April 14, 2009
old, weird america
Roadside Architecture. "I have been passionate about commercial architecture and roadside related things all my life. I grew up in California but New York City has been my home since 1980. I started this website in 2000 simply as a way to organize my own photos. Since then, it has become a bit of an obsession and grown to well over 1,000 pages." flickr. blog. [more inside]
Umetnost
The Digital Library of Slovenia has (among other things) music [like this] [previously], posters [like this] and photographs [like this].
![[like this]](http://www.dlib.si/documents/plakati/plakati/URN_NBN_SI_img-Z2VIRZQS.jpg){kind=link}
![[like this]](http://www.dlib.si/documents/fotografije/fotografije/jpg/URN_NBN_SI_img-C1RA5WO8.jpg){kind=link}
if robert lowell is a poet i dont want to be a poet
"Not until I put them there." David Antin worked in a wide range of innovative modes until landing in the early 1970s on what he calls the talk poem. Antin speaks extemporaneously and then transcribes his talks using only space as punctuation. The implications of positioning these works as poetry are, of course, part of the point.
"How did these two women who had everything end up living in squalor?"
This weekend marks the U.S. premiere of the new HBO film Grey Gardens (starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie) -- promo [video | 02:01] || 'Inside Grey Garden' [video | 03:33]. The film is based on the 1975 documentary filmed by the Maysles brothers, depicting the "true story of Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis....[who] live[d] in a world of their own behind the towering privets that surround[ed] their decaying 28-room East Hampton mansion known as 'Grey Gardens.'" [more inside]
Sharpies: expressing difference through a well-dressed thuggery
"Normally subcultures in Australia are taken from other countries and just reproduced here. Sharps or sharpies are an Australian specific subculture, developed in Australian specific conditions." Sharpies were members of suburban youth gangs in Australia mainly from the 1960s to 1980s, particularly in Melbourne, but also in Sydney and Perth to a lesser extent. "Everybody was in a gang. Everybody. Every second street there was a gang. Um -- there was like you were either in a gang or you were the victim." The time of the sharpies is part of Melbourne folklore. Forget JFK. Where were you when Frankston erupted after the AC/DC concert in 1977? While the violence was legendary, so were the fashion and the music. Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls, Buster Brown, Skyhooks, Fat Daddy, Hush. And nobody danced like the sharpies (which resembles skanking of some sort). Anyone over forty who grew up in Melbourne has at least one story to tell about the sharpies (PDF). Some stories are about gang leaders with missing teeth and shit-eating grins, while others look back with some sort of fondness.
Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection
The Wriston Art Center Galleries Digital Collection at Lawrence University has over 1500 images of various artworks, focusing especially on prints & printmaking and ancient coins. All can be viewed in extremely high resolution (click "export image" above the artwork). Here are a few I particularly like: Beginning of Winter (Japanese woodcut), Rising Sun (Paul Klee painting), From Distant Lands (watercolor), Three Kings (Jacques Villon engraving), Untitled I (netting) and Noble Lady and Prince (Japanese woodcut).
If you're planning a teabagging...
The Last Guide You'll Ever Need
If society fell apart this afternoon I’d be willing to bet you’d die. You’ve spent your life learning how to ‘cut and paste’ or how to master E. Honda’s Hundred Handslap in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but when the world comes crashing down and you’re hungry, you’ll be eating crunchy Ramen noodles and wondering how your own pee tastes. Lets face it. You’d die. This blog is to help those plan for their escape from the collapsing rubble of our society." Survive the Apocalypse.
Which is your favorite Dead show? Can you even remember? These folks can.
NYT article 4/12/09 Interesting article about the Dead on the eve of their tour. Bonus: link on the sidebar that shows reader photos. Find your friends. Or not.
