the dead city?

was leafing through an old book this afternoon which i have not looked at in a long while. titled the living city, written by frank lloyd wright, published in 1958, it is a very

outspoken bit of criticism, centered on what he saw as the overcentralization, dehumanized values, and waning sovereignty of the individual as wrought by our big cities. to say wright had a low opinion of the grid, the skyscraper, and the cubicle of our urban centers is an understatement.

posted by jmorrison on 07/31 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
over the wall

i have not had too many pets of my own. when i was a lad a had a hamster, whose name i can not remember (forgive me o’ nameless bundle of twitching cuteness). he died quite quickly after becoming my ward. i remember wrapping him in a wash cloth and bringing him down the block to the churchyard. i buried him under some shrubs near the iron fence around the church parking lot. was a very sombre affair. being at that time scrotum deep in catholic school assured a suitably dark and weighty mood, wash cloth and parking lot or not. dead pets are sad. i’ve got two cats now and don’t want to think about that. but what about “lost pets?”

posted by jmorrison on 07/30 | lost & found | | permalink
intelligent microwave ovens! no fucking way

each and every time i come across a report or timeline put forth forecasting any aspect of the future i find myself with two separate reactions vying for mental prominence simultaneously: 1 fascination.  2 skepticism. the fascination is certainly easy to understand, any forecasting endeavor is engineered to illicit exactly this response. “oooh, robot cars powered by hamster farts! imagine that!” at the same time though, for me, this fascination can’t help but ultimately collapse under the shock waves of a mega-shrug. i mean, big deal. these forecasts are just gussied-up educated guesses right?

case 116

today we continue in our series of transcribed case studies from the classic psychopathia sexualis. for those who are just joining us psychopathia sexualis was first published in germany in 1886 and was an attempt by richard von krafft-ebinng m.d. to catalogue and illuminate every manner of “sexual perversion” bubbling under the surface in his day and age. (earlier entries in the series include cases 225, 123, 98 / 99, and 88) today’s case is filed under the pathological erotic fetishism heading-

posted by jmorrison on 07/29 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
snubbing the stuckists

the Tate Museum has turned down a proposed gift of 160 paintings offered by a group of artists known as the stuckists. Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota wrote to the Stuckists, who offered the gift: “We do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation, or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection.” ouch. the ol’ hierarchical bitch slap from the local gatekeepers of art history. here’s the thing, in my view the tate was absolutely right in handing out said bitch slap.

posted by jmorrison on 07/28 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
this is like porn to me

Cheap real estate in France. Need I say more? Okay, maybe a little. First off, euros are currently about 20% above the dollar, so 80k euros is in the neighborhood of 100k dollars. Now know that the wine country of france is lousy with old barns for 50k dollars or so, for conversion; or, if you’re a wuss who needs a house that you can actually sleep and shower in, like, now and shit, figure a hundred thousand. not so different from backwoods usa prices, true; but you can own your own vineyard, and get f’rinstace 500 bottles of free wine a year (basically, you just sell the grapes to a vintner in exchange for payback in cash or wine, and pay a bit to have it bottled).

the olden days, when actors only acted crazy

the period 1870 to 1920 saw a huge growth in “variety theater” in america. it drew greater audiences than the “legitimate” theater which presented serious literary works and appealed to “elite” audiences. by contrast the variety stage was democratic and broad in approach. The variety stage strove to attract all classes of people from every cultural background by offering varied programs and relatively low admission fees. To succeed at show business entrepreneurs provided public entertainment that transcended the specific tastes of a particular class or ethnicity. It emphasized action and caricature. more below

posted by jmorrison on 07/28 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
meanface

came across (via j-walk) this cool little experiment going on at the moment called meanface. from the site’s info section: meanface is the result of combining all of the user submitted faces to form one average (or mean) face. the more face submitted the more evolved and definite the meanface should become. the thumbnail is a scaled down version of the current mean of the 2163 submitted thus far. go visit and add your own. see below for more.

name these tunes. round 1

below you will find 15 verses from various songs. let it be known that he or she who can best identify the artists responsible for these verses will receive… something… sometime. if you identify the most you win, that simple. but here me now and here me well: no cheating!!! “but how could you know if i cheated?” i hear the devious among you asking… i just will. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) as not to tip off your competiors. you have until friday. good luck.

