Baboon Palace

I’ve started doodling at work lately. I frequently have to copy large files over the network, which takes about a minute, a long enough time to get bored staring at the windows Copying Files dot dot dot animation. So I draw little pictures sometimes. No big whoop.

The trouble with working from home, which is also the completely awesome thing about it, is that I can blow three hours drawing ridiculous shit and playing with photoshop. I spent the whole morning doodling this idea I had while I was in the shower.

The Boy Who Mistook His Bicycle For A Hat.
Also, something about a woman walking her toaster.
I don’t know.

I was surprised how much trouble I had drawing a bicycle from memory. I kept thinking: where do the pedals connect to the frame? Which is strange, because I see bicycles every day and yet I can’t inspect the mental image carefully enough to draw one. It’s also hard to draw circles. And who has time for spokes? Not me, that’s for sure. Fuck spokes >:(

My new favorite illustrators.

My new favorite choose-your-own-adventure comic book thing.

My new favorite giant pink bunny.

via Drawn

Dadahead has posted a wonderful and uplifting list of quotes about Dada.

Dadaism is great of course, as is situationism and postmonsterism, among an uncountable infinity of other isms very much deserving of your time and enthusiasm. Among these is Neoism, which names the simultaneous emergence of the new (‘neo’) and the well-defined (‘ism’).

There is no way to become a neoist, and therefore no reason to do so. Neoism strongly recommends that you do your very best to embrace all other isms before turning to neoism.

Neoists communicate primarily in the form of brief koans or parables or performances, such as the following:

Two girls wearing silver overalls and Monty Cantsin-look alike masks visited Monty Cantsin. The first girl said: “I bet this is an allegory.” The second said: “You have won.” The first said: “But only allegorically.” The second said: “No, in reality. In allegory, you have lost.”

Or:

When you try to explain something you often end up in confusion. Meanwhile if you try to create confusion you might come up with a perfect nonsense.

Or:

Wearing sandwich boards that said in English & French: “Neoist Parking Meter Action – Pay Me to Go Away”
& wearing a parking meter hood over my face, I stood at empty parking places
& waited for cars to park there. Then I followed the drivers when they left their cars with an impassive face & my hand out-stretched mechanically. The drivers all avoided me by walking somewhere where I wasn’t – after which I left a Neoist Parking Ticket under their windshield wiper. Finally disgusted by what I thought was a mediocre response to my imaginative begging, I started to walk back to the LOW theatre. En route, 2 guys stopped me & asked me what I was doing. When I explained, they thought it was so funny that they pretended to get out of a car & gave me money.

Neoism is the invention of Istvan Kantor, who gave us the name Monty Cantsin.

Cantsin is a name chosen/invented by Cantsin to refer to an international star who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren’t. What is usually an egoistical role (star) becomes abstracted by its disassociation from a particular person. When someone thinks/feels that the star context/advantage might be useful, they can “wear” the Cantsin identity.

It’s fair to say that Monty Cantsin is motivated purely by sexual desire.

If you wish to understand Neoism, write down again and again the same word: Neoism. Do it until you get really sick. Then run into the bathroom and take a shit. This is a simple everyday exercise to keep a very close and continuous contact with Neoism.

There are endless meditative action routines to keep our body and mind in total awarness of Neoism.

Amen?!

Hm this is sort of disturbing.

A British newspaper said that a Chinese cosmetics company was using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe.

Agents for the firm, which could not be named for legal reasons, have told would-be customers that skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot is being used to develop collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments, the Guardian newspaper said following an undercover investigation.

“The agents say some of the company’s products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is ‘traditional’ and nothing to ‘make such a big fuss about’,” the daily alleged.

Well hey I guess it isn’t a big deal then. I suppose I was being culturally insensitive there for a second. Now I see that rendering dead bodies into cosmetic products is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Just as reasonable as shooting prisoners, perhaps.

Has everybody read the NYT article about The Believer and n+1? It’s long, but definitely worth it.

I’ve always enjoyed the Believer, I like their sense of humour. I’ve never read an actual physical copy of n+1, but the few samples I read in their archive leads me to believe that maybe they are haters. But I don’t really know.

I don’t have much to add, except to point to the resulting melee at The Valve. One of the n+1 editors, Marco Roth, pops in to clarify his position on blogging versus print publishing, and there’s a spirited discussion about Wes Anderson’s status re: hipsters and racism.

John Emerson thinks that liberal arts degrees are bullshit.

I spend most of my time studying liberal-arts-type stuff on my own. It’s my substitute for TV. Books are one of the least expensive forms of entertainment, and if you’ve got a halfway decent library in town, books are free.

There is really only one sacrifice you’ll have to make if you read all the time: if you do that, you can forget about being normal. People will regard you with suspicion. More successful people will fear you because you’re smarter than they are and are suspected of having a bad attitude. Self-made men and bitter, unsuccessful people will despise you as a failure. Slackers will avoid you because you’re too serious and think too much. So you basically have to give up on all normal human relationships, but given today’s baseline for normal human relationships, you may come out ahead on this.

See also this Crooked Timber post.