From: blumke8@uni2a.unige.ch (Alexander Blumke)
Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc
Subject: Magic Eighteen tombstone
Date: 6 Aug 1997 02:08:16 GMT

Lately I got invited for the 18th birthday of one of my friends' brother,
who is a M:tG player also. I was Looking once more into a Jean-Michel
Basquiat anthology

(cultural footnote: JMB is a painter we made fun of so often between
friends that I'm slowly becoming a fan of him. His drawings can be
described as... Well, whatever JMB had in mind when he made them, they
*look* like four-year-old child scribblings, in any case - more or less
same style than Cy Twombly, if you know this one. He also was a friend of
Andy Warhol, died rather young at the end of the eighties, and his works
are worth quite some dough for some lunatics.)

when I got the idea of making a M:tG work of art as a birthday gift. I put
myself at work, and the result was the following:

On a background of domino-like placed Fallen Empires Boosters, I formed
the number "18" with 5th Edition starters. The support on which the whole
thing was fixed was an A3 format sheet of paper on the bottom of which I
printed (in courier font, for the record) the title, "Magic Eighteen"
(which, besides of course having the usual profound metaphysical meaning
of whatever, also nicely symbolized the weird times of this stage of
life). In the lower left corner, the words

Assembled for [friend's brother's initials]'s 18th birthday
by Alexander Blumke, Magic: the Gathering world champion 1995
August 2, 1997

summed up the technical details. My sig was on the lower right corner.

It really looked nice. The gift was a great success, but while I was
discussing with his parents about the fact that I hadn't had time to frame
it yet and that maybe I'd ask Wizards to expose it at PT Mainz, he TORE
THE PICTURE APART AND OPENED THE STARTERS! I mean how stupid can one be?
How great can the urge of opening packs be?

I was furious and sad and outraged, but I didn't say anything - after all,
it was his birthday...

Sorry for taking your time like this, but I really had to get it out of
myself. And if you wonder why I got into such details, it is because I
wanted this message to be a little graveyard, the last trace of a work of
art that once was...

Well, I figure that as I laughed about Jean-Michel Basquiat's works, mine
didn't deserve a greater respect anyway... Serves me as a lesson.

If you feel compassionate and want to deposit some flowers at the foot of
this tombstone, you're welcome.

-- 
From the top of his Ivory Tower, he looked to the east: the dark and barren grounds seemed to stretch to the infinite.
From the top of his Ivory Tower, he looked to the west: fertile rye fields extended beyond the horizon. No cliffs, no mountains, only rye fields as far as one could see.

                                                  Alexander Blumke
                                               blumke8@uni2a.unige.ch