A Random Assortment

~ In memory of the creator of Diplomacy. I only played this game a couple of times a decade ago. But I loved it. I'm pretty sure I repeatedly double crossed a couple of the men I was playing with by batting my eyes. Great game. Really, besides Boggle, the only game I like. (via Jacob Levy)

~ On childhood and nature.

~ Arendt and Eliot in one article?! Best. Article. Ever. Now I need to find a way to get to England for these shows.

"Kitaj’s obsessive concern with his Jewishness started in the early 1970s, after he read Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust. For 14 years on and off he worked on “Desk Murder”, finishing the painting in 1984. Invoking Arendt’s phrase, “desk murderer”, it shows the spooky outlines of a 1940s office set against a blood-red background, which morphs into the shape of a mobile gas van."

“'If Not, Not', his masterpiece from the mid-1970s, is mesmerising, lusciously painted and formally resolved. The dreamlike blue lake is inspired by Giorgione’s 'The Tempest' overborne by the looming gates of Auschwitz, in a landscape littered with symbolic objects and people. Kitaj acknowledged his debt here to Eliot, another American émigré, and to the idea of the 'waste land' of T.S. Eliot’s great poem 'as an antechamber to hell'."

 (HT: Francisco.)

~ Oh my goodness, ew: unity wedding sand.