Who is James Oddo? I didn’t know this until about 10 minutes ago, but he is the Staten Island Borough President.
We don’t pay that much attention to Staten Island. It is the borough that most New Yorkers think is part of New Jersey, but it isn’t.
But I like this story. A politician responds to a political loss with cleverness and, well, a sense of humor.
http://gawker.com/staten-island-official-subtly-owns-real-estate-develope-1758811146
What could be more beautiful (other than the obvious)?
Color me bemused, but these (supposedly) authentic color images in the Temple of Dendur make me think that Matt Groening is perhaps older and more immortal than he at first appears. (It’s the colors!)
I don’t know if the pictures in this collection are taken by one person, or are by different people, but all express the strangeness and beauty of under ground.
The video shows a performance of the Robotic Church, an art space in Red Hook Brooklyn. There were apparently a few performances in 2013, and not much since.
But this video is aces.
I learned about the Robotic Church in Gothamist today, but the space was written about in the New York Times in 2013.
I hope they resume performances soon.
Movies are important, all over the world, and many presidents watch movies. It seems that no president watched more movies than Jimmy Carter. And the man who lusted in his heart brought the first x-rated film to the White House, at least officially. (Didn’t JFK live the x-rated life?)
And note that by the time Midnight Cowboy screened at the White House it had been rerated R.
The link here is to a story about a guy who uses FOIA requests to glean the movie watching schedules of the Presidents of the US. He’s extracted the publishable goods for Carter (and Nixon and Reagan). What the hell is Bill Clinton hiding?
Much less Jerry Ford?
I’m thinking about making a tumblr devoted to movies our leaders should watch. They’ll watch, right?
BTW perhaps the best filmic incursion into the Carter White House was Terry Southern’s Magic Christian. Not a great film, but an awesome provocation.
We’ve seen the posters in the subway. An exacto knife and some el Markos makes for something messed up. Not exactly art, but not—at least not always—mindless. The designer Lydia Cambron has made it art.
Dennis Cooper is a novelist and poet and dramatist and critic and editor, who resides outside the mainstream cultural industry. We apparently went to the same small liberal arts college in Southern California at roughly the same time, though he would have been a couple of years ahead of me. I don’t remember him.
Going through his bibliography just now, I don’t seem to have read him before today, either, though it is a stretch to call what I just did reading.
He calls his new work, Zac’s Haunted House, an html novel. It works like this.
Click on this link. Scroll down. Follow the directions.
I downloaded the html folder, opened the file inside it called index.html with Chrome and I was good to go.
I would imagine if you have fast internet and give each chapter time to buffer, it would work fine online, too.
Zac’s Haunted House is made up entirely of GIF files artfully arranged. If I understand correctly, these were all files found online, then resized and put in order by the author.
As you scroll down the page you will find correspondences and themes, mostly to do with transformations and blood letting, lots of horror/slasher imagery, though there is humor, too. If you take such things to heart you may find it disturbing.
I found it pretty amazing, even if I’m not sure it is anything more really than a fabulous trick. Fabulous tricks, after all, are fabulous.