B.zedan

 What’s new from the mind of Iris Van Herpen

The first time I got my photo taken directly onto tin was at Idapalooza by an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, Dinah DiNova. Years later, when I decided to take up the task myself, she gave me advice I think of probably every time I mess up a plate. Her advice? “Don’t try. It’s incredibly hard and it will take over your life.”

Too late, I’m obsessed. But I’m also absolutely and stunningly in love with Dinah’s work. She’s raising money to finish her project tin, sin & kinship, a multi-year documentation of queers and hobos and anarchists and all the other loveliest people in the US. $100 for a one of a kind 8×10 tintype by her is an absolute steal, too.

Happy belated Halloween all ya'll,
Since I scanned a Pumpkin already, I wanted to do something else and was introduced by my flower people to the Pumpkin Tree. Actually more like a pepper and closer to an eggplant. Here's the whole bunch.

“No Man’s Job”

Latest personal project by photographer Anthony Kurtz. Kurtz took these dynamic portraits of workers at Femme Auto in Senegal.

Every October, I make it a point to take a walk down Bleecker Street and check out the Ralph Lauren stores, which as far as I’m concerned, have some of the best Halloween displays in the city.

Rather than being goofy or gorey or over the top, they’re always done with creativity and great attention to detail. Really dug this year’s one…

…featuring a creepy scarecrow in a corn field (wearing a Ralph Lauren suit stuffed with hay, of course). Sorry for the glare – I love the stalks and pumpkins…

But there’s something especially unsettling about the scarecrow’s face that gives it that special touch. Note the ravens cawing on his shoulders:

There’s another interesting display across the street at the second Ralph Lauren store…

When you first see the window, it feels like a nautical setting – a submarine, perhaps?

A beheaded body (a mannequin, of course) has been stuffed in a tarp and chained to anchor, presumably to be thrown overboard.

Various chains and handcuffs hang from the iron walls…

…while rats and mice run all over the body:

Ha, and unless this is an advertisement for the new line of Ralph Lauren canvas body bags, I really appreciate that the set design came first (though I suppose someone might walk by and notice the scarf).

But what exactly happened here? I might be going out on a limb, but if you look in the next window (again, sorry for the glare), you’ll see a bunch of sailors, some of whom have clearly gone insane.

Some are wielding weapons, while others have been chained up, most likely to meet the same fate as the body in the first window. My thought? Some folks on a sub went a little stir crazy, and we’re seeing the result in mannequin form. Awesome!

Lots of cool little details, like body parts poking out of places…

Love the bloodied fish hook:

More body parts.

Back when I wrote about the window displays in 2009, Ralph Lauren had four stores, each with their own Halloween theme. They’re down to three stores, and the third didn’t have anything going on. But I definitely liked the old-fashioned electric chair across the way, which has apparently reduced its victim to a pair of hands and the clothes he was wearing.

Here’s my Bleecker Street post from 2009 – really can’t beat either the ice-fishing skeletons or the brutal mannequin massacre. Know of a really cool Halloween display in New York this year? Let me know so I can check it out before it’s gone.

-SCOUT

via http://frankocean.tumblr.com/

The tiny clip-on Memoto camera takes two photos a minute. The Memoto app displays the GPSd photos on a timeline, so you can go back and see where you were at any point in the past.

The camera has no buttons. (That's right, no buttons.) As long as you wear the camera, it is constantly taking pictures. It takes two geotagged photos a minute with recorded orientation so that the app can show them upright no matter how you are wearing the camera. And it’s weather protected, so you don’t have to worry about it in inclement weather.

The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment of your past.

I think it should have a pulse sensor on it so that when your heart rate increases, it starts shooting video.

Memoto

So today I went to the North Carolina State Fair!

My buddy Otter, her husband, and Kevin and I all tromped out to eat Fried Thing On A Stick and risk E. coli in the livestock barns. Unfortunately they’ve apparently had way too much E.coli around, because there was very little livestock comparatively—half a barn, no more. I was sad. I wanted to see draft horses with gigantic rumps and interesting chickens. No luck. Did get some shots of donkeys and sheep and had much better luck at the petting zoo, where a cow licked Kevin and Otter was menaced by Unsettling Camel Lips. (Definitely my next band name.)

We also met The World’s Most Satisfied Goat.

Awwwwwww…yeah. I have a fence.

But no enormous horse butts. I looked for a place to drown my sorrows.

