Latest Articles by Sarah Canice Funke
Yesterday a friend and I went to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center to see Andy Warhol. Well, not Warhol himself, since he's dead, but his art work. We saw soup cans and marilyns and mick jaggers and jackie kennedys and shoes and other items of pop culture adulation. One exhibit consisted merely of a room filled with silver, pillow-shaped balloons, tossed about by air-currents. We sat on the floor and let balloons float over us, cover us, and waft away. The experience was relaxing, mesmerizing, like watching the ocean or the sky. Abbie wanted to decorate her room that way. I thought it would make a striking Carter Hall Christmas Decoration, though I suppose 5th South's M-and-M creation came pretty close to achieving the same effect. After the museum closed, we went to Poor Richard's Bookstore, where I exerted a bad influence over my friend's pocketbook, and convinced her to pick up a couple of books. We both found copies of The Little Prince and commenced to read to each other right there in the store, alternating pages between our two books. I also found Moby Dick (see below) and the rest of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Then we went to Woodman Valley Chapel's evening service. Afterwards, as we ravenously ate dinner at Carrabba's, Abbie asked me what I had thought of the worship music, and I suppose the expression on my face gave everything away. "That bad, huh?" she laughed. I introduced her to Sufjan Stevens' Michigan, since she had recently graduated from Michigan State University. Her enjoyment of this album gave me a slightly evangelistic feeling: I had brought another wayward stray into the Fold of True Aesthetics. Just kidding. But sharing music one loves and discovering that someone else loves it, too, produces a certain thrill in me. Maybe I should go into music advertising. Wait. I am.
**********************************************
I also have a print of a tomato soup can. Someday, when I have a permenant kitchen, that print will hang there as a social commentary, making statements that perhaps only I will understand, but somehow a Warhol soup can hanging in a kitchen just struck me as deliciously appropriate.