Caitlin Burke

“Ever since I can remember, I’ve been troubled by the state of things.” That’s how Mark Bryan begins his artist statement. I read it after looking through a couple dozen images of his work, and it tied some things together for me.

Bryan’s work spans politics, popular culture, social commentary, and quiet contemplation. He says he usually starts with a beautiful landscape but can’t leave it at that. His subjects are by turns funny and mischievous and troubling and destructive. He’s thoughtful and respectful, even loving, in his work, but not sentimental. He manages to understate even in bizarre pieces.

The originals of much of the work at his portfolio site have been sold, I am delighted to see. He also makes prints available. When I started this entry, I wanted to compare him to another painter I also love, but Bryan deserves his own entry. “Apart from all the trouble we cause ourselves, I believe we are immersed in a powerful and beautiful mystery,” he says. All the most observant realists are passionate romantics, too.

Google has just launched a service hosting images from LIFE magazine, back to about … forever!

“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.”

You can also browse by people, events, culture, and more, or use search terms.

Oddly concurrently, Listverse recently published a haunting list of the last known photographs of - mostly - well-known people.

Other entries include Einstein, Monroe, Princess Di, and of course Hitler. (And Anne Frank.) Each item includes the circumstances of the photos and their discovery.

Several years ago, I found a portfolio of work by Bri Hermanson and fell in love with her viscerally effective work. Political, social, literary, epic, she’s used her woodcut-like technique and wonderful sense of muted, blocky color to tackle the World Trade Center bombing, the phenomenon of McDonald’s, and, recently a very quirky Tarot deck. (Go look right now. I’ll wait.) I just happened across this tonight, in an old blog entry of hers:

She made it for the New Yorker cover contest earlier this year, and I, well, I wish I had seen it then.

Strange maps traces cartography from the sublime (a floor map of his home derived from notes taken on all the Sherlock Holmes stories) to the tragic (single men live in LA; single women live in NYC - nota bene, though, plenty of girls in SF as well).

And, of course, as in the April Fool’s map above, first run by the Guardian in 1977, it also brings the ridiculous.

Kikkerland Design offers fabulous “puzzles” that illustrate anatomy of various animals, including pigs, beetles, frogs, and snails. Oh, and people.

I’m not a big Hitchens fan, but I am glad he exists if only to have occasioned this cartoonish review.

I love advertising. I work in the advertising industry, and one of my favorite parts of what we do is concepting for new campaigns. That’s when the big gorgeous work - that will inevitably be cut down to size by our clients - comes out with abandon. Still, we’re in a highly specialized segment, and in a pretty nichey part of it at that, so most of what we do won’t mean very much to normal people, which is good in a way, because the really fun stuff can’t be shared around anyway.

Partly because of this, and partly because my love of advertising goes all the way back to my childhood, I watch consumer advertising somewhat closely. Luckily for me, some of the shops making the best ads also have pretty good websites, so if I find a shop whose work I really like, I have somewhere to go for high-quality examples of it. I don’t watch a lot of network television or read a lot of high-circulation magazines, though, so I’ve really come to rely on the Internet - especially blogs and services like YouTube - to aggregate ads for me.

My current favorite is Ads of the World, which aggregates ads in most media from markets all over the world. A friend says he thinks some shops just maintain an office in places like Djakarta solely so they can get hilarious ads clients won’t buy out into the world, and if that’s true, those ads will probably end up here. But the above ad isn’t in that category - it’s just a wonderful, eye-catching sell offering a solution to a real problem. (No idea whether it’s a good solution; my own skin is so sensitive to wool I’d never consider trying it.)

I have always loved astrology as “found art,” particularly the ultra short astrological predictions in the newspaper. When I was growing up, I read them routinely, and whenever someone else was on my mind a lot, I made sure to check theirs as well. I have never taken much interest in general claims for any zodiac, though, and I would not be able to list out the characteristics attributed to the different signs, except my own and a few that were particularly hilarious to me with respect to specific others. I laughed along with my atheist, humanist fellow travelers when Dawkins stopped people on the street and asked them to read “their” horoscope (provided on a card) and say how well it matched their self-identification. I laughed even harder when the only skeptic was a Capricorn - of course! But I am sure that if that were not my sign I’d have found it less funny.

I don’t read a physical newspaper anymore, so I’d fallen away from regular consultations of the stars. A few months ago, a friend reminded me of Free Will Astrology, where you can find the quirky horoscopes of Rob Brezsny. These passages from the horoscopes main page this week sum up what seems to be his general position:

At my think tank, the Beauty and Truth Laboratory, we believe that stories about the rot are not inherently more entertaining than stories about the splendor. On the contrary, given how predictable and ubiquitous they are, stories about the rot are sedatives.

Evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.

Most modern storytellers go even further in their devotion to the decay, implying that breakdown is not only more interesting but far more common than breakthrough, that painful twists outnumber sweet transformations by a wide margin.

That’s just absurd disinformation.

Superficially, he’s wrong about the sedative quality of ugly stories. Ugly stories have been explicitly with us and discussed in detail as literature for thousands of years, and the catharsis they elicit is a potent psychological state. Brezsny, though, picks out the modern, introspection-free, and commercially driven fare provided by “journalists and novelists and filmmakers and producers of TV dramas,” and he is right to be critical. I think he’s wrong about breakdown and breakthrough, though, and about twists and transformations - unfortunately.

Brezsny calls for a 50/50 split between what he describes as pop nihilism and stories about splendor, harmony, integrity, joy, beauty, bliss, renewal, and love. It seems a bit silly out of context, but in Free Will Astrology he offers an appealing, entertaining, and surprisingly useful expression of those values. Each horoscope entry contains a little story or some note of context, and then he proceeds to challenge the reader to do something active and positive. Take Taurus for this week:

“An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter,” says the Talmud. But professional dream researcher Stephen LaBerge thinks that’s too broad a statement. In his book Lucid Dreaming, he says dreams are more like poems than letters. If you try to extract literal meanings from them in the service of your ego, they may reveal nothing. But if you’re willing to find lyrical, unexpected information that could aerate your imagination and dislodge you from your habits, dreams are more likely to be useful. Keeping in mind everything I’ve said, Taurus, treat the events of your waking life in the coming week as if they were poems coming from a dreamy part of your psyche that’s enticing you to change your life.

I try to read the horoscopes for every sign every week, partly just because I enjoy them but also because - being a member of the choir he is preaching to - I already do a lot of the things he suggests. I don’t know whether his stories and suggestions are consistent with the claims for the Zodiac; it wouldn’t matter. His general message is the essence of a “good” horoscope: something in there that anyone can find a way to relate to. I would go further and say better than a good horoscope, because there is something in there that anyone can find a use for. Even the questions I’ve already asked myself can be useful to ask again:

I would love to place an elegant gold crown on your head. I have the urge to declare you monarch of the expanding realm, maker of new laws, and reshaper of the collective vision. Are you up for wielding that much power? Can you handle an increased level of responsibilities? Or would you prefer to preside over a smaller domain, content merely to keep the daily grind from erupting into chaos now and then? It’s mostly up to you. What do you want?

You can see the horoscopes for all signs, on a single page, here.