The Invisible Library

Via Boing Boing, a collection of Soviet era holiday cards. I like this one because it reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. Happy Holidays, Comrades!

I stumbled upon Brass Goggles while looking at these magnificent adding machines on Boing Boing Gadgets.

Warren Ellis asks an intriguing question:

Is it possible that steampunk is making a comeback as acquiescence to the notion that our more recent apparently plausible models of the future will never come to reality?

To a large degree, I would say, yes, it is. (more…)

Jesus made of food is bad but Jesus as food is… holy? No wonder I don’t get religion:

NEW YORK (AP) — A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled Friday amid complaints from Catholics, including Cardinal Edward Egan.

The “My Sweet Lord” display was shut down by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in Manhattan, said Matt Semler, the gallery’s creative director. Semler said he resigned after officials at the Roger Smith Hotel shut down the show.

The artwork was created from more than 200 pounds of milk chocolate and features Christ with his arms outstretched as if on an invisible cross. Unlike the typical religious portrayal of Christ, the artwork does not include a loincloth.

The 6-foot sculpture was the victim of “a strong-arming from people who haven’t seen the show, seen what we’re doing,” Semler said. “They jumped to conclusions completely contrary to our intentions.”

But word of the confectionary Christ infuriated Catholics, including Egan, who described it as “a sickening display.” Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.”

I’d think that something like the President’s response to Hurricane Katrina or Abu Ghraib would be a worse assault on Christian sensibilities, not a fucking sculpture made of chocolate. But then, I’m not a giant pick like Bill Donohue.*

Via Boing Boing.

________

*Who now will call me anti-Catholic for calling him a prick.

Harpers has a great essay up by Jonathan Lethem. It covers a wide range of topics from artistic appropriation to copyright law:

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

[…] Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he’d himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

This is something interesting. Art, all art, is quickly changing. This greybeard novelist strikes us as hoplessly outdated in his puritanism. But it wasn’t that long ago, just a few years, really that this was the law of the Arts. Andy Warhol is still cursed in some artistic circles, because he had the audacity to incorporate popular culture (pitewy!) into his painting! The nerve! Painting is reserved for alegorical murals depicting moral and religious themes, not soup cans and garish silk screen prints of mocie stars!

Today, we’re starting to see the first generation of people raised on pop art. We don’t fear the stigma of borrowing or quoting. We’ve internalized the idea that there’s nothing new and are setting out to explore the used. Pop art and highbrow met at at a party one night and fell in love, now their babies are making a mess of things. Isn’t it beautiful?

Lethem also has something interesting to say about copyright as well. Read it all and borrow the good parts.

Today I cataloged one of the most intriguing and beautiful books I’ve ever seen, a sort of Steampunk homage to the Lunar landing, called the Apollo Prophecies:

Rumor has it that the surviving members of the only twelve humans to have walked on the moon call themselves the Order of Ancient Astronauts. Much has been written of these voyagers of yore, but if the Order of Ancient Astronauts should ever gather together like knights of the Round Table for a reverie, it is fairly certain that they would favor a new publication about their exploits titled The Apollo Prophecies.

Published by a non-profit organization called the Aperture Foundation located in New York that is dedicated to the advancement of photography in all its manifestations, The Apollo Prophecies is one of the most creative works produced to date about the moon exploration program. It consists of a slipcased package containing a dual sided, 19-foot long duotone photographic panorama that unfolds into a richly visual fantasy of a time-bending Moon expedition, together with a 16-page booklet telling a saga-like tale of Moon-dwelling civilizations predating and predicting the arrival of Apollo.

The photographic panorama is segmented into 60 panels and it can be paged through like a book or unfolded accordion style for a flowing mural effect. Free of text, we see a rocket launch a stylized space capsule to the moon. The pair of Apollo-era astronauts aboard land on the lunar surface, unpack the lunar rover, and embark upon the tasks of observation and rock collecting. They soon encounter a friendly civilization of Edwardian-era explorers, in addition to helpful space-suited monkeys and elephants, living on the moon. The truly ancient astronauts help the Apollo spacemen prepare their craft for the return voyage to Earth. Children will love the whimsy of these images and anyone with an appreciation of space as a frontier will admire the extravagance of the publication’s production.

