"These are my 2 ravens. They're not actually mine. I'm just taming them...."

These are my two ravens ♥️🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛#animals #birds #rfkjr pic.twitter.com/UNT4596Eeh

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 18, 2024

1. Is this a political message in metaphor?

2. Is this just exactly what it is — a man interacting with wildlife that happens to frequent his backyard?

3. The use of "taming" prods us to read the relevant section of "The Little Prince": 

Wake up and smell the instant coffee....

Yesterday, at 2:18 PM, 3 posts down, I was talking about "talking about instant coffee," and then, that evening, I was rewatching my old favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre" and that line jumped out: "we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream."

A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important, such as when Andre — after feeling he's heard the voice of The Little Prince — runs across a copy of an old surrealist magazine with a page of handprints from 4 eminent men whose names begin with the letter A and 3 of them are Andres and the other one is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wikipedia has this about Saint-Exupéry:

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience.... On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert....

See? A random Andre.

"Question: When will we put Dr. Seuss on the twenty?"

That's a question I wrote in this page of the sketchbook I drew when I was in Paris. (It was some time in the 1990s. I forget when. I blogged this page in 2004, the first year of this blog, after St. Exupéry's plane was found in the Mediterranean Sea, 60 years after he crashed and died.)

I loved that France had put an artist on its money, and I felt a little sad that we Americans don't put our artists first. So I must feel elated that we've done it at last. We've put an artist on our money:

I got my wish, so I'm just going to be happy about an artist on the money, not argue about the particular artist chosen. 

When I wrote in my sketchbook, I picked the name Dr. Seuss not only because he wrote accessible words and drew charming drawings, which is what St. Exupéry did. I picked it because I thought virtually all Americans could get behind the choice of Dr. Seuss. We all know him and have enjoyed his work. Who can't like him? But 18 years have passed, and... is Dr. Seuss cancelled? He's somewhere on the road to cancellation.

So I couldn't get my precise wish.

When you wish upon a Star-Bellied Sneetch/Makes no difference who you reach/Something like your heart desires/Will come to you....

So I got my wish imprecisely. I got Maya Angelou! 

***

Like a songbird, her legs are invisible as she flies, arms outstretched/Darting into the slots of vending machines/Across America.

"In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness..."

"... or just to get shit done.... [H]e comes off as surprisingly aware of the minefield of sensitivities around him... and he’s certainly beyond aware that he’s paying a cost to be the boss. He’s a domineering older brother to George and rival/BFF/frenemy to John, and now he’s playing de facto manager to everyone — not necessarily because he’s taken pole position in the band on merit alone, but because Lennon is suddenly more invested in a woman... Seeing McCartney recognize and articulate all these shifts, and soldier on while he gets a little bit sad about them, is one of the pleasures of 'Get Back.' If you don’t come away from this with just a little more admiration for Paul, you may just be too in the bag for John and Yoko and their bag-ism, but that’s all right. Everybody is going to be your favorite or most admired Beatle, some time before you complete the eight-hour Get Back Challenge. 'Daddy’s gone away now, you know, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp,' McCartney says, about they’ve felt rudderless since the death of manager Brian Epstein. In the contretemps with Harrison where the guitarist famously says 'I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,' McCartney tells the whole group he’s aware of turning into dad, and he doesn’t like it: 'I’m scared of that one… me being the boss. And I have been for, like, a couple of years – and we all have, you know, no pretending about that.'"

From "Why the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ May Stand as the Best Rock Doc Ever" by Chris Willman (Variety).

Lots more at the link. I resisted watching this show because I didn't want to subscribe to another streaming service — in this case, Disney. But I gave in, paid the $8 for the first month, and intend to exit as soon as I'm done watching this 8-hour extravaganza. I'm only one hour into it, after 2 sessions. I can only take so much. They look bored, that is, John, George, and Ringo look bored. Paul is more or less everything. That's pretty unpleasant! But I see that's the idea, and I have to watch it slowly enough to appreciate the details, the clues. Is John bored or is he utterly mentally absent, relocated somewhere in drugworld? Is Ringo bored or is he paying intense attention and just essentially, perpetually mute? Is George bored or is he an angry, resentful son of a bitch? 

ADDED: Willman casually used the term "bag-ism" — accomplishing a little play on words. I know what it means. I remember bagism, but I looked up the Wikipedia page anyway:

"I grew up in the former Soviet Union and in a late, flaccid, totalitarian state, the idea that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' was particularly obvious."

