• SFGate:

    “To be a photographer was a gift of the gods,” she said in a Chronicle profile by Kenneth Baker, written in 2001. “I can’t imagine anything that would have been better.”

    Biographer Margaretta Mitchell’s book, “Ruth Bernhard: The Eternal Body,” contains the artist’s own assessment of her adopted home. “To me … San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting.”

    Here.

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  • Sprawlscapes, photo blog by Chip Litherland:

    backyards, backwoods, overpasses, underpasses, left turns, right turns, porta-potties, condominiums, loading docks, alleys, targets, wal-marts, cul-de-sacs, mobile home parks, airports, neon, golf courses, parking lots, car dealerships, waffle houses, warehouses, mom-and-pop’s, bowling alleys, skyscrapers, ditches, bridges, graffiti, murals, subways, abandoned buildings, billboards, public “art,” fast-food restaurants, fences, mailboxes, highways, driveways….these are a few of my favorite things.

    Here.

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  • A very cool piece of art from Guillaumit, from the blog ArtCade:

    Guillaumit inaugure notre série d’artistes exposés dans le PS3 Living-Room, avec une toile impressionnante et foisonnante de détails.

    Difficile de décrire les activités de Guillaumit, tant cet illustrateur-graphiste-vidéaste va dans tous les sens. Alors on le laisse expliquer lui même : “J’ai commencé par un travail de videaste et d’animateur flash, puis j’ai réalisé des pochettes de disques, des affiches, maintenant je fais aussi des T-shirts, sweat shirts (avec AndreaCrews), poupées (avec l’artiste japonaise Miou ), cates postales, livre pour enfants…. Je travaille au sein du duo sonore et visuel Gangpol & Mit où je développe toute la partie visuelle et le gros de mon travail consiste en la création de vidéos originales pour des diffusions vidéo live.”

    Here.

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  • SocialPest:

    Ok I admit it this is a shameless way to generate traffic, but anyway here’s the SOCIALPEST top 10 list of artists who helped to shape the current “Street Art” landscape.

    This whole exercise is tongue in cheek so please do not let it wind you up.

    Here.

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  • Arcade Ambience Project:

    As a child of the 80s, I will never forget the feeling of walking into a crowded arcade — the sounds, smells, excitement, etc. This page is dedicated to recreating the audio portion of that experience in the form of a long, non-looping ambient audio track.

    “If I close my eyes while listening to Arcade Ambiance, I can clearly envision myself hanging out at the local Golfland Arcade circa 1983 sporting the latest in early 80’s fashion (camouflage Vans and a Members Only jacket), while feeding quarter after quarter into Dig Dug, Galaga and Phoenix. Thanks for taking me back to a happier time.” –David

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  • Juxtapoz:

    Photos from the opening reception of Mike Burnett’s NeighborWOOD, a custon wooden toy group show, at Compound Gallery in Portland, OR. The show opened on December 7th and runs until December 31st.

    Here.

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  • NYT:

    And Jace, who created a piece on the building’s fifth floor that includes a frighteningly large mousetrap, made of wood and metal and baited with a huge bag of fake money — a clear jab at the development that is about to transform the building — probably won the prize for longest commute. He flew in from the island of Réunion, east of Madagascar, where he lives, spent several days in the building and then returned.

    “It’s like a family reunion we’ve got here,” said one artist in from Milan who calls himself Bo and works with a partner, a small woman who calls herself Microbo. “Except some of the family you’ve never met before.”

    The other evening, as music blared from multiple stereos, about a dozen artists were arrayed among the floors, still at work. One known as Lady Pink, a veteran New York graffiti artist, was applying the last touches to a large, pink supine version of the Statue of Liberty that was being impaled with a cross but seeming somehow to enjoy it.

    Here.

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  • Washington Post:

    They sent congratulatory telegrams to Hamas, their rabbis advised Yasser Arafat (and took a fee for their trouble), and they stood outside the White House wagging signs — “Judaism Has No Right to Rule over ANY PART of the Holy Land” — to protest a November visit by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

    But even by the standards of Neturei Karta, these most ultra of ultra-orthodox Jewish Hasids took a step into the world of the very strange, if not the meshuga, or crazy, when they showed up as honored guests at a conference of Holocaust skeptics and deniers in Tehran. With a hug and a smile for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rabbi Aharon Cohen walked into a conference room with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, discredited academics, and more than a few white supremacists and served up a rousing welcome speech.

    Here.

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  • NYT:

    The stadium was packed, the guns were cocked and even the drenching rain could not douse the jihadist fire.

    Thousands of Somalis, from fully veiled, machine-gun-toting women to little boys in baggy fatigues, gathered Friday to rally against what they called foreign aggression. As a squall blew in, they punched wet fists into the air and yelled, “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”

    “I am ready to die,” said Osama Abdi Rahim, dressed head to toe in camouflage and marching around with a loaded rifle. He is 7 years old.

    Here.

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  • Mark, Male 27-year-old, from MySpace:

    I certainly love girls who look at me and judge me without ever actually talking to me or anything, then go running to their friends talking sh*t about how I hit on her! Look at you ya dumb bitch, yea you “might” be hot but you’re dating a loser who is lucky to clear 30k a year and has no aspirations to do anything with his life but party. Lucky catch sweetheart, congrats!***Party girls, ugh the bain to my existance. Every night you can be found clubbing it up in Scottsdale or whever you and your harlot friends go. Then you call me bitching how you are poor, cant find a nice guy and what you should do, how about this for a thought STOP HANGING OUT WITH YOUR SLUTTY FRIENDS AND GET A JOB!!, enough said there (she knows who she is!)