They also had Key Lime, but that’s just crazy talk.

That should do nicely.

Served with powdered sugar, whipped cream, and cinnamon.

In case you’re curious, Deep Fried Pumpkin Pie Onna Stick will drown a LOT of sorrows. Nearly all of them, in fact. I’m pretty sure that I could learn that I was single, destitute, and had foot herpes and I would greet this news with equanimity, if it came with Deep Fried Pumpkin Pie Onna Stick.

Other fair food of note included Alligator Onna Stick (Kevin rated this as “Chewy, but not bad.”) roasted earns of corn dipped in butter, and Buffalo Chicken Rangoon, which was a little heavy for rangoon but otherwise tasty.

Then we went to the sideshows.

I cannot do sideshows with humans in them because that’s just…urgh, no. But things in jars! I will go leave eyeball tracks all over a three-headed pig in a jar!

One of the two was mostly live animals, mostly livestock with extra bits. They had a sheep with an extra leg and one of those four-horned goats and a steer who probably had a couple of extra legs but was laying down. Plus a Zonkey. Can’t argue with a Zonkey.

The seriously bargain basement sideshow, though, was…well, it was a thing.

It had a half-dozen deformed plastic babies with large signs saying that this was EDUCATIONAL ABOUT THE HORRORS OF DRUGS.  (…’Kay?) They had what purported to be a shrunken head, a Genuine Figi Mermaid (sic)* and a plastic bust of the Long Necked Woman, which would have been more impressive if it hadn’t been a plastic mannequin head with the neck wrapped in steel cable.It had, for no apparent reason, a paper-mache chupacabra. It had a pickled octopus and a number of unfortunate fetal pigs and what claimed to be mummified pygmies from “Astralia.”**

It also had a turtlope, a taxidermied tortoise with a jackalope head hanging out of it, whereupon Otter demanded to know why I had not drawn it already.

But the high point of one of the most cut-rate, tacky, inferior sideshows I have ever seen—nay, the high point of the entire day—was Swamp Man.

Photography was not possible in that space, owing to poor lighting and reflective dusty glass, but on the way out, before we reached the entirely legitimate 200 Alligator Snapping Turtle, underneath the taxidermied 2-headed raccoon, there was a…thing.

It appeared to be a human face, or something close to it, with a rather strange white beard and an open, frowning mouth with four teeth. The eyes were painted, although fairly realistically. There was something odd going on with the nose. It was all covered in dense white hair, with tan sideburns that swept forward.

Otter was gazing at it, baffled (more “Why does this exist?” than “What is it?” I imagine) but something about it was naggingly familiar. I took a step back and felt one of those mental clicks, like when you see a magic-eye puzzle flip the other way and suddenly what you thought was a bowl of fruit is actually a young woman with large kumquats.

“My god,” I said, starting to laugh, “it’s a white-tailed deer butt!”

The tail was the beard. The eyes had been shaved and painted, and they’d done a little work on the nose. And that meant that the mouth was…was made out of…had previously been the deer’s…

Oh dear god.

Teeth and everything.

When we had collected ourselves and gone outside to try and explain the Miracle of Swamp Man to Otter’s husband, I went to Twitter. And an alert reader—god help us all—informed me that no, this was not a singular deviation, this was, in fact, a thing.

Called “Assquatch.”

(Includes Bonus Photo Of Deer-Butt Doorbell!)

These are all much better than Swamp Man was, if “better” is a term that can be applied under these circumstances.

“The thing that amazes me,” said Otter, as we struggled off into the Midway, where the big thing these year was giant stuffed Rastafarian bananas–

Depending on the eyelids, they were either cheerfully stoned or filled with burning banana rage.

–”the thing that really amazes me is that you looked at it for like five seconds and you knew it was a deer’s ass.”

“It’s a gift,” I said modestly. “Evidently.”

“Clearly you need to update your resume.”

So that was our trip to the fair. I leave you with Man In Squid Hat Who Does Not Approve Of These Shenanigans.

There will be no more deer-butt shaving on Squid Hat’s watch!

 

*All in keeping with the grand sideshow tradition! I take my hat off to the Mermaid. Not sure where Figi is.

**It’s near Figi.

very scary, indeed.

puparazzi:

by Pinta Velloso

Jayne Mansfield, 1956 | From the Collection of Larry Rivers

The personal letterhead of Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield – as used in 1956, 11 years before her death at the age of 34. 

