Pablo’s Love Pad Goes Public
Painter’s Love palace unsealed
Hot spot
The French chateau where Picasso lived and now lies buried with his ‘green-eyed beauty’ has opened to the public, writes Matthew Campbell.
The dining room smells strongly of wood smoke. Drops of paint cover the floor upstairs. Pablo Picasso’s spirit haunts the imposing fortress in whose grounds he is buried with Jacqueline, his last love.
Vauvenargues chateau in southern France has opened to the public for the first time, offering a rare glimpse into the home of one of the greatest figures of 20th-century art.
The red-shuttered chateau is where Picasso lived with his second wife from 1959 to 1961 and where he created some of the greatest work of his later years.
Much to the excitement of Picasso fans, the house — abandoned by Jacqueline and Catherine, her daughter, to caretakers after the artist’s death in 1973 — is just as they left it, giving it the uncanny air of a time capsule.
In a sparsely decorated bedroom, a 1950s telephone sits on the bedside table. On the floor is a giant, Swiss cowbell.
“Each morning, Picasso, already in his late 70s when he moved into the chateau, would see if he still had the strength to lift it.”
Lucy In The Sky With The Wolf
Real ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ gravely ill
By Gregory Katz, Associated Press
They were childhood chums. Then they drifted apart, lost touch completely, and only renewed their friendship decades later, when illness struck.
Not so unusual, really.
Except she is Lucy Vodden — the girl who was the inspiration for the Beatles’ 1967 psychedelic classic “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” — and he is Julian Lennon, the musician son of John Lennon.
They are linked together by something that happened more than 40 years ago when Julian brought home a drawing from school and told his father, “That’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
Just the sort of cute phrase lots of 3- or 4-year-olds produce — but not many have a father like John Lennon, who used it as a springboard for a legendary song that became a centerpiece on the landmark Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
“Julian got in touch with me out of the blue, when he heard how ill I was, and he said he wanted to do something for me,” said Vodden, who has lupus, a chronic disease where the immune system attacks the body’s own tissue.
Lennon, who lives in France, sent his old friend flowers and vouchers she could use to buy plants at a local gardening center, since working in her garden is one of the few activities she is still occasionally well enough to enjoy.
The Average Male Cortex At Work
from Dr Drew…
Biggest Banksy Exhibit Yet in Bristol – Identity Still Unknown
Banksy back in Bristol for biggest British exhibition
Banksy, the graffiti artist, has returned to his home city of Bristol to set up his biggest ever British exhibition.
The artist – whose identity is the subject of speculation – has installed the works in Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery inside a giant burned out ice cream van.
The van, which sits under a giant melted cone, appears alongside dozens of sculptures, oil paintings and his trademark stencils.[ click to continue reading at The Telegraph ]
Incredible Hulk Training King Of Pop
| Lou Ferrigno training Michael Jackson | |
| BANG Showbiz
A source told Britain’s The Sun newspaper: “Lou has been visiting Michael to build him up so he can perform his dance routines. “But Michael refuses to lift weights. He doesn’t want to bulk up.” |
|
The ‘Incredible Hulk’ actor – a former Mr. Universe – is paying secret visits to the ‘Thriller’ star’s Los Angeles home to help him prepare for his forthcoming ‘This Is It’ run of shows at London’s O2 arena.New Vegemite
Australia’s Vegemite gets 1st makeover in 85 years
Posted: 06/14/2009 11:11:54 PM PDT
ADELAIDE, Australia—The iconic Australian food spread Vegemite is getting a makeover.
Kraft Foods Australia announced Sunday that a creamier variation of the product would be on store shelves July 5 alongside the original, which has been a staple in pantries Down Under almost since its invention here in 1922.
“With such a well-loved, iconic brand, we wouldn’t create something using the Vegemite name unless we were absolutely sure Australians would love it,” said Simon Talbot, Kraft Australia’s head of corporate affairs.
Vegemite—a salty, slightly bitter spread made from brewer’s yeast—is such a part of Australian lifestyle that it even made mention as a sandwich in the 1980s hit song “Down Under” by Men at Work. Australians spread it on toast or crackers, top it with tomatoes or avocados, use it to flavor soups and gravies, pack a jar when traveling and write home for more when living abroad.
Eno Plays The Sydney Opera House
Sydney Opera House’s white sails turn into giant canvas for spectacular light display
Bathed in an ever-changing display of brilliant light, this is Sydney Opera House as you’ve never been seen it before.
Called 77 Million Paintings, the installation is the work of artist and music producer Brian Eno and features 300 of his drawings.
He told the BBC he wanted people to ‘surrender to another kind of world,’ as they watched the transformations.
