The Nature of Permanence

When I was a child in my fathers car, I would watch the city zip by from the back window and read the rooftops from the highway. I remember seeing COST REVS wheat-pastes on every crosswalk light in the city in the mid to late nineties. For a while I truly thought REVS was running for office.

One of my all-time favorite pieces I could only see from the BQE. REVS image of Sisyphus pushing the stone of Life up the hill with a checkerboard beneath him. I found what seems to be a recreation of that piece a few weeks back in East Williamsburg. It was a strangely sentimental moment.

REVS journey as an artist has always amazed me. He wrote a book inside the tunnels of the subway. Each wall a new page of his life. I mean this in the most literal of senses. He wrote his story deep in those tunnels and I always dreamt of reading them first hand. For now I just collect snippets.

Thanks to Wooster Collective for posting this video today, to help me remember the writer who made me look at each wall twice.

"Spilling whiskey and learning songs for The ONE that got away"

Rotoscoped live performance of Tom Waits circa 1979.....


The original live action was shot with 5 cameras - 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from "The One That Got Away" blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make this 5 1/2 minute live action short which was then turned into animation.

Even animated he's the hotness....

Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle...

A worker of the Malaysian Fisheries Development Board (LKIM) in Batu Maung, Penang, discovered this strange auqatic biped upon contemplating making lunch. The only thing that saved it from the soup pot was the Chinese belief that eating fish with unusual features could bring disaster or ill luck. It was later thrown back into the waters from whence it came, bogling the minds of local scientists who believe it must have swam into Malaysian waters from either North Sulawesi in Indonesia, or South Africa.

Who would have thunk it. Sharks are scary as it, the last thing they need is to learn how to run too....



In other new species news, the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra has been discovered to be a seperate species from its cousins in mainland Southeast Asia.

Sometimes growing to the size of a small panther, the clouded leopard is the biggest predator in Borneo, equipped with the longest canine teeth, relative to body size, of any cat.

Its nice to know we are still evoloving, new islands springing up, fish with feet, and freshly discovered differentiations in species. So exciting! I hope they find one of those flying fish with feet, THAT would be the coolest animal ever made.

Banksy Feature- BBC Culture Show

Living By Words Alone

In the midst of a demonstration, a breaking moment of news, or near riot, there is a certain degree of bullet-proof delusion that cancels out the usual fear involved in such moments when you are reporting on the event itself. Your camera or recorder feel as if they are a shield between you and the rest of the world, since within the minds eye you have ceased to be a participant and have crossed into the realm of conscientious observer.

The fantasy of merely being the watchful eye is just that. Everyday reporters put themselves at risk, far more reality based than the fear of losing a lead or accidentally deleting that perfect shot. Those who report the wars are not just watching but become a part of them. Often used as pawns and leverage in negotions, these men and women take risks for a living.

The Committee to Protect Journalists keeps meticulous records of abuses to the journalistic community and offers help for those headed out on dangerous assignments or in the midst of capture or arrest in hostile environments.

Go check out their site: Committee to Protect Journalists and browse the press freedom archives for statistics on killings, abductions, and imprisonments. And after that consider giving them a donation, to help keep the project running.

"In the Image of God"

Trailer for the Face2Face project:


Face2Face takes an up close and very personal look at that which divides us politically set against that which connects us on the very basic humanistic level. In an attempt to bring a bit of compassion and understanding to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, French photographer JR and North African mathematician Marco, have embarked upon this project to convert signals into messages and to connect art to action.

From Face2FaceProject.com:

"After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families."

You can see more of JR's work on HERE