Robot Monkeys

Fashion designer Alexander McQueen is dead. I was never someone who followed fashion, in fact for years I found haute couture baffling until I stopped seeing them as ostensibly clothes, but rather simply as art.

The reason I bring this up is not only because the guy apparently committed suicide, or that the man knew how to put on a show, but because I’ve been sitting on that picture of the Milan Fall 09 “The McQueensberry Rules” show for a year in my drafts folder, and I’ll never get it out if I don’t use it now.

Any of these would have been perfect for someone attending the Edwardian Ball.

The only picture hanging in my apartment is the above photo of Fidel Castro playing baseball. It’s a poster entitled, “Fidel at Bat: Images of the 20th Century.” I bought it because it was such a non sequitur. There was Fidel, playing baseball in a full stadium, with cameras all around him. There was no context for this photo. It was just there.

I wondered what was going through the pitcher’s mind. Was he told to give up a hit to El Presidente? Does he lob the ball up there so Fidel can get a hit? If he does, he can’t make it too obvious that it’s just a lob. What if Fidel just whiffs at it? What if, Fidel when he enters the box, says, “Give me your best pitch.” Do you show it?

Did Fidel play the whole game? Probably not. It was probably just a stunt, but in my imagination, he plays the whole game and goes 3 for 4 with a sacrifice bunt. (“We must all make sacrifices for the good of the whole,” Fidel is quoted as saying in the post-game interviews.)

Originally, I was just going to leave this post with that image, but as I searched around for a scan of the photo, I found several more photos of Fidel playing baseball, including wearing a baseball uniform, instead of his trademarked army uniform. Unfortunately my search added a bit of context to these photos, but it flesh out my alternate reality a bit. Castro was a star pitcher in college, noted for his curveball, so of course, he’s a pitching. He also, lead off. Lead off pitcher. That’s my Fidel.

Continue reading

George Tames, New York Times, 1961

Callie Shell, Aurora for Time, 2009

Previously. Previously Previously.

Ben Wiggins’s time lapse from around the bay.

via Laughing Squid

Eric Pakurar, took a photo every day of the same Greene St doorway in Manhattan for eight months straight, recording how the graffiti changed as part of his Chemical Warfare Project.

He is currently soliciting the identities of the individual artists, the individual pieces on Flickr.

Via Wooster Collective

Digeratti Xeni Jardin for BoingBoing Video and the Chron interview (albeit separately) collage artist Cassandra C. Jones.

Cassandra finds amateur photos of the same thing (e.g. the moon, lightning, a sunset, etc.) and then combines them in novel ways. Such as taking photos of lightning to make the shape of a rabbit, or animating the phases of the moon from a hundred separate snapshots.

Cassandra’s show, “Send Me a Link,” opens this Saturday (Reception 4 pm – 7 pm) and runs through September 5th, at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, 172 Minna Street, SF (11 am – 6 pm, Tues-Sat)

BOOOOOOOM! highlights the work of Jeff Wall. The above photo is of course an interpretation of the narrator’s room from Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man”.

When I was in junior high or early high school, my mom gave that book to read. I put it down after that scene (which if I remember correctly occurs on page six). “The man’s crazy,” I said. The idea that someone could, or even would, steal that much electricity just because he could, was beyond me. Now that I’m older, it’s one of those books that I need to revisit.

Simon Høgsberg’s We’re All Going to Die is a 100 meter composite photo of 178 people walking on the same railway platform in Berlin in the summer of 2007.

I have no idea where this is installed, but it’s available online for your enjoyment. It really appeals to the voyeur in me, seeing all these people just go about their day, most of whom don’t notice the photographer. I especially like the featureless background. The composition, along with it’s provocative title, made me contemplative, and a little depressed.