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Perfect for Mother's Day: the Baby Be of Use series or The Secret Language of Sleep.

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A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.

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For more information
about this contest,
click here.

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Contest Winner No. 37.

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Shipwrecked
Desperation.

By Charles Mudede
via Matt Haber

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From the blog of Seattle's
alternative weekly paper
The Stranger.
(http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/04/rock_bottom)

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Rock Bottom.

The image on the cover of today's New York Times ...

... brought to the surface of my awareness this painting:

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899)

And that painting brought to the surface this other painting.

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1778)

But the first image, the image from rural Zimbabwe, is the true image of being stuck in life. Those young men have nowhere to go, particularly the one with the bust radio on his legs. The baked wall of the hut, the dead dust, the sole source of energy, the corn, that's not growing fast and plentifully enough—this is the rock bottom of the world. I don't think they are listening to the results of the election. Not news, but music. On the radio Oliver Mtukudzi sings "Ruki," a sad but pretty song about how certain people are just lucky ("ruki") and others are not.

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Weschler Responds.

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Friend of the Contest Matt Haber turned us on to this recent Web posting by The Stranger's Charles Mudede, relating a recent New York Times photo of desperate stasis in Zimbabwe (waiting out news of the results of the recent presidential election) to Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899), in which Homer, in turn, was clearly riffing on John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778). (Robert Hughes offers an interesting comparison of those two paintings in his American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, noting that in the Copley painting rescue is near—and indeed Watson did live to tell the famous tale—whereas in the Homer the lone, black shipwrecked sailor's circumstances seem decidedly less promising. Peter Wood, for his part, in an essay reachable by way of the Wikipedia entry on the painting, has suggested that, with The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer may have been intending a commentary on the dismal situation of blacks in the post-Reconstruction South, as Lincoln's democratic vision precipitately faded during the final decades of the 19th century.)

I myself might have added Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, from 1819, to the mix,

noting how the polarities of news-spreading are now conspicuously reversed: In the Géricault and the Copley, the painters were depicting and further broadcasting imagery of at-that-time widely reported and discussed events in the news. In the Times photo, the guys in the picture are portrayed as themselves waiting out, waiting for, the news, though the same sense of shipwrecked desperation conspicuously pervades all the scenes (and people of color are prominent in each).

As for what it's like to sit there, in the comfort of our breakfast nooks, gazing on the desperation of others, I am in turn reminded once again of that Eric Fischl painting I cited a while back (see Contest Winner No. 9):

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OTHER WINNERS.

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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper

2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter

3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth

Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler

4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen

5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem

6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic

7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin

8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker

9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park

10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky

Weschler's Second Interlude

11. Love and War by Kim Wood

12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb

13. The March by Emily Marvosh

14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson

15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn

16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb

Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler

17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper

Carnival of Convergences

Weschler's Fourth Interlude

Aftersquib to the Foregoing

18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer

19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz

20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley

A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney

Another Carnival of Convergences

21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld

22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch

An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge

23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch

26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland

Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs

27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee

Carnival of Convergences No. 3

28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn

Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler

29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss

The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler

31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel

32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen

An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler

Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler

Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler

Carnival of Convergences No. 4

Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler

33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva

34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia

Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler

35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling

36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch

Carnival of Convergences No. 5

Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler

37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber

38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter

 

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