“Fahrenheit 451″ Was a Recipe Direction

It’s 2010 and there are no prune wrinkle technicians.  What is wrong with us. The wall-to-wall face of a much younger, bewildered Ray Bradbury would sure disapprove as much as he disapproves of this entire Sunsweet Pitted Prunes commercial.

[via the evermonstrous Coilhouse]

George Washington Is a Book Thief

Because you’re not a real American until you’ve stolen books from the public library.  Take that, socialism!

These aren't the books you're looking for.

From the article:

George Washington did not even bother to sign his name in the borrower’s ledger. An aide simply scrawled “president” next to the title to show who had taken them out.

Bravo, George.  Bravo.

Doombabble #4: Art is for Ghosts Edition

I admit, I’m a bit of a sucker for moleskine drawings of people on the subway, and Rebecca Bird’s are delightfully varied and evocative.  But don’t let that fool you–check out “explosions” for some wonderfully incongruous watercolor holocausts.

The illustrations of Kent St. John carry fog in their depths, like a blur of years wore them down from the ancient stories they first crawled from–but beware, they’ve still got the edge from antiquity.

On the other hand, Zachary Zezima keep space in fine pencil lines and only the choicest of colors. “Forbidden Love,” especially, works like a fractal, dividing and dividing and dividing to atoms of black and white.

via chistopher golebiowski

Stepping over into the realm of photography, the scenes laid out by Andres Valerio in his “Black Black Magic” series look like the intricate rites of sorcery.  Pieces carefully composed, offerings burnt, as if some demon would arise up  from the center with the right intonation.  Watch your speech around this one.

The figures in Daniele Cascone’s photography are headless, curious beasts, greeting and wandering in a world of cast-off detritus.  Maybe it is their obscurity that makes them seek the light–lost for so long they have forgotten civilization and sight, feeling their way around with sharp, black&white fingers.

What would the great artists of oil and canvas have to say to modern art today?  I imagine it’d be something akin to Adrian Ghenie’s rich paintings, with the age of sensibility of classic techniques and an unmistakably disparate view.  Paintings such as “Pie Fight Study 2,” where a man claws layers of oilpaint from his face, or “Babe in the Woods” with a lost toddler finding her way amongst a palette of industrial colors, reach back into history like great time-travelers and bring everything into new focus.

via emohoc

In continuance of my admitted obsession with decay, Ren Rox and her ongoing personal series for the love of black and white.  I love it when the world bands together to prove your half-baked thesis correct.

And, because one ethereal black&white photographer isn’t enough, here’s Alexey Titarenko and his series “Time Standing Still,” painting an otherworld St. Petersburg where the souls grasp handrails and walk the marketplace over and over and nothing else moves.

Someone beat steampunk over the head with the Industrial Revolution, and that someone is Jud Turner.

Look deep into the eyes of Marc De Cunha Lopes.  Real deep.  Then try to pull yourself back from the edge before you go over.  His SKLT collection has been raising a good bit of buzz recently with its bleached skeletons moving through a copycat of your house, but the real nightmares are in the HPL series where a blind man gazes from a disembodied heart and a woman suckles a newformed shoggoth.  Chills.

And lastly, to end on a positive (if garish and somewhat lo-res) note, here’s io9′s terrific collection of insane space disco videos.

Weekend Adventures: The Sidetracked Pilgrim

Phew. I’m tired.

Right off the bat, forgive me for telling this story out of order.  Just imagine you’re reading some Nabokovian narrative that instead of dealing with overwrought middle-aged men in a byzantine out-of-grasp world, it’s just one kid nowhere near middle age who can’t frame his stories correctly.  Good?  Good.

It’s cherry blossom time in D.C., and that means everyone and their photographer grandma is out on the streets, myself included (except the grandma bit).  And while I refrained from going full cliche, I did find myself in the midst of the 50th annual Sakura Matsuri Street Festival on my tiptoes with my camera over my head, taking a whole mess of completely blind shots and hoping that I would actually get the performers in this one and not the film crew hiding under the stage.

Like this:

And not this:

Heh, heh.  Whoops.

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Weekend Adventures: Obscura Day in DC!

What a Saturday this has been.  In case it’s not obvious enough already, I’m a bit on the adventurous side.  A combination of a large yard to run wild in as a child, a zealous father coordinating Boy Scout campouts and making each one more exciting than the last, and a fair bit of natural curiosity.  So when I heard that Atlas Obscura was organizing a massive adventure across the globe for their first-ever Obscura Day, I knew I had to join in.  Our destination?  For us DCers, it was the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A bit of history: the National Museum of Health and Medicine was founded in 1862 by the Army Surgeon General William Hammond with the purpose of gathering specimens and furthering the study of combat medicine.  From there (originally as a collection on his desk), the Museum’s catalogs grew, moving it first to Ford’s Theater after Lincoln’s assassination, then to the Army Medical Museum and Library (where the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Gallery is today), and finally to its current location.  It’s got over 25 million specimens in its archives and…maybe you should just check out some pictures.

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