UK uses shock, irony to help prevent STDS.

(when everything else has failed, adn syphliss/the clap have reached levels close to 40 per cent, handing out pamphlets and rubbers isnt enough. This might work)

gaurdian

Raphaels Madonna of the Pinks , which the UK spent 40m on, is a fake.

Passion, the movie has tie in acessories whats next , a buddha bio pic with plush bodvihtta toys, when you buy a bk veggie burger.

is nothing sacred ?

all over

When the pentagon is telling Bush that global warming needs to be taken seriously, do you think he will stop being beholden to fossil fuels ?

gaurdian via talk left

emmet williams via momus's blog: click opera

steve bell is an embittered genius, nothing this nasty could be an editoral cartoon in our country.

gaurdian

Works Cited.



Adorno and Horkheimer. The Culture Industry. The Cultural Studies Reader. ed.ed. Simon During. New York:Routledge, 1993.

Benjamin,Walter. Illumnations. Translated by Hannah Arendt. (New York:Schoken Books, 1968).

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. New York:Routledge,1989

McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man. New York: The Vangaurd Press. 1951.

Storey, John. An Introduction Guide to Cultural Theory an Popular Culture. Athens:U of GEorgiaP, 1993.






















Works Consulted.


Books :
Simon, Jarvis. Adorno:A Critical Introduction.New York : Routledge, 1998.

Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent.New York : Rinehart, 1954

Websites:
"Our Clients" Billboard Liberation Front.2004 Accessed 2 Feb. 2004. http://www.billboardliberation.com/clients.html

"Suddenly Van Gogh" Artnet. 2003. Accessed 3 Feb. 2004. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/itoi/itoi2-13-03.asp

Films:
Chaplin, Charlie. Modern Times. Charlie Chaplin. Warner Home Video. 1936;2003

