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Majewski uses Michael Francis Gibson’s detailed analysis of the painting as his source material for the movie, demonstrating how a work of art criticism can be faithfully adapted to cinema. A mixture of special effects, live action, and vivid cinematography lend the film a surrealism that never clarifies whether we are traveling through Bruegel’s painting, if this is simply the world as Bruegel sees it, or if we are touring Gibson’s analysis. Ultimately, it makes no difference.

There is no strong narrative, rather we jump around from one scene to another. We take in the scenes as an eye would scan over different sections of a canvas. Some of these scenes are savagely brutal, others are tender, and some are simply mundane. Bruegel (Rutger Hauer), his patron Nicolaes Jonghelinck (Michael York), and the Virgin Mary (Charlote Rampling) are the only three characters with any substantial dialog throughout the film. Surprisingly, they are relatively minor compared to the cast that brings the film (and the painting) to life with little or no words. By the film’s conclusion I was struck with a renewed appreciation for Bruegel’s painting, a better understanding of its historical context, and an awesome realization of art’s deep connection to our humanity.

The tagline to The Mill & The Cross reads, “Behind every great painting lies an even greater story.” I can’t think of a better movie to drive this point home. The Mill & The Cross really stuck with me. It is unlikely I will ever be able to view painting the same way again. I will admit that this film might not be for everyone, but I highly recommend it to anyone who is willing to try something different.

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Written by Nate Gass
Recorded & Produced 2009-February 2012 by Nate Gass
Featuring additional percussion by Jay Jenison

A couple years ago Jay came over to my apartment and we recorded samples around the living room and kitchen. These samples sat neglected on my computer until last Friday. I made a goal to utilize these samples and complete 1 song within a week. This was the result. I threw just about everything (including the kitchen sink) into this one.

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I’ve been following Lawrence Lessig for a few years now. Reading Free Culture & Remix was for me a transformational moment that completely changed how I view copyright. Lessig’s ideas inspired me to use library school to study and celebrate the culture of shared information and creativity we currently live in.
Now Lessig is branching out and addressing broader government issues. His latest book is called Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress- and a Plan to Stop It. I wish I could say I’ve read it, but unfortunately my last semester of grad school doesn’t allow much time for extra reading. For now, I’ll remain content with this Google Talk freely available on YouTube.

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10. Wild Flag – Wild Flag
No album exuded more pure joy than Wild Flag’s self-titled debut.  Comprised of seasoned veterans from Sleater-Kinney, Helium, and The Minders, Wild Flag gets to have its cake and eat it too, combining the joy of youthfulness and the kind of talent that only emerges from experience.  This is straight up guitar rock, but expertly crafted, with scuzzy riffs and propulsive drum fills aplenty, and peppered with hints of psychedelia or punk in tracks like “Glass Tambourine” or “Short Version,” respectively.  The sensation of the pure ecstasy that permeates the album is what truly sets it above the fray, though.  Songs like album opener “Romance” or foot-stomper “Electric Band” are all about the communal rapture that is the distinct byproduct of living in the music, either by making or listening to it.  “We love the sound/The sound is what found us/The sound is the blood between me and you.”  After years making music, Wild Flag knows that, unless your hips are shaking and feet are tapping, you’re doing it wrong.
(Evan Mather)

9. The Decemberists – The King is Dead
This was my early frontrunner for 2011 album of the year, and it never relinquished the top spot. There were a few close moments as I fell in love with these other albums, but this is too perfect an album to not take my personal top spot. In fact, the biggest knock on The King Is Dead seems to be that it’s too perfect. The King Is Dead comes from a long line of great and varied albums by the Decemberists, and this one’s an Americana-pop masterpiece. It’s the most concise and accessible songwriting Colin Meloy has ever shown us, and it works on every level. From stomping anthem (“Don’t Carry It All”), to post-apocalyptic two-step (“Calamity Song”), to heartfelt ode to Meloy’s son (“Rise to Me”), it all works. Add Gillian Welch’s perfect background vocals to the mix, and you have an endlessly interesting and listenable record. Our whole family of five loves this album. I would guess that we’ve listened to this entire album well over 50 times this year, never skipping a track, with many more listens to come.
(Andrew Gates)

8. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Strange Mercy took listeners on a winding path, making sharp turns whenever it seemed like we knew where Annie Clark was going.  Her tremendous guitar skills are featured much more prominently than on 2009’s Actor, often ripping through elegiac string arrangements like a chainsaw.  Her mixture of electronic instruments, complex and lofty vocals and buzzing guitar creates a textured and elastic-sounding album that draws the listeners in again and again.  Clark’s lyrics paint vivid landscapes that recall David Lynch’s vision of the suburbs, a dark and sad core within a polished, idealized exterior.  The album is at its best with the one-two punch of “Cheerleader,” whose angry chorus pounds like slamming doors, and “Surgeon,” a hazy, gorgeous ballad that burns with a strange mix of desperation and seduction.
(Ryan Ebling)

7. TV on the Radio – 9 Types of Light
TV On the Radio is a very complex band. They combine many disparate elements from Jazz to Funk, Soul and Hip Hop to Punk. They often prove to be an acquired taste if for no other reason than the fact that it takes several listens to sort out everything that is going on in their music and find the thread of cosmos that unites all of their seeming chaos. But that underlying order is definitely there, and it is especially easy to tap into in their latest album, 9 Types of Light. Admittedly, I got into TV on the Radio on this album, but it wasn’t for lack of trying previously. For me this is the album that made all of their previous work click. This album is not merely strong for being the most accessible, however. It is really strong for being, in my opinion, the best and most artful fusion of all of these disparate elements they constantly work to marry together. Many bands try to fuse genres that we are supposed to appreciate and result in something that is more “experimental” than interesting, but the core strength of 9 Types of Light is that it isn’t music that demands detached appreciation, it wants you to get up and move.
(Tim Yoder)

6. Tom Waits – Bad As Me
Tom Waits has been around longer than any other artist on this list, and with that said, your like or dislike of Bad as Me may well be a foregone conclusion. By now, either you know and like him, you don’t, or you have yet to discover him for yourself. This album may not be the best place to start with our old friend, but what makes it so refreshing is the simple fact that it is still really good. So many artists out there with as many years of acclaim behind them simply run out of steam and keep producing mediocre material rather than go a long time without releasing something. Others do some very inadvisable things in an attempt to stay relevant (Mr. Reed, for example, who will not be appearing on this list). Tom Waits does not need to truck with that. Somehow he manages to continue producing the same high-quality material while staying every bit as odd and innovative as before. You may not agree with each experimental element he adds, but in the end, Waits can always fall back on his exceptional story telling to make his albums great.
(Tim Yoder)

5. Low – C’mon
2007’s Drums and Guns left most Low fans wondering what on earth was coming next. Its sonic palette, based predominantly on simple loops, a droning organ and a very angry Alan Sparhawk, made for a substantially different appeal than the lovely minimalism of the old days. Clearly, here was a band tired of the same old and ready to try something new, even at the expense of alienating longtime fans and arguably eschewing an aesthetic which they had themselves made into a cult. So it was with a measure of relief that longtime Low fans put on this year’s C’mon and heard: a lovely record – a very, very lovely record. Lush, understated, and melodic, it plays like an overview of Low’s discography, with elements of the bleak early stuff, yet more song-based, as has been their wont more recently. Sparhawk’s guitar work has matured quite a bit in recent years, and that’s on display here, most notably on the 8-minute epic “Nothing But Heart.” Meanwhile, the songwriting is as strong as ever, and at times even a bit stronger. Notably the songs themselves are more developed, both sonically and melodically, than in the past, and while this makes for a different appeal than the early stuff, it also makes for a terrific record which only gets better with repeated listens.
(Ethan McCarthy)

