artistic license or don’t mess with the jesus

I took an afternoon walk to the neighbouring village and explored the old churchyard to find a creepy and unsettling sculpture just in time for Halloween. This large bronze figure dominated the entrance to the cemetery and featured a detailed skeletal figure that was inverted, like it had fallen from the cross and was hanging, upside down. Click on the images to see the features, which are a little washed out from the darker exposure in miniature.

The tablet to the side reads "Death has no more power." A lot of variations on a theme are out there, displaying craftsmanship and commissions for public art in good faith but there is something a bit disconcerting in such a departure from the traditional, whose symbolism is inscrutable and yet no parody and only piety and memento mori is intended. The image and the wonder haunted me the whole way home.

retronautics institute

I stumbled across this fantastic web-site called Retronaut that features a lively and active almagest through the past decades with collections of vintage photography, advertising ephemera, and artwork (although I later realized that their work as curators has been embedded in a lot of other sites I visit).

The web-site has amazing exhibits of early colour photography of New York, London and Moscow, 1960s fashion-shows, future-perfect visions of the colonization of outer space, Hong Kong public housing, and celebrities posing with their record collection. Check out the extensive and daisy-chained catalogue for yourselves.

priorität or listening-tax

I suppose that in the midst of everything else that is happening the business of legislation and upholding the rule of law must go on, but I found this item being entertained by a few members of America’s Congress to be backwardly-visionary: law-makers want to make it a felony to perform and share (primarily via the largest video repository of the internet) cover-songs. Violators could face prison-time for lip-syncing, sampling, karaoke, or otherwise playing copywritten music, regardless of the venue or platform’s policies or whether the rendition is talented or not. A group has rallied to stop this proposal, championing the alternative-history cause of one young vocal artist, who happened to be discovered singing cover ballads in just the manner they propose to outlaw, and portray the young performer as unjustly incarcerated in this bizzaro, future dystopia. It is easy to guess the instigators behind this bill (and its natural extensions) but at the same time hard to reconcile the cognitive dissonance behind an industry that would want to stifle creative experimentation and fame-making in its future associates.

viennese waltz or ballroom blitz

 The negative attention plied and mounting on the European Union and imminent crisis talks, replete with rumour and grandstanding and loggerheads, is striking me as a very sort of Zen/Non-Zen exercise. There is an imponderable quality to the debate, that the raining down of economic doom, has levied undue focus on these otherwise normal and healthy proceedings. The European clubhouse, founded primarily on hope, understanding and cooperation but also maybe cynically on the guilt of Germany and the opportunism of others (and the constituent parts were never, it seems, painted with so much contrast when there were borders), is holding deliberations among its treasurer, secretary and president. If this was happening with a less scrutinous watch, would there be so much noise? Of course what happens matters, especially when it could affect the timbre of politics, social support, peace and self-determination, yoked or not to an indenturing debt, but other major economies have also collapsed under the weight of their own greed and surfaced (not recovered) none the wiser, unlike Europe who has already made regulations more transparent and more robust in order to reemerge again, stronger and more secure.

There is no easy or obvious answer to these challenges, but nor is there a wrong decision that cannot be overcome. The most-watched designations are overgenerous and meaningless, and Triple A-Alpha-Ailm-Aleph-Double-Plus-Super-Thanks, I'm sure will settle to a new baseline.  There is something horrible and vicious about an academic exercise, a zero-sum-game--something that claws its way back to equilibrium--that seems very Non-Zen but also a little bit reassuring that affairs will adjust and right themselves, and that the core of a place, buildings, streets and communities can be much older and essentially more durable than their latest ascribing armour--city, nation, state.

true colours or womp rat

Despite all the active dismissal and disengagement by most of the media, the occupation movement continues and has spread far to Tatooine and Hoth (Antarctica). These occupiers have a story to tell, which might be best conveyed without the scrim and arras of reputed anarchy and homogeneity that the movement’s detractors are peddling.

People are upset at the sight of their futures eroding without being afforded the same protections as the perpetrators, and that that this diverse group camped out at Wall Street would join in says a lot, considering all the exaggerated heights that public defendors claim that we have to fall.