7,304. I wish Sling Blade had done for John Ritter’s career what Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta’s.
13,486. I would like to see Columbus Day replaced by another holiday. That holiday should be attached to a single, calendar date, so we can still attach it to a Monday every year.
30,001. Banksy. Genius. Again. He set up an art stall – one of the kind that usually has more than one crappy sketch of John Lennon available for purchase – and put his own autographed paintings up for sale for $60 each. And guess what?
This idea borrows heavily from the Joshua Bell subway thing:
Different art forms, same results. There are some differences, and they’re interesting. Bell’s virtuosity may be more clearly noticeable to the casual observer than Banksy’s, but Banksy is almost certainly better-known than Bell; to the same casual observer, Banksy’s unique artistic style is more easily recognizable than Bell’s, and by a wide margin. Also, While people in the subway missed out on an opportunity to hear one of the world’s great musicians up close, people on 59th Street not only missed an intimate gallery-type experience but also lost out on the art investment of the century.
Banksy even put up one of his best-known images, the bouquet-throwing rioter, in prime viewing spots (11 seconds into the video). It’s amazing that this could go unnoticed all day. How many people that would’ve recognized that image as a valuable Banksy painting in another context must have walked by that stall that day? A thousand? Five thousand? And it appears that none of them stopped (though I haven’t ruled out that the Chicago guy was just playing it cool – what a haul!)
This neatly allows me to bring up, a propos, one of the best Halloween costumes I’ve ever seen:
