small ritual

madonna

there's a lot of comment about madonna charging £80-160 per seat for her UK dates. but it's a free market, the tickets are selling out, so good luck to her.

the thing i admire about madonna is her survival instinct. whenever her career is on the slide through poor product and bad choices, she pulls her act together and does what she has to do - make a great pop album. and lo and behold, she's the woman of the moment again - this time, at a point where she could reasonably have let it go. that commands my respect.

and looking like that at her age too. whatever did she do? that ass is a masterpiece of taxidermy.

hiatus

i had several big posts lined up for this week, but my father is very ill in hospital and my blogtime has been taken up with phone calls to my mother. tonight i'm not feeling well myself, so i'm going to bed with a hot water bottle.

church as a verb

on arrival in austin daniel presented me with an artwork that he'd commissioned from his friend patrick [remind me of patrick's surname daniel!]

the work is called 'church as a verb', it's based on various items on smallritual.org including this and maybe this. the title 'church as a verb' comes from this essay.

patrick writes:

The background is a Nolli plan of London, more specifically the area encompassing Holy Joe's. The transparency is based on movements of the body. The green lines are the extension of dance movements based on quadrants in space [the ultimate points of extension]. The pink diagram illustrates hypo/hypertonic exchange within the cell. So the two layers interact with each other showing the established structure and free flow of ideas and movement.

[apparently the area round holy joe's gave a better nolli plan than round grace - denser urban fabric]

having brought it back in its two pieces in a tube, i got it framed and hung up today. here's patrick and the work at daniel's apartment:

and here is is in my apartment:

thanks patrick and daniel, it's an honour.

btw i know it's slightly misaligned at the right - i'll correct that in a few weeks when it's flattened out properly. it was quite a ticklish job getting the rear layer [which is cardboard] into the right position after weeks of being rolled up.

wifi communion and teleconsecration

wifi-enabled drinking glasses by jackie lee and hyemin chung at MIT media lab

Two cups are wireless connected to each other with sip sensors and     LED illumination. The Lover's cups will glow when your lover is drinking.     When both of you are drinking at the same time, both of the Lover's Cups glow     and celebrate this virtual kiss.

via Mike Rose on the Grace Lent blog

a magnificent idea with obvious uses for wifi-enabled holy communion [someone needs to work this out for the bread]

so how do you consecrate bread and wine if it isn't all in the same place? at Grace we've wondered whether a prayer of consecration spoken over a mobile phone held above the bread and wine is valid - can anyone explain why not? and if so, one could have dial-a-priest or consecration call centres [waiting to take your call 24 hours a day].

applying that to the medialab glasses, there would be another light that would glow when consecrated.