Dear Visitors—
I hate to say it, but the blog is going to be quiet for one week while I’m on a semi-working vacation. Once I get back, I’ll be settling into the Portland rain, where there’s plenty of time for blogging and awesomeness. Thanks for bearing with me.
Chas
Photo by Lieko Shiga
via I Heart Photograph
Sherman’s March is a wonderful documentary from 1986 that traces the creative and romantic path of filmmaker Ross McElwee as he attempts to make a movie about General Sherman’s march through Atlanta. But all these new flames and old flings keep showing up, and they mix with his own self-doubts about his project, and thankfully, he never stops rolling camera. Here are two women from the movie who represent very distinct and recognizable southern archetypes, even though McElwee tenderly depicts them as wholly unique:
Students were given a stock IKEA Akurum wall cabinet, with which we were asked to create an interactive experience to “interact” with one or more of the jurors. We were given a week to conceive of, design and produce the piece.
I built a diorama of three apartments Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”. The audience member picked-up a video camera and peered into the rooms, doing so, triggered audio clips from the film’s samples of Jimmy Stewart’s character’s dialouge on the view into courtyard from his rear window. Output from the camera was displayed on a projection behind the cabinet…
David Byrne doesn’t update his blog too frequently, but when he does, he doesn’t mess around. Today he fills us in on a cross country drive he took with his daughter, musing on, among many other things…
Mormon architecture in DC:
“As a spectacle it surely ranks as one of the great works of architecture, but I seriously doubt that architectural scholars and critics will agree with me here — they might prefer the more austere, minimal church of Tadao Ando or Corbusier’s wacky asymmetrical church in France. I’ll take this one, and Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, over those austere buildings. If certain architectural works are made to inspire awe and act as three dimensional signs and symbols, then surely this one qualifies.”
Midwest highways:
“Cars are the hot item this decade — NASCAR and other “shows” seem to be in evidence all across the country. We pass massive trucks and trailers covered with images of NASCAR drivers and/or race cars. The highways are now a network for race cars carried by trailers crisscrossing the continent to do their “shows” here and there. These trailers are constantly on the move — they fill the roads and the race car images are everywhere, including fast food outlets and billboards.”
Dollywood:
“Although there are none anywhere else, I glimpse the few posters of Dolly on our way out, with her huge tits and hair, and her fairly extreme makeup. She’s a little worked over now, which makes the look even more extreme, and a little scary. The hourglass figure on the tiny woman, the little girl voice- combined with an astute business sense and dynamite songwriting — well, it’s a confusing combination for a Yankee. The look smacks of insincerity, or someone living in a fantasy world, yet her acts, what she did (like creating Dollywood), and her songs are completely sincere and heartfelt. The look says sex combined with little girl, a combo typical of Japanese schoolgirls and manga comics, but not of a serious singer, and later an actress.”
Texas:
“My steak is delicious, as it should be here. The decor is all red chairs, tables and trim, in honor of the local High School football team, the Mustangs. A large painting of the coach sits right on the wall behind us. I watch a man across from us shoot up his insulin after he and his wife finish their meal. He does it deftly, as casually as one would look at one’s watch.
The restaurant (the only one within walking distance of our hotel) doesn’t serve alcohol. I’m not that surprised — between the early-for-us dinner hours and dry counties, I know we’re not in New York anymore. I wonder at how some of these puritan restrictions — the encouragement to go to bed early and to not enjoy a drink with one’s meal — have lingered. I suspect that drinking, much like drug use, is considered a sign of moral weakness, and a disdained desire for pure, cut-loose pleasure something maybe not to be encouraged either by our puritan ancestors or the skin-of-our-teeth settlers and farmers in this part of the country. You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it. These indulgences have therefore been relegated to “bad” places — honky tonks and dark, sad bars in the case of drink, secluded sessions in the sole company of other users for druggies.”
Carlsbad Canyons:
“I find the formations disturbingly biomorphic, organic, and mostly sexual. Alien sex planet. The names they give them seem to belie what they actually resemble. It seems the underworld is comprised of vast landscape of penises, vulvas, vaginas, tentacles and fleshy flaps. Freud would have had a field day in here: it’s as if our own forbidden images and imaginings have all been forced not merely into the unconscious, as he would have it, but physically underground, in exaggerated form, with elements of the male and the female sometimes mixed together. Other elements seemed strongly sexual, but not quite human, like the sexual organs of insects, or deep-sea creatures. Only in this case it is the sexual organs of rocks hidden 830 feet beneath the earth’s surface, as they should be.”
His cruise through the desert before finally hitting Los Angeles:
“The road enters the Mojave Desert and we pass over scattered ranges of hills separated by long flat desolate expanses. It’s lovely. We stop briefly at Quartzite, where many RV parks are clustered — people living in RVs with hookups, not holiday campers. I browse through a sort of flea market of rocks that a couple has set up. On tables and in metal barrels there are piles fossils, crystals, jade and other minerals priced mostly by the pound.”