Spectacular: Sydney Opera House is lit up by a stunning array of ever-changing colours and patterns
‘All the things that humans do, including imagining, are the way we deal with emergencies including the global financial crisis,’ he said.
‘So to imply, “oh God, there’s a crisis, no time for imagining any more” – it’s not true.
‘This is the time for imagining and the way we learn to imagine, one of the ways we learn to imagine, is through the experience of art.
‘The human ability to imagine made people capable of surviving.
‘By allowing ourselves to let go of the world that we have to be part of every day, and to surrender to another kind of world, we’re allowing imaginative processes to take place.’
Glowing: The work, called 77 Million Paintings, was designed by Brian Eno who used 300 of his drawings to create it
Robert Colescott Gone
Robert Colescott, Painter Who Toyed With Race and Sex, Dies at 83
Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and almost tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Jandava Cattron, who said he had suffered for several years from Parkinsonian syndrome.
Mr. Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the first African-American to do so. By then he was well known for pitting the painterly against the political to create giddily joyful, destabilized compositions that satirized, and offended, without regard to race, creed, gender or political leaning.
People of all colors haunt Mr. Colescott’s paintings, mostly as chimerical stereotypes that exchange attributes freely. Their mottled skin tones often suggest one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interactions evoke a volatile mixture of suspicion, desire, pain and vitality. His slurred shapes, wobbly drawing and patchy brushwork imply that no truths can be held to be self-evident, that life is mired in slippery layers of false piety, self-interest and greed, but also lust, pleasure and irreverence.
Steeped in history and art history, Mr. Colescott often found new uses and meanings for the landmarks of Western painting, borrowing compositions and characters from van Eyck, Goya and Manet and peppering his scenes with the Africanized faces from Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
James Frey Signing @ McNally Jackson Today 1-3pm
James Frey
Saturday, June 13 2009, 1:00pm – 3:00pm
Author of Bright Shiny Morning (Harper Perennial)
James Frey, whose memoir A Million Little Pieces made him one of the most controversial writers in the country, returns to fiction with his bestselling novel of Los Angeles, Bright Shiny Morning, of which the New York Times wrote “He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park.” Frey brings his work to the streets this Saturday at McNally Jackson, greeting readers and signing copies of the new paperback edition of Bright Shiny Morning at a sidewalk table outside of the bookstore.
The Meteorite Bejeezus
Boy Hit by Meteorite
By SPACE.com Staff
A 14-year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.
“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account. Astronomers have analyzed the object and conclude it was indeed a natural object from space, The Telegraph reports.
Most meteors vaporize in the atmosphere, creating “shooting stars,” and never reach the ground. The few that do are typically made mostly of metals. Stony space rocks, even if they are big as a car, will usually break apart or explode as they crash through the atmosphere.
But human strikes are rare. There are no known instances of humans being killed by space rocks.
Google Search For Humor Fails
Rude roof on Google Earth
CHEEKY pupils used bricks to spell out “C**K” on their school roof – and it was spotted from space.
The stunt, by school leavers, was unnoticed for years until the bricks were captured by mapping website Google Earth.
Now head Gordon Ironside is having them removed from Sutton Grammar School, Surrey.
Tube Steaks With Pickled Onions
Tube Steaks With Pickled Onions
1 small white or yellow onion
1 small red onion
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons celery seed
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
8 all-beef hot dogs, about 1/4 pound each
8 hot dog buns
Yellow mustard
Ketchup
Using a sharp knife, cut a few shallow slashes in each hot dog. Prepare the grill for direct cooking over medium heat. Brush cooking grates clean. Grill hot dogs over direct medium heat, with the lid closed as much as possible, until lightly marked on the outside and hot all the way to the center, 5 to 7 minutes, turning occasionally.
15 Minutes Of Pop
Iggy Pop: Good Lyrics and Concerts Take 15 Minutes or Less
It’s hard to pass up posting all the great quotes Iggy Pop keeps throwing out there in his promotional interviews for Préliminaires, so here we go: Today’s quote kind of follows in the same vein as Pop’s slamming of intellectual rock stars last week. When it comes to writing lyrics or playing shows, he says you shouldn’t waste your time.
“Good lyrics take 15 minutes or less,” Pop told Paste Magazine’s Xavier Martin. “Any longer, it’s probably shitty.”
The Gentleman Farmer Guzman
Luiz Guzman, ‘The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3’
Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
June 11, 2009
Luis Guzmán caught the train late and had no idea where it was going.
