Grateful Dead

Oh well, fuck them then...

I tried to sign it, but that website didn't seem to care for my Android.

it's no surprise a male dog barks aggressively.a pussy would sing soprano. did you sign the petition Mary and Mike?

it appears that Cyndi Lauper sings "At Last" very well.

I nominate Pussy Riot for the best band name ever.

helps to fill the void of no more Breaking Bad. Completely politically incorrect, too. Enjoy :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5q8KWL6Ezw

Cornelia Parker What Do Artists Do All Day? In Conversation Cornelia Parker is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. She was born during the year 1956 in Cheshire, England. She was raised on a Cheshire smallholding. Cornelia Parker's work is regarded internationally for its complex, darkly humorous, ironic style. Cornelia Parker's work is highly allusive and patterned with cultural references to cartoons, a style which she adapts to her need to capture things in the moment before they slip away and are lost beyond human perception. When examining her work holistically one can see the following themes driving her work forward consumerism, globalization, and the role of the mass media in contemporary life. Cornelia Parker was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 and featured in the 8th International Sharjah Biennial in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates in 2007. Cornelia Parker has rural roots, as Simon Hattenstone for the Telegraph writes, Her sickly father had never been out with a girl until he was 34 and met Parker's mother, a German girl who had been traumatised as a Luftwaffe nurse in the second world war. Life was tough and physical – mucking out the pigs, milking the cows. "My father wanted a boy badly and didn't get one, so I was happy to be the surrogate boy. I was very strong, always doing manual labour." Later, Cornelia Parker studied art and received her MFA at Reading University in 1982. The Telegraph reports that Cornelia Parker trained at Wolverhampton Polytechnic because she was turned down by the larger colleges in London. After her Masters degree Cornelia lived a bohemian lifestyle in the fringes of Eastern London where she worked from home. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Wolverhampton (2000), the University of Birmingham (2005), and the University of Gloucestershire (2008). As the Telegraph writes: While she got teaching jobs in the art schools that had rejected her, she was opposed for years to the commercial art market, and wasn’t represented by a gallery until she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. Parker is married to the American artist Jeff McMillan. She has a daughter Lily, with whom she became pregnant with at the age of 44. The pregnancy is depicted in a piece of art in which Parker purchased the night gown worn in the film Rosemary's Baby hoping to wear it for birth but it was too small so she displayed it as a piece of art. Many of Cornelia Parker's artworks are ephemeral or 'site-specific', created for a single time and place. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) was such a work, in which Cornelia Parker had the British Army explode a garden shed, and the fragments were suspended in the air around a single source of illumination casting shadows of the shattered pieces on the walls. This work was displayed at the Tate Modern Gallery. Mark Hudson wrote the following in a review of the work for Telegraph: Squashing a brass band is quite another. Flattening a whole band’s worth of instruments and sending them to the North East, home of the Durham Miners’ Gala, where the blare of brass is the very breath of proletarian pride, suggests a degree of chutzpah bordering on the suicidal. The striking style of the suspended sculpture, which challenges the limitations of time and space, is typical of Cornelia Parker's work. Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) (1999) is another example of this type of sculpture, in which charred fragments of a building supposedly destroyed by arson are suspended by wires and pins in a pattern which is both geometrical and chaotic. The work captures the identity of the two states by a retroactive positioning, much in the manner of a forensic scientist might reconstruct the scene of a crime. Cornelia Parker has had numerous solo exhibitions in England, Europe, and the United States, at the Serpentine Gallery, London (1998), ICA Boston (2000), the Galeria Civica de Arte Moderne in Turin (2001), the Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2004), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (2005), the Modern Museum at Fort Worth, Texas (2006) and Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima Peru (2008). The work of Cornelia Parker was included in group exhibitions and public collections at the Tate Gallery in London, MOMA in New York, the British Council, Henry Moore Foundation, De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Yale Center for British Art and many other venues. Some of her most noted exhibitions and works include Chomskian Abstract (2008), Never Endings (2007, 2008), Brontëan Abstracts (2006), The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) (2003), Subconscious of a Monument (2002), Blue Shift (2001), Edge of England (1999), and The Maybe, in collaboration with Tilda Swinton (1995). b. 1956, Cheshire, England For some years Cornelia Parker’s work has been concerned with formalising things beyond our control, containing the volatile and making it into something that is quiet and contemplative like the ‘eye of the storm’. She is fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions. Through a combination of visual and verbal allusions her work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary. 2013 a solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, London 2012 The Unseen: 4th Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, China 2012 Medals of Dishonour a group exhibition at Hermitage’s Menshikov Palace, St Petersburg, Russia 2011 Thirty Pieces of Silver York St Mary’s, York 2010 Doubtful Sound, a solo exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 2008 Latent News, a solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery 2007 – 2008 Never Endings, a touring solo exhibition at IKON, Birmingham; Museo De Arte de Lima, Peru 2001 a solo exhibition at GAM, Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna, Turin 2000 a solo exhibition at ICA Boston http://www.frithstreetgallery.com/uploads/artist_cvs/Parker%20CV.pdf

Next week's episode: "The Do's and Don'ts of Financing a Hollow Log" - {%};-)

Nice write-up, Anna. I loved the series but found the finale a bit disappointing. I guess I was hoping for a little more thought-provoking ending. Instead, it was a pretty predictable shoot-up. I thought maybe Walt finally succumbing to his cancer, quietly, alone, might have been more poignant. And the machine-gun in the trunk seemed a bit far-fetched. (we knew Walt was a genius chemist, but now apparently he is also a brilliant mechanical engineer....(?)) My favorite seasons were 1 and 2; those seemed to be the most realistic to me. After that they sometimes seemed to try a little too hard. Still, I loved all of it. I think it's the greatest psychological suspense/thriller i've ever seen (movies, TV, or otherwise).