4. Wilco – The Whole Love
The first sounds of opening track “Art of Almost” are revelatory. I’ve long loved Wilco, so I was expecting to like this record, but it only took a few seconds to know that I’d probably love this one. When I saw Wilco in concert in 2006, I suspected that I was witnessing one of the greatest American rock bands of all time in action, and as they continue to make music, they only confirm that suspicion. This album contains pop gems (“I Might,” “Dawned on Me,” “Born Alone” and the title track) alongside strong ballads (“Black Moon,” “Open Mind,” “Rising Red Lung”), sandwiched between two of the best songs Wilco’s ever recorded (“Art of Almost” and “One Sunday Morning”). As I declared upon my first listen, a bit tongue-in-cheek, ”The Whole Love is the whole truth.” Listen and discover how true it is.
(Andrew Gates)

3. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
On paper, Helplessness Blues, the Fleet Foxes’ follow-up to their self-titled debut, isn’t too far of a departure, but more of a refining and deepening of their lushly harmonized folk sound.  But oh, what a deepening!  The songs springing from band-leader Robin Pecknold were so numerous that they needed to be combined into several multi-part song medleys ala side B of Abbey Road. The melodies on this album seem to have been harvested from some profound, elemental source, with a sound so eternal that it seems as if these arrangements of notes always existed even before they’d ever sprung from anyone’s lips or fingers.  There’s more lyrical complexity, whether wistful in love songs like “Lorelai” or profound and spiritual in “The Plains/Bitter Dancer.”  Still, it’s the music that sets this album as one of the true masterpieces of modern folk music, with sonic ventures like the conclusion of “The Shrine/An Argument” sounding like the combination of an orchestra tuning up and a crowded barnyard, which is exactly what the whole album is: a marriage of the purest elemental nature and the mystical struggle to transcend it all.
(Evan Mather)

2. Radiohead – The King of Limbs
To me, the phantom blobs haunting the cover of King of Limbs are a spot-on representation of this year’s Radiohead album. Unlike the more song-oriented In Rainbows,  King of Limbs might require a few listens before revealing the structure hiding in the music. This collection of songs is more like an amoeba, fluid and shapeless but with a strong membrane of unique melodies holding it all together. Ambient samples and loops swirl and swell in and out of the mix leaving you unsure of what you’re supposed to be focusing on. The tones creep up and come from weird places- the pulsating feedback loop signaling the chorus of “Morning Mr. Magpie,” fugelhorns echoing from a distance on “Bloom” and “Codex,” or the entire mix functioning as its own volume knob on “Feral.” King of Limbs is a studio-oriented album capturing one of today’s most innovative bands stretching the boundaries of sound manipulation. The experimentation on side A sets the listener up for a near perfect side B. All the elements of Radiohead’s technique build up to a perfect execution in “Lotus Flower” right before moving into “Codex” and “Give Up The Ghost,” arguably the most beautiful 8 minutes of music in 2011. King of Limbs is Radiohead’s shortest album yet. At just over 37 minutes it never outwears its welcome. Its easy to put on repeat and listen to 3-4 times in a row, finding something new each and every time. Which, after all, is what we’ve come to expect from Radiohead at this point.
(Nate Gass)

1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver
I gave this album a thorough listen during a rainy day in Indiana. My friend was gushing about this album while giving me a tour of the recession-destroyed area surrounding South Bend. That setting might have to be the required environment for a first exposure to Bon Iver, and while I’m willing to admit that’s mostly me prescribing my context, there’s a bit of truth to it. Justin Vernon has had a strong connection to the midwest, particularly Wisconsin, my home state, since he started. Somehow, an artist coming out of an uncool place and making some uncool decisions on his newest album managed to produce the most heartfelt and trend-bucking album of the past few years. To the extent that he’s a folk artist who created an album that deviates dramatically from his previous sound, he’s treading a path beaten by Sufjan Stevens last year and Iron & Wine earlier this year. Still, In a decade drenched in nostalgic throwbacks, he utilizes older sounds that don’t seem borne down by the weight of pop’s history. In addition to risks like the inclusion of the smooth synth and sax and the double kick drum, he also risked being completely sincere about all of it. Age of Adz occasionally turned a winking eye to the audience, but Vernon’s falsetto never betrays an ounce of irony or misdirection and in the hands of virtually any other artist, songs like the miraculous “Beth/Rest” would have become a guarded joke or cut altogether. Bon Iver is a masterful album that deserves all of the praise it has received this year and more.
(Stephen Hull)

