Artist Julie Green Paints the Last Suppers of 600+ Death Row Inmates on Ceramic Plates

in Art, Food & Drink, History, Law, Life, Politics | January 15th, 2016

What would you choose for your last meal?

The com­fort food of your child­hood?

Or some lav­ish dish you nev­er had a chance to taste?

What might your choice reveal about your race, region­al ori­gins, or eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances?

Artist Julie Green devel­oped a fas­ci­na­tion with death row inmates’ final meals while teach­ing in Okla­homa, where the per capi­ta exe­cu­tion rate exceeds Texas’ and con­demned pris­on­ers’ spe­cial menu requests are a mat­ter of pub­lic record:

Fried fish fil­lets with red cock­tail sauce from Long John Silver’s

Large pep­per­oni piz­za with sausage and extra mush­rooms and a large grape soda.

Chateaubriand steak, medi­um rare with A‑1 steak sauce, fried shrimp entree with cock­tail sauce, large baked pota­to with but­ter, sour cream, chopped scal­lions, bacon bits, salt and pep­per, six pieces of gar­lic but­ter toast, whole Ken­tucky Bour­bon pecan pie, one liter of Coca Cola Clas­sic, and bag of ice. 

Last Meal Plate

The lat­ter order, from April 29, 2014, was denied on the grounds that it would have exceed­ed the $15-per-cus­tomer max. The pris­on­er who’d made the request skipped his last meal in protest.

Green recre­ates these, and hun­dreds of oth­er death row pris­on­ers’ last sup­pers in cobalt blue min­er­al paint on care­ful­ly select­ed sec­ond-hand plates. The influ­ence of Dutch Delft­ware and Span­ish still life paint­ing are evi­dent in her depic­tion of burg­ers, Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en, and pie.

Many of the requests betray a child­like poignan­cy:

A sin­gle hon­ey bun (North Car­oli­na, Jan­u­ary 30, 1998) 

Shrimp and ice cream  (New Mex­i­co, Novem­ber 6, 2001)

 A peanut but­ter and jel­ly sand­wich (Flori­da, Feb­ru­ary 26, 2014)

One man got per­mis­sion for his moth­er to pre­pare his last meal in the prison kitchen. Anoth­er was sur­prised with a birth­day cake after prison staff learned he had nev­er had one before.

Some refrain from exer­cis­ing their right to a spe­cial request, a choice Green doc­u­ments in text. She resorts to sim­i­lar tac­tics when a pris­on­er requests that his final meal be kept con­fi­den­tial.

Final Meal Not Made Public

Each meal Green paints is accom­pa­nied by a menu, the date, and the state in which it was served, but the pris­on­ers and their crimes go unnamed. She has com­mit­ted to pro­duc­ing fifty plates a year until cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is abol­ished.

Green nar­rates a Last Sup­per slideshow above, or you can browse all the plates in the project, orga­nized by state here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

The Odd Col­lec­tion of Books in the Guan­tanamo Prison Library

Mod­ern Art Was Used As a Tor­ture Tech­nique in Prison Cells Dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Bound by Law?: Free Comic Book Explains How Copyright Complicates Art

in Comics/Cartoons, Law | January 5th, 2015

boundbylaw_hi-res_small

Let’s say you’re a film­mak­er shoot­ing a doc­u­men­tary in New York City. You wan­der through Times Square, through muse­ums, through oth­er des­ti­na­tions, let­ting your cam­era roll along the way. Only lat­er do you won­der: Do I need to clear the copy­right on the Andy Warhol and Jack­son Pol­lock paint­ings that came into my cam­er­a’s field of view when I was shoot­ing at the MoMA? Or do I need to get clear­ance on a Miles Davis song that a busker, caught on film, hap­pened to be play­ing?

Those are the dif­fi­cult kinds of ques­tions that film­mak­ers face, and they get sort­ed out in a pret­ty unique com­ic book writ­ten by Kei­th Aoki, James Boyle and, Jen­nifer Jenk­ins. Spon­sored by Duke’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain, the com­ic is called Bound By Law? (Tales from the Pub­lic Domain). And it’s avail­able as a free PDF file (8mb — 16mb), in html for­mat, and also as a flash ani­ma­tion. There are also trans­la­tions in Por­tuguese, French, and Ital­ian. And wait, there’s more: the com­ic comes with a Fore­word by Oscar-win­ning film­mak­er Davis Guggen­heim, and an Intro­duc­tion by Boing­Bo­ing blog­ger Cory Doc­torow, who calls Bound by Law? not just “a trea­tise on copy­right,” but also “a lov­ing trib­ute to the form of comics.”

