the erotic coloring book
thought today i’d dip into my extremely sexy archives… ahhh yeah baby… and offer you a little somethin to heat up this cold dry sunday… o.k. so i’m no barry white but i did pick up this little gem at a local bookstore on a recommendation from the clerk (thanks nameless clerk) which i wanted to share. it’s a slim but large format volume called the erotic coloring book published in 1975 by berlin & associates out of l.a., illustrated by a guy named craig berlin. it’s high-larious and most assuredly nsfw. possibly nsfpptdhf as well (not safe for people prone to dangerous hallucinogenic flashbacks). you might consider it the companion piece to this earlier post i suppose. see a sampling of the self proclaimed erotic pages below.
all of the following are details, click all for full page.
what a silly time them 70’s were huh? hope you enjoyed. now go grab some crayons and get to work.
man, yesterday it was spam, today filth… this place is really degenerating isn’t it?
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a cry for help from the spam factory
today’s topic: spam. the bad followed by the good. first the bad- the nonist’s url was spoofed by a spammer somewhere so if you have received any emails trying to sell you pharmaceuticals or raising the alarm over bird flu i apologize, but rest assured it was not from us. second the good- last week i received two bits of mail, undeniably spam, which never the less caught my eye. at the top of each message was the usual junk, but in each, after a short bit of blank space, the message continued with a large block of text which to my -highly- developed ear sounded uncannily like dada poetry. the first thing that sprung to mind was that fortune cookie which reads: “help me i’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory.” was this a creative cry for help?
all is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night
what has happened in these last two weeks while i have been away from the site? in the world at large: i can’t say for sure, have not been paying much attention. most likely a few horrific natural disasters, maybe an unjustified invasion or two? Certainly Bodies were meticulously counted for one reason or another? “terror” was surely wrought and/or fought somewhere? a vapid very nearly brain-dead celebrity either murdered or married someone, was either pardoned or jilted, and any which way it received the same amount of media attention. Yes? our swine politicians lied to us, lined pockets, passed the buck, signed death warrants, and otherwise “defended” freedom and democracy? am i right? pretty much business as usual then?
in my own personal microcosm: i saw the host of a morning show tell a woman who had gastric bypass surgery (stomach stapling to lose weight) and a full body lift (to remove the resulting baggy flappy skin) that she was, and i quote, “very courageous.” i somehow found it within myself to neither smash the television with my bare hands nor to pick up the first blunt object i could find and go on a brutal killing spree. so that was good.
i read accelerando by charles stross. a fine book. his best yet i’d say. the singularity, post-singularity economics, post-humans, matrioshka brains, etc. it’s ever so slightly depressing though. it rekindles your desire to live forever, in whatever form, to see how it plays out, even though you know damn well that no matter what kurzweil says, no matter the timeline in stross’ book, you won’t see any of it, you won’t be uploaded, you won’t get re-constituted, you
won’t live forever. someone a handful of generations from now might get the chance but not you. Not as a denizen of this particular neophobic, supernatural obsessed, pig-headed culture. now I’m in the middle of anansi boys by neil gaiman which will itself no doubt depress slightly by dint of the comparative lack of real-world magic…
in other microcosmic news i’ve pretty much quit smoking. yes i know, you see that “pretty much” sitting there in the middle of that sentence trying to look inconspicuous… well i’m down to a couple a day instead of a pack or more. so i’m on edge but otherwise pleased. I feel as if i’m well on the way. Perhaps by the time I tuck cozily in to my deathbed my lungs will have cleared. that seems to leave only a vicious strain of self-devouring cynicism to contend with. the last remaining and hardest to kick of all the bad habits. also i celebrated a birthday. i turned 31.
aside from the 9-5 i slogged through, the crop of bad movies and pre-season basketball i watched, the walks i took, and the few decent conversations i had i didn’t do much of note. i certainly didn’t break out the brushes and start painting again (leonardo you can rest easy for another day) nor did i get to work on a novel, a short story, a paragraph of micro-fiction, or even a dirty knock-knock joke. truth be told i sat on my ass a lot doing not much of anything. Nary a longing glance passed from my eyes to the g5 tower. looking at me from across the room you might have taken my calm inactive exterior as a sign of peace and relaxation. you’d have been mistaken unfortunately because what may have seemed peaceful satisfaction to your dirty filthy prying eyes was in reality more akin to paralysis.
these last couple of weeks have seen a surprisingly potent and disruptive internal tumult…
on second thought…
before i continue let me say i realize that the “bearing of the internal” thing, especially when delivered by a faceless digital acquaintance, can be very tiresome for you readers out there in entertain-me land. some people enjoy watching others squirm and flail and ultimately dissolve in a cloudy puddle of ruined identity, while others, the lion’s share i’ll guess, just want to see some pretty pictures or have an amusing anecdote served up hot and fresh. as i’m not really in the business here of purposely boring people i’ve decided that rather than describing in minute detail the gaping and slathering mental maw I found myself staring into I will instead simply lie to you. Yes, that is exactly right. I am now going to spare you the embarrassment and unpleasantness of any public soul searching in favor of the extremely bearable lightness of lies.
