The T-shirt reads: destroy capitalism.
There's been a lot of hype about the Banksy exhibition in Auckland (no, our former mayor is not showing his watercolours!) but the experience left one art lover cold. He says $35 is really steep, especially for an artist who is "an anarchist, anti-consumerist, satirical street artist". Reddit user rincewind4x2 says the impressive thing about Banksy's art is where he puts it (on the Israeli West Bank barrier, he painted an image of children digging a hole through the wall) when you take it out of its original context it loses a lot of the punch. "Don't get me wrong, I do like Banksy's work, but because he actually goes to Palestine to paint anti-war sentiments, and goes to the world's most prestigious art galleries to hang up his own Dadaist creations, none of that really comes up in this exhibit though." And the irony of commercial sponsorship is also uncomfortable, he says. "The first thing you see when you enter Aotea Centre is a car decaled with all they corporate sponsors' logos hideously mimicked in his style.
Nightmares under the knife
Apparently people can hear things while under anesthesia and they can be profoundly affected by what they hear, even if they have no memory of it. In the book Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness a woman suffers from terrible insomnia after her hysterectomy; later, while hypnotised, she recalls her anesthesiologist joking that she would "sleep the sleep of death". Another patient becomes suicidal after a minor procedure. Later she remembers that, while she was on the table, her surgeon exclaimed, "She is fat, isn't she?" And this, when another woman went to the hospital for cancer surgery in the 80s. While the procedure was a success, and all of the cancer was removed, she felt that something was wrong. She went back to her surgeon, who reassured her that the cancer was gone; she consulted a psychiatrist, who gave her pills for depression. Nothing helped — she grew certain that she was going to die. She met her surgeon a second time. When he told her, once again, that everything was fine, she suddenly blurted out, "The black stuff — you didn't get the black stuff!" The surgeon's eyes widened. He remembered that, during the operation, he had idly complained to a colleague about the black mould in his bathroom, which he could not remove no matter what he did ... the surgeon's words had lodged in her mind. As soon as she discovered what had happened, her anxiety dissipated. (Source: The New Yorker Read full story here.)
