A bit early, but unless something really seismic passes my way quite soon the best thing I've nicked off the net all year has to be dj BC's mashup of Philip Glass and Dizzee Rascal, Stand Up Dance.
I was in the British Museum a couple of years ago when I came across the death mask of Oliver Cromwell in one of their display cases. Oh, I thought, so that's what he looked like. That's the bloke who killed a king and helped drag Britain kicking and screaming into the 17th century. Oh, and killed a bunch of people, many of them Irish.
(And even a couple of kilos of plaster of paris can still be controversial).
You don't really get a sense of a person from a painting, at least I don't, but with a death mask you can look at the shape and size of someone's head, and imagine them lying there, asleep, about to wake up and invent gravity (as in the case of Newton).
They were created as soon after death as possible, to get the best likeness. The one above is of Beethoven, and obviously was once dropped by someone. oops. Other famous death masks include Jonathan Swift, Dante, and Hitchcock, oddly enough. For anyone who's as morbid as me, there's an excellent list here with pictures of Princeton's collection.
In the immortal works of Nick Ross, don't have nightmares.
Mod out.
There was a bittersweet piece of genius in this morning's papers - the infamous and excellent London graffiti artist Banksy has just got back from the middle east, where he tagged the wall that the Israelis have erected to, well, fuck over the Palestinians and steal their land (is there another interpretation?!).
Of course he did more than tag it - he produced some of the coolest images I've seen and without a word made a more eloquent statement on Israeli policies than a whole raft of Panoramas, Dispatches and newspaper articles. We all know what's going on, we all think it's wrong (don't we?), what's to talk about? If they won't listen, tag 'em!
The google news link above has some pictures here and there, but you can see all of them over on the Wooster Collective site, which is the online motherlode for all things spraypainted as far as I can tell.
My favourite one is above - I'm a sucker for a good stencil - but some of the others are technically more superior. Some paper this morning was suggesting he should be entered for the Turner Prize, and apart from the fact it'd go against his entire ethic, he'd surely win. Better than video loops or installations of rubbish. And funnier too.
His site is extremely cool, this or this for example. I'm not a big fan of simple tagging, but then if it wasn't for the penalties imposed for graffiti people would have more time to hang around and be creative. There's enough state-sponsored visual pollution already after all.
Mod out.
