The best of recently snooped street art

Assorted randomness.

Shapely

Some things in my life are beginning to take shape.
At a snail's pace. Convoluted, unstraightforward.
Still, I have this light-headed feeling as if I was rising.

It is good.

 The blog author apologises for not remembering

 where she found most of these images. She should 

be much more organised, really. First from top:  photo 

by Olafur Eliasson, then trailing vortex featured here.

Handmade taxidermy monsters

The bottom one has a name: Der Wolpertinger. Apparently it is a make-believe creature of German folklore, supposedly living in the alpine forests of Bavaria. It possesses the body parts of several common game animals; portrayed with wings, antlers, and fangs, all attached to the body of a small mammal. Stuffed Wolpertingers are common Bavarian Inn mascots, often displayed alongside real Black Forest taxidermy hunting trophies.

 

by Sarina Brewer via Accidental Mysteries

Inspiring: Mikhail Gubin and his collage sculptures

There is something particularly magnetic and consuming in these bundles of almost-random shapes, shades, lines, planes and textures. I am not sure what it is, but I find them all instantly appealing. Soothing to look at. Beautiful. Not unlike a chaldron from Jonathan Lethem's great novel Chronic City.
If I had a sculpture like that at home I would no doubt just stare at it in a relaxed yet curious fashion for hours at a time... Watch as it changes over the course of the day with the play of light and shadows.

Also, it looks like they are made of trash.
Go trash!!!

 See more Mikhail Gubin's pieces here

The Singing Ringing Tree

"Atop a barren hilltop in Lancashire, England, stands this most unusual musical sculpture. Designed by architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, the “tree” is comprised of a series of pipes, cut and stacked in a spiral fashion. When the wind is blowing (and when isn't the wind blowing in England?!) a mesmerizing tone echoes through the hillside, like a lost sound effect from a Pink Floyd album"

I am sold.
Roadtriiiiip!!!

Bed, Bath and Beyond!

If you are looking for exciting new things to do you should consider:

1. Seeing Minima Live

Minima is an instrumental wonder-band. They performed a live movie score to the original 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu at the Holbourne museum the other week, and it was fantastic! So much so that I vow to see them again if and when they perform somewhere commutable. Their repertoire includes cult silent cinema hits such as Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Aelita Queen of Mars. A must see!!! Click here for their performance schedule.

2. Listening to Ice Music

Curiosity in Corsham?! Who would have thought!? "Norwegian composer and musician Terje Isungset performs each show using instruments crafted from glacial ice to produce a haunting, ethereal sound." At Corsham's Hartham Park on Dec 1st. Sadly, I will be otherwise occupied, but it definitely sounds like something worth seeing live!

3. Watching a movie (or five) at the Bath Film Festival

Lots to choose from at this year's Bath Film Festival! 14th to 25th Nov - so better book your tickets now! Download the brochure here or pick it up from the Tourist Information shop next to the Abbey.

4. Ice Skating

Because it is so much fun when all the little kids are much much better then you at something!;-) Nov 23rd till Jan 6th will see a sizable skating rink appear  in Victoria Park with 1 hour sessions (including skate hire) under £10 per adult. The last time I put on skates was in NEGATIVE 22 degrees Celsius last February in Warsaw. I lasted a good 20min before my limbs froze off. By comparison skating in Bath sounds extremely tempting!

5. Dressing up to dance

There is nothing like a winter masquerade party! I have heard good things about this pop-up vaudevillian cabaret show night in Cambridge on 1st of December. My costume may have lots of feathers...

6. Browsing at the Market

Fancy getting trampled on by hordes of tourists? Oh shush, you'll come anyway. Because it's worth it. Because there is something magical about the randomness and thrill of browsing dozens of stalls, gaping at fairy lights and getting drunk on cheap mulled wine. I am all for it! I'm especially looking forward to the Transient Graffiti planned for the Abbey and Holbourne museum.

7. Listening to The Bookshop Band

The Bookshop Band write songs about books and perform in independent bookstores. Geek out! Live at Mr B's bookstore on the 6th and the 11th of December. Note to self: do not miss.

Oof.
Enough for now...;)

animated surrealism: Solipsist

Eerie, colorful, bizarre.
Directed by Andrew Huang and a recipient of the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at the Slamdance Film Festival.

