Hey there, visitors — there’s more (and much better) photos of this here — check ‘em out.
I got another cryptic text from a friend last Friday afternoon: “Fight Club in Union Square. GET HERE.”
For those who don’t live in New York, Union Square has historically been a giant meeting place for political protesters, social activists, and merchants of all sizes. In the days following September 11th, it was a meeting place for rescuers and mourners alike. Now it’s home to a multiplex, Ann Taylor Loft, a Whole Foods, and a Diesel store.
So really, it makes perfect sense that in the inner chamber of Manhattan’s consumer culture, right there in Union Square, there would be a massive, public fight club.
You ever notice how grown people that are perfectly capable of feeding themselves lose their minds over free food at work? Fuck bombs, the best way for The Terrorists to strike at the heart of American capitalists would be like this:
Plant a guy in the company in an admin position — get him in as a temp. He won’t need to be there long.
Deliver any number of cyanide-laced pizzas and/or doughnuts to every office building in America. Everyone in every office everywhere loses their mind over free pizza, including security guards. If The Terrorists are feeling fancy, they could make the poison a two-stage compound, lacing the cream cheese with one half and various bagels with the other.
Have the temp send out a company-wide e-mail that announces free food.
The cops arrested an actual genie on the subway this morning. They knocked him right out his Adidas, face-down on pavement wet with rain from a million dirty feet. His skin was dark, black like an event horizon with bulging swirly yellow eyes like two eggs from another planet. He roared, rhyming:
Let me go, let me go!
Why SHOULD you?
‘Cause I said it was so!
I can grant you three wishes,
or I can eat your soul!
Everyone just sort of walked around him to get on the train, only staring a little bit. I stepped over him, wishing the train would stop being all slow on the way to Manhattan all the time.
Really, if you were undercaffeinated and a little late to work, what would you wish for if you were on the spot like that?
Artist William Hundley, living and working in Austin TX, dares to ask the burning question that lurks deep within the psyche of every man, woman and child:
“What if I put that thing up on a bunch of cheeseburgers?”
More photographs of cheeseburger-elevated objects on William’s website, here and here … including an iron, a portable television, a skateboard, and a miniature Easter Island head.
My dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time on July 3rd, 1982. He was taking the next day off from work and had volunteered to take me to see Star Wars or fireworks for the first time, saying over dinner, “We can do whichever one you want, Jeffrey. It’s up to you.”
I know he meant it generously, giving me that choice, but the responsibility crushed me. Home video was a few years from being affordable, and even though Star Wars was the greatest gift to little boys since gunpowder and matches, it HAD to leave the theaters someday. I knew that much. I’d never seen fireworks, either, and those only came once a year. I couldn’t focus on which one I wanted to do more — because I had to miss one of them, and I didn’t know which one, I anxiously grieved over missing both.
I found this incredible image of Stanley Kubrick directing Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ while sifting through the Internet this morning. I wonder what they did with that set afterwards. It would be so awesome if they just rented that rotating drum out as a studio apartment, so that when you walked to the living room from the bedroom the apartment rotated, but you stayed still …
My friend David William is helping me beef up the NY/Web-based arts coverage here, just to get more content moving through the pipes and be another set of eyes, ears, and opinions on the street. We’ve been friends for a while now, and I’ve loved his art and aesthetic for a long time. Make sure and make him feel welcome, folks, while we monkey with the technicalities of setting him up with his owner user account here.
He writes in here with his first guest post:
Walking past the Taco Bell on 14th street, just West of Union Square, I spotted these two new cut-and-shuffle jobs:
I can’t look out my office window on a grey rainy day like today without imagining Spinners weaving through the buildings, crowds of people with glowing umbrellas and shady eyeball craftsmen working their frigid magic on the streets.And as the 21st century grinds on, I’m more and more convinced that Blade Runner is coming true. It’s like some window in an alternate future was left open, just a crack, and all that alternate reality is whispering through, one invention at a time.
Listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack really helps this vision coalesce, too. Vangelis’ haunting ambient score over the sounds of busy, rainy city life are mixing really well with the view outside. A great geek friend of mine hooked me up with the motherlode too, a while back: a collection of ambient background noise and sound effects from Blade Runner.
And of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t want to share … help yourselves to ambient background sound and effects from Blade Runner, as well as Vangelis’ score, laid over sounds from the film:
