I finished it recently -- after trying to drag out the pleasure as long as possible. A brilliant, wonder-full book -- it fills me with hope for the future of the human imagination.

Nobody can mix kitsch and depravity like the Japanese!

Could this "friend" be a journalistic . . . ahh . . . composite? Based on the friend of a friend who knew a deaf girl and a character on a prime time soap? Just asking.

No distinction was made in the film's commentary between public and private art. Art commissioned for public display is typically *given* a context -- both a visual context and a narrative one. This "experiment" merely demonstrates how minimally urban pedestrians navigate their environment. An alley with no store fronts or windows is hardly an ideal place to site a public art display.

This leaves out, of course, the whole conversation about modernism and post-modernism . . .