"For seventy years, the rhetoric of the Soviet state was always about happiness for all, a better future for all, equality for all—bullshit rhetoric that was like a paper bag thrown over a bomb. But apart from learning about how the genocidal state operates, you also learn instantly to recognize this idea, in whatever guise it comes at you, that someone else knows what you need to be 'happy,' and that this knowledge is certain and enforceable. You see it miles off. It emits a special stink even before you know it’s there.... When I was growing up in Ukraine, a line from Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry’s The Little Prince seemed to capture the ethics my family was teaching me without teaching it to me didactically: 'You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.' And if you can’t handle forever, then please don’t start. Just don’t.... The idea that doing something is always better than doing nothing is very dangerous, I think.... So much work and deliberation need to happen before you actually do anything that is ethically grounded and not fundamentally self-­serving."

Says Maria Tumarkin in "Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy" (Yale Review).

Here's Tumarkin's book — a collection of essays — "Axiomatic."

I have no idea where this article goes, but I want to praise the NYT for this beautiful, evocative, mysterious, screen-filling presentation.

I spent 5 minutes looking at the details of that photograph — which is by Damon Winter — and thinking and talking about it with Meade. I still haven't read anything more than the words you see there, the caption — "Erik Hagerman heads out for his morning ritual, a thirty minute drive into town for coffee and a scone, at his favorite coffee shop in Athens" — and the byline — "Glouster, Ohio" (so the Athens is Athens, Ohio not Athens, Georgia). I really haven't read anything more, even now, as I write this. I just love the image. I feel like saying — creative-writing-ishly — there, now, you make up the story.

I can't get over how much I love that image. I love the way the curve of the ground makes the house look like it's on its own little planet. I think of:



Searching for that image, which I knew I'd put up on the blog before, I found the 2010 post, "Obama plan to land on asteroid may be unrealistic for 2025." I had totally forgotten about that going-to-an-asteroid business, hadn't you? I was skeptical at the time. I wrote the sentence: "Go 5 million miles to paddle your gloved hands across the surface of a rock and stir up a cloud of razor-sharp dust particles that will — once you leave — hang there endlessly."

Searching the blog for the Little Prince, I also came up with this November 2017 post (which has a "Little Prince" image): "Trump and the elephants — what just happened?" ("So you've probably heard that Trump made an announcement that had to do with killing elephants, people got upset — because people love elephants — and then Trump took it back — kind of.") Coincidentally, Trump and the elephants is back in the news this week. "Trump’s cave to elephant and lion hunters" is deplored by the editors of the Chicago Tribune:

Some African governments allow [elephants] to be taken by trophy hunters.... Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tried to discourage this macabre pastime by outlawing imports of elephant trophies from specified countries. African elephants are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, and the law says their body parts may be brought in only if “the killing of the trophy animal will enhance the survival of the species.”

I think those words "Under President Barack Obama" bring tears to some eyes. There was a time! Once our quills were made to temporarily lie flat, but that time is gone.

But speaking of temps perdu, we left Erik Hagerman, walking down his ranch-house asteroid, nearing the bottom of the paved drive, which ends abruptly, like the end of a dreamlike Obama presidency. He must continue onto the rougher way of the gravel road. Where is he going? To the endless coffee cup and the scone.... Dare I step off the image I've said I love and walk onto the gravel path of the article?

Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones. To make sure he doesn’t overhear idle chatter, he often listens to white noise through his headphones. (He used to listen to music, “but stray conversation can creep in between songs.”)

Why? Why drive 30 minutes to get coffee if you don't want the company of other human beings? Surely, the whole point is to "overhear idle chatter"! But he plays "white noise" — nothingness. Not even music, because with music, there are spaces of silence, and "stray conversation can creep in between the songs." Why come down from your asteroid? It can't be the triple-shot latte with whole milk. Is it to truly experience loneliness, to see and need to defend against the others? To really feel your distance, you must approach.

At Donkey Coffee, everyone knows his order, and they know about The Blockade. “Our baristas know where he’s at so they don’t engage him on topics that would make him uncomfortable,” said Angie Pyle, the coffee shop’s co-owner.

I'd skipped to the middle of the article, looking for coffee, and now I need to puzzle out Hagerman's problem:

Mr. Hagerman has also trained his friends. A close friend from his Nike days, Parinaz Vahabzadeh, didn’t think he was quite serious at first and, in the early days of The Blockade, kept dropping little hints about politics.

