Lead Story
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In October in San Francisco, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, 32, registered his brain as a sculpture (which he’d created “thought by thought”) and began selling futures contracts on its six billion neurons, offering the rights to its creative output after his death–assuming, of course, that the medical science of the future can keep his brain functioning. Keats has written a prospectus for investors, which includes MRI scans showing the localized activity that occurred when he thought about love, art, death, and so on; for now he’s selling ten-dollar options to buy a million neurons for $10,000 when he dies. (He sold only 71 the first day.)
California’s lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante (runner-up to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the October recall election), isn’t the only public figure in the family: as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in September, his 39-year-old sister, Nao Bustamante, is a prominent performance artist whose works have included (1) wearing a strap-on burrito dildo that men could kneel before and take a bite from, in order to absolve themselves of “500 years of the white man’s guilt,” and (2) submerging her head in a clear plastic bag filled with water and then tying it closed around her neck, a low-budget knockoff of a Houdini stunt intended to create an “urgent situation to respond to.”
In September the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, reported on resident Ed Weilep’s attempts to get a stop sign installed at the junction of Havana Street and Eighth Avenue, an area subject to the jurisdiction of three different entities: territory west of the center line of Havana is regulated by the city of Spokane, and the land up to the east edge of the street is administered by incorporated Spokane Valley–which leaves the northbound lanes of Havana under the authority of Spokane County. Said Weilep, “You get a real thrill going through that intersection.”
