Today, two armed masked thieves brandishing a handgun raided Oslo’s Munch Museum, and snatched the famous painting, “The Scream”, off the wall before fleeing. Plus another of Edvard Munch’s lesser known paintings, Madonna. Everybody knows the Scream, but I’ve never seen that Madonna one before. It’s nice. I like it.

The Scream is noted for its opened-mouthed man grabbing both sides of his head, a look that portrays fear, desperation and anxiety. After World War II, perhaps no other artwork mirrored the alienation and isolation of modern-day life.

I don’t know about all that. I’ve never seen it in person, but this painting never spoke to me. Shit, really, it’s the same exact pose as Macauly Culkin makes in Home Alone, and noone goes on and on about how that movie “mirrored the alienation and isolation of modern life….”

 
But shit. Maybe it did, the movie I mean. With his whole family forgetting about him, just leaving him behind all alone in the world. Having to fend for himself, but not ready. Like in that painting. Maybe those two figures in the top left of the painting are Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Coming to rob him, to teach him hard lessons about isolation and independence.

The original reason I clicked on the news item about the theft of this painting is that it’s mentioned in a scene in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which I just finished. That book was goddamned awesome. Here’s the scene, in chapter 12, where they are looking at the Scream:

‘Would a squirrel need that? An atmosphere of love? Because Buffy is doing fine, as sleek as an otter. I groom and comb him every other day.’ At an oil painting Phil Resch halted, gazed intently. The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry.

‘He did a woodcut of this,’ Rick said, reading the card tacked below the painting.

‘I think,’ Phil Resch said, ‘that this is how an andy [android] must feel.’ He traced in the air the convolutions, visible in the picture, of the creature’s cry. ‘I don’t feel like that, so maybe I’m not an -’ He broke off, as several persons strolled up to inspect the picture.

Actually I found a transcription of what appears to be the whole book online. They also have Ubik, which I want to read next. Seems that there are quite a few bootleg copies of his books floating around online, which is great. Great that there are “fake” versions of his books so readily available, since so much of his stuff is about fakes and reality. If only I had a printer. I can’t bear to read an entire novel on the screen. Even if I had a printer and an endless supply of paper, I still might buy the book, because I like holding books in my hands. I wonder if that will ever go away for me. I finally stopped being interested in buying cds, in having the actual object. It seems totally extraneous to me. Not to mention expensive. But maybe it’s all just a symptom of the “alienation and isolation of modern life”…