My very good friend Kelly McKay’s fashion magazine Swoon is launching its latest issue, a split publication devoted to the New York and Los Angeles music scenes. Issue five, arriving immanently, is available for pre-order?
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Over the weekend I saw a talk by Canadian cartoonist Seth, whose work I’d heard about for a long time but hadn’t gotten around to actually reading. His stuff is great?
Maybe we should add a new “WTF?” category:
NASA started to beam the song towards the North Star, 431 light years from Earth at midnight GMT on Monday, drawing congratulations from former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, who mused that it marked “the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”
But today’s New Scientist asks whether such signals could expose us to the risk of attack from mean spirited aliens.
Beatles space broadcast ‘risks alien attack’
Thank you Mister Mark Jordan of London, England!
Impressive stop motion video with plasticine by samuelle3. Samuelle3 explains borrachos, ” Stop-motion animation tribute to Oskar Fishinger. Using black plasticine, paper and wire over a precarious light-box and my tripod fixed to the wall.”
Totally worth checking out!
Etsy user darkvomit sells original oil paintings, kinetic art and Christmas card sets. From his listing:
“The Pope of Trash” by Kelly Hutchison (aka “Dark Vomit”). Original oil painting… Gesso…Painted… then varnished on wood panel. Measures 26 inches by 31 inches with the gold frame (frame comes with purchase) Ready to hang on the wall as is. Signed and dated by artist.
One of my more interesting vacations involved a weekend in Palm Desert with Thomas Pynchon‘s just-released Mason & Dixon. Fueled by coffee, date shakes and excitement, I plowed through that book’s 773 pages in 3 days, and emerged from it shaken…dazzled…moved. Yep, moved. What seems to get lost in the shuffle when those of us who still talk about Pynchon talk about Pynchon is how gracefully he can knit together a moment of Maximum Emotional Devastation. I’m thinking now of Mason receiving comfort from his estranged son in the wake of Dixon’s death, or Zoyd Wheeler’s understanding that after so many wrong turns in life, in coming to Vineland, he was finally, FINALLY, guiding his family somewhere right—and good. I could go on and on, and probably will, when next Tuesday sees the release of Pynchon’s seventh book, Inherent Vice. The early reviews are in, and they do look promising—especially if you’ve been waiting for a Pynchonian take on Raymond Chandler set in the very beach towns where he presumably composed Gravity’s Rainbow.
And if you’re interested in that book’s construction, you might want to check out
A Journey Into The Mind Of [p]. The more interesting parts of Fosco Dubini’s (!) documentary trace Pynchon’s footsteps all the way to the apartment he was living and writing in. The least interesting parts revolve around the chase for the man himself.
I mean, we (old fans) all know what he looks like by now, don’t we?!
Louis Menand on Inherent Vice in The New Yorker
Tim Martin on Inherent Vice in The Telegraph
Oh, and big FYI: the Inherent Vice wiki goes live next Tuesday morning!
The August issue of Vogue takes us inside the Manhattan duplex of noted photographer and conceptual artist, Cindy Sherman. Along with the usual niceties—Kippenberger sculptures, a Prada-stuffed closet—we’re likely to find, what else, “wigs, mannequin heads and fake body parts, toys and novelties, masks, insects, and racks and racks of thrift-store clothing.” For Sherman, there is, perhaps, no more loaded a notion than playing dress-up. But for a lighter look at how she resolves gender “construction,” here’s her short film from ‘75, Doll Clothes:
No, this item did not come from News of the Weird… and no, that furry character above is not an extra from “Willy Wonka” either…
The compound Brilliant Blue G blocks a chemical that kills healthy spinal cord cells around the damaged area - an event that often causes more irreversible damage than the original injury.
BBG not only reduced the size of the lesion but also improved the recovery of motor skills, the rodent tests showed.
Those treated with BBG were later able to walk, although with a limp. Rats that did not receive the BBG solution never regained the ability to walk.
On the downside, the treatment causes the skin to temporarily turn bright blue and BBG needs to be injected soon after the trauma. The test injections were given within 15 minutes.
Director David Lynch worked up a number of images in his patented surrealistic style for a book to accompany the new album by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse (featuring an A-list team of additional collaborators like The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega, Frank Black, James Mercer (The Shins), and Julian Casablancas).
But there’s a bit of a catch: the limited edition packaging for the album comes with no music. That’s right, all you get is a blank CD with the message “For Legal Reasons enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will” stamped across it. The reason for this is that EMI would sue Danger Mouse were he to release the CD properly (he’s been in this situation before, obviously, with “The Grey Album”).
The idea, if you haven’t figured it out already, is to download the music wherever you might find it (I just found nearly 5000 results leading you right to it on the various torrent trackers) to burn to the enclosed blank CD.
Our friends at Dazed and Confused spoke to Lynch about the collaboration:
Dazed: Do you approach painting and photography in the same way as you would creating a scene for one of your films?
David Lynch: Yeah, exactly. If an idea comes for furniture, you will see a table in your brain. You will see what it’s made of and the shape of it, and if that idea is something you love, then you go into the wood shop and start making that table. If you get an idea for a painting and you’re all fired up about it then you go right into the painting studio and start working on those. Making a film is just a longer process, but when you’re in love you don’t care how long it takes to make something.
Dark Night of the Soul official website