The new administration compelled her to engage more deeply in politics, not less. She had only recently become a United States citizen, and she was passionate about the immigration debate. She did not let Mr. Hagerman opt out easily. “I was needling him,” she said.

Ah! He built a wall — The Blockade. I will build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me... I will build a great, great wall...

How to write about articles you've never read.... makes me think about how to make art about the stray chatter you overheard in the coffee shop...

Trump and the elephants — what just happened?

So you've probably heard that Trump made an announcement that had to do with killing elephants, people got upset — because people love elephants — and then Trump took it back — kind of.

I see that even Scott Adams — who revels in explaining why whatever Trump does is some genius "master persuader" move — thought Trump blundered ridiculously. Even though (if?) Trump's plan made good sense at the real-world factual level, it was horrible messaging at the emotional level, which is what matters in politics, and he shouldn't have done it. In that view, Trump's quick turnaround was a correction, abandoning rational policy to realign with emotional politics.

But let's undertake the thought experiment: What if it was a good idea to temporarily waft the idea of ending the ban on importing elephant trophies? I've been toying with a few thoughts on the subject.

No elephants actually died. The idea was out there and then squelched, just something to think about. What most people seemed to think about was how great elephants are. We love elephants. They're just about the favorite animal on earth. I mean, what's the competition? Dogs? Giraffes? Human beings? Pandas? We just got all balled up in our warm, enthusiastic love for the gigantic beasts with the big ears and the long trunks.

It's an almost childlike response. Didn't you draw elephants when you were a child? Every drawing of Noah's Ark has an elephant. We've been trying to draw elephants for a long time:

An elephant is the first thing the author tries to draw in "The Little Prince":

We have many soft buttons about elephants. The first thing I saw this morning on Facebook was an old photograph of a little girl sitting on a stool next to an elephant. The elephant is also seated (I guess because getting elephants to sit down was a standard circus trick imposed on captive elephants), and the girl has her arm as far as she can get it around the elephant. The elephant doesn't have its arm around the little girl because elephants don't have arms, and it's unlikely that the elephant loves the little girl. But we see love, because the love is in our heart.

But did you know that just in India, 100 to 300 human beings are killed by elephants every year? I'm reading that at the World Wildlife Fund website:

Elephant-human conflict poses a grave threat to their [that is, the elephants'] continued existence.... When elephants and humans interact, there is conflict from crop raiding, injuries and deaths to humans caused by elephants, and elephants being killed by humans for reasons other than ivory and habitat degradation. Elephants cause damage amounting from a few thousand dollars to millions of dollars. Every year, 100 humans (in some years it may be 300 people) and 40-50 elephants are killed during crop raiding in India....

We have no wild elephants in America, and I notice the "Pleistocene re-wilding" plan (blogged here in 2005) didn't get too far. We don't have elephants trampling cropland and little girls in Nebraska. For us, elephants are like unicorns. They live in Imaginationland. If Trump kills them, he kills out dreams.

Do you think he didn't know that? I'm going to suggest that he knew he could make elephants fill our brain. They are huge, not just in real life, but in our mind. You won't be able to ignore the elephant in the room that is your head space, and Trump put him there. The question is what were you not thinking about when you were thinking about the elephant? It's the most perfect distraction ever. It was so distracting that you didn't even notice what was that thing about Trump that we'd have been harping on if it weren't for the SAVE THE ELEPHANT!!! I think it was Roy Moore molested children, therefore Trump should be impeached.

Yes, we were thinking about big unruly penises, but a human penis looks like nothing compared to the elephant's trunk. Look at that thing! It's huge! It's prehensile!

By the way, "trunk" sounds like "Trump." And elephants "trumpet." Don't you hear them in your head now? Trump and elephants begin to merge in that deep part of your psyche that makes no sense. Suddenly, you love Trump. You were loving elephants, and Trump is saving the elephants now. All is good, the arc of elephant-saving bends toward justice.

Once the Trump and trumpet wordplay had us screwing around with blowing Trump's crazy hair:

But now Trump is trumpeting like an elephant...



... an elephant that in real life might like to trample you to death, but an elephant that exists in your mind as the lovable creature that Trump saved.

The stretch-pierced earlobe + snake problem.

"I was holding my #SNAKE and his #DUMB ASS saw a hole, which just so happened to be my fuckin #EARLOBE, and thought that it would be a bright idea to #ATTEMPT to make it through... "

Facebooking from the emergency room, with photograph.

