Two Zoos

Flarf on NPR

2009-01-29T00:34:00.001-05:00

LOC Classification Game UPDATE

2009-01-28T02:00:00.002-05:00

Recent News: That tasty librarian is now me!

Bailout & Animaltronix, a Zoo News Double Dip

2009-01-28T01:27:00.006-05:00

Two Zoo News articles of interest today:

First, Congress calls zoos and aquariums with golf courses, swimming pools and casinos, calling them less than "highest quality". Hopefully, bear hockey is still well-funded.

Secondly, there's talk of trouble brewing around the idea of animatronic/virtual animals replacing the "real deal" in zoo pens. I'm no expert, but cybernetic half-animals with huge computer-brains can only lead to Trouble. I'm still scarred from the robotic allosaurus I saw at the Dallas Museum 15 years ago. I can only assume they have become MORE terrifying.

ALSO:

Good wigs, Uncle Mo!

(Thanks Ari, Jess, & LT!)

Want a CLASSY New Career?

2008-03-17T12:19:00.002-04:00

Job posting on NYFA:

Wildlife Sculptor
Museum of Sex
(New York NY)
The Museum of Sex is seeking a visual artist with experience creating large-scale sculptures. Sculptures will be used in an upcoming exhibit on animal sexual behavior.

We are assembling a team of scientific advisors to guide content, and are excited to produce both an educational and entertaining exhibition. We are interested in creating models of animals in mating positions to serve as educational diagrammatic tools as well as visually stunning artistic pieces. We are looking for a highly skilled artist to produce anatomically accurate life-size sculptures.

We are specifically interested in producing sculptures of the following animals: Pandas, Bonobos, Deer and Amazon River Dolphins. The ideal candidate will have experience creating sculptures of wildlife, and a familiarity with anatomy. It is essential that the artist create work of high quality in a time-efficient manner. There will be a firm deadline for the completion of the pieces.

Please send a resume, artist bio and three photos of your work to: sjacobs@museusmofsex.com for review.

Biozones

2008-02-26T15:13:00.005-05:00

Cool post (with good pictures) about the design of the new zoo in Vincennes, France on BLDGBLOG. I totally agree with Geoff Manaugh:

And I have to say that the renderings of this place look pretty cool. But why do we only build zoos like this? Why not suburbs or college campuses? You mold landforms out of reinforced concrete, and you install artificial waterfalls and fake rivers, and you grow rare orchids under the cover of geodesic domes. And then your grandkids can grow up in a savannah-themed suburb outside Orlando. The next town over, kids run around through giant fern trees, chasing parrots. Perhaps themed biozones are the future of suburban design?

Rereading BLDGBLOG, I realized how much I like the tone in which everything is written. It feels as if any moment now, at least within ten years, we could start reengineering the entire planet - both our built space and the natural terrain. It's tastes like sci-fi utopia, but with the illusion of being grounded less outlandish "facts" and a sense of design. I.E.: let's use this science I just found to make the world fun and pretty - fuck everything else, what could be more important?

Gondry SWEDES Amanda

2008-02-25T23:23:00.003-05:00

BREAKING NEWS:

Thanks Martha!

Huge Happy Healthy, Hide Home Hollow

2008-02-25T11:25:00.004-05:00

Entire post stolen from my anonymous teacher friend:

In humanities class I taught a "craft lesson" on writing good titles for nonfiction reports. The three strategies we discussed were using alliteration, surprising the reader, and using humor. They each had to rewrite a series of "boring" nonfiction titles using one of the new strategies. Then they tried all three strategies out on their own research topic and came up with a new title for their report.

Jorge

Clearly he has a flair for drama...

The Death Penalty --> The Death Penalty of Innocent People
Endangered Animals --> Humans Endangered Them
Owl Eyesight --> Owls: Eyesight of the Future

He thought this was an awesome-sounding titles and refused to recognize that it completely misrepresents the topic...

How to Get Into College --> How to Get Into Collage Where Their Is Hot Girls

Having a good imagination means that sometimes your grip on reality is a little tenuous...

Pit Bulls --> Pit Bulls to Weirwolf

Your sense of humor is a little quirky...

Helpful Owls --> Owls On the Hunt: For Rats
Helpful Owls --> We Want Owls! When Do We Wanet? Now! Do You Know Why?

And sometimes being funny is more appealing than being kind...

Hurricanes --> The Hurricane Was Fun to Ride

But ultimately you can rein yourself in and come up with a cool title on your own...

Helpful Owls --> Owls Do Us A Favor

Elizabeth

A sampling of her "new titles" shows how utterly out to sea she was with this assignment...

Hurricanes --> Is Bad to Kill People
How to Get Into College --> By Passing Your Grade

She used a dictionary to help write alliterative alternatives to her current title...

Where They [owls] Live --> Huge Happy Healthy

Habitat --> Hide Home Hollow

Her attempt at a funny title is similarly surprising...

Where They Live --> Don't Read The Black Book

Hmm.

Raquel

Flirting with humor...

Owl Hunting --> Owls Vomit Rat Hamburgers

But soon back to being poetic...

Owl Hunting --> The Hunting Night

Kassandra

Adding exclamation marks can mask any creative difficulty!!!!!

Adaptation --> Adaptations Owls Have!
Owls --> Owls...They Are Special!

It instantly renders any title surprising!

Owls Help Us --> Owls Help Us!

What's the point of brainstorming when you've already hit upon the ideal?

My final title is Adaptations Owls Have!

Juan

He clearly values the element of surprise...

The Death Penalty --> People That Are Being Killed By The Government
Hurricanes --> Is Big and Is Coming.

And has a beguiling way of hooking his audience...

How to Get Into College --> How To Move To A Higher Level

After much searching in the dictionary, two perfectly alliterated but ill-advised titles...

Owl Habitat --> Hood Habitat
Owl Habitat --> HipHop Home

Eric C.

Eric's contribution to the nonfiction genre...

The Death Penalty --> Bad Chocies Ends You Up With A Bulliet On Your Face

(Why Don't We Know Any Wood Owl? photo added by Two Zoos.)

Refreshing, Chiliastic, and Chill-tastic

2008-02-19T01:32:00.003-05:00

Rainbow Dividers. Just keep refreshing.

Two Zoo Art Menagerie, No. 3: The Proper Animal

2008-02-18T13:11:00.004-05:00

The Black & White gallery in Chelsea will be showing a three-part program called The Proper Animal this Spring. While I'm not exactly convinced on the quality of the work, I feel that it is my zoo-journalistic duty to inform you, the zoo-enthusiast public, of this possibly zoo-tastic event. The first of three parts looks really dumb, so we'll skip it. Here, in order, are the later 2/3 of the program:

Tamara Kostianovsky: "Actus Reus"
@ Black & White, 4/17 – 5/24

"In her solo debut exhibition, Tamara Kostianovsky extends the cold human gaze to killing. Methodically dissected beef carcasses made out of discarded human clothes are both ethically and aesthetically disturbing. The intense reality of the opened body cannot stop the humans from looking at the killed animal. The looker is not the killer, and some of the power in the relationship therefore lies with the looked-at thing, dead though it is."

Julian Montague: "To Know The Spiders"
@ Black & White, 6/5 – 7/12

"Julian Montague continues his investigations into overlooked realms of daily life. In his highly acclaimed Stray Shopping Cart Identification Project exhibited at the gallery in the fall of 2006, his method was to build a system of classification around a mundane object. In To Know the Spiders, Montague mounts a visual exploration of seemingly mundane animals – the spiders that occupy the peripheries of human architectural space. His process begins with the collection and killing of a spider. He then studies its face under a microscope and from the resulting drawings creates a portrait of the spider in the form of a fabric banner. The banner is then placed and photographed in the exact spot of collection. The banner illuminates the presence of a silent witness and sometime symbiotic partner while also serving as a memorial to the spider that had to die for that understanding to be gained."

The Stray Shopping Cart Identification Project website is kind of fun, too.

