French public-service announcement, counseling safe sex in the age of AIDS. Found on the Web. Who knew that whip-tailed scorpion boy from Aldebaran would morph, in flagrante, into the real thing? Must’ve been that bug powder we’d both been sniffing… WHAT: The Las Vegas Weekly, an alternative newspaper, has just published my essay on the […]
Image: Public domain, thanks to the Powerhouse Museum Collection. …and I feel fine. So I wrote a drive-by critique, for H+ magazine, of the prevailing New Age fixation on 2012 as the zero hour for the Coming Singularity, allegedly predicted by the ancient Maya, when Time Shall be No More or we’ll bear witness to […]
As the only member of my southern San Diego bordertown’s Class of ’78 who was a card-carrying member of the Patti Smith fan club, I waited for Patti’s vanishingly rare appearance in America’s Finest City with the giddiness of an Opus Dei insider waiting for a papal audience. Poster from May 16, 1978 Patti Smith […]
Head by Gaetano Zumbo, La Specola museum, Florence, Italy. Postcard. My two-week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger ended Monday. Exhilarating, exhausting, ex…machina? Archives here, and here, and here, and here, here, for anyone interested. Reliquary of San Valentino, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, Italy. Postcard. I’m still picking the shrapnel out of my […]
Head by Gaetano Zumbo, La Specola museum, Florence, Italy. Postcard. My two-week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger ended Monday. Exhilarating, exhausting, ex…machina? Archives here, and here, and here, and here, here, for anyone interested. Reliquary of San Valentino, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, Italy. Postcard. I’m still picking the shrapnel out of my […]
Stuffed and mounted monkey, Museum of Zoology, University of Bologna, Italy. Author photo. For the next two weeks, I’ll be cheating on Shovelware, blogging about my recent Grand Tour of Uncanny Italy at Boing Boing, the self-described “directory of wonderful things” and the Web’s fifth most popular blog, at least as of today’s Technorati rankings. […]
Obtainium. Found on the Web. Out of the blue, a mail-art publication called Abe’s Penny, which serializes disjointed, dreamlike narratives in postcard form, arrived in the mailbox, recently, to my enduring bafflement. As it happens, I’ve always regarded mail art, with the notable exception of the incomparable Ray_Johnson, as refried Fluxus, a harmless hobby for […]
Capuchin mummy, Palermo, Italy. (See their mummified bretheren in the Capuchin catacombs, Rome. Copyright CABINET magazine, all rights reserved. Another Advertisement for Myself: This Sunday, I’ll leave for Rome, to spend two weeks in the Eternal City as a scholar-in-residence at the American Academy, a venerable center for scholars and artists. While in Italy, I’ll […]
CREDIT: Obtainium. Excavated from the Web. WHAT:“Solar Flare: Sun Ra’s album covers were wild, inspired, and a universe away from Blue Note”: my feature on the graphic-design sensibility of the jazz composer Sun Ra, Print magazine, June 2009, pps. 86-93. WHERE: HERE. CREDIT: “Boldly Go,” by Abdi Farah. (For more about this astonishing work, go […]