Your Daily Awesome

Richard Reames of Williams, Oregon is an arborsculptor: He grafts, prunes, and bends sapling trees into sometimes-functional art. He’s the leading expert in the field, and he’s dedicated to teaching other people his craft and preserving the history of those who have sculpted living trees before him. Beside decorative trees like the one pictured above, he’s currently growing a boat and is planning on sculpting a house from living trees. His website is fascinating (if a bit wonky), and an interview with Cabinet Magazine, which includes photos of historical precedents for Reames’ work, can be read here.

What will happen to the sculptures as the trees grow?
There are two angles of approach here: growing for harvest and growing for longevity. When I grow a tree to be harvested, I cut it when it reaches its ultimate thickness. For unharvested trees, the amount of negative space in the design determines the how long it takes for the branches to meld together and swallow the design.

Trees are in transit, just like we are. They simply add annual rings every year and grow from their tips. They don’t push out of the ground. They’re actually very predictable, once you learn how they grow. They’re mellow kinetic sculptures. It’s a medium that embraces time, that forces you to think about what the tree was like when it was younger, and what will it be like when it gets older. People realize the value in an art project that requires years to take its ultimate shape.

Let’s Paint TV
article from LA Weekly
more Let’s Paint videos on YouTube

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directed by Andy Bruntel

Diabate was born in Mali in 1975 to a long line of jeli, musician storytellers more commonly referred to as griots. He’s known as a master of the kora—a 21-string harp with an enormous gourd resonator, which he began playing, as the Believer tells us, when he was just 29 inches tall. A beautiful song of his was featured in the Believer’s music issue this summer, but for boring technical reasons, I can’t upload that song here. I can actually do one better, though: Here’s a great recording of a 2002 concert from upstate New York. This is absolutely beautiful.

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UbuWeb has assembled a terrific group of street posters and found miscellany that are simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, like tiny blinks into some post-9/11 Balzac novel. A lot of artists and artist collectives right now are trying to pull off projects quite similar to this—creating very direct, human-to-human pieces of art that don’t really look like art, and then disseminating them in “the community” on telephone poles and other unassuming places. But compared to first-wave pleas and missives like these, the artists’ versions (which are frequently overly earnest and Boy Scout-ish) usually remind me of grad students who try to make folk art. It’s nice to be reminded of the mysteries and passions of the originals.

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I’ve got pretty much zero interest in clean, handsome web design—I like sites where music goes off when I least expect it; gifs twirl like they’re in some eternal, kinetic purgatory; pop-up windows obscure the content; and broken jpeg icons dot the landscape. So I was pretty thrilled to come across this contest for the ugliest myspace page. A lot of the pages have already changed back to boring, tepid templates, but there are still plenty of winners, like this one, this one, and this one.

We probably all remember speeding up our favorite records so they’d sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. But it never occurred to me to do the opposite: If you slow down an Alvin and the Chipmunks record just right, you can hear the human voice actors singing very slowly in their normal voices.

Here’s the Chipmunks’ Christmas song that we’ve all heard a billion times before, and here’s what you would have heard if you swung by the studio when it was being recorded.

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Tokion commissioned young artists like Cory Arcangel and Ashley Macomber to design wallpapers for your computer desktop. Aren’t you ready for a little change of scenery?

Last week I had the chance to interview the author of my two favorite novels, The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995). Both books are about a divorced sportwriter-turned-real estate agent named Frank Bascombe, who struggles to keep his head above water in the choppy mundanity of adulthood. Quite literally, no books have impacted me so much in adulthood as these two novels. When I was in my 20s (not so very long ago), Bascombe made a lot more sense and seemed to possess better strategies for coping with life to me than most of the adults I knew, so I (unconsciously) adopted him as a role model—a sort of homing pigeon who had flown into the cave of adulthood and reported back with what had and hadn’t worked for him.

It’s been 11 years since Independence Day came out, and I had no idea until very recently that a third Bascombe book was on the way. That book is Lay of the Land, and to my great relief, it’s pretty incredible. It starts off a little slow, but around 100 pages in, it turns into a story of uncommon emotional depth and clarity. (If you haven’t read any of these books before, I’d recommend starting from the beginning.)

So last Friday, within an hour and a half of finishing The Lay of the Land, I was on the telephone with Richard Ford, talking about the new book, Frank Bascombe, and why we read. It was a pretty incredible morning. You can read the interview HERE.

I want books to be smart. Books are my opportunity to be smarter than I could be in any other way of living. That’s what I go to literature for. When I read novels, I want them to tell me something that I couldn’t have been told any other way. I always go to novels rather hungrily. I don’t know if all readers do that. Maybe they don’t. Obviously we know lots of readers who go to books just to be diverted or just to have their attention drawn to something else, but that’s not why I go to literature.—Richard Ford

Here’s a song from the Blow off of their amazing new CD, Paper Television, plus a photo I took of singer Khaela Maricich a year or two ago.

The Long List of Girls (mp3)

David Barsalou has created a fascinating website that pairs Roy Lichtenstein paintings with the comic panels they’re based on. I can’t even begin to imagine how Barsalou spotted and gathered all of these—there are over 70 examples on the site. Initially, the natural response is to marvel at how much Lichtenstein copied directly from the strips. But after you get over that, it’s far more interesting to see where they diverge and what choices Lichtenstein made as an artist to differentiate his canvases from the comics. Somehow, this page makes Roy an even more intriguing figure than I already took him to be. As with so many artists and writers, I loved him when I was younger, disowned him as I got “smarter,” and now love him all over again.

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(Here’s a column about the website from yesterday’s Boston Globe that’s sure to make grouchy art-haters even more contemptuous.) via

Jason Polan sketched every piece of art on view at MoMA last winter and bound the drawings in a book that you can buy here. It’s only $20, but for a cool $100, you can get the deluxe version, in which Polan gives you a personal guided tour of MoMA, makes a unique drawing of any work of art you choose, and buys you a hot dog afterward. Throw in the book, and that’s a pretty well-spent C-note.

In November 1998, the man who held the Australian record for treading water achieved another personal goal. He pecked out the words “one million” to complete his 16.5 year quest to type (in words, not numbers) all the numbers between one and one million. The project, which he began in 1982 after going on disability from his job as a police typing instructor, is 19,890 pages long. His secret: Type for 20 minutes an hour, every hour.

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If you ask around, the chances are pretty good that someone has seen a phone book ‘being ripped in half’ or knows of someone who does it, although it remains a feat of strength that almost seems superhuman. The purpose of this article is to de-mystify the tearing of a phone book and show you just how easy it can be. Tearing a phone book in half is something I have wanted to do since before I ever got into grip training but how do you go about ripping a 2” thick hunk of paper? It wasn’t until I started talking with Michael Wayne, a good friend of mine and strong ‘gripster’ in his own regard, that the technique clicked in my head.

Read the whole how-to here, and above all: “Have fun with this, and if you have any aches or pains, wait until they are 100% better before ripping more books!!”

This is a short piece Miranda did for NPR’s the Next Big Thing in 2003. Like so much of her work, the act of touching is a central metaphor. And also like so much of her work, it winds up in a very different place than where you might have expected.

Listen here.