| 1 August, 1999 | ||
| The Mojave Desert Phone Booth strikes again, this time on the front page of today's Las Vegas Review-Journal. See also: Godfrey Daniels' original MDPB site. Rex Rosenberg alerted me to his Payphone Project, containing information, numbers and photos of payphones all over the US and a dozen other countries. More on navigability, and yet another argument for the "back" button and against spawning new windows: Getting Back to Back: Alternate Behaviors for a Web Browser's Back Button. I'm a little closer to changing my ways. Opinions?
A new updated-daily source for independent music news: bring the
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| 2 August, 1999 | ||
| YES, DEFINITELY: Jim Studt's Magic 8 Ball answers your questions live. It sits in a Lego Mindstorms™ shaking cradle in front of a webbed camera, turning 'round and 'round before your eyes before displaying its response to your question. |
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| 3 August, 1999 | ||
| Tracy Cox's hypertext project, "fetishturgy: Fashion and Fetishism", is a great little piece incorporating Baudrillard, Marx, Freud. Another reason I love the web: Wm. Murray's Time Page. An aerospace worker in Seattle, he read Strauss & Howe's "Generations" and was inspired to lay down these thoughts of his own. More extensive than it looks at first glance. The Elephant's Memory, a simple pictorial language. Do you know what a Fuller Projection is? A Dymaxion Map? Check out this page on the Buckminster Fuller site... and if you've got more than a little time on your hands, check out the five-part Letter on Tensegrity from Buckminster Fuller. I've only made it to the third section, but it's fascinating so far. |
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| 4 August, 1999 | ||
| An unusual weekend in the wild... A South African rancher plans to stage a motorcycle rally in which participants will be invited to hunt down prostitutes with paintball guns. From the Electronic Telegraph, registration required. Go to the front page for 3 August. So maybe you knew what a Fuller Projection was... but have you ever seen a Synthaxe Drumitar? The Fashion/Fetish link from yesterday was broken, thanks to a lower-case 'f' in the URL. My bad. It's fixed now. (Muchas smoochas gracias to everyone who e-mailed in their complaints! It's nice to know you care...) |
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| 5 August, 1999 | ||
| Listen to the upcoming (11 August) solar eclipse on shortwave radio. I saw "Drop Dead Gorgeous" last night -- loved the movie, love that accent, you betcha! Salon's recent review seems accurate and fair. I just learned that there's a web site to accompany one of the best books I've ever read, "Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light" by Leonard Shlain. There goes my morning... Take note: as of today, the 5th of August, 1999, altavista finds 6 pages using the search criteria "disintermediary". I will check back weekly. |
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| 6 August, 1999 | ||
| Is it Friday? Thoughts of Daddy-O's, tequila... I'm so digging the artwork in "The Investigators" on Kaliber 10K. They sell clothes on the (delicately-named) Naturist Society site. I'd have suggested sunblock, tanning cream, or body paint. (Would you have guessed that the Naturist Society is based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin?) I only have until the 28th to get to London to see the "Visions of Ruin" exhibit at Sir John Soane's Museum. It looks wonderful. I'm such a sucker for artful decay. Weekly cardhouse.com find: Satan's Syrup. Hey! Now I know what a Laffer Curve is! |
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| 7 August, 1999 | ||
| Sleep Test. I failed. Yet another redesign will never make word.com the thing of beauty it once was... do you remember the first time you saw that site, circa 1995, and how you'd never seen anything like it before? Learn to Mambo with Cabaret Diosa! (They do weddings...) Molly Kiely went to the desert again. This time with Wagner. Molly's passion for the desert is even greater than my own... she'd be a good guide, except she likes to be left all alone as much as I do. Maybe a Misanthrope's Trip is in order. (Not that I think she's a misanthrope. Any more than I am, at least. I just don't like most people.) |
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| 8 August, 1999 | ||
| Run, Lola, Run... It's a fun ride, that's all. Don't go in with expectations any higher than to have a good time with a fast-paced film. And soundtrack. (Read the director's statement.) | ||
| 9 August, 1999 | ||