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Crime Unseen is a show examining two worlds of photography.  It is an exhibition exploring how photography – drawing on “photojournalism, forensic photography and documentary landscape” – reflects and records crime, inquiring as to the impact a violent act can have on a participant, a witness, a location, or a society.  Curator and Associate Director Karen Irvine for the Museum explains on the web page dedicated to the exhibition: “In fighting crime, the notion of truth is imperative, so we put photographs to work as a way of determining the actions and identities of perpetrators, though sometimes such judgments prove to be inaccurate.”

Though photography is the most accurate visual representation that has yet been devised, it is still just that: a representation.  It can be altered, and even when it is unadulterated, its capacity for truth is severely limited.  Because of this assumed inherent objectivity, though, some things are lost.  First is a sense of context, where undeserved value is placed on the photograph as evidence of pure fact and representation of reality.  The second sacrificed element is often the human connection between the viewer of the photographer and the forensic eye which is examining it.  A photographed knife is viewed merely as evidence, where its size is measured, its location is documented, and the blood splatter is analyzed.  It becomes removed from the actual act it was used in, detached from the flesh it tore.  The lens and film create a barrier, separating the traditionally analytic and forensic eyes for which crime photography was originally intended.  The show’s best works permeate or completely remove that barrier.  They comment upon the disparate subjectivity and objectivity that a photograph can provide, and “actively engage with myth and reality as they question the roles of memory, the media, and evidence in solving and remembering crime.”

Two collections within the exhibit – selections from the Chicago History Museum’s archives from the Chicago Daily New, and Christopher Dawson’s series Coverage – both explore what, historically, was the first step of photography’s estrangement from objective truth: its use in the media, specifically in news reporting and photojournalism.  By taking images and presenting them alongside reporting intended for the general public, the truths within the images are sacrificed.  The stories accompanying them, at best, must be distilled, leaving out supposedly irrelevant details that could be essential in properly understanding and contextualizing the image and the events they are recording.  At worst, they are altered or re-contextualized to serve a purpose other than presenting fact, whether it be a political purpose or simply to sensationalize the events in order to sell issues or advertising space.  The motivation to inform is supplanted by the motivation to profit.

The collection from the archives of the Chicago Daily News – including famous photographs of the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, among others – serves to document not only those events, but photojournalism’s early days.  Dawson’s Coverage, on the other hand, takes the post-modernist approach of documenting the documentation.  He has photographed the massive media coverage of major crime stories, such as the trials of O.J. Simpson, Barry Madof and Casey Anthony.  His photographs capture masses of reporters and endless lines of news vans, all idle and laying in wait for some new development, even if it’s as minor as a person leaving a home.  They echo, in many ways, Garry Winnogrand’s well-known photograph of the Elliot Richardson news conference, pulled back and exposing the wires and equipment involved in recording and staging the “news.”  Dawson, instead of pulling back, has simply turned the camera completely around, and photographed nothing but the artifice of creating the news.  His pictures are all wires and equipment, with the actual “news” completely absent.

In one of Dawson’s photographs of vehicles amassed during the Casey Anthony trial, there is also a campaign sign for a candidate named Van Fleet running for some elected office.  It is a humorous pun on what we are actually viewing – a fleet of vans – but also serves to pointedly question the role that the news media, with all of its embellishments and sensationalism, has come to play in our society.  Are they, in fact, leading us?  Did we elect them or not?  Both of these collections are interesting and of either artistic or historic value (or both) on their own, but together, they draw a clear through-line from the early era of photojournalism, where the seeds of luridness and melodrama were planted, and the modern day, where we are reaping its fruits.

