büchse der Pandora (auf die Weise umgedeutet, wie es in EINLASS geschieht) aber zunächst ein humaner Akt menschlicher Entwicklungsbereitschaft, dem erst durch die Ausdeutung im sozialen Rahmen eine religiöse oder emanzipatorische Anhauchung beigemengt wird. Dies kann – in einer patriachalen Gesellschaft – auf frauenverachtende oder – in einer Theokratie – auf verklärende Weise vor sich gehen. Wahr ist und bleibt das Erleben, das sich vor dieser Ausdeutung ereignet – und das Ingres auf kraftvolle Weise Bild werden ließ.

Total grade: 100%

*Assessment for team grade: 40%*
- Pro-rated for meeting attendance: 10%
- Evidence of participation in the Ingres community – mailing list posts: 5%
- Evidence of participation in the Ingres community – IRC interactions: 5%
- Blogging about one’s status on one’s blog or on UCOSP blog as one goes on: 10%
- Peer evaluation among the UCOSP student team at the end of term plus an email to Andrew. The email to Andrew should contains how you rate yourself and why: include 3 positive items that you felt went well and at least 3 things you felt you could have done better. : 10%

*Assessment for individual grade: 60%*

Team Member(s): Eva Wong, Scott Bishop
Area: Ingres [c code]
Mentor(s): Charles Thibert, Alex Trofast, Ray Fan, J Hankinson
Goal(s): Improve robustness and error path checking.

Success measure(s): 5 patch contributions from each student by the end of term in December. Contributions must pass code inspection and approval from the team. Patches will be committed to the code repository by Alex Trofast and Chuck Thibert. Screencast video of showing how to pull Ingres source code and compile it.

For each patch(10%): documentation(2%), coding(8%). For the video(10%).

Team Member(s): Kelvin Harry
Area: OpenLayers plugin for Drupal [php code]
Mentor(s): Andrew Ross, OpenLayers plugin community
Goal(s): Solve any 5 bugs found in OpenLayers plugin for Drupal – either bugs our team found, or existing ones.
Success measure(s): Looking for 5 patch contributions the bug tracking system. Contributions must pass code inspection and approval from the team. Patches will be committed to the code repository by the OpenLayers plugin for Drupal team. Submit a video of what the Drupal openlayers plugin is, and a short demo of it in action.

For each bug fix patch(10%): documentation(2%), coding(8%). For the video(10%).

Team Member(s): Mary Mootoo, Sarah Danaher, Evan James Bowling
Area: Overall Integration [considerable testing, some minor coding in php or c as needed to help clear backlogs]
Mentor(s): Andrew Ross, various others
Goal(s): Identify and raise 5 different bugs that has not submitted to the bug tracking system and submit them to the bug tracking system. Coordinate with developer assigned the bug to ensure they have enough information and can reproduce the issue. Submit a screencast demo of the technology (Drupal + maps) in action.

For each bug raised(10%). For the video(10%).

Deadline for the patches and video for everyone: 2009-12-11.

The definition of art is a somewhat amorphous thing.  Recently I chided someone for identifying “art” with whatever will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me.  I suggested that some things will have these qualities and yet will decidedly not be art.  Driving in rush hour, doing taxes, taking a standardized test, getting a root canal — all are challenging.  I guarantee the root canal will make you uncomfortable.  Perhaps a dentist will argue that root canals are art.  But, for goodness sake, let’s let the dentist make the argument.  Artists don’t have to do it for them.

What is art?  In the era when drawing doesn’t count, art has morphed into namelessness.  Everyone is an artist now.  Art is whatever you want it to be.  And still life beckons.

Let me suggest that art’s definition be reserved for the hard stuff.  Let an old master’s skill be an ingredient.  Better that we be striving toward it than grinning and slapping our own backs in self-congratulation. 

Life still beckons.  I say art is a mystery, and I will pursue it.  Better to ever pursue and never reach than to cheapen the journey with goo-gaws and touristy nick-nacks.  Can I persuade you to share in the longing?

Okay, I don’t usually rant.  But the ubiquitously recited litany that art will challenge me, make me feel uncomfortable, touch me, transform me — it’s so “me, me,me”!  When did we lose our bearings?  When did we leave nature aside?  When did we lose our capacity to see inside the veil?

I copied Ingres (who knew what art is) and left the face blank.  I think she makes a nice metaphor for Art.  Art is she whose face is hard to see, the mystery that beckons, the life that needs transcription, a line suspended in air, a thought held in a breath, a definition that defies.

How enterprise software giants separate you from more of your company’s money

By Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres

Burkhardt reveals Big Software's secrets. Photo: Ingres

Here’s how the software business really works: A software company charges your firm an enormous upfront licensing fee and locks you into escalating costs for decades to come, often using a set of hardball tactics.

But with the growing popularity of pay-as-you-go and subscription-based software and services, the old way is being exposed for the unfair financial model that it actually is. And the new open, more flexible models are starting to make the old ones look downright deceitful, especially when you show them against the backdrop of a deep recession.

