Category: ultrarandom

Junk Drawer

I’ve been menaing to write more about the many exciting or at least mildly amusing things going on lately, but it’s been hard to gather the will to sit and concentrate on the blogging thing. Here are a bunch of quick links that I’ve been meaning to pepper throughout a series of scintillating posts…

The Junk Drawer

  • Art Chantry, Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 is an incredible restrospective of the work of my all-time favorite designer, now showing at P.S. 1. I can’t rave about this enough. The work is fun enough to look at in reproduction, but he does so much with materials and printing tricks that seeing the stuff in person is about a million times cooler. (And they’re using the same title for the exhibit as I did for a fictional exhibit years ago. but I’m not bitter.)
  • Speaking of P.S. 1, I’d like to point out that it’s not the same place as P.S. 122 in the East Village. You really ought to check out what’s going on at P.S. 122, because they put on tons of great theater and dance and performance and such, and it’s their ticket prices are great for what you get. More on this later, because I’m starting to work on a number of projects with them.
  • And speaking of great stuff at P.S. 122, Heather Woodbury is kicking off their new season in September with her one-woman, eight-installment, 100+-character show, What Ever. You really ought to check out her web site, where you can listen to streaming audio of entire acts of the show, so go and whet your appetite.
  • Flaming Fire were one of the guest acts in the Devo Tribute Show I saw last week. They were pretty exciting, and the lead singer was pretty hot, but you must check out their site to see the progress they’re making on their project to have artists illustrate every single verse of the Bible (1079 illustrations complete; 35586 remaining).
  • The Grand List of Comic Book Cliches is funny because it’s true.
  • Typophile: The Smaller Picture is a project that’s building a typeface via collaborative effort over the internet one pixel at a time. (Thanks, Mike!)
  • Gilles Barbier is the artist of a fantastic, witty sculptural installation called L’Hospice that depicts elderly superheroes loafing around in a nursing home. (Better pictures halfway down this page.)

A Brief Respite

Let’s take a quick break from all this stress and appreciate a few things. First, you absolutely must see this beautiful record of WTC views taken by a friend from her bedroom window. Second, and this is really a matter of making believe that nothing is wrong at all, is something pretty:

To keep things in perspective, though:

I’m speechless

This is one of the scariest views of the collapse I’ve seen yet

I’m pretty sure I know who the guy in the bandana is

Going Postal

So it’s not just my imagination — the Post Offices in Brooklyn really are worse than the ones in Manhattan. I think about this all the time: it’s one of the downsides of living in the ‘hood. My neighbor and I were commiserating last night about how awful it is to see one of those yellow notices in our mailbox, telling us we have to trudge down to the grimy local Post Office to wait on line for a half hour while surly troglodytes scream at us through an inch of plexiglass. Just yesterday morning she earned valuable brownie points by chasing after the mailman so he didn’t disappear with a package of mine, saving me from a saturday morning trip to hell.

This morning, as I was dropping off some of the eBay packages (by the way, I keep finding more old treasures to auction, so keep checking that out), the very friendly woman at the very efficient Post Office at 34th between Park and Lex was surprised that I had carried the boxes in from Brooklyn, but then confessed (across the open desk when we conducted our transaction) that she’s heard nothing but awful stories abut the conditions there. I told her about my fear of seeing the dreaded yellow slip, and she agreed sympathetically.

Apathy

Screw it, I’m just too busy to sit down and write anything long and funny or deep or whatever. I’ll get around to it. But I’ll show y’all a whole stack of mini-Polaroids once I’m back up and running.

Dragging My Heels

I’ve been in a bit of a fog this week. Dragging my heels, yawning at work, and sitting slack-jawed around the playhouse just watching movies (Singing in the Rain, Poison, Muppets from Space) or goofing around on the website. As soon as all my houseguests left sunday, my spirits just came crashing to the ground. I always get like that after I’ve had a good time with company around. I guess I’m still not fully recovered from being such an anti-social loser all this Fall — I still feel like it’ll be weeks between chances to see friends.

Until there’s something worth mentioning….