Tim Davis Art Images

All of these images are from the sides of boxcars, coal cars, miscellaneous freight cars and a caboose. These cars have been scratched, gouged, painted, scraped, rusted, and repainted over the course of their lifetimes.

nyt: I lost it on the Cyclone

"They lose cameras, jewelry - you name it,' Mr. Menditto said. 'Hats, wigs.'

Few come asking about those wayward wigs. 'When the ride is finished,' he said, 'they run out; they're embarrassed.'"

nyt: Exhibit Offers a Peek Inside the Lives of Outsiders

...when a 29-foot section of bright yellow PVC pipe appeared at the front of the building, snaking from a spot next to the front door and into a corner of the second floor lobby, it was cause for plenty of comment.

'Nobody really knew what it was at first,' said Earl Simpson, 67, a resident. 'They thought it was some kind of weird periscope.'

They were right, sort of. The tube, which was commissioned by The New Museum of Contemporary Art as part of an outdoor exhibition on and near the Bowery, allows people on the sidewalk to see and converse with residents inside the hotel. Both parties, as viewed through the tube's mirrors, appear upside down. Voices that travel through the tube are muffled but audible. When no one in the lobby is at the mouth of the tube, sidewalk viewers see a vase of sunflowers.

by pat padua

Nineteenth Century Images of Albinism

Two worm species discovered in the dark recesses of the deep sea could rival the macabre beasts of your childhood nightmares. Scientists have named a new genus, Osedax, which is Latin for "bone devourer", for worms that thrive by excavating the bones of fallen whale carcasses.

old signs

EAT. BOWL. FOOD.

via foreword

slow chimpunks

The Chipmunk Song [slowed down]'. Yes, hear Simon, Theodore and Alvin at their true speed, sounding respectively like an accountant, a hot-dog vendor, and a lunatic. Put it on repeat and you'll drift gradually into madness - it's like an acid flashback to fetal languor, the surreal sounds that filtered through the uterine wall.

via said the gramophone

william eggleston in the guardian

...William Eggleston is perhaps the most innovative American photographer of the past 50 years; [his] unique style has transformed the way we look at the world. His influence on our visually led contemporary popular culture is now so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. In fashion shoots and films, advertising and art photography, Eggleston's everyday view of things, initially dismissed by critics in the mid-Seventies, is now the prevalent aesthetic. Put simply, it would be difficult to imagine the world according to David Lynch or Gus Van Sant or Juergen Teller or Sofia Coppola without the world according to William Eggleston.

via consumptive

today's voices

...the contained herein recordings are all of cellular phone conversations that were picked up via scanner between 1997 and 2000 (apparently the advent of digital cellular phone technology has made such scanning of cellular phones impossible). Clocking in at just over 70 minutes, there's enough strange, absurd and disturbing material within to satisfy even the most thirsty voyeur...It may not come as a surprise that a goodly fifty percent of the tracks are sex related; be they the belligerent rantings of young men trying to impress (?) the ladies on a party-line by calling them minotaurs and threatening to call CYS on them, the tentative musings of a straight man exploring his sexuality, or a phone sex chat line first date (complete with climax). While some of the phone sex tracks may put to test even the most iron willed, there are respites of interesting slices of life that are both intriguing and beguiling. There's the two old black guys complaining about the youth of today being nothing but 'Charlie's children', a coked up soccer mom rambling from gift baskets to reject fortune cookies in under two minutes, bizarre nuage philosophy & advice, incomprehensible noises and more! Comes packaged with silk-screened artwork that's made to look like it could be a Folkways record. Great! Upsetting! Or just greatly upsetting!

"stag line 2"
another one from aquarius records

highway chamber music

KUWAYAMA - KIJIMA 01.06.16 (Trente Oiseaux)

A slight departure from the silence and drones that often-inaudible composer Bernhard Gunter's Trente Oiseaux label is known for, this disc by Japanese cello and violin duo Kuwayama Kiyoharu and Kijima Rina is a live acoustic improv set. Not exactly jazz improv, though! More of an avant-garde modern classical chamber improv thing, but minus the actual 'chamber', 'cause the real twist is that '01.06.16' isn't just live, it's what you might term a 'field recording' -- they recorded it outdoors, beside a highway at midnight! So you get the sound of passing cars and trucks, adding a whooshing, rumbling texture to the proceedings. We're not sure if they're really listening to the traffic and interactively improvising with those sounds -- although it seems that way at least some of the time -- but the ambient (and very present) pulsation of the highway noise makes a nice setting for the creaking, scrabbling, droning interplay of their strings.

via aquarius records

pinnate o'er belmont

From: Rupert Morgan
Subject: pinnate o'er belmont

Wheelbarrow about find lice on razor blade beyond bubble bath, or near
insurance agent eat paper napkin related to. Furthermore, parking lot
inside omphalos feels nagging remorse, and recliner for apartment building
pee on stovepipe from. Gypsy toward blithe spirit procrastinates, and
starlet for give a pink slip to behind bubble bath. From reactor rejoices,
and taxidermist related to ceases to exist; however, cough syrup living
with avocado pit admonish. Class action suit for is uxorious. puppeteer
henley balinese upstand curtis.

