Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood” (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

LOS ANGELES — New York has Times Square and Las Vegas has the Strip, but more than any other American metropolis, the City of Angels is a city of signs. From the distinctive (and sadly defunct) brightly colored Colby posters to large-scale freeway billboards, from the neon to the hand-painted and even the rotating, signage is a ubiquitous element of the urban fabric here. We have so many signs that we have to hire people to stand on the corner, flipping and spinning them so their messages stand out above the din. On April 18, artist Richard Kraft unleashed another 200 signs into this visual cacophony for his “100 Walkers, West Hollywood” project.

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood” (click to enlarge)

At 2pm, 100 volunteers wearing sandwich boards and bowler hats assembled in a grid in the West Hollywood Library parking lot. Poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, the maestro of ceremonies, then read a series of phrases, releasing one walker at a time to embark upon their specific walking routes around the neighborhood. They were instructed not to speak if approached by spectators, but to hand out one of a series of business cards with a perplexing combination of text and image. Once they had finished their circuit, each walker returned to the parking lot and stood for a minute before removing their outfit and resting their feet. Kraft has staged similar performances with one, two, twelve, and twenty-five walkers, but he has been planning for an event this large since 2011, when he exhibited a model with 100 figures at Charlie James Gallery.

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood” (click to enlarge)

Unlike roadside signs that entice us to purchase the best, the most, or the cheapest, Kraft’s sandwich boards have no particular message. They are the opposite of concise advertising, offering confusion instead of persuasion. Drawing on a range of sources, from children’s books to news media and evocative texts, the signs encourage the viewer to form their own conclusions. “I felt like we were 100 Chauncey Gardeners panning the streets of LA,” said walker Andrew Scharlatt, referring to the main character of the film Being There, whose simple-mindedness is mistaken for great wisdom. “Just as the elite found him to be this intellectual, based on him really saying nothing, these boards had profound statements, but it was up to the viewer to read into their meaning.”

Kraft was influenced in part by a series of billboards by the late artist Félix González-Torres. “They were so striking in their difference to the plethora of imagery we see all the time,” he told me. “It was so interesting to me that these really quiet, simple, black-and-white images drew one’s attention way more than the amped-up volume of most billboards. Hopefully these sandwich boards, although they’re much smaller, will stand out in a similar way in their difference to what we normally see.”

Another important figure for Kraft was Stanley Green, the “human billboard” who walked around Kraft’s native London for 25 years with a sign advocating a low-protein diet as a means to curb lust. Green’s adoption of a medium associated with advertising to promote his noncommercial message shares a kinship with Kraft’s curious, open-ended signs.

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood”

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood”

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood”

Part of the wonder of the piece was not only seeing how the signs interacted with the landscape, but also how people reacted to them. Construction notices, real-estate ads, and signs for upscale boutiques on Melrose took on a surreal quality in light of the perplexing new arrivals.

An interaction between walker and stranger in Richard Kraft’s “100 Walkers, West Hollywood”

Tracing the walkers’ routes I met Curtis, who was setting up a yard sale outside a house on Willoughby. He had seen some walkers but wasn’t aware of the project. Earlier in the day, a blimp with a large eye on it had caught his attention, and he wondered if it was related. In a sense it was. One sign in particular, reading “Beware of the Rabble” — which could have been a subtitle for the entire piece ­— stuck out to him. “That works any day of the week,” he said.

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood” (click to enlarge)

Further along, on the way back to the start, a family from the Bay Area stood at the corner of Melrose and San Vincente snapping pictures as walkers crossed the wide boulevards. To the man, the piece represented the network of anonymous suits that control everything, their tentacles spread throughout the metropolis, while the woman appreciated the interactions between strangers that the work encouraged. As if on cue, a stranger approached, saying, “It looks like they’re protesting something.” To which she replied, “Maybe they are.”

Richard Kraft, “100 Walkers, West Hollywood”

Richard Kraft’s “100 Walkers, West Hollywood” took place on April 18, beginning at 2pm, in West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

(This is an excerpt from my piece titled "How We Can Transform America’s Broken Economic System to Work for EVERYONE". You can read it in full on Medium.
Per citizen calculations are based on 92.8% of the US population being legal citizens.)

The following is a short list of our shared expenditures as a society. On the left is the total cost and on the right is the cost per American citizen.

• We spend $2.7 trillion for health care — $9,090 per citizen per year

• We spend over $1.4 trillion on crime — $4,713 per citizen per year

• We spend $1.3 trillion on Social Security — $4,376 per citizen per year

• We spend $1.2 trillion on education — $4,040 per citizen per year

• We spend $840 billion on our military — $2,828 per citizen per year

• We spend $544 billion on the “empty labor” of workers not actually working while at work — $1,831 per citizen per year

• We spend $500 billion on welfare — $1,683 per citizen per year

• We’ve spent $260 billion each year since 2001 to wage a “War on Terror” in a way that has increased terrorism — $875 per citizen per year

• We spend $200 billion on work presenteeism — $673 per citizen per year

• We waste $180 billion on unpurchased food — $606 per citizen per year

• We lose $160 billion by not using our vacation days — $539 per citizen per year

• We spend $110 billion on federal corporate subsidies — $370 per citizen per year

• We spend $108 billion on the cost of hunger — $364 per citizen per year

• We spend at least $100 billion on a patent system that decreases innovation — $337 per citizen per year

• We spend $100 billion buying illegal drugs — $337 per citizen per year

• We spend $51 billion fighting our buying illegal drugs — $172 per citizen per year

• We spend $92 billion on gambling — $310 per citizen per year

• We lose $90 billion commuting to and from work — $303 per citizen per year

• We spend $70 billion on the mortgage interest deduction — $236 per citizen per year

• We lose $70 billion by not legalizing and taxing marijuana like we do alcohol — $236 per citizen per year

• We are spending $1.5 trillion over 30 years for the F-35 — $168 per citizen per year

• We actually subtract $53 billion from the economy by using coal power — $178 per citizen per year

• We lose $40 billion to suicides (40,000 x $1 million each but the true cost is incalculable) — $135 per citizen per year

• We spend $8 billion the Pentagon can’t account for — $27 per citizen per year

• We spent about $4 billion in 2014 on our midterm elections — $13 per citizen per year

• We spend $2.3 billion in volunteering over 100 million hours of our time at food banks to feed those of whom a majority have jobs but aren’t paid enough to not need food banks — $8 per citizen per year

Updated: 4/27/2015

• We spend $40-50 billion on financial fraud — $151 avg per citizen per year

• We lose $203 billion on occupational licensing restrictions — $683 per citizen per year

• We gave away $130 billion in natural resources to a foreign mining company in 2014 — $438 per citizen

• We spend $229 billion on the costs of gun violence — $770 per citizen per year

• We spend $71 to $277 billion on the costs of air pollution — $586 avg per citizen per year

• We spend over $100 billion on state and federal disaster relief payouts — $337 per citizen per year

• We spend $80 billion on state, county, and city subsidies to corporations — $269 per citizen per year

• We give $83 billion in interest rate subsidies to the largest banks — $269 per citizen per year

• We spend $270 billion more than we need to on the cost of medications — $909 per citizen per year

• We give $181 billion to all businesses in the form of special exemptions and exclusions, credits, deductions, deferrals, and preferential tax rates — $609 per citizen per year

• We lose $142 billion to corporate tax havens — $478 per citizen per year

• We lose $885 billion in lost GDP (5%) due to not paying women the same as men — $2,979 per citizen per year

As a society, we are now spending or throwing away about $11.9 trillion dollars or $40,000 per citizen every year

There exists overlap between some expenditures, but the above also represents only a partial list of all expenditures.

This is what we're seemingly entirely okay right now spending or wasting our money on. Somehow, we just don't have a problem with $40,000 per citizen every year.

To understand how we can reduce these expenditures and losses by more than $12,000 per citizen by spending an additional $12,000 per citizen, next read "How We Can Transform America’s Broken Economic System to Work for EVERYONE"

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Marcel Duchamp, “Dada 1916–1923 / Sidney Janis” (1953) (all images courtesy Swann Auction Galleries)

For a 1953 Dada exhibition, Marcel Duchamp designed a one-page catalogue meant to be crumpled up and tossed in the trash. One of these unfolded “Dada 1916-1923 / Sidney Janis” (1953) poster-sized catalogues is on view from May 2 to 7 at Swann Galleries in New York ahead of their Modernist Posters auction.

