1. Frank Gehry guest stars on the PBS children’s show Arthur. In the episode titled “Castles in the Sky,” Arthur the 8-year-old aardvark and his gang of animal pals are devastated when their tree house collapses under the weight of snow. Gehry guest stars as the guy (er, aardvark?) who saves the day by helping them learn about team cooperation, incorporating client needs, budgets, and spatial considerations as they design and rebuild their perfect space. Nearly 11 million viewers watch Arthur each week. For more information, visit PBS’ Web site.
I know it’s pretty ridiculous for a 30-year-old to have nostalgia pangs for Abbie Hoffman, but this book (and the Anarchists Cookbook) scared and thrilled me like few others as a teenager, and it’s so easy to remember why, flipping through the contents here. From the best ways to get free concert tickets to knife-fighting lessons to hitch-hiking do’s and donts, I thought this was the most amazing collection of information ever assembled.
Wow, this Stephen Quayle guy is some kind of wacko, but he sure has an amazing gallery of giants through history.
I have invested over 30 years researching the vast history of giants. It has, for the most part, been kept from the public. Proof of giants’ existence - their skeletal remains - has been quickly secreted away in obscure museums, when not destroyed. Additionally, time has cloaked and sugar-coated these creatures’ true perverse nature, the majority too vile, too demonic for bedtime stories. However, history is replete with their tales of unimaginable cruelty, sexual perversity, cannibalism and pagan rituals. This is only the beginning. Some things are best forgotten… or are they?
Where did these giants come from and what was their connection with ordinary humans? Just who were they? What happened to these extraordinary creatures? Is it possible they could ever return? The last question I will answer right now - YES, they most definitely could return! And they have something much worse in mind for mankind.
Last Sunday, the New York Times published Richard Barnes’ gorgeous photographs of the starlings that flock by the tens of thousands to Rome every fall and winter. Jonathan Rosen wrote a very nice essay that accompanies the photographs in this multimedia feature.
One of the nicest looking books that’s come across my desk in quite a while is Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar. The (true) story goes like this: An avid record collector was digging through the crates at a Washington DC flea market one day, when he discovered dozens of soul albums from the ’60s and ’70s by an artist named Mingering Mike. The collector, Dori Hadar, took a closer look at the records, and discovered that they weren’t actually LPs at all, but hand-drawn and -crafted works of individual art. The artist—Mingering Mike—had created beautiful, original albums, of which he was the star performer. He even went to far as to draw individual grooves on the cardboard records. Hadar was a private detective by day, so he sleuthed out this Mingering Mike, who agreed to have his incredible artwork shown to the public for the first time in this book.
The Morning News has a great gallery of the albums, as well as an interview with Dori Hadar.
People familiar with Lawrence Weschler’s style of teasing out fantastic connnections between works of art, natural phenomena, and historical events, as he did in Everything That Rises, will be on familiar turf with “Languorous Bodyscapes.” As for everyone else—welcome to Weschler’s world.
I’m reminded of the old story about the guy who goes to a shrink, desperate for relief: “Doc, Doc, you’ve got to help me, I can’t take it anymore. My problem is —” At which point the doctor interrupts him: “No, no, don’t tell me. I’ll give you a little test here and I’ll be able to tell you what your problem is.” He pulls out a sheaf of placards from his desk drawer and shows the patient the first — which portrays a simple pair of straight, parallel vertical lines — asking him, “What’s this?” “Oh my God,” says the guy, “it’s two people, a man and a woman, and they’re necking, and ycch, it’s disgusting.” Hmm, thinks the shrink as he scribbles a note on his clipboard. “And this?” (Another two lines, this time horizontal.) “Ach, Jesus!” exclaims the patient. “It’s the same two and now they’re in bed, they’re having physical relations, intercourse, and, aye, it’s completely revolting.” Hmmm, thinks the shrink as he jots himself another note. “And this?” (Another two lines, this time crossed.) “Oh my Lord, dear God,” stammers the patient, barely able to continue. “It’s the same couple and this time, I can’t even say it, they’re . . . they’re —” “Sir,” interrupts the shrink, “we don’t even have to go any further, I can already tell you what your problem is: You, sir, have a pathologically dirty mind.”
“I’ve got a dirty mind?” The patient explodes: “You’re the one showing me the dirty pictures!”
Effect: You are walking down the street and casually pick any spectator.
You ask them to come with you to a nearby car and pick a dead fly off the windshield.
You hold it in your hand do a few passes with the other hand and appear to be really concentrating and the fly slowly comes back to life to the surprise of the spectator.
Preparation: Freeze the fly
Method: You need to catch a fly and freeze it which puts it in a temporary coma, this can be done by swatting the fly hard enough to immobilise it then placing it in a small container in the freezer.
The fly then needs to be quickly taken to a suitable windshield IN THE SHADE and placed there.
It is important that the car is in the shade to prevent the fly from defrosting too quickly.
Then go and find a spectator and take them back to the car which should appear to be randomly picked.
The heat of your hand will revive the fly which should soon start to move.
A lot of this trick is in the actions of you reviving the fly.
It may be necessary to practice how long it takes for the fly to revive itself.