More Gondry

2008-02-08T09:25:00.000-05:00

Be Kind Rewind just keeps looking more and more "zero cool". I suggest you rewatch the original trailer to refresh your memory before you watch the Michel Gondry sweded version above. And then watch the sweded version. And then the original. Keep switching back and forth until everything seems just a little bit more real and a little bit more empty.

Also, previous post, fyi.

Thanks Anthony!

Youtopia, Metopia, Ourtopia

2008-02-01T10:23:00.000-05:00

You really have to trust me and wait this video out.

At first it just seems silly and mildly lame. I was just sort of absent-mindedly watching it. But then about halfway through I started getting really excited about the world-altering products of tomorrow (that we can have today!). By the end of the video I was ready to float out of my chair and into a safe, pain-free Land of Cockaygne. Sort of like the end of 2001, but flying directly from my kitchen/couch, out through the roof, and into the other realm.

Via The Triumph of Bullshit.

Chimp Art

2008-01-30T13:26:00.001-05:00

Speaking of art and apes, Chimp Art on NYTimes.

Dr. Frederick Soroka, a local chiropractor, said he would happily provide periodic adjustments to the young artists. Ms. Allen said a pilot had offered to take her chimps up in his plane; he suggested that it might help their art, she said.

"The Wondrous Union of Brute Face with Human Expression"

2008-01-29T17:21:00.000-05:00

Tantalizing post about Hermann Ploucquet on Ravishing Beasts:

Truly, Ploucquet had delighted English audiences with his novel creations: “nothing can be more genuine than the admiration, or more hearty than the laughter, with which the civilised animals are greeted. Ploucquet’s most popular were a series of six tableaux illustrating the German fable Reinecke the Fox based on Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s etchings of Goethe’s version of the medieval trickster tale. Reminiscing several decades after the Exhibition, J. A. Froude noted that the appeal of Ploucquet’s vision of Reineke was sufficient to incite a craze for the neglected fable: "Everybody began to talk of Reineke."

Link.

Two Zoo Art Menagerie, No. 2: Shape of the Ape

2008-01-29T16:24:00.000-05:00

Klaus Weber: "Shape of the Ape"
@ Andrew Kreps

"The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Klaus Weber's Shape of the Ape, the artist's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

"The exhibition features a singular installation, shown for the first time, consisting of over 30 figurines culled from E-bay, perched atop fragile glass pedestals. The figurines are all versions of the same sculpture: an ape sitting on a stack of books pondering a human skull. And at the center is a large, cast iron version of this well-known statuette - but its body is fragmented, or broken with its head and arms scattered on the floor.

"The figurine was originally created by a German artist in the late nineteenth century, and its subsequent appearance in various and bizarre scenarios intertwines capitalism, communism and fascism. A copy of the figurine was given to Lenin by an American businessman who hoped to do business with the Russian government. Although the entrepreneurial overture was rebuffed, Lenin nonetheless kept the figurine and displayed it prominently on his desk. And later after World War II a Nazi plane that had been shot down and sunk in an Austrian lake, and rumored to be loaded with gold and secret documents, was found instead to contain one of these same figurines.

"The statuettes refer to the dialectic of what separates man and ape, or nature vs. culture, and the sheer number of the figures in the show call into question issues, not of original vs. copy, but of repetition and difference. And the fragmented ape at the core of the show deconstructs the hierarchy of man and animal - the human skull could replace the apes - and vice-versa.

"Klaus Weber has shown extensively in both Europe and the United Sates. He recently had a solo show at Herald St. and the Hayward Gallery in London, as well as the Kunstverein in Hamburg and will have a solo exhibit at the Secession in Vienna in 2008. He has participated in group shows such as Ecstasy: In and about Altered States, The Geffen Contemporary Art MOCA, Los Angeles and at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Andrew Kreps.

Note: "Two Zoo Art Menagerie" is a new feature within the Two Zoos compuverse, highlighting twozooesque shows on view in The City right now.

Two Zoo Art Menagerie, No. 1: Skipping the Page

2008-01-29T15:58:00.001-05:00

Skipping the Page
@ The Center for Book Arts

"Skipping the Page takes as its starting point the idea of tempo as it relates to the printed page, for a group show that touches on several different artistic disciplines beyond the traditional understanding of book arts. In doing so it invites us to consider the technology of the book as a device to depict and respond to the passing of time, within a cultural moment when other technologies are more often foregrounded as appropriate to the task.

"All of the art works in Skipping the Page invoke an idea of rhythm, of mean tempo - in many cases invoking that rhythm only to compromise it with acts of ambiguity, failure, culture jamming, disruption, acceleration and deceleration from an expected tempo of an action or process. The works in Skipping the Page then, are varied in form but united in exploring the uneven rhythms of the passage of time. As Henri Lefebvre noted in "Rhythmanalysis", rhythm is revealed as much in its disruption as in its sustained presence and many of the works in the show celebrate and contest this unevenness - or deliberately create situations where it might arise. And at a cultural moment where a war can be supported or disputed partly based on whether the events of a single day marked either a moment of Nietzschean rupture or acceleration of an ongoing globalizing process (with all the attendant political and ethical consequences for either reading), Skipping the Page is a modest suggestion that now is an appropriate time to begin revisiting some ideas around tempo, velocity, acceleration etc. that dominated parts of critical thinking in the 1990's but have somewhat (been) disappeared from the landscape since.

"Artists include Michael Baers, Svetlana Boym, Beth Campbell, Julie Chen/Barbara Tetenbaum, Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Neil Goldberg, Karen Hanmer, Ryan Holmberg, Vlatka Horvat, Sam Lewitt, Marie Lorenz, Richard McGuire, Trong Nguyen, Leah Oates, Mark Orange, Garrett Ricardi, Marco Roso, Seth Price, Lan Tuazon, Uwasa, Chris Ware, and 432a (Nami Matsuo & Lars Niki).

The Center for Book Arts.

Note: "Two Zoo Art Menagerie" is a new feature within the Two Zoos compuverse, highlighting twozooesque shows on view in The City right now.

UPDATE (2/18): I went, and it was stupid. Oooops.

"Tommy Books and Leprechaun"

2008-01-18T14:40:00.000-05:00

How the Strand gets its books, from NYTimes:

Around lunchtime, Neil Harrison, another regular who’s lived mostly on the street, showed up with a stash of leather-bound 19th-century books, their marbleized covers aswirl with greens and blues. He said that a building superintendent had allowed him to clear out a storage area used by a man who had died whose family did not want the books. Mr. Harrison didn’t know the authors — Thackeray, Gibbon — but he knew enough to know that the books had value.
Sure enough, the books went straight to the third floor, where book preservationists would clean them up and eventually offer them for sale. “Six hundred,” Mr. Winokur told him (he thought the store could sell the Thackeray volumes for between $1,000 and $1,500). When he heard the number, Mr. Harrison crossed himself, then whooped. He peeled off a $20 to give a clerk as a tip; he left and came back five minutes later to hand Mr. Winokur $20, paying back some money he’d borrowed from the store the week before.

LOC Classification Game

2008-01-18T01:40:00.000-05:00

Why get a degree in Library Science when you can sort books for free on the internet?

Yay! Reminds me of the many poorly paid hours I spent at the Watson Research Library secretly reading magazines behind book-carts instead of doing my job. . .

And look at that tasty librarian/ghostbuster I found on zoogle!

Via The Triumph of Bullshit.

Belated Elephant Christmas

2008-01-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

The Secret of the Man-Ape

2008-01-09T15:17:00.000-05:00

In lieu of a "real post":

Carl: check out number 23

me: fuck

its hard to describe my reaction

the cover is so calm

that it doesnt really 'blow my mind'

it makes me feel like i dont understand something

Carl: i know

me: as if this should somehow make sense

why three books about sailing?

why does he have a gun?