I had trouble with this reading, because I was unsure exactly Adorno was saying, and I had more questions then I had answers. In many ways, he seems to hate fun, and not appreciate what culture can do, and what it has done. He recognizes, in the first pages of this essay, that "the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system" (30) and it reminds me of seeing proper art under Stalin and Hitler, with the robust blonde haired peasants but he also uses that phrase to condemn all offerings that come from studios and rehearsal halls.
This leads to the questions that I have. Does Adorno think it impossible to use pop culture against itself, and does he think that people are so silly, blind, stupid or drugged to react to pop culture in a critically aware, self reflexive way ? He says on the first page that popular culture has replaced the church and industry, it has become the opiate of the masses, and all who consume it are nothing better then mice in a medical study of addiction. If this is the case how does he react to camp or pop art or culture jamming or any of the other ways that we have found to mess around with the dominant culture ?
When queers were forbidden their discourses, they took the culture that surrounded them and made alternate readings and texts. This camping of texts is in direct opposition to his statement "The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion , leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience."(34) Culture Jamming works the same way, for example a neon sign advertising Camels, remade to say "Got Cancer Yet" or DJs mashing together the Strokes (with their guitars meant to be more authentic) and Christina Aguilera (pop star as example of artifice.) People were doing this in the time and place of Adorno, though--he talks favourably of Dada, perhaps forgetting that Dada uses popular culture, for example the colleges of Hannah Hoch, which condemned BMW by using their advertising.
I keep reminding myself that he was trained by a modernist composer(Gunnar Berg), that he was a critic of jazz throughout his life, and that he was a post World War II German trying to find a path of Marxism that was not related to the crush of Stalin's jackboots. He saw how film was used under the Nazi's and how music was used by the Soviets. Maybe this could explain my other problem with this text, that he obsesses over the authentic and denies the artificial. There are problems with how he conflates these terms. The authentic appears to be done by one author, who leaves their explicit stamp on a text.
He talks lovingly of a Jazz Musician who cannot help but improvise on a Beethoven Minuet(35), mentions how Picasso and Schoenberg have a "disdain for style" (37), and imagines what a studio executive would do with Hugo or Balzac (35)1). It seems like the objection he has to popular culture is the first half of that phrase. It takes a staff of hundreds to make a film, and dozens to record an album--in many ways the actors, best boys, grips, studio musicians, producers and other hanger ons are as vital to a production as the auteur or artist. Because it requires a certain amount of assembly production, then according to Adorno, it cannot be any more important then a Chevrolet.
All of these questions and qualms can come down to a refusal to have fun, and a distaste for those who do. Cole Porter was quoted as saying "beware of the power of a cheap tune", and my biggest problem with Adorno is that he has refused to allow that popular culture can affect anything--and if it does affect it, it is because those who are affected are too stupid to see the wizard behind the curtain.
John Storey, in his introduction to the theories of popular culture, called "What is Popular Culture" provides no favourites, no theories to which he agrees the most. It is then, as objective as he possibly could have made it. He has six definitions of popular culture, each with their own theorists, and each with their own critics. The six definitions of popular culture are quantitative, residual, mass culture, folk culture, hegemony theory, and postmodernism. The easiest of these to define is quantitative theory, if culture is liked by many people, if it becomes popular enough then it is pop culture. If it can be ordered like the ,The New York Times Best Sellers list, and the Billboard Hot 100, or then it is popular culture. The problem with this theory is that it becomes difficult to set benchmarks. How many people does it take to make something popular ? It also ignores how an object becomes popular, assuming that it gets that way through some kind of populist groundswell and not determined by the machinations of commerce. Residual theory claims that popular culture is what is left over after we dispose of the high culture created by and for the intellectual elite. In this theory high culture is complex and full of moral worth and enobling ideas. This is patronizing to those who consume popular culture, it constructs a binary where those who love what is popular are common, easy, tawdry and cheap. It defines culture as work of the elites, and the commoners--making the work of the elites better then the work of anyone else. It denies the power of emotion, and states that work of high culture are nothing more then intellectual exercise. It does not allow for concepts of melodrama in works like Madame Bovary with the heroines dying as a result of desire, the same way that desire could work in Harlequin romances. The other thing that residual theory misses is the politics of creating the canon. It is as if works that are high art come from the heavens intended for a populace that will never really understand them, and a populace that is dependent on having these ideas feed to them. There is not as much of a wide line between high and low culture as they like to think there is. The third definition comes from the marxist Frankfurt School and claims that popular culture is mass culture, which again, means that it does not come from the audience of consumers, but is put forth by an elite. This time the elite is not intellectual but commercial. Popular culture is created in factories, or by mechanical reproduction. The only reason for popular culture to exist then , is to sell. They do not care about audience as co-creators of works, but as stooges, like Charlie Chaplin caught between mechanical cogs in Modern Times. As opposed to this commercial pressure, is the unique object, the singular work, created by only one person, with out commercial intentions. The problems with this theory is how it retains the cult of the singular, like they were not created as objects of status, to buy and sell. There is also this idea of consumers as hopeless pawns, who are unable to affect culture in any way, or who are so unwise that they cannot subvert being sold to. The fourth theory that Storey brings up is one that calls popular culture an updating of working class culture. It is then, almost the opposite of the residual Category, in this theory a culture of the people is viewed as more authentic then the culture of the elite, and this authenticity is viewed with pride. They take their raw materials from mass culture, and use it in their own ways, with a full reflexive knowledge. The large problem here is defining what is authentic. It becomes a series of symbols and codes, like a religion, instead of being instinctual or logical. Speaking of the authentic, the fifth theory comes from the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci, and is called hegemony theory. Its view of popular culture is a struggle or exchange between dominant and subordinate culture, with each using each other. In this view everything becomes homogenized and popular culture is what results in those processes. Postmodern culture, our sixth, is the easiest to define, in that it documents a constant recycling of culture, and where there is no real distinction between high and low culture.
