In Late Spring

Down here, everything moves. There’s a continuous swaying din. Even when it’s quiet, the silence becomes loud. The stillness is the coiling that precedes a lion’s pounce.

I imagined a great tropical farmland, partitioned and wild, and that I was the fruit-fed sacrifice. On the final day, they burned sage and sent the chieftain’s daughter to soothe me before the blood rite. Their wagons circled like a nesting snake. My terror was a desired component of the ritual; my pleas a swansong before the knife’s flash.

I awoke bound to a stained slab, surrounded by a tower of faces beautiful and ancient…

*

This Orientation...

I haven't seen either painting in person, but I'm curious as to what the proper orientation is for Glenn Brown's You Take My Place in This Showdown, a clear reinterpretation of Dali's The Great Masturbator (Brown likes to redo Dali).

Everything gets more confusing not just because of Glenn's verisimilitudinous rehashery - he's also keen on pulling Baselitz-style flips with his paintings, especially with his portraits. Gagosian's page for Brown shows the painting with a clockwise rotation to Dali's original, a turning that would render Dali's surreal self-portrait upright. The image on Gagosian also looks like a terrible reproduction, though Brown is also known for trompe-l'oeiling his paintings to simulate impasto and other ways to signify decadence/general putrescence (though I'm pretty sure he hasn't lent his talent to simulating shitty JPEGs).

Other changes in Brown's painting include a truncation of the original image, as well as the removal of several elements - including an ant-sieged grasshopper clinging to the portrait, its head perfectly proportioned/positioned to enter Dali's nostril - and general stylistic alterations. Further sleuthing shows the painting oriented more like Dali's, but I don't know who to trust.

Disorientation Disney Postscript: Had a feeling that the weeping Alice looked like someone associated with GIFs, and realized it was Rhizome director Lauren Cornell. Funny that the picture I found of Cornell seems to have images of characters from other Disney animations on the computer screen (looks like Arthur from The Sword in the Stone and Mowgli from The Jungle Book)*. Though the glasses appear to have been added, so... IDK, DWI? All together now...

Bonus Relevant Free Association

*ADDENDUM: The video on the computer screen in this photo is Versions (2010) by Oliver Laric (thanks Duncan Alexander). Among other things, the video appears to show how Disney reused animations for its various characters (like applying different "skins" to game animations).

Exegeses of some bon.gs recently posted to Facebook

Waldo Sweep in China
Image Search led me to this website - the icons, mannerist pixilation, and general busyness was appealing (and somewhat reminiscent of Robotron). Also had just watched this interview of Werner Herzog by Steven Colbert that a friend had posted to Facebook. Started repeatedly tiling this GIF to bon.gs and realized that it kind of also looked Where's Waldo?-ish. Tiled this windmilling samurai over the "landscape" and then remembered someone having posted this Herzog/Waldo parody.

Chersquares
Friend posted this video of Cher so I responded with the above. Had posted this low-quality video of the final scene from Chastity a week or so ago after seeing said scene play out on one of those sad, catheter-commercial-laden channels that people without cable get.

Defending the Hive
Decided to make this from images found by looking up "orbbs" (misspelling intentional, not sure it mattered). "Sun" in upper-left was supposed to be part of the offending sphere, but it mysteriously relocated itself upon reposting.

Hospital Virtual
Aligned select florales de Bach from this archive a la David Thorpe's botanical hybrids.

Sardius Impervious
Discovered this visionary website while promiscuously Googling all things apocalyptic in anticipation of the recently unrealized Rapture. Central gradient-tastic "Sardius Man" comes from this page, which seems awash in color theology.