Carl: i guess he can't get a library card

me: his ferocious expression and her terrified look don't really fit his calm thought bubble

Carl: i think that tension is where the image derives its strange power

me: also: "language-master of space" ??!!

Carl: i found this on ffffound.com

its a good blog

me: this whole cover is like a new frontier of crazy shit: totally calm, straight-faced crazy shit with no bells and whistles

oh shit!

Carl: the artwork contributes to that also

me: the cover next to it so good too

what a calm thought in the face of death!

and he's still drawing!

the "WOW!" is such an understatement

Carl: and i love the implication that he usually draws monsters that he can maybe, sorta beleive might exist, but this one is just too crazy

me: and "not even I"

because he is known for his ability to believe easily

big, red italic "i"

becasue THAT is the most important part of the statement

good work Carl

"Hobbes's Existence Was Never a Puzzle to be Solved"

2008-01-08T02:36:00.000-05:00

Important lines of scientific inquiry are being unspooled at the Calvin and Hobbes Wiki:

In another story, Susie has to stay at Calvin's house after school because her parents are working late. Calvin only finds this out on the way home; when Calvin and Susie reach the house, Hobbes is waiting by the door for Susie and wearing a tie. But the question is, how is Hobbes wearing the tie? Another instance of ambiguity is a strip in which Calvin imagines Hobbes and himself on the front page of many newspapers after winning a contest. Although these newspapers are clearly a figment of Calvin's imagination, Hobbes appears in "stuffed" form. Calvin has taken photographs of Hobbes, but on each occasion, when adults see the pictures, Hobbes appears as a stuffed toy.

[. . .]

Many readers assume that Hobbes is either a product of Calvin's imagination, or a doll that comes to life when Calvin is the only one around. However, both of these theories are incorrect. As Watterson explains in the Tenth Anniversary Book, "Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than dolls coming to life": thus there is no concrete definition of Hobbes' reality. Watterson explained: "Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way." Hobbes' reality is in the eye of the beholder. The so-called 'gimmick' of Hobbes is the juxtaposition of Calvin and Hobbes' reality and everyone else's, with the two rarely agreeing.

Other good pages: An incredibly detailed but touchingly incomplete list (it only covers 1986) of the strip's story arcs. July 5. "Templates" of what happened each year on a particular day; example: May 1.

Also, the C&HWiki has possibly the world's scariest navigation bar icon (an undead "Calvin" smiley face?) And here are the official rules of Calvinball.

"It's Hard Work Trying to Fit a Subtle Spirit in a Large Body"

2008-01-07T18:59:00.000-05:00

When I am old, rich, and partially deaf, I will have these scenes cast in painted porcelain and set in my garden as a piece of moral advice for my zoo-loving guests.

From Bibliodyssey.

Book from the Ground

2008-01-04T18:46:00.000-05:00

Xu Bing's novel, Book from the Ground, written in universal pictograms reminded me of Paul Chan's alternumerics, except that the pictograms are meant to be decipherable/readable. Surprisingly readable. I wish there was more of the book online. At least there is some more info at MoMA.

The pictograms also reminded me of this article on Otto Neurath from Cabinet. Here's a taste:

Intent on informing the uneducated Viennese proletariat how the association was improving their living conditions—and perhaps desperate to inject some life into the grim organization—Neurath created giant colored diagrams of the increases in poultry-breeding and vegetable production. Using simple pictures of chickens and carrots, scaled in proportion to the statistics, Neurath discovered a way to popularize statistics, ripping them free from the dusty text of the dour school primer. (That Neurath’s pictograms are intractably associated with today’s school primers shows both our ability to rapidly adopt innovative ideas, and, at the same time, quickly become bored by them). “A silhouette compels us to look at essential details and sharp lines; there are no indefinite backgrounds or superfluities,” Neurath wrote. By using non-realistic symbols as units of representation, visitors to the show could, at a glance, immediately understand complex information regardless of their education. The International System of Typographic Picture Education, or “Isotype,” had been born.

UPDATE:

This whole exhibit sounds phenomenal! Why didn't I hear about it when it was up?

EVEN More Tiger

2008-01-04T18:12:00.000-05:00

Thanks WJCITH/Anthony!

UPDATE:

From Wildlife Trust of India:

The team cautiously moved towards it and could get to almost 20 feet where she was growling away. Bodo could see her clearly and took a shot at it with the dart gun. The dart missed her and this enraged her so much that she charged and took a “flying” leap on to the elephant’s head. “I have not seen something as dramatic as this,” Vivek Menon, executive director WTI, who recently saw the footage, said. “I could never imagine that a tiger could so effortlessly leap from the ground on to an adult elephant’s head, which is at least 12 feet above the ground,” he said.

The footage showed that Pegu saw the tigress leaping and threw the metal ankush at it to defend himself. “The tigress saw the ankush coming, dodged it in mid-leap and took a swipe at Pegu without actually landing on the elephant, which had stepped back,” Menon said.

“It all happened in a few seconds and before we knew what both Bodo and the guard had fallen down,” Dr Choudhary narrated. What now happened was even more amazing. As the tigress landed on the ground Joymala quickly pinned her down with her left fore foot and tried to control it with its trunk. The tigress struggled under this weight for at least half a minute roaring, as other people in the vicinity shouted and fired shots in the air. In this commotion another attempt was made to dart it, but even this shot was off the mark. The tigress finally struggled loose and ran away.

Michel Gondry at Deitch

2008-01-04T17:24:00.000-05:00

Michel Gondry will be recreating the video store from his upcoming movie Be Kind Rewind at Deitch Projects in Soho at the end of January. Visitors will be able to make their own home-made versions of movies on the gallery's mini-back-lot, and rent them too.

I am very excited to see Be Kind Rewind (even if Ari isn't.) I really liked the card-boardy awesomeness of The Science of Sleep, and this looks equally crunchy/crinkly (and staticky?). I didn't like Eternal Sunshine - it felt gimmicky and full of faked-out overly sentimental scenes (and even surfaces). It seems like Gondry has been making better movies since he started writing them himself and cut-out the overly-convoluted plotlines. Or, replaced convolutedness for convolutedness's sake or gimmickry's sake with convolutedness for the sake of dreaminess or a good way of representing how we might think and decide (see below, I guess).

Plus, Be Kind Rewind reminds me of the Indiana Jones remake by the kids in Mississippi in the 80's - which also looks stupendously great, and I would have seen it if Anthology Film Archives hadn't screwed me by confusingly calling that film Indiana Jones: The Adaptation and the original film Indiana Jones: The Adapted. I wonder if anyone made the opposite mistake and went to see the original Indiana Jones, and found themselves watching a home-made version. . .

In addition to the "bricolage" aspects of Be Kind Rewind, there also seems to be an element of the magical/occult quality of technology. At least, in the preview and press release: Jack Black's brain is magically "magnetized"; ghosts and ectoplasm are replaced with plastic bags, lights, and toothpaste. I wouldn't normally be thinking about magic and technology (sort of sounds like cheesy things I used to talk about in middle school when Robert Heinlein was very important to me, and Arthur C. Clark seemed important to me even though I didn't really know anything about him), but it had already crossed my mind earlier when I was watching No Country for Old Men.

The inhuman killer in that movie seems to possess an other-worldly or mythological ability to track down and destroy the people he (or his patrons) want destroyed. When he destroys them, he uses a pneumatic livestock air-gun to punch a whole into his victim's brain, leaving nothing behind but a hole (i.e. no bullet). He also uses the pneumatic gun to blow locks off doors, making it seem as if he can drift anywhere, through walls, and into locked chambers. His ability to track people is partly explained by a radio transmitter that is hidden in a briefcase, but even when that is thrown away he still continues to show up at the right places at the right time.

