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. 9.
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Painfully Unaware.
By Dan Park
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The image on top is courtesy of a buddy of mine who is currently
in Haiti. He's been there since a little after we graduated from the
University of Virginia last May. My friends and I won't hear from him
for weeks at a time but occasionally we get a hurried e-mail
cataloguing the crazy things he's seen in the weeks since his last
correspondence. This time, we were provided with a photograph
typifying his daily sightings. Haiti has been in politico-social
strife for years but recently the violence has escalated due to a
highly contested presidential election. In the picture, you can see a
masked driver wielding a sidearm and other heavily armed men hanging
off of the white pickup. In his e-mails, my friend says that he's had
to brandish machetes while traveling alone. This is particularly crazy
because one month before he left for the violence of Haiti, he was in
Charlottesville partaking in the never-ending cocktail party that is
Foxfield Races. For those who are unaware of the tradition, Foxfield
is an annual horserace put on by local bluebloods in a quaint valley
of Virginia. Somewhere down the line it became a nice excuse for the
local University of Virginia students to set up plots and to engage in
excessive drinking away from their fraternity houses for a change. The lower
picture explains itself: lots of drunken coeds in flower
dresses, sipping strong bourbon and gingers out of their respective
sorority cups, and even drunker guys, looking painfully fratty, chasing
after aforementioned coeds. If I were writing a dissertation, a
lengthy commentary about wealth disparities, Western excess, and
poverty may have followed, but I'm not; so let the two pictures speak
for themselves.
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Weschler Responds.
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Another nice catch, albeit in this case quite a profoundly unsettling
one. I am put in mind of an Eric Fischl painting from early in his
career, back in 1983, see below, back in the days when desperate
Haitians were clamboring aboard rickety vessels of at best dubious
seaworthiness and risking their lives, and that of their whole
families, on a terrifyingly dangerous passage across the straits and
(if they were lucky) onto the resort beaches of a resolutely oblivious
Florida, populated by the sorts of leisure guests who, in another part
of their lives, might be expected to swarm the Soho openings of trendy
shows like Mr. Fischl's very own, themselves clamboring desperately to
purchase canvases by the hottest new talent.
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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
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 Muņoz
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
Cameras, Action! From Disney World to St. Peter's Square, the Mediative Flight From the Immediate by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 6
Convergent Postscripts by Lawrence Weschler
From Da Vinci to Duchamp, by Way of Russia by Lawrence Weschler
Venus on a Vespa, Berger on My Mind by Lawrence Weschler
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