Slam, slam — oh, hot damn. I love the confidence of this li’l Unlikely G.
Archive for the ‘Found objects’ Category
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Don’t be a Don’t Bee
July 3, 2011Do be a Do Bee: a cheerful, smiling drone.
via.
You don’t want to be a Don’t Bee. Then you’ll never be very happy.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Vintage girl’s French prayer card
July 2, 2011
via.
Catholicism is for lovers.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Textual healing — “Moving, moving, since creation”
June 30, 2011
Capped by me, via diggers on the issuu.
via.
From The Children’s Encyclopedia, by Arthur Mee. (London: The Education Company. Orig pub. as The Children’s Encyclopædia 1908). Specifically the first image and its caption appeared in the “Ideas” section, Volume I, p. 112, the text snippet from p. 118, of this revised edition c. 1930.
August is going to be The Children’s Encyclopedia Month because I’m totally in love with its beauty and bizarreness. Tell a friend.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking news, this time it’s personal — An e-man you can trust
April 28, 2011These are insane computer time’s we live in. Wow.
15 chords?! Girls Like A Boy Who Plays Music!
To say nothing of my love of tackos, movies, and cartoons. But my breasts are only a “nice” size, versus “large,” per se. I hope this doesn’t mean I don’t get in on that hot “did not ever go to jail” action.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, “Not gay” edition
July 28, 2010He’s having surgery to get rid of the noise. What more do you want?
The man is clearly secure in his heterosexuality. Why do people even keep bringing it up?
I know I am a softie, but I do think this is another sad case. I even hope it is a joke. What if someone had That Much going on in their head? I hope not. I hope no one does.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, Lonelyhearts edition
July 27, 2010No cheating skanks.
Money-grubbing whores okay.
Seriously, I feel really badly for this guy. He must have been deeply hurt to feel justified in such a personal attack on someone he once loved. Bad news bears all around.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, Attack of the killer tomato edition
July 26, 2010
via the duty on the tumblr.
It is a long time to carry such a burden.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, Nickelback edition
July 25, 2010
Anyone who hates Nickelback enough to take out a personal is someone I could seriously see myself in a relationship with.
Just kidding. If you are organized enough to place an advertisement in a mainstream newspaper, you’re too sane to want anything to do with me. Trust me.
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, Time travel edition
July 24, 2010I’ve only done this once before.
If only I had seen this next week. But it’s too early now.
June is bustin’ out all over — time to jump along with it
June 3, 2010Today has gone about as I expected, but with weirdly more zen-like contentment and even restrained happiness.
The principal as much as said at the interview that she would have to go with the more experienced teacher to fill the position at the school where I’ve been working as an aide and substitute, no matter how she felt personally about me, due to parent demand for fully credentialed teachers, as I had anticipated. I assured her I understood that with the parents, it is always a delicate balance and I appreciated that she was in an awkward position. We agreed it was a shame that I can’t in good conscience take out a loan and pursue my credential until I have a job to finance that academic endeavor, and the promise of one in my own field is worth holding out for, but I can’t secure a position like that without proof I am at least beginning an effort to be in a credential program, which puts me in this awful Catch-22.
Brigitte Bardot photographed by Phillipe Halsman, 1951.
But overall it was a really positive, loving, and upbeat interview, and it accomplished my chief goal, which was to demonstrate the sincerity of my committment to the little community she has created at her school. She was really nice and spoke glowingly of things she hoped we would be able to do in the near future. She said frankly that she wanted me on her staff and that once this position was filled according to tradition and political appeasement, there would not be pretty much any competition for whatever new openings may arise next year. It was a good talk.
via Square America.
So. Happy thoughts. Great things happening in my life with these tutoring jobs for the Scamps and kidlet finishing up kindergarten tomorrow, plus my Katohs graduates high school tonight, and all in all I’ve got a million things to be thankful about and a new season in which to celebrate them. And I have decided — no more hiding and tossing in my sleep. No more anxiety and self-doubt constantly wracking me. No more tearing at my fingernails and spitting them out while my mind hashes through all the ways things can go wrong and obsesses over my bank account.
Audrey Hepburn photographed by Philippe Halsman, 1955.
Time to start leaping a little. Let’s do it!