Bound By Law? — which has been released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license — will be added to our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices. Har­vard also has a MOOC on Copy­right — one of 260 MOOCS get­ting start­ed in Jan­u­ary 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Mon­dri­an, Munch & Flem­ing Entered Pub­lic Domain in 2015 — But Welles, Achebe, and “Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater” Didn’t

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

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Kandinsky, Mondrian, Munch & Fleming Entered Public Domain in 2015 — But Welles, Achebe, and “Purple People Eater” Didn’t

in Art, Law | January 2nd, 2015

kandinskybluered

As you faith­ful read­ers of Open Cul­ture know, we love noth­ing more than when impor­tant works of humankind fall into the pub­lic domain. Accord­ing to cur­rent Unit­ed States copy­right law, a work stays out of the pub­lic domain for 70 years after its author’s death; for cor­po­rate “works-for-hire,” 95 years after its pub­li­ca­tion. This means that, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, new things arrive in the pub­lic domain each and every year. Since we’ve just start­ed a new one, what has the pub­lic domain gained?

On Jan­u­ary 1, 2015, accord­ing to Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain, pub­lic-domain read­ers received “the writ­ings of Rachel Carl­son, Ian Flem­ing, and Flan­nery O’Con­nor” — in Cana­da, that is. As for Euro­peans, they can now freely enjoy “the works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, Edvard Munch, and hun­dreds of oth­ers.” But what of the Amer­i­cans? Alas, “no pub­lished works will enter our pub­lic domain until 2019,” owing to an exten­sion of U.S. copy­right law leg­is­la­tion that pushed up retroac­tive copy­right by 95 years for any­thing cre­at­ed between 1923 and 1977 — a legal event that may, some whis­per, have had the endorse­ment of a cer­tain cor­po­ra­tion in pos­ses­sion of a cer­tain high­ly lucra­tive car­toon mouse.

sheb-wooley-the-purple-people-eater

For a sense of what this has cost us, the CSPD has put togeth­er a tan­ta­liz­ing list of still-vital works of lit­er­a­ture, film, music, and sci­ence that could have gone pub­lic domain this year, if not for that med­dling exten­sion. It includes Chin­ua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Simone de Beau­voir’ Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Gra­ham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Nathan H. Juran’s Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Chuck Berry’s “John­ny B. Goode,” Sheb Woo­ley’s “Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater.”

To learn more about the art that some parts of the world have new­ly wel­comed into the pub­lic domain, see also Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Pub­lic Domain Day post by Alli­son Meier. Though we could eas­i­ly feel frus­trat­ed by the rich­ness of the mate­r­i­al that Amer­i­ca has refused, in the words of Jus­tice Louis Bran­deis, to let “free as the air to com­mon use,” do remem­ber the exis­tence of a lit­tle some­thing we cit­i­zens of 2015 like to call the inter­net. The increas­ing­ly few bound­aries and lit­tle fric­tion with which it has enabled us to con­nect and com­mu­ni­cate will cer­tain­ly con­tin­ue to alle­vi­ate the cramp reg­u­la­tions like these have put in our style. So even if Amer­i­cans won’t enjoy a mean­ing­ful Pub­lic Domain Day for four years yet, I’d say we still have rea­son to cel­e­brate.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sher­lock Holmes Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain, Declares US Judge

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

A Cab­i­net of Curiosi­ties: Dis­cov­er The Pub­lic Domain Review’s New Book of Essays

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Edward Snowden Explains Why He Blew the Whistle on the NSA in Video Interview with Lawrence Lessig

in Current Affairs, Law | October 27th, 2014

Most like­ly every­thing you know about Edward Snow­den’s unmask­ing of gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance pro­grams has come through an indi­rect source — mean­ing, you haven’t had the chance to learn about Snow­den’s moti­va­tions, thought process­es, goals, etc. from Snow­den him­self. Here’s a chance to change that.

In the video inter­view record­ed on Octo­ber 20th at Har­vard Law School, Lawrence Lessig spent an hour talk­ing with Snow­den on a Google Hang­out. Lessig, a law pro­fes­sor with dual inter­ests in keep­ing infor­ma­tion open and lim­it­ing gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion, was a nat­ur­al choice to con­duct the inter­view. How­ev­er, I would­n’t say that he gives Snow­den a soft inter­view. He asks some good ques­tions, which gives Snow­den the chance to spell out his think­ing — to explain the prob­lem he observed while work­ing in the NSA and how he went about address­ing it.

