A Golden Bee for Picture Show

I just learned today that the PRC's 2007 Boston Cybearts offering was featured in the Boston Phoenix's 2007 Art in Review. I am proud as pie to report that the good art folks there counted Picture Show among the best of 2007! The Phoenix gave the first nod to the amazing "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination” at the Peabody Essex Museum. This was truly an outstanding exhibition -- a true visual and mental feast and a rare experience indeed -- and I am thrilled to have our exhibition share the same ink.

Here is the blurb on Picture Show:

Back to the future “Picture Show,” organized by Leslie K. Brown at Boston University’s Photographic Resource Center, went low-tech to mull motion pictures. The best stuff seemed teleported straight from some fabulous 19th-century inventor’s lab. Deb Todd Wheeler offered a magic picture wheel and hand-cranked light-up illusions. Steve Hollinger adapted old-time amusement hall flip-book animation technology to create visions of an atomic apocalypse. And a strange pedestal contraption by Hans Spinnerman of the terrific, hallucinatory Musée Patamécanique in Bristol, Rhode Island, somehow made a giant bumblebee appear to hover inside a bell jar.

I am particularly proud of this accolade because...

1.) It's the first time I curated a show with kinetic, interactive art and the first time I worked with this kind of new media meets old media (oh how nervous I was during the opening and throughout the whole show).

2.) I've always loved pre-cinematic and optical toys (and creating as much atmosphere in the gallery as I can).

3.) This is an idea I've had for some time.

4.) These artists were top notch and a joy to work with (and great senses o' humor too!).

5.) Perhaps it was because most of the work was constructed or assembled over several days right in the PRC, we developed a great sense of camaraderie. I count them among my friends. We took a particularly memorable trip to visit le Musée Patamechanique in Bristol, RI after the show ended its run. (Congrats on your recent grant!)
6-1000.) It was a joy to see how much fun visitors had with the show! You can browse pics of the light-sensitive, lens-based, and people-activated artwork here at this flickr set.

Thanks Steve, Olivia, Deb, Erica, Hans and Neil! And thanks Greg Cook!

ABOVE: Detail of Hans Spinnermen - The Dream of Timmy Bumble Bee. Installation at PRC, Photo by Jeremias Paul

Midtown meets Polaroid

After a long blog absence and a much needed holiday break, I continue my musings on Midtown Plaza (see the last post for a little history of America's first indoor urban mall). We actually went to Midtown the first night I was back in Rochester for the holidays. Parking underground and then riding the escalators up into the mall brought back a flood of memories (including trips to the stationery store Scrantom's for art supplies). My father and I wandered around for a while taking oodles of photographs. There were actually a fair amount of people there, likely paying their last respects to a Christmas tradition. You can read several Rochestarians' memories as printed in the local newspaper on Christmas eve here.

More on my trip home later (and more and better posts in the New Year!), but in the meantime I present one of my fave Polaroids above. It shows a (barely) live tree oddly lit by crazy bright hanging pendant lights. You can actually see it in its glory days in the left of the below picture. (The overall lighting of the mall, however, was incredibly dim and orange, which made picture taking quite difficult.) If you'd like to see more digital snaps I took at the mall and running commentary, please visit my flickr page.

P.S. I realize that taking Polaroids diverges from my Kodak roots, but somehow the nostaglic feel and format of Polaroid seemed appropriate for Midtown. And it's nice to support them and film too!

Where is Brian Ulrich when you need him?

I just learned that Midtown Plaza -- the very first downtown indoor mall in the US, dedicated in 1962 -- in fair Rochester, NY will be demolished within the next year or so. This past weekend, I hung out with Brian Ulrich in Boston. I went to his talk at Montserrat and showed him our AD AGENCY show that his work is also in (both of which tackle ideas of consumerism, see some pics here). We had a great time and he's back safely in Chicago after a rough travel day, but I ask you: Is this a coincidence?

Brian, someone, anyone, will you go to Rochester and document this? Heck, with shades of Flint, MI in Roger and Me, and now with its large Kodak brownfields, where is Michael Moore? I will be paying a visit when I go home for Christmas and taking my own humble snapshots. The mall has seen a decline in the last decade, but it still holds such a soft place in my heart.

To explain Midtown more: As a child, this was a magical place. During the holidays, they set up a Magic Mountain (much like as in A Christmas Story) and a monorail (which, as you can read here, is quite rare), decorated displays, and threw up a HUGE tree. This was THE place to see Santa.