Danny Lyon, an incredible photographer who has made unforgettable images of, among other things: biker gangs, Texas penitentiaries, the Civil Rights movement, and demolition in Lower Manhattan in the ’60s, recently came up with 10 suggestions for New York City.
#10: Tax incentives and cash rewards up to $10,000 for each person brought over from the Other Side. Any citizen who befriends a criminal, prostitute, or drug addict and/or pusher, and through that friendship, example, employment, or encouragement, makes that person into a useful and nonpredatory citizen, shall receive that amount. There is no limit on the number of people you can bring from the Other Side, nor the amount you can earn in this socially beneficial program. Good luck.
“Noguchi designed this playground for a portion of the United Nations complex on the East River in New York. The project was to be privately funded and located on property given a special international diplomatic designation. Nevertheless, Robert Moses (the authoritarian director of public works for the City of New York) was able to get the project canceled. Moses was Noguchi’s arch-nemisis in NYC having ridiculed his design for Play Mountain back in 1933. He continued to thwart any public park of Noguchi’s design from ever being constructed in New York. I believe Moses criticized this design as ‘dangerous’ and little more than a ‘rabbit warren’.”
Things Magazine has scanned this beautiful 1976 book about our effect on the environment, and reproduced it in its entirety. Very charming stuff.
Section 3: Throw away yourself and build a new you
Before you go to ground, destroy as much of the old you as possible. You want to go beyond making yourself disappear: You want to make it seem as if you never existed. This means that you should do as much of the following as possible before and after you disappear:
•Destroy all photographs you have access to before you disappear. This includes family volumes of photographs that family members have. Your family members may or may not be supportive and hand over (to your opposition) all of their photographs of you depending upon your situation. Your family could be forced to support your opposition through threat of law or through physical violence. If you destroy all photographs of you, they can’t be shown around gas stations and quick food stops.
•Discard all your worldly possessions except cash. Most importantly destroy and discard all of your credit cards! The instant you use a credit card or an ATM bank card while on the run is the instant the authorities or private investigators know where you are. Before you run you should empty all bank accounts anyway. Gas debit cards can also be used to find you. Telephone calling cards can be used to find you. In fact, any magnetic card with your name or the name of someone you know can and will be used to find your general area. Destroy them all. If the FBI, DEA, BATF, CIA, or any number of other agencies are involved in searching for you, they can pinpoint your location within minutes of you using a magnetic card.
Don’t even think about hanging onto a credit card or other type of magnetic card for an emergency. You might think about maxing-out your cards then converting what you purchase to quick cash… but don’t take cards with you! What you don’t have can’t tempt you to give your location away. When you’re cold and hungry you will be tempted to use any cards you keep so destroy them before that happens.
•Purchase clothes you normally wouldn’t consider wearing and put them on in a place where you won’t be observed. Cut your old clothes into pieces and flush them down the toilet — you don’t want your old clothes to be found.
•Abandon your car. Don’t bother driving your car into a lake or an ocean. They can be seen from helicopters or, at minimum, fresh tracks left in the mud surrounding lakes can be spotted from the air easier than by people from the ground. Since you’re giving up an asset, make giving it up work for you.
Abandoning your car in a place where you feel confident it will be stripped and sold by thieves is a good idea yet you’re left with having to walk out of a probably dangerous neighborhood.
Leave the pink slip of the car in the glove box to make it easier for thieves to chop and sell your abandoned car. Leave a door unlocked so they don’t have to break a window. You want the car to be taken in mass rather than picked apart on the street where a cop will spot it so it’s best that you leave the key in the ignition while you’re at it. Before you walk away from your car, leave the engine running, in fact, so that a thief will feel more comfortable stealing it. You could make it look like you’re just running into a store to buy something quickly.
•Purchase another car. In America one can slap down $300.00 and buy a pile of junk with no questions asked and no identification needed. If the seller has the pink slip and a key, you buy it if it’s cheap and doesn’t have anything a cop might consider stopping you for a safety violation.
Make sure that the back license plate has a current registration and that the exhaust doesn’t visibly smoke. Make sure the turn indicators are working and that you have headlights. Make sure the windshield has no cracks. Broken or missing break lights are often used as an excuse by police officers to pull over suspicious cars so make sure that the break lights are working.
Don’t borrow a friend’s car. Don’t even think about borrowing a family member’s car. There are cameras situated along America’s highways and, while I don’t know their resolving capabilities, I think it’s likely that the make and model of cars streaming past them can be made. Even if they can’t resolve your car, a borrowed car is a known avenue of your escape so avoid it.