One thing that comes across is that Snow­den has thought things through. Snow­den might not have the cre­den­tials of the Har­vard Law stu­dents in the audi­ence — he got a GED and took a few com­mu­ni­ty col­lege cours­es, after all — but you get the sense that he could teach a pret­ty good Intro­duc­tion to Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment course, if not a thought-pro­vok­ing sem­i­nar on con­sti­tu­tion­al law. Regard­less of what posi­tion you take on Snow­den, it’s worth watch­ing this inter­view before you declare final judge­ment.

via Boing­Bo­ing

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The Rise of the Patent Troll: An Animated Primer by Kirby Ferguson

in Law, Media, Politics | April 14th, 2014

Recent­ly, I’ve been spend­ing time inves­ti­gat­ing copy­rights, keen to find out if it’s crick­et for me to impose my vision on cer­tain authors’ long ago work. An author myself, I freely admit, I might not cot­ton to it were some stranger to have her way with my work, with­out per­mis­sion, on a stage, for all to see! Either way, I’d pre­fer things to be set­tled with­out a law­suit.

My head was so full of copy­right impli­ca­tions and loop­holes, I was unaware that a par­al­lel sit­u­a­tion was blow­ing up beyond all rea­son in the world of patents. Such igno­rance is a lux­u­ry unavail­able to legions of small soft­ware design­ers, pod­cast­ers, and small busi­ness own­ers, as artist and film­mak­er Kir­by Fer­gu­son of “Every­thing is a Remix” fame makes clear in his ani­mat­ed primer, “Rise of the Patent Troll.”

The prob­lem, he says, owes to a gap between cen­turies old patent law and a new tech­nol­o­gy that yields “inven­tions” whose parts can’t be attrib­uted as eas­i­ly as your aver­age sewing machine’s or cot­ton gin’s.

Depict­ed here as hairy, pointy-eared sto­ry­book fig­ures, the real life bad­dies are much more scary—newly formed cor­po­rate enti­ties oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly seek­ing to enforce patents for dig­i­tal inno­va­tions they don’t real­ly own. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, they’re tar­get­ing the lit­tle guys, indi­vid­u­als who don’t have the resources to defend them­selves when attacked. Yes, in this con­text, a fair­ly renowned come­di­an can be con­sid­ered a lit­tle guy.

Fer­gu­son joined forces with dig­i­tal watch­dogs Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, Pub­lic Knowl­edge, and Engine to make the film, but the prob­lem proves too slip­pery to ful­ly explore in three ani­mat­ed min­utes. I think the car­toon is actu­al­ly bait, to get view­ers like me to sit still for the next three min­utes, in which the artist turns the cam­era on him­self, to enu­mer­ate what cit­i­zens can do to make a pro­posed patent reform bill stick. If it all feels rather urgent, I’m guess­ing there’s a rea­son.

For more back­ground on what patent trolls are all about, don’t miss this episode of This Amer­i­can Life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Film­mak­er Kir­by Fer­gu­son Explains How Apple’s iPhone Was A Remixed Cre­ation

Ayun Hal­l­i­day would freak worse than a goat if one of these trolls came after her. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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What Books, Movies, Songs & Paintings Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?

in Art, Books, Film, Law, Music | January 2nd, 2014

2014whatcouldhavebeencollage

Every year, Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain high­lights major works that would have entered the pub­lic domain had the copy­right law that pre­vailed until 1978 still remained in effect today. That law (estab­lished in 1909) allowed works to remain under copy­right for a max­i­mum of 56 years — which means that 2014 would have wel­comed into the pub­lic domain works first pub­lished in 1957. Some high­lights (from the longer list) include:

Books

  • Jack Ker­ouac, On the Road
  • Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
  • Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christ­mas and The Cat in the Hat
  • Studs Terkel, Giants of Jazz
  • Ian Flem­ing, From Rus­sia, with Love

Movies

  • 12 Angry Men (Hen­ry Fon­da, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klug­man, Ed Beg­ley, and more)
  • A Farewell to Arms (Rock Hud­son and Jen­nifer Jones)
  • Jail­house Rock (Elvis Pres­ley)
  • The Sev­enth Seal (writ­ten and direct­ed by Ing­mar Bergman and star­ring Max von Sydow and Bengt Ekerot)
  • Fun­ny Face (Audrey Hep­burn and Fred Astaire)
  • Gun­fight at the O.K. Cor­ral (Burt Lan­cast­er and Kirk Dou­glas)

Music

  • “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peg­gy Sue” (Bud­dy Hol­ly, Jer­ry Alli­son, and Nor­man Pet­ty)
  • “Great Balls of Fire” (Otis Black­well and Jack Ham­mer)
  • “Wake Up, Lit­tle Susie” (Felice and Boudleaux Bryant)
  • Elvis Presley’s hits: “All Shook Up” (Otis Black­well and Elvis Pres­ley) and “Jail­house Rock” (Jer­ry Leiber and Mike Stoller)
  • The musi­cal “West Side Sto­ry” (music by Leonard Bern­stein, lyrics by Stephen Sond­heim, and book by Arthur Lau­rents)

Art

  • Dali’s “Celes­tial Ride” and “Music: the Red Orches­tra”
  • Edward Hopper’s “West­ern Motel”
  • Picasso’s “Las Meni­nas” set of paint­ings

Under the cur­rent copy­right regime, you’ll have to wait anoth­er 39 years — until 2053 — before these works hit the com­mons.