After capturing three Emmies this year alone (Best Dramatic series; Best Supporting role }Anna Gunn, Walter White's wife 'Skyler'[; Best Production/Technical values (or similar)) I would have to say that the ending episode of the series, it's ultimate conclusion, was satisfying. The series was always praised by TV critics. One of the things underlined before the final episode by said critics, and myself also here in this thread last year, is the playing out of the series on a lean, spare run to it's logical conclusion. That is, every episode had something to contribute to the plot line and there was no playing out tangents that had nothing to do with furthering the dramatic content of the series, with the possible exception of the "fly in the super-lab" (not it's official name) episode. Now, as for the ending.... It wasn't one of those confusing or ball-bustingly unsatisfying endings that leaves you gnashing your teeth and wanting to yell at the ceiling. For instance, it would have been a bummer if Walt had left Jessie slaving away in a Meth mine for the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang bent on supplying the Czech Republic's meth-head population. It would have been unsatisfying had not the whole Aryan crew not been taken out by a simple but tech-savvy swiveling machine gun in the huge trunk of an old American car. An older car, but an American classic that logically had room for such a device. The ending continues to play out with such things as Walter being able to pay for his son's college education (coincidentally, with the amount he originally set out to make in the first episode) and getting back at his old lover and her new husband who had used Walter's brilliant technical research for their ultimately wildly successful high-tech start-up called "Grey Matter" or something to that effect. Brilliantly, Vince Gilligan's writer's manage to kill a third bird by including Jessie's two old cohorts whom he has using laser pointers to convince the couple that they are guns for hire who will kill them should they not give "Flynn" (the nickname for Walter's son named Walt Junior) his college cash. that Lydia, the conniving bitch who plays the materials handler for the big German conglomerate that provided a necessary, hard to get precursor chemical gets hers with a simple phone call from Walter saying ricine had been spiked into her stevia sweetner packet at the cafe (slightly unbelievable unless you believe he is willing to kill everybody using stevia at said cafe that day). The number of people who end up being killed on this series during it's six year run is truly staggering and if I had to hazard a guess I would say the number is somewhere around two to three hundred starting with an obscure character chained up in the basement of then Jessie's aunt's house. There is poignancy being developed even at this early point as neither partner in crime wants to kill somebody and they end up having to toss a coin to see who will do the deed. Walt shows a father's tenderness by cutting the crusts off the sandwiches he is feeding his prisoner and showing some real angst about the matter, an angst that is only dispelled when he realizes, by solving the cognitive puzzle of a missing piece of dinner dish that is a jagged shard, that his prisoner intends to kill him with should he get the opportunity. Fast forward one or two seasons when Walt, Jessie and Gus Freyne narrowly avoid being killed by an apparent drone missile attack called in by the DEA, I think, on the marriage of an important cartel relative that is also a summit between two cartels and thus a prime target. The missile kills probably 50-100 people. Fast forward to the last episode while Jessie slowly strangles to death the baby-faced Aryan brotherhood sociopath stone killer whose uncle runs the prison gang. Walt kills the uncle without any compunction at all. The scene that follows is what I found most interesting about the whole final episode: Jessie picks up a pistol and prepares to shoot Walter, who seems to welcome the death which is impending from all angles. Jessie finds this too easy and asks Walter's permission, which he enthusiastically grants. Jessie finds that all too easy and drops the pistol, telling Walter to do it himself. Well thought-out ending by Gilligan's writers of the interaction between these two main characters. Jessie then high-tails it out of the compound, busting a gut laughing while he busts the gate. Walt, meanwhile, takes a final tour of yet another meth lab on the premises of the Aryan compound Jessie has been forced to labor in as the police close in. Whether it be from the cancer, the cops or the bullet wound he has sustained in the final scene, Walt knows he is dying and is no longer running from the law. The most telling scene in the entire episode comes earlier when he is talking to his wife Skyler about why he did this continuing series of crimes when he had had multiple opportunities to just walk away with mad stacks of Benjamins. He says something to the effect that he likes it. It was something that made him feel alive, even as he was dying. Two supporting characters that are worthy of mention and probably rate Emmy's for their support roles, are the lawyer Saul (not even his real name in the fictional mode) who was always good for a laugh whenever he made an appearance. He had the lawyer/criminal/lawyer role nailed right down to the white Cadillac with the license plate "lawyrup". The other was Mike, the former cop turned hard core criminal security chief. The show would have paled somewhat without the brilliant performances turned in by these two. I have to say for a final time that I loved the pathos of this show and the social commentary it provides as a plot for so many people's lives in America, whether it be for the ongoing $800,000 a year lifestyle or the Eighty million dollar empire built up over time. Otherwise good people are turned bad for the slightest of justifications. In America there are ever so many more people "Breaking Bad" rather than "Breaking Good". Thank God for the example of those Breaking Good. May their example always shine brightly! (Please excuse the length of this review, I hope you found it a good summation and a good read.)