TommyPom digs Converse’s new music Tumblr.
About
Brand Strategist in sunny Southern California. For some (slightly) original thoughts, visit my blog: http://dennisdemori.com/ or check out what I'm posting on Twitter: @DennisDemoriFollowing
About
Brand Strategist in sunny Southern California. For some (slightly) original thoughts, visit my blog: http://dennisdemori.com/ or check out what I'm posting on Twitter: @DennisDemoriFollowing
TommyPom digs Converse’s new music Tumblr.
Little people, big food! We’re pumped for Christopher Biffoli’s new book of photographs, featuring tiny figurines next to food.
Is there a way of ensuring that a work of art or literature won’t survive? Shelley Jackson thinks there is, and is out to prove it with SKIN, a project she calls A mortal work of art.
In the summer of 2003 Jackson put out a quiet call for volunteers. Each volunteer would agree to have a word from her 2095-word story tattooed somewhere on his or her body. The story is a closely guarded secret and the volunteers are able to read it only after they’ve been inked.
Jackson encourages potential volunteers to read her other works, especially her short stories, but if she has her way, the complete text of SKIN will never be made publicly available, in print or online.
The first tattooed word (SKIN, the story’s title) is on Jackson’s own wrist and subsequent words are slowly being issued in story order, based upon applications Jackson feels speak to her.
Over 10,000 volunteers for her project have poured in from all around the world. Mothers and daughters have requested words together as a bonding experience and groups of friends have asked for words in sequence to form a sentence. Thus far, Jackson has accepted 1875 applications, has received a total of almost 22,000 emails and has proof of 553 inked words.
Once a word has been tattooed, the person then “becomes” the word and Jackson refers to her “words” as someone else might speak of their own children.
Jackson isn’t fussy about the final incarnation of her work. She says if she doesn’t find enough participants, the incomplete version will be considered definitive. If she hadn’t received any volunteers at all, the call itself would have been the work.
To attempt to define exactly what her work is begs some interesting questions. Is it literary? If this story were printed on paper it would certainly be called a literary work and not a work of art, but conversely “words” do not usually have jobs and paint their nails and do the washing up.
From that perspective it’s easy to see a whimsical element of performance art, and it cannot be denied that this project is far more visually interesting than the average novella.
The most fascinating element of SKIN, be it literary or artistic, is its transient nature. The story may never be fully realised, as it seems possible that before the last word has been “born” one of the others may have died.
And the author is quite aware that many of her words could outlive her. But this seems to be part of her grand design, an integral part of her artistic vision: “As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.”
(Via).
Shattered glass and resin sculptures by Daniel Arsham (2013)
Coachella and Other Things You Can’t Afford
I am a (reasonably) young, “creative” person living in an urban environment. As such, essentially everyone I know purports to be poor. Like, super poor (their emphasis, not mine). Now, not to get all Reagan on your ass, but I fully believe that my friends’ particular breed of poverty is a choice. They’re not poor because they have to work two jobs to pay for their mother’s chemotherapy. They’re not poor because they were born disenfranchised. They’re poor because they waste their money on stupid, superfluous shit that does nothing to better their quality of life, because they still complain incessantly about being depressed.
Unless you’re attending as a paid member of the Monster™ Energy Extreme Promotional Team, if you’re going to Coachella this weekend, you no doubt shelled out tons of cash for tickets. Know what would have been a more productive thing to buy? Health insurance. If you’re wasting what little scratch you have on the tired, money-sucking trappings of young life that I’ll outline below, check yourself before you wreck yourself. Any by “yourself,” I mean your credit (which is what defines your worth as a human anyway).
FESTIVAL TICKETS
My great-grandmother spent a couple weekends in the desert once—escaping the Turks, who had murdered her entire family. The modern day equivalent of her journey consists of shitheads with Skrillex haircuts shlepping out to the godless wasteland that is the Coachella valley and spending $400 for the privilege of getting dehydrated on $12 beers, being aggressively marketed to by tech companies, and listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. No wonder the members of this generation have no goddamned character.
BRUNCH
According to my father, food exists solely to “make turds.” Viewing food as turd fuel means:
A) The word “brioche” doesn’t need to be in your vocabulary,
and
B) You don’t have to waste $30 every Sunday eating overpriced turd fuel in the company of women in sundresses and your hungover, financially irresponsible peers.
Henrique Oliveira - Desnatureza (2011)
via GQ
- The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth (2000)
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
- White Teeth, Zadie Smith (2000)
- True History Of The Kelly Gang, Peter Carey (2000)
- 2666, Roberto Bolaño (2008)
- Tree Of Smoke, Denis Johnson (2007)
- Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower (2009)
- Fortress Of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem (2003)
- Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
- Runaway, Alice Munro (2004)
- Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald (2001)
- Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
- The Art Of Fielding, Chad Harbach (2011)
- Netherland, Joseph O’Neill (2008)
- The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007)
- The Line Of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
- Saturday, Ian Mcewan (2005)
- The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers (2012)
- The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
Stephanie Gonot - Edibles (2012)
The Crazy Details About How Apple Is Going To Construct Its $5 Billion Spaceship HQ
Peter Burrows at Bloomberg Businessweek has new details on the construction of the building. It may not have been an Apple product like the iPhone or the iPad, but it still got the same treatment from Jobs’ obsessive eye for detail.
Here’s a sample of Jobs’ specifications:
- Burrows says, “Jobs wanted no seam, gap, or paintbrush stroke showing.”
- He wanted everything “polished to a supernatural smoothness.”
- Wood used inside the building is to come from a specific type of maple tree, and it can only be “heartwood,” which is the wood from the center of the tree.
- It will have six-square kilometers of bent glass, which will be bent at a factory in Germany, then shipped to California. The company doing the glass had to develop new machines for making it.
- Apple will pre-build bathrooms and cubicle banks then have them driven to the office and installed. This saves time and allows the construction to be more exact.
- Jobs didn’t want concrete floors, he wanted “a stone-infused alternative such as terrazzo, buffed to a sheen normally reserved for museums and high-end residences,” says Burrows.
- Jobs also wanted the seams where walls met to be 1/32 of an inch across, whereas the standard for construction is 1/8 of inch.
- He wanted the ceiling to be polished concrete instead of sound absorbing material. Apple also has a very specific plan for the concrete ceiling. It wants to pour ceiling molds on the ground, then lift it to the ceiling, an approach that is far more expensive.
Businessmen and politicians make the worst bloggers because they do not like to tell what they know, and telling what you know is the essence of blogging well. They also fear to be wrong; and, as Felix Salmon, Reuters’ finance blogger, insists and sometimes demonstrates: “If you are never wrong, you are never interesting”.
Anatol Knotek | Visual-Poetry on Tumblr.
Greetings from the team at #LAUNCH2013 in San Francisco. We’re sharing what’s in everyone’s future by using GonnaBe to show where they’re going to be & what they’re going to be doing…all right from our gypsy camp.
Dale J. Stephens, author of Hacking Your Education and founder of UnCollege.org
via NPR
(via curiositycounts)
