I know I already did Intron Depot, but I think Ghost in the Shell is awesome enough to deserve its own entry. This is the English version of the graphic novel, I also have a bunch of the individual issues packed away in comic boxes as well as a japanese version. There is also a movie and more than one miniseries out there, so it's probably safe to say that this is Shirow's most successful creation.

The story digs pretty deep, drawing heavily from western philosophy to discuss the nature of consciousness, humanity, evolution and the interface between human and machine.

Anyway, I think I'm going to make Wednesday book day for no reason in particular.

Todays book is Snowcrash, which is a kind of post cyberpunk classic. It spread in a virus like manner amongst my group of friends in the late 90's and I basically had to read it to be able to follow any conversation that was going on for a period of a couple of months. It has what I think is the best opening of any book ever.

Dune was one of the first adult novels I ever read on my own.  I’m not sure where I got it from, probably the library, but it took me forever to read it. I also saw the David Lynch movie somewhere in the middle of reading it for the first time. Or rather, it was most likely the disavowed Alan Smithee version of that particular production. So that’s forever tainted my view of the book. Unfortunately whenever I imagine Feyd Rautha it’s always Sting yelling “He is the Kwisatz Hadarach!!!11”

The 2000 miniseries improved on some things and was god awful horrible about others, so really there still hasn’t been and probably never will be a perfect Dune movie ever made. Certainly we will never know the greatness that would have been Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Surrealism is pretty cool.  Salvador Dali is another one of these guys that is ubiquitous on the walls of college students, and a big seller at poster sales. His paintings are pretty great, but I also like his forays into other media, and the intersections between them.  Things like the Mae West room and the amazing dream sequence from the Hitchcock movie Spellbound below show that Dali was a mutant of the highest order, and an awesome trickster.

This book is pretty great, and traces the evolution of Van Gogh’s portraits through his career. There are lots of details about what was going on in his life at the time various pieces were done, which really adds to the collection as a whole.

Masamune Shirow is one of my heroes, and this is a collection of sketches, paintings, line drawings etc, by him. He’s the creator of Ghost in the Shell, Dominion Tank Police, Appleseed, and various other robot-centric future stories.  Some of the stuff in this art collection borders on cheesecake, as he tends to exaggerate his female figures to the point of ridiculousness but I still like the book overall.

The picture here is Major Kusanagi and a Fujikoma from the Ghost in the Shell.

Last year while we were in New Mexico we visited the Georgia O’Keefe museum. It’s pretty small, and we were able to cover the whole thing in a couple hours tops. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures from it, I think photography was forbidden there.

This book didn’t come from there, I think Rebecca had this from a while ago. I think I like it best of all the O’Keefe books laying about.

I’ve taken quite a few art history classes at this point, and man are the textbooks ever expensive. They’re always so pretty though, so I’ve kept all of them. This was from my first Art History class at EMU, and covered everything from cave paintings through to the European Renaissance.

The picture above is the Lamentation from the Scrovegni chapel by master Florentine painter Giotto, completed in the early 1300’s. You can see in this painting that he’s crammed the focus of the piece down into the bottom left corner. Giotto is cool like that and got away with a lot of unconventional stuff for his time.

The Scrovegni chapel was financed by a wealthy moneylender, who commissioned it to atone for his sins of usury. It was built on the site of an old Roman arena, which was long in use for open air morality plays, re-enactments and other festivities. Giotto based many of the frescos inside on the elaborate sets and costuming that were used in these stage productions.

Detroit does still have it’s fair share of cool things, however. Chief amongst these in my mind is the DIA.  The Institute of the Arts is a world class museum with an enormous collection of art ranging across all styles, periods and regions. They’ve recently completed some major construction, which gave them a huge increase in space allowing for display of an even bigger selection of pieces from storage. I’ve done some volunteering there before, pointing people towards whatever they were looking for (usually the bathrooms, haha) and I still feel like I find something new there every time I go.

Another of the reasons that I love the DIA so is that they have a really liberal photography policy.  Anything that’s in the general collection is fair game for photos as long as you’re not using a big external flash or a tripod. So that pretty much leaves special exhibits and visiting stuff as the only place where photos are prohibited.

And I guess that brings me to the book for today. This is a collection of photos obviously from the DIA, showing off some of the highlights of the museum. The piece shown here is a 15th century chinese sculpture of the Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha, returning from a long time practicing asceticism in a mountain retreat.