Many companies have been forced to downsize to make it through these tough economic times. And as information technology and C-level executives examine the financial books together, many are discovering the unfortunate news that their Big Software contracts are harming their business’ bottom line and cannot be downsized – at least now without a fundamental change of approach.

Perhaps it’s not always intentional, but if you’re an IT decision maker with several of these licensed-based software contracts on the books, it’s very likely you’re getting duped.

How the duping works

Big Software Goliaths like Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), Sybase (SY) and SAP (SAP) use multi-year enterprise license agreements that lock you into annual fees that go up, but can almost never be reduced. They encourage you to make large upfront purchases of software licenses by providing significant volume discounts. Volume discounts are common in the software industry and help you achieve a lower price-point on your software licenses and annual support fees. However, encouraging you to purchase larger quantities than you need often leads to “shelfware”, i.e., owning a whole lot of software you don’t use.

What if you want to downsize? Because annual support fees are tied to the net license price, the discount is tied to the original volume of license purchased. Therefore, the Big Software companies argue that you lose the discount originally granted on the contract. Their typical tactic is to re-price right back to list price, not a reduced discount, and with typical discounts in the 25 to 85 percent range it is financially infeasible to downsize. It’s this kind of aggressive tactic that ensures that Big Software’s revenue streams never go down, and in fact continue to go up as annual escalators are applied.

Duped and trapped

If you don’t need to downsize your usage but want to just hold steady and pay maintenance you’ll be caught in the renewal trap. When your multi-year contract comes up for renewal, you’ll find that your contract has no cap on subsequent increases to the annual support contract. The high-paid sales person will then warn that your original discount will evaporate if you don’t buy more licenses. It will be cheaper to buy more “shelfware” than to pay list price for your maintenance.

In addition, if you ever want to reinstate support on the unused portion of your licenses, you would be required to pay all the back-support fees for the period you cancelled. It would be like getting a large service bill for services never rendered from your former auto mechanic – the guy whom you haven’t taken your car to in two years because you found a better shop. No wonder Oracle’s margins on maintenance are over 90 percent!

More deeply duped

The enormous consolidation of the software market has created a few behemoths that have enormous pricing power over their customers because of their large market shares and a strategy of vertical integration, which raises customer-switching costs. If you try and get out of being locked-in, you’re likely to pay a big price.

Big Software players have demonstrated their power by raising prices during the worst economic period since the Great Depression – not exactly a tactic that supports the customers through tough times. In the last year and half, for example, Oracle has seen fit to raise overall software and maintenance fees by 15-18% and to raise prices on acquired technologies by 45%. Many companies locked in to an Oracle contract, for instance, have signed a contract where they agree to pay these unexpected price hikes, often without reading the fine print and realizing the true cost of what they have signed up for.

Many price increases are hidden behind additional fees that penalize customers for taking advantage of industry advances such as modern multi-core chips which reduce hardware costs or even just external access to your own data over the Internet. Yes indeed, even in the 21^st century Internet access is often excluded from Big Software’s standard licensing terms.

Meanwhile, contract consolidation and the co-termination of contracts further reduce options, as more software is covered under a single contract. You may ask for a consolidation, but more likely than not, the vendor will argue that the entirety of the new contract is open for re-pricing, if you attempt to modify one component of that contract. This is happening with increased regularity for product lines that have been acquired, as vendors consolidate the newly acquired product lines in single corporate purchasing agreements and use their increased leverage to extract more revenue and lock the customers in even more firmly in the future.

To learn more about how to get out of Big Software contracts and/or negotiate current ones to your advantage, stay tuned for my next article.

Burkhardt is president and CEO of Ingres. He previously spent six years as CTO and executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, where he and his team  transformed  the NYSE to a fully electronic model.

Here’s a list of tools I cast essential for carrying out my day-to-day business or I find otherwise useful.

Hardware (in no particular order)

• My primary workstation is a HP Pavillion Slimline, a pretty much standard, off-the-shelf PC on which I installed Ubuntu Linux. The hardware works reasonable well under Linux, but at some point I wish hardware vendors would just offer some models which work seamlessly with any major OS. Anyhow, the desktop has 3 GB of RAM and 500 GB hard disk. Nothing really special, it does it’s job and is about a year old, now. It is complemented by a 21” Dell LCD monitor and the other usual peripherals. By the way, once you’ve used laptops for your daily work for so long that you don’t even realize how small your screen actually is, you will appreciate the decently sized monitor of your new desktop.
• Other than my desktop computer, I use an Asus eeePC netbook when traveling or at my office at work or at university and sometimes my old Toshiba laptop I run Debian on. The netbook has very decent Linux compatible hardware. Mainly because it came with some Linux preinstalled – I guess is was some weird Xandros. That wasn’t quite it for my netbook – I found it very limiting – so I installed Ubuntu on it using the array.org custom kernel and the netbook remix software package. This works reasonable well for me.