Unlike so many haunches who have made their psychotic looking glass to us.
When dahlia for guardian angel is precise, pit viper over play pinochle
with toward bodice ripper. Sometimes of somnambulist laughs out loud, but
from bartender always host graduated cylinder beyond diskette! Gonads
remain green.

by pat padua

spam haiku

From: Odis Piper
Subject: aboveboard

icosahedra
did he chase, reign, in his twen-
ty, brian, being

a generally
mecca, the doctor bowed, del-
icate, but the conversa-

tion.

after the beep

These answering machine excerpts are taken from old episodes of WFMU's The Audio Kitchen, a program which showcases a wide range of found audio. The archives containing these particular calls are no longer online, but the most recent season of the program (summer 2003) is available on the Audio Kitchen website.

via fluxblog

PhotoPermit

It's easy, sad to say, to collect a lot of stories about the abuses of local authorities and harrassment of photographers. This is an important function for photopermit.org, but not the only purpose. Even more importantly, the site is here to help photographers to avoid hassles and have the means to respond intelligently in the face of abusive authority figures. Photographers are not terrorists, and they need to be able to convince others of that fact.

Lewis Carroll Scrapbook

The Lewis Carroll Scrapbook at the Library of Congress is an original scrapbook that was kept by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Better known as Lewis Carroll, the Victorian-era children’s author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Dodgson was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford. The scrapbook contains approximately 130 items, including newspaper clippings, photographs, and a limited number of manuscript materials, collected between 1855-72.

moog avoirdupois

To subject The Band's 'The Weight,' with all its mythic American resonance, to the analog chill of the Moog synthesizer just seems plain wrong. But here it is anyhow, from The Moog Machine's 1969 album Switched-On Rock, in all its inexplicably funky glory, with a killer, fat bass line and panning swooshes galore. Bunuel and Christian redemption aside, only the melody remains.

via the wily filipino

by pat padua

more than a turnpike

"New Jersey Turnpike in the wee, wee hours, I was rolling slowly 'cause of drizzling showers," wrote rock legend Chuck Berry in his 1956 song, "You Can't Catch Me." Berry may have been going slowly—but he was actually on a road made for speed. See how the history of cars, roads, traffic, and ideas about service all came to bear on the Turnpike driving experience.

via New Resources at FREE

i am a pilgrim state asylum

A photo essay that would seem to scream b&w, but which is mostly in a muted color that works out alright.

From a site auspiciously titled Mustard Gas Party, whose motto should be, "There's a party in my lungs - and everyone's invited."

BOOM! (1968; Dir. Joseph Losey)

Wasn't nearly as bad as its rep. Not that it's any good.

The movie opens and waves crash on the rocky shore under the the title: BOOM! The overbearing tone is set from frame one. A beautiful widescreen landscape gradually narrows into a vertical sliver, until the camera zooms back to place you in the turret-window of a Mediterrranean villa. This is the island kingdom of Sissy Goforth (Liz), a faded, dying, beauty (though Taylor, not quite faded yet, is too young for the role) and bitch. (The term is used by all three principal characters - even Noel Coward's; oh for the days before bitch-and-ho). Goforth is nasty to the servants and to the flunkies who serve as her security force on the island; the latter are led by a bereted dwarf commander with a pack of dogs bigger than he is (nature=bigger than man) at his beck and call (man=domain over nature?). The only person among this small parade of humanity who she's even vaguely happy to see is the Witch of Capri, played by Noel Coward. The role was originally intended for Katherine Hepburn. Richard Burton, looking like The Prisoner, is Goforth's uninvited guest - the Angel of Death.

You get the idea. It's later Tennessee Williams (who wrote the screenplay, based on his play The milk train doesn't stop here anymore). But if you accept that tone, the movie's not *that* bad. It looks great. When I told a friend I thought it was visually compelling - the widescreen compositions, the rhythm of closeups - he said oh, those tricks are straight out of Sergio Leone. But isn't that interesting - using the visual language of a spaghetti western for what is essentially a chamber piece? I mean, the island *is* big enough for the two of them.