Perhaps the most ambitious (though for this writer, least effective) collection attempted to create a partially-fictional narrative out of a specific historical crime.  Christian Patterson’s series explores the murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugit during the winter of 1957-58, whose pursuit, capture and trial captured the imagination of the American public.  (This is fairly well-explored territory, having been explored by such diverse artists as Bruce Springsteen or Terrence Malick before.) Patterson believes “the most important implications of the crime are located not in the social or in the collective, but in the interior responses we have to it — emotionally, intellectually, and in our imaginations.”  He appropriates archival photographs from the crimes along with his own created images, as well as other mixed media pieces.

As Patterson’s series is the most obviously post-modern in the exhibit, it is ironic that where it succeeds most is on a purely formal level.  His attempts to connect such disparate images as empty roads and houses at night with shotgun scatter through museum board or photographs of bloody snow, all tied together with an unexplained fictional account loosely based upon historical murders, fails to ground the series or grant it any cohesion.  The pieces work best when standing on their own.  Photographs of a single spent shotgun shell lying on the ground or of blood streaked snow are highly graphical, with the shapes of the objects themselves, and the shadows they create, echoing works from the Purist movement in the early parts of the 20^th century.  The most successful piece is one of a house of cards, exposed multiple times from different angles.  It plays with the concept of point of view, of how a slight shift in one’s perspective can completely alter their world and send everything crashing down like, well, a house of cards.  Sadly, the unity of his series’ theme is equally tenuous.

All of the photographers involved in the show take different approaches to looking at the intersections between crime and photography, though all, in some way, look at its effects.  Those effects can be quite disparate, though, varying in the specificity of the crime, and the focus on either its human or societal impacts.  The most expansive approach comes from Krista Wortendyke in her piece Killing Season: Chicago.  Between October 2010 and January 2011, Wortendyke photographed the site of every homicide in the city, often days or weeks after the crime was committed.  These photographs are arranged chronologically on a wall in a mural-like scope.  In times when there were many murders, the photographs rise high, while times without murders leave gaps, creating the impression of a city skyline.  The images, absent of context, are exceedingly banal, combined with the unique display method, all serve to illustrate how violence and crime disappears into the make-up of a city, and can become as integral to its composition as its buildings.

Just as removed, though more specific to particular events, is the work of Angela Strassheim.  Having worked as a forensic photographer as well as having an MFA, she has a foot firmly planted in both objective and subjective photography, which her pieces reflect.  Strassheim’s work is divided into two types.  The first are a simple series of color photographs, almost a pure snapshot aesthetic, of various locations.  They are crime scenes, and the photograph is simply titled a piece of evidence, such as a field with a “No Trespass” sign titled “Small rod, kitchen knife.”  Like in the photographs in Killing Season: Chicago, the triviality of these photographs belies the violence that occurred there, and with the haunting yet vague imagery placed in the viewer’s head by the titles, create a haunting effect.

Even more unforgettable is her other series of photographs, these of specific crime scenes.  Developed in stark, high-contrast black and white,  they show rooms in which crimes have been committed, using equipment to expose old blood splatter in almost fluorescent, glowing white.  Though the rooms are ostensibly empty, the effect is given that something, in addition to the blood, remains.  In one piece, “Evidence No. 11,” there is a radiant TV blaring pure white, almost as bright as the blood cast against the wall.  It is reminiscent of the “hydrogen” jukebox in Robert Frank’s The Americans: technology showing the only sign of life in an empty and lifeless room.