Pictures can been seen here and here.

The book is for sale in all the usual places.

And I call dibs on a novel called the Order of Ancient Astronauts.

After much frittering and sillyness trying to find a way to set up an online print shop to make Zombie Jesus Loves You T-shirts, I’ve decided to go the quick and easy route and just post a large version of the image, a very big, high quality JPG that you can copy to your heart’s content, print out onto whatever kind of iron-on paper you like and make all sorts of cool Zombie Jesus Loves You shirts, totes, underwear, what have you. For free. I’m not in this for money. What I do ask is that you send me pictures of whatever you make and I’ll post them here.
Other fun, blashemous images and such to follow shortly…

BBC News:

An artist’s sculpture has been rejected by the Royal Academy of Arts which has instead opted to display the wooden support it was put on.

David Hensel, 64, from East Grinstead, West Sussex, was told the laughing head would be part of the summer exhibition.

But at a preview he found that just a piece of wood intended to support the head was on display on the plinth.

The Academy said the judging panel assumed the two pieces were separate and decided the support was better.

You can follow the link to see pictures of both the sculpture and the plinth.

Now, there’s several way to look at this story (but then, isn’t there always when modern art is involved?): either it was a cock up of mythic proportions— imagine, the philistines are running the show over there at the Royal Academy and don’t even know their own asses form a plinth— or, it was just a mix up, the judges were told that the plinth was a separate piece and judged it accordingly, weighing it’s aesthetic merits against those of the 10,000 or so other entries, and found the laughing head wanting in comparison to it’s base.

Of course, at some point regardless of which view you take, you have to realise that the Lord High Curators of Artistic Merit for all of Bloody England chose a block of wood over an actual object recognizable as a work of sculpture. There is no other use for a discrete laughing head. It serves no possible purpose except an artistic one, while a block of wood has infinite possible uses. We could then say that the judges were merely signifying that they are for the infinite in art, rather than the singular. Or rather, they’re all a bunch of dingbats.

Link via Crooked Timber.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if we had a genuine appreciation of the arts in the US? I mean a real culturally ingrained love for the spectacle and pageantry of art, not just some underfunded office that occasionally gives money to some dipshit who submerges a crucifix in urine.

We could probably have something as wonderful and fun as, The Sultan’s Elephant, the four day event that is currently going on in London:

The Sultan’s Elephant is a spectacle you’ve only imagined… Created by theatrical magicians Royal de Luxe, it tells the story of a sultan from far-off lands and his magical, time-travelling mechanical elephant. Forty feet high and 42 tonnes in weight, this beautiful creature will capture the hearts and minds of everyone who sees it.

The Sultan’s Elephant is played out over four days in the streets, squares and public spaces of central London. Whether you dip into it for three hours or follow its progress for three days, this breathtaking show will live in your memory forever.

The story (with pictures):

Once upon a time, there lived a sultan who was tormented in his dreams by visions of a little girl who was travelling through time. This is his story, incredible but true.

The sultan could no longer sleep, his growing anguish diverting his attention from affairs of state. In order to cure his sickness, and believing that he would find the girl in the land of dreams, he commissioned an unknown engineer living in 1900 to construct a time-travelling elephant. A few months later, the sultan set off with his court in search of the little giant, which, in the course of his nightmares, had been transformed into a marionette 5 metres high.

The trip was awful, but they found a series of clues as to her wherabouts. The giant loved sewing - she liked to stitch cars to the tarmac, boats to quaysides, trains to railway tracks and sometimes even envelopes to letterboxes.

The elephant followed the trail left by the puppeteers. And as in all love stories, strange things began to happen. Such was his happiness at getting closer to her, he began to expel hundreds of living birds which disappeared into the sky in a burst of joy…

Ah, to be in a city that spent hard earned tax dollars on something so frivolous and joyful… Maybe some day, after WW III, when Canada and Europe rehabilitate us into a real civilized country…