Marcel Duchamp, “Dada 1916–1923 / Sidney Janis” (1953) (detail) (click to enlarge)

The Dada catalogue has all 212 works listed from the exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, including 12 by Duchamp alongside those by Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Man Ray, and others organized by country. Staggered alongside are four concise essays by Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Jacques-Henry Lévesque, and Tristan Tzara, with the name of the exhibition in semi-bold, reddish orange over the black letterpress text. The layout readily recalls the kinetic feel of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2″ (1912), but it has as much in common with his readymades that took an object and repositioned it as art (most famously with the “Fountain” urinal, one of which was replicated in the Janis show). As Caroll Janis wrote in Art in America in 2006, when the “painstakingly produced catalogue” was printed, Duchamp reportedly “took a sheet in his hands, crushed it into a loose ball, and suggested that a trash can full of these paper balls be offered to visitors entering the vernissage” (which, as usual, he didn’t attend). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of these crumpled versions in its collections, with the catalogue going from printed poster, to trash, to art just by the action and context.

Duchamp was heavily involved in the exhibition, working on curation and installation alongside the catalogue design, and it would be majorly influential on younger artists like Robert Rauschenberg, who would also embrace trash in the spirit of the readymades. It may not be his most subversive catalogue design, as that would have to go to the cover for Le Surréalisme en 1947 where a foam and rubber breast had to be touched in order to open the book. But considering how many galleries now use the one-sheet, newsprint, or other light paper design, it may be his most prescient.

Marcel Duchamp, “Dada 1916–1923 / Sidney Janis” (1953) (detail)

The Modernist Posters are on view from May 2 until auction on May 7 at Swann Auction Galleries (104 East 25th Street, Flatiron District, Manhattan).

(via equalityinliterature.wordpress.com)

The world of letters is famously hostile to women — and, to prove it, there’s the VIDA count, a yearly tally of the gender breakdown of bylines and authors reviewed in major literary magazines. Unsurprisingly but disappointingly, the numbers remain dismal: this past year, the New York Review of Books published 96 articles written by men and only 24 by women.

But for every attempt at exposing sexism, there’s an entitled man with a chip on his shoulder, mumbling to himself in a café in Bushwick that no one appreciates his genius. In this case, it’s Equality in Literature, a blog designed to show that men in the literary world are getting the short end of the stick. “It was a bar bet,” the About portion of the site confesses. “A couple of us asserted that women were more prominent in literary journals.” What follows is an exercise in self-righteous male indignation that rivals the worst the internet has to offer: a series of cherry-picked statistics “proving” that women are outpacing men in the literary world.

Almost — but not quite, apparently — needless to say, there are many things wrong with this endeavor. For one thing, it doesn’t function as a refutation of the VIDA count, which represents a survey of journals of literary criticism and narrative journalism like The London Review of Books and Harper’s. Equality in Literature confines itself almost exclusively to journals that publish fiction and prose, a different beast altogether.

The New York Review of Books’ 2014 VIDA count numbers (via vidaweb.org)

The blog devotes a great deal of time and attention to parsing the results of writing contests with female winners, the results of which don’t go a long ways towards proving the supposed point. As Sarah Seltzer points out in Flavorwire, in many writing contests, entries are submitted anonymously so that they can be assessed without bias; if anything, the takeaway is that editors discriminate against women’s writing precisely by virtue of the female names attached to it.

More importantly, Equality in Literature is fundamentally misguided, relying on profound misunderstandings of the way in which we are required to rectify oppression. It is a standard feature of most ethical theories that different people are required to take up different duties in virtue of their distinct positions: someone witnessing a drowning child is obligated to save the child, whereas someone hundreds of miles away from the child does not share this obligation.

Similarly, the responsibilities and obligations of men in the literary world are relativized to their position of dominance within the sphere. The conservative insistence on “equality” glosses over the nuances of ethical obligation: “equality” may not mean a 50/50 byline distribution, given that the context overwhelmingly favors male critics.

