| 1 September, 1999 | ||
| Good lord. There's a whole yahoo.com category devoted to Blair Witch Project parodies. My favorite? (Thanks for asking...) The Kyle's Mom's a Bitch Project. Walter S. Arnold is a sculptor/stone carver, and has a beautiful site dedicated to his craft. His section on architectural ornamentation is great, but I really love his fireplaces. From Mike Harding, a The Mystery of the Green Man, a common theme in architectural ornaments. Another letters gallery, including: a Civil War spy on the day of his execution, PB Shelley from the Swiss Alps, and from Anatole France, a plea for the lives of Sacco & Vanzetti.
|
||
| 2 September, 1999 | ||
| The latest twist in my ongoing breathless anticipation of the Wisconsin Death Trip movie: They now have their own site. Well, at least the domain name. SCORE! It's being shown at the Venice Film Festival, and they finally posted a page w/ synopsis!!! Colorado is home to 55 "fourteeners", mountain peaks over 14,000 feet in altitude. The current speed record for climbing all of them is 16 days. Andrew Hamilton is currently trying to do it in 13, and some friends of his are updating his site, the Colorado Fourteener Speed Record, with his progress. (I'm going to be out in Telluride next week, but I'm not planning on climbing any mountains. Just gazing up at them as I soak in the steaming hot springs...) Read Jeff Marsh's rant about his own attempt to scale two fourteeners in one day. (I did, and reconsidered my Colorado plans. Maybe I will make it up one.) Jackpot, ada'web's internet slot machine, sorta. Downloads three random sites, you "win" if the top-level domains match. Is it just me, or is Winona Ryder going to look just like Nancy Reagan when she gets old? Robert Anton Wilson's favorite jokes. This was probably inevitable: Star Wars I meets Pulp Fiction. |
||
| 3 September, 1999 | ||
| William Kunstler died four years ago today. The world felt just a little safer to me with him in it... Stew Albert remembers. The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, lovingly compiled and maintained by David Dodd, is amazing. The notes contributed to some of the lyrics, the annotation and research, is unmatched. You don't need to be a Deadhead to get a kick out of how far-fetched (or astute) some of them are... Where were you when Jerry died? |
||
| 7 September, 1999 | ||
| William Hogarth was a wonderful troublemaker. An engraver from the 18th century, he created some hilarious caricatures... his work provides an insight into life in London as it really was. The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, hosts William Hogarth and 18th-Century Print Culture. (Marriage a la Mode and The Enraged Musician are two of my favorite Hogarth paintings.) Take a stroll through the Virtual 42nd Street, then read the National Trust for Historic Preservation's feature on the restoration of the magnificent New Amsterdam Theater. Forget that it's Disney: fact is, they were the only ones with the money to do it right. And thanks to the landmark laws, they couldn't mess it up. I swear, it's worth a ticket to Lion King to see this renovation. Barring that, there's a gorgeous book... |
||
| 14 September, 1999 | ||
| I'm back from my trip to the mountains. God, it's so beautiful there. I'm still trying to figure out why I don't live there... it's perfect. Woodamn!!! The Wisconsin Death Trip site finally went live! Now if they'd only get the schedule up so I know when I'll be able to see it... This site is in Italian, but has some beautiful eclipse photographs from old-churches-as-pinhole-cameras. "Download of page may result slow, due to the large amount of images." One reason to wish I still lived in Chicago: Cows on Parade, a wonderful citywide collection of painted cows created by various artists. |
||
| 20 September, 1999 | ||
| The most familiar chiasmus is President Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." chiasmus.com is "a web site for word, language and quotation lovers" created by Dr. Mardy Crothe. This month's feature is double chiasmus.