The trouble is with the acting. Not that it's over the top - this is later TN Wms after all. But sparks don't fly. The mannered superstar accents of Liz and Dick should be perfectly suited to Wms outrageous theatricality, but these voices also get shrill. Wms once said that every one of his plays is about one human being trying to make a connection with another, and I just didn't get that here. Taylor plays the prima donna all too well, but there's little sense of the loneliness of a self-cloistered aging star. She's not desperate enough - and how hard can it be to drum up tension in a battle with death - played by your husband? Autopilot isn't enough. And if Taylor is too young for her role, Burton is too old for his, unable to summon a physical panache on a par with his vocal panache (the person jumping off a railing onto Goforth's terrace is obviously a body double).

I'm glad I saw it. I only looked at my watch five or six times.

hasn't he been punished enough?

A man who shot himself in the testicles with a sawn-off shotgun was jailed for five years yesterday.

via tmftml

paul is dead , kitty kitty

For all the Beatles freaks, here's DJ Roby Yonge's original Paul Is Dead radio broadcast from the wee hours of October 21, 1969---the one that started it all. It's a 28 meg file, but it's worth it just to hear Roby talk about how you can see numbers in the text of the Magical Mystery Tour album cover if you 'really get very very high on some mind bending drug.'

via kittytext; audio is here

breakfast in america

To The Editors:

So what do I think of the new smaller sized Portland Press Herald?

I would say there are some good things and some bad things.

I always read my paper at the breakfast table all alone. And wow! There's a lot more room for my waffles, coffee, juice, etc. That's good.

But when I finished reading the paper, I spotted a housefly on my refrigerator, so I rolled up the paper and tried to whack it. I missed by about 1.25 inches. That's bad.

Paul Blaisdell
South Portland, Maine

via design observer

US soldiers are to have abused arrested children

More han hundred children are after information of the international red cross in Iraqi prisons arrested, among them also in the notorious prison Abu Ghureib. As the TV magazine "report" reports, it is to have come also to abusing of children and young people by coalition troops.

via this modern world and sadly, no.

download Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore says: 'I don't agree with copyright laws, and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it...as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor.... I make these movies and books and TV shows because I want things to change, and so the more people who get to see them, the better.'

via boing boing.

"Pussy" galore
Or, language and the two-yr old.

He searched around the room, trying to find an object to attach to the two syllables. My wife is a folk artist and there were many objects among our many collections for him to choose from -- bottle-cap men, ceramic cars from Mexico, strings of red chile lights. He spun around and then pointed at me. "You!" he said gleefully. "You are a pussy!"
...
...(I'd recently purchased a meat mallet, and couldn't stop using the term -- saying it at home, in my classroom, in my car: Where is my meat mallet? Who stole my meat mallet? Have you met my meat mallet?)

spamalia

blithe spirit tea parties near 0

Now and then, living with football team satiate for nation. And organize the dark side of her blithe spirit. Sometimes living with pork chop self-flagellates; but abstraction behind mirror always teach from cyprus mulch! Rangy, conduct dictatorial apostate calumniate.

Amalia and I took around piroshki (with clodhopper related) to microscope, over pickup truck. Amalia and I took cargo bay around (with toward clodhopper) cough syrup about chestnut. Amalia and I took bodice ripper about tuba player (with from sandwich, toothache) living with midwife sell to defined by gonad.

William Gedney Photographs and Writings

From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s, William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the indolent lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney was able to record the lives of others with remarkable clarity and poignancy. These photographs, along with his notebooks and writings, illuminate the rare vision of an intensely private man who, as a writer and photographer, was able to reveal the lives of others with striking sensitivity. Included here are selections from Gedney's finished prints, work prints, contact sheets, notes, notebooks, handmade photographic books, book dummies, and correspondence.

So Many Signs, So Little Time

An archaeologist of signs has set himself the task of photographing every old sign in Manhattan between 14th and 42nd Streets...

...Peering into one such stack of signs for cloak makers and cloth cutters on 29th Street, Mr. Grutchfield pointed out the name 'Pollack and Feldman,' barely visible against the old brown bricks. 'It says he makes muff beds,' he said. 'Now what the hell's a muff bed?'

Eddytor's Dozen by Chuck Eddy

Now Albert Ayler and Skye Sweetnam have in common both alliterative names and superbly noisy new releases you have to consult eBay for!

flea market photos. click on the bespectacled temptress for more.

found photos: digital edition
via consumptive

Iranian woman 'gives birth to frog'

While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal.

It has been speculated that the woman, who has not been named, unknowingly picked up the larva while she was swimming in a dirty pool.

via metafilter