Good stuff

[Dave Monroe]

... in honor of the holiday, read Kevin Salatino's Incendiary Art: The
Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe, which served as the
exhibition catalogue for an exhibit of, well, early modern european
representations of fireworks at the Getty museum.  Had some interesting things
to say about fireworks, warfare, Vesuvius and Pompei, special effects (indeed,
I came across the book in the footnotes to an essay on special effects
somewhere; also comes up in Daniel Tiffany's excellent Toy Medium: Materialism
and Modern Lyric [Leibniz, automoata, meteorology, Wallace Stevens, you name
it ... see also his Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra
Pound]), the politics of representation, the sublime, and so forth.  If
anyone's interested (or even if anyone's not ...).  And then I see that the
Met (I think) has a similar, though more far-reaching, show in progress (was
in the NY Times' "Living Arts" section earlier this week, maybe even on the
Fourth).  In the air, apparently ("no puns where none intended"--Samuel
Beckett) ...

In a vaguely related matter, there's also what I presume is a mushroom gravy
cloud in Chicken Run (q.v., and note not only the number of the featured
hut/coop/stalag, but also the shape of the lock on the enclosure fence, cf. a
certain competitor's flagship character) ...


Jeremy Osner wrote:

> Henry Musikar wrote:
>
> >  Looks to me like
> > impatience, i.e. get on with the good stuff/exposition/melody/plot, a la
> > Rossini.
>
> I want Cause and Effect
>
> J
> still rubbing my eyes from the dazzling
> "biggest fireworks display ever" in
> NY last night, presumably the biggest
> next to Dresden Hiroshima et al.