In my advanced age I have lost the urge to venture far from my abode. Indeed, as far as the country of my birth is concerned I have yet to explore farther west than the Mississippi, choosing instead to traipse up, and occasionally down, the East Coast. Much of it has to do with climate, both in terms of weather and social temperament. Indoctrinated as I am to the curt, succinct interpersonal interaction of the Northeast, the lands to the west appear to my mind as a fetid morass where individuals languorously loiter on the street, holding court in a fashion that runs contrary to a matter of the utmost importance, i.e. arriving at my intended destination. I am in a rush people; I have no time for your greetings and salutations.
Yet, as of late, I have found myself looking towards California with something disturbingly not unlike longing. Last Saturday in Los Angeles, Coilhouse held a soiree for the launch of their magazine. Fortunately, my disappointment from missing that event was mitigated somewhat by the fact that I had, some time ago, fashioned cardboard standees of Zoe, Meredith, and Nadya. We had a wonderful evening. There was punch, chips, and three different kinds of dip. Don’t you judge me.
If that wasn’t bad enough only now I’m finding out that Dave McKean has had an exhibition at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery since July 19th, and it is ending this Saturday. Those of you who have chosen to settle in or near this fetid metropolis may want to check it out. I would utter a curse upon L.A. but that would be like kicking a two legged puppy; it has it bad enough without any assistance from me.
Photos taken during the construction of the the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border of Switzerland and France. The bowels of the facility are dazzling in their complexity and scale. This wire-rimmed sphincter is the “CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB)”.
Twelve years ago author and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson received a call from a man named Tony. Tony was interested in obtaining a copy of a documentary Ronson did about the Holocaust for his employer, whose name he did not wish to reveal. After some cajoling Ronson finally extracted the gentleman’s name. Turns out it was Stanley Kubrick.
That was the last Ronson heard until a few years after the legendary director’s death when Tony called and asked if he would like to come poke around Kubrick’s mansion. What Ronson found there was a cinemaphile’s wet dream: thousands of boxes containing thousands of meticulously organized photos, memos, and letters, years of Kubrick’s career minutely categorized and filed. Ronson would spend five years sifting through them before they were carted off to their new home at the University of the Arts London.
Any claims I might make to possessing a natural predisposition to surfing are belied by my pale complexion and, at times, questionable equilibrium. This is probably for the best, as I have celebrated Shark Week long enough to know that those sea-bound carnivores despise the hobby; the wave enthusiasts perturbing them to the point that they oftentimes resort to physical intervention.
There are no sharks in the oceans of photographers Steve Gorrow and Dustin Humphrey. No, in their series for Dopamine — an art installation sponsored by Intrepid51 — the world beneath a surfer’s board is occupied by nude women astride motorcycles, submerged shanty-towns, and strange, Dr. Seuss inspired automobiles; and in contrast to our own, it appears to be a world blissfully unaware of the wave riders skimming the surface above their heads.
Be careful where you click if exposed, female breasts are frowned upon in your workplace.
Last month the world was astounded by photographs, taken in the Amazon, showing one of the last tribes of uncontacted indigenous people, according to reports at the time. News agencies were quickly setting their presses ablaze with the news, the Casually Racist Victorian Antiquarian Times running the headline “Tribe Of Savages, Unconverted And Unsullied, Found: Fear Of Flying Machine Proves The Need For Our Intervention”.
At least that’s the kind of headline one would expect to have read considering the current reaction to the revelation that, far from lost, the tribe’s existence had been known about since 1910, and that the photographer, one José Carlos Meirelles — working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency — deliberately flew out to terrify them with his flying, mechanical dragon photograph them to lend credence to the thinking that the “policy of no contact and protection was working.”
The outrage over this seems to me to be, perhaps, misplaced. I could find few articles from major news agencies claiming that a lost tribe had been discovered. An MSN article even quotes Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, head of the Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), as saying
We have been watching this isolated indigenous community for at least 20 years. The idea in revealing the photos was to raise the alarm over the risk threatening them.
Anthropologists have known about the group for some 20 years but released the images now to call attention to fast-encroaching development near the Indians’ home in the dense jungles near Peru.
So, yes, 20 years is not the same as the now revealed 98, however, the fact still remains that the Brazillian government knew of this tribe and did not claim to have just discovered them at the time the photos were taken. There also seems to be some anger over the fact that by flying over this village and photographing them, Meirelles has in fact contacted them in the process. This I can understand, but I have a feeling that, having been recorded as early as 1910, chances are they have been contacted previously, though most likely sans airplane. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why people are so up in arms about this?
Some cells have mattresses, others blankets, still others bare floors. None that we had seen (and we found these cells in each institution visited) had either a bed, a washstand, or a toilet. What we did find in one cell was a thirteen or fourteen year old boy, nude, in a corner of a starkly bare room, lying on his own urine and feces. The boy had been in solitary confinement for several days for committing a minor institutional infraction.
In December, 1965 Dr. Burton Blatt and his friend Fred Kaplan, a photographer, visited “five state institutions for the mentally retarded”. Kaplan was armed with a small camera attached to his belt, which he used to surreptitiously take photographs during their tours. The finished photo essay, which they titled “Christmas in Purgatory: A Photographic Essay On Mental Retardation”, is a harrowing catalog of loneliness and despair; the reader being saved from its crushing weight only by its last collection of photos from The Seaside, an institution in Connecticut, whose program is cited here as an example of proper, institutional care. The entire book can be viewed at the link below, as well as hundreds of others chronicling the history of mental and physical disabilities.
A diving suit, created by the brothers Carmagnolle (Alphonse and Theodore) in 1882 and most certainly the inspiration for the iconic, lumbering Big Daddies from Ectomo favorite, Bioshock. The distinguishing feature being the helmet, which is pock-marked with 20 portholes. This massive underwater suit of armor weighs in at a staggering 837 pounds and was presumably never put into service. The sole example is found on display at the Naval Museum in Paris.
BLU’s Muto: animation on a public wall. Beautiful surely, but I couldn’t help but think about all the artwork he covered up to make it (I know, it’s a public wall, it comes with the territory.) Thanks to Ry-Tron and everyone else who sent this in!
Don’t you fucking dare post knitting patterns for Dr. Who characters. So sayeth the BBC, though most likely it was worded in a far more politely threatening manner filled with words contain superfluous “u”s. Thanks, August Moon!
Korean photographer Yeondoo Jung’s series that recreates scenes found in children’s drawings. Some are funny, some fantastical, and some are simply surreal but all of them are beautiful. If these are indeed based on actual drawings by children, one wonders how close the photos came to the original scenes envisioned in each child’s mind. Two more after the jump.
Note: The artist’s site seems to not be responding due to a traffic overload.
Update: The site seems to be up and running again. Make sure to check it out for some photos not found in the other links below.
For cephalophiles — those of us for whom the stray flickering of a sinuous tentacle across the screen is mirrored by a ghostly tentacle tugging in our laps — this composite by Rachel Blaser, simply titled “Octopus” is enough to blow out our accumbens nucleus like an egg tossed into the microwave. And for the rest of you, it should still be breath-taking.
There’s some mysterious story being told here, though I’m not sure what. Octopuses do not usually lissomely recline on outcroppings of rock. Is it a photograph of an octopus scooped up by a deep-sea tornado and deposited on some Himalayan mountain-top? Or does it reveal a strange parallel in evolution on some harsh alien world, as a silicon-based royal octopus regally bathes in mists of sulfuric acid, dreaming of worlds and Asiatic vaginas to conquer.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