Walter Benjamin, although a member of the Frankfurt School, was in many ways working in reaction against it. For Adorno and Horkenheimer popular culture is is the enemy that imposes will against a populace that can barely refute it. They find no meaning in the act of consuming and nothing worth noting in the role of consumer, in that way they refused to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of popular culture. Benjamin was not a reactionary like Adorno, he did not hate popular culture but viewed it as way to progress. He was a utopian socialist, and his work is about what should happen as opposed to what will. He viewed mechanical reproduction as the key to the destruction of capitalism itself. His most radical idea then was the idea of aura, where we have moved past the work of art itself, and are concentrating on what surrounds it, or in the words of Benjamin in his seminal essay "Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction"One might subsume the eliminated element in the term aura and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." (221) He thinks that art making and art viewing from the age of the cave painting onward had a very specific cult, that "the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition". (223)The object itself, even divorced from its historical social context, was deeply imbued with a power of veneration. He uses the example of a statue of venus, for a medieval cleric the object was a pagan idol, but for the Greeks it was an object of veneration but for the both of them, the object existed in a space that was more important and more dangerous then just a chunk of marble. He goes on to say that with the increase in mechanical reproduction certain things happen to the work of art itself. With the ability to make the art have many forms, and placing high art in new contexts the meaning of that art changes. The oppressive traditions that the aura is based on are lessened. He thinks that the ability to place art everywhere, the creation of posters, postcards, notebooks, and other mass images will democratize art making, and will eventually strip the work of any aura. Its like Marx who thought that their would be a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would release itself into a kind of a paradise of working classes. Benjamin even calls those who wish to remain in the traditions of high art making bourgeoise, and implies that they will be viewed as irrelevant when the revolution comes. There are constant examples of High Art being very much alive, and from benefiting from the Aura, even after a century of mechanically reproduced work that was supposed to destroy that object. For example, there is Van Gogh, who's work is easily found in reproduction and his auction results. There was the 86.5 million dollars paid for The Portrait of Dr. Gachet 1n 1990, a slump year for art. Or think of the biannual pilgrimages to Venice, Italy; Kessel, Switzerland; Sao Paulo Brazil or any place else the biennale takes place. An institution that began in the 1880s, with the origin of photography and film.
Then there is Andy Warhol, who should have killed the Aura and Object. He did not paint or sculpt--he made multiples, prints, photographs, films, video; of popular culture, of movie stars, car crashes, consumer goods. The only thing that made his Brillo Box different then one you could pick off the super market shelves, was his name and the absence of scouring pads. Andy Warhol became famous on his aura, and the aura of his work, providing a twin halo surrounding himself and the objects which he produced. There is no destruction of his aura because of its mechanical reproduction.
Benjamin would argue that the aura would fall way, that what we have now with high art is the late decadent stages of capitalism when anything could be bought and sold. The cult of the object will not go away, because people are obsessed with elites, and want something individual and special. Andy Warhol ended his life doing society portraits of Iranian Princesses, selling his name in the process.
Marshall McLuhan assumes that pop culture is already there, we cannot move its presence out of our lives. So what we do is question it, consider its implications, motives and powers. He wants us to look at the newspapers we get in the morning, the advertising in the magazines, comic books, movies, fashion and pulp fiction He might be the first North American not to take comics for granted, and to recognize people like Mickey Spillane as seriously as Ernest Hemingway.
In his sections on the Hearst Newspapers (5-7) he notes how the emotions of the readers are manipulated and how these large, giants pretend to care about the working classes. It gives close attention to what the work says, but also notes why it says it. The concentration of american media as a colonial enterprise is noted in tactics like the "real tendency of disconnected news items assembled from all over the world and placed side by side...to evoke the idea of a world society" , compared to Time or Life "swamping with a flood of superimposed emotion the emergent image of the world as one city" (5) and then talks about the military industrial complex, and its results in making news, saying "the headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning and newspapers have thrived on war ever since".(6) This moralism continues, with the conclusion tying ideas of industry and media, telling us that "Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumours of war are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press."
He continues with this line of thinking in his other discussions of popular culture, in the next section, he talks about radio and television, using an add from RCA that places a right to listen and look at the same level as a right to assemble or speak or the other inaleable ones mentioned in the American Bill of Rights. He talks of that Bill of Rights as a "vision of human integrity based on a noncommercial way of life remains the core of the American dream"(21)
I think of this as a misreading, remembering Horatio Alger, promising material success, or the American revolution being as much about finical liberations anything else. For every "give me liberty or give me death", there was a "no taxation without representation" Talking of that fight for liberation, McLuhan, a Canadian, talks of the new complacency that has marked American live, saying "A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music...Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission..." They have lost the fighting spirit and are now consumed by the economic liberation they once wanted.
He continues this line of thinking, with a moralist tone. His discussion of comics is one of the first critical studies in North America, and makes some of the same arguments that noted child psychiatrist Fredrick Wertham did in his seminal 1953 book Seduction of the Innocent. Werthham told of the evil that comics do, and McLuhan is more subtle--but there is a disapproving tone throughout his section on Crime Comics. He talks of the criminal as hero saying "he is fighting against hopeless odds, against this kind of daredevil there is no need to talk up the mealy mouthed righteousness of the mealy mouthed businessman"(30), hinting that Americas heros have always been their outlaws. He compares two sections later, the crime comics with Superman, talking of him as some kind of priest, created by two high school kids as a "ruthlessly efficent...one man crusade against crooks and anti social forces"(102) The goal of Mcluhan, then, is to point out the contrasts in american popular culture, noting the deep structures that become vital and ignored by the average reader, and dismissed by most critics.


In high school I did not wear blue jeans, I wore cords or trousers, or something that wasn't made of denim--it was too common, and I was too cool. In the years since, I have started wearing Jeans, but only one kind-indigo boot cut gwgs made in Winnipeg and bought at army and navy--no nascent guilt about small children in slave conditions in third world countries. They make me look good, and they are a colour that rewards repeated wearing. I don't even think about them anymore, just slip them on, and they have moulded to by body. They are comforting. It seems then, this is what popular culture is, something so ubiquitous that there is little thinking done about it.
Thats why the first chapter of Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture is so intense. Called the Jeaning of America, it talks of what the implications of this uniform are. He took his class of 118 and had an informal survey about jeans. all 118 owned a pair, and 111 were wearing a pair at the time of the asking. (1) What does it mean, if this sample is representative, that this course cotton cloth has become the fabric of choice for most of the world. He talks about there being no real way to define the user of jeans, "We cannot define a jeans wearer by any of the major social category systems--gender, class, race, age, nation, religion, eduction" Although he admits that the class that he samples is not representative, he tells of the meanings that those jeans had, namely "informal, classless, unisex, and appropriate to city or country" .(2) How could one item of clothing mean so much to so many people ?
Thinking past this one group of people, we can think of the role that Levis played in the former Eastern Europe, where bootleg and smuggled copies became symbols of freedom and desire for american views. Their have been critics who talk about how samizdat american culture was the defeat of capitalism--not Reagan and his talk of the evil empire but Levis and Coca Cola.
Fiske talks about that, saying that "the physical toughness connoted by jeans allowed these middle class students to align themselves with a highly selective set of meanings of physical labour. Jeans were able to bear class specific meanings of the American work ethic. " (3) There is irony then, that the ideal consumer in America wants to be working class, and Soviet society idealized that same concept of working.
The difference was, that jeans in America became attached to the nascent american capitalism. Levi Strauss was a miner in the San Francisco gold rush, and the toughness and working class nature of his material was not towards solidatary but towards manifest destiny and exploratory capitalism--or in the words of Fiske ""The meanings that helped to make the west significant for these 1980s students were not only the familiar ones of freedom, naturalness, toughness and development and above all, Americanness." (4)
This freedom has been taken over by other signifiers though, and that general view of freedom and working class determinism has been given other meanings, in the words of Fiske, Advertising is used in an attempt to give meanings to these product differences that will enable people in the targeted social formation to recognize that they are being spoken to" (6) and then if this is true, then designer jeans "speak to market segregation and social differences" (7) . In this way then, jeans no longer become the classes, sexless uniform garment for most americans, and are no longer about the freedom of the American west. By the creation of exclusive categories they become snobbish, upper class, gendered, uniform of status and gentrification. Advertising can change the meaning of popular culture just by saying it is so. He then talks about people tearing jeans as a way of rupturing their power, and then having those jeans being sold back to them at exorbitant prices. Fiske makes the point that no matter how much resistance popular culture gives to commercial culture--commercial culture will capture and repackage it.

