quarta-feira, 08 de setembro de 2004

Tiki themed art show in San Francisco, Friday, September 17th. Mark Frauenfelder: Shooting Gallery in San Francisco is having a tiki themed art show, called "Tiki Art NOW! A Volcanic Eruption of Art." This painting of Marcia Brady with a moko by Isabel Samaris is fantastic! Don't miss this group show featuring over 60 artists from around the world paying homage to Tiki!  This stunning display of neo-primitive images is captured in a 90-page full color catalog available opening night (or later from Shooting Gallery). Link [Boing Boing] 11:59:30 PM    comment []

Venice: 9th International Architecture Exhibition - METAMORPH The 9th Intl. Architecture Exhibition 'Metamorph' directed by Kurt W. Forster will take place Sept. 12 to Nov. 7, 2004. The chosen theme signals the transformations which over the past several decades have been so profound as to mark a momentous passage in the evolution of architecture. “ Few people today would not share the sense that we are living in times of great changes, of profound shifts in almost every discipline. In the field of architecture, these have taken on such a breadth and depth as to suggest the advent of a new era. The signs of these new times can be found dotted around everywhere and we have sought to collect them together to provide a world-wide survey under the concept of METAMORPH.” — Kurt W. Forster. Picture: Wilkinson Eyre Architects: Royal Ballet School Bridge. London, 2003. Link 2:53:24 AM  Google It!  comment []

Classic pulp mag replicas. Cory Doctorow: Girasol Collectables is a small Canadian press that's producing high-quality facimilies of classic pulp magazines (I bought a copy of this Spicy Adventure Stories mag yesterday for the cover, without realizing that one of the stories was written by Robert Howard under his Sam Walser pseudonym) at the rate of one a month. At US$25-35 per issue, it's a little pricey to consider as a subscription item, but as a one-off, these things are fantastic. I love the old pulps, but when I buy them, I'm reluctant to give them a home beside the toilet, where they'd be great reading material, what with all their humorous quack-remedy ads, overblown short stories, and general bite-siized irony. But the old pulps feel like a piece of history, something you down own so much as take custody over -- they're so fragile and poorly wrought that they bring out the maternal/archival instinct in all but the most hardened junk-hater. But these replicas -- in addition to being better-manufactured than any of the original pulps! -- are cheap(ish) and replaceable, and a perfect tank-top reader. I kept hauling out my copy yesterday and showing it around, and the universal reaction among the WorldCon-goers was a bittersweet sigh of regret for the passing of the golden age of dreadful fic and exploitative covers and quack advertisements. Link [Boing Boing] 2:05:09 AM    comment []

Psychic TV turned on again. David Pescovitz: Transmedia artist Genesis P-Orridge has reactivated his seminal industrial/trance band Psychic TV to tour Europe and the United States beginning this month. Last winter, I was fortunate enough to catch a rehearsal and they sounded fabulous--tight, energized, and... happy. (Douglas Rushkoff was playing keyboards with the group for several dates late last year but will not be joining this particular "de-tour.") Genesis is quite a sight these days as well. As part of the Breaking Sex art exploration he's immersed in with his other half, Lady Jaye, the two received identical breast implants on Valentine's Day 2003. Gen's new mantra? "S/he is Her/e." Link [Boing Boing] 2:04:06 AM    comment []

Hard boiled crime stories, old and new, in classic packaging. Cory Doctorow: Hard Case Crime is a new paperback imprint that's reprinting old pulp crime novels and commissioning new novels in the style of the old pulps. They're publishing them in replica packaging designed to look like the old dime-novels, and they've even brought Robert McGinnis, best known for painting the original James Bond movie posters, out of retirement to do cover art. From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as well as by promising young writers like Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain. Today, Block, Leonard, and McBain still make the bestseller lists with each new hardcover -- but the pulp novels that first captured the public's imagination weren't hardcovers. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one's published books like that in years. Link [Boing Boing] 2:03:08 AM    comment []

Phillippe Starck designs Optical Mouse for Microsoft. Xeni Jardin: Superstar designer Phillippe Starck created this inventive little mouse for Microsoft. Blue or orange, about $25-$30 US. Link to product details. Supercool Parisian hipster boutique collette also sells 'em online for 45 euros, but you'll have to survive their website's abominable Flash-based UI first. [Boing Boing] 2:01:56 AM    comment []

Wikipedia versus Britannica. Cory Doctorow: Ed Felten's doing some empirical comparisons of the online Britannica versus Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's doing pretty good! Virtual memory: Wikipedia has a pretty good entry; Britannica has no entry for virtual memory, and doesn't appear to discuss the concept elsewhere, either. Verdict: advantage Wikipedia. Public-key cryptography: Good, accurate entries in both. Verdict: toss-up. Microsoft antitrust case: Britannica has only two sentences, saying that Judge Jackson ruled against Microsoft and ordered a breakup, and that the Court of Appeals overturned the breakup but agreed that Microsoft had broken the law. That's correct, but it leaves out the settlement. Wikipedia's entry is much longer but error-prone. Verdict: big advantage to Britannica. Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries. Link [Boing Boing] 1:59:36 AM    comment []

Trippy blotter art. David Pescovitz: A sheet of LSD blotter paper printed with this approprately psychedelic optical illusion is up for auction on eBay. Click the image for the full effect. Presumably, the paper has not been dipped. I've also seen "blotter art" printed with M.C. Escher illustrations. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!) UPDAPTE: BB reader Carlos Poker points out that the optical masterpiece borrowed for this blotter was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka. [Boing Boing] 1:58:34 AM    comment []

© Creative Commons 2004 Antonio C-Pinto. Last update: 26.09.04; 18:56:18.