Last suppers

The subject of a death row inmate's last meal has been dealt with by a number of artists. Julie Green's Delft blue ceramic take on the idea, spotlighted in this week's New York Times, caught my eye...

The last meal served to John Wayne Gacy, as imaged in an essay in the Mail Online

I think part of what interests me about this work its potential to revitalize the idea of the still life in some way...it still contains the moralizing overtones of traditional Dutch still life painting, but with a decidedly modern, documentary spin...more on that later (perhaps).

It's not okay to use the word 'cultureverse'...

...but I still really was interested in a story on today's Morning Edition from Neda Ulaby called In a Fragmented Cultureverse, Can Pop References Still Pop?

If you have a chance, give it a listen - some of the interesting ideas that came up include

• The 20% rule
• The degree to which increasing tribalization of cultural reference makes as all like immigrants
• A comedian saying "I assume everyone has seen Fargo"

More soon - I hope...but enjoy for now...

The beauty of code

Picked this up from Artsjournal.com today...loving it the expression of boredom with the cliches of 'new media'...

Stop whatever you are doing...

...and go to Soundcloud to listen to the Portland Cello Project performing Beck's Song Reader.

What are you doing still here - go! NOW!

If you require some kind of hype, read the LA Times Pop & Hiss on this monumental achievement...

You can almost smell the stale beer...

Make sure you stop at the New York Times for The Party is Not Over...it's pretty awesome.

Seeing the light, then losing sight of it

Greatly enjoyed Jim Shepard's essay on Flannery O'Connor on the Atlantic website...Shepard names something that has always bugged me about the idea of epiphanies in literature - that they don't last. He writes:

Writers talk a lot about epiphanies—what O'Connor, in her Catholic tradition, called "grace"—in short stories. But I think we're tyrannized by a misunderstanding of Joyce's notion of the epiphany. That stories should toodle on their little track toward a moment where the characters understand something they didn't understand before—and, at that moment, they're transformed into better people.

[...]

This kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn't act badly. And that's one of the great things about what The Misfit tells the Grandmother in the line I like so much. He's not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He's saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

In other words, these conversion experiences don't stick—or they don't stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

I have to admit I've had more earth-shattering epiphanies than I can actually recall...too many moments in which everything seems to make sense, only to get swallowed in the fog of living again a few hours or - if I'm lucky - days later. I've tried to write them down, draw them when they are of that nature, but even then, I too often end up looking back at my notes and wondering what on earth I was seeing in that state of enlightenment.

Images of creativity

Today, I'm thinking about people making things...

Mother Nature forging a baby. Note the unfinished infants at the bottom left...

I've always been really interested in the image of God as an architect...