shrove:
attended
(dave d., dana (from vancouver), dom, rachel, colleen, aaron, bryan,jordan)
ate:
pancakes
talked about
post structalism
queer theory
feminist biblical scholarship
pseudogiaphry(sp) and deutrocannoncial work
korean war
the united nations and russia
polish history
david orchard
smarties
pancakes
hebrew
the mishanh and levetical customs
wound ballistics
the death rate in medival eras
slave narratives
early african epics
roland
genji and the non narrative thrust of early japanese poetry
cold mountain poems
curling
west african beer
tattoos
abortion

Bush is pushing thru a constutional ammendment against queer marriage.
This is the first time in american history where an ammendment is made to deny rights.

fuck him, and his narrow hateful ways.

its offical, Kiss Machine from Toronto has accepted a poem of mine called intercessors of elaborate technologies , in the no. 8 issue called babies and robots.

i write good.

if i think of sex (if done b/w two people who love each other) as a holy, communal, sacrament--then why do i think any attempt to extend that into longer, more intricate situtions are not about love but about property and power.

if sex is a gift from god, then isnt marriage--a longer, more difficult, perhaps more rewarding commitment, is our gift back to her.

marriage misused does not mean that marriage is always a sin, always about abuse, always about the destruction of personal autonomy.

and anyways, doesnt god call for a de(con)struction of personal autonomy ?

(side note: celibacy came for catholic priests because the Church wanted to keep bishops property in its own hands--andrew asked me on thurs. if this meant that all of the gifts that came from that policy were negated--i told him of cuorse not, perhaps (not perhaps, deft. ) he was telling me to look the same way @ marriage.)

i owe him an apology (and thomas, tara, erin, drew, trevor, etc.)

agape and eros are not two sentries firing shots, but a river flowing into an ocean.

g&a/c&b have broken up.
sadness.

i thot they both were good couples.
fuck love.

on the passion (andrew, if you are reading this, i would like one of those 2 dollar tickets)
1) the excuse of using the bible and only the bible is bullshit, one gets what one wants from it (albert shwitzer wrote a book called the historical jesus where he desected various users opinons about christ, and how they used the gospel--they tended to ignore what would be inconveient (i do this too--noticing the sexual other too much, for example, or assuming an anti captialist bias)
2) Catholicism is a big tent, and a huge number of people are in it, from radical marxists to crypto fascists, & there is always tension b/w the folk church and rome.
3) its not authentic if it doesnt have greek.
4) it seems v. odd that he is forgrounding the flaying, and backgroding the crucifixion.
5) Caphias (sp) role should be watched v. carefully, the blood curse that he may have said has been cut and reentered several times.
6) how much satan is in this movie scares me (he is nowhere in the gospels)
7) the use of certain catholic mystics is worrisome.
8) THE DUDE MADE FUCKING BRAVEHEART !!
9) i am going to see it ( a friends local pentecostal church rented out a theater for sat. morning.
10)vanity project or tool for evangicalism, people underestimate the sheer cultural power of religous fundementalism (cf the book American Jesus, the current president, and left behind et al being the only cultural resistance that has not been excorparated.
11) astroturfing is bad mmmkay
12) gibson is not my kind of radical, but how many catholics allow me fully into the church...xian love is a two way street. (collary (sp) christ talked about speaking against false teachings as it being better to have a millstone arround a childs neck...& i think gibsons teachings are false/dangerous...im catholic b/c of v2 and i like this pope)

god and commerce in unholy union,


(from justly married , a series of photos about queer sf marriages)

calgary
good food, good art, good company.
met andrews wife to be, over lunch--much too polite&quiet on first impressions, but then so is andrew.

more later.

The US department of education, which helps television companies close caption, has denied funding for the following shows. No one is knows why, and the list is so weird that it really does not seem to be strict censorship.

these women have been together for fifty years.

hollow comes and settles
in the base places

the nape of my neck
and the bottom of my spine

where belly widens
and thighs narrow

the arch of my foot
and the crown of my head

hollows of desire
beyond anything
that can be explained

the hollows that the soul
will fit in
like hook
like eye
like hand
like glove

but nothing so simple
we are not born w. souls
but attain them
by common suffering

the missed bus
the ache of desire at
waiters and baristas and
clerks in offices
the click of rosary beads
and the dull patina
on christs right knee

nothing so dramatic
as a miracle of cured cancer
or stigmata
or anyother opening up.

just life.
and hungers
hollow

Hunger
I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.