who says lies, when told with proper feeling, can’t provide catharsis?
as I was saying…
I found myself paralyzed. The smell of the autumn leaves after the rain… It was, if anything, too evocative, the sight of the wet streets, too beautiful. i’ve always loved the fall. Just outside the black enameled bars of my first floor window a wood thrush, solitary and uncommon here in october, shook the rain from his feathers. his spotted white belly puffed and deflated, puffed again and relaxed. his long thin beak poked purposefully at nooks hidden beneath the cinnamon colored curve of his left wing. he stood amidst the small plants and the garbage cans in front of my building. fat raindrops still fell at irregular intervals, finally making their way through the few leaves which managed to remain with their branches. i remember thinking, “what is he doing here, he should be three quarters of the way to southern mexico by now.” he turned and looked at me through the open window then and just stared. a dog walker was dragged past by her sniff crazy black lab, en rout to a date with a zip-lock bag no doubt. a motorcycle blasted across 75th street toward columbus, its boom bouncing between the apartment buildings like thunder in a canyon. the wood thrush never flinched, just kept staring; his black eye, a tiny glass bead, trained right on me. i could hear the wind outside, could feel that perfect october cold. the thrush blinked and and like a flash i understood everything.
he was an old timer, a 9 year old. he’d only managed to sire one clutch this year. what’s worse two of the five eggs hatched brown headed cowbird chicks… those god damned nest parasites. he’d spent the last few months rooting through the underbrush of central park for insects to feed them all. sometimes he’d luck upon some berries, sometimes not. he was tired. most likely there would be no more clutches. this meant his most impressively elaborate and gratifying songs were behind him. and he knew it. he’d still take to the lower perches at dawn and dusk for a while yet. still do his best to combine two notes at one time in that flute-like voice he’d been known for, was proud of… but without the flush and urgency of the mating season… well it wasn’t the same was it? nothing was. he was old, could feel it in his left wing, could see the bright pink of his legs and feet had faded a bit. when the younger guys had taken to the air to start the long migration he told them he’d catch up, but he knew he didn’t have it in him. he also knew, and damned well, that no thrush had ever survived a winter within the breeding range. this late in october there were very few fellows left to sing with. this morning he hadn’t heard any other thrush’s song answering his own. it was very possible he was alone, the last wood thrush in new york city.
i blinked then myself, having taken this rush of imagery and feeling into my mind in the space between two heartbeats. the thrush turned away from me and started walking toward the curb, possibly embarrassed, possibly satisfied at having related his story. a few cars passed slowly by making that sustained whooshing sound that’s manhattan’s closest amalgam to ocean surf. the thrush watched them pass lazily, walking toward the street, then took to the air headed east back toward central park. it was dusk and i assume he had some singing left to do. i just sat there. not long after the street lights blinked on and the rain started coming down again.
i spent the better part of the last two weeks thinking about this thrush, perhaps the city’s last and my best laid plans of sprawling paintings and pithy narratives seemed to pale, becoming nothing but bumbling human hubris to me. as i said, in a way i was paralyzed. i thought of his song, the complex “flute-like” song he’d been so proud of and i thought about my own creative output, my projects, this website… i knew then that it had all gone horribly wrong somewhere along the way. that what i was doing every day was not right, not good enough. until tonight i’d been unable to even log on to the site.
there you are. pretty lies in place of ugly convoluted truth. happy? yeah, it’s much better this way…
now to bend the lies a bit i’ll say this, i expect changes here. i will likely post less, certainly not every day. perhaps other more drastic changes will follow? not sure yet. i still invite all of you to contribute as before, but be warned, the ground may shift beneath your feet. the nonist must evolve, age, even cease to be, as everything must.
anyhow, there it is. glad to back in whatever capacity. hope everyone is well.
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More laptops needed?
At first I was excited by this project. Then, my wife, who is a teacher at an international school here in Penang, Malaysia, said, ‘does the world really need laptops? What about books? What about better educated teachers?’ She makes a great point. Are cheap and mass-produced laptops (no matter how cool they are for technophiles) really going to solve the world’s educational problems? Picture a classroom full of students paying no attention to one another and staring for hours at an illuminated screen… (I apologize for two sequential posts- I am a new and overly excited user.)
The Meaning of Words
Does the meaning of words become more or less clear when words are associated with image? A group of artists and designers have collaborated with me to explore this topic. One member of the group will choose a word, then each member creates an image for that word. The results are posted here. Are there any nonists that would like to participate? If so, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your submissions or questions. The next word to ‘go live’ is lonesome.
yikes!
saw this photo over at happy pallace which both f and mr.b agreed was creepy. it is isn’t it? why is it if something this banal can creep people out that movie makers can’t slap together even a marginally scary film anymore? in my opinion there are two mistakes which are made again and again. 1- c.g. simple right? c.g. is almost never scary. latex and makeup will trump c.g. every time. 2- goofy, over-stylized, jump-cut direction. not scary. never was, never will be. anyhow, it just so happens that i also came across some images today which i thought were pretty gosh-danged creepy. i would crap myself if i opened a door and came unexpectedly upon any of these scenes: yikes, eek, god no, oh crap, shiiit, cripes!. yeesh. awful huh? so what say ye? what are the scare meisters in hollywood doing wrong?
