Your Daily Awesome

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via This is That

The person at this Flickr account volunteers at a prison library and has compiled and posted drawings, notes, and miscellany found on the carts and tucked in books there. Fascinating stuff.

via I Heart Photograph

The Blue Ribbon Glee Club is a punk rock choir from Chicago. Here they are performing “Where is My Mind.”

Fugazi “Waiting Room” (mp3)

much more at Teplin
via the Ephemerist

via WFMU

A conversation with Andy Warhol, contacted through a psychic with mediumistic abilities via webchat

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Oliver Laric, previously on YDA

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and Arial, which is extremely fishy. Sajak, meanwhile, gives us nothing.

via Your Monkey Called

“Desire Path: A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.”

via Everyone Forever

The Taliban forbade all forms of human representation—from “pedestrian crossing”-style street signs, to ancient statues, to photography. But when Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak went to Afghanistan in December 2001, he discovered a cache of studio photographs of male Taliban. They were purportedly taken for identification purposes—a small loophole in the law—but as you can see these are much more convivial and decorative than your standard ID card. Watch a fascinating short video piece about Dworzak’s finds here; it raises all sorts of interesting questions about representation, beliefs, and functionality.

Sohier photographs hobbyists and other people who have devoted themselves to microcosms in which they are in complete control.

Man working on miniature barn, Shelburne Farms, VT, 2004
Man applying tanning lotion before bodybuilding competition, Worcester, MA, 2003
Man in church basement with nativity scene, Brooklyn, NY, 2002

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In 1278 the Cistercian abbot of Sedlec, Henry, traveled to Palestine and the ‘Holy Land’, bringing home a sample of earth from Golgotha which was later, upon his return, sprinkled over the grounds of his local cemetery. The grounds were immediately considered scared, and hence became a much sought after location for relatives to bury their dead. In the 14th century, the Black Death spread the bubonic plague across Europe and now 30,000 bodies all wanted a resting place within the sacred grounds. Such vast numbers of dead led to the creation of the ossuary in 1511 by a half-blind monk who gathered up the bones to be stacked up within the ossuary, making space for new corpses, which were soon taken up by more victims from 15th century Hussite Wars. The ossuary itself is situated in the basement of the All Saint’s Chapel.

Frantisek Rint, wood carver and artist was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to imaginatively compose the bones into works of art; amongst his creations came the Schwarzenberg family’s coat of arms, and a chandelier containing every bone in the human body, composed of several bodies. In the four corners of the ossuary sit four ‘bells’, pile upon pile of bones carefully stacked with a hollowed centre.

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In 1958, Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office conducted several lengthy interviews with Keaton about his life and career. The interviews, which can be listened to or read here, provide a rare glimpse of a vanished era from one of the masters of slapstick. In doing so, they help give perspective and a sense of history to the entertainment we see today.

Before I was a year old, they quit medicine shows and started into the smallest of the small-time vaudeville, trying to work their way up. They had some very tough times. Of course, they had makeup on me and were walking me out just as soon as I could walk in front of an audience. By the time I was 4 years old, I was a regular member of the act, wearing grotesque clothes with a bald-headed wig and Irish beard on, and slap shows. It started when a manager in Wilmington, Delaware, said, “Keep him in the act and I’ll raise your salary $10 a week.” That’s what started me.

It wasn’t Sarah Bernhardt who said, “How can you do this to this poor boy?” when they were throwing me around madly. Everybody said that. From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week–that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can’t do acrobatics, can’t walk a wire, can’t juggle–a lot of those things–but there was nothing said in the law that you can’t kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we’d get called into court every other week, see.

Once they took me to the mayor of New York City, into his private office, with the city physicians here in New York, and they stripped me to examine me for broken bones and bruises. Finding none, the mayor gave me permission to work. The next time it happened, the following year, they sent me to Albany, to the governor of the state. Then in his office, same thing: state physicians examined me, and they gave me permission to work in New York state.

Massachusetts thought I was a midget.

“Myoung Ho Lee, a young artist from South Korea, has produced an elaborate series of photographs that pose some unusual questions about representation, reality, art, environment and seeing.

Simple in concept, complex in execution, he makes us look at a tree in its natural surroundings, but separates the tree artificially from nature by presenting it on an immense white ground, as one would see a painting or photograph on a billboard.”

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Pinhole photographer Justin Quinnell turns his mouth into a camera with these fun pinhole photographs. I seem to recall somebody else doing mouth pinholes several years ago, but can’t remember who. Does anybody else have a clue?

Update: Reader/photographer Jonathan points me to a video of Ann Hamilton doing something similar in “Face to Face.” Thanks Jonathan

via This is That

via TSOYA
Previously on Your Daily Awesome (from my first week of blogging)

Now available: glowing crescent moons, to do with what thou wish.

via Ffffound