Quick - how much do you know about Rhesus Macaques? Thanks to my finals, I bet I know more about them than you do.

My final projects continue to kick me in the buttocks. Nonetheless, I'm enjoying working on them far more than any final projects I can recall, so that's progress. That's why I haven't really made any comments on that last post. I'm glad to see all of you keeping in touch, though!

James Lileks finally put in his two cents on the relatively new Walker Art Center building which I see every night on my way home from work:

I’m writing my Sunday Strib column on the new Walker Art Center, which strikes me as a building of such surpassing hideousness people will be afraid to say anything lest they be revealed as clueless philistines. I literally shrieked the first time I saw it, and I’m not a shrieking kinda guy. But it looks like a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robot; it hangs over the street with such brutish malevolence that you want to cross the street to avoid it.

His comments are pretty much exactly what I thought and what Marilyn thought about the great hulk. What he left out is that it sits across the street from two beautiful gothic cathedrals, and the Walker seems to be glaring across the lanes at them, angry, hurt, and resentful that they were created to be beautiful while he, twisted and misshapen, will never be called "beautiful" by any stretch of the imagination. Bitterly, it lunges out toward the freeway exit, longing to stretch its ponderous bulk over the cars and take a vicious bite out of the lovely churches' butresses and domes.

Even better, due to the odd lighting in the upper windows, on some nights it appears to be eyeing the oncoming traffic with a menacing stare, and on other nights, it seems to be weeping disconsolately, cursing the heavens. A storehouse for the misbegotten, self-obsessed creations of Man*, staring hatefully - and longingly - at the Houses of God across the way...

Perhaps I've misjudged the new building. Apparently, it is art.

*Is my bias showing? I've never been much of a fan of modern art; frankly, I think it's far inferior to pre-World War artwork. I know that each new movement says something about the world in which it was created, but I guess I just have no appreciation for the stuff that's churned out now, which seems to me to be engineered for shock value and nihilism than any expression of beauty or wonder. Not that artwork always has to express beauty, but it wouldn't hurt once in a while. Having said that, I don't know a whole lot of artists who seem to be genuinely happy and hopeful. Hm. Why am I spending all of this time qualifying an off-the-cuff blanket statement?