posted by jmorrison on 07/27 | sights & sounds - games | | permalink
the book of the hunt

completed in 1388, and based on the author’s personal experience,the book of the hunt by Gaston Phoebus deals with different types of game, the care and training of hounds, methods of hunting stags and other wild animals, as well as traps and snares. An exceptionally beautiful manuscript of the book was produced early in the fifteenth century. The animal imagery is outstanding; it brings vividly to life the way hunting and related activities were practiced in the Middle Ages. from the national library of france’s manuscript division. the thumb is a detail from hunter staked out behind a decoy.

giant fish-headed soldiers are just the beginning

i’m heavily digging nicholas di genova’s drawings today. now has a capsule review of his current show. after a bit of art flimflam they get to the point nicely: Art-speak aside these drawings are fucking cool. They tap directly into the giddy kid in all of us who revels in the idea of armies of giant fish-headed soldiers, saurian mutations ripping each other to shreds and towering three-headed crab robots. wurd. check out some of his work at le-gallery on this flickr set and via his own site- newer work, and older work.

posted by jmorrison on 07/25 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
a nonist public service pamphlet

there is a growing epidemic in the cyberworld. a scourge which causes more suffering with each passing day. as blogging has exploded and, under the stewardship of the veterans, the form has matured more and more bloggers are finding themselves disillusioned, dissatisfied, taking long breaks, and in many cases simply closing up shop. this debilitating scourge ebbs and flows but there is hardly a blogger among us who has not felt it’s dark touch. we’re speaking, of course, about blog depression.

posted by jmorrison on 07/24 | piss & vinegar | | permalink
philosophical toys

check out jack & beverly’s optical toy collection. these toys, once called philosophical toys, have an important place in the history and development of photography and cinema but they are also fun!. We have several examples of the magic lantern, Zoetrope (wheel of life), and Praxinoscope, as well as a Phenakistoscope, a Polyrama Panoptique, a Kinora, Mutoscope, and flip books. be sure to check their site map for other points of interest. as well as the page devoted to camera obscura. good fun. (via eotg via bibi thanks guys.)

posted by jmorrison on 07/22 | sights & sounds - games | | permalink
stars in a jar

came across a post at we make money not art this morning about a project called camera lucida, an interactive “sonic observatory” allowing participants to view sonoluminescence in action, till now a phenomena only viewable in a highly specialized sonochemical laboratory. along with some historical information they offer a video of the camera lucida in action. it’s a fine idea and i’m sure in person the effect must be pretty amazing, the video i suspect does not do the project justice. so what exactly is at work here and what is sonoluminescence?

xilogravuras

from brazilian popular prints published by redstone press. this is the first book to appear in english devoted to the startling woodcuts that illustrate the brazilian literatura de cordel. this ‘string literature’, the work of virtuoso popular poets, originated in the harsh back lands of north east brazil. these passionate narratives, by turns realistic and fantastic, now comic, now tragic, at once reflect the realities and the dreams of the brazilian poor.

posted by jmorrison on 07/21 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
today in history: a black basalt slab

for 1400 years, no one knew how to read egyptian hieroglyphs. during napoleon bonaparte’s egyptian campaign, a french soldier discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing. the irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: greek, egyptian hieroglyphics, and egyptian demotic. the ancient greek on the stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests of Ptolemy V in the second century B.C. more startlingly it announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. thus the artifact held the key to solving the riddle of a written language that had been “dead” for nearly two millennia.

on this day in 1799, the rosetta stone was discovered.

posted by jmorrison on 07/20 | lost & found | | permalink
president of the lambs

Our unwell nation is surrounded by a thousand doctors, all claiming to know what is ailing her; but so few understand; they look at what is on the surface, when the malady is in her very entrails; it is as if worms had eaten away at her vitals. And so they have. I am deeply troubled that very, very few people think about the deep systemic implications of whatever is happening on the surface on any given day. This is why the Far Right became so powerful; the warning signs have been there for well over a decade, but few saw them.

posted by tbuckner on 07/19 | news & views - op ed | | permalink
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