Mariano Ching and Louie Cordero’s Zombie Lady and Michael Phelp’s Freaky Wingspan

Anyone who grew up glued to The Muppet Show, Saturday-morning cartoons and reading MAD magazine compilations (particularly the anarchic Groucho Marx-meets-Salvador Dali comic surrealism of the Don Martin strips) will find kindred spirits in the paintings of Louie Cordero and Mariano Ching on show at blanc artspace in Mandaluyong City. Here we get pop surreal stuff like wild-eyed bike tots with knee-high socks charging towards zombie-lady made of glowing-green goo. Zombies seem to figure prominently in pop surrealism and for those who’ve done time in the electronic salt-mines of the 24-hour call center industry with its graveyard shifts, Bizarro-world timekeeping and utter disregard for Third World body-clocks, zombiedom isn’t so much silly invention as a 21st-century career path. Weird fun is the order of the day. Over at the University of Reading, scientists removed neurons from rat brains and hooked them to electrodes on a robot. The robot takes its instructions from the pink broth of rodent brains and manages to avoid obstacles 80% of the time (hell, even humans can't avoid 100% of obstacles in their way, right?). So is this the beginning of SkyNet? Over at the University of Geneva, scientists are using the spanking-new Large Hadron Collider to explore how two subatomic particles can seemingly communicate nearly instantaneously, even if they are separated by cosmic distances. Einstein dismissed this in his lifetime, calling it “spooky action at a distance.” But it seems the LHC is going to find more and more situations where Einstein’s ideas don’t apply. Just last week, they seemed to have recorded sub-atomic particles “exchanging information” at speeds ten thousands faster than the speed of light opening the theoretical possibility of faster-than-light (FTL) warp speeds (cue “Star Trek” music). I write “seemed” because this report has generated quite a lot of dissenting opinions from astute particle-physics students (half of whom are named Vikram). So it’s a brand new world out there. While most of it doesn’t make sense in terms of classical Newtonian physics, it's all in good fun (until the rat-brained machines take over and wipe us out). Speaking of something that doesn’t quite make sense, I’ve read that Michael Phelp’s outstretched arms are three inches longer than he his tall. Hmm. And could Yelena Isinbayeva’s stomach muscles get any tighter? And, again, why is beach volleyball an Olympic event? And how come Usain Bolt’s singlet flapped in the wind, and yet he outraced his body-hugging jump-suited (supposedly more aerodynamic) competitors? Freaky! Cordero and Ching’s heady dose of pop surrealism opened last August 15 at blanc artspace.