Duterte’s Hell

especially if we do nothing to oppose grotesque humans like Duterte and Trump.

Artists of the Wall 2017

For about a quarter century each June, a block-long concrete retaining wall / bench in Chicago’s Loyola Park has been the canvass for a festival of Rogers Park muralists: the annual Artists of the Wall festival. Each year the previous year’s work is removed, the wall subdivided, and the artists go at it.

Not being a show specifically for professionals, the quality varies widely and some years are much better than others. 2017 was somewhat better than average, in my humble opinion, but even in the years that are not so great it’s not unusual for most entries to have details, at least, that are worth admiring.

Here are the ones I would like to share with you.

photos by roman

wallartee 3

Details from CTA viaduct mural, Red Line at Touhy Avenue:

Click on image to enlarge.

Good Morning,

How about some coffee?

OMD

The real scandal is not when people treat their pets as if they were their children but when they treat their children as if they were pets. Happens all the time.

I Hate Music Videos

(nice dancing even if some of visuals are clichéd).

103 Years and Counting

wallartee 2

Twixt Morse and Farwell on southbound Glenwood Avenue in Chicago, the CTA retaining wall was decorated with a mural derived from “underground” comix of the late 1960s and early 1970s. (See for example the 1971 album art by Dave Sheridan above.) The mural was done in 1993. The photos below were taken in the autumn of 2000. By that time, the patina of seven years of Chicago weather and pollution made the mural look almost appropriately aged.

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

Photo by Roman

.

Apocalypse Rhyme by Oliver Harrison

If this were on the printed page, the form would be called “concrete poetry” — with some irony, I guess, as the production of cement is a major human source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But this? Video poetry? I’m inclined to be sullenly dogmatic and insist that anything not meant to be performed ought to be called something other than poetry, even if it’s really good…

We Sleep

The review is more interesting than the movie,

but you may be able to find We Sleep on the web. For copyright reasons, it tends to get taken down rather promptly (and with some irony).

The basic premise for Carpenter’s movie, incidentally, is from a 1963 short story by Ray Nelson. Beside the basic premise, the short story is quite different than the movie. The story was originally published in the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. I first encountered the story in Judith Merril’s 9th Annual Edition The Year’s Best S-F. Year’s best anthologies didn’t begin with Merril nor did they end with her, but her work as an editor of this series was nothing short of brilliant. It helped that she was working at a time when science fiction / fantasy plot elements and ideas were beginning to infiltrate into mainstream literature and into other genres.

Are these real aliens or humans in drag?