Islam, modernity and democracy
Is the west thwarting Arab plans for reform? Few Muslims now invest much hope in the democratic western powers (essentially the US, Britain and France) that back the rulers who oppress them, even if, against the odds, they still admire “western” values, science and culture. There is no endemic or intrinsic conflict between Christians and Muslims. Rather, the root of the problem is that a majority of Muslims is convinced that the west – interested only in a stability based on regional strongmen, the security of Israel and cheap oil – is engaged in a war against Islam and is bent on denying them the freedoms it claims for itself. That is why it is so self-defeating to collude in tyranny as ostensibly a lesser evil than political Islam. [more inside]
Marjorie Glicksman Grene (1910-2009)
The philosopher Marjorie Grene died last month at the age of 98. Author of over 30 books, pioneer in the philosophy of biology and one of the first interpreters of existentialism, Grene was an iconoclastic thinker fondly remembered by many. Her contributions span the whole of philosophy, and her long career began with a bachelor's in zoology from Wellesley; from there she studied with Whitehead and C.I. Lewis at Harvard, with Jaspers and Heidegger in Germany in the 1930s, and alongside Carnap, Hempel, and Polyani in Chicago. Hence she was one of the few modern philosophers who was as conversant in existentialism as she was in logical positivism.
Warning, One Minute To Singularity
A Postgraduate Year at Rushmore Academy
Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style. A video essay in five parts by Matt Zoller Seitz. (Links go to the text of the essay; click on the embedded video to view.) [via]
Back Off, Haters
Youtube singing sensation Miranda branches out into music videos. Single Ladies, Genie in a Bottle, Dancing Queen. Want to sing like Miranda? Of course you do. Lucky for you, she gives singing lessons.
Nothing In My hands
Dick Cavett conjures up the great Slydini. Part 1., Part 2. "It was like seeing a man walk up a wall. Nothing prepared you for it. Right at the start, a solid, heavy silver dollar, held before my eyes, vanished into thinnest air. And by no method I knew of. Certainly no sleeves. The two hours flew too quickly."
Bradley Walker
Perhaps the greatest country baritone since George Jones is confined to a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy and has a day job at a nuclear power plant. [more inside]
Susan Boyle stuns them all on Britain's Got Talent
Susan Boyle, a big surprise on Britain's Got Talent . Miss Boyle astonished the judges at the auditions for ITV1 show with her rendition of I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables. [more inside]
DIE HARD: Dysfunctional cop saves marriage by murdering foreign national.
137 Uncomfortable Plot Summaries of a wide variety of movies, TV series and even a couple books, from varying points of view (whatever is the most uncomfortable). A treasure trove of pop culture redefinition.
Saving Sin City
Two Christian ministries, Hookers for Jesus and JC's Girls aim to "save" Las Vegas sex workers from their professions by introducing them to Christianity. [more inside]
scarygirl
Scarygirl. Flash platformer/adventure game with absolutely staggering production values and art. The intro sequence is awesome.
Government Comix--more exciting than it sounds...
After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more. [more inside]
Peanuts Roasted
Peanuts Roasted A blog devoted to going through all of Peanuts' 49-year-plus comic archives, from beginning to end, and linking to the more interesting strips.
[via mefi projects] [more inside]
The Case Against Eating Seeds.
Surgeons find fir tree growing inside patients lung. Of course, this isn't the first time objects have found their way into the human body. Nail in skull. Paintbrush in skull. Towel behind lung. Potato in Vagina.
The 10,000 Year Clock
Raise the boom and lower the load. Dog everything.
Hand signals are used to transmit instructions from a spotter on the ground to the crane operator high above. Here is a poster illustrating those hand signals, courtesy of the California Crane School. Feel free to post it at your job site, or to have any of the images tattooed onto your forearms.
To Know Him is To Love Him
Six Years after the murder of Lana Clarkson, Phil Spector has been found guilty. (previously) [more inside]
The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins
The holy grail of Sci-Fi weapons
We herd you like memes
Sociology papers online
Harvard Sociologist Robert Samson, known for his work challenging the Broken Window hypothesis (previously on Metafilter), has a number of publications on neighborhoods, race and immigration, crime, and spatial dynamics posted publicly online. Here are just a few recent publications (all pdfs):
*Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiences Meet Social Structure
*Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability of African American children
*Rethinking crime and immigration
*Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality
*"After School" Chicago: Space and the City
Napoleonic Wars at the European Library
To go, or not to go? that is the question;--/Whether 'tis better for my views to suffer/The ease and quiet of yon hated rival,/Or to take arms against the haughty people,/And by invading end them? The Napoleonic Wars, in word, image and map, at the European Library. [more inside]
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