A ghost crab eats oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill, shown glowing yellow-orange under ultraviolet light, at Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola, Florida.
Glowing Oil Could Aid Gulf Spill Cleanup (National Geographic)
No, I’ll tell you this is an impersonation of a rock and roll singer impersonating Elvis, is what this really is…
And what we’re hearing is a result of them playing the mixing console as if it was a keyboard cum instruent…
roared by. Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy behind this man’s quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects. The way he’d oh so clearly practiced a chair’s back-leg tilt over and over. The way he’d studied objects with a welder’s eye for those strongest centered seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support. She never . . . never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly he’d no need for manner. She never sees that in his quote careless way he actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him. Of his own body. The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling. And no one . . . and she never understood that. Sour sodding grapes indeed. You can’t envy someone who can be that way. Respect, maybe. Maybe wistful respect, at the very outside. She never saw that Brando was playing the equivalent of high-level quality tennis across sound stages all over both coasts, Jim, is what he was really doing. Jim, he moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player’s dictum: touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you. I know you don’t understand. Yet. I know that goggle-eyed stare. I know what it means all too well, son. It’s no matter. You will. Jim, I know what I know.
I’m predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great. You will be the real thing. I know I haven’t taught you to play yet, I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know. It doesn’t affect my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today you are starting, and within a very few years I know all too well you will be able to beat me out there, and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It’ll be out of a sort of selfless pride, an obliterated father’s terrible joy. I feel it, Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child’s body in the chair so it’s at the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book’s stiff bend. You do it unconsciously. You have no idea. But I watch, very closely. Don’t ever think I don’t, son.
You will be poetry in motion, Jim, size and posture and all. Don’t let the posture-problem fool you about your true potential out there. Take it from me, for a change. The trick will be transcending that overlarge head, son. Learning to move just the way you already sit still. Living in your body.
This is the communal garage, son. And this is our door in the garage. I
Infinite Jest, p. 158
Image from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center (Inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Don DeLillo’s Players.)
It might not sound like the crime of the century. But the theft of a box of pencils has reignited a bitter feud in the art world.
The pencils in question are actually worth £500,000 and form part of a £10million Damien Hirst art installation.
They were taken as a prank by a 17-year-old graffiti artist known as Cartrain, who claims he had no idea the ‘Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series’ were in fact rare and worth that amount.
He is currently on bail, and, if convicted, will be responsible for one of the highest value modern art thefts in Britain.
The incident took place in July when Cartrain visited Hirst’s Pharmacy exhibit at Tate Britain in Central London.
He apparently used the opportunity to take revenge on Hirst, who had reported Cartrain to the Design and Artists Copyright Society after he created a number of collages based on Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, For The Love Of God.
The online gallery selling the collages eventually surrendered the artwork and Cartrain was ordered to pay back the £200 profits he had made.
Having apparently swiped the pencils, Cartrain then made a ‘wanted’ poster, which read: ‘For the safe return of Damien Hirst’s pencils I would like my artworks back that DACS and Hirst took off me in November.
Sally Bennett Jones, 1944–1988. Center medallion of triangles, surrounded by multiple borders, 1966, cotton, 86 x 77″
Linda Pettway, born 1929. “Logcabin” — single-block variation, tied with yarn, ca. 1975, corduroy, 88 x 78″
Mary Elizabeth Kennedy, 1911–1991. “Housetop” — “Logcabin” variation, ca. 1935, cotton, rayon, 84 x 79″