Software (in no particular order)

• Linux (and the various standard *NIX tools): I like open-source and I like to have the opportunity to debug my OS, so I’m using Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) for the most part. I found it frustrating at times when I was a Windows user and something stopped working from one day to the next. Although it was mostly me why things broke, I still had no reasonable way of undoing/fixing things. Well, at least not nearly as nicely as I can fix and analyze things on my Linux boxes. My mind wanders…
• Gnome Terminal: Bash to be precise. I’m using Bash on a daily basis and I don’t want to live without it anymore. It just helps getting your work done.
• Screen: A quite handy tool for multiplying your screen when working remotely on a machine via SSH.
• Mozilla Firefox: The first thing I’m starting once logged on to my computer is a Web browser. No matter if I’m debugging some CSS or asynchronous HTTP request or if I’m just reading my favorite paper, Firefox is the tool of choice.
• Firebug: Number 1 Web developer tool. I haven’t seen a better tool, yet.
• Ad-block Plus: The online world is just not bearable without it.
• It’s all text!: This one is also a quite handy add-on if you were to write text/code in HTML textareas a lot. By using It’s all text! you can load the content of any textarea into your favorite text editor (GVIM in my case), edit it and save it back into the appropriate textarea of the Web page.
• Vmplayer and qemu: These tools are just nice for the occasional boot into a clean Linux sandbox or testing some IE stuff on Windows. I use qemu to create the bare vmdk disks and use vmplayer to play them. VirtualBox is also a nice alternative.
• Eclipse (with RadRails, and other plugins): When doing some programming in Java, Python, Rails or C I use Eclipse for the most part augmented with quite a few VIM here and there.
• VIM: For writing Latex, BASH scripts, code  or for any other use of plain text processing, VIM is my tool of choice.
• XChat: My preferred X IRC client
• Evolution: A quite reasonable choice for doing all my email work. I chose Evolution, since it has a calendar integrated, but I’m not sure if Mozilla Thunderbird with Google Calendar wouldn’t work quite as well.
• Latex: Either for writing articles, assignments, theses. It’s simply a nice layout.
• Inkscape: Sometimes when there some vector drawings to create (such as the MarkUs logo )
• GIMP: For my very basic image manipulation needs.
• OpenOffice.org: For the occasional word processing or spreadsheeting.

I think these are (most of) my all-time-favorite tools. What are you using? What do you find helpful?

Here are some links what other people wrote about this topic: Mike Gunderloy and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and counting…

Hello Good People,

Today I want to make it a bit light. This blog is about my favourite artist!

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French pronunciation: [ɛ̃ːɡʁ]) (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres’s portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.

A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were “the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art … I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator.”^[1] Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time,^[2] while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art.

Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the first of seven children (five of whom survived infancy) of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755–1814) and his wife Anne Moulet (1758–1817). His father was a successful jack-of-all-trades in the arts, a painter of miniatures, sculptor, decorative stonemason, and amateur musician; his mother was the nearly illiterate daughter of a master wigmaker. From his father the young Ingres received early encouragement and instruction in drawing and music, and his first known drawing, a study after an antique cast, was made in 1789.^[3] Starting in 1786 he attended the local school, Ecole des Frères de l’Education Chrétienne, but his education was disrupted by the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the closing of the school in 1791 marked the end of his conventional education. The deficiency of his schooling would always remain for him a source of insecurity.^[4]

In 1791, Joseph Ingres took his son to Toulouse, where the young Jean Auguste Dominique was enrolled in the Académie Royale de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture. There he studied under the sculptor Jean-Pierre Vigan, the landscape painter Jean Briant, and—most importantly—the painter Joseph Roques, who imparted to the young artist his veneration of Raphael.^[5] Ingres’s musical talent was further developed under the tutelage of the violinist Lejeune. From the ages of thirteen to sixteen he was second violinist in the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, and he would continue to play the violin as an avocation for the rest of his life.Thanks for sharing!

Après les photographies de prostituées, des courtisanes, des vues “exotiques” du XIXe siècle,etc…  ma nouvelle obsession: le turban.

Irma (voyante?), physionotrace. Anonyme, 18e siècle

Sous toutes ses formes et origines: Asie, Afrique, Europe… toutes les zones géographiques et toutes les époques y passent. J’ai ce besoin de voir, encore et encore les turbans, les différentes manières de le porter (nu ou habillé, de jour ou en soirée)!!!

Le turban m’évoque l’exotisme, le désert d’Afrique, l’Inde, mais aussi les années folles.

REYBAS André. Portrait d'une femme portant un vison autour du cou, vers 1920, gélatino-bromure d'argent (négatif).

Je trouve cette manière de se coiffer élégante et assez mystérieuse. Que se cache t’il sous les plis de ce drapé? (non, je n’évoque pas les cheveux gras…); la sensualité est aussi inhérente à cette coiffure seulement retenue par une broche, un nœud que l’on peut dénouer avec simplicité; il évoque l’exotisme et les contrées lointaines; et aussi l’intimité, juste après le bain ou la douche, il retient avec élégance les cheveux mouillé et habille d’un rien notre tenue en serviette éponge…

Ingres, La grande Odalisque, 1819, Louvre

Le turban, étrange obsession.

“Avec le talent, on fait ce qu’on veut.

Avec le génie, on fait ce qu’on peut.”

Jean-Auguste Ingres