The centerpiece the rest of the year was the Clock of Nations (the picture above is a rare one with people from Rocwiki), which is a large clock that opened on the half hour to reveal moving dolls from different countries. The department store across the street hosted the Scholastic Art Competition on the top floor. I participated in this in middle and high school. I remember going to a fancy indoor cafe and it used to have one of our favorite grocery stores, Wegmans. In his early engineering days, my father was even involved in its construction. For many years, it actually seemed to work. Consumerism also seemed a little less brash and crass and community just a tad more important - but maybe this is just my nostaglia (not to mention being too young to notice). Now, the marionettes no longer move and the displays are gone. The large department stores have long since vacated and many stores are closed or just plain random. Few people go there. This year, my friend decorated 2 windows near the Liberty Pole and attended the last Midtown Christmas celebration. Many came for its last hurrah.

Next, some history: Here is a flickr group started the same day as the demolition announcement, some great memories on a mall blog, and wikipedia's history. You MUST watch this fascinating socio-economic take on Midtown embedded below. The segment is from a 1963 Jam Handy industrial film short, "Rochester: A City of Quality," interestingly sponsored by RG&E, the Rochester Gas and Electric company.

The New York governor announced this October that Midtown will be destroyed, making way for the new PAETEC (a telecommunication company) headquarters with 1,000 employees. This company, I might add is already based in the Rochester area, and I assume already has a building. You can read more from the newspaper.

The demolition ALONE will cost over $50 million and the state will help to subsidize the new construction. I know jobs are good, but it is only adding 500 jobs, maybe. The enterprizing folks who do live downtown have no where to buy groceries and not much do to after 5pm. How is this good for the city? There is so much potential. Has every use and option really been exhausted for Midtown?

I say, Bah Humbug!

(For those interested, after watching the below video, "Rochester: A City of Quality," you can watch a parody of it: "Rochester: A City of Poverty"

Good news for film

As most know, the longer Kodak makes movie film, the longer it will make photo film. Good news for all! Here is the latest from Rochester's newspaper. You can get the business angle here.

(November 30, 2007) — Eastman Kodak Co. on Thursday unveiled a new generation of motion-picture film produced in Rochester that will expand the spectrum of light available to cinematographers.

Vision3, which is an upgrade of Vision2 film, uses an advanced dye layering technique to help the silver halide crystals capture more light. That means the crystals can be smaller, which makes the image less grainy, according to a description of the film on the company's Web site.

David Long, a former Kodak employee who helped create the film, said Vision3 is the equivalent of adding new colors to an artist's palette."Cinematographers are artists who paint with light and this allows them to work with deeper, richer shadows and lighter highlights," said Long, who is now chairman of the Rochester Institute of Technology digital cinema program. ...

Happy Tofurkey Day

Turkeys enjoying their own thanksgiving meal. Consider celebrating a turkey instead of eating one. Images courtesy of www.adoptaturkey.org and Farm Sanctuary. (I love that in the second image, the turkey is standing in the salad.) Happy thanksgiving!

Recreated Iconic Photos

First, I apologize, it's been a long time since I've blogged. In typical fashion, I installed an exhibition and promptly got sick for over a week. Today, I am feeling slightly better and surfed around to find today's featured images via Your Daily Awesome.

As far as I can tell, these photos might be authored by a collective called Henry VIII's Wives (it's a little hard to tell from this website). Funny, then disturbing, then provocative, these staged images of famous photographs featuring senior citizens remind me a bit of Vik Muniz's hand-drawn pictures from memory titled "The Best of Life," an example of which is seen at the very bottom of this post. The above images are by far the best from a small online selection; I hope that they continue along these lines. A quote from the mystery site:

The series of photographs entitled The Iconic Moments of the 20th Century emerged in the processual (?) work with the pensioners in a home for the elderly in Glasgow emanates the same impression. A group of aged volunteers pose in their everyday outfits and in their daily environment (the vicinity of the Home) to re-enact the scenes from well-known newspaper photographs taken from history books and encyclopaedias. The images in question depict ‘historical moments’ that took place in their lifetime: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference during the World War II, the Napalm Attack and the killing a Vietcong from the Vietnam War, or the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was depicted live on a TV programme. - Jelena Velcic in Breaking Step—Displacement, Compasion (sic) and Humour in Recent Art From Britain, Catalog, 2007 Belgrad

I conclude with a quote by Muniz on his series from an interview with Peter Galassi:

The Best of Life Series, for example, are drawings of very famous photographs made entirely from memory. When the drawings were good enough to look like a bad reproduction of the original image, I photographed them and printed them with the same half tone pattern we usually see in these images for the first time in the papers. In these works I tried to find out what a photograph looks like in your head when you are not looking at it. They carried the structure of the famous news pictures but they were in fact very different.

