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- School of Seven Bells opened for M83 last night. They are wonderful! (Music: Half Asleep, Connjur, I am under no disguise)
- Photographer Ben Westwood (Vivienne Westwood's son) on how his craft "becomes the background, like wallpaper" (via.)
- Street with a view: "May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more." (via.)
- "Anyone who has played D&D has spent a lot of time talking about race – 'Racial Attributes,' 'Racial Restrictions,' 'Racial Bonuses.' Everyone knows that different races don’t get along – thanks to Tolkien, Dwarves and Elves tend to distrust each other, and even non-gamers know that Orcs and Goblins are, by their very nature, evil creatures. Race is one of the most important aspects of any fantasy role-playing game, and the belief that there are certain inherent genetic and social distinctions between different races is built into every level of most (if not all) Fantasy Role-Playing Game" - Race in Dungeons and Dragons. (via.)
- Porter Square's Spark Craft Studios is handing over their small business to the winner of an essay contest. Says the crafting boutique/instruction studio: "The winner will receive the contents of the store at the time of the transfer, including store fixtures and furnishings, exterior signage, the point-of-sale system, a modest inventory, and the website. Please note: We believe the store requires an infusion of capital for additional inventory to be successful."
- Taro Okamoto's Asu no Shinwa ("Myth of Tomorrow") depicting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, finally has a permanent home near the Keio Inokashira line in the Shibuya station. The painting, compared to Picasso's Guernica, was originally commissioned by a Mexico City luxury hotel in late sixties. "Taro wanted the Japanese to surmount the misery of the past rather than to retract inwardly — to blossom outward and look ahead. That was a radical concept in 1967. He was probably the only Japanese person who even considered that," says the developer Manuel Suarez. Asu no Shinwa was missing for decades, "until it was found in 2003 by Okamoto’s wife in a yard for building materials in Mexico City."
- One of the mystery photos in LOC's crowdsourcing Flickr experiment turned out to be my hometown back in the 1940s: "Sylvia Sweets Tea Room" in Brockton, Massachusetts. The daughter of the late owners of the restaurant left a comment on the photo giving further background. It makes me somewhat sad to read the comments ("me god such a lovely place !!!") because I never knew the city this way. Home of the first department-store Santa Claus. The city's big industry -- shoes -- was nonexistent by 1970. Although boxing is still a big deal there and I hear great things about The Fuller Craft Museum (still one of my favorite buildings.) And like any post-industrial town, there are attempts to coax the creative class into "loft condos." Now Brockton is a place for those who "like hearing gun shots and 5 year old kids cussin worse than most adults and seeing creak heads walking around all day." LOC has a number of Norman Rockwell Brockton snapshots. But so much has changed.
- "You know the aesthetic: Put-upon ironist is exhausted by the puffery of an irksome world and decides to take it down a few pegs using nothing but razor sharp wit, lots of “I” statements, and the Oxford Dictionary of Allusions" - Ezra Klein. "Having not made an argument, it can’t reach a conclusion. If your premise is 'I hate bricklayers,' then expending 800 words to decide that 'I still hate bricklayers' does not signal to your reader that the journey has been a worthy enterprise." See also: Alex Pareene's 'Slate' Continues to Out-Slate Self.
- Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies department, is leaving next year to be a Provost Professor at the University of Southern California. According to a current grad student in CMS, the school is "freezing admissions for next year, and will in all likelihood end its graduate program." Their lecture series is one of the highlights of living in Boston. Check out the podcasts.
- Scaffolding around an architectural masterpiece is one thing, but what about a giant ad for the Quantum of Solace? For the first time in history, the Grand Canal and St Mark’s Square are displaying huge advertisements. (via.) "The law allows the scaffolding on public buildings under restoration to carry advertising so long as the superintendent considers that it does not “detract from the appearance, decorum or public enjoyment of the building”. While the existing ads in Venice have aroused local and international protest, Venice superintendent Renata Codello insists that she has been very discriminating: 'I have turned down masses of proposals, including one with the entire Italian football team dressed only in their shorts,' she told the Association of Private Committees for Venice last month."
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