| Day One (of three, relax) of self-serving promotion:
Wednesday night, August 11th, intertelevision.net is presenting a webcast of the finale of the New York Anti-Folk Festival, recorded live at Tompkins Square Park on July 31st. What is anti-folk?, I hear you wonder... check out Lach's page devoted to explaining the origin of this genre. Lach is responsible for it all, so get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. One of the featured artists is Clavicle Recordings' very own John Kessel, so check it out! (Don't worry if you forget. I'll remind you again tomorrow. And Wednesday. And harangue you on Thursday if you missed it.) According to Griel Marcus, James Marsh is making a movie from one of my most favorite books ever, Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip. The weird thing is that I can find precious little online about this project other than the fact that someone made a "making of" movie about it. A free karaoke CD, and only one per household? How will I choose between Classic Country, New Country, and Gospel? "...they go out when there will be a storm and, as a result, they are separated from the comforts of home. Like Adam and Eve, their banishment is a painful one." |
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| 10 August, 1999 | ||
| As promised, another plug for tomorrow's webcast of the NY Anti-Folk Festival... Wednesday from 7:00 to 11:00 pm. EDT. Rhonda Roland Shearer's "Marcel Duchamp's Impossible Bed and Other "Not" Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence From Art To Science" is rocking my world today... This is kinda like a "Cornwall Eclipse Project"... Watch Carnie Wilson's gastric bypass surgery, live, today. Or not. |
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| 11 August, 1999 | ||
| Today's Salon piece on the string theory conference in Potsdam started me rooting around a bit. What is String Theory? Here you go. And a verrah nice page from the Cambridge Relativity Group. More as I continue to dig. Dig? Revolutionary refrigerator magnets. Must have. "...are drawn into the unit where they are exterminated and returned to the environment in a biodegradable form." Meet Ken's #1 friend... TONIGHT, 7:00 - 11:00 pm EDT, intertelevision.net's webcast of the New York Anti-Folk Festival! (I'll shut up now about this.) |
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| 12 August, 1999 | ||
| Friend Katie, in London, writes about watching yesterday's eclipse. She's got some wonderful photos, too. M.I.T. theses online: Choose a year, any year, and pick a topic. From 1951, "The application of a high-speed digital computer to the present-day air traffic control system" (ohmygod, it's 275 pages long and it's been scanned, page by page. No OCR.). 1996's "Photon migration in turbid media: time-resolved optical imaging in tissue-like phantom" is in gif format, too... Kelly Jeffery takes a stab a stop-motion animation with a Lego™ Light Sabre Duel. "There were days I didn't feel well, but not because of being Greg." -- so says Barry Williams on his freshly-launchered barrywilliams.net. (Psst! Ladies! He drives a 1986 Corvette!) |
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| 17 August, 1999 | ||
| Woodamn! The "Wisconsin Death Trip" movie I mentioned on the 9th seems to be real. At least it's listed on imdb.com now... Weird. Altavista now finds only two matches for "disintermediary". (See August 5th) Leather Clad Trailer Trash: It's funny that one of their requirements for inclusion on this fine page is that you have a web site of your own. Conclusion: Faux, wanna-be leather-clad trailer trash. From East L.A., Limp Shrimp Records. I just like the name. "Think small!" (Speaking of small, this reads like something out of The Onion.)
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| 18 August, 1999 | ||
| STAND RIGHT, WALK LEFT!!! It's just not that hard, people. Charlie Bertsch, in the latest Bad Subjects, writes about Autobiography in Music Criticism. After being initially drawn in by his evocation of Lester Bangs, it occurred to me just how autobiographical all of this really is. I've been reading Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung for the better part of this summer. While I'm typically happy to plow through a book (or more) a day, I'm savoring every word of this one, allowing myself a review or chapter only every week or so. If you want to check out some LB on the web, start out at Jonathan M. Gladstone's Lester Bangs page. He's got links to a couple dozen articles, including "Where Were You When Elvis Died", which prettymuch brings us back to Charlie Bertsch's thesis about autobiography in music criticism. (Smoove, huh?)