Vik Muniz, Best of Life, Memory Rendering of the Man on the Moon, 1989.

Dispatch from graduate school

We're midway through Bruce's first semester in the MFA program at UConn. He is swamped, but he loves it. I don't see him much, maybe Friday through Monday, but even that has been decreasing. Is there a support group for significant others who have a loved one in graduate school - i.e., grad school widows? (The tables will likely be flipped when I *hopefully* venture off myself someday.) On another note, it's pretty fascinating to watch a close one go through such a transformation.

Today, Bruce had his midterm crits and I drove down for dinner when they were done. It went well! Above, I have posted some of his critted work and below, one of his newest images on the 40th parallel, 97 West. Bruce recently was a visiting artist at Metropolitan College in Nebraska (this community college has over 200 photo majors!). While there, he visited 4 points on the 40th (95,96, 97, and 98) and the sixth principal meridian. They are some of the best 40th pics he's made yet--all made in the rain. A new looseness pervades them, especially this one in which he didn't clean the rain drop off of his lens (on purpose).

Oh, and as you can see above, these images are all single images; there is only one triptych/panorama, and it's a vertical one! In school he is investigating other, more emotional issues, but with the same signature Bruce preciseness, yet in a different way, such as a series of all the men in his family and view FROM the 16 place he's lived in Massachusetts TO where we live now. Congrats to all! Maybe I will see him at Christmas...

Kodak building implosion update

David Valvo sent me some new pics of Kodak buildings 65 and 69 after their implosion (check out the last post for more information) on October 6th. For those who know Rochester, they are (were) near the corner of Ridge Road and Lake Avenue. Above is a close up of building 65, where all yellow mailers were processed that folks used to send to Kodak. Even a week later, David noted, several people still gathered to pay their respects if you will.

Building 69 (called Photographic Technology), photo by David Valvo

Building 65 (color print and processing), photo by David Valvo

Sadness and Woe: Kodak demolishes buildings

Several weeks ago, Kodak demolished Building 50 (one of the buildings where black and white paper was made) in Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. It seems that there are no plans to build on or sell the land; several others were imploded this past summer and a couple more are slotted to be imploded soon. You can read more and watch slideshows and videos of Buildings 9 and 23 at this Democrat and Chronicle online feature. Buildings 65 and 69 came down this past Saturday.

Kodaker Dave Valvo, whose remarkable pictures are below, explains what happened in each of the buildings, the images, and the effect it had on former employees:

{about Building 50 in the first photo}
To the left of bld 50 was where paper roll storage Bld 16 used to be. Behind Bld 50 in his picture is where Bld 9 used to be, Paper Finishing, Bld 10 where I started at KP [Kodak Park] and Bld 36. Looks like a war zone up close. I photographed this about 3 hours after the destruction. Many old Paper Manufacturing alumni were coming by and we talked. Everyone had a glum face as they saw where they spent much of their lives... gone...

{about Building 65 in second photo - Dave said he will go back to document the rubble}
This is building 65, scheduled for implosion very soon (it was, this past Saturday). It was also known as CP&P or Color Print and Processing. All films sent to Rochester using the old yellow mailers were processed here. It was later part of Research. I worked here at that time for a while. This is a difficult image to capture. Those of you from Rochester will know why. There are buildings on camera side of the street. So this is a stitch of taking images around the sides of the buildings as though they were not there and then putting the result together.

From my Dad: "I did not work there [building 50], but I visited it often when I was coordinating B/W paper...when I started at Kodak in 1962 they had 120,000 employees worldwide with 60,000 in Rochester. ... It takes much fewer employees for digital that it does for film especially if you have others do the manufacturing for you. Remember that George Eastman and his successors wanted a vertically integrated manufacturing plant so that they had DIRECT control over all aspects of the manufacturing process even including gelatin making (Eastman Gelatin in Peabody, Mass, etc.)."

Here are some quotes from a recent AP article on the recent events:

As film fades, Kodak's mammoth manufacturing hub shrinks
By BEN DOBBIN, The Associated Press, ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP)

As mainstream photography turns digital, the mammoth film-manufacturing hub that George Eastman opened here in 1891 is swiftly shrinking. A decade ago, when it stretched across 1,600 acres, Kodak Park was easily the biggest industrial complex in the Northeast. By year-end, when Eastman Kodak Co. wraps up a drastic, four-year digital overhaul, its miles-long perimeter will encompass a mere 700 acres. ... The company used explosives to implode three cavernous buildings this summer and has sold big tracts to developers, most recently a 330-acre plot anchored by a 2.1 million-square-foot warehouse. ... Even as revenues in its traditional businesses tumble, Kodak is still leaning hard on high-margin film to generate the profits needed to see it through the most painful passage in its 126-year history. Kodak Park, now a mix of old-world chemical plants and the most advanced filmmaking technology anywhere, sprouted up on an abandoned fruit farm a few miles north of downtown two years after Eastman launched silver-halide film in 1889. ... Only about 100 buildings will be left this winter, down from 212 in the 1990s. Kodak's work force also is contracting: its global payroll will soon slide to 34,000, half what it was five years ago. In Rochester, there will be fewer than 10,000 employees - versus 60,400 in 1983. ...

You are getting sleepy, "buy Kodak, buy Kodak..."

Photographs by and couresty of Dave Valvo, www.davevalvo.com. Thank you Dave for sharing and taking these important photos!

Wattenberg, Words, and Tags

My friend DK has been migrating his blog, limeduck, from blogger to wordpress. As DK works in marketing for a software company, some of what he says technically about blogs/web programs goes over my head. However, he recently posted on tagging and tag clouds, which struck a chord. While not completely familiar with the technical programs that generate these, the idea of categorizing and classifying data, words, and concepts hits the librarian/researcher bone in me. I do enjoy how DK brings in simple everyday examples: he put a Walt Whitman poem through a tag cloud program, creating a new artistic interpretation in the process.

Inspired by this post, I rediscovered and played with Martin Wattenberg’s and Marek Walczak's amazingly cool, engaging, and simple, yet profound web artwork, The Apartment (2001). TO EXPERIENCE -- Click on the following url and then click on the blinking and word apartment to launch and just start typing in words (nouns, verbs, etc.): www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/

Sample Apartment, From http://www.bewitched.com/


See more of Wattenberg's work here. (I also recommend Sand Shrimp and Shortcut). I’ve heard this local IBM researcher-cum-artist speak and he is really smart and nice. Caution! The Apartment is extremely interesting and fun and you will likely spend a long time playing with it. Be sure to look at the constellation of apartments (all apartments) and click around! You can sort the apartments by vision, story, intimacy, secrecy, etc. Each is a discrete poem/creation in itself.

From "The Apartment" statement:

Viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer's words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships....Apartment is inspired by the idea of the memory palace. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined
inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.

Art for Sale: 20x200 and PRC Auction

Apparently, between Bruce's school and work, I've been swamped. I am sharing the below 2 bits until I can muster up a topic post.

The sleepless (sleepy?) Jen Bekman has just launched another brilliant idea, 20x200 - editions of 200 for $20 each. I just scooped up 2, and it was so easy and quick, it was scary. One mag states that she wants this to be the gateway drug to the artworld. I say Jen, you've succeeded! For me, as someone who works in a non-profit with a non-profit salary, I do buy some, but not a lot. This allows me to buy more! It also will be a great idea for presents.

Speaking of non-profits, you can help support the PRC and what we do by buying a piece of art at our benefit auction. You can "buy it now" on the silent auction right now, bid on the live on the evening of October 27, or if a $75 ticket is more your speed (it's a great party with an open bar and tons of yummy food), than by all means snap one up. Click here for the online catalogue and here for info on the event and tickets. Now, enough with the shameless promo (hey, it's our largest fundraiser of the year)-- off to work to help hang 170 works in silent auction.

Random list post

So sorry for the long absence! We've been covered up at the PRC with the benefit auction and Bruce started school last week. I am exhausted, thus a random list post is in order.

- Over on the Soth blog, another discussion has ensued; this time it's about art and education. Helping Bruce research graduate schools, applying, and now his attending, especially as an older MFA student, keeps such ideas fresh on our minds. I am crafting my response as we speak.

