user: Input: Art review: Terry Frost
It's Upstairs, Downstairs at the Royal Academy. Downstairs is the shock-horror of Apocalypse, while upstairs the Sackler gallery has the far more respectable retrospective of Terry Frost RA. It suggests a neat, cynical division of the RA's public into two. But the result is a surprise. Frost began painting in a German prisoner-of-war camp where he spent four years of the second world war, and today lives in Newlyn, Cornwall. His paintings bounce, breathe, make you feel you have been transported to a salty, sunny utopia somewhere between Land's End and Long Island.

This exhibition makes the best case I've seen for the rather implausible claim that the abstract painters who worked in St Ives after the war were Britain's answer to the New York School. That's not true: British abstract painting was mostly too modest, too dry, too English. But Frost's paintings have some great qualities.

There's a freedom to the way he slaps on the paint that must surely have something to do with his desire to escape imaginatively from that PoW camp. He throws together a circle, a spiralling squiggle, a series of slanty straight lines. He likes these dollops and blobs and streaks of colour, and his palette - at its most intense in 1950s paintings such as the Tate Gallery's Yellow Triptych (1957-59) - is never confined. What Frost does best is allow dull English colours - the creamy grey of a cloudy morning, the rust and smoke browns of heavy industry in Leeds Painting II (1954-56) - burst into unlikely life, so that Leeds burns gold and bronze.

Frost is also an artist of nature. He's in a British tradition of landscape that has observation of the world as its beginning and end. With Frost, the observation leads into liberating abstract territory; but his painting has a roughness of texture and underlying realism of colour that ground it in the world. That's where the toughness of his early paintings comes from.

Frost never had the massive originality of his American contemporaries. You can see that in the 1960s he started to jump on the latest bandwagons: he puts words in a painting, like the young David Hockney; he has a go at painting like Ellsworth Kelly. In 1974 he moved back to Cornwall and his painting since has been more lightly decorative, without the bite of his early work. But even today, in his 85th year, Frost can do it: Exclamation Mark (2000) rocks off the wall.

Painting is a sensualist's art with little use for irony. Leaving the RA you pass Richard Prince's pictures in the Apoca lypse show. He does mock-1950s abstract paintings over which he prints terrible jokes: "I was up there in the prison talking to Charlie Manson and he says to me he says 'Is it hot in here or am I crazy?' " Frost's paintings from the 1950s, the core of his achievement, are abstraction without the irony, and they make Prince's jokes look sad, sad, sad.

 Until November 12. Details: 020-7300 5959. This show is being personally supported by Paul and Alison Myners. Mr Myners is chairman of the Guardian Media Group.
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It's about: Terry Frost  Royal Academy, London    ***


Input: VidCon Members Read Mean Tweets About Themselves
This weekend’s VidCon is a gathering of content creators from all over the internet. Naturally, Jimmy Kimmel used the opportunity to have them all read Mean Tweets.

Perhaps because internet stars are so much more used to dealing with hateful comments than the average celebrity, many of them had a quick reply for their haters. Mamrie Hart, for example, talked back to one user’s “eat a d—” insult. “Sorry, I had a big lunch,” she said.

When Jus Reign read his error-filled tweet — “Non of his videos has popped quit,” one user wrote in part — he immediately joked, “I think this guy’s having a stroke.”

Not even VidCon founders Hank and John Green were immune from the vitriol. “I stumbled upon a Hank Green video,” wrote one fan. “And it was the most annoying thing I have ever clicked on. And I thought his brother was a douche.”

Tyler Oakley, meanwhile, got one that he managed to laugh off. Watch it all go down in the video above.

This article originally appeared on EW.com
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It's about: VidCon brings out the best in mean tweets


Input: How Safe Is Your Slow Cooker?
Slow cookers are convenient, easy to clean and virtually fool-proof. You just throw your ingredients inside, set the dials, and return a few hours later to a fully cooked meal.

RECIPE: Slow Cooked Beef and Mango Quesadillas

But why are we so quick to leave our slow cookers unattended? Sure, that’s arguably the whole point, but is it really that safe to leave a hot appliance simmering away on your kitchen countertop while you’re away at work?

READ: Ten Ways to Make Your Home Safer

“It’s not safe to leave any appliance on without someone in the house,” says Jim Long, the public information director of the New York Fire Department. And though he personally doesn’t recall a recent incident in which a slow cooker was to blame for a fire, he says that the FDNY has seen “all sorts of cooking-type incidents, from appliances to hot plates.”

“I don’t believe that it’s safe … to exit your apartment or home, with this kind of method of preparation,” he adds.

Slow cooker manufacturers Crock-Pot®, however, beg to differ. While they suggest certain safety precautions in their instruction manuals, the company responds affirmatively to the question, “Can the Crock-Pot® Slow Cooker be used unattended?” on the Frequently Asked Questions section of their website. Their answer, in full, reads as follows:

Yes. Crock-Pot® Slow Cookers are safe for countertop cooking for extended periods of time. If holding food on the warm setting for a long time, cut back on the cook time accordingly to reduce overcooking.

Aileen Fanjul, a representative of the Crock-Pot® brand at Jarden Consumer Solutions, says the appliance doesn't need to be monitored at all times. "It is safe to leave your Crock-Pot® slow cooker on while you are out of the house," she states. "The slow cooker runs on very low wattage, allowing you to cook a meal over an 8-10 hour period of time. Programmable units include an Auto-Shift to Warm feature, automatically shifting the unit to a Warm setting once the set cook time is up."

That being said, Fanjul also recommends that Crock-Pot® users follow the proper safety precautions. "Always make sure to fill your slow cooker between one-half and three-quarters and the unit is placed on a hard, flat surface," she says. When the unit is on, Fanjul adds that users should keep the power cord away from the edges of their surface areas, and only use the side or lid handles when coming into contact with the Crock-Pot®.

But, of course, one single company can’t speak for other manufacturers of slow cookers. For each and every make and model, it’s best that a home chef “follow all directions and manufacturer’s recommendations,” according to FDNY veteran Long.

Even still, Long doesn’t recommend walking away from an operating slow cooker. “Never leave candles unattended,” he says, illustrating his point with an analogy. “When and if using any cooking appliance, be in the area. Be available to operate it safely.”

The bottom line? “It’s better to operate safely,” Long says, than to be sorry.
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It's about:

assistant: We've heard we can walk away from these appliances, but is that a 'crock'?