To remove that image from your mind, I leave you with these snake quotes:

1. "'Where are the people?' resumed the little prince at last. 'It’s a little lonely in the desert…' 'It is lonely when you’re among people, too,' said the snake.'" — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

2. "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?" — Voltaire (Candide: or, Optimism)

3. "Don't touch me, I'm full of snakes."  — Jack Kerouac

"It's only with the heart that one can see clearly..."

"That's a plant? Thought it was Meade's bed head?"

Out loud, I read a comment by BarrySanders20 on that post with a photo of a spiky plant in front of the window through which we see the first snowfall.

I say: "Yeah, Meade wears his hair like The Little Prince."

Meade says: "Meade wears his hair like Butters."

I have a realization: "Maybe Butters is The Little Prince."

[IMAGES REMOVED]
ADDED: Meade says: "Butters' hair is like one of the stars." And stars are crucially important in "The Little Prince." The Little Prince, before disappearing from Earth, says:

“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night... You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”

"In place of the WWII aviator who narrated the book, the film’s hero is a little girl in a headband, plagued by her math homework in the modern day."

"The core story of the book—which has the pilot wandering the desert for eight days with the Prince, basically hearing all about the ecosystem of his home asteroid and his love for a rose that grows there—is sent to her by an eccentric, lonely older neighbor. This new, modern spin emphasizes that these bits are magically realist—they are shot with what looks like computer-rendered Claymation—and develops a new emotional plot, which has a friendship unfolding between old man and young girl."

Hmmm.



IN THE COMMENTS: Birches said: "I was prepared to hate the trailer. But I think it could work. Obviously, the movie is not Le Petit Prince. It's a movie about how reading Le Petit Prince can change your heart. Perhaps they should have named it The Prince and I."

The Prince and I? Isn't that this?



To President Taft!

"Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass."

Earlier today, I made a "café" post out of a photograph of a tablescape that included my small toy robot, and betamax3000 used it as an occasion — a "café" post is an open thread — to speak for the robot, saying Althouse-blog-related things like: "Robot has no need for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robot has no need for extraneous data." And "Robot would eradicate Gatsby of unnecessary organic units. Story now smaller."

The Althouse blog has an ongoing Gatsby project consisting of quoting and talking about one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" every day. No one remembers why. It's simply a tradition on the Althouse blog. There's talk of switching to "Lady Chatterly's Lover" or "The Little Prince," but these are rumors, borne in on the breeze that sweeps through the windows and makes the curtains swirl upward into the ceiling that seems like a wedding cake.)

So I've chosen a sentence for Robot/betamax3000 with all the organic units pre-eradicated. A shadow moves. That's the action. It moves and gives way to... guess what?!... another shadow. And more and more shadows. A procession of shadows. A shadow parade. Another inanimate thing is the dressing-room blind. And since we've got a dressing room, we can imagine an organic unit putting on makeup — rouge and powder — but our organic units are eradicated, so it's nothing but a shadow, the absence of a living person, and lest you think you see a person in that mirror in the dressing room, F. Scott Fitzgerald will have you know that even the looking-glass is invisible.

"I think there's a very fascistic thing under The Little Prince, you know.... I think there's a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere."

"You know, there's something, you know, that... masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle, you know what I mean? I mean, I can't quite put my finger on it, but I can just imagine some beautiful SS man loving The Little Prince. You know, I don't know why, but there's something wrong with it. It stinks!"

A quote from "My Dinner With Andre" that ties together this morning's 3 posts:

Andrew Cuomo's "muscular brand of politics"  

Politicians, including Hitler, using children 

Hitler's resemblance to Chaplin

Is there a Chaplin/Little Prince connection?



Talk about the sentimentality of fascists.

30 lawyers each pick a book that every lawyer should read, and Dr. Kevorkian's lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, picks...

... "The Little Prince"!

“The Little Prince connects you with your own being so you’re looking inward rather than outward. When you really get down to trial work there isn’t a mechanism where you learn tricks for convincing people of something you really don’t believe. It all has to come from inside you and requires self-examination. I don’t think it has relevance for lawyers doing transactions or mergers and acquisitions. It does have relevance for those who seek to do what I do, which is trial law.”

A somewhat similar perspective comes from Sam Adam Jr. (who represented Governor Blagojevich at trial):

“Respect For Acting [by Uta Hagen] taught me how to look inside yourself and bring out those things that other people see, or want to see, to take a look at a character and understand who that character is in order to become that person. That’s what a whole lot of trials are about—preconceived notions about who you are, and who your client is. You can quickly sum up who the audience wants you to be.”

There are a lot of different ways to look inside yourself. Interesting to think about the lawyerly ways.

