A few of years ago or so I became interested in the art of grimoires. The woodcuts of regular geometric shapes overlaid over demons or simply naked people. Codes. Magic. Dark conspiracies. Grimoires have it all. The ultimate book of magic is the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript. Discovered in 1912 in an antique bookshop, its authorship […]
Vinyl “For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it […]
North Korean lore calls [Mt. Baekdu] the birthplace of Kim Jong-il, though Western experts say he was born in the Soviet Union. The Koreas are sending a joint research team to the active volcano Mt. Baekdu, located on the North Korean-Chinese border. Apparently, the North Koreans are concerned about the possibility of an eruption – […]
Fourth in the series of indeterminate length, Recolonizing Detroit The root cause of the problems Paul Romer encountered in Madagascar was the local population. So how about founding these cities not just in unpopulated areas, but in areas people do not identify with as well? Could this be effective? From the European perspective, that’s what […]
Writing about traveling bookcases and other dead media storage solutions got me thinking about other furniture that always seems pregnant with possibilities, yet just isn’t practical anymore: secretary desks, and travel desks. I love all the cubby holes in the secretary desks. Holes full of letters, bills, and checks. Drawers containing pens, ink wells, and […]
So today was the last shuttle mission. I remember my mom waking me up early that April morning and asking me if I wanted to watch real spaceship launch. Of course I did. We went into the living room, and sat in front of that old black and white television we had, and watched it […]
From Carmen Hermosillo’s (aka humdog) 1994 essay Pandora’s Vox i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made […]
It is the year 2011, and I now have a robot maid. Alas, it does not have a sassy voice, and even though it comes in sexy black, it does not come with a french accent either. Mostly it just beeps, like robots from a long time ago, but occasionally it does speak in a […]
Mike Thompson‘s Blood Lamp is a sealed flask containing luminol. When the owner finds himself in need of light, the neck is broken, and the owner uses the jagged edge to cut his finger and drip blood into the liquid contained in the flask. On a superficial level, the lamp looks like something out of […]
In the Sixth Century, somewhere in the Swat Valley, an Indian Buddhist carved this jade figurine of Buddha. In 1954, the figurine was unearthed in Helgö, Sweden, during the excavation of a medieval Viking farm. It was found with an Egyptian ladle, a Byzantine bowl, an Irish crozier. It is now on display at the […]