Your Daily Awesome

We all have these moments when we wish the world could just stop existing for a while. Whether it’s to get away from a personal crisis or from universal threats, from time to time all we want to do is curl up and hide. Now, for these moments we have the perfect soultion: the HideAway. Pre-shaped in the hiding-position, this cover has a snug fit and is easy to use. You can get into it fast and easy, anywhere and at any time. HideAways are available in a range of positions, materials and sizes.They are compact and lighweight, and stored in the useful carry-on bag, you can take your HideAway everywhere you go. Choose out of our evergrowing collection, or have a HideAway custom-made for yourself or your loved ones.

Be sure to check out all the models here, including the HideWay Corporate (with a space for your briefcase) and the HideAway Thuglife, made out of the latest sportswear fabrics. And Santa, I hope you’re paying attention.

via

Remember all the way back to September, when Banksy slipped a life-size sculpture of a Guantanamo Bay detainee in the Rocky Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyworld? Banksy’s just released the video that documents the whole subterfuge, and it’s pretty kickass. The video of him sneaking his own artwork onto the walls of the Met is pretty incredible, too. Both are found right here.

Dear Ken:

Got your note, deeply honored. Being new to the company, really appreciate opportunity to outline some ideas for “Borat” DVD. As Josh mentioned, we do indeed have a wealth of footage that could be put to good use as DVD extras. In other cases, have taken liberty of suggesting some reshoots:

OPENING “VILLAGE” SECTION: How about a high-speed montage of the actual difficult, brutal lives of the villagers in Romania—the hours of debilitating toil, their oppression at the hands of their corrupt government, premature loss of teeth, death of infants, etc., etc.—culminating in a panning shot of the village on the morning of the day when they first realize they’ve been had, and that, as far as posterity goes, they will always be remembered, if remembered at all, as savages, rapists, prostitutes, etc., and they stumble out of their little sheds or whatever, looking traumatized? (Would be good if one or two could fall into depression/commit suicide as a result = confirmation of their “subhuman” status? Rich social commentary.)

SOUTHERN DINING SOCIETY SECTION: Do we have footage of the woman Borat identified as unattractive being consoled in her darkened living room later that night by her husband? Particularly good if, all her life, she’s fought the feeling that she was not attractive, and only recently has come to feel pretty, owing to the steady love of her husband, who does, in fact, find her pretty, in part because of her kindness to him and others in their community—and now all those wounds have been reopened! Also, although she is crying, she tries to cry quietly, so as not to alarm the kids. Super!

Read the whole thing here.
George Saunders is amazing.*

*The asterisk takes you to a sweet mp3 of Tony Danza(!) reading Saunders’s story, “The Barber’s Unhappiness”

Have you started collecting yours yet?

E*Rock, Bob Weisz, Joe Merrell, Adam Forkner
Tom Moody, Matt Smear, Matt Smear, Matt Smear
Karthik Pandian, Guthrie Lonergan, Paperrad, Matt Smear

The Quantum Sleeper Unit is a high-level security system designed for maximum protection in various hostile environments

Quantum Sleepers can also be fitted to provide protection from destructive forces of nature such as tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods.

The Quantum Sleeper is the ultimate in protection, entertainment and communications, “ ALL ROLLED UP IN ONE”.

PROTECTION: With this unit you don’t have to run to a “Safe Room”, you’re already in it.

ENTERTAINMENT:The Quantuum Sleeper comes with options for:
- CD player,
- DVD Screen with PC hookup,
- Microwave and Refrigerator

COMMUNICATIONS
The Quantum Sleeper comes with options for Cellular Phones, CB and Short-wave Radios

link
via

Top to bottom: Chrystel Lebas, Robert Adams, Philip-Lorca diCorcia
link

So you say you need some new music? Then give a big thanks to Jona Bechtolt, AKA YACHT, AKA beatmaker extraordinaire for the Blow. On a recent European tour, Bechtolt was invited to curate a one-hour set for French National Radio, and his programming has been archived on the web for all of our enjoyment. It’s a damn spiffy mix, with a lot of great Portland bands (including a few remixes of the Blow), Girl Talk, Momus, Dirty Projectors, and more. You can see the whole tracklisting here, or just go ahead and start listening here. Merci, dude.

by Matt Schweiger

Your average 12-year-old boy is about 5 feet tall, weighs in the area of a buck-fifteen, and has developed little muscle mass.

I am 21, approximately 6 feet tall, tip the scales at an even 180, and have a moderately athletic and muscular build.

Judging on these statistics and what I assume would be a natural ferocity that would spring forth in a moment of physical danger, I estimate that I could beat up seven 12-year-olds before they overtook me. Of course, these would have to be the aforementioned average-sized 12-year-olds. Future linebackers, NBA players, and all Scandinavian children would throw off this equation. On the flip side, if these were some wimpy, four-square-playing, future-jockey 12-year-olds, I imagine the number would skyrocket to anywhere between 12 and 15. It’s simple exponential math.

This is also assuming that my opponents are smart enough to organize themselves into a circular attack instead of coming at me one by one. If it were an individual, king-of-the-mountain battle royale, I could endlessly pummel 12-year-olds without mercy. But we’re assuming at least a sixth-grade education in a marginal public school as well as some exposure to kung-fu movies, so these kids would form a circle.