Neither of these movies is saying that technology = magic, or that technology is so powerful that it is magical the way it will change our lives (which lots of other movies and books seem to say a lot). Instead it seems to be connection the strangeness of technology with the strangeness of the occult. Relationships between different objects or between objects and events are explained through the language of auras and fields of energy (less direct and more metaphorical than simple cause-and-effect). The magnetized/magic-ized Jack Black's presence in a room erases tapes against his will. His body is, in this case, like a technological object, not because he can have an effect on other things, but because the instrument of that effect is not his hands or his voice but something invisible, undetectable, and inexplicable. Or rather, it is only visible and detectable in its result (a sort of reverse photograph that replaces images with static), and it is only explicable in hindsight and with a fantastical explanation ("magnetized"). Then, a similar cross between technology and occulty-ness shows up in the Ghostbusters movie within the movie. . .

I just realized this post is getting really long. I should just stop it here. Maybe I can come back to it again later (after the movie comes out and I've seen more than just the trailer?). Something about the way both movies make technology seem more occultish by using recently-out-of-date objects - like VCR's, pneumatics, radios, etc. - instead of virtual reality, the internet, thermal energy etc. Recently-out-of-date objects feel blockier and heavier, i.e. more "realistic" or "natural" or hand-crafted?

Also, is the movie set in Passaic because of Robert Smithson?

Via Vulture.

Two Zoos Video of the Month: Black Dice Kokomo

2008-01-03T17:21:00.000-05:00

Yes! YES! I want everything to look like this!

Lots of the commenters on this video's YouTube page call the video "trippy" and fucked up. Or they say "Black Dice is a gateway band, they'll lead you into much harder bands like acid or heroin." This really doesn't strike me as trippy/druggy or mind-blowing though.

Instead, I feel like I'm watching what goes on inside the brain of a child who grew up in the 80s and 90s. The flashing colors and melty/prismatic graphics aren't "far out" or "fucked up" - they're just a little louder than usual. Why can't all of our TV shows and films look like this? I'm sure I could follow a plot even if old beer commercials and dirt bikes were flashing on screen at the same time. And I would be way more interested in the movie.

This is what thinking looks like; this is what the world looks like. Different shapes, names, colors, thoughts, smells, liquids, etc. slamming together. It isn't avant garde - or, at least, it shouldn't be avant garde - great swaths of people should be making videos, art, poetry, novels, etc, etc. that look and read like this.

Via Viewers Like You.

Tiger Escapes Zoo, Kills Teenager

2007-12-27T02:33:00.000-05:00

A tiger escaped from her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a 17-year-old zoo visitor. From the AP:

Police shot the 300-pound animal to death after a Christmas Day rampage [!] that began when the tiger escaped from an enclosure surrounded by what zoo officials said are an 18-foot wall and a 20-foot moat. Two brothers who also were visiting the zoo were severely mauled.

The same tiger, a 4-year-old female named Tatiana, ripped the flesh off a zookeeper's arm just before Christmas a year ago while the woman was feeding the animal through the bars. A state investigation faulted the zoo, which installed better equipment at the Lion House, where the big cats are kept.

Also, TV animal expert and talking head Jack Hana detects a slight hint of mystery (and murder?) surrounding the escape:

One zoo official insisted the tiger did not get out through an open door and must have climbed or leaped out. But Jack Hanna, former director of the Columbus Zoo and a frequent guest on TV, said such a leap would be an unbelievable feat, and "virtually impossible."

"There's something going on here. It just doesn't feel right to me," he said. "It just doesn't add up to me."

Link.

Paul Chan's Alternumerics

2007-12-12T00:13:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, I saw an animated video by Paul Chan at the Whitney that featured characters lifted from Henry Darger's (fucked-up, naive, wonderful, disgusting) fantasy world. Chan animated and activated Darger's 15,000 page history (The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion) - a textual and pictorial chronicle of, essentially, a war between soldiers and prepubescent girls (who have penises).

Then, I kept seeing Paul Chan's name popping up all over the place. And then he was in a book-length interview with Martha Rosler. But I wasn't really that gripped by what he was working on. THE END.

But then (!) I read about his "Alternumerics" fonts in Art on Paper, and I got really excited and calsped my hands in ecstasy - and jumped on the Paul Chan adulation bandwagon. "Alternumerics" are fonts that Chan has created that replace all of the letters in a swath of text with little symbols, squiggles, words, blank spaces, diagrams, and whatever else. For instance, An Email from Orbitz (2005, and pictured above) is a screenprint of a spam email set in Chan's "Self Portait as a Font - Cursive" font. There is also a "Print" version of the font. These two were far and away my favorites. All of the fonts disassembled and destroyed the sample texts they were used to encode, but these two more than any of the others created a new and interesting whole out of the garbled remains. I like how the squiggly lines in the Orbitz text run over and into each other in a way that simultaneously recalls crossed wires and (transcontinental jetliner) clouds. The "Charles Fourier" and "Sexual Healing" fonts were also pretty interesting for the same reason.

So, download the fonts and fuck around with them. And then screenprint them and try to sell them to people. Also, check out Paul Chan's cool audio library at his site too - especially the works that mention animals and the works containing recipes. There's also an interview online about it.

I Want to be Miniature

2007-12-11T01:35:00.000-05:00

It took me way too long to post this:

This is a set of images documenting a model of the world's richest duck's money bin, built by me [Mat Skull], using blueprints created by the great Don Rosa and Dan Shane. The blueprints are a part of the Rosa story "The Beagle Boys Vs. The Money Bin" from 2001. Visit this page to read Rosa's own words about the blueprints.

And remember Carl Barks - the mind behind the idea of a man storing all his money in a giant concrete bin.

Link to Mat Skull's Flikr set.

Absences, Animalia

2007-12-10T07:35:00.000-05:00

I apologize to all of you Two-Zoo-Too-Fans out there, but I have not been able to get many posts up of late.

But fear not! Animalia: The Journal of the Anglo-American Zoological Enthusiasts Society, Lefferts Gardens Chapter has asked me to guest edit their upcoming issue, and I have been working diligently to deliver a quality product to them. More TK (at some point...) on animals, zoos, astronomy, books, camouflage, naval design, and, of course, Animalia.

Detail from The Triumph of Dionysus, by Pierre Brebiette, via BibliOdyssey.

Central Park Carriages UPDATE

2007-09-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

AP:

Witnesses said the horse, which became startled by a street performer playing a drum, ran nearly a block along the sidewalk on the southern edge of the park before colliding with the tree, said Joseph Pentangelo, assistant director of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The 13-year-old animal, named Smoothie, had been a carriage horse for only a year, an official said.

"We are devastated by the tragic and sudden loss of our mare Smoothie," said Carolyn Daly, a spokeswoman for the Horse & Carriage Association of New York. "This afternoon's freak accident was overwhelming to all of us in the industry who so dearly love our horses."

The Secret of Magic Island

2007-09-11T07:23:00.000-04:00

"Live animals who act and think just like people!"

But are there monkeys on that island?

Manshroom, Affordable Art

2007-09-10T08:09:00.000-04:00

Manshroom, by Amy Ross. Available in Limited Edition print from 20x200 .

Too Zoo Two by Twos

2007-09-10T07:56:00.000-04:00

NYTimes D&W:

Animal-shaped cookies from England come with a story. The owl and pussycat from the Edward Lear poem and two pairs of Aesop characters — the tortoise and the hare, and the lion and the mouse — have their tales printed on the colorful boxes of eight cookies. Two by Two Animal Biscuits are made by Artisan Biscuits in Derbyshire, England, with just flour, butter, sugar and simple flavoring agents like fruit juice or vanilla and do not taste like packaged cookies. They are $3.79 a box at Gourmet Garage stores and $4.95 at Blue Apron in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

More Zoo Hi-Jinks. . .

2007-09-10T07:52:00.000-04:00

First there was the "Let's Use My Ferret to Steal that Diamond" con. Now there's the fake meerkat photo session hoax.

