UNUSUAL ART & MUSEUM SITES Devilishly Clever Graffiti
One of the most entertaining articles we read in 2007 was a profile in The New Yorker of a guerilla artist known only by the name Banksy. He is famous in his native England for mind-bending, controversial graffiti, but his other stunts have included painting on animals; replacing copies of Paris Hilton’s debut CD with a fake version featuring such tracks as “Why Am I Famous?”; climbing into the penguin enclosure of the London Zoo and painting, in seven-foot-tall letters, the words “We’re bored of fish”; and, in 2005, placing “subverted artworks” in the Met, MoMA, the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum, all without permission. He has a knack for grating raw nerves—for instance, with the large portrait of Mother Teresa that he overlaid the words “I learnt a valuable lesson from this woman. Moisturize everyday.”
The New Yorker article was filled with provocative Banksy quotes, such as...
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“The last time I did a show, I thought I’d got a four-star review, then I realized they said, ‘This is absolute ****.’”
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“Hollywood is a town where they honor their heroes by writing their names on the pavement to be walked on by fat people and peed on by dogs. It seemed like a great place to come and be ambitious.”
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“Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realize that reciting red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a f---ing muppet.”
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“The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious and the weak.”
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“I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days. I don’t know how the art world gets away with it—it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the DJ says, ‘If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.’”
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“I love the way capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies. It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean, how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?”
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“I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”
A+ Size Women
The Judgment of Paris Pinacotheca at www.judgmentofparis.com/pinacotheca features an art gallery of plus-size female nudes through art history. (Scroll down and click “Enter” to see the paintings.) So what was the Judgment of Paris? Get the full story and see a painting of Paris’ fateful moment at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Paris.
Amazing Sidewalk Art These images have made the rounds of the Internet a few times, but they are worth a second look, and on these sites you can see them grouped together. If you haven’t seen them before, you’re in for a treat.
• Humorous works by Julian Beever: users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm • More ominous works by Kurt Wenner: www.kurtwenner.com/streetportfolio.htm
The Human Camera Here’s something truly amazing: a clip from a documentary in which an autistic man, a "human camera," is flown over Rome, a city he has never visited, and then draws the city in a wide panorama in precise detail: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8YXZTlwTAU&eurl=
Paris, Now and Then The Atget Retrographic Project, which pairs early 20th century photos of Paris by Eugene Atget with the equivalent views today. Zut alors!
Naked in the Streets
While our Naked at the Met hunt takes on nudity in a museum, photographer Spencer Tunick has achieved notoriety for taking nudity to the streets en masse. Hordes of people have stripped and reclined around the world for his lens. He was once arrested in good ol’ New York for his “sessions” here, but later received a settlement for his legal fees. You can see his striking work at spencertunick.com.
An Infinity of Photos
Got several thousand minutes to spare? Then you may have time to browse the New York Public Library’s new Digital Image Database, packed with 30,000 images, with 570,000 more to come (give or take a Polaroid). Searching is easy, and you can dig up prints, maps, drawings and other graphics. Plus you can buy copies for $25 to $55. Now you have no excuse for bare walls in your home. Not enough to tide you over? Check out the National Geographic Image Collection, with more than 10,000 images.
Van Gogh A-Go-Go Van Gogh Gallery is a comprehensive site on the one-eared guy.
A Cyber-Sucker Born Every Minute
Here’s a museum you can only tour on the Web: P.T. Barnum’s infamous American Museum, a freak show that stood near City Hall before it burned down. CUNY has re-created it online (more or less). See the famous Fiji Mermaid! (A monkey torso sewn to a fish tail.) See the dress that Jefferson Davis wore when he fled from the Yankees! See the Egress!
Da Vinci Made Cinchy
Leonardo da Vinci would approve of the inventive section dedicated to him on the Boston Museum of Science site. It includes quite a few interactive investigations of his work, such as an explanation of how he achieved three dimensionality in his paintings thanks to the relatively newfangled device of the vanishing point. You can tour galleries and learn the secrets of the paranoid Renaissance man’s backward handwriting. You’ll also discover how foresighted Leonardo’s inventions were, including his plans for cell phones and dental floss. Elsewhere, see a project to build a Leonardo bridge
and learn about his writings at the American Museum of Natural History.
