The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
NANO Fiction, the bi-annual publication of flash-fiction/micro essay/ prose poems, was denied nonprofit 501(c)(3) status because the IRS deemed the journal pornography.
Three months prior to their nonprofit application, they published an issue featuring the photography of Traci Matlock and Ashley Maclean, which is definitively not porn, but did include sexual themes.
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Photographer/rambler Mikael Kennedy shares photos from the seventh volume of his over-a-decade-long project, Passport to Trespass:
Photographer Irina Werning recreates childhood photos.
They look like this and speak volumes about youth, adulthood, and all that’s in between:
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In the preface to Haunted Houses, photographer Corinne May Botz writes about seeing the ghosts of gypsies as a child: “I lay in bed stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking.”
“So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.”
At Guernica, an insightful article about the ruin-craze, especially the Detroit ruin craze.
...more“Sebald is brilliantly visual.
He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see.
Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the detail of so many things hitting the senses in a rain of fleeting simultaneous impressions, but the precise emotional shading and personal import of each of these moments.”
Photographer Rick Poynor offers a dazzling commentary on the “embedded images” in the late W.G.
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Now that It is over—now that the circus has come and gone, its glaring lights, its grips and its roadies; now that the visiting dignitaries have made their dignified departures and the newspapers have returned to publishing news
The week in New York Jonathan Ames has a Ball, Salman Rushdie reads, Paul Auster stays true to NYC, Ann Beattie compiles stories form The New Yorker, Patti Smith hosts a tribute for Jim Carroll, feel Refreshx3 at Happy Ending, John Baldessari holds this title of week’s MOVIE PICK, (Le) Poisson Rouge Gleeks out, and New Photography 2010 in ART.
This week in San Francisco: readings, readings, readings! Porchlight, Tenderloin #7, and Naked Minds will keep your craving for words at bay, Nato Green hosts Iron Comic at the Punchline, and Fifty24SF brings science-y new art to the Lower Haight with The Undivided Mind.
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In three different rooms on two coasts, artist Darren Almond is practicing visual alchemy.
One thing he does is take long exposures on full moons in ridiculously remote locations. Another thing he does is capture time itself. The still above comes from one of his two Sometimes Still projects currently showing at Matthew Marks in New York.
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Department of The Japanese are Better Than Us: polar bear clouds!
Also on the Asian whimsy front, in Thailand you can have food served to you by a samurai robot.
Gerry Canavan has kindly pointed us towards a rad MeFi post on the about to launch new spaceplane!
...moreThe tragedy of umbrella genocide.
If you should find yourself in Ahrensburg, Germany, perhaps you’d like to check out the Flour Art Museum.
Also, in the above situation, you’d probably be able to read the text that goes with these rad photos of bureaucracy around the world.
...moreSome fun news for you this President’s Day: 38 percent of the world’s surface is in danger of desertification!
The entire coast of California in aerial photographs.
I am only linking to this because it contains my favorite word.
Wayne Levin’s underwater photography is fully sweet.
...moreI was debating whether to link to Flavorwire’s write up on Roa’s Urban Zoo or their math-related pic of the day. But you know what, it’s Thursday so why not spoil you a little?
Being bored is going to kill you.
...moreThis is all very serious.
Everything in the world is going to be ok because this link is filled with tiny pandas.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is building a full-scale replica of their theatre and shipping it to New York.
...moreI really just want to use the phrase “acoustic wind pavilion.”
A look at a few of the 180,000 pictures from the Magnum photo archives.
Live feed of a Bald Eagle’s nest. (via MeFi.)
A look into the Swedish Pavilion at this year’s Shanghai World Expo (I heart world expos, or any expos really.)
David Blaine talks to TED about holding your breath.
...moreWhy yes, I DO like pictures of Dubai.
Pain Pack let’s you experience other’s emotional pain.
The ultimate graphic novel (in six panels).
Blue whales voices dropping.
What does your brain think is funny?
...moreC. D. Payne’s museum of oddities.
Some people live lives filled with beautiful Chinese tea house/spas. I am not one of these people.
New Scientist on our most likely next space location.
When someone sends you a link called “Axe Cop,” you put that link up.
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Margo Berdeshevsky’s work straddles the line between fiction and poetry. Her characters grieve, dream, punish themselves, and try to find harmony between who they are and who they might still be.Passport photos of famous artists. (via MeFi.)
Dinosaur comics reminds us that there are still reasons to be excited.
Here is that info on exciting new Chinese infrastructure architecture you were asking about.
Crazy-gorgeous-washed-out-Spanish-photography of the day.
The actual use of a 60 second earthquake warning system is questionable, but none the less.
...moreConceptual art we can get behind: the biggest disco ball the world has ever known.
No, we don’t speak German, but we do like these pictures by Keith Davis Young a lot.
A completely awesome (if highly impractical) bike-lane idea.
...moreSomething happened and Morning Coffee missed the schedule. We’re not sure why.
Ruben Brulat takes some pretty amazingly epic self-portaits.
Eight ways in-vitro meat will change our lives. (via MeFi.)
Evidently a new species of orchid was just accidentally discovered.
...moreFeelin’ kind of teenaged today.
Vintage Polish fashion magazine advertisements? Yes please.
Department of beautiful but terrifying implications: Dead tire graveyard.
Guardian UK on the unsure cause of Jane Austen’s demise.
Yesterday was the first day of December (spoiler alert!), and with it Big Picture has started their Hubble Space Telescope advent calendar.
...moreHave a good Thanksgiving, we’ll see you on Monday.
Famous missing body parts.
Alice’s copy of “Through the Looking Glass” is up for auction.
LA without traffic is a pretty unsettling thing.
What was once thought to be mineral deposits we now know to be beautiful cave excrement.
...moreJim Kazanjian’s aberrations.
We try to stay away from foreign language links as much as possible, but these x-rays of speech are pretty universally rad.
If your kid isn’t afraid of things they are going to stab you (or maybe just do a lot of petty theft, whatever).
...moreI don’t know if anyone has noticed this yet, but it is Autumn.
The bitter lapse into everyday life.
Wayne Levin’s haunting underwater photography.
How to convert old factory buildings into rad Spanish art musuems.
Impromtu musical from Improv Everywhere.
...moreMondays are good days for best ofs and photography (this is a fact, look it up).
Here are some birds eye view pictures and some taken through microscopes.
19th Century dust jackets.
The moral here is that it is a mistake to teach bears to ice skate.
...moreGiving blood doesn’t have to be boring, it can be terrifyingly futuristic too!
Death Drive looks at the last thing seen by nine of our cultural heroes.
...moreIn the time after, when industrial civilization is a bitter and too-slowly-fading memory, a memory of a nightmare too atrocious to be believed by those who were not alive in the time before and so did not experience it and its destructiveness, birds will begin to come back, and whip-poor-wills will sing, and bobwhites will sing, and murrelets will fly to oceans no longer being murdered and will return with their bellies full of fish to feed their young.
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I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.
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