Daily Batman: ViewMasterrrr edition
June 3, 2010
Original ViewMaster slide via Jim Lucio, aka defekto on the flickr.
ViewMaster Batman set description via Mr. ViewMaster:
“A Greenway Production in association with Twentieth Century-Fox Television.
(R)GAF Corporation, New York, N.Y. U.S.A. T.M. Reg. U.S. Pot. Off. Marque Deposes. Marcc Reg. Printed in U.S.A.
SEE AND ENJOY OTHER STEREO PICTURES OF
Just another Monocle Monday: Ms. Carolyn Wells edition
March 22, 2010“A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind’s eye.” — Carolyn Wells (1862-1942): librarian, mystery writer, poet, absurdist, Jersey girl, baseball aficionado; heroine.
Via timbravo on the tumblr. Hell and goddang if that is not just about the g’est picture of a little kid I have ever seen.
Ms. Well’s famous limerick abount canny canners:A canner exceedingly canny
One morning remarked to his granny:
“A canner can can
Any thing that he can
But a canner can’t can a can, can he?”
Illustration from Such Nonsense.
The awesome Ms. Wells, who began her literary career as a librarian in Rahway, NJ, had a binary-brained love of both words and wordplay, resulting in the kind of mind that invents riddles and complex, skillful patterns out of what appears to be nonsense. She compiled and published an anthology of clever verses by herself, some friends, and great absurd poets of the past who she admired called Such nonsense! an Anthology through George H. Doran Company, New York, in 1918. Some of the authors included in the anthology are G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, William Makepeace Thackeray, Carroll, and W. S. Gilbert. You can read the entirety of the volume on the googlebooks, one of the seemingly last bastions that values lit without lumping it alongside lattes and shitty cd samplers of some Juilliard sophomore covering Bessie Smith. You know the kind of horrible CD sampler I am talking about:
Via officineottiche on the tumblr.
All black and white picture of the skinny blonde singer playing piano on the cover with her eyes closed, all you push the button on the screen to hear a sample and it sounds immediately like she has grown up on at least a quarter acre with probably a pony that she rode in jodphurs until she decided she wanted to be a ballerina instead but she was never so vulgar or interesting as to imagine combining the two interests and she is presently dating a trust fund guy with dreads who was obsessively checking his iTouchPhonesALot thingy the entire time she was in the studio making what we are broadly defining as a “record,” the record apparently being a record of the time some flat chick from upstate New York saw a homeless guy pawing through the trash in front of the Dean and Deluca and decided that because she had Feelings about it, she now had the right to perform herself some blues and has now come at the undertaking metaphorically wearing goggles and carrying a graduated cyllinder. (“Blues, this is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”)
Like so many times with me, that got way out of hand. I’m not sorry, but I am a little disappointed in myself. Seriously, though, dudes. Fuck the megabookstores: save the libraries.
Seen in several places. I choose not to credit until I can find an original source.
That last shot reminds me — PSA: I have pretty eyes. In fact, I have the prettiest brown eyes. Did You Know? Established fact, suckas. [citation needed]
Haiti Appeal from gifted photographers
January 16, 2010A group has formed called the Charity Print Auctions Pool on the flickr, and they have a really great and creative idea for raising money to donate to the Red Cross to be used in Haiti relief efforts.
Created by Andy(Shotage) aka Andy Newson on the flickr.
Andrew Newson, the group’s creator, explains:
I created this today, a group dedicated to photographer print sales to raise money for the Haiti Earthquake appeal.
Each photographer donates a print at whatever size they wish and people bid on the image in the comments.
Photograph by Heather Powazek Champ, a flickr employee and gifted photographer. Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco.
The auction will finish at midnight on Sunday 17 January 2010, unless the photographer specifies otherwise on the image. So who ever has the highest bid in the comments, gets the print.
“Wait a sec …” by photgrapher Ingo Meckmann of Connecticut.
When the bidder wins the print, they will head over to the Red Cross and donate the bid amount. They will also take a screen grab of the payment/donation confirmation screen to send to the photographer. On receipt of that, the photographer will arrange for the print to be made and have it posted to you.
So, go and check out the group and get bidding on the image you want on your wall.