“I didn’t study acting,” says one of the busiest character actors around, calling his career “a fluke.” “I pretty much was a street kid growing up, always involved in the neighborhood and all the different characters. I hung out with poets and musicians and community activists. I met César Chávez when I was 17. This is everything I use. My career is a reflection of my life.
“That character I did in ‘Anger Management’ — I really grew up with a guy like that. He used to dress so sharp, he was so buffed but when he spoke, you thought you were listening to your sister.”
The actor is in town for only two days, for the premiere of Tony Scott’s “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” in which he plays a disgruntled former MTA motorman sucked into a hijack plot by a vengeful ex-convict ( John Travolta) while an ordinary MTA employee ( Denzel Washington) tries to defuse the situation. The movie, he says, was “a cool flick” to work on, “watching Tony, how he manipulates the whole situation, all the cameras. And seeing how John Travolta drove this movie; he was like a badass badass, if I can say so.”
Guzmán is eager to get back home to catch his 13-year-old son’s baseball game, but rather than his native New York City, that destination is Vermont, where he is a gentleman farmer with his wife and five children. “It’s a different life, a different head,” he says. “I think it keeps me younger. It keeps me much healthier mentally, spiritually; the air is cleaner, the environment.” And, he says, “You learn how important manure is in your life.”
It has been a long, strange trip for the former social worker from the Lower East Side.
Sterling says, “Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency”
from Bruce Sterling’s BEYOND THE BEYOND @ WIRED.com
Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature
- By Bruce Sterling
1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
3. Intellectual property systems failing.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
Do Not Watch While Hallucinating
Top Hat of Couture
John Mahdessian prefers not to be called a dry cleaner.
“That’s a fuckin’ insult,” he said, between pulls off a Marlboro Light on a recently Sunday morning. “That’s like calling a world-renowned surgeon a doctor.”
We were outside the nail salon next door to the Madame Paulette flagship, first opened by Mr. Mahdessian’s great-uncle Andy as a mom-and-pop dry cleaner in 1958, when it was named for Andy’s wife, a French gal who worked as the seamstress. It recently underwent a massive $500,000 renovation and now occupies half the block.
Mr. Mahdessian, 43, is president of what is now called the Madame Paulette Organization, “the world’s leading custom couture cleaner.” The jovial, self-described “eligible bachelor with a spotless reputation” has been married to his business since taking the reins from his father, Noubar, 20 years ago. (“He thinks girls are like shirts: You have to change them every two weeks,” Noubar said wryly.)
John works six days a week. Sundays he treats himself to a mani-pedi and a massage.
Interview In The Break Room
A Million Little Mashups
from Coudal Partners via MediaBistro
A QUICK CONTEST FROM WHERE WE DO OUR BEST THINKING
Booking Bands
The walls in the washroom at our studio are all chalkboards. It was Susan’s idea and after she spent a weekend painting them up, not much happened. An occasional drawing or joke was added, a visiting courier might leave a crude message or one of Jim’s kids would draw a puppy or write something unintelligible. Lately, however, we’ve taken to using that forum for a series of wordplay games and the current one is pretty fun. The idea is to mash up the name of a book with the name of a band.
Here’s a few of our examples to get you started:
The Things They Might Be Giants Carried*
The Who Moved My Cheese*
The Old Man and The Sea and Cake*
Charlie Daniels and the Chocolate Factory*
Catch 182*
Horton Hears a Hoobastank*
Of Mice and Men at Work*
Bare Naked Lunch Ladies*
The Agony and the XTC*
JAMES FREY? WASN’T HE IN THE EAGLES?
A Million Little Pixies (Aaron Kelly)
A Million Little Feat Pieces (Jim Sheeran)
A Million Little Richards (Brian Braiker)
A Million Little Peaches and Herb (Robert Hofheimer)
My Friend Lynrd Skynrd (Daniel Pink)
My Friend Leonard Cohen (Jamie Stolarski)
(I am TOTALLY dismayed that no one got “A Marillion Little Pieces*” or “My Friend Len”)
Charles Dickens’ not-so-slim pickens
The Pickwick pAperchAse (Cy Culpin)
Nickolas Nickelback (Joshua Johnson)
Oliver Twisted Sister (Joshua Johnson)
Nicholas Nickelbee Gees (Jim Sheeran)
A Christmas Carole King (Tracie Bedell)
A Christmas Carole King Lear (John Upchurch)
A Christmas Carol Channing (Meredith Payne)
David Gray Copperfield (Troy Kukes)
Bleak Housemartins (Tom Ward)
A Tale of Two Bay City Rollers (Tim Carvell)
A Tale of U2 Cities (Jessica Sheeran)
Great White Expectations (John Boeckmann)
“Because then the actresses used to be dressed to the gills.”
