Art

• My Fling With Mixel

  IN WHICH Fingers Paint while Dry, and Egos are Lightly Battered in a Hollandaise Sauce

  On Mixel

  Mixel confounds me as a piece of software that shines so brightly, the shadows of its flaws are made proportionately more apparent.

  

  Mixel is an iPad app for making collages that has the whole “social networking” thing baked into its DNA.

  Making a collage feels like something the iPad was born to do. Swipe swipe, swipe swipe, tap, swipe, BOOM! ART! I am not an artist by training or temperament, although I do doodle extensively in the margins of my notebooks. Using a pile of raw ingredients and the few methods mixel provides for manipulating them, I can create something that, if it isn’t art, looks and feels like “art”.

• Some Thoughts on The Dark Knight

  I went and saw the Dark Knight again. This time I went with my parents. My mom is a pretty devout woman with a decent artistic sensibility. Afterward she was still trying to process the experience, and it was good to get her take on things.

  One thing she said that struck me: “Everyone says it’s lots darker than Batman Begins. I hate that. It’s not dark, it’s sadistic.”

  In one sense, she’s right. It is sadistic. But the sense in which she’s right is incomplete. The Joker is sadistic, not the film. He is a twisted sadist whose mere presence should have given the film an R rating. But the film doesn’t glorify that evil, it exposes it. It presents a glimmer of hope and a dash of martyrdom in the face of such evil.