A snippet from NPR’s “A Eulogy For The Boombox”:
Before there were iPods, or even CDs, and around the time cassettes let break dancers move the party to a cardboard dance floor on the sidewalk, there were boomboxes. It’s been 20 years since the devices disappeared from the streets. It’s high time to press rewind on this aspect of America’s musical history.
Back in the day, you could take your music with you and play it loud, even if people didn’t want to hear it. 150 decibels of power-packed bass blasted out on street corners from New York City to Topeka. Starting in the mid-‘70s, boomboxes were available everywhere, and they weren’t too expensive. Young inner-city kids lugged them around, and kids in the suburbs kept them in their cars.
They weren’t just portable tape players with the speakers built in. You could record off the radio, and most had double cassette decks, so if you were walking down the street and you heard something you liked, you could go up to the kid and ask to dub a copy.
They were called boomboxes, or ghetto blasters. But to most of the young kids in New York City, they were just a box.
Read more of A Eulogy For The Boombox by Frannie Kelley
(via Nerdcore)
Crazy cool animated fashion gifs created by Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader for Spiral Mag.
Reed + Rader
(via Today and Tomorrow)
Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but I found Your Scene Sucks rather amusing. From the website:
everyone seems to be involved in some sort of strange contest where the winner wears the tightest jeans, puts on the silliest looking makeup, and sports the worst haircut. in the end, everyone loses. you all end up looking the same.
referring to the kids involved with today’s music scene, my good friend dave mcwane once said, “it’s not a fucking fashion show.” truer words have never been spoken.
(via Lost at E Minor)
Artist Ran Hwang creates these giant wall installations by using a gazillion buttons and hammering pins. Ran Hwang says:
My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work. This is a form of meditative practice that helps me to find inner peace. Typical materials related to the fashion industry are used to create conceptual icons such as Buddha or traditional vase. Works are divided into two groups.
For the first type of work, pins are used to hold the buttons onto the surface to form silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so that buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency tobe irresolute. I use buttons, because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings. The second group of work consists of connecting a massive number of pins with yards of thread to occupy a negative space of the presented image. Here, threads serve as metaphor for connection and communication between unlinked human relations. Fulfilled negative space and absence of the image formed by positive space suggests deeper understanding of the image. I believe mortal essence in the heart of self recognition.
(via Dude Craft)
Momus offers a style and lifestyle guide to the next decade. Just about everything on here seems spot on.
A new decade is a time in which to declare “everything you know is wrong”. A fresh decade is a time to jettison secure old knowledge and grope around for new. Since a new decade is just around the corner, let’s start groping now.
Forget the places you’ve been going on holiday, and go on holiday instead to Beirut.
Do not expect to learn about the world through journalists.
Any Obama backlash will simply help usher in someone worse. Skip it.
Your mother holds a key piece of information, essential to your happiness. All you have to do is ask her the right question.
This image, found via Ectoplasmosis, should properly excite the Masonic conspirators over at Boing Boing.
Feature Shoot says:
Francesco Giusti lives and works in Rome, Italy. He recently won 1st Prize in the Viewbook Photostory competition for his documentary series, SAPE. Of this series, he says, ?
Hilarious article from GOOD Magazine on people and their dog-obsession:
Kids chase fewer squirrels and postal workers than dogs, but the way we pamper our poodles and great danes and mutts has a lot in common with how we treat our toddlers and teens.
Though I try not to over-kid-ify my canine, the bounds of sane dog owner behavior are blurry. I frequently arrange playdates for my rat terrier Monkey, and, I hate to admit, once shoved him into a Dracula costume and took him to a dog party, which included dog cake, dog champagne, and a doggie masseuse (who terrified my pooch?
Flickr user, EYE-talian, has a wonderful photostream of hundreds of masks collected from around the world. EYE-talian says, “I’ve been collecting masks since 1989 when I first purchased a mask in Cancun, Mexico. I was intrigued by the weird hallucinogenic Mexican masks because they looked similar to the oddball sketches I was doing at the time.
On subsequent visits I purchased additional masks, usually buying the most unusual masks I could find and/or what my budget and baggage limits would allow. In the meantime, I stumbled upon some very cool German paper mache, and starched buckram Halloween masks at antique shows around Cincinnati and picked those up as well. I never had any intention of amassing a formal “collection” but one thing lead to another and then…. Holy Shit… Ebay!
Besides Ebay, a few of the masks were given to me by fellow collectors and a handful were purchased at local import shops. Yes I have way too many, and unfortunately don’t have room to display them all. I began taking photos of them a few years ago as a record of what I had, and eventually ran across Flickr and decided to post them there.”
Visit Eye-talian’s The Maskatorium
EYE-talian ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO USE AUTHORIZED WITHOUT PERMISSION.