making friends with the natives
it’s an age old story: you find yourself in some thick rainforest a million miles from your cozy suburb. the call of nature strikes and while taking a crap behind a tree (wiping with some poisonous leaf of course) your surprised to be surrounded by naked blow-gun toting natives! in this all too common scenario the sensible thing is to make friends, quick-like. according to this little book i’ve got, originally published in 1934, titled string games for beginners representational pictures made with a length of string are one of the most common bits of cultural overlap going and for this reason are one of the best possible ways of making friends with natives! indeed.
48 years ago today
quote: the first artificial satellite was launched October 4, 1957. and it wasn’t american. the soviet made sputnik, weighing about 183 lbs., took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth on its elliptical path, 500 miles up. traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, sputnik would “beep, beep, beep” it’s telemetry as it passed over. americans were mortified. this was scary stuff. people thought that the russkies were going to be dropping bombs from the sky. and the news just got worse. a month later, the soviets launched sputnik II, which weighed 1100 pounds and carried a live dog, laika. americans scientists were scrambling to catch up. in december they launched vanguard. which went between 2 and 4 feet up and promptly burst into a ball of fire. our satellite was thrown clear which was as close to travel as it got.
cruel shoes
how does the song go? there’s a time for blah and a time for blay, a time to blub and a time to bluuh? something like that. well the way i see it there’s a time to knit your brow and a time to smirk and i’m almost positive 7:43 on this particular evening in october is a time to smirk. thing is i’ve got nothing smirk-worthy to say. so i turn to mr. steve martin. didja know that long before he was writing pieces for big snooty magazines and having his “droll and oh-so-witty” novels adapted to film he wrote an extremely silly book called cruel shoes? yup. this is back in the 70’s when he was still a drug addled standup laying down routines on vinyl. 77 to be exact. the sleeve describes it as “wild and zany.” haha. zany! that ought to be worth a smirk all by itself. anyway what follows are some short pieces from cruel shoes. enjoy.
the paper architecture of brodsky & utkin
picked up a book yesterday from the princeton architectural press collecting some of the works by the russian architectural duo of alexander brodsky and ilya utkin and i’m very happy i did. got it for a song and it’s a really gorgeous book. or rather the 28 plates are. they’re an interesting duo, a bit like a visual rosencrantz and guildernstern in that they create etchings together and their styles are indistinguishable within the whole. the buildings and spaces they create are wildly poetic in no small part because they are by and large unbuildable. these are paper architects you see.
some snippets from the books into:
in 1957 kruschev declared socialist realist architecture the “over-decorated” style and abolished the academy of architecture. the notion of a critically assimilated cultural heritage (i.e. the reuse of classical forms to serve modern ideological ends) was replaced by a doctrine of unadorned utilitarianism. modern technology, especially prefabrication, was exploited to produce the urgently needed mass housing and aesthetic discourse of any kind was considered unnecessary and immoral. faceless functionalism continued to dominate throughout the brezhnev years as economic constraints, a hopelessly tangled bureaucratic procedure, a dearth of building materials, and a shrinking body of skilled laborers exacerbated unimaginative planning. this scenario confronted brodsky and utkin and their classmates at the moscow institute of architecture in the mid-seventies.
many of the more creative young soviet designers abandoned the exasperating professional situation they found themselves in while others like brodsky and utkin began using international competitions as a creative outlet.
as brodsky and utkin and a dozen or so other friends began to produce such projects in evenings and weekends over the next few years, the group assumed the title of “paper architects” - a derogatory epithet applied to avant-garde architects still producing radical work after the socialist realist clampdown of the thirties.
brodsky, utkin, and the others began producing visionary schemes in response to a bleak professional scene in which only artless and ill-conceived buildings, diluted through numerous bureaucratic strata and constructed out of poor materials by unskilled laborers, were being erected - if anything. as such their work constitutes a graphic form of architectural criticism, an escape into the realm of imagination that ended as a visual commentary on what was wrong with social and physical reality and how its ills might be remedied.
now that you’re prepped here are 10 of brodsky and utkin’s etchings (click all for large version)-
for a little more on the subject of “the paper architects” you might try here and here. for a bit on earlier “paper architects” see here.
if your interested in the book try the newer updated edition.
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gateway graphics
i am no longer a weed smoker so it’s been a long while since i held a little pack of rolling papers between my fingers. the brands i remember most (not counting the nefarious blunt period) are big bambu and lion of judah. the brands i remember seeing when i was a kid were joker and ez wider. but really these are only the tip of the iceberg are they not? there is a whole galaxy of papers out there and a whole galaxy of design to go along with them. in as much i’ve collected a bunch of images here for your viewing pleasure. the old hippies might consider this a stroll down memory lane, if they could remember anything. for the uninitiated this might be a gateway gallery to harder more dangerous graphics. enjoy.