Masai "Warriors" on Display

2007-09-07T07:24:00.000-04:00

Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo is putting Masaii "warriors" in an exhibit - to educate us about the Dark Continent and the black man's animal nature? The Christian Science Monitor:

Although zoo officials protest that their good intentions are misinterpreted, their protestations are undercut by the shifting nomenclature they've employed to describe the Masai warriors. An April press release noted their fearsomeness: "They'll tell visitors stories of their frightening encounters with lions and leopards, and of wielding spears to protect their animals." Since the debate erupted, they've become tame "educators."

Why place a "village," which is a human environment, inside a zoo showing imported animals in their native habitat? So that visitors would equate the two, exoticizing each.

Damaging, as well, is how the "African Village" conflates cultures and people, indiscriminately throwing together Masai warriors and Kikuya architecture, a building type drawn from a different Kenyan cultural group.

The Pink Windmill Kids

2007-09-06T08:54:00.000-04:00

This is what life should feel like.

Apparently this is from Emu's All Live Pink Windmill Show:

an anarchic British television Children's ITV series of the 1980s featuring star Rod Hull and his demented puppet, Emu.

Each week a green witch Grotbags threatened and tried to steal Hull's aggressive arm length puppet Emu so that once captured she would be able to use its "special powers" to control all the "brats" in the world.

Oh..?

As usual, via O!MSE!

)) update: was this show made for the specific viewing pleasure of pedophiles?? ((

"Force Fed Sand and Metal"

2007-09-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

Metro (UK):

The world's heaviest pig has been sacrificed as part of a religious ceremony, sparking fury among animal welfare groups.

The animal, which was force fed sand and metal to reach its record breaking weight of 908kg (143 stone), could not even stand as it had its throat slit at the ritual in Taiwan.

(Thanks Carl!)

Image: Frederick George R. Roth's Pig Tied to a Stake, 1903

"Standing in Filthy Water and Their Own Waste"

2007-09-06T07:38:00.000-04:00

NYTimes:

The New York City comptroller, auditing for the first time the way the city polices the carriage horse industry, said yesterday that the city had abandoned many of its responsibilities and permitted some carriage owners to maintain their horses in substandard conditions.

Monitoring by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Department of Consumer Affairs at the Central Park South carriage stands is inadequate, the audit found, and lax veterinary care in the field and infrequent inspections have created health hazards.

In addition, horses are not provided with enough water, risk overheating on hot asphalt and are forced to stand in their own waste because of inadequate drainage, the report said. And though licensing is an important tool for tracking horses, the audit found that the paperwork for 57 carriage horses described different animals from year to year, though the license numbers did not change.

Image: inverted x-ray of Degas' Horse Balking (Horse Clearing an Obstacle)

LOOK*IT: Krazy & Nemo

2007-09-05T07:57:00.000-04:00

Zachary Chavez is in the process of building a wonderful Comic Library of Little Nemo and Krazy Kat scans. He has been scanning since near the end of July, and is now putting up about to Krazy Kat's and one Little Nemo per day. He also plans to transcribe and tag all of the comics, making them into a searchable archive.

These scans are huge and wonderful. Maybe he'll add Rarebit someday...

Sterne, Back in the Spotlight

2007-09-05T07:35:00.000-04:00

Paul Duguid investigates the strength of the Google Books Project in First Monday.

With each scanned page, Google Books’ Library Project, by its quantity if not necessarily by its quality, makes the possibility of a better alternative unlikely. The Project may then become the library of the future, whatever its quality, by default. So it does seems important to probe what kind of quality Google Book Project might present to an ordinary user that Google envisages wanting to find a book.

But when Duguid tries to use Google Books to read Tristram Shandy (the greatest novel ever?), he is quickly disappointed. The left side of the first page is cut off in one scan and completely missing in another. The famous black page for Yorick is completely missing - which defeats the purpose of using a scanner rather than Project Gutenberg's textual transcription. The most alarming absence, though, is the complete lack of volume numbers. Google Books apparently does a poor job of differentiating books by volume number. Yet many older books (and the majority of the "classic" 18th century novels) were published as individual volumes - Tristram Shandy, in fact, is a nine volume book. How are researchers and readers going to use Google Books in the future, if they aren't told what text is what? Shenanigans

Part of these faults appear to stem from Harvard, Stanford, et al.'s decision to send their very worst books to be digitized (is this why the black page was left out):

Google may or may not be sucking the air out of other digitization projects, but like Project Gutenberg before, it is certainly sucking better–forgotten versions of classic texts from justified oblivion and presenting them as the first choice to readers.

> > > < < <

Mini-Update: Debate between Duguid and Patrick Leary, the editor of SHARP-L. Leary says:

Google Books is a tool for extensive research across a populous universe of corrupt texts, not a tool for intensive study of one typographically complex literary classic. Book historians will not be using Google Books and its ilk to analyze Sterne's uses of typography in Tristram Shandy. But they will be using it to find, say, references to the novel inside a wide range of memoirs, biographies, works of criticism, and periodicals, to many of which they would not otherwise have access, and in many of which they might never otherwise have thought to look.

Image above from here. (I had a hard time finding a good image of the hand-marbled page or even a good page about it to link to.)

Zoo Tigers Sold and Skinned

2007-08-27T07:58:00.000-04:00

The Sunday Times:

Rare captive species are routinely being overbred by zoos, which use cubs to attract visitors in the peak summer season. Later in the year “excess” animals are killed and their skins sold to [a Belgian taxidermist] for no other reason than the fact that the zoos no longer have any room for them.

Sharks & Seals

2007-08-24T07:50:00.000-04:00

Thank you PLANET EARTH, BBC.

Get Down Goblin

2007-08-15T07:31:00.000-04:00

Via Ow! My Sweet Eyes!

LOOK*IT: The Open Library

2007-08-15T07:05:00.000-04:00

Open Library is a beautiful new project from the Internet Archive that offers a vision of the future of electronic book libraries. Scott McLemee interviews one of the people working on the project, Aaron Swartz. The interview is pretty informal, but it gives you a lot of things to think about for the future of book archives and libraries:

A big hope of mine is that by making all of this data available in a centralized place, we’ll make it vastly easier to build applications around books. Want to build a site that lets people find other people who have the same books who live near them? No longer do you have to build a whole bunch of infrastructure to locate and refer to books — instead, you just need to build the part relevant to your application. (Like the geolocation stuff.)

Also:

We’re hoping to make the scanned text into a wiki as well, so that people can fix typos and correct errors in our processing (OCR) of the scan. We’d also like to think about new ways that people can work with a book’s full text online and what the proper interface for that should be. And, of course, we want to think about ways we can get more books scanned. One idea is a “Scan this book” button on every out-of-copyright book, where for $50 to $100, we’ll page the book from a library, deliver it to the scanners, and then email you a PDF of the book and put the full text online, with a little nameplate thanking you for funding it.

At the moment, all of these ideas seem to be a rather large literary castle in the sky. They certainly aren't impossible though. One of the harder problems will surely be the scanning of the hundreds of thousands of books in libraries around the world, but if Google et al. are willing to help, that won't be an insurmountable hurdle. The biggest problem, then, might be getting people to actually spend time using the system - but who says it has to be finished within this generation?

This wiki aspect of the Open Library also reminded me a lot of Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel" (full text). Borges's fictional library contained every possible version of every possible book within it. Versions could differ from one another by as little as a single letter. At a certain point, the difference between two versions would be great enough that you could no longer determine the original text from the variant, resulting in near-infinite stacks of letter-based nonsense. Needless to say, this basically drove the inhabitant of the library insane. As the wiki-edits pile up in the Open Library, new versions might eventually spawn new books, and the list of edits will also become a new (readable?) text. It won't be near-infinite like Borges, but it might result in a new medium or a new way of reading - spinning out of but still grounded by physical libraries.

(Above picture is from here)

Klanken en Gebaren

2007-08-14T16:15:00.000-04:00

It seems that conceptual artists from the Netherlands were responsible for the mysterious appearance of this enormous Lego man on the beach in the resort town of Zandvoort last week. Googling "No Real Than You Are," the phrase emblazoned on the Lego man's boxy blue chest, leads to a website in which the Lego man describes himself as an emissary from a virtual world, eager for readers to "take me with you on a journey through beautiful meadows, words, sounds and gestures." Like the gesture of this little blond girl...

