First, I must officially announce the end of the Ted Cruz Magical Mystery Tour. Congratulations Senator Cruz: you have broken my will. On the Alpe Duez that is the 2016 Presidential Campaign I have cracked and am heading back towards the team cars for a snack while I watch you doggedly grind on to try and catch Trump and Carson, who look surprisingly good in their tight fitting bike shorts. It’s easy to see where Trump gets his confidence from. He's got really nice calves.
It was a nice idea, I think, to try and capture the hum drum day to day movement of a man on campaign. But in practice it turned out to be a lot of work – trolling through Twitter feeds, logging miles, calculating distances, estimating the amount of chicken eaten at this event or that event; it all turned out to be a little too much for me. If I had been able to keep track daily that would have been one thing, but I got two kids at home and I’m holding down a job at the candy factory and Chelsea FC are in crisis and there just isn’t any time.
So we return the bus back to the Merry Pranksters, dispose of the rest of the marijuana at the Colorado state line, and with heavy hearts say farewell to the mystery tour. We hardly knew thee.
But it also gives me more time and space to follow the campaign in general. It is interesting, if not also down right fucking scary. Yes, Trump and Carson are ahead in the polls (though dismayed by the appeal of Trump I understand it, though Carson….wow, I mean, I just don’t know what people see in him), but look at my boy Cruz down there. Poll numbers stubbornly persistent around 7 – 10%, biding his time, staying out of the lime light, raising tons and tons of money and basically right now just trying not to lose, so that if and when Trump and Carson lose their appeal he is the next man up, the anti- establishmentarian who has in fact been a part of the establishment, who understands the levers of power and therefore is best positioned to destroy it. Look out my friends. Look out.
Second, a half-hearted boo to the Renoir Sucks At Painting (RSAP) movement.
Look…Renoir isn’t my favorite either. There are other painters I enjoy more, but there are also plenty I enjoy less. I think when Renoir is on he is excellent – it is hard for me to have any problems with his Luncheon of the Boating Party, I love his portrait of Monet, and I think these show that he can be quite good. I think the problem with Renoir is, perhaps, that he can be sublime and shambolic in the same canvas.
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| Renoir Eats Lunch on a Boat |
Take for example one of my favorite paintings, A Bar at the Folies- Bergere:
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| Fun Fact: The Oranges signify that this woman might actually a be a prostitute. |
I love this painting. I love the fact that Renoir captures the movement around the busy Parisian bar, the people mingling over their drinks, the eyes of the barmaid with their sort of sad look, signifying the loneliness that one can feel in the midst of a bustling hedonistic paradise. And look, there in the corner? That is a bottle of Bass Beer, with its signifying red triangle trademark. Delightful!
But ah, the mirror in the background. We see the barmaids back, with her disappointing squirrel tail haircut, and I suppose that we are the man in the top hat, talking to her. But the problem is that by the laws of physics that perspective in the mirror should not be -
Wait, what? This is a painting by Manet?
Manet?? Really??
Huh.
Okay, so maybe Renoir sucked at painting after all. Still, I’m not going to traipse around the country with a sign that says “God Hates Renoirs” like a trooper in some kind of artsy-fartsy wing of the Westboro Baptist Church. I have more important things to do with my time, one of which is definitely NOT following every movement of Ted Cruz as he continues to ask people for large amounts of money so that he can become leader of the Greatest Country on Earth and then refuse to govern it effectively with the obstinacy of a stubborn child denied desert because she didn’t eat all of her carrots, and yet still refuses to eat the carrots based on principle alone.
Plus, art is subjective. Who can say what is good, and what is bad? Lots of people thought Van Gogh was horrible painter when he was alive, it was only near the end of his life that the critics finally started to see what we think we see today. And it’s not like everything Van Gogh did is a masterwork. Van Gogh is my favorite painter, but there were some days were clearly there was too much brandy in his coffee and the results were slap dash and crappy, and in general his portraits often leave something to be desired. Mr. Geller is right that we shouldn’t just assume that something is good because we’ve been told for years that it is so, but then what right does he have to tell people who love Renoir that his art is the worst art of all art? He has no right. He’s just a blowhard who has latched onto this one “cause”, garnered a following, and will probably try to spin it into a book or a movie or a You Tube channel or something. I believe he is genuine, that he hates Renoir with all the gall and vitriol at his command, but 50 years ago he’d just be an eccentric man fuming in the corner of a coffee shop, chain-smoking cigarettes and writing letters to the editor, and we’d give him a wide berth rather than embrace him.
And so, I will do the same.
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