What's better than a bit of art to cheer one up on a gloomy Friday?
How about "three more night shifts to go until my holiday in Europe"?
The thought alone puts the colour right back in my cheeks!

Ugly unicorns!

Aren't they just adorable?
Please, if you have a few moments to spare , honour the absentminded gods of doodling and:
1. draw a kick-ass ugly unicorn today
2. send it to me to be loved!

Simple.
x

App frenzy!

Of course I had to go and get an iPhone once I could (just about to) afford it. Three months later the sum total number of my acquired apps is: 5.
This American Life, Motivational Quote of the Day, McSweeney's (though no password for it), Tv channel app and a Radio app. Essential. Nothing too fancy. Not even the app that lets you take photos that look like Polaroids (too... popular).
But I am aware that there are some crazy cool apps out there. Like the one being featured at the V&A exhibition Power of Making which displays wonderful works of art-slash-craft-slash-technology and includes such splendid examples of human ability to MAKE as the life-size crochet bear, a plastic 3-D printer, a fine metal flute to dry stone walling, hexapod robots and spray-on fabric. The app in question is called penki and it allows you to "paint with light creating 3D messages and images with an iPhone that are revealed with long exposure photographs". Awesome!
One curious young gentleman dedicated a few dozen minutes behind closed doors with lights off and my old instruction-less digital camera and... TAA DAA!!!

Cool, huh?:D

Power of Making exhibition runs at the Victoria and Albert museum London until January the 2nd 2012.

oh my god new facebook profile pic!!!

The most miserable dog on Etsy award goes to this poor fella:

Sweethoots

- knitted cruelty for all seasons

Forbidden Images

A magical sequence of images that were once deemed too immoral for public viewing. Enjoy!;)

"This short was made for the 2007 72 Hour Film Festival in Frederick, Maryland. All of the clips used in this film came from a reel of 35mm nitrate found in an old theater somewhere in Pennsylvania. The projectionist clipped these scenes to meet local moral standards of the time.
Will our current forms of censorship look just as ridiculous to future generations?"

Fame and infamy in the search of lost youth

Fig.1 A century after his death Dr. Brown-Séquard
proves madness and disrepute will still get you
on a stamp. In Mauritius.

I have just been entertainingly distracted from my studies by a bizzare curiosity paragraph in the Oxford Handbook Of Clinical Medicine, 8th edition (2010), pg. 711:

"After his neurological experiments, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817-94), the most visionary of all neuroanatomists and the grandfather of HRT (hormone replacement therapy), proclaimed he had found the secret of perpetual youth after injecting himself with a concoction of testicular blood, semen, and testicular extracts from dogs and guinea pigs. In the 1880's over 12,000 doctors were queuing up for his special extracts, which they used on their patients in various ways. He gave the extracts away free, provided results were reported back to him. 314 out of 405 cases of spinal syphilis improved, and his own urinary flow rate rose by 25%. Endocrinologists never forgave him for bringing their science into disrepute. To this day, no one really knows if his (literally) seminal work has given us anything of any practical value. But he might be pleased to know that testosterone is now known to have the urodynamic benefits he anticipated, at least in men with hypogonadism.
Like many brilliant men, he had a cruel streak, backing clitorectomy for preventing blindness and other imaginary complications of 'masturbatory melancholia'. Had he not been blinded by the 19th-century ideas about female sexuality, could he have found a marvellous use for his concoctions, for 21st century 'hypoactive sexual desire disorder'? Possibly, but only if he relied on placebo responses."

Fabulous. I wish we had more (any) classes on history of medicine...

Saturday in London!

So cool!

MAKE TEA NOT WAR!

Regents Park Road bridge graffiti.
Is this a wombat? I want it to be a wombat...:)

Curiosities, midgets and victorian animalia!
Amazing! Wonderfull! Not to be missed! GO GO GO!
Museum of Everything: Exhibition #3

Pictures taken around Camden:)

Wonderniture: Coat racks

My favourites:

industrial fun


mental!


meat hooks!


my grandpa was a plumber


childhood revisited


geeky good


more of the macabre


be the giant you are inside!

Reasonably cool:

give the drunken octopi something to wrestle with!

& maybe not so much:

What?!
Fail.


this is just a branch...


plastic cups? really??


fake antlers suck