TwoNoses.blogspot

2007-08-13T07:08:00.000-04:00

Xingu, a "Double-Nosed Andean tiger hound", lives in Bolivia and is descended from Spanish hunting dogs. I had a hard time believing that this story was true and that Xingu's nose was not just a one-off genetic mishap. I'd still like to know more about the "Pachon Navarro" Spanish Hunting dogs. (Thanks Carl!)

CYCLORAMA: Vélogorrhea

2007-08-09T11:02:00.000-04:00

With fewer than eleven months remaining before the next Tour de France, now is the perfect time to begin brushing up on your French cycling vocabulary. As you stand on the shoulder of the A64 watching Levi Leipheimer whiz past, cleverly increasing the pace of the pack just enough to lose lesser cyclists as the stage nears its finish, you can exclaim your admiration for how he has managed to "mettre un coup sur le meule" ('meule' means 'grindstone')--the wheat gets sorted from the cycling chafe. You can note that a cyclist is sharply dressed by saying that they are "tout 'CAMPA'"--'CAMPA' being short, of course, for Campagnolo, the Italian manufacturer of top-notch biking equipment. And when someone loses the path, you can note that they are "trampling the alfalfa"! ("Pietiner la luzerne.")

Two Zoos Video of the Month: Wildebeests

2007-08-09T07:25:00.000-04:00

It's eight minutes long. But it is also the best thing you will ever see. Or at least the best thing involving wildebeests. Also, what's with the super-dramatic "Battle at Kruger" title? (Thanks Ari!)

Russian Aquanauts Plant Their Flag

2007-08-06T19:06:00.000-04:00

Russia has made a symbolic claim for ownership of the Arctic seabed - or rather, all the oil and minerals beneath said seabed - by sending two manned submarines to plant a flag at the bottom. NYTimes:

“We must determine the border, the most northerly of the Russian shelf,” Mr. Chilingarov [a member of the Russian Parliament who participated in the dive] said on national television before the dive, which was billed as the first of its sort — a descent into the inky darkness far beneath a large window cut into the ice sheet by a nuclear-powered ice breaker. ...

The day’s events underscored both Russia’s restored sense of confidence and the international competition for access, influence and extraction rights in the far north, which has intensified as oil and gas prices have surged and as trends in global warming have encouraged speculation that the region could become more navigable.

At first, I was pretty excited about this adventure. The Arctic/Antarctic regions are so ghostly and unnatural (see Robert Smithson's Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica above), and combined with some Zissou-esque submarines I thought it would be impossible for this mission to fail to enchant me. In the end, the Russians proved that most exploration and large-scale scientific endeavours are mainly boring bureaucratic exercises. Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Captain Cook, etc. only seem especially adventurous now because we are less in touch with the commercial and petty political situations that motivated their state and commercially-financed voyages. Nevertheless:

“I doubt that this one submersion will make a breakthrough in the problem that is being discussed in the media,” [Ivan Y. Frolov, director of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg] said. “It was a good chance to demonstrate the capabilities of this equipment and the depths that can be reached, and to demonstrate the courage of Mr. Chilingarov, which is great.”

Ahhh... The Slope

2007-08-06T07:39:00.001-04:00

Via.

All-One-God-Faith

2007-08-06T07:30:00.000-04:00

I can't believe I missed the premier!

Einstein, 1939, after Nazis & Commies united, proposed spacebombs that destroy all, unless we finally teach the Moral ABC's the real Rabbi Hillel taught Jesus to unite all in All-One-God-Faith. As teach astronomers Abraham - Israel - Moses - Buddha - Hillel - Jesus - Spinoza - Paine - Sagan & Mohammed, inspired every 76 years, 6000 years by the Messenger of God's Law, the sign of the Messiah, Halley's Comet: "WE'RE ALL ONE OR NONE!" "THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD!" "TEACH LOVE THY ENEMY!" "LISTEN CHILDREN ETERNAL FATHER ETERNALLY ONE!" Israel - Moses - Buddha - Jesus - Mohammed: ONE! ALL ONE!

Also, drummers are getting arrested because Dr. Bronner's tests positive for the date-rape drug.

Astro-Trifecta

2007-08-01T20:55:00.000-04:00

Sky plates are here. (via bldgblog)

Memorize the names and weights of everything we've left on the moon, amaze your friends! (via things)

Help map the cosmos at Galaxy Zoo (NB: not an actual zoo).

Endpaper Maps

2007-08-01T08:52:00.000-04:00

Chris Mullen is in the process of (re)building his intriguing, awkwardly-named website The Visual Telling of Stories:

This site records a range of material dedicated to the study of the Visual Narrative. The original site, intended for part-time students and other interested parties was closed down by the University of Brighton when I taught there and I was subsequently denied access to the original images most of which, however, were in my own collection.

I am in the process of re-building the Visual Telling of Stories on my own Server in an expanded and improved format which I hope you continue to enjoy.

The site is full of interesting pictures from literature and beyond, but for this post I'd like to concentrate on the page that led me to VTS: "Endpaper Maps". I don't know why every work of fiction doesn't come with a map. Even when the map fails to illuminate the text in a meaningful way, just having a sense that the narrative unfolds across a space makes it seem more real, more tangible. I especially like the maps whose plane is at an angle with buildings and trees jutting up from the landscape - not only are the characters and words in the book nameable and identifiable, but so are the landmarks around, through, and within which they move.

Map #16 comes with weird (sado-masochistic?) Blakean imagery, as well as words written out as waves hugging the craggy coast.

Map #9, from the endpapers of Mystery Manor, enticingly presents the titular estate as an object of scrutiny. The manor itself is the book's central character, the one whose secrets will govern the course of the plot. The placement of the book's protagonists around the object of scrutiny recalls a mandala or Gothic tympanum, with the manor as the Buddha or Christ who holds the lesser elements together. Bill and Anna even seem to be studying it from the air, in search of a clue. Can you discover the secret of Mystery Manor?

(via strange maps).

Antonioni/Bergman

2007-07-31T12:44:00.000-04:00

Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman both died on Monday.

NYTimes:

In a generation of rule-breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated. He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for such mainstream conventions as plot, pacing and clarity. He would raise questions and never answer them, have his characters act in self-destructive ways and fail to explain why, and hold his shots so long that the actors sometimes slipped out of character.

LOOK*IT: Circles

2007-07-29T21:16:00.000-04:00

Alec Sloth has put up an interesting series of posts about circular photographs. In the 19th Century, circular photographs used to be much more common than they are today. As Soth points out, most contemporary circular photographs are consciously "staged or experimental". Soth means that current photographers are willing to play with their medium in an "avant-garde" way, but I think his use of the word "experimental" does a nice job of tapping into the scientifish aspect of circular photographs? Are these circles insets of chromosome pairs from a Biology textbook? Shots of M-39 sitting in the Astrophysics slide projector?

Square photographs and paintings share some of the uniqueness of the circles. Unlike rectangular shapes, uniform squares and circles feel standardized, and their borders seem to be arbitrary or, at least, not determined by the artist. This lets the both of the shapes hold onto their fragmentariness, like samples cut out of the middle of a picture-printed cloth. In other words, they are not final; they are pieces of a whole. The round sides (side?) of the circle make it float as if disconnected from the plane it is positioned on: the computer screen, the gallery wall. Or maybe I still have hot air balloons on the mind.

It is interesting that ellipses appear to be even less arbitrary than rectangles. Perhaps because of their association with Christmas vignettes, Rococo finery, and keepsake portraits, ellipses are quintessentially artificial and un-scientifish. And yet, how do the very scientific elliptical orbits of planets fit into the circle/ellipse debate? I'll let you answer that for yourself - preferably when you wake up in the morning and lie still in your bed, with your eyes closed.