Deborah Luster’s collection Tooth for an Eye, at first glance, seems to have a similar remove to other works in the show.  Black and white photographs of the locations of murders in New Orleans – a gas station, a park, an empty lot – all framed in a perfect circle, echoing both a gun-sight and bullet hole.  The photos  are hung in a large four by six display, creating a mass effect similar to the wall display for Killing Season: Chicago.  Hints of a more human and personal touch emerge, though; where Stressheim simply titled her photographs via the objects involved, Luster’s photographs include the name and age of the victim, with the round framing echoing a bullet hole or target sight.  The artist, in her own words, “takes a close look at something that no longer exists—an invisible population—in the only way in which one can approach such things, obliquely and through reference.”  This humanistic and more intimate approach is a clear result of the artist’s own experiences – her mother was the victim of murder.  As violent crime has intruded itself into her own life so much, it makes sense that she doesn’t maintain the more removed and analytical approach of other photographers in the exhibition.

A similar personal approach is taken by Taryn Simon in her video project The Innocents.  Where others have been focusing on the direct victims of crimes, Simon records interviews of victims of another type: people who have served time for violent crimes that they didn’t commit.  These recordings take place at some site of significance: where they were misidentified, where they arrested, where they were when the crime was committed, etc.  It shares the aspect of the Marxist-Realist approach to documentary photography of including the voice of the work’s subject, with these men’s voices forming the bones on which the power of the images rest.

The best works of the show, though, are the photographs by Corinne May Botz.  Botz photographed recreations of crime scenes in dollhouses, which were used in the 1940s and 50s to train police officers in examining evidence.  What is most discomfiting about these images is the contrast between the grisly nature of the recreated scene – blood splatter near cribs, bullet holes, dolls laid out as corpses – with the idyllic nature and innocence of what is traditionally a child’s toy.  It also comments upon the layers of representation in crime photography; these are recreations on film of events that were already recreated in the dollhouse, adding layers upon layers of separation between the viewers in the gallery looking at the images with the actual violent events that inspired them.  Paradoxically, the photos are more affecting, partially because that disconnect is at the forefront, along with the juxtaposition of the dystopic scene in what was once an idyllic setting.

Though photographs are incredibly accurate representations of their subjects, they are still just that – representations.  As they have become a hallmark of our society’s recordings of crimes, from the news media to forensic work, they have been relied on more and more to convey exact truths, a task which they are sometimes imperfectly suited towards.  None of the photographs in Crimes Unseen are of crimes being committed, but of crimes seen.  They are simply how police or the media or artists or simple humans have tried to understand these events.  What the works in Crime Unseen manage to do is to eschew the essential truth of crime photography, and look more towards the human truths underneath.

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(Part three of a four part series that took a year off.  Read parts one and two.)

Winter has such a singular essence, which made creating this list both difficult and simple.  Difficult in that there were fewer songs to choose from to fully exemplify the feeling of winter being expressed through music, but much easier in distinguishing whether a song did contain those elusive qualities.

I discovered, in my compiling and obsessive listening and re-listening to these songs, that all of the limited aspects of songs that express the quintessence of the season could be distilled simply to the opening line of one of the entries: Wilco’s “Via Chicago”.

I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt all right to me.

So put on a sweater and let the frigid air chill your eardrums as we perform an autopsy on winter and deconstruct that line.

“I dreamed…”

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“It’s not law — it’s a kind of thuggery, and it will make the Net a much, much less vibrant place (and a teeny bit safer for copyright holders — if that) if it is enacted.” – David Post

Anyone who has ever kept a blog, uploaded a YouTube video, used Google for research, or ever created or published anything on the web should be concerned about this legislation. It carelessly jeopardizes intellectual freedom and democracy on the net.

If you don’t feel like reading Post’s short blog post, then Dean Baker over at the Huffington Post sums it all up in two sentences:

“The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would place an enormous burden not just on Internet giants like Google and Facebook, but any website that allows people to post content or includes links to other sites. An owner of copyrighted material would be able to go the Justice Department and claim infringement and request that the whole site be taken down.”

Forbes has put together a list of things the average person can do to stop SOPA.

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