Monthly Archive for September, 2007

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Genius-ceuticals: Making America smarter one overprivileged child at a time.

I found this in a swanky beach house I managed to get myself invited to this past weekend. The “great lemon taste” of this chewable fish oil caplet falls somewhere in between day-old tuna and Lemonhead candy. Any kid that isn’t smart enough to spit these out when their parent forces them to take them is too dumb to benefit from it anyway.

Posted by San Suzie

Fidel: Alive and well in Hawaii.


Photo by San Suzie

Plane ticket from Havana to Kona: $2,000.00

100 grams of Hawaii skunk: $200.00

Kicking back on the North shore of the Big Island: Priceless.

Posted by San Suzie

MANHATTAN RETURNED TO INDIAN (for a day)

Celso's village

I spent the better part of today sitting on a lawn chair on a piece of sod in the middle of Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. The occasion: Celso had created his own sovereign nation (an art installation complete with a tee pee, a trading post and gambling) on a parking space-sized piece of turf for NYC Park(ing) Day.

The highlights:

  • 6:30 am: Set up a tee pee, trading post (a couple of boxes of American Spirit cigarettes) and gambling center (a dozen lottery cards with Celso’s drawings) on the corner of Columbus and 62nd. Only 14 hours to go.
  • 7:30 am: A lady asks us if the tee pee is for sukkot.
  • 7:45 am: Celso leaves to find a bathroom and two Jehovah’s Witnesses come over and read the Bible to me. I tell them I’m running a trading post and offer to trade them my apple for a Bible. They tell me that God loves me and leave.
  • 8:15 am: A bystander tells us we’re “cuckoo” (complete with disdainful Manhattan eye-roll).
  • 8:41 am: A building maintenance guy asks us if we’re psychics. I offer to tell him his fortune for $20. He respectfully declines.
  • 10:42 am: A cameraman from Fox News takes footage. (We ended up making the evening newscast for a whole second.)

Fox News Camera Man

  • 10:44 am: Someone offers us $1 for our parking spot.
  • 12:15 pm: G. Gordon Liddy walks by. I’m so busy talking I don’t get a picture. An opportunity for a sublime family Christmas card quickly evaporates.
  • 12:35 pm: Someone agrees to a trade! In exchange for one American Spirit cigarette, we get half a mini-bottle of hotel hand lotion.
  • 1:45 pm: Four members of the production crew from Lincoln Center come over for lunch. One of them has just spent 36 hours straight working on a VH1 show.
  • 4:35 pm: A Dalmatian and two Shih-Tzu’s hungrily eye our grass.
  • 5:00 pm: The after-work rush begins. Young professionals make themselves at home on our sod. Someone asks if we’ll be serving cocktails.
  • 7:45 pm: Breakdown begins.
  • 8:00 pm: Celso and I review the day’s loot. In exchange for the loosies, we ended up with: 1 yellow highlighter, 1 ballpoint pen with a logo for Schilke Music Products, Inc. in Illinois, 1 purple rubber lizard, 1 box of Jolt chewing gum, 1 zen poem in a photo cartridge (“Zen zen zen zen/Angst angst angst angst/Styley styley styley styley/Chillin’ at the tee pee”), 2 #2 pencils, 1 bag of soy jerky (teriyaki flavored), one postcard of NYC by Jeff Prant, 1 Paper Mate ballpoint pen, 1 graphite pencil and 1 Band-Aid.

For more pics, see my Flickr set.

Posted by C-Monster

Nature Break

The birds

Photo by C-Monster.

Aerial maneuvers over Brooklyn. See the video here.

Posted by C-Monster

Today’s color dose.

Graff Truck

Photo by C-Monster

Nothing rescues the grey blandness of midtown better than a good graff truck. Featured here: SKI, RESKEW and 2ESAE

Posted by C-Monster

Inappropriate?

Wes Lang @ Deitch

New York Mag reports that these pieces by Wes Lang, featured in a show called Mailorder Monsters at Deitch Gallery were deemed inappropriate by Jeffrey Deitch and yanked from the exhibit–after the show’s debut on Sept. 6th. I was at the opening and managed to snap this shot before the pieces came down. (The show was purportedly an exploration of “new trends in fucked-up figuration.”) The original press release for the show explained the purpose of Lang’s work:

Wes Lang’s monsters come from the cultural detritus of a very fucked-up America. He takes images pushed under the cultural carpet and forces them back into view to be countenanced. He often takes on Native American art, black Americana, the Civil War era, or pornography in his exploration of the deleted scenes of American history.

For the record: I’m hardly in love with Lang’s pieces. It’s the kind of look-at-me stuff that begs for controversy. (And frankly, these images are an old trend in fucked-up figuration, not a new one.) But I’ll defend his right to make them. Art doesn’t always need to be comfortable. But I did see something else there that I found disturbing. And it had nothing to do with the art.

Posted by C-Monster

News Flash

The Internet can kill you.

Posted by C-Monster

The Wonderful World of Rubbish Shadows

Photo by pashasha.

For more on the art of Tim Noble and Sue Webster, go here.

Posted by C-Monster

The Digest

Blah blah blah by Skewville

Photo by C-Monster.

  • Today’s if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest story: If public art goes missing, does anyone notice? Not in Miami.
  • Britney + Petraeus=Comedy Gold
  • News Flash: Museums are pandering to Latinos by giving away free tacos. I wish they’d pander to Latinos by renting out their galleries for quinceañeras. Just think of the photo ops.
  • And speaking of pandering.
  • Trippy techno-art.
  • Hostile Film Review of the Week: “Think of it like Todd Solondz remaking Crash in a cul-de-sac, but with twice the tampons and a quarter of the self-respect.” Ouch. (Via Art Fag City.)
  • Insect origami.
  • Sci-fi car parks.
  • Strangely compelling Barbie jewelry.
  • The 12 Most Horrifying Torture Devices in Human History: Sadly, neither Paris Hilton’s “acting” nor the President’s State of the Union speeches made the list. I guess there’s always next year. (Via Critical Miami.)
  • The science of gangsta rap lyrics. Complete with Venn diagrams.
  • Your moment of zen: Edward Hopper at the National Gallery.
Posted by C-Monster

Smackdown: Christoph Büchel vs. Mass MoCA

For the past few months, I’ve avoided reading about this story for the same reasons I avoid watching slasher flicks: who needs all the gratuitous violence? But this oh-so-juicy NYT article is a nice round-up on the whole artist-versus-institution controversy and it has the benefit of disgorging one of Büchel’s installation shopping lists:

accouterments for Mass and Baptism; a hospital bed and related medical equipment; eight voting booths; hundreds of old tires; piles of old computers; 1,000 beverage cups from a race track; 1,000 feet of barbed wire; 12 grenades and 35 pounds of bullet casings; eight body bags and 75 white protective suits; four prosthetic legs; decorations and campaign buttons from election rallies; a concession stand, popcorn and popcorn buckets; Christmas lights; and 16 large bags of corn leaves and husks.

I don’t know what the hell he was working on, but I wish Mass MoCA would just give him the dough he needs to finish the project. I’m dying to know what he had planned for those popcorn buckets.

 

Posted by C-Monster