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HBO: Six Feet Under – Obituary

The last episode was one of the most heartbreaking and tender things I’ve ever seen.

Here, HBO has actual obituaries … well, don’t go looking if you haven’t seen the episode yet. But when I ran across them just now, I gasped.

It’s miraculous, when you can feel so close to fictional characters. I’m not a sap for stuff like this, really. But Alan Ball is a bloody genius.

No, more than that. It’s not just intelligence that made this show work. It was courage to map the real contours of human hearts.

Bah. That sounds cheesy. But I don’t care.

If you’re a freaky stalker type, you can take a trip to the actual address of Fisher & Sons, at least according to the obituary from a few weeks ago.

David Milch is my new hero. His incredible work on Deadwood is one of the great works of (literary? dramatic? cinematic?) art in the 21st century. And I’m not one who is normally given to such statements. Honestly, I think that extremely well-made “series” such as Six Feet Under and Sopranos that have a coherent long-term story arc over four or five years are *the* new great art form that we’ll look back on in 10 or 20 years and say “damn the 90’s and 2000’s were the golden age of that.”

Anyway, Milch is amazing. Anybody who has heard an interview with him or seen the commentaries on the Deadwood DVD’s has to either be a stone idiot or completely enthralled with the guy.

In this interview I found from 2002, I discover that he studied under Robert Penn Warren, managed to kick a heroin addiction, and was an even bigger part of the best years of NYPD Blue than I realized.

Here’s a link, and a quote I found awfully helpful in my own striving to make something literary.

David Milch’s Active Imagination

I don’t linger a lot in self-delusory exercises in control – don’t describe too much or even have to have an objective idea of what a scene is about. My only responsibility to an active imagination is to submit myself to a state of being where characters other than I move around and I try to serve that process. I just get to that – I don’t plan scenes. I don’t outline. I feel my way along because I have come to believe everything you believe about writing instead of writing is bullshit. It doesn’t apply. You can make an outline but an outline is not going to work because it doesn’t apply to what is actually written. I am content to work in uncertainty much more than I used to be – content to not know where I am going.

This seems wrong on so many levels. The main one for me at the moment, though, is that all these people are using the word “architecture” but nobody’s talking about how the buildings are used. They’re fixating on the outer form.
If architecture is mainly about making wacky shapes on the skyline, then why can’t Brad Pitt do it? Anybody could.
And they’re using the word “design” … grrr.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | From Troy to Hove – Brad Pitt’s new career

The height of the towers was reduced after protests from residents and only two are now proposed. But their radical sculptural design, described by one critic as “transvestites caught in a gale”, remains unchanged.

A telling quote from Pitt:

In an interview with Vanity Fair last year Pitt said: “I’m really into architecture, structure and design. Give me anything and I’ll design it. I’m a bit nutty with it.” Pitt added: “I’ve got a few men I respect very much and one would be Frank Gehry. He said to me, ‘If you know where it’s going, it’s not worth doing.’ That’s become like a mantra for me. That’s the life of the artist.”

Yes. That is wise insight for any artist. But that’s *ART*!! Design is for things people have to USE.

via jjg




Finster’s Poem

Originally uploaded by inkblurt.


finster_guitar_front



The whole guitar.

Originally uploaded by inkblurt.

In 1987 some friends and I traveled out to visit the Rev. Howard Finster in Summerville, GA. You may have seen his artwork on albums by REM and Talking Heads? But that wasn’t his main gig … his main gig was being a folk visionary for Jesus (and sometimes Elvis) who had an entire cosmology all his own. He was in some ways the William Blake of North Georgia. He had an entire garden of sculpture and art that he called Paradise Gardens, some of which the boys in REM helped him out with when they were younger lads.

We sat with Howard and listened to him opine, surrounded in his cramped living room where almost every surface had been turned into art — ceiling tiles, doorframes, everything. He served us CocaCola (a beverage he believed to be in some way ordained by God, with mystical significance) and played his banjo for us some.

I had taken along a weird little guitar I’d found and rebuilt (and painted turqoise…I was silly) and for some reason had a hankering for him to scribble something on it. An angel or something. I sheepishly asked him for that, but he took it into his kitchen for half an hour and then came out with it looking like you see here.

Howard told me way back then to please share the message he’d inscribed there. I never really thought about that until now, when it hit me that with the Internet, I can indeed share it with anyone who cares to see. So here it is.



For the coolest plastic figurines ever, check out Parastone Mouseion collection. Guaranteed to turn your office cube into a conversation piece.
According to the site: “With the greatest respect for the original works of art the designers of the Parastone studios in The Netherlands have brought to live famous paintings by lifting images out of the flat surface.”
As much as I like Bosch, the Aubrey Beardsley one may be my favorite.


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