Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
So wrote John Updike in his
moving tribute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams -- an appropriately pedigreed account for this
oldest and
most fabled of ballfields that saw
its first major league game played
one century ago today.
As a team
in flux hopes to recapture the magic with an
old-school face-off against the New York
Highlanders Yankees, it's hard to imagine the soul of the Sox faced the
specter of
demolition not too long ago. Now
legally preserved, in a sport crowded with corporate-branded superdome behemoths,
Fenway abides, bursting with
history,
idiosyncrasy,
record crowds, and occasional
song.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 20, 2012 -
48 comments
Kevin J. Weir is an artist, making ads (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5), and more interestingly, not ads. In the latter category, he has made 3 stand-alone sites:
the Flux Machine, a tumblr of public domain images turned into animated GIFs, ranging from amusing to surreal (with an extra dash of Lovecraft), which
Cartoon Brew likened to
Terry Gilliam and
Stan VanDerBeek;
Nyan Waits, another spin-off of the
Nyan Cat meme/theme, now with more Tom Waits; and
Loud Portraits, an interactive portrait gallery.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 4, 2012 -
9 comments
Ross Becker's
photographs of Christchurch. The central business district reopens this weekend for the first time since the earthquake (Previously:
1,
2,
3) on February 22, 2011.
[more inside]
posted by doublehappy
on Oct 26, 2011 -
3 comments
Like a "modern-day pirate," 75-year-old Ray Ives has been diving for sunken treasure for decades. Wearing an ancient, bronze-helmeted diving suit, he searches the ocean floor and keeps a huge collection of marine salvage (including antique cannon balls, 'bottles, bells, swords, portholes and diving gear') in a shipping container "museum" at a British marina.
Ray: A Life Underwater:
Vimeo /
YouTube. (A short film documentary.)
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 23, 2011 -
5 comments
The Third Wheel. Australian photographer Jackson Eaton offers a series of photographs about the awkwardness of being the third person that alternate between hilarious and creepy. (
Via)
posted by Bunny Ultramod
on Aug 26, 2011 -
37 comments
AFP photographer Juan Mabromata recently visited the
ruins of Villa Epecuén in Argentina, a small touristic village that started slowly re-surfacing after the rising waters of the nearby lake left it completely underwater nearly 26 years ago.
[more inside]
posted by palbo
on Jul 26, 2011 -
18 comments
Christophe Huet and other talented artists at the
Asile studio in Paris produce amazingly lifelike and realistic CGI and photomanipulated creations. (Flash and audio, but the music, also created by Huet, is lovely.) Some images NSFW.
posted by Gator
on May 18, 2011 -
6 comments
[Antonioni] gave to three elderly Muslims the pictures he had taken of them. The eldest one as soon as he took a glance at the photos, immediately returned them with these words: "What is it good for, to stop the time?" Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroids
posted by juv3nal
on Apr 5, 2011 -
19 comments
"I figured I'd explore for a bit and before I knew it I was 50 yards within a huge cave gazing at the most beautiful, otherworldly sight I had ever laid eyes on," he tells us. "It was like stepping into Superman's lair and every changing shade of blue lured me deeper and deeper."
Inside Glacier Caves. [more inside]
posted by Rinku
on Mar 9, 2011 -
20 comments
Photographer Irna Werning's project, '
Back to the Future' recreates classic childhood snapshots 20-40 years later, using the same settings, subjects, and clothing. Zefrank's
Young Me Now Me (
previously) is a much more extensive crowdsourced version of the same concept.
(via BB. One photo very slightly NSFW)
posted by schmod
on Feb 15, 2011 -
15 comments
Back on
August 15, 2010, Aesop Rock kicked off a sprawling collaboration effort, with input by 28 artists, with
an eclectic collection of videos spanning from
music videos to
odd clips and
a Kimya Dawson recording studio dance party,
works by photographer Chrissy Piper, and
lots of music, from
unreleased tracks,
remixes, and
mixtapes. There's even a post about being
manhandled by a nude model, written by the Dwarvs front-man
Blag Dahlia. Going back to the beginning of the site, the second post was
a collection of facts about bats, and the only obvious connection back to the tragic impetus for the title of this ongoing collaboration (
900 bats) --
over 900 bats were torched to prevent disruption of work on the ongoing
renovations of the historic
Bala Quila (also spelled
Bala Qila) fort in
Alwar, Rajasthan, in north-eastern India.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Dec 16, 2010 -
4 comments
