Your Daily Awesome

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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

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

More images and info over at BibliOdyssey

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…

See the whole project
via Things

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.

Click here for a full-size view.

“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’.”

more here

Things Magazine has scanned this beautiful 1976 book about our effect on the environment, and reproduced it in its entirety. Very charming stuff.