so, bb has revealed to me the magic of disturbingauctions.com, a place where strange ebay biddings go to be together, and i'm just hooked. i even bid on the 20 "grammerphones and little dog," my first ebay bid of my entire life. featured here, we have the "vintage photo of white sheet with heads of eight women," a bonafide "twotle," (no longer alive, but it was!), and a "bizarre civil war era photo of gentleman with clown."
you'll definitely be hearing more about this.
backbreaker alphabet from hijack your life. thanks to camilla. i especially love the b.
remember my seaweed alphabet from last year?
you can see the trailer here to get a taste.
"Some eggers' mania for collecting extends to drawers of seashells or boxes of toy soldiers. Most of those jailed have speeded their own journey to the cells thanks to the evidence of their own index cards or coded computer files carefully detailing every clutch and theft. An obsessive-compulsive attention to detail can obscure reality. On one police raid, officers were amazed to find an egger reminding them to wipe their feet and not spoil his carpet.
Others seem addicted, gripped by an obsession they can no longer master. When the knock finally comes on some collectors' doors "there's this dawning realisation of what they've been doing for 20 years or more," says Thomas. "We've had some break down and cry and say, 'I'm so glad you've finally come, this has been controlling me for years. The breeding season comes and I can't stop going out and collecting eggs.'"
excerpt from here.
via the kircher society.
at finding this gloriously color coordinated set of cigarette cards on flickr. the official definition of a cigarette card, courtesy of wikipedia, is "a trade card issued by tobacco manufacturers to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise cigarette brands." i love the contradiction of pictures of exercisers advertising cigarettes. and for youse who know me, i'm a sucker for little compartmentalized pictures of people in various states of bending.
For acid marble's but a friandise
consuming tea and nibbling cream gateaux
the chosen fruit is hued a bright cerise
so stink the rotting skins from long ago
I styll can call to mind those hours of ease
those greedy mice leave nothing for the crow
we chill like nudists put on ice to freeze
most people like to read the words they know
The brave man cries I do not care a jot
the shark is smoked on beds of bergamot
while coming home we find the wind turned mean
You'll come to miss the peasant in his smock
I quite forgive you when you run amok
at least the metro's one place where you've been
from the online interactive version of queneau's cent mille milliards de poemes
1. M. Le Blanc (LOC), 2. Maggie Jones of Cleveland [baseball] (LOC), 3. Burman (LOC), 4. Eva Morrison (LOC), 5. Blind stenographer using dictaphone (LOC), 6. C.Y. Smith [boxing] (LOC)
and hundreds more where they came from.
fiona has taught me this word: sortsolsum. the danish word for the swarming of starlings. (you can see it happening in the fifth photograph.)
i love the synesthetic and sensuous quality of these six photographs. how they borrow sugar from each other. i also prefer these six ingredients: snow, paper, string, sticks, cloth, and ether.
1. Turfed Ducks in flight 鳳頭潛鴨, 2. myrtle, 3. un coin de ciel bleu, 4. 30810014, 5. sortsolsum, 6. natural history
the million little pictures show is going to be in san francisco.
out of all the adventures displayed there that night, mine will be among them.
"...This is not important, except that it is possible to continue. Writing about art seems to me more and more dangerous. There are too many words troubling the wonderful silence of the visual."
much more of this insightful interview between gomez and ernesto neto here.
stuart haygarth calls it his "tide chandelier".
i want a pair. i want to stroll through the aisles of the grocery store in them. i would wear them waitressing, gliding through the restaurant with martinis on a tray, gracefully dodging the footwaiters and sommelier. i would juggle the wide white plates for sidework and no one would ever go hungry.
wonderful photo found on flickr here.
designer martín azúa (out of barcelona) on the concept behind his Nest House:
"The life in the city is complicated when thinking of the most basic necessity and sometimes absurd obligations. Freedom is reduced in what you have or need. Birds don’t pay the rent. They settle into a place and use the closest resources. Their nests form a part of nature. Learning form them, we came up with the idea to build the nest house of simple metal structure and some rope which are completed with natural materials like leaves, branches etc… It doesn’t take any space as it is hung on a tree with a thick tape not to damage it. Once installed it can serve as point of observation or an essential habitat in which you can spend a night. The nest house allows us a perception of the natural space of animal, plant and human life."
the rest of his inventions are equally whimsically beautiful. thanks to labour of heart for the link.
when the pictures came back
the last three i had taken in my dream
were all overlaid with the same
laundry-slung background
of a backyard in the nineteen thirties,
wih the foreground subjects all differing:
me on a field trip poking washed up jellyfish with a lacquered chopstick
me in a burning restaurant just as an owl snatches the white rabbit out of my arms
me tying three bells to a cat's collar so as to warn birds of its whereabouts
all clarified with the soft muddiness
of moments safely past any chance of correcting.
is this not nostalgia:
to live in the gone moment at last?
[i found this image [found on ffffound] very compelling, and so used it as a visual kind of scaffold for a poetic state.]
i think when the note is pressed, something pokes the corresponding cat at the tail end. my cat does this when i put my foot under him in bed, to try to warm it.
image from ffffound.
"Montague: Your father was an inventor. What were some of his inventions?
Cage: He invented a submarine that held the world's record in 1913 for staying underwater. But it ran by means of a gas engine, so it left bubbles on the surface, and you could tell where it was. It never occurred to him that it would be important to hide. When he saw that people wanted to travel underwater secretly, he then invented a way to discover them. It was used in World War I in the English Channel to detect German submarines. When he died he was working on space travel without the use of fuel. In other words, the release from or acceptance of gravity.
Montague: Where did he do his training?
Cage: Out of the blue. He never graduated from high school.
Montague: My grandfather was also an inventor and had a similar background with no real formal training. He was the inventor of the snap clothes pin, double-ended toothpick, hard-surface paper plate, book matches, and other such things, but never graduated from high school.
Cage: Right, inventors don't have to."
from a 1985 interview with john cage by stephen montague.
via ubuweb.
a pattern of favorites to form a bouquet. their relationships to each other hold up to however rigorous of a study we might subject them to. images gathered that lie flat beside each other and yet instigate further alliances and betray secret tensions. i like to steep them and drink the tea after it's cooled slightly. 1. MY MOLSKINES, 2. Sasha by Daniel Jackson for i-D Sept 2006, 3. happy new year!, 4. From New High School Algebra, Wells and Hart, Copyright 1912, 5. 010804035.jpg, 6. Wren 1-2-08
maira kalman's book "the principles of uncertainty" is a visual treasure. it is deeply satisfying in the way only illustrated books can be, the way illustrated books are satisfying to children, this is the way that 'the principles of uncertainty' is satisfying to me, as it must be to other childlike adults.
it makes you feel a certain wild permission to write a book this instant and start painting the world as it pours through your retinas.