I was alerted to this site by my mother-in-law, Jeanne, who'd heard Dr. Crothe on NPR. Jeanne's favorite example was from Sophie Tucker: "When her husband Ernie turned eighty years old, he told her that he was going to get a 20 year old girlfriend. |
||
| 22 September, 1999 | ||
| In my search this morning for a Tang™ logo (still haven't got one, if you know where I can find one, please send me a note!), I found this wonderful little site in the Retro Future Archives, "The Wrong Stuff: NASA's Space Food Oddities". Oy. Another find from the same search (10:22 am EDT and I'm still looking...): the development of Gatorade™, in handy flow-chart form. This came up in the same search for Tang. How terribly depressing. |
||
| 24 September, 1999: | ||
| In 1846, the Donner Party set out from Keokuk, Iowa. Daniel M. Rosen has made a wonderfully complete site with daily log entries, photos, trail maps, photographs and drawings. Also in the last century but well into the 20th, hundreds of thousands of children were put onto orphan trains bound for the mid-west. Howard Hurd was one of those children, and his Orphan Train Riders History site details the experience of him and his brother, Fred Swedenberg, as they were removed from their home in upstate New York because of neglect and sent west on the rails. They Rode the Orphan Trains is an article by Jim McCarty containing ads seeking homes for the children arriving on the trains. I seem to have West on the brain this morning, don't I? Here's The Ghost Town Site, with gorgeous photos from ghost towns in California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Nice interactive maps and history section, too. THE 1999 GHOST TOWN TRIP is a seven-day itinerary for a trip made this month through a couple-dozen ghost towns, primarily in Nevada. |
||
| 27 September, 1999: | ||
| The story of Alferd Packer (America's Favorite Cannibal) was introduced to me first through a song by Phil Ochs, The Ballad Of Alferd Packer. Early in this decade -- pre-South Park -- Trey Parker made a wonderful movie about dear old Alferd, Cannibal! The Musical, which is now distributed by Troma. It's avaialable for rental, and is very, very funny. (I got it through Kozmo...) I still haven't found a great image of a TANG™ bottle or logo, if anyone can help.
|
||
| 28 September, 1999: | ||
| James Lileks rocks my world. A recent addition to his wonderful Institute of Official Cheer is Dateline: Kennel, Dogs in the Papers of the 50's and 60's. Many thanks to everyone who's helped in my quest for the elusive TANG™ logo. Alas, it's not the logo I recalled. I don't know if it's changed or if I just did too many drugs in the 60's to remember it correctly. 25 Ways to Close a Photograph ... ... with Men of Progress ... ... and Women of Vision is a fabulous collection of old photography and new text by Tim McLaughlin. ("She was the type of woman who wore a paper-white dress to stand in front of brick buildings. Her mouth was young, the curve of her lips gentle, like a coastline bending into mist. But under her eyes dark circles aged the top of her face so that her lovers could kiss her but could not endure the rake of her gaze. At the age of seventeen she tied a white sash over her brow and closed her eyes to everything. She opened her mouth wide and sang a lament that blinded every listener with sorrow.") Tonight: El Vez at the Mercury Lounge. (He's playing tomorrow as well, and it's a good thing -- because this looks like it's going to be a late night @ work. :P) Wisconsin Death Trip (by Michael Lesy) is finally being brought back into print!!! (April, 2000.) |
||
| 29 September, 1999: | ||
| My favorite Fresh Samantha flavor is Raspberry Limeade. It's almost as good as the lime rickies from the little candy shop under the subway station at Coney Island. Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire is where I first read of Everett Ruess's mysterious 1934 disappearance -- at the age of 20 -- deep in the canyonlands of southeastern Utah. "Wandering Soul", by Leo W. Banks of the Tuscon Weekly, tells Ruess's tale (though the article is a few years old). I'm working on a project right now that's got me digging through posters from the Russian Constructivist period... while the Lotman-Institut site is in German, they've got some wonderful images from artists including V.B. Koreckij, G.G. Klucis and A. A. Radakov. (And here's one for those Cardhouse guys!) I've got to say that the applet/animation on the front page of this Russian Painting site is tastefully done. |
||
| 30 September, 1999: | ||
| Of course the entire text of Abbie Hoffman's "Steal this Book" is online. This Declaration of Life from the Quakers is an interesting variation on a living will. Porn Flakes: Kellogg, Graham and the Crusade for Moral Fiber Dilute! Dilute! OK! I can't believe that I haven't seen this before: Dr. Bronner's Home Page -- on Geocities, no less. The complete text of the label is available, too. |
||
|