Archives for October 2008

The Sarah Palin flash mob is a pretty great idea. (via.) Why? Because there are so many ways to play it: photoshopped Palin, moose huntin’ Palin, pageant Palin, debate Palin. All the other varieties are simple: a suit, a semi-beehive, glasses, and cheap-looking (preferably red) platform shoes. No one besides Madonna is that iconic in that many different looks.

Synesthesia in a bottle: Wode’s Boudicca fragrance is bottled in what looks like a high-end graffiti can. It appears on the body like blue paint, which disappears in minutes (I’m guessing they use some kind of disappearing ink forumula.) Interview with the designer at JCReport. The fragrance launched at Frieze Art Fair two weeks ago, and is now sold at Barney’s. The ad campaign plays into the crime scene fashion photography trend.

“How many of us are seduced by the notion that in a room full of people supporting Barack, maybe we’ll meet guys who are at least a bit like Barack himself. Thoughtful, charming, a bit gangly, yet possessing the grace of a gazelle (a gazelle you want to text message with late into the night). I imagine the straight guys out there who are attending phone bank parties are really hoping to meet their Michelles. Sure, they want to call long lists of swing state-based agoraphobics, but isn’t the perk the possibility that they might meet beautiful, fiercely intelligent women with super-adorable underbites while doing so?” - Jessi Klein. Related: this image.

The Economist reviews Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History starting with the anecdote on the curious habits of 19th century polymath Francis Galton, who would “estimated boredom levels by counting fidgets; in Africa he used a sextant and tape-measure to calculate the proportions of the buttocks of a “Hottentot” woman from afar. Galton also created a “beauty-map” marking every woman who passed as, “attractive, indifferent or repellent.” Davis’ book also discusses obsession as a creative tool, “And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity.”

BBC News Magazine on the architecture of shopping malls. Particularly interesting: how designers “integrate into the surroundings so a sense of place is part of what it is.” Also attempts at some resemblance with the natural world. Says another designer, “Most people would prefer to shop in the natural environment, but want convenience as well as not getting wet.” More on malls.

Avant-guard web archive UbuWeb is publishing work that could be considered “unpublishable” — “ranging from an 1018-page manuscript (unpublishable due to its length) to a volume of romantic high school poems written by a now-respected innovative poet.” Right now there are thirty-eight of what will be a series of 100 published on the web, the “perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure.” (via.) Previously.

I got my journal back! CJ the awesome bartender at The Middle East found it behind some stuff and emailed me. It’s been about two months and I was still not over it. Finally I have a proper place to put all my emoness pent up since it was missing.

Students of Baghdad University’s College of Fine Art were hired to paint Iraq’s many concrete blast walls (”Bremer walls“.) Great photo here. Slideshow from WSJ. Video. More.

Red meat for technology ephemera fetishists: LACMA has put online its 400 page catalog on a project pairing artists with science and technology programs: Art and Technology, Project 1967 - 1971. Found on if:book, who summarizes, “John Baldessari wanted to work in a botany lab coloring plants; George Brecht wanted IBM & Rand’s help to move the British Isles into the Mediterranean; Donald Judd seems to have wandered off in California. And some of the collaborations worked: Andy Warhol made holograms; Richard Serra worked with a steel foundry; and Jackson Mac Low worked with programmers from IBM to make concrete poetry, among many others.”

Interesting article here about graffiti artists annoyed with photographers using images of their tags and selling them. Typoe, a Miami-based artists mentions finding a photograph for sale for $3,000 that is little more than his wheat pasted poster on an abandoned building. “It’s one thing to take a picture of a big, abandoned building with a few tags,” he says. “But it’s another to take a photograph with a huge piece of graffiti in it. You can’t just do that and not give credit.”