•Don’t fill up your newly-acquired car with any of your personal belongings. If you get stopped by a cop or a cop drives by you, you don’t want it to look like you’re packed up to the ceiling with all your worldly possessions. You need to discard everything you own and don’t let it show that you’re doing anything other than commuting to or from work. Even if the cop doesn’t stop you, if word gets around that you’ve gone missing, the cop is more likely to remember a stuffed car than all the countless cars simply commuting. They’ll match your profile against your description and may recall the general — if not the exact — type of car you may be driving. If you want to escape notice of the cops, you need to blend in.
Cops work off of profiles: They are trained to spot the unusual as well as how to spot individuals fitting a variety of profiles. Someone on the run fits several profiles. You want to “fall out of the net” and slip through the typical police profiles.
A cup of coffee on the dashboard in front of a guy or gal wearing work clothes arouses no suspicions. You’re on your way to work, not running from someone.
Don’t studiously avoid catching a cop’s eye, by the way. Lean back in your seat, left arm on the window sill, right hand on the steering wheel at the 6:00 O’Clock position. Take a sip of your coffee, water, or Diet Coke every now and then, and try to act like you’re a mindless commuter getting from point A to point B with the rest of the lemmings.
Keever’s dreamlike photographs are pretty sensuous, but the most interesting part might actually be how she makes them. (Kind of a problematic conundrum, no? No?)
via Metafilter
This video is a little long (a whopping 18 minutes!), but I found it fascinating. Savage-Rumbaugh is a leading expert on bonobos, a Congolese ape that she has worked with for years. In this video, she demonstrates their understanding of the English language, plus their ability to use tools (they start fires with lighters and extinguish them with jugs of water), plus their capacity to, well, to play Pac Man.
via Nerdcore
I couldn’t find any more information on this amazing building, but these images are entirely captivating.
If these two essays bring you a fraction of the intrigue and happiness they brought me, your afternoon is about to get a whole lot better:
The Abyss: Music and Amnesia, by Oliver Sacks:
In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly. As his wife, Deborah, wrote in her 2005 memoir, Forever Today:
‘His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.’
In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.
Slights of Mind: The Science of Magic, by George Johnson
Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there.
‘In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern,’ he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. ‘If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.’
Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen’s white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator’s glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.
As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.
He left us with his definition of magic: ‘The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.’
If Awesome Tapes from Africa simply collected these cassette covers from Ghana, Kenya, Mali, and beyond, it would be worth a mention for that alone. But the blog actually posts all of the music as downloadable mp3s, creating an invaluable crash course on contemporary sounds from the most musically rich place on the planet. Happy listening.
Animal Logic
Previously on YDA: Barnes’ photographs of Roman Starlings
In New York? See Animal Logic in person
Carlo Giovani is a Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator who does amazing things with paper.
via Coudal
Last year, I ran an idea by my editor for a short feature: I proposed listening to a single song (I hadn’t decided which yet) nonstop, for a good length of time—an entire waking day, for instance—and write about the experience. Keeping track of the thoughts that arose throughout the repetitious affair—frustrations, insights into the song, maddening lunacy, etc.—and shaping it into a little essay. My pitch might have been a little off, because it was met with middling enthusiasm, so I promptly forgot about it and moved on with life. But it turns out that Steve Delahoyde of the brilliant Coudal Partners had a very similar idea, and made a short film about it. He used his weekly drive from Iowa City to Chicago to submit himself to an endless loop of Abba’s “Dancing Queen.” The film’s really fun, and after watching it, I’m glad Delahoyde took the bullet and subjected himself to this instead of me. Watch the film here.
via Mental Floss
British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster make sculptures that are unremarkable in and of themselves, but which cast amazing realistic shadows onto gallery walls. This first piece is “Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)”, composed from the artist’s rubbish from the six months it took to create piece (plus a pair of dead seagulls, for good measure).
via Think or Thwim
Tiger’s Nest Monastery: “Legend has it that Guru Rinpoche, the second Buddha, flew onto the cliff on the back of a tigress, and then meditated in a cave which now exists within the monastery walls.”
Vishnu Temple of Srirangam: “Legend has it that a long time ago, a sage rested and put down a statue of Vishnu reclining on a great serpent. When he was ready to resume his journey, he discovered that the statue couldn’t be moved, so a small temple was built over it. Over centuries, the temple “grew” as larger ones were built over the existing buildings.”
Wat Rong Khun: “The all-white, highly ornate structure gilded in mosaic mirrors that seem to shine magically, is done in a distinctly contemporary style. Chalermchai expects it will take another 90 years to complete, making it the Buddhist temple equivalent of the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, Spain.”
Borobudur: “In the 19th century, Dutch occupiers of Indonesia found a massive ancient ruin deep in the jungles of Java. What they discovered was the complex of Borobudur, a gigantic structure built with nearly 2 million cubic feet of stones.”
Many more at a truly fantastic post over at Neatorama