Going back, adding my new "Little Prince" tag to a lot of old posts...

I find this, from my old man... before I ever met him other than in the comments.

"Obama plan to land on asteroid may be unrealistic for 2025."

Headline that made me laugh.

Anyway, what's unrealistic? In 2025, he won't be President. So it's totally realistic of him to blab about crap he won't have to do. And I'm quite happy to have him dreaming about the distant future instead of inflicting things on us right now.

The moon is 240,000 miles away. A trip to an asteroid would be 5 million miles — at a minimum.

Why go?

Why not!

Asteroids have always been passed over as a destination for human explorers. Then-president George H.W. Bush wanted NASA to go to Mars, while his son, George W. Bush, chose the moon. During the past six years, NASA spent $9 billion building a spaceship, rocket and other gear to help reach the second Bush's goal of returning humans to the lunar surface by 2020.

In February, Obama took steps toward killing Bush's moon program, which was beset by technical troubles and money woes. Two months later, in a speech at Cape Canaveral, Obama announced that the astronauts' next stop is an asteroid.

A President's got to be about going somewhere... somewhere else.

So far, the Obama administration has been quiet on the need for a major sum of money to accomplish his goal.

Ha.

What do you do once you get to an asteroid?

•Humans can't walk or drive on an asteroid.

... [E]ven the biggest asteroids have practically no gravity. So anything in contact with the surface could easily drift away.

Like thoughts in the cranium of a President.

"You don't land on an asteroid," says former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, a longtime advocate of asteroid studies. "You pull up to one and dock with it. ... And getting away from it, all you have to do is sneeze and you're gone." He envisions a spaceship hovering next to the asteroid and occasionally firing its thrusters to stay in place.

Astronauts wouldn't walk on an asteroid. They would drift next to it, moving themselves along with their gloved hands.

La la la. Float along!



In gloves!

To keep from floating into space, crewmembers could anchor a network of safety ropes to the asteroid's surface, but "that has its own risks, because we don't understand how strong the surfaces of asteroids are and whether (they) would hold an astronaut in place," says Daniel Scheeres, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado.

Lasso an asteroid!

The minimal gravity also means that any dust the astronauts stir up will hang in a suspended cloud for a long time. Because there's no weather on an asteroid, there's no erosion to smooth the dust particles.

"It's all going to stay pretty razor-sharp. ... It's not the most friendly stuff in the universe," Korsmeyer says. Keeping humans safe as they explore an asteroid "is going to be really tricky."

Dodge razor-sharp dust!

Go 5 million miles to paddle your gloved hands across the surface of a rock and stir up a cloud of razor-sharp dust particles that will — once you leave — hang there endlessly.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lemondog says:

Any chance the little prince could speed it up???!

Mebbe......next year?

Now we know the B in B-612 stands for Barack.

Just so, you might say to them: "The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists." And what good would it do to tell them that? They would shrug their shoulders, and treat you like a child. But if you said to them: "The planet he came from is Asteroid B-612," then they would be convinced, and leave you in peace from their questions.

OMG! He's not a natural born citizen! But he was charming, he laughed, and he found quite a lot of sheep.

Nick Gillespie gets soooo intellectual about the basis for judging Reason Magazine's "Everybody Draw Mohammed" contest...

... that I was forced to look up his educational background. Turns out he has a PhD in English literature. Ah, it makes too much sense to me.

Now, they got 190 entries in the contest. (I disapprove of the "Draw Mohammed" day, you should know.) I would love to see what the whole pile of drawings looked like. How many were stick figures or crude scratchings on the level of the "Draw Me" pirate? How many were loaded with embarrassingly violent or racial fantasy? I wish someone had had the foresight to film a documentary of these Reason guys cooking up their contest and then opening the various envelopes? I wonder if there was a point — one particular drawing? — when they felt bad about what they were doing.  And then something pushed them in the direction of getting super-elitist intellectual about picking the winners.

In coming to a consensus, we discussed standard concerns such as originality of vision, playfulness, a sense of proportion (both in terms of craftmanship and message), and relevance to the goals of the contest.

See? Read between the lines! What were they looking at when they reached that consensus? How many pieces of paper went into the discard pile over "craftsmanship"? How much did they laugh as they did a first cut over craftsmanship, and what did they say as they tossed these things aside? I would love to have been a fly on the wall... or a vole in the corner. "Sense of proportion"... what were the drawings that made them frame that standard? "Originality"? What percent of the artists drew Muhammad as a dog or as a guy with a turban-bomb? "Playfulness"... throw all the gruesome, gory things over there. "Relevance to the goals of the contest"... ha ha... so many of you scribblers did not get it. You thought it was about telling Muslims their prophet is evil, and not that free expression is precious. You fools! Did you think Nick Gillespie went to grad school for this?! 

