See Jeff Mangum, the (apparently) reclusive front-personage of Neutral Milk Hotel, being completely upstaged by a toddler during the (apparently) legendary performance in Athens, GA in 1997. For (apparently) one week only. Fair warning.
(Owing to the peculiarities of the video streaming, the local preference for valid embed code will have to be foregone for the week. Any claims regarding the validity of the code on this page should therefore be taken with seasoning, to taste.)
UPDATE: I got fed up with having to pause the stream every time this page loaded, and there’s no obvious way to disable the autostart in this heterodox embed code, so I’m replacing it with a link to the original in situ…
(via Mefi, thx to msalt)
Alas, you don’t get street gangs looking this smart anymore (or, maybe you do. Stick yours in the comments). This appears to be an autochrome – on which subject I have a long uncompleted post sitting in the back.
Achingly beautiful. More Sigur Rós on YouTube:
(via wood s lot)
Adam “Ape Lad” Koford alerts us to
only a paper moon, a haunting collection of century-old studio photos employing the classic paper moon prop. As Adam points out, there’s some excellent faces among these pictures — mostly on the subjects, but occasionally on the props, too.
The set also had me rummaging the old hard drives for an image (below) I picked out from the Wonderland of Knowledge — where would this blog be without that book? — years and years ago. It’s the lead illustration for, of all things, a chapter on astronomy.
I remain convinced that this image will come in for something, one day, eventually.
(via Drawn!)
Posted in Cosmos, illustration, kids, photography
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Tagged Ape-Lad, Cosmos, illustration, kids, Moon, paper-moon, photography, portraiture
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In Argentina, a Museum Unveils a Long-Frozen Maiden – New York Times
SALTA, Argentina — The maiden, the boy, the girl of lightning: they were three Inca children, entombed on a bleak and frigid mountaintop 500 years ago as a religious sacrifice.
Unearthed in 1999 from the 22,000-foot summit of Mount Llullaillaco, a volcano 300 miles west of here near the Chilean border, their frozen bodies were among the best preserved mummies ever found, with internal organs intact, blood still present in the heart and lungs, and skin and facial features mostly unscathed. No special effort had been made to preserve them. The cold and the dry, thin air did all the work. They froze to death as they slept, and 500 years later still looked like sleeping children, not mummies.
See what I’m talking about? Sometimes, there really isn’t anything that needs to be said.
(via MeFi)
UPDATE: added the link, also from timory’s MeFi post, to the words, “religious sacrifice” above.
Extremely creepy photo set about which I have little to say that I didn’t say already about the Greenberg exhibition last year in Shock and Awww. Actually, rereading that post, I find that there is something else to be said: I would suggest that the rhetoric of outrage at the “abuse” of “innocent” little girls is equally problematic to the phenomenon of which the pictures ostensibly form a critique. The “innocence” of children is a cultural construct, just as much as the sexualisation for commercial purposes, and the objections to that. A very tangled web, that one.
Oh, and the questionable taste on display here extends beyond the pictures themselves: to see what I mean, go to the pictures and then hit the ‘info’ link, and watch the transition. You might be well advised to first equip yourself with something to bite on.
(via WFMU)
Rather lovely illustrations by Andrej and Olga Dugin, from a children’s book, The Adventures of Abdi, which once details are tracked from here to there and back again, turns out to have been written by Madonna. Yeah, that Madonna. The massed critics of Amazon.com don’t seem to think much of the story. It left one reviewer feeling “like an orphan in a catholic orphanage”. That’s not good.
The consensus on the moral of the story seems to be, “don’t give up, no matter how bad things get, because everything happens for a reason, and it all turns out to be for the best” — a “moral” of such breathtaking dishonesty, it would be hard to attribute it to anyone but a multi-millionaire celebrity author. The illustrations, however, as can be seen here, are brilliant. Perhaps they could be used as a starting point, and someone with the time and inclination could write a new and better story to go with them?
(via Monster Brains)
Okay, so it’s a tad contrived — I don’t think any 8-year-old is going to be making Pulp Fiction references of her own accord, for one thing — but maximum points for sentiments and candour. A-and for winding up the religious right. Read all 891 comments? Erm, no, I don’t think so.
And Fox News? Bwoy, they lapped it up, as you can imagine. Except you don’t need to.