Via Modern Art Notes.
The Ruins, Hubert Robert, 1777 via The Met.

Big Fat Wrecks

2007-07-26T20:34:00.000-04:00

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

Container ships are the Brobdingnagian behemoths of the sea, and when they heel over, it's like a city block's worth of skyscrapers all lying down on their sides at once. For an idea of where these wrecks are headed, see these shots of a fifty-year-old wreck that beached on the Great Barrier Reef. I dived the wreck last year and I'll never forget it. The above-water portions had rusted away until they looked like a scabrous metal Parthenon, while on the ocean-bottom, giant schools of meter-long parrotfish danced around a propeller-shaft as tall as a house.

I find container ships absolutely fascinating. It's amazing that the bulk of the world's goods are carried by only a few thousand vessels (there's even a list). And yet, in most pictures, the behemoths appear strangely static, and the containers strapped across them look less like packages whizzing across the surface of the earth and more like permanent pieces of the deck's architecture. But in these photos, as the containers scatter and burn like so many mistreated LEGO brick, they reclaim their status as modular and ever-moving units in the largest ever man-made system: global trade. Also, when you look at the big ships floundering, keep in mind that they can each cost in excess of $150 million, not counting the merchandise strapped on top.

Link (via BoingBoing).

The Darjeeling Limited

2007-07-26T20:26:00.000-04:00

Trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie. Wes Anderson AND India AND train-travel?! Please, please tell me there are going to be dioramas too. Also: the poster.

Lisa C Soto at Aljira

2007-07-26T19:15:00.000-04:00

Lisa C Soto makes cool map-based art. She is appearing in E8, i.e. the Aljira Emerge 8 Exhibition, right now until September 29th. Watch out, though - it's in Newark! Image above is a slightly cropped version of her painting Continents, Islands, Tectonic plates.

Via ArtCal.

Another Massive, Expensive Winsor McKay Book

2007-07-26T07:48:00.000-04:00

First there was Peter Maresca's massive, expensive, and beautiful edition of Little Nemo comics: Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!. Now there's Ulrich Merkl's massive, expensive, beautiful and COMPLETE edition of Winsor McKay's other major strip, the Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.

Each episode presented the dream of some poor soul who had the misfortune of partaking of Welsh Rarebit (a melted cheese toast) before retiring, a decision that resulted in unusual and fantastic dreams. In the last panel, the dreaming victim awakened, vowing never to partake of Rarebit before bedtime again.

Merkl's edition is also lovingly and helpfully annotated and features both color and black & white pages. $120 for 21 x 16.2 inches and 120 pages, or $114 for 17 x 12 inches and 464 pages?

Via MYRANT.

High Altitude Balloon

2007-07-25T19:48:00.000-04:00

I had no idea that it was possible for non-scientist, non-military folks to make their own high altitude balloons. There's something incredibly peaceful and quaint about balloons and ballooning - even the words "balloon and ballooning" feel ridiculous to type. I almost have to struggle to believe that balloons even exist; they are so frail and fantastical. That's probably why they show up in Surrealist and Dada art so often (vide Max Ernst). A rocket tries and tries to escape the earth, and I'm not overly impressed when it does. But how does a measly sack with some ropes and a basket do it?

I think I might be over-fetishizing balloons; I've never ridden in one, and I'm not out looking for a balloon ride. They're great to think about, though, in a lazy, escapist kind of way. We're used to the idea that planes and cars and ferries can take us from one place to another. And when you get on a plane or into a car, you're not waiting to be taken off course to an unplanned destination. But that is what a balloon seems to be made for. It's round; it doesn't point in a specific direction. It's at the mercy of the winds. Who doesn't want to climb into the basket, get thrown off course, and end up wrecked on one of Gulliver's uncharted islands. Even one of Gulliver's belatedly-charted islands would be nice.

German Zookeepers Selling Animals as Meat

2007-07-19T07:49:00.000-04:00

"A German mayor has filed charges against zoo workers in his town for shooting animals and selling them as meat."

Link.

$10k Enigma Machine on eBay

2007-07-19T07:12:00.000-04:00

On Enigma machine is up for auction on eBay. Only eight days left! David Pesovitz at Boing Boing:

The Enigma machine, introduced in 1923 by the Chiffriermaschinen Aktien-Gesellschaft (Cipher Machines Stock Corporation), was used by the Germans to encrypt messages during World War II. With eight days left in the auction, the current bid on this specimen is $10,100 and the reserve has not been met. According the auction listing, this Enigma is in "museum condition" and includes extra lamps.

Oh, I want one so bad! Little wooden suitcase, you can flarf and unflarf!

Link to Enigma on eBay. Link to Boing Boing post.

assume vivid astro focus in Louisiana?

2007-07-19T07:01:00.000-04:00

These maps of the Mississippi's shifting riverbed (made by the keystone cop U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) look like something straight out of an assume vivid astro focus installation. See geology is fun! If you let Ken Kesey color in the lines..

Newsflash: these are the riverbeds that are actually shifting slower than the rest. When the riverbeds are meandering at a higher rate, the whole map just becomes a freaked-out blur , , , or did I jst blow yr mind?

Bee "Crisis" Is Now a Bee "Opportunity"

2007-07-19T06:45:00.000-04:00

The New York Times more or less retracts its end-of-the-beekeeping-world forecasts from April.

“Every time there are these disappearances, the ills of the moment tend to be held accountable,” said May Berenbaum, who heads the entomology department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and led a National Academy of Sciences review of the status of North American bees and other pollinators that was published last year.

“In the ’60s it was synthetic organic insecticides,” Dr. Berenbaum said. “In the ’70s it was Africanized bee genes. In the 19th century, there is a wonderful report about this resulting from a lack of moral fiber. Weak character was why they weren’t returning to the hives.”

Also, talk of a "bee census". What fun!

China to Weather: Drop Dead

2007-07-18T20:45:00.000-04:00

The Chinese government maintains a vast paramilitary "weather control" bureau that "combats" droughts and forest fires. From Asia Times Online:

According to Wang Guanghe, director of the Weather Modification Department under the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, each of China's more than 30 provinces and province-level municipalities today boast a weather-modification base, employing more than 32,000 people, 7,100 anti-aircraft guns, 4,991 special rocket launchers and 30-odd aircraft across the country.

Link (via Catholicgauze!).

Two Zoos Video of the Month: The Tube

2007-07-18T08:01:00.000-04:00

London Tube drivers are posting videos. And getting in trouble for it! (Via BLDGBLOG)

Fantasy Maps

2007-07-18T07:55:00.000-04:00

The Map Room has a link to the Fantasy Atlas:

a German-language collection of maps from various fantasy (and some science fiction) novels. That there are so many entries speaks to the fact that it’s virtually impossible nowadays to write a fantasy novel without creating a map of the secondary world in which it takes place.

Some of these maps are pretty cool looking. I especially like Eric Rücker Eddison's map of "Ouroboros". The strange circular insets that seem to float above the rest of the map are intoxicatingly enigmatic. Are they zoomed-in portions of the main map? Are they representations of distant lands like the Alaska/Hawai'i insets on U.S. maps? Are they smaller snake eggs inscribed with a geography? I also don't know whether to cringe or swoon when I read the bare-bone names Eddison gave to his different continents: Witchland, Pixyland, Demonland, Impland (in German as: Hexenland, Gnomenland, Damonenland, Koboldland). So cute! Apparently, The Worm Ouroboros was one of the first fantasy novels to create a large-scale alternate world (on Mercury?) I've always been interested in the motivation behind authors of "high fantasy" to map and define fictional places in an imaginary void. It is so much more brazen than the naturalistic approach of most "literary" authors - but essentially the same thing.

National Zoo Keeper Week!

2007-07-18T07:54:00.000-04:00

The San Diego Zoo says it's N=Z=K=W already! Wow, time flies!