Choire Sicha’s review of Jon Ronson is a beautiful piece of writing.  Particularly crucial:

Public shamings are often described in this book in terms of physical violence. Tweeters are “a pitchfork mob,” according to Michael Moynihan, who unmasked Lehrer; according to Ronson, they are both “the hanging judge” and “the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.” Enough “stabbing,” Moynihan says of the people attacking Lehrer: “HE’S DEAD.” It’s not just Lehrer, either. Twitter users have “taken a lot of scalps,” Ronson writes. “We were soldiers making war on other people’s flaws.”

It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street. The actual beating is — surprise! — exponentially worse. Eliding any difference between words and deeds may seem natural to a non-American like Ronson (many European nations have laws against hate speech), but it makes the continuing argument in this country about how to handle offensive language more challenging.

Jonah Lehrer isn’t actually ­annihilated, dead or even particularly injured. Not even a year after his alleged digital murder, he sold a book about love and mistakes, and while that one’s awaiting publication he has a co-authored book coming out this September. He is still only 33 years old, still represented by Andrew Wylie. Mike Daisey? Just completed a fresh run of evenings at Joe’s Pub! Jim McGreevey? Graduated from the ­General Theological Seminary, doin’ great. And Justine Sacco? Eh. . . .

What are the actual stakes of shaming? Lurking and somewhat ­underdocumented in the tales gathered here is the fact that as agonizing as these experiences are, men often survive them just fine.

Jonah Lehrer, despite being exposed as a third-rater and a fraud, keeps getting book contracts. Adria Richards, who noted some inappropriate behavior at a conference online, faces ongoing threats and had her career ruined. The distinction seems rather important.

Not me babe. 

gryffinewt:

sheridan-holmes:

wolfnanaki:

nowyoukno:

Source for more facts follow NowYouKno

I’ve seen these before! They’re produced by Bandai (the same company responsible for Tamagotchi and Digimon), and after every 100 pops, a random sound effect will play (like a dog barking or something).

They followed this with Mugen Edamame, which emulates squeezing edamame:

Then they did the Mugen Peri Peri, which simulates the action of opening boxes with tear tabs (like FedEx packages, Pocky boxes, and so on):

no but like if these kinds of actions calm you down in stressful situations tHINK ABOUT IT (the innovation not the situation LOL)

STIM TOYS

blackrangerpower:

ctron164:

revolutionarykoolaid:

Every 28 Hours (4/1/2015): Phillip White has become the 290th person killed by the police in 2015. Police have yet to provide any clear reason why he was killed being pursued. They have tried to claim he was reaching for an officer’s gun, but he died AFTER being hancuffed. He is the second person in as many weeks to die while in the custody of Vineland (NJ) police. Rest in power, Phillip. We fight for you now too. #staywoke #farfromover

This is so gruesome and uncalled for, when is this going to stop ?!?!

This is why I couldn’t care less about a cop getting shot

Seattle-based photographer Brittany Wright carefully arranges foods by color and shape to create stunning gradients of hues in her photo series #foodgradients. Some of her photos are of a mix of different foods while others–like her gradient using blueberries–cleverly use the same food in different stages of ripeness for a variety of colors.

photos by Brittany Wright

via Foodiggity

myimaginarybrooklyn:

Cigarette cards depicting possible professions for women, circa the 1880s.

100%

highlandvalley:

highlandvalley:

まじKARATEKA

これね

via http://thisisnthappiness.com/page/2

themarysue:

hexzell:

Bonus:

Princess Leia says, Fuck you. 

sexualpiper:

americaninfographic:

Greek Gods

this is so epic omg

John Oliver skewered fashion’s obsession with cheap clothing and poor oversight during the latest episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. Oliver looks at a series of incidents over the past two decades that showcase the exceedingly seedy relationship cheap fashion brands have with suppliers that leads to trouble.

Trendy clothes are cheaper than ever. That sounds great for the people who buy them, but it’s horrible for the people who make them.

ohmygil:

shintenbunshin:

literally nothing can ever top this

this is on a whole other level

plainjanefaye:

galacticdad:

housing should be a basic a human right.

people shouldn’t have to “earn” a roof over their heads so that they don’t die in the streets.

There are more empty houses in the US than there are homeless people. There are 24 empty houses for every homeless person.

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/{USER_ID}/newsubscriptionvideos

New comic!