One of my favorite cemeteries in New York is so small, I must have walked by it dozens of times in my travels before I first noticed it.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve missed it too. Lined by residential buildings, it’s only natural to assume the short stretch of fencing on the south side of West 11th Street to be the courtyard entrance to an apartment, or maybe a back patio.

But if you take a moment to look closer…

…you’ll find what has to be the smallest graveyard in Manhattan.

How small is it? Just big enough to hold about 30 graves bordering on a worn, moss-covered brick path.

But perhaps even more unusual is its irregular shape: a long, thin triangle. How did this strange little graveyard come to be??

The West 11th Street graveyard is all that remains of the Second Cemetery of the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue of the Congregation Shearith Israel. Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation in North America, was founded in 1654; the cemetery dates to 1805.

Back then, West 11th Street stopped before reaching Sixth Avenue, and the cemetery would have been positioned something like this.

Below is an 1817 map showing both the then-existing streets (in pink), along with how the encroaching grid pattern would soon transform them. The cemetery was said to run along Milligan Street, identified below as the second-down pink street.

In 1830, West 11th Street was extended through the cemetery to Sixth Avenue, leaving only the southern corner and a bit of the northern corner (now gone). The angle is so sharp, the cemetery actually stretches in front of the neighboring brownstone.

Most of the graves line the walls of the cemetery, many secured into the crumbling brick by cement or iron hooks. After nearly 200 years, much of the writing is illegible.

The Second Cemetery was founded as a sort-of secondary site to the congregation’s main burial ground in Chatham Square, specifically for those who died of illnesses like yellow fever, or didn’t have a direct connection to the temple.

Two graves in particular stand out as you peer through the fence: first, this obelisk, which belongs to Joshua Cantor, a Danish-born painter who moved to New York City in 1822 and died in 1828.

The second is this faded above-ground tomb – I couldn’t make out the name from the street:

One grave has been restored: Ephraim Hart, who fought in the Revolutionary War.

Since I first found it, I always stop to glance in whenever I walk down West 11th Street.

Not that I expect anything to be different. In fact, that’s what makes the little graveyard on West 11th Street so special: the final gasp of existence of a West Village that is no more, a time when cow pastures were just down the street and local children would hop the fence to steal fruit from the apple trees growing in the cemetery.  In fact, it really isn’t hard to picture this brick path continuing on for a ways.

-SCOUT

PS – For more info:

• New School Free Press: Across From Lang, A Forgotten Graveyard
• NYC Cemetery Project: Second Shearith Israel Cemetery

In the interactive art installation “Rain Room,” visitors can walk through a thousand square foot space that is being soaked by falling water—without getting wet themselves (video). To achieve the effect, cameras track the locations of people within the installation, shutting off nearby water valves to stop the downpour over the visitors. The installation is on display at the Barbican Centre in London through March 3, 2013. “Rain Room” was created by London art studio rAndom International.

via The Guardian & The High Definite

photos via rAndom International, video by Gramafilm

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   Part of the Zoomology series

This is a quick follow-up to an earlier post on Solomon Butcher in which there two two photographic images that are clearly "manufactured"--one is created in the darkroom (simply adding trees in a tress-less landscape), while the other (below) is an unlabelled recreation of an event.  This is in the lines of Timothy O'Sullivan and Matthew Brady dressing up their images a bit by posing the dead or giving them added bits (like muskets and so on) to enliven the picture.  This one though is entirely theatre--as it happens there are very few 19th century photographs depicting a crime-in-progress.  Butcher just decided to show his audience what the crime probably looked like.  In any event if not for a little Zoomology the scene could've perhaps passed for real. 

This is a detail from the full-plate glass negative, printed out so:

Without the enlargement it is difficult to tell what sort of instruments the ranchers were holding.  But up close the wire cutters are simply suggestions of that too, being made of wood and all. 

And this:

And:

 

The Apex Predator Shoes by Fitch & Young are for people "residing at the top of their food chain." They're classy Savile Row Oxford shoes soled with 1,050 teeth taken from dentures, presumably as morbid trophies. 

Link -via Design Boom

It’s pretty clear that we Dreamers are into Halloween and costumes. I know this. Yet, when I put a call out to fellow Dreamers for pop and modern culture costume tips, I did not expect that I’d get so many awesome ideas from pretty much everyone. I am going to do my best to share everybody’s recommendations, so pull up your socks, we’re going in.