Tintin Injury Chart

2007-07-18T07:41:00.000-04:00

Tintin has been in the news a lot this week. Borders Group is going to begin shelving the extremely racist and misguided Tintin in the Congo (Hergé's second Tintin book) in the graphic novels section instead of children's. The controversy seems to have begun in Britain, where someone must have finally noticed that Tintin bringing colonial enlightenment to crudely drawn, big-lipped savages is no longer acceptable children's book material. At least the current version of Tintin in the Congo no longer includes the page in which our intrepid reporter blows up a rhinoceros with a stick of dynamite (hilarious! ugghh..) By the way, none of the articles I've read mention that Barnes & Noble has been shelving all of the Tintin books in the graphic novels section for several years.

I don't want to sour you on Tintin, though; so, here is a great chart of all of Tintin's major injuries from the series. Something about the closed, precise world of Tintin seems to lend itself to this type of S/Z-style structural analysis - maybe because it's really easy to count frames? The chart comes from a "medical article" in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that examines why Tintin never ages over the 40 years of the series. This doesn't seem to be quite as interesting to me - clearly, the whole Tintin universe is stuck in a sort of interwar fantasy land, much like Bertie Wooster. The article does pick up on the creepiness of Tintin's half-boy, half-man physique and attitude, but this is hardly original to Hergé (I'm thinking of the hundreds of Dickensian 19th Century characters caught in a similar limbo state - especially the many, many orphans). Anyway, whether it's structuralist or medical analysis you're after, the clean lines and colors - and the petri dish panels - make Tintin eminently "study-able". Onward, Tintinology!

PS: Tintin has been seeing a lot more good press in the last several months (New Yorker, Tom McCarthy, etc.), presumably because of the upcoming Spielberg/Peter Jackson film version. (Thanks Hannah and Ling!)

Astronomy Pic of the Day

2007-07-17T21:24:00.000-04:00

Astronomy Pic of the Day (using an apparently loose definition of what is "astronomy"). Squares A and B are the same colour! Click photo to see the proof! (Also via Drawn!)

LOOK*IT: Post-Waldo World

2007-07-17T21:16:00.000-04:00

I'm not usually impressed by comics or picture books about the Iraq War. They are always end up feeling like a poor imitation of the text-only articles in Harper's or The New Yorker (or worse). Why buy an expensive black and white or poorly-colored "political" comic book when you can get the same thing for free at nytimes.com?

Where's Bin Laden by Xavier Waterkeyn avoids this problem by tapping into a different (and possibly deeper) vein of what makes the Iraq War interesting - by reviving the Where's Waldo genre. Each spread in the book shows a different possible target from the "War on Terror" - New York, Holland, Australia, Bali - or a "terrorist breeding ground" such as Afghanistan. The book also plays up the original's emphasis on human bodies over scenery. Instead of tilting the horizontal plane up towards the reader and making the landscape resemble an overhead map (like Renaissance paintings), Xavier Waterkeyn basically just piles people on top of one another. Human bodies are the infrastructure of these landscapes. Each nation in the book is unapologetically built out of its citizens.

Now, as you scan the tightly packed page you are playing the same game that the U.S. plays - all-seeing overlord of both friendly territories and distant, exotic lands. In the post-colonial world, there are no longer blank areas on the map; all that remains is to sort and name all of the elements within the borders established on the Rand McNally map. But this is not necessarily an easy game: the landscape is overfilled with information. "Finding" Waldo begins to resemble finding a "target lock" for a smart bomb above a Cambodian village.

In the end, I couldn't find him (well played, Waterkeyn). This book appears to be from the Netherlands (what will their crazy activist cartoonists do next?), and it has been available since September in the U.S. I don't know why it hasn't made a bigger splash. It's well drawn and pretty fun. I hope the "Where's ____" genre catches on.

Nine Boxes, No Exit

2007-07-17T19:34:00.001-04:00

This starts out as annoying and buggy, and then becomes increasingly terrifying. If your computer is anything like mine, the sound will go in and out, like a transmission from an alternate world. Just remember: they are trapped in those boxes for eternity, unable to touch another human. They can only swivel their heads. The maid doesn't even really move at all.

UPDATE: arrgghhh..

Terrence Malick - Days of Heaven - October

2007-07-17T07:38:00.000-04:00

The Criterion Collection is releasing a "director-approved special edition" of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven in October. Lots of beautiful "magic hour" twilight shots and long takes of grasses swaying in the wind and birds playing in the grasses! Plus: Texas Panhandle locust plague - don't miss the locust bonfires!

Doesn't the film still above look like an Edward Hopper painting? See, magic hour..

Matt Dawson Drawings

2007-07-17T07:25:00.000-04:00

For my first link, I'm going to direct you to Matt Dawson's website (matt-dawson.co.uk, surprise!), which I stumbled upon this morning via Drawn!.

Matt has a lot of nice animal drawings (I especially like the elephants!) and some covers that he made the new Penguin Classics editions of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and A Dog's Heart.

CASE STUDY: Monkey Island

2007-07-15T23:52:00.000-04:00

Many people seem to dislike the Central Park Zoo since it has far less animals and other "attractions" than the Bronx Zoo, or any other standard American Big City Zoo. What's a zoo without an elephant or some giraffes anyway? I mean you might as well call it a farm, basically. I think the Zoo's small size gives it a boutique feel, though. As if these animals were especially select and unique.

The smaller size of the pens and glass cages also brings the layout of the Zoo closer to that of a natural history museum or the exhibits of furnished rooms that many museums have in their permanent collections. If you started at the Met on East 82nd, then walked down twenty blocks to the Zoo, and then walked back up to the American Museum of Natural History at West 81st, you could very easily find the same architectural arrangement of large glassed-off boxes sitting invitingly around the sides of a bare room filled with spectators, offering up their carefully classified, "edifying" treasures to all who would come and see. And, if you were especially diligent, you could even make a satisfying triplet of the three experiences by looking at, say, a still-life, stuffed otter in the riverine diorama at the AMNH, the two live otters at the Central Park Zoo, and an exquisite otter-pelt hanging at the Met.

Earlier in the week I had been reading Elizabeth Hanson's book about the history of American zoos, Animal Attractions. Her book mentions that during the 1920's and 30's many zoos constructed large exhibits called "monkey islands" in an attempt to attract bigger crowds and follow the shifting currents of zoo fashion.

I just assumed that such a cheesy and "unscientific" exhibition style would have been rejected by the new breed of sensitive and "modern" zookeepers that began to campaign in the 1970's for increased standards of naturalism and caring for their wards. But, of course, at the Zoo on Saturday, I finally recognized the Snow Monkey exhibit for what it is: a Monkey Island. I guess I had always just assumed that the monkeys lived on a gigantic rock in a lake because that's how they lived in the wild - on sub-zero lakes high up in the mountains of Honshū, Japan. All of the National Geographic pictures of them soaking in volcanic hot springs did make them seem semi-aquatic. But, no, of course not. An island is no more a monkey's "natural" habitat than a human's. So why the popularity of monkey islands?

Monkey Islands developed out of the desire to create a space of freedom for animals within the walls of the zoo complex. The island is separated from the rest of the zoo grounds by a small moat. Because the moat is filled with water and resembles a natural body of water such as a creek or a lake, it is not necessary to construct a cage around the exhibited monkeys. This creates the illusion that the monkey island is part of a naturally occuring landscape that the zoo happens to surround. It also heightens the physical separation between the spectator and the specimen. The monkeys exist in another world, a miniature world that is unaffected by our human presence, but small enough to be fully examinable and gingerly contained by the city that surrounds it.

Even though the monkey islands traffic in the illusion of nature and the illusion of separation, they are by no means fixated on an attempt to mimic the natural habitat of animals. As Elizabeth Hanson notes:

The aesthetic of realism was often discarded; most zoos had a monkey island, for example, with playground equipment or houses that made the island look like a small Midwestern town. Another popular theme for monkey islands was, in place of a grassy island, a half-sunken ship surrounded by the moat.

(to be continued...)