- The new issue of PDN is refreshing and excellent. The fine art photo issue unpacks the gallery mystery (budget breakdowns are all!), profiles several curators and editors, and tackles digital versus traditional print collecting. It just hit the PRC library, thanks to our friends at PDN. It's so good, in fact, I plan on getting my own copy to use in my upcoming class talks/visits/lectures.

- At the following link you will see Bruce's new set of wheels and graduate school residence, a 1991 westfalia vanagon. Although some of his classmates and our friends think it's wacky, I am wholeheatedly behind the idea! Plus, it's a real 'bute.

Hudson River...School

I share with you a few of my humble Picturesque pics from our last trip before Bruce goes to grad school at UConn for his MFA. Tomorrow, he gets oriented, picks his studio, and then classes start next week. Updates as needed. We're in for a big change!

Kaaterskill Falls
(this was a tough hike with ~20 lbs of Bruce's 8x10 film and lenses on my back! Boy do I understand large format work so much more.)

View from Olana, Frederick Edwin Church's house

Next Stop Wonderland

Two artists (and a museum) that I featured in the PRC show Picture Show are in the Boston Globe today, and it's a great, wild ride of an article thanks to Greg Cook. Neil Salley, curator of Le Musée Patamécanique--think cabinet of curiosities meets new media museum--has a large spread and even a video (see the latter here). I can't wait to see what it looks like on paper! If it's possible to miss an exhibition after it's down, I sure miss this one! Here is a link to the piece I showed by Hans Spinnermen at the PRC (you can explore the flickr set to to see the whole PRC show).

I spoke to Greg at length on the phone about le Musée and other efforts, such as the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Here is my quote in the newspaper:

The Musée's website is packed with footnotes that purport to explain what's going on and the institution's historical underpinnings. Leslie Brown, a curator at Boston University's Photographic Resource Center who has exhibited one of Spinnermen's contraptions, says, "You cannot read some of the footnotes . . . and not laugh. I think one of the footnotes said, 'See Marcel Duchamp.' All of Duchamp. It's like saying, 'See Philosophy.'"

Congrats Neil, Hans, and all of the patamechanics! A thanks goes to Greg, who is also at the helm of another another seemingly kindred institution, The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.

UPDATE: Greg Cook posted some excerpts from his conversation with Neil on the NEJAR blog. Great stuff!

Neil Salley and Hans Spinnermen's Earolin, From Boston Globe

Flickr flurry, then dénouement

Over on the Soth blog, there has been a hullabaloo about flickr. Earlier, Alec posted a comment Stephen Shore made about flickr and posed the question "where are the great pictures on flickr?"; today, he emailed and received Shore's response, calling for any ire to be redirected and for a truce to re-establish the "thoughtfulness and civility of debate." For me, as it always is on Soth's blog, it was the hope of higher discussion that inspired me to throw my 2 cents in. With 227+ comments and counting, I thought I'd highlight a few quotes, including my attempts to explain my fascination with such things, as both a form of introduction and closure.

From Shane (not in comments, but on his blog): Venue aside, it’s really just a fact that all the greatest work is generally found hiding amongst everything that’s not; how could a single piece of art be particularly moving or especially nice to look at if all art was? ...It can be rather tragic to witness any previously tangible practice go digital (as Flickr is, for many, a replacement to a dusty photo album) and perhaps this is part of Shore’s frustration?

From me: As has been echoed by now hundreds of times, flickr is a tool. Some use it for marketing, some for games, some for documenting, some as a diary, and some for art - just like photography itself. It’s not so much individual images for me, but the great uses that are so brilliant, much like an amazing archive or a powerful database. This is also similar to the purpose, function, and now renewed interest in vernacular photography. With the patina of time, will all flickr images gain such collector status (that is, if they can be retained later and perhaps become physical)? Flickr for me is a giant box of photos at a flea market that I can dive in, sort through, and take what I want from it and perhaps use or think about images in new ways...Signing off - WWST (What would Stieglitz think?)

From Ryan A: Being someone who is in the process of studying cultural anthropology, i think flickr and other online sites like it are amazing–and yes, i think they are fascinating insights into people’s lives. im not sure about the images gaining some kind of artistic collector status though. i like your flea market comparison though. it seems to me that photographers, writers, and many others are always going around trying to understand humanity and life. well, sites like flickr (whether art, vernacular shoebox nonsense, or what) give pretty amazing views/slices of SO MANY lives that it’s mindblowing really. when have we ever been able to access so many people? anthropologically, flickr is a gold mine. i dont really care how much great art is there. great art is so personal anyway. who knows.

