Today, a fellow on trial for rape in Atlanta grabbed the guard’s gun and shot his way out of the courtroom, killing three people. What a week for craziness! Let’s recap:

Thursday, March 3: 4 RCMP officers are killed by a nut with a rifle. The media treat this like it’s the end of Canada. The mourn-porn continues with a rebroadcast of the memorial tomorrow.

Sunday, March 6 : This evening, a man throws his daughter off a 401 overpass in an attempt to murder her, and then he jumps off and kills himself.

Tuesday, March 8: the police stop a guy with a knife on Yonge St. There is video footage, so it gets on the news. Oh, so dramatic.

Wednesday, March 9: a fellow sets himself on fire in front of Queen’s Park, after ramming some cop cars with the rented Budget van. Budget gets free advertising as the whole thing is captured on camera, because there was an farmer’s protest at Queens Park at the time. The nut didn’t know that, crashed the party, and stole the show. The farmers bitched about it.

Today, March 11: the fellow in Atlanta, and JetsGo discount airlines go belly up and strand all their potential passengers, laying off their entire workforce.

Something is happening at large, some kind of doom is prepping itself, and the shit is hitting the fan. My favorite though is this guy shooting himself out of courtroom as if he was Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. I’m sure the Hollywood hacks are already at their keyboards prepping the drafts of that one.

On another note, today’s email from Joey Comeau asked, ‘have you seen the trailer for A Scanner Darkly yet?’ I hadn’t, so I checked it out here. Wow, 2005 – the year of the animated painting. There’s something massive right there – that we’re at the point to pull off something like that.

This image of Winnoa Ryder has a very limited palette. My self-portrait, that I made in Photoshop at the end of 2002 and now use as a logo – it was hard to reduce that to a simple palette. When I do the images today – well, I haven’t in a long while – but when I do, I try to sample the image’s colour, and just make it more blocky, and homogenize a section. A Scanner Darkly is a masterpiece of drawing, colouring, and of digitization. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out in September.

To be able to essentially make a movie that is pretty much nothing more than an animated painting – and this isn’t like that movie Linklater made in 2001 that gave me a headache to watch – that says something to Danto’s ideas about the ‘End of Art’.