Susan Farley / For The Times
COLUMN ONE
The typist’s tale of ‘Last Tycoon’
Years after ‘Gatsby,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary got to witness the second act of an author who didn’t believe in them.
By David L. Ulin
June 8, 2009
All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty’s Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary.
It was April 1939, and she was 22, a Bronx transplant with typing and dictation skills. She’d been in Southern California for a little more than a year, coming west to help her father, a New York furrier, set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard. “Everybody said, ‘You’re a furrier? What are you doing in Southern California?’ ” Ring remembers. “But he knew the studios used furs. Because then the actresses used to be dressed to the gills.”
Wiki Wiki Huh? Wiki
The Wars of Words on Wikipedia’s Outskirts
IT is an interesting twist about Wikipedia that the most controversial, most heavily trafficked articles — on abortion, politics, virgin birth — are often the most accurate and vandalism-free. Not that people aren’t trying to cause mayhem.
It’s just that the frequent visits ensure that vandalism is quickly removed, aided by automated tools that can recognize crude writing before it ever appears.
Leave these high-traffic thoroughfares, however, and things can get a bit sketchier. A few wrong turns and you may find yourself deep in Hatfield-and-McCoy territory. Entrenched enemies engage in combat over the wording of topics so obscure — Armenian historians from the first millennium, for example, or breakfast cereals — that you may wonder: so much fighting over this?
But it is exactly the obscurity that makes these Wikipedia articles ripe for feuding, fighting and vandalism. A basic tenet of the online encyclopedia is that articles be written from a neutral point of view.
“Tech has taken us / For a ride.”
Billy Elliot Fan Kicks Tony’s Ass
‘Billy Elliot’ wins 10 Tonys; best play is ‘Carnage’
By Michael Kuchwara
Associated Press
Updated: 06/08/2009 10:28:26 AM CDT
From left, David Alvarez, Kiril Kulish, and Trent Kowalik accept the award for Best Performance by a leading Actor in a Musical, for their shared role in the show “Billy Elliot the Musical”, at the 63rd annual Tony Awards in New York, Sunday, June 7, 2009. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) (AP)
NEW YORK — “Billy Elliot,” the big British musical about a coal miner’s son who dreams to dance, bowled over Broadway on Sunday, winning 10 Tonys, including best musical and a unique best actor prize for the three young performers who share the title character.
The trio — David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish — traded off on the “thank you” part of their acceptance speech, shyly thanking people associated with the show only by their first names. They also acknowledged siblings and parents. Finally, Kulish told the cheering crowd at Radio City Music Hall, “We want to say to all the kids out there who might want to dance: Never give up.”
“Billy Elliot” collected eight other awards, including director of a musical, book of a musical and choreography, but its composer, Elton John, was upset for best score.
“Sui generis in its imagined depiction of the world.”
Raqib Shaw – conjuror of magical worlds
Fantastical finishes showcase the work of Raqib Shawa – a vibrant artist destined for greatness.
By Norman Rosenthal
Intense: Raqib Shaw’s ‘Absence of God’
If you are involved in the business of constantly looking at contemporary art, as I am, it is rare to come across an artist’s work so different, in the best sense of the word, that it seems almost sui generis in its imagined depiction of the world.
Such is the case of the work of the Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw, born in Calcutta in 1974, and who came to the UK in 1998. He studied at Central St Martins School of Art, and now lives and works in his north London studio, which he hardly ever leaves.
[H]e has had shows of his work at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, so there must be some kind of buzz around him, even if he is still relatively little known by the general art public. Hopefully his new spectacular show, about to open at White Cube in Hoxton Square, will change that, at least here in London.
The Death Of Thumbing It
A guide to hitchhiking’s decline
It’s not driver selfishness that’s done for thumbing a lift but technological and economic change
Joe Moran, Friday 5 June 2009 23.30 BS
The decline of hitching is a lesson in how significant historical changes happen invisibly. I own a secondhand copy of the Hitch-hiker’s Manual: Britain, published in 1979 by a young travel journalist, Simon Calder. This uninviting-looking book, with its grainy pages and ugly typeface, conjures up an exotic roadside world that is now vanished.
It provides a record of the rich hitchhiking subculture that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: the long line of hitchers at hotspots like Staples Corner at the foot of the M1, with their own imperfectly executed queueing etiquette; the attention-grabbing gimmicks used by the more enterprising hitchers, such as wearing ties, dinner suits and even gorilla costumes; and the dirty tricks employed by the unscrupulous, like leaning on crutches or wearing soldiers’ uniforms to encourage drivers to stop.