From me: Hi Ryan! I think we’re coming at this from similar angles (from art history and anthropology). What I meant by collector status was really the fascination of an image divorced from its original use. i.e., if someone came across a shoebox full of some neat square photos that had circles in them (a group on flickr) but didn’t know about its origin, man would it draw a lot of interest, both money wise and in a museum! We showed a great documentary film a while back in conjunction with a show. Other People’s Pictures followed snapshot collectors and dealt with why people collect what they do. In a way, flickr allows folks to both photo and collect, groups and pools take that one step further. And yes, it is fascinating. This weekend I will go to Home Movie Day at the Harvard Film Archive (to find where and when in your city, go to http://www.homemovieday.com/). Will I see stunning art films? No. Will I see some glints of art and brilliance in someone’s old super 8 kodachrome? Yes. Will I see some amazing pieces of history, culture, and windows into people’s lives? Most definitely!

And lastly, from Ryan's blog, this comparison is apt: To me, it's a great tool, and it's incredibly fascinating to see the multitudes of ways that people employ it. Fine art be damned; I like Flickr. Speaking out against it is like coming out and saying you don't like paper. It's a tool. Some people use it to mail off their bills, some people use it to write the Grapes of Wrath.

Pow! Kablam! NYC watch out for Boston!

I just got this great email from one of my favorite artists, Jane Marsching, in which she describes how she is involved with an "absurd, crazy, ambitious, bold campaign to change how the world views the Boston art scene. Imagined and coordinated by the brilliant Brian Burkhardt, it features twenty Boston area artists dressed up as superheroes (I will be Rogue from X-Men)." This Saturday is the big shoot at EP Levine's with an afterparty to follow.

This is wicked cool. Sign me up! More info and image:

The project starts with a photograph: an iconic image of twenty Boston-based artists dressed as superheroes, posing against the Boston skyline. Through the production and distribution of this image, we intend to lay the groundwork for a local and national/international advertising campaign to raise awareness of the caliber and accomplishments of artists residing in Boston.

The photograph and the advertising campaign is a non-profit initiative that is by artists, for artists. The artists who are involved live in Boston, and have varying levels of career recognition. Some of the artists have gallery representation, while others are independent. Some have national and/or international exposure, while others are more local. The group of artists represents a variety of media and mediums, concepts, and interests.

We intend to spearhead the initial phases of this project. This includes the production of the photograph, hosting of a launch party, and development of a website. We also intend to leverage the photo shoot and launch party as an opportunity to get press exposure. Looking ahead, we feel that a strategic national/international advertising campaign featuring the Superheroes photograph and website link is critical to building significant awareness of Boston’s vibrant art scene. The photograph and related publicity has the potential to act as a blueprint for an on-going and evolving awareness campaign designed serve Boston, its artists and its public.

Antiques Roadshow meets Robot Wars

Anyone who know me knows I love stuff. My apartment looks like a Victorian parlor. I am also an Antiques Roadshow geek. I was thrilled when a friend started working for them and got Bruce and I behind the scenes at a show in Philadelphia. I was disappointed that our stuff wasn't worth anything (and the appraisers weren't as excited about them as we were), but my heart beat fast when we were allowed to hang out in the green room where those who were chosen for taping were being prepped. We got to see their objects up close and hear even more stories. I keep hoping that I will discover a treasure someday, something that the shop owner won't recognize. So, I read with a mixture of horror and glee about a new Chinese television show in my latest Kovel's Komment's e-newsletter (seen below). What's next? Antiques Roadshow survivor? Wait, they've come close.

"'Collecting Everything Under Heaven' is the latest hot TV show in China, according to Reuters. It starts out like the Antiques Roadshow -- bring in an antique and get it appraised. But this is literally a "hit" show. If the piece is deemed a fake by the experts, it is smashed to bits with a hammer by Wang Gang, host of the show, famous actor, and collector. Since China is the largest source of fakes in the world -- everything from DVDs to medicine -- the show claims to be symbolic. Wang says, "We must eliminate the false and retain the true. I want to shock people with a smash." We bet this is one show that won't be copied in the U.S." - from Kovel's