Table of Malcontents - Wired Blogs
Our Deviant Artist of the Day is the bizarrely named Zul Solar...
19th century Argentinian artist, surrealist, utopian, polyglot, bizarro Catholic occultist, minor character in the works of Borges, and correspondent of Aleister Crowley! Xul was driven by a restless zeal for revision and reform: considering the Spanish language to be ‘several centuries out of date,’ and moreover, ‘a cacophonous language composed of words that were overly long,’ he developed Neo-Criollo (Neo-Creole), whose vocabulary was mostly drawn from Spanish and Portuguese, but which also incorporated elements of French, English, Greek and Sanskrit. He composed texts and even conversed in this invented tongue which, however, was continually changing, with each successive elaboration of it being different than the one before.
I'm not entirely sure I like his work, but his life is fascinating and filled with madness. Gizmo is an 80 minute documentary, full of enough oddball inventions and freakish talents on display for a month's worth of ToM posts. Behold.
..the power of the open mind!
Howard Smith's 1977 documentary about improbable inventions is now freely available on Google Video. The documentary compiles old newsreel footage of wacky inventions in action, (or inaction as the case may be), as well as some inventors' physical quirks and others' daring deeds in "bringing their invention to market," all for your enjoyment. A personal favorite, the backwards car, can be seen near the 50 minute mark.
I've only watched the first ten minutes, so no authoritative commentary from me, but this is my midnight viewing.
And, of course, he'd be right. Many porn stars are offering vibrating casts of their various orifices.
No less a pornographic luminary than Miss Jenna Jameson offers a surprisingly diverse line of , cast from Jenna herself at various stages of contraction. As an ultra-journalisticky journalist interested only in the august TRUTH of things, I've always been curious how the entire casting process worked. Now someone has obliged me: minxish, tattooed porn star Belladonna has posted a photo-essay on her Myspace blog all about her experience having her genitals, face and even fist cast in latex for mass production.
The best part of it is that it's entirely work safe, as every labia, nipple and clitoris is covered in a thick layer of flesh-colored goo. You know, I often wonder about this sort of thing: right now, only porn stars decide to make casts of their carnal assets, but it honestly isn't hard for me to imagine gossip rag 'celebrities' like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan allowing their name to be marketed in conjunction with something like this. The porn industry is, after all, a sooth-sayer for the future of marketing and technology.
I've long been a fan of Jake von Slatt's incredible : in my imaginary rock and roll retro-future, I hover in an airship above London, playing it with an intricate brass and leather glove of my own devising, each claw a separate talon-shaped guitar pick. But I think Von Slatt's just been trumped. Big time.
There's a new steampunk guitar in town: the Villainizer, courtesy of Thunder Eagle. The Villanizer started life as a Rhoads Jackson V. It's not every day you take a band saw to a guitar that plays as well as this thing does.
However, I had no distinct plan other then doing a mechanical look to it. But I had more of a Sci-Fi / Blade Runner thematic in mind at that moment. After cutting, a spacer was cut and installed to join the two pieces of the body.
Knowing damned well that wouldnt be a strong enough of a join for just about any player, the steampunk look hit me, and I went on to installing the copper pipe, and soldering the joints. You just cant have steam power without a gauge, so I cannibalized an old oil gauge and made a custom face in it with my name and a real complex readout. Gears.
Man I hacked more gears together then I knew what to do with, and inlaid them into a cut plexi frame that was then screwed into the body...
Jake, I'm sorry, man. You've been owned. Oh, certainly, your Steampunk Strat is more clean and elegant.
The brass gleams. But my steampunk is just like my rock: rusty and corrosive. I really love the simple, joyful quality to this video of a bunch of students staging a dinner party upon a moving train on the London Underground.
.. especially how they try to play host to the regular commuters, and even offer the soliciting, head-scarved panhandler a croissant.
But there's something equally wonderful about the YouTube comments for the video. User remarks: Something tells me the "diners" are a sordid bunch of pretentious art students, no doubt taking a break from a long day setting up another video installation of tramps crapping into a pail, or prostitutes vomiting into bags of flour. Come on.
Cynical or not, the viciousness of that comment is just dessert. It's so delicious, I'm tempted to lick my fingers..
. once I get done crapping into this pail, that is. To travel through time and space, you need a map.
Not just any map: an intricate Neo-Copernican cartograph of chronological cosmology. Any collection of bizarre British midgets can tell you that (reference: Terry Gilliam's bizarre time travel opus, Time Bandits). But where do you get a map like that?
From John Heliman of Metropolis Freelance Graphic Design. I have loved Time Bandits since I first saw it 26 years ago. Being a Monty Python fanatic, I was excited to see a Terry Gilliam film - particularly starring Sean Connery, John Cleese and Michael Palin.
Another star of the film for me was the art direction. I really admire the look of this film. It has some truly nightmarish images which hint at things to come from Mr.
Gilliam with Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. That detail extended down to the props. One prop in particular has always sparked my interest.
I have always wanted a copy of the map from Time Bandits. I recently decided to create my own replica of this exquisite prop. John is selling quality canvas reproductions of the Time Bandits map for $105.
00, which might seem a little bit steep, but if you can afford a thousand bucks for a wristwatch GPS unit, you're likely to begrudge yourself not buying a time travel map when you get stuck at the end of the universe a millisecond before the Big Crunch. The subways of Europe can be deliciously strange. I'll never forget the first time I traveled down, down, down, seemingly thousands of miles underneath the bulging belly of the Prague city streets into the ancient city's chthonic womb, on a surrealist, nearly infinitely long and steep escalator.
I have had a fondness for subterranean subway architecture ever since. I have never seen Stockholm's subways, but the incredible images over at have me eager to book a ticket for a summer holiday. The Stockholm Tunnelbana has three lines encompassing 110km of track and 100 stations of which 64km and 55 stations are underground.
Several of the deep underground stations are cut into solid rock which were left with cave-like ceilings. The builders carved fascinating artistic objects out of the rock. One like the base of a gigantic Greek column (Station Radhuset) resembles the excavated remains of some lost city of Atlantis encased in an ancient lava flow.
The Station Kungstradgarden has torsos and lion heads emerging from the rock. Modern murals and statues are liberally used in many other stations.
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