 

Comics

We’ve got some solid comics fans here, most notably Zaffie at our Tumblr. She’s already pointed out that Kate Bishop in Hawkeye #2 (story by Matt Fraction, art by David Aja) is wearing what looks like the Extraordinarily Longer Thigh Highs in Plum & Black.

 

 

Spiderman is a classic. And it takes some layering, but one of our Shop Dreamers dressed up one of the manequinns at our brick and mortar store in Opaque Tights in Royal, Opaque Solid Nylon Trouser Socks in Red and the Spider Lace Pantyhose for a webtacular Spidey look.

 

 

Super heroes (and villians) are easy game when looking for good use of legwear. They have to wear something under the leotards, right? Another Dreamer reminded me of one of my favourites—Poison Ivy, specifically her character design by Bruce Timm for Batman: The Animated Series. Her simple look is all pulled together by simple lime green tights.

Of course, you don’t have to keep it simple. We’ve had (amazing!) customers pull unique, stunning looks together too (like this fabulous steampunk Poison Ivy).

 

 

TV

I know a lot of you are into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (if only because of all the drawing requests!) so you know that there are a ton of rainbow options to accessorise your Rainbow Dash costume. But one Dreamer suggests that the Furry Rainbow Leg Warmers might be just the thing. You’d be like a My Little Clydesdale!

 

 

I am going to be honest here and say that I have no idea who this character is (thank goodness for Dreamers filling me in!), but Fishnet Footless Tights and the Lace Anklet with Ruffle seem to be pretty key pieces to dressing as Robin Sparkles from How I Met Your Mother.

 

 

Another popular character is Rachel Berry of Glee. She wears a lot of knee highs and a lot of solid colour basics that can be easily matched by the Color Tights and the Opaque Solid Nylon Trouser Socks.

 

 

Video Games

One game that a lot of folks I know are playing is Borderlands. Gage the mechromancer has some great black and white wide stripes that are perfectly matched by the Extraordinary Striped Thigh Highs in Black & Natural.

 

Also in Borderlands (which is looking to be a pretty sock-tastic game) Mad Moxxi rocks some mismatched stripes and Fencenet Thigh Highs. It’s hard to tell what colourway the stripes are, but the Uma Striped Over the Knee looks to be a good match.

 

Movies

We were pretty big fans of the Joker’s socks in The Dark Knight. Though we don’t have the Joker’s every day chaos-checkered socks, we do have a taller option in the Neon Checkered Chaos OTKs that would look fab for folks going as Nurse Joker.

 

Our Tumblr caught this one already too, but Sally from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas wears scrunched black and white stripes. I think maybe the Super Warmers – Short would be a great match (and give you room in your shoes for patchwork tights)!

 

 

If you want to be classically classy, one of the Dreamers points out that you can’t go wrong with Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Either the Satin Gloves with Snap Buttons or the Opera Length Satin Gloves with Rhinestone Trim plus the Sheer To Waist Pantyhose in Black with a little black dress and pearls? Perfect.

 

This one is a little esoteric and you need a friend to really pull it off, but you could totally channel the vibes of 101 Dalmatians with the Contrast Vertical Striped Thigh Highs for Cruella DeVille (maybe over some red tights?) and the Foot Traffic Polka Dot Knee Highs for a Dalmatian.

 

 

A far more straightforward approach would be to emulate the original horror stylings of Jaws with a 3-D Shark Bite Sock over some Bloody Zombie Thigh Highs.

 

 

Whew. That’s a good one to end on, right? I hope we’ve helped inspire you if you’re still struggling with a costume. Remember, we love when folks share how we’ve helped them make a costume perfect and our Facebook is a great place to do it! How are socks helping your costume come together?

 

 

The bar for fine art photographs of dogs in goofy costumes was set quite high in the 70s and 80s by photographer William Wegman and his Weimaraner companions Man Ray and Fay Ray, and while I suspect 20% of the entire industry of the internet is spent sharing adorable pet photos, it’s rare to see a single animal transcend the rest. Some worthy contenders recently have been Theron Humphrey and his dog Maddie, and also Seth Casteel’s underwater dogs. But a new pup has thrown down the gauntlet and her name is Trotter, a one-year-old French Bulldog lovingly captured by her owner, San Francisco photographer Sonya Yu who bills herself as a Professional Food Pornographer. You can follow Trotter’s dressy exploits on Yu’s Instagram feed but also check out her personal work which is outstanding. (via the fluffington post, which apparently, is a thing)

“Every year, towards the end of winter, Carnival (Fasnacht) breaks out in the streets, alleyways and squares of the old town of Lucerne, Switzerland. This is a glittering outdoor party, where chaos and merriness reign and nothing is as it normally is. Strange characters in fantastic masks and costumes make their way through the alleyways, while carnival bands (Guggenmusigen) blow their instruments in joyful cacophony and thousands of bizarrely clad people sing and dance away the winter. Lucerne Carnival starts every year on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday with a big bang. There are big parades on Dirty Thursday and the following Monday, called Fat Monday, which attract tens of thousands of people. Lucerne’s Carnival ends with a crowning finish on Fat Tuesday evening with a tremendous parade of big bands, lights and lanterns. After the parade, all the bands wander through the city playing joyful music.”

What an awesome event! Who wants to join us there?

Photos of carnival-goers/performers wearing awesome hand-crafted costumes taken by Michael Buholzer and Urs Flueeler.

[Images via Design You Trust]

Excellent advice for maintaining a positive outlook. From the wonderful blog, Futility Closet.

A letter from Sydney Smith to Lady Georgiana Morpeth (right), Feb. 16, 1820:

Dear Lady Georgiana, -- Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done -- so I feel for you.

1st. Live as well as you dare.

2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75° or 80°.

3rd. Amusing books.

4th. Short views of human life -- not further than dinner or tea.

5th. Be as busy as you can.

6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.

7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.

8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely — they are always worse for dignified concealment.

9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.

10th. Compare your lot with that of other people.

11th. Don’t expect too much from human life -- a sorry business at the best.

12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.

13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.

14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.

15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.

16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness.

17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.

18th. Keep good blazing fires.

19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.

20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana,

Very truly yours,

Sydney Smith

See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are.

What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There's nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It's a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it's transformed my idea of what it's like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I've thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain.

"If you were there," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, "you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air." The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your spaceboots.

Read the rest of Robert Krulwich's post — and check out some spectacular photos of the things — at NPR

I’ve been riding my bike to and from work every day this summer. I’ve been enjoying it so much since I found a short cut where I can avoid riding on the large highway. A small part of the trip is between a corn field and an open pasture and that little passage has been such a wonderful daily experience.

   
   
   

Today was the first really cold morning and I realized that summer is finally winding down. While riding I thought about how I wanted to remember this. I’ve done my best to document it well with instagram (above), but I want to REALLY remember it and that brought me back to another memory from when I was probably 14 or 15.

When I was in high school I went on a trip with my grandma to Southern Illinois for a family reunion. It was a very memorable trip where (not in order of importance):
1. I realized “PEOPLE IN THE STATE OF ILLINOIS ACTUALLY TALK WITH SOUTHERN ACCENTS?!”

2. I got to spend time and bond with my grandma and great aunts

3. I heard many family stories and visited countless locations from their past
4. I met distant relatives (it was a family reunion after all)
5. I visited Amish country, witnessing (from a distance and for the first time) people living the simple life

6. My grandma bought me a pair of PLATFORM MARYJANES (similar to the ones pictured above, that I wore into oblivion, actually until the heels disconnected from the shoe and even after that I duct taped them together and wore them for a couple more years)
7. AND she gave me the concept of purposely making a memory.

My grandma had the habit of going for a daily walk after eating dinner everyday. It’s a habit I often think back on and wish I could do myself, but then get distracted by “oh my gosh there’s something new on the internet”. When I would stay with her, whether at her home or on the above mentioned trip we would go for walks. One evening after dinner, while on this trip, she and I, and my two great aunts went for a walk. I can’t remember how we got where we were or what happened afterward, but during the walk at one point we came out into clearing, a dewy grassy path next to a soy crop field, the sky was amazing and there were crickets or cicadas singing. My grandma said to me “make a memory of this”. I tried to take it all in with my senses and then closed my eyes to burn the memory into my mind. And while I have the memory still there, the details are fuzzy, but the thing that made the most impact was the simple concept. Make a memory.

Everyone carries cameras everyday now. Even if it isn’t a camera-camera, we have our cell phones with cameras installed and can document the visuals of our daily lives swiftly. But how often do we step back during those kodak moments, put the camera down and truly take it all in? Let’s live in the moment AND still remember the sound of someone’s laughter, the balanced fragrance of summer’s greenery and humidity, and the feel of grass between our toes, all in one moment. A polaroid picture for the mind.