Okay, I'm picturing approximately 90% of the drawings eliminated over these standards.

So Gillespie reveals the true test of a proper "Draw Mohammed" drawing.

The single most important element...

It's one thing.

.... and the thing that ties these selections together–is that each image forces the viewer to do two things.

I mean... it's 2 things!

First, they consciously call into question the nature of representation, no small matter in fights over whether it is allowed under Islamic law to depict Mohammed (for the historical record, there is no question that the idea that is always wrong is only of recent vintage; there is a long history of sacred and superficial images of the Prophet). The homage to Rene Magritte below states "This is not a pipe. This is Muhammed"...

He's translating the French for us. (And respelling "Muhammad" as "Muhammed," splitting the difference between the contest-name spelling — "Mohammed"— and the artist's use of the presumably politically correct spelling — "Muhammad.")

... playing with the surrealist's famous statement about the necessary disjuncture between a picture and the thing it seeks to represent. 

An insight that somehow fascinated people who studied post-modernism circa 1990. (Gillespie received his English PhD in 1996. I'd love to know more about what he studied. Can we see his dissertation?)

Just as the drawing is not a pipe (it's a drawing of a pipe), it cannot be Mohammed even as it insists it is. Even more, it is plainly not even a drawing of Mohammed or of any human figure.

Similarly, the invocation of the popular Where's Waldo? series forces the viewer to ask Where's Mohammed?, and to begin a hunt for a figure in the midst of an overstuffed scene. One assumes the black-robed character in the upper right-hand quadrant of the image is our quarry, but then what does it mean to confer on a small dot any significance whatsoever?

Second, each of the images forces the viewer to actively participate not simply in the creation of meaning but of actually constructing the image itself. This is clearest in our grand prize winner, the image below, which pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.

I like the way the winner — with a connect-the-dots puzzle — avoided drawing Muhammad altogether. Man, if I entered a "draw Mohammed" contest and the winner didn't even draw Mohammed, I'd be kind of pissed... and reading Gillespie's revelation of the highly intellectual but previously secret standards would not calm me down. "Reason"?! Bah!

"I was inspired to make a sculpture and studied many other logs, but I realized that I was only interested in this particular one."

I love this line of wall card next to a sculpture at the museum:



That line made me — and, independently, Meade — think of the way the Little Prince felt about the rose he loved. Eventually, the Prince encounters a garden of roses:

"You're lovely, but you're empty," he went on. "One couldn't die for you. Of course an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than you altogether, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass. Since she's the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except for two or three for butterflies). Since's she the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."

Here's the sculpture that was made out of the loved log:



"Hinoki," by Charles Ray is actually one of my favorite things in the Modern Wing of the Chicago Institute of Art. I've criticized the writings on the wall at the museum. I dread these explanations of art, but I loved Ray's essay, which you can read in full here. The man found and fell in love with a log, but the log was about to rot, so he got big cypress tree and got it carved into a replica of the log:

"With several friends, I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki).... When I asked Mr. Mukoyoshi about the wood and how it would behave over time, he told me that the wood would be fine for 400 years and then it would go into a crisis; after two hundred years of splitting and cracking, it would go into slow decline for another 400 years. I realized then that the wood, like the original log, had a life of its own, and I was finally able to let my project go and hopefully breathe life into the world that surrounds it."

What is life like for a graveyard tree, rooted in death?

Are their psyches distorted?



But what is any soil composed of...



... if not the dead?

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat."

That's a funny way to put it, isn't it? As if we'd stopped talking about Watergate long ago and the memory of it had gone all fuzzy. W. Mark Felt is 91, and his family thinks he ought to have the experience of hearing what people say when they find out he was the historical mystery man. He says he's not proud of it himself, so maybe he wanted to avoid hearing criticism, but his family seems to have assured him he'd be celebrated and seems to have wanted to share the experience with him.

UPDATE: Anyone else having that Joe-Klein-wrote-"Primary Colors" feeling? The hidden identity was fascinating, the actual identity quite boring.

In the comments: I see I'm being sentimental in assuming the family is motivated by a desire to share a celebratory experience.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Amba finds comparisons to "Jaws" and "The Little Prince."