There's a great many reasons why we love disasters, and none of them have to do with enjoying the suffering of others.
MUSICALS and gangster dramas weren't the only movies audiences flocked to in the 1930s -- they also loved disaster films like "San Francisco," "The Hurricane" and this 1937 melodrama about the famed 1871 Great Chicago Fire.
But that world did not survive Vietnam, or the Love Canal disaster.
Love and disaster and all the other forms of human incident accumulate in Morrison's fictional houses.
Love, death, disaster, transformation: there are no frivolous topics on "Codes and Keys," the seventh album by Death Cab for Cutie.
The collection spans history and tackles subjects from bees (chromium) and butterflies (iridium) to love (yttrium), disaster (osmium) and art history (zinc), via unsung aircraft fitters such as her own father (titanium).
The ingredients on the blackboard were taken from "Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs" and the glossary of Hurston's "Mules and Men," which lists spells for conjuring both love and disaster.
In the pause before all this happens, you know something about the shape of the life you've chosen to live between the silence of almost infinite possibility and that explosion of things as they are--those vast unanswerable intrusions of love and disaster, or just the casual scatter of your child's winter clothes on the hall floor.
(She has also made a "Soul Catcher," a "Spirit Detector," and a neon sign for Fatima's storefront (also in the New Museum show), which reads, "I Can Heal: Readings $2"). The ingredients on the blackboard were taken from "Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs" and the glossary of Hurston's "Mules and Men," which lists spells for conjuring both love and disaster.
Still, the accomplishments of "In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden" come close to matching its ambitions as it explores the blinding nature of class division, the difficulty of reaching out beyond one's own milieu and the caprice with which luck, love and disaster play out within the divisive layers of society.
