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Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Last week, it was Photoshop Phriday at Something Awful, with the proprietors trying to assemble their favorite fictional animals out of real photographs. Results are mixed but some of them are just great -- check out this take on Miyazaki's Catbus:
I want to take a ride with Totoro! (And speaking of Studio Ghibli, I am on pins and needles waiting for Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea to hit the theaters...) On another page, we see in quick succession Charmander, Road Runner and Wile E., and Cat Dog.
posted evening of July 29th, 2009: 1 response
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Saturday, June 27th, 2009
 John Holbo's latest episode of Squid and Owl (if you haven't been reading along, view them as a slide show here -- funny stuff) mentioned the pleasantly-named Codex Zouche-Nutall, which sent me looking to find out more about it. Turns out scanned images of it and several other Aztec, Miztec and Mayan codices are online at the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies website.
posted morning of June 27th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, June 19th, 2009
Martha's latest work is up on YouTube: Catchy!
posted evening of June 19th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, June 13th, 2009
I spent yesterday afternoon at the MoMA with some friends, where I found two exhibitions devoted to word-based art. Both are really engaging and interesting, although by the time I got to the second I was already towards the end of my attention span... Tangled Alphabets is a show of the calligraphic art of León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. I was particularly taken with Ferrari's work -- Schendel's mostly left me cold, though I could see how it makes sense to exhibit the two together and how Schendel's work sometimes offers a nice counterpoint. I was sorry there was no print available of Ferrari's Cuadro escrito, which seemed like the highlight of the show to me: -- the text is a description of the painting Ferrari would compose "if I knew how to paint, if God in his embarrassment and confusion had accidentally touched me..." There is a catalog of the show, and additionally a bilingual edition of León Ferrari: Obra 1976-2008 -- this latter does not have a whole lot of the calligraphic works but does contain some really interesting texts and paintings. Downstairs there was an exhibition of printed art and techniques of printing, The Printed Picture -- the primary focus of this was on technology used to render graphic images in printing, but what really caught my eye was a room of typography in different faces and made with different printing technologies.
 Si yo supiera pintar, si Dios en su apuro y turbado por error confuso me hubiera tocado, agarrarÃa los vellos de la marta en la punta de una rama de fresno flexible empapados sumergidos en óleo bermejo y precisamente en este lugar iniciarÃa una lÃnea delgada flaca ya con la intención de cubrirla después maniobrando con la transparencia. Al lado un pozo absolutamente negro y definitivo. Enganchados en las ramas algunos repugnantes amarillos circuncisos como nidos de codesera el cochino pájaro del ártico que utiliza sus mismÃsimos hijos para alimentar las focas que le placen (nadie supo nunca por qué siguen naciendo) colgantes arracimados a la tela ayer virgen de la cual dejo dos cuartas cuadradas libres y enseguida un caballo formidable pero frustratorio por retaceado blanco corriendo espumante con las crines y las colas desplegadas, un verdadero corcel del malón resuelto con realismo fotográfico pero con cierto aire metafÃsico para introducir uno de los elementos de confusión y también un sospechado sugerido signifÃcado opaco bajo el barniz, no simbólico, como para que al verlo alguien ni siquiera se de cuenta que en sus entrañas se refriega preguntándose qué significa ese caballo blanco veloz hacia el monte de Venus entre las hierbas altas oscuras enruladas la gran quebrada magnética y luego el volcán.
↻...done
posted morning of June 13th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
 Nice. (Thanks for the link, Dave!)
posted afternoon of June 9th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, June 5th, 2009
 So I happened in today's XKCD upon the knowledge that Codex Seraphinianus is not the only or the first such book, written in an invented language and alphabet -- I mean I suspected vaguely that there were other similar books, but the cartoon gave me the name of one, and the Wikipædia article on that one gave me some more names. Best thing: at the bottom of that article is a link to a complete download of the Voynich manuscript, scanned in at pretty high quality.
 Update: Some thoughts from ciphermysteries.com about decoding the Voynich manuscript.
posted evening of June 5th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, April 25th, 2009
Martha posts an image of a new painting at her Flickr account today, Loki's House. She explains: Loki was hiding out after the death of Baldur in a house open to all four directions, so he could see if the gods were coming after him. He was making a fishnet when they arrived. He threw the net in the fire and hid in the stream as a fish. But the net didn't burn fast enough.
A longer version of the story is here.Update: Today is a good day for FB friends posting new artwork. Below the fold, a beautiful illustration of James Trotter and various bugs floating on a giant peach, by Jed Alexander.
posted evening of April 25th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, April 13th, 2009
 Last month, Saramago wrote a note about his dogs Camões and Pepe, and speculated that a Portuguese dog in the White House would be "an important diplomatic success, from which Portugal should work to get the maximum advantage in its bilateral relations with the United States..." -- today Bo is in the White House -- "the Great Danes and the hounds of Pomerania are dying of envy" -- but Saramago is critical:
In any case, allow me to say that I have a serious reservation that I must express: one cannot have any idea what a Portuguese Water Dog is, to put around his neck, to photograph him, a collar of flowers, as if he were a Hawai`ian dancer. At only six months of age, Bo is not yet fully aware of the respect that he owes the canine branch into which he had the luck to be born. ...
posted evening of April 13th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, April 11th, 2009
I'm always taken with pictures of the aurora borealis. Hope I get to travel north sometime in the proper season for looking at it. My dad sent a link to some pictures of the Northern Lights over Yellowknife, Northwest Territories -- also there are some great pictures of frozen landscapes in Antarctica.
posted afternoon of April 11th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, April 9th, 2009
The 14th, untitled poem in The Romantic Dogs is only three lines: I dreamt of frozen detectives in the great
refrigerator of Los Angeles
in the great refrigerator of Mexico City.
This introduces a series of five poems about "lost detectives" and "frozen detectives" and "crushed detectives" -- they moan desperately, they stare at their open palms, they are "intent on keeping their eyes open/ in the middle of the dream." These poems -- which are all about dreams -- make me think of Raymond Chandler; there is no stylistic similarity to speak of but I read "detectives" and "Los Angeles" and that is where my mind goes -- and they make me want to read Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives to find out what his dream-detectives do when they are fleshed out into characters...The fourth poem in this sequence, "The Frozen Detectives," has another painting reference in it: I dreamt of detectives lost
In the convex mirror of the Arnolfinis:
Our generation, our perspectives,
Our models of Fear. I had to look this up -- turns out to be a painting I've seen many times and read a bit about at some point lost to my memory, "The Betrothal of the Arnolfinis," by Jan van Eyck:
An amazing, incredible picture; I don't have much to say about it here but that mirror seems like a fine place for dream-detectives to get lost. Anyway Sylvia was looking over my shoulder as I looked this up and she immediately recognized it as appearing in her book Dog's Night, which is the story of the dogs in all the paintings in an art gallery getting loose after hours one night -- it's a fine book and I recommend it if you are looking for a present for a young kid -- as I recall it's best suited for about a five- or six-year-old.
posted evening of April 9th, 2009: Respond
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