Why is this tribe of people virtually extinct? Drivers did not suddenly become less altruistic and, while risk is often cited as a factor, the number of machete-wielding psychopaths on the roads has presumably remained stable.
There are two schools of thought about the decline of hitching…. The second school of thought focuses on a more nebulous cultural shift. Hitching began its long decline at the end of the 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. Is it possible that, in a less equal society that is more sceptical about the value of public goods, there has been a gradual waning of the civic-minded impulse? Certainly the Thatcher years saw a general reaction against anyone perceived as a hippyish freeloader, epitomised by the attitudes towards new age travellers at Stonehenge. In a society where everything has a price, it becomes harder to sustain what the social policy expert Richard Titmuss called the gift relationship: the kinds of exchanges based on trust and goodwill that bring intangible benefits to everyone but are the hardest to retrieve when they are gone. Just as you need a well-populated tribe of hitchers to create the perception that it is a respectable activity, so any gift economy needs a self-sustaining momentum for it to work.
Décolletage Opening for Emin
Vital Signs
LONDON
06.01.09
Left: Artist Tracey Emin. Right: A view of Tracey Emin’s show at White Cube. (All photos: Lynne Gentle)
MASON’S YARD IN SAINT JAMES’S was the place to be in London on Thursday night for Tracey Emin’s “Those Who Suffer Love” at White Cube, and Abraham Cruzvillegas around the corner at Thomas Dane Gallery.
The weather was superb, the designer shades were big, the heels were death-defying, and there were mountains of décolletage as far as the eye could see—coincidence, perhaps, but I suspected homage to endowed and proud Ms. T. Emin. A steady succession of glossy, purring motors dispatched oiled and dapper Euro-men sporting size 0 arm candy. Everyone was groomed and dressed to the nines—a rare spectacle in London, where the drizzle often defeats even the most determined sartorial efforts.
Where Emin’s work was once shocking and self-consciously “obscene,” it now seems almost quaint; its poetry has outshone its shock value. The exhibition, comprising neon, animation, sculpture, and works on paper, was beautifully hung, and even the animation of a woman (certainly the artist) masturbating felt almost PG-13.
Darby Crash in The Decline Of Western Civilization
Smokey Finally Beats The Bandit
Inexhaustible Icon
GM Has Left Its Brand on the Cultural Landscape
By Paul Farhi, Washington Post Staff Writer
No company — or at least no company’s products — has been as celebrated in American popular culture as General Motors. For generations, GM vehicles have inspired artistic metaphors of freedom, speed, 
youth, romance, power, sex. As a billboard in Chevrolet’s home town of Warren, Mich., once succinctly put it, “No one writes songs about Volvos.”
Heroes (and admirable anti-heroes), for example, tend to drive muscle cars. Burt Reynolds telegraphed his good ol’ boy bona fides by driving a hell-raisin’ black Pontiac Trans Am (with gold firebird hood decal) in the “Smokey and the Bandit” movies. A few years later, a high-tech version of the same muscle car conveyed crusading crime-fighter Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) to the scene in “Knight Rider.” The Trans Am’s cousin, the Chevrolet Camaro, got the nod in the 2007 blockbuster “Transformers.” In the 1960s TV series “Route 66” — about the romantic and adventurous possibilities of the open road — the two young protagonists took to the highway in an iconic Corvette convertible.
Rock music has been inseparable from cars since rock-and-roll’s embryonic days. Some pop historians credit “Rocket 88” — written by Ike Turner in 1951 as an ode to GM’s powerful Oldsmobile Model 88 — as the first recording of the rock era.
Caine Gone
David Carradine: Life and career
Here he’s in an iconic shot from the 1970s show “Kung Fu” during which he became a household name as the character Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin priest traveling the 1800s American frontier.
Darling Nikki Now 25y.o.
Let’s Go Crazy: Celebrating 25 Years of Purple Rain
By PopMatters Staff
Edited by Evan Sawdey and Produced by Sarah Zupko
Introduction
*cue church organ*
”Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today 2 get through this thing called life …”
… and thus begins one of the greatest pop culture phenomena of our time.
Back in the summer of 1984,Purple Rain was more than just a movie: it was a genuineexperience, a transcendent multi-media event that celebrated commercialism and creativity in equal measure, turning a mid-level R&B singer into an overnight superstar and international sex symbol. At one point during that year, Prince had not only the Number One movie in America, but also the Number One album and the Number One single. In fact, when Purple Rain entered the album chart at peak position on August 4th of 1984 (displacing Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., of all things), it wouldn’t vacate that spot until January 19th of the following year.
Yet all these accomplishments wind up leading us to one very simple question: why?