December 4
December 3
Norman Mailer directed a movie featuring himself, his then-current wife, one of his ex-wives, Rip Torn, an Andy Warhol superstar, and Hervé Villechaize.
It didn't end well. (warning: language, blood, crying children)
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posted by Joe Beese at 9:14 PM -
11 comments
The Orienting Stone. "A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of existentially reversed
qibla (this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the origin point of a three-dimensional space..."
[Via]
posted by homunculus at 4:00 PM -
22 comments
Funerary rites differ widely across cultural time and space, and customs that seem normal to their practitioners can seem bizarre and macabre to outsiders. Certain Zoroastrian sects—such as the Parsis of India—famously
place their dead atop
dokhmas, or "
towers of silence", to be devoured by vultures. In recent years, the decimation of India's vulture population due to diclofenac poisoning
(previously), and the construction of modern high-rise buildings which provide an unintended view of the process,
make the future of this custom uncertain. (If you're feeling morbid, you can get a vulture's-eye view from
this video.) The Tibetans sometimes practice a similar custom known as "
sky burial" (warning: graphic photos).
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posted by greenie2600 at 1:36 PM -
20 comments
People with a keen strategic sense maintain a well-diversified hoard of coins and painstakingly build alliances with local shopkeepers or bank tellers, conspicuously proffering coins for one purchase or deposit in the hopes of being indulged when they're short of change at some point in the future. Argentina's coinage problem.
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posted by cortex at 12:32 PM -
16 comments
Phase — Mother Earth, a piece created by Mono-ha artist Nobuo Sekine in 1968, has been
re-created:
Consisting of a hole dug into the ground, 2.7 metres deep and 2.2 metres in diameter, with the excavated earth compacted into a cylinder of exactly the same dimensions, Phase — Mother Earth was instrumental in the early development of work by the Mono-ha artist group, and has been considered a landmark work in Japanese postwar art history.
More about Mono-ha inside.
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posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 12:01 PM -
7 comments
"I was listening to the radio and it’s one of those moments where you have to stop what you’re doing and pay full attention.”
Dory Previn, met composer
Andre' Previn while working in MGM's music dept. in the 1960s. They collaborated on movie music such as
"A Second Chance" and
"Valley Of The Dolls". Andre' divorced Dory in 1969 to marry Mia Farrow. Following this, Dory Previn recorded six original
albums known for their
wit and
confessional tone. Dory Previn unofficially retired in 1976 and has been reluctant to give interviews. However, she released a free online album,
Planet Blue in 2002. She gave a
rare interview to the Times in February. She talked about her influences and meeting Howard Hughes with
Bernadette Cahill in 2005.
posted by The Whelk at 9:24 AM -
6 comments
"Some day we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me."
In 1979, Paul
Williams and Kenneth
Ascher composed "
The Rainbow Connection" [midi] which served as a radio hit and song for the
The Muppet Movie. It was nominated for an Academy Award and
reviewed in the allmusic guide as a song in which "Kermit the Frog sings with all the dreamy wistfulness of a short green Judy Garland." Enclosed are some performances of it I hope you enjoy.
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posted by cavalier at 8:26 AM -
40 comments
Second Great Depression? We should be so lucky. Or so Dmitry Orlov says. Orlov, an engineer who watched the collapse of the Soviet Union, argues that the United States is well into a similar process of collapse. In Orlov's model, collapse is divided into five stages: financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. The first one is currently happening, and the next two are guaranteed to follow; as for cultural collapse, that happened a long time ago, but people were to narcotised by consumerism to notice. And things look set to get very, very dire indeed, with runaway hyperinflation, shortages, the breakdown of political institutions, the fragmentation of the US, and, if the "social collapse" stage is reached, roaming gangs and ethnic cleansing.
posted by acb at 8:08 AM -
61 comments
First libraries started loaning records, then toys, then films and games - now they're loaning out people.
The Living Library Project allows members to hear people's stories not on the page, but in person.
posted by mippy at 7:21 AM -
14 comments
December 2
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