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| 19 August, 1999 | ||
| Oh, this is just awesome! Michigan State University's Radicalism Collection: Digital images of documents ranging from Margaret Sanger's What Every Girl Should Know to the Black Panther Party's Credo for Rioters and Looters. Just put it alllllllll online! Grab the nearest UPCA (12 digits) or UPCE (8 digits) bar code numbers, pop them into the deBarcode form and get a description of the product and a link to the manufacturer's web site (if available). |
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| 20 August, 1999 | ||
| Check out this composite satellite photo of North America at night. Mmmm. Andrzej Werbart's Our Need of Taboo: Pictures of violence and mourning difficulties. My beautiful friend heyoka just wrote this for Scarlet Letters. The Kitty Klicker... there's nothing special about this, is there? It's just a clicker. (And can someone please explain why I've always associated these things with nuns in Catholic schools? I'm not Catholic, I didn't go to Catholic school. I don't even own a cat.) |
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| 21 August, 1999 | ||
| Be still, my heart! I've just been turned on to the most wonderful photographer: Francesca Woodman, who died in 1981 at the age of 22. There is only one book of her work, published in 1998, but there are a few web sites to give you a tantalizing taste: one on basscult.com, and another at Boston's Bernard Toale Gallery. Weekly Wire ran a review of the book which also provided the best (though scant) biographical information on the artist. For you cheaters out there, a crossword puzzle solver. |
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| 23 August, 1999 | ||
| This will be my afternoon: William Blake's Bastille. I'm sorry, but four hours is problematic? For the truly lazy, the ultimate in low-impact exercise. The Oglethorpe County Majorettes present their interpretation of Michael Jackson's Thriller. The site for this fall's exhibit of the photos and drawings of film designer Alexandre Trauner. Yum. Go right to the photos. Alec Hammond designed the upcoming "Four Dogs Playing Poker". |
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| 24 August, 1999 | ||
| Wow. And to think that mid-day today, I was peeved to get $20 in singles as change. Now they're all entered here.
Corn Circles, "Corn Circles", the Waterboys The world's largest work of art: the Marree Man, 4 kilometers long, in South Australia. An article in a Melbourne paper is inconclusive as to Maree Man's origin. And another great collection of crop circle photos, Buddha Maitreya's Heavenly Angelic Forms of Communication. ("We understand your lack of understanding, but just relax Satan is dead, technology and the Internet and the freedom to communicate will help you to clarify your illusions and be able to see for yourself by sharing the truth.") |
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| 25 August, 1999 | ||
| Stefan Schmitt's Statistics of a Mass Grave: The Kibuye Case -- a fascinating, horrifying piece on the forensic anthropology of a Rwandan mass grave site. yahooka.com is just a delightfully inspired parody (of sorts. Well, of Yahoo, actually, but you know.). Alyce and JP Jacquet have freeloop.com, a site to document a year-long road trip in their "creatively enhanced" 1963 VW bus. It's a pretty nice site, though I had a hard time finding their online updates. The sketchbook is wonderful. |
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| 26 August, 1999 | ||
| Oh, wow. James Lileks' site is a trove of wonderful things. Where to begin... Start at the Institute of Official Cheer, where you can visit the Gallery of Regrettable Food, or check out the artwork of Art Frahm (a study of the effects of celery on loose elastic -- don't ask, just go). He's got lots of ghost ads from Minneapolis and New York City, too, and a celebration of Fargo, ND in the 1950s. This is a fantastic site -- the kind of place that makes me really, really happy there's the web. ureach.com provides free 800-number voicemail, fax services and more. Kinda cool. |
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| 27 August, 1999 | ||
| From the Skeptic's Dictionary, Robert Todd Carroll on "Pareidolia and the Face on Mars". And many more links about the face on Mars... | ||
| 30 August, 1999 | ||
| Originally compiled by Mike Pawka, and handy-dandy rasta/patois dictionary. illusionworks.com is a great exploration into illusions and explanations of how they work -- terrific use of Java in many of the examples. Jump to the Hall of Illusions, or the section on Oscar Reutersvard, the "father of impossible figures". I saw Keller Williams play again this weekend. He's so wonderful. See him if you get the chance -- his voice is just so sweet and smooth, his 10-string guitar the perfect accompaniment. I'm digging into pattern language stuff again, and while this site looks familiar and I thought I'd posted a link to it, I can't find one. So here's Todd Coram and Jim Lee's Experiences -- A Pattern Language for User Interface Design. Rich, rich, rich in references & links. Roll-your-own: Bad Hemingway |
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| 31 August, 1999 | ||
| This collection of postcards from Mount Holyoke College is beautifully presented, well-organized. A million stories... This is driving me crazy -- it's worked every single time. If any of you know the secret, care to clue me in? Heh. I know how it works now. ;-)
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