Dream On
Once upon a time, the Guggenheim Museum received backing from Mayor Giuliani for its ambitious plans to build a $650 million, 40- to 45-story museum on the East River in lower Manhattan, where it would display post-World War II art. The unusual, collage-like, jumbled design of the building, by famed architect Frank Gehry, would have had a titanium and glass skin, as is said to resemble and to have been inspired by clouds. Then the Guggenheim realized it was broke. Poof, no more clouds.
Moon with a View
When it comes to art, it’s tough to top Ma Nature. You can look at NASA’s Solar Simulator as some high-tech science site, with views of the planets and their moons as seen from any of those planets or from the Cassini, Galileo or Voyager space probes. But you may be more likely to look at it as the coolest art gallery in the universe. Hypnotic.
Bizarre Graffiti Our favorite was the spray-painted GOD IS COMING to which someone added AND HE'S BRINGING DONUTS! www.picturesofwalls.com
Are These Classifieds for Real?
What about the first one: "Wanted: 30 Chinamen and a zeppelin for elaborate practical joke. Can you help?" www.horsman.co.nz/story.do?id=67
It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!
Our new Munch Around the Village Hunt in New York’s Greenwich Village includes the unusual restaurant Peanut Butter & Co., with an all-peanut-butter, all-the-time menu. Delicacies include the Elvis (a grilled sandwich with bananas and honey) and the Pregnant Lady (with pickles). You can get everything to go, including their own varieties of peanut butter in jars. Learn more, or buy online, at www.ilovepeanutbutter.com. And now take it away, Brian, our favorite animated character: www.devilducky.com/media/38524 What inspired Brian: www.ebaumsworld.com/flash/peanutbutter.html
Honey and Jelly for Your Honey Instead of giving chocolates, why not surprise that certain someone (which could be yourself, and why not?) with something a bit more exotic? While we were researching our hunt at Seattle's Pike Place Market, our tastebuds fell in love (or was it lust?) with Moon Valley's Fireweed Raw Honey (not hot, but named for the local plan these bees apparently ransack) and Mick's Peppouri, jellies with exotic flavors, such as ginger, garlic, wine, and spicy Death Valley and Buzztail. Remember: The use of these delicacies need not be limited to the kitchen.
This Week’s Sermon: At churchsigngenerator.com/index_1.php you can type your own topic into a photo of a church sign, then save the image to your computer and then e-mail it independent of the Web site. Great for pranking your friends!
133 Dumbass ThingsYou Should Never Do... if you find yourself the hero in a sci-fi or speculative fiction story. “Number 8: I will design redundancy into all ship systems, so that the loss of one component will not cripple the entire vessel....Number 22: I will never assume that an enemy is dead unless the remains are available for examination....Number 43: If I have a copy of the Evil Overlord's plans and my capture is imminent, I will not send the only copy of those plans away with a cute little sidekick. ” Reminds us of Rule No. 1 for survival on a dessert island: Kill the Gilligan. Go to bull.dumpshock.com/humor/hero.html for the list.
Free Long-Distance Calls All that you need is a computer with a microphone. Go to skype.com, download and install the program, tell your friends to do the same, and soon you can enjoy free phone calls to all of your Skype buddies—as well as instant messaging and file exchanging.
Wing Sings! Enjoy the, uh, unusual stylings of New Zealand songbird Wing! Be sure to try the sound clips of such songs as “Dream Lover” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” (Note: We had to rename the files with the suffix .mp3 to get them to work with RealPlayer on our Mac. But it was well worth the bother.)
Pick the Best Movie, Music or Game Why trust one critic when you can consult 40? Metacritic collects numerous published reviews of movies, music and games and comes up with an average score. You can also read excerpts from the assorted critics’ reviews. And unlike the ratings on Amazon, it doesn’t seem as if every product gets the equivalent of 4 stars.
The Light Side of the Moon Hear what Neil Armstrong really said on the surface of the moon—or at least according to The Onion and Blogjam. Warning: It wouldn’t pass muster with the FCC.
At MovieMistakes.com, click on “Top Mistakes” and enjoy such nuggets as the one voted number one by the site’s members: In Star Wars, “When the stormtroopers break into the control room, watch very carefully and you will be able to see a storm trooper nearly render himself unconscious by smacking his head off a door frame.”
Sure, you know the Internet Movie Database. But have you checked out the many cool features that, when you look up a movie, appear on the left side of the page? I like to look at the breakdown of the User Rating. Just click on the stars and look at the chart to find out if people of your age and gender like a film as much as the average suggests. For instance, when last viewed, the chart for The Passion of the Christ shows that it is least popular with men over the age of 45 (6.7 stars), yet most popular with males under the age of 18 (8.9). By the way, women over the age of 45 rate the movie at 8.2 stars, which suggests that a lot of husbands and wives are arguing on the way home.