You can find a longer list of 1957 works still under copy­right on Duke’s web­site.

Note: If you’re won­der­ing how many works of art entered the pub­lic domain in 2014, the answer is sim­ple: 0. As the Duke site notes, “Not a sin­gle pub­lished work” is enter­ing the pub­lic domain in 2014. “In fact, in the Unit­ed States, no pub­li­ca­tion will enter the pub­lic domain until 2019.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sher­lock Holmes Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain, Declares US Judge

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Free Philip K. Dick: Down­load 13 Great Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries

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Sherlock Holmes Is Now in the Public Domain, Declares US Judge

in Books, Law, Literature | December 27th, 2013

sherlock_holmes_in_public domain

Chief Judge Rubén Castil­lo of the Unit­ed States Dis­trict Court of the North­ern Dis­trict of Illi­nois has ruled that the char­ac­ters and sto­ry lines used in 50 Sher­lock Holmes texts pub­lished by Arthur Conan Doyle before Jan. 1, 1923 “are no longer cov­ered by Unit­ed States copy­right law and can be freely used by cre­ators with­out pay­ing any licens­ing fee to the Conan Doyle estate,” reports The New York Times. This gives con­tem­po­rary authors the abil­i­ty to write their own Sher­lock Holmes mys­tery sto­ries and keep con­tribut­ing to a rich tra­di­tion of detec­tive fic­tion. It would also seem­ing­ly put pre-1923 texts firm­ly in the pub­lic domain. (You can find The Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes and oth­er relat­ed sto­ries in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions. ) Leslie S. Klinger, the edi­tor of The Com­plete Anno­tat­ed Sher­lock Holmes, who filed the civ­il suit, praised the judge’s deci­sion, say­ing “Peo­ple want to cel­e­brate Holmes and Wat­son, and now they can do that with­out fear.” Now it’s time for them to write some­thing that can hold a can­dle to what Conan Doyle cre­at­ed those many years ago.

Don’t miss any­thing from Open Cul­ture. Sign up for our Dai­ly Email or RSS Feed. And we’ll send cul­tur­al curiosi­ties your way, every day.

via Arts Beat

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Arthur Conan Doyle & The Cot­tin­g­ley Fairies: How Two Young Girls Fooled Sher­lock Holmes’ Cre­ator

Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Ques­tion­naire Made Famous By Mar­cel Proust (1899)

Watch John Cleese as Sher­lock Holmes in The Strange Case of the End of Civ­i­liza­tion as We Know It

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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Discusses His Love for Reading Proust, and Why “Literature is Crucial to Any Democracy”

in Law, Literature | October 23rd, 2013

breyer_1-110713

Worth a quick note: The New York Review of Books has post­ed an intrigu­ing inter­view with Supreme Court Jus­tice Stephen Brey­er, who reflects on an impor­tant moment in his intel­lec­tu­al life — read­ing Mar­cel Proust’s À la recherche du temps per­du (In Search of Lost Time) for the very  first time … in French. Decades ago, while “work­ing as a legal intern at an Amer­i­can law firm in Paris,” Brey­er need­ed to improve his French. Read­ing through all sev­en vol­umes of Proust’s mon­u­men­tal work seemed like a good way to do it. 3,500 pages and 1.5 mil­lion words lat­er, Brey­er fin­ished. And then he re-read them again. The first vol­ume of the long nov­el, Swann’s Way, was pub­lished 100 years ago, in 1913. Asked why he still cher­ish­es Proust’s work so much, Brey­er had this to say:

It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter types, but also every emo­tion, every imag­in­able sit­u­a­tion. Proust is a uni­ver­sal author: he can touch any­one, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons; each of us can find some piece of him­self in Proust, at dif­fer­ent ages.… What is most extra­or­di­nary about Proust is his abil­i­ty to cap­ture the sub­tlest nuances of human emo­tions, the slight­est vari­a­tions of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shake­speare of the inner world.

You can read the full inter­view at NYRB, which gets into to some fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tions, like Why is lit­er­a­ture cru­cial to a democ­ra­cy? and Does read­ing the US Con­sti­tu­tion hav­ing any­thing in com­mon with read­ing a great lit­er­ary work?

A hat tip goes to The New York­er’s Page Turn­er blog for call­ing this to our atten­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Mon­ty Python’s “Sum­ma­rize Proust Com­pe­ti­tion” on the 100th Anniver­sary of Swann’s Way

Lis­ten­ing to Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past, (Maybe) the Longest Audio Book Ever Made

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Find Recherche in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion

Free French Lessons in Audio & Video

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