Read the whole piece here

Chris Ware, of whom I thought I had my fill years ago, pops up to deliver these four covers for the Thanksgiving issue of the New Yorker. It’s one of those “collect all four” deals, but the only one that really turns me on is the one on the bottom right. The NYer has actually posted Ware’s entire broadsheet-y comic on their website, as well as an audio interview with the artist. After being absolutely floored by Jimmy Corrigan, I was never too taken with anything Ware did subsequently, and after a number of years, I thought he had become imprisoned by his signature style. But the cold, forced-family rituals of Thanksgiving and the literary elegance of the New Yorker seem like a perfect fit for Ware’s style, and I’m eager to receive my hard copy in the mail. Here’s hoping for number four.

E. Buzz Miller’s Art Classics

E. Buzz Miller…..Dan Aykroyd
Christie Christina…..Laraine Newman

Announcer: And now, Public Access Cable Television Channel D presents.. “E. Buzz Miller’s Art Classics”.

[ dissolve to E. Buzz Miller and Christie Christina sitting on a couch in a darkened room ]

E. Buzz Miller: Good evening, welcome to Public Access Cable Channel D, this is “Art Classics”. I’m your host, E. Buzz Miller. And my lovely guest to my left here is Miss Christie Christina, and she’s opening at the Coach & Pull Bar tomorrow night. But enough talk, let’s get right to tonight’s art classics.

[ E. Buzz holds up painting of naked woman lying on a bed ]

E. Buzz Miller: Now, the first one here is called Venus of Irbino, and it was painted in 1538 by a guy in Venice. And, this is for real, his name is spelled T-I-T-I-A-N. Titian! Honest to God!

Christie Christina: [ giggles profusely ]

E. Buzz Miller: He’s a very famous respected artist, and this is a bona fide art treasure. And I don’t think anybody could disagree that this is a really nice painting of a broad on a couch! How about you, Christie? You’re an artist.

Christie Christina: Well.. I’m an artist and an entertainer! [ giggles profusely ]

E. Buzz Miller: Yeah, right! [ laughs ]

Christie Christina: [ giggles profusely ] But I think she’s very heavy.

E. Buzz Miller: Well, of course.. but, back then, that’s the way they liked them. You know.

Christie Christina: Oh. [ giggles profusely ]

Read the whole (hilarious) transcript here
Anybody have this video online?

Artificial Heart Recalled

How to Aggravate

info
via

Hugo Ball: Co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich; led the Dada movement and is widely credited with naming the movement “Dada.” In 1916, the year that he wrote the Dada Manifesto, he penned the poem “Karawane” from nonsensical words, and Dada history was made.

Marie Osmond: Member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; recorded the album Goin’ Coconuts with her brother Donny; appeared on the cover of Designs in Machine Embroidery.

Marie Osmond reciting Hugo Ball’s Karawane (from memory, no less).

via

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch
R. Crumb, Jackson Pollock

created by Michael Leavitt

The El Perro del Mar CD is quickly shaping up to be a winter favorite. The string-and-backup-singer arrangements allude to a bygone era of music that I love without sounding old-timey; Sarah Assbring sings like she’s at the bottom of Lake Melancholy; and overall, the album makes me happy in a very mellow way. Here’s the song “Party.”

In this pretty fantastic project, Karolina Sobecka and cohorts projected videos from moving vehicles of animals in locomotion onto building, buses, and trees at night. But “the animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: As the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also. The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor.” It makes a lot more sense when you watch this highly reccomended video.

via

Photos by yours truly.
link

Patent application filed February 15, 1991.

“A timepiece for monitoring and displaying the approximate time remaining in a user’s life. A microprocessor monitors the passage of time. A resettable memory is connected to the processor for storing data representative of years, days, hours, minutes and seconds. A display is connected to the microprocessor for displaying data stored in the memory. Buttons or switches are provided to enter and change the stored data so that the approximate time remaining in the user’s life can be reset by the user.

Life expectancy has been a major concern of people throughout the ages. Insurance companies routinely develop and publish actuarial tables to indicate the average lifespans of certain people in specified groups. This actuarial table data is based on a number of factors, such as overall health of the individual, whether a person smokes cigarettes, consumes excessive alcohol, and genetic factors such as family histories of known diseases and recorded lifespans.

Heretofore, there has been no way of automatically monitoring one’s own life expectancy, based on factors such as actuarial tables, contemporaneous events and heredity.

More precisely, it would be advantageous to predict a person’s life expectancy based on factors including health-related activities, such as consuming fatty foods, over-eating, stress, jogging, exercising, etc.

It would also be advantageous to provide a timepiece that would allow one to be apprised of the probable time remaining in one’s life.

It would also be advantageous to monitor the probable remaining time left in one’s life on a yearly, hourly, and even seconds basis.”

I would absolutely wear one.

via

click here

“Philip Kwame Apagya’s formal portraits in front of commissioned painted backgrounds seem to be suspended between realism and a sort of naïvité, they are both unreal and hyperealistic: the dreams of African people are put on stage—against scenery which praises consumer society.

The subject stands in front of a painted backdrop that portrays everything people dream of having: fake New England country houses showing off some porcelain, VCRs and TVs in bar closets, modern kitchens with well-stocked refrigerators with coke and cheetos…

portraits with a quarter / half / full smile,
because nobody in africa is really deceived by make-believe…
but for one glorious moment they can have it all.”

link