Freezing the fly as quickly as possible with dry ice is a better way of freezing the fly as because it is quicker it causes less damage to the fly.
A native to Los Angeles, Alex Prager’s photography career began on the cusp of her teens. After holding down a slew of jobs in the private sector, from selling knives to washing cars, Prager, so inspired by the modern works of William Eggleston, decided to make the leap to full time photographer. With little more than a camera, a few odd subjects, and some rolls of black and white she set off down that long and familiar road of the sojourning artist: self-discovery. The photographs capture the essence of each sin; sometimes with a wink and a smirk, sometimes with the shy bat of lashes, and sometimes with a blunt obvious blow to the head. The work carries Prager’s signature surreal high-saturation color and the use of high-gloss plexiglass, which further gives the viewer the feeling of peering into an alternate strange and wonderful world.
The Interstitial Library’s Circulating Collection is located at no fixed site. Its vast holdings are dispersed throughout private collections, used bookstores, other libraries, thrift stores, garbage dumps, attics, garages, hollow trees, sunken ships, the bottom desk-drawers of writers, the imaginations of non-writers, the pages of other books, the possible future, and the inaccessible past.
In a sense, this library has always existed. However, until now it has had no librarians, no catalog, and no name.
The Interstitial Library does not aspire to completeness. Indeed, we champion the incomplete, temporary, provisional, circulating and, of course, interstitial. Above all, we aim to acquire and catalogue those books that are themselves interstitial: that fall between obvious subject categories; that are notable for qualities seldom recognized by traditional institutions; that no longer exist, do not yet exist, or are entirely imaginary.
Some lucky bastard came across a collection of over 400 Polaroids of strippers trying out for a SoCal nightclub during the late ’60s and early ’70s. What’s more, he purchased the collection for a mere $10. At least he’s been nice enough to share the (presumably) best of the lot.
San Francisco website Fecal Face recently went down to Santa Cruz to visit artist Jim Phillips, who created some of the most iconic skate graphics of the 1980s. Phillips is still hard at work, and this photo essay from the studio visit is a sure-fire dose of nostalgia for anyone who ever slapped a Slime Balls, Independent Trucks, or Santa Cruz sticker on a deck back in the proverbial day.
Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints. Music composed by Esko Grundström.
In this radio drama, middle-aged, doctoral candidate Irving Paley is obsessed with a work of contemporary sculpture in downtown Manhattan, and the ways it affects those who pass by it regularly. On an answering machine he collects the stories of a range of New Yorkers, all of whom have some relationship to Alamo, aka “the Cube.” Over the course of an interview with a public radio reporter about the project, Paley reveals how the Cube has slowly consumed his life, while back at the sculpture, a mystery surrounding the artwork deepens.
I swear to god I wasn’t spending my night googling “inbreeding + enfeeblement” earlier this week, but that didn’t stop me from running across this fascinating article on the topic.
In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats, not Rothschilds and Darwins. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery—or worse. “You can’t marry your first cousin,” a character declares in the 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs. “You get babies with nine heads.”
So when a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, a genetic counselor at the University of Washington and the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, announced that cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage, it made the front page of The New York Times. The study, published in the Journal of Genetic Counseling last year, determined that children of first cousins face about a 2 to 3 percent higher risk of birth defects than the population at large. To put it another way, first-cousin marriages entail roughly the same increased risk of abnormality that a woman undertakes when she gives birth at 41 rather than at 30. Banning cousin marriages makes about as much sense, critics argue, as trying to ban childbearing by older women.
I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need “Windows 95?” After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose. Half Price Books became a regular haunt, and an abandoned house gave me a set of outdated reference books, complete with mold and neglect. Each book tells me how to begin according to its size, type of paper, and sometimes contents.
website
On Apr. 1, a new museum of counterfeit goods opens in the German city of Solingen, near Cologne. The Museum Plagiarius, housed in a converted railway building, will permanently exhibit 300 original products together with seemingly identical rip-offs. These items range from fashion and household products to electrical and medical equipment. They come from the annual Plagiarius awards, presented by the museum’s co-founder Professor Rido Busse. “The idea is to shame the con men and help the general public realize how widespread the problem is — it’s not just limited to Louis Vuitton bags,” says Professor Busse.
Original: Haaga Kunststofftechnik, Kirchheim/Teck, Germany; Copy: Wuyi Zhouyi Mechanical & Electrical, Zhejiang, P.R. China This multiterrain cleaner for outdoor rubbish is made by a German company whose entire business is based on just a few models of sweeper. Yet a Chinese company plagiarized the product, right down to its packaging, in one fell swoop.
Original: Alfi, Wertheim, Germany; Copy: He Shan Jia Hui Vacuum Flask and Vessel, Guangzhou, China The top prize this year went to this vacuum jug called Sophie, designed by Alfi with high-quality polypropylene and a five-year warranty. The Chinese rip-off merchants, which made a jug that leaks, changed the manufacturer’s name printed on the front to Albi. The World Customs Organization and the European Commission both estimate that 7% of worldwide commerce is counterfeit, causing global losses of up to $500 billion and costing several hundred thousand legitimate jobs each year.
gallery/story via
