Toothpicks, 2007
Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.
Plastic Bottles, 2007
Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
(detail)
Plastic Bags, 2007
Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.
(detail)
I’ve always wanted to know what went on behind the editorial doors of “the world’s only reliable newspaper.” Now that the mag has folded, one writer talks about his time there.
Then one day I spotted an online ad from WWN seeking new “reporters.” I wrote back that I was thrilled at the opportunity, because who else would tell me that Hillary was dating a space alien? I further mentioned that the “mainstream” media always censored my best scoops like “Man Doesn’t Stop for a Red Light in 30 Years, and Never Has an Accident or Gets a Ticket.” The editors asked me to send in that story as a sample, and I was off and running.
Part of the fun of “reporting” for the WWN was constructing a scenario under which such a thing, though highly unlikely, could be remotely possible. In this case, I knew the driver couldn’t live in a big city where he’d be behind other cars that stopped for lights. So I placed him in a small town, so small that for years it didn’t even have traffic lights. When the town put them in, Earl (the driver), who was colorblind, sued, claiming the lights discriminated against colorblind people. He lost, but folks in the town agreed that since everyone knew Earl and his distinctive red truck, if he honked at an intersection he’d be granted the right of way. Ergo, he never had to stop, and broke no law. His one near-accident occurred because the other driver was deaf, and couldn’t hear him honk. Groused Earl, “They shouldn’t let deaf people drive. I could’ve been killed.” Plausible? Of course not. Would you place 1,000-1 odds that it didn’t happen? I wouldn’t.
Once I was “in,” I often described my job, without a hint of exaggeration, as “thinking of the stupidest shit possible.” I once pitched a story positing that the U.S. government had data confirming that the one commonality linking all mass killers, including the Columbine shooters, was that they never masturbated. Rather than issue this report, which would save lives but promote onanism, the government preferred to let occasional slaughters take place. My editor rejected it on the grounds that it was “too plausible.”
WHAT: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.
WHY: No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you’re Jewish.
HOW: A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n’ Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.
link
thx James
Your narrator there was Jim White, an incredible singer/songwriter from Pensacola
Do you want your car to have the look of a real sunroof? You can install it in 5 minutes!!
High Status at a very low price !!!
A CAR WITH A SUNROOF LOOKS EXTREMELY GOOD!!!
My ceramic landscapes create new endings for the cartoon drama of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. In the cartoon, the coyote’s rudimentary traps backfire. His efforts to catch the bird are always for naught. In my “Death Scenes”, the traps succeed forcing the drama to end with the total destruction of the roadrunner.
“Death Scene: The Roadrunner is Struck Down by a Fifth of Bumble Bees”
“Death Scene: the Roadrunner, Trapped in a Camouflaged Pot Hole, is Eaten”
“Death Scene: While Enjoying a Cliff-top View, the Roadrunner’s Throat is Chewed Through”
Every morning of every weekday for 12 years, Thomas Montgomery punched in at the Dynabrade factory in Clarence, a small town in upstate New York. He strapped on his goggles and stood at his machine until the late afternoon, churning out components for power tools. After work, he walked the family dog, Shadow, and took his two daughters to swim practice. He became such a regular presence at the local swim club that he was named its vice president. He tried to be a good father and a decent husband to his wife of 16 years, Cindy. There were a few things he enjoyed — poker night on Fridays with the guys, playing Texas Hold ‘Em on Pogo.com, and the Dynabrade euchre tournament, which he dominated for two years in a row. For the most part, though, life was uneventful.
Which may be why Montgomery looked at himself — a 45-year-old former marine with a reddish mustache, bulging gut, and disappearing hair — and decided to become someone else. That person, he wrote on Dynabrade stationery that he stored in his toolbox at work, would be an 18-year-old marine named Tommy. He would be a black belt in karate, with bullet scars on his left shoulder and right leg, thick red hair, and impressive dimensions (6′2″, 190 pounds, and a “9″ dick”). Emboldened by his new identity, Montgomery logged onto Pogo in the spring of 2005 and met TalHotBlondbig50 — a 17-year-old from West Virginia, whose name, he later learned, was Jessica.
He began instant-messaging “Jessi,” who later also went by the handle “peaches_06_17,” and the lies flowed easier with every press of the Return key. His mom had died of cancer when he was 12, he told her, and his father was a military man. At 17, Tommy had raped a cheerleader, and his life became so hopeless that he enlisted in the Marines. After a stint at boot camp in June to train as a sniper, he was headed to Iraq. Montgomery concocted elaborate ruses to maintain Tommy’s cover story, creating a second identity as Tommy’s dad, Tom Sr., who bore a striking resemblance to the real Montgomery. Tommy’s access to the Internet was supposedly limited because of his military duties, so Dad, as Jessi soon referred to him, began shuttling messages between the two lovers. He also told Jessi to send any mail and packages for Tommy to him, because he had contacts in Iraq and could get them to the young marine quickly.
Tommy’s tales of hard luck drew Jessi in. He was in need of comfort, and Jessi provided it, saying she was proud of him despite his mistakes. Tommy responded by telling her that she was “the best thing that ever happened to him.” As their intimacy grew, he sent her a picture of a young marine, claiming it was himself, and confided that he planned to commit suicide in Iraq; she made him promise to stay alive for her. They talked on the phone when they could. But if Jessi couldn’t reach Tommy, she sometimes IM’d Tom Sr. to talk about her lover. Jessi also emailed Tommy photos of herself, care of Tom Sr. She lived up to her screen handle, whether she was running her fingers through her flowing blond hair or wading in a pool in a yellow bikini or showing off her long tan legs in a denim miniskirt…
Readers already familiar with Timbaland’s work and legacy should just go ahead and click here and let the fun begin.
