Finds of a Mind in the Wind

Jason Demers makes an impact in his first game for Dallas, absolutely leveling Jarret Stoll.

A silent protest in Love Park, downtown Philadelphia orchestrated by performance artists protesting the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The onslaught of passerby’s  wanting to take photos with the statue exemplifies the disconnect in American society.  Simply frame out the dead body, and it doesn’t exist.  

Here are some observations by one of the artists involved in the event:

I don’t know who any of these folks are.

They were tourists I presume.

But I heard most of what everything they said. A few lines in particular stood out. There’s one guy not featured in the photos. His friends were trying to get him to join the picture but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body.

"Something about this doesn’t feel right. I’m going to sit this one out, guys." "Com’on man… he’s already dead."

(Laughs.)

There were a billion little quips I heard today. Some broke my heart. Some restored my faith in humanity. There was an older white couple who wanted to take a picture under the statue.

The older gentleman: “Why do they have to always have to shove their politics down our throats.” Older woman: “They’re black kids, honey. They don’t have anything better to do.”

One woman even stepped over the body to get her picture. But as luck would have it the wind blew the caution tape and it got tangle around her foot. She had to stop and take the tape off. She still took her photo.

There was a guy who yelled at us… “We need more dead like them. Yay for the white man!”

Happy 25th Birthday Jamie Benn!

Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died today in 1610. 

To his death, Caravaggio remained protective of his art. During his exile, his patrons continued to hope that maybe soon he would return to them, but he never did. Upon his return, his style would have responded again, as it had so effortlessly ebbed and flowed with the different regions he visited, responding to their wealth, spirituality, poverty, sickness, and crowds, and he perhaps would have continued into further greatness. Caravaggio didn’t have many material possessions (we know this from inventories taken of his belongings), but he did have one thing that he prized above all else and that was wholly his own: his art.

Caravaggio was a revolutionary and an innovator whose art breathed new life into the aesthetics and mechanics of Catholic devotion. He was not leader or a mentor who welcomed or recruited others to copy what was his. Caravaggio was simply a man “of a fantastic humor … bizarre” and above all, a good man and painter “who [could] perform well in his art and … paint well and imitate natural things well.”