xradiograph
hand-painted sign for a vanished restaurant
Chris Nakashima-Brown introduces us to the burgeoning Polish ragga-bhangra scene.
What planet and century is this, again?
Yeah, I don’t care, either.
While I think this is the Best Joke of all Time, and my fiancee
contends that is not even a joke (”because it is not funny”*), it
continues to strike me on a visceral/cognitive level. There’s the
schoolboy-glee of the imagined-yet-frustrated response, coupled
with the ontological insistence that an object has (must have?) itself
as a property.
And perhaps it is more of a suggestion. Could a stick not be sticky?
Could a chair lack chairness? My fiancee would readily agree that –
if this is a funny — it lacks funniness.
*does a joke need to be funny, any more than a piece of art be beautiful? Is funny an essential property of joke?
image source: Village Voice
March 1, 2007
Defacer With Mystery Agenda Is Attacking Street Art
By COLIN MOYNIHANSomeone out there has a problem with art. Or at least a certain kind of art and artist.
The evidence is the bright green and purple splashes of paint that began appearing on walls in Brooklyn and Manhattan more than a month ago. The carefully aimed blobs obscured or disfigured dozens of pieces of street art created by people who may not be household names, but who have achieved the esteem of peers and some recognition from the mainstream art world. The targets of the paint attacks have included posters, paper cutouts pasted on walls, and images stenciled on the sides of buildings.
Many of the paint splatters were accompanied by messages printed on plain white sheets of paper and pasted near the splatters. Those communiqués appeared to condemn the commodification of art, but it is difficult to be sure what the messages really mean. One reads, in part, “Destroy the museums, in the streets and everywhere.” The author has kept his or her identity a secret.
Olyphant steamed over colliery fire
The fire started in July 2004 when someone set a stolen car on fire and the fire spread to a coal refuse pile then moved underground. The U.S. Office of Surface Mining plans to isolate the 8-acre fire by digging a trench around it and allowing the fire to burn itself out.
See Also: Sinkhole in Guatemala City
November 7, 2006 A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues
The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.