If you relish negative reviews, then Rotten Tomatoes will be to your taste.
Vote on the best four-word movie reviews at fwfr.com.
Theaters get more and more revenue from showing more and more commercials before movies, yet ticket prices in Manhattan keep rising, breaking the $10 barrier. And audiences accept it like sheep in a slaughter pen. Nomovieads.com is trying to stop the ads—or at least force theaters to list the times that movies actually start, so you can avoid the commercials.
If you’d like a sense of what it was like to be in the middle of Times Square when the ball dropped, check out a site called panoramas.dk. Times Square at the fateful yet arbitrary chronological moment is just one of the many 360-degree photos here. You can also visit the Statue of Liberty’s petite twin sister in Paris, or the surface of Mars, or my favorite, the view from the top of Mount Everest. (Warning: You’ll need Quicktime and a fast connection. )
Someone is posting the most bizarre eBay comments you’ll ever see. Some samples:
* “I’ll bid on you til there’s nothing left but crumbs! Then I’ll bid on the crumbs.”
* “If you can guess 3 of the foods in my retainer, I’ll send you a free VEGETABLE.”
* “Rainbows are pretty. I don’t know why I shoot at them.”
* “Say hello to Barbara for me. I’ve been watching her at night.”
* To a seller named “abomb” the mystery man writes: “Praise: Fast delivery. Precision machined parts. Clearly labeled chemicals. Discreet. A+”
* To a seller named “cdc”: “Praise: You items carry HARMFUL DISEASES and VIRUSES. I think. I’m pretty sure. RARE! A+
* And to “kinfolk”: “Praise: We all came from the same loins. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”
See the whole, large collection on eBay.
Find out whether or not 19th-century New York theologian Clement Clarke Moore plagiarized A Visit from St. Nicholas (”’Twas the night before Christmas...”) in an interesting Forbes article.
If you type in your home phone number, and it’s listed, Google will reveal your name and address. And if you click the link to Mapquest, you can see your home marked on a map, or you can see your neighborhood and home photographed from on high. Yikes!
Are there photos of you on the Internet? You can check by going to the Images section of Google and typing in your name. Or just type in your first name and see what kind of people share it with you. The results may distress you. Especially if your name is Melvin.
Look under Google’s Services & Tools for more tricks, including how to find out who has linked to your own Web site. One of the more interesting sections is Google Labs (labs.google.com/), a testing ground for new uses of the search technology. Here, you can request email updates on particular topics or try to pinpoint people or businesses in a certain geographical location—such as your own Zip Code.
For the big, BIG picture, Google Zeitgeist tells you what the top Google searches have been for the last week or month, broken into such categories as Top 10 Gaining Queries, Top 10 Declining Queries, Popular Male Celebrities, Movies, and even what’s hot in other counties. Search for yourself often enough you too can make the Top 10 list. Especially if you’re a raving narcissist.
See your neighborhood by satellite at Terrafly. We’ll keep our blinds drawn.
Behold the actual“Engrish” subtitles that translators in China came up with for Lord of the Rings II: The Two Towers.
Enjoy the photos of products in the Foreign Groceries Museum, including Crunky, Blocky and Pikey desserts and, on page 6, a surprising Hello Kitty product.
Some songs try to pump up the excitement by abruptly shifting to a higher key, in a leap that this collector calls a “gear change.” Browse his audio Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall of Shame and find out if your favorite group is an offender:
Take a 60-second vacation at Quiet American, which offers one-minute audio recordings made in places around the world, close your eyes and listen. Snippets include the sounds of peacocks in India, a shoreline in Sweden, late-night jazz in Paris and firecrackers in Taiwan.
First, be surprised at this “Psychic” site’s ability to intuit a number you pick. Now the real challenge: How does the trick work? (Hint: Try picking the same symbol twice.)
Measure your left-brain vs. right-brain skills with a vexing test.
A list of links about diners, thanks to the Diner Museum.
Vending machines that dispense art, by Artomat (see, for example, the one in the New Museum bookstore).
Be sure to read more than one of the subversively hilarious Amazon.com reviews of one Henry Raddick—they have a cumulative effect. One of my favorites: the review of the 14” Spider-Man Ultra Pose and Stick Figure.
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