There are some really, really extraordinary photographs in this group, some from professional photographers who have agreed to participate.
Photograph by Ineke Kamps, a painter and photographer whose book It’s Oh So Quiet: A photographic journey through vacant rooms was recently published.
Low-res version of “The Full Monty” photographed by Anna Nguyen aka ZeeAnna! on the flickr. Winning bidder will receive a high-res print.
“The Funambulist,” by Arup/অরূপ on the flickr. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Audrey Hepburn and the War, featuring her childhood drawings
January 8, 2010All of the artwork in this post was done by Audrey Hepburn during World War II.
Audrey at the beach in 1937, 8 years old, before the war.Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it all in at once.
In 1939, Audrey Hepburn’s mother Ella moved Audrey and her two half-brothers from Belgium to their grandfather’s home in Arnhem, in the Netherlands. She believed they would be safe there. On May 10, 1940, six days after Audrey’s eleventh birthday, the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, having already come through Luxembourg and Belgium. The Germans called their campaign of invasion of the Low Countries “Fall Gelb;” in Dutch, the Nederlanders refer to it as “Slag om Nederland,” or, “Battle for the Netherlands.”
Audrey passed much of her time outside of school during the occupation drawing.
Completely hemmed in and outmanned by the German army, the Dutch main force in the Netherlands nonetheless held out for five days in mid-May, 1940 — a small contingent near Zealand held off the Wehrmacht through the 17th, but finally surrendered after grave loss of life. Almost exactly five years later, the final Dutch province was liberated.
During the five-year occupation of Arnhem, besides spending her time drawing and performing openly in plays with her mother and friends, Audrey attended school under the name “Edda van Heemstra,” a pseudonym invented by her mother Ella that she hoped would not betray Audrey’s English roots.
Audrey in costume for one of the plays in which she and Ella performed to raise spirits in the town during the occupation.
Audrey trained in ballet and secretly performed for small, sympathetic groups to raise money for the Dutch Resistance.
“The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performances.”
1939 — age 10.
I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when war broke out and 15 when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it, but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn’t know what I was going to read. I’ve never been the same again, it affected me so deeply.
During the Dutch famine over the winter of 1944, the Germans confiscated the Dutch people’s limited food and fuel supply for themselves. Without heat in their homes or food to eat, people in the Netherlands starved and froze to death in the streets. Hepburn and many other Dutch people had to resort to using flour made from tulip bulbs to bake cakes and cookies.
Arnhem was devastated during allied bombing raids that were part of Operation Market Garden. Audrey’s older brother Ian was sent to a labor camp, and her uncle and cousin were shot in front of her for being part of the Resistance.
Audrey and her brothers Anthony and Ian playing in 1938.
We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they’d close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read the diary [of Anne Frank], I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today’. That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.
In Belgium in 1934, five years before the war broke out.
I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child.
When the tanks came in and the country was liberated, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration trucks followed. Hepburn said in an interview that she ate an entire can of condensed milk and then got sick from one of her first relief meals because she put too much sugar in her oatmeal. This experience is what led her to become involved in UNICEF late in life. (source)
My own life has been much more than a fairy tale. I’ve had my share of difficult moments, but whatever difficulties I’ve gone through, I’ve always gotten a prize at the end.
Donate to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, online via PayPal, by phone at 310.393.5331, or through the mail to The Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, 710 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 600, Santa Monica, CA 90401.
Update 1/27/2012: Contact info for the AHCF update:
Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund
65 S. Grand Avenue – First Floor – Pasadena – CA 91105
phone 1.626.304.1380
fax. 1.626.304.1386
email ahcf@audreyhepburn.com
Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Found shopping list, “Bat food / not tape” edition
December 3, 2009Shopping list on heart-shaped paper, found and photographed by the ultimate pits on flickr.
Oh, you have this shopping mission well in hand, my friend. I’m shocked someone who seems as organized as yourself lost this list!
I picture this shopping agenda’s generator walking around the Dollar Store in a panic after misplacing their clever master plan, finally being asked by a put-upon clerk, “Do you need help finding anything?”
“I don’t remember!”
“Do you need … tape?”
“Oh, god, I don’t know anymore.”
The Thought Experiment 