'T was this on tables I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread,
'T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature's dining-room.

The plenty hurt me, 't was so new,
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.

Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.


ed


i had lunch with colleen two days ago, and her wisdom and guidance, taught me alot, and made me consider things with new implications.

these people agreed to have their stories of trauma and healing told, as a way to deal with violence, and to beg for forgiveness. harrowing and powerful

its powerful because of the inclusion of people who could not forgive, and the legitimacy it gives to ideas of revenge and retibution--i would like to think i belive in the power of love...but do i ?

celibate queer that i am, i will never really have to worry about the ethical implications of breeding--but this week i have been pulled into conversations about abortion--my position is easy on the surface--its not a good idea, it causes trauma, it is done to girls more then boys, but it best to be safe, medical (but does that clinical effiency means that it can be dehumanized?)

the question i cannot answer, is when does life begin. if it begins at conception, am i an acessory to murder. is the potential for life, as traumatic as life itself ?

Rowan Willams discusses contempary depictions of christ in modern art. i love mr williams, i think he speaks for god.

the problem w. me being a priest is that my sexual ethics are skewed...
imagine
a queer 15 yr old coming out and me saying its all ok, god made you whole and holy. '
a man talks about lustful thoughts about a woman other then his wife, and i think of hagar
a man cheats on his wife, and i am not mad about the sex but the lying. (or me offering marriage counselling, w. my cynicism towards monogomy)
someone confesses to masterbating and me telling them it isnt a sign at all.

and i still have that buddhist third way, can kill a starving man by feeding him vs christ as single, eunuchs for the kingdom of god, pauline/augustine/orgienin(sp) attitudes towards sex rolling thru my brain like tumbleweeds

hannah arendt, the grand jewish critic of hitler, and the seductive implications of fascism had an affair with hedigger, who was a nazi apologist, do you think the mutual self loathing made the sex better ?

BBC photos of the haji pretty and holy

An inmate in denver was used for taser target practice by the local sheriff

fark

Mackson Wasamunu a zambian photog, has been beaten up, detained, his camera broken and his film seized, for shooting pics of a police action.

large cross section of the 19k pages of documents that paul o neil left with. nothing too damaging but the attempts at transparency are interesting.

mefi

with anthrax & ricin showing up in the places of the most powerful, one would assume that bush would view decontamation as a priority. he has cut the whole budget.

any reason ?

mefi

good article on the dangers of nigerian writers who chose to dissent, including punishments that range from prison to tortue to exile to death.

Scalia and Cheney are best pals that go duck hunting together.

shouldnt there be more of an arm reach seperation b/w the executive and the judiacary(sp). something about that system of checks and balances.

ive been happier since antioch, lat is giving me some money for peices i wrote, and kissing machines a zine out of toronto may take some of my poems.

me

oh god
you have given me your people, and i am one of them.
i am in him, and with him and of him.

god
you, in your mercy, have given us yr son.
and we are that son--we are the body of christ
all in one, and one in all.

i am not a toe, or an ankle but a blood cell,
interacting with all other cells

i do not want to suffer or struggle.
i want to swim thru the blood stream
bringing oxygen and life to each part.

blood from the hands
from the feet
from the sides, from the crown of thorns
on his head,

blood streaming from him
rivulets in every pore,
and we are that blood.

god, in her wonder,
realized that life is suffering
and told the world--told jeremiah, told kali, told the buddha, told jesus.

make me a channel of yr peace, god
o lord, cast me remake me mold me shape me
strip me of the world
and make me a servant of yr desires.


Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo.
(for a few months in june, this appeared, 5'7", on a 20 foot plinth in traflagar sqaure, wallinger said of this "i wanted to show him as an ordinary human being Jesus was at the very least a political leader of an oppressed people and I think he has a place here in front of all these oversized imperial symbols.")