The SR-71, here shown in its A-12 variant, is the most beautiful design object of the 20th Century. It was a burst of raw vision, literally conceived within a dream, and built with the lovely precision of a Faberge egg. Fragile as an egg, it’s skin consisted of hundreds of intersecting geometric panels, [...]
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The Library of Congress keeps bringing the heat of history to Flickr’s Commons. For the 150th anniversary of the War of Northern Aggression, they’ve loaded up a cannon load of stereographs, analglyphized them and blasted them across the bow of the internet. So dig up the old red & blue shades and enjoy [...] I know he promised to keep us out of Flickr, but he went ahead and joined anyways. The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library has unleashed 634 images of Wilson-era photographic fury into Flickr’s Commons. Images range from crazy flagfish postcards like the one above to lots of WWI stuff, including this excellent horse & [...] Just when I thought I had exhausted the total supply of severed heads in LA museums, LACMA shines through. I was double lucky (or bi-winning, as we say these days) on this find, as I arrived at LACMA just after they rotated the Raymond and Frances Bushell Collection of netsuke in the Japanese [...] I am so gonna steal this “elongated body tiger line drawing” for some future project. That’s real style, there, just lovely line work. Hollow Brick with Tigers and Bi Disk, from the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-225 CE), from the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Side view & label. When [...]
Ahh, the de Young Museum. I both love and hate you. So terribly designed internally, so many waste of space shows, so much a cattle car designed to dump folks right into the gift shop. But then you do amazing things, like the Vivienne Westwood and Hiroshi Sugimoto shows. I feel the same way about the permanent collection. So hodge-podge, but then there are just these huge treasures in it. Like the above. My absence from working life has enabled my mind to engage more with areas of personal, rather than professional, interest as of late, and a big part of that is my interest in overlaps between contemporary art practices and spiritual/religious beliefs, particularly shamanism and animism. So wherever I go, I seem to be finding opportunities and minor revelations. The de Young is home to a small, but interesting group of objects from Eskimo, Inuit, Inupiaq and Yupik Native American cultures that I find illuminating. At top is a small sculpture of a shaman, mid-transformation into a bear. It’s a few inches long, the kind of thing you might keep in your pocket. Apparently an aspect of Inuit and Eskimo shamanism is not only the shaman’s ability to transform into a bear (or vice versa), but also his ability to contemplate or see his own skeleton. So these three symbols of bear, shaman and skeleton together symbolize the underlying power of the shaman in much of the far north and the arctic. I’ve posted about this before, but the Smithsonian has been just keeps piling on the awesome in the Gottlieb Jazz Photos Flickr set. They’re up to over 1500 images in the set now, nearly double my last peek, and they continue to be amazing in every possible way. If you haven’t lost a [...]
Made my first visit to the Tacoma Art Museum recently, where they’re currently showing some of the Japanese prints from their collection. Museum collections of Japanese prints, basically mass-market, popular culture items, always function as a reminder that 200 years from now, someone’s gonna be displaying a museum collection of xerox punk flyers that have become somehow “priceless” and “ancient”. On to the prints. The collection has some definite highlights, mainly due to some very early prints and some Meiji-era prints that, while less “magically Japanese” than the classics by Hiroshige and Hokusai, were of primary interest to me (I’m more of a Yoshitoshi fan, myself). The most interesting of these is the image above, a 1904 print showing Japanese soldiers crossing the Yalu River during the Battle of Yalu River in the Russo-Japanese War. It’s not the kind of image you see anywhere before the advent of photography and journalism. A couple more images I’d like to highlight are below the break, and a whole bunch more, with their labels, lurk in my Flickr set. Vigilant Citizen, the greatest of all occult/conspiracy/music video review blogs, is in your downtown, analyzing your library. Whether your a card carrying member of P.A.G.A.N. (People Against Goodness and Normalcy, see Dragnet), a subterranean lizard-Angeleno, a believer in the Foursquare Gospel of Aimee Semple McPherson or just a celebrity member of boring old [...] OK, this is kind of a “Dad Joke” of a post, but it’s really just another excuse to direct folks over to The Selvage Yard to see more of Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr, to bad girls in black and white. The Selvage Yard remains one of the best blogs about style, fashion, [...] |
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