But if you’ve missed the whole Timbaland phenomenon, it’s your lucky day. Widely considered the preeminent hiphop producer of the past decade, Tim’ rewrote the rules for how hiphop should sound by incorporating elements of drum n’ bass into his syncopated, heavily synthesized sound. Although a lot of people will disagree with this, I think his musical voice found its perfect, cohesive whole on Justin Timberlake’s last album, which is a sonic wonder.
But now somebody has performed a huge service and compiled “A Brief History of Timbaland Beats,” five CDs worth of music that the Virginia native produced. It’s all available for free download, so get it while the getting’s good. This is an incredible resource and a major boost to anybody’s ipod. Prepare to have your ears blown.
The Elliott Condensed Bible is a Bookwork by Neva Elliott, the content of which as created from the editing of the New King James Bible (the version used by the Gideons). Chapters contained are: Do, Do Not, Shall and Shall not. Each chapter contains the sentences or parts of sentences from the bible which contain these words.
via VVORK
…Being the Decider for a Best American anthology is part honor
and part service, with ‘service’ here not as in ‘public service’ but rather as
in ‘service industry.’ That is, in return for some pay and intangible assets, I
am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities
down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about
this kind of Decidering is interesting in all kinds of different ways; but the
general point is that professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that
we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-
increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art
and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof
expands at roughly the rate of Moore’s Law.
The immediate point, on the other hand, is obvious. Unless you
are both a shut-in and independently wealthy, there is no way you can sit
there and read all the contents of all the 2006 issues of all the hundreds of
U.S. periodicals that publish literary nonfiction. So you subcontract this job —
not to me directly, but to a publishing company whom you trust (for whatever
reasons) to then subsubcontract the job to someone whom they trust (or
more like believe you’ll trust [for whatever reasons]) not to be insane or
capricious or overtly ‘biased’ in his Decidering.
‘Biased’ is, of course, the really front-loaded term here, the one
that I expect Houghton Mifflin winces at and would prefer not to see uttered in
the editor’s intro even in the most reassuring context, since the rhetoric of
such reassurances can be self-nullifying (as in, say, running a classified
ad for oneself as a babysitter and putting ‘don’t worry — not a pedophile!’ at
the bottom of the ad)…
Square America, the web’s best site for well-curated vernacular photography from thee olden days, as far as I can tell, has a great new gallery up called At the Window, which should be fairly self-explanatory.
The photographs in half awake and half asleep in the water are images that peek from this shore through to the other shore. They look candid and relax, but are the labour of courage and love from an artist who is not a great swimmer. The art critic Kotaro Iizawa has commented on this series,”The visual line does not settle and leans heavily to one side, while the calm and collected colours of the photographs seem to trip up the viewer in an unstable manner. The feeling of being stranded however, is strangely comforting.”
website
via Heading East
It’s Christmas in August, kids! The good folks at Metafliter dug up an ungodly amount of YouTube goodness from my favorite artist ever.*
Here’s one to get started, in which he sends a clear message to his rival, Memphis wrestling legend Jerry Lawler.
From the first episode of SNL
The greatest Elvis impersonation
Andy on the Dating Game
Latka as ultra-slick Vic Ferrari
Great segment from his 1979 TV special
The Has-Been Corner
The fourth wall comes tumbling down on live TV
He apologizes and finds Christ
This is billed as his interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but I think some YouTube user just made that up
He meets David Boner
Congas on Carson
Helping Southern wrestling fans
“I’m from Hollywood.”
Serenading Memphis
Vs. Jerry Lawler on Letterman
Memphis tagteam
Tony Clifton on the Dinah Shore Show
Clifton meets the Muppets
Fantastic Entertainment Tonight-style segment about Tony Clifton
Together with Rodney
Interview with his ex, Elayne Boosler
*One day, just to even the scales, I’ll do a massive tribute to David Byrne, my other favorite artist.
The new issue of Seesaw magazine is now online, and the current issue features my interview with South African photographer Roger Ballen, whom I consider one of the most fascinating artists working today. He’s also a very thoughtful and opinionated man, and I gained a lot of insight into his work from talking to him, and was fascinated to hear his thoughts on the nature of photography and why so many artists using photography just can’t get it right.
Your photographs tend to always have an element of spontaneity to them, as still as they might appear.
There has to be. That’s such an interesting thing that I’ve discovered in photography. A lot of artists today use photography, and they create these sort of installations or conceptual photographs. But you remember almost none of those photographs. They just sort of sit there and you have to figure out the guy’s theory to get into the work. The reason the images don’t get inside you is because the artists don’t understand anything about photography. You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived. The mind doesn’t believe it. The mind has to see that photograph as commenting on some aspect of truth, whatever truth means.
The most common question people ask me, especially in Shadow Chamber, is “Is this place real, did you make it, did you do this, did you do that?” The answer is, there are so many answers to that question. Everything you see in Shadow Chamber is me, because nobody else could take those pictures, even if they went to the same place as me. So it’s way of viewing the world photographically, it’s a very complex way of seeing it. Then, each one of those pictures involves thousands and thousands of subconscious and conscious steps to get to that point. Because photography is such an easy medium to master technically, especially with today’s cameras, people don’t realize that it’s not just being able to pick up a camera. When I lift that camera up to take a picture, I’ve gone through thousands of steps to get to that point. That’s what you’re really seeing; it’s a complex view of the world, through my imagination, through my experiences. It’s a science and art at the same time.