    Here.

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  • Regret The Error:

    Gather ’round for our annual collection of the funny, shocking, sad and disturbing media errors and corrections from the past year. From typos that celebrate Queen Elizabeth and her remarkable egg-laying abilities, to media hoaxes, unreliable sources, the Sago disaster and apologies for mistakes nearly 120 years ago, it was a good year for Regret. Though not a banner one for our media brethren.
    We dubbed 2005 the Year of Consequences. This latest was the Year of the Belated Apology. Read on for the details and, in our vernacular, The Crunks.

    Here.

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  • Washington Post:

    But not always. In one Loudoun incident that has become infamous among area police departments, a man stole a bait vehicle and was able to drive it from Leesburg to Southeast Washington because of technical difficulties. Police eventually got the suspect, minutes after the camera caught him smoking crack and masturbating. He had spent part of his ride urinating in a soda can, then drinking his urine to try to quell a case of the hiccups. He also vomited twice.

    “We still crack up about that one,” said Detective Chris Dengeles, of Arlington’s auto theft unit. Mostly, though, “we might have guys muttering to themselves. Nothing real exciting.”

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  • GameSpot, by Crom:

    The world of Conan the Cimmerian, the fantasy barbarian of legend created by Robert E. Howard, portrayed in films by Arnold Schwarzenegger and re-created in several games, is returning to consoles. Funcom today announced that the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures has been approved for the Xbox 360 by Microsoft.

    While this is good news for 360 fans who yearn to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women, it isn’t especially surprising.

    Here.

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  • SocialPest:

    I think you will agree that these art prints Paul Insect produced for this years Santa’s Ghetto are f*cking awesome.

    Here.

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  • The New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas issue is always a fascinating read. A lot of these topics were already posted here on my blog from other news sources as the year went on, but I want to highlight some of my favorites with links to the Magazine:

    Bicycle Helmets Put You at Risk

    Walker decided to find out — putting his own neck on the line. He rigged his bicycle with an ultrasonic sensor that could detect how close each car was that passed him. Then he hit the roads, alternately riding with a helmet and without for two months, until he had been passed by 2,500 cars. Examining the data, he found that when he wore his helmet, motorists passed by 8.5 centimeters (3.35 inches) closer than when his head was bare. He had increased his risk of an accident by donning safety gear.

    The Boomerang Drone

    When the Phantom Sentinel takes flight, it looks like an awkward boomerang — a set of three small blades. It spins in a circle, faster and faster as it ascends into the sky. Then, when it reaches about 50 feet, it whirls so fast that something remarkable happens: it vanishes right before your very eyes.

    Hyperopia

    Kivetz also interviewed 69 students from Columbia University who had returned one week previously from winter break and found that as a group they were split in roughly equal numbers between regret and contentment for having worked or partied. But when Kivetz talked to alumni who graduated 40 years earlier, the picture was much more lopsided: those who hadn’t partied were bitter with regret, while those who had were now thrilled with their choice. “In the long run,” Kivetz says, “we inevitably regret being virtuous and wish we’d been bigger hedonists.”

    N.C.A.A. Psyop

    On game day, when Pruitt went to the foul line for the first time, Cal students began chanting: “Victoria! Victoria!” and reciting Pruitt’s phone number. Pruitt, a 79 percent free-throw shooter on the season, missed both shots and had one of his worst games of the year, shooting 3 for 13 from the field. Cal won the game by 11 points and went on to the N.C.A.A. tournament.

    Psychological Neoteny

    The next time you see a mother of three head-banging to death metal or a 50-year-old man sporting a faux-hawk, don’t laugh. According to Bruce Charlton, a doctor and psychology professor at Newcastle University in Britain, what looks like immaturity — or in Charlton’s kinder terms, the “retention of youthful attitudes and behaviors into later adulthood” — is actually a valuable developmental characteristic, which he calls psychological neoteny.

    Reverse Graffiti

    The British artist Paul Curtis is not sure what to call his version of vandalism. “People call it ‘reverse graffiti,’ ” he says, “but I prefer something less sinister: ‘clean tagging’ or ‘grime writing.’ ” Curtis, a k a Moose, selectively scrubs dirty, derelict city property (tunnel walls, sidewalks) so that words and images are formed by the cleaned bits. “It’s refacing,” he says, “not defacing. Just restoring a surface to its original state. It’s very temporary. It glows and it twinkles, and then it fades away.”

    Workplace Rumors Are True

    So you heard from Bill, who heard from Martha in accounting, who heard from Chucky in the mailroom that the company’s plan is to downsize your division right before Christmas, and your head is on the chopping block. Stay calm, right? It’s only a rumor. Well, this is partly true: it is only a rumor. On the other hand, because it’s a rumor, and because it has been passed along by various colleagues, chances are very, very good that you’re doomed.

    Full list of 74 ideas Here.

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  • NYT:

    “I am facing the most difficult times of my life here in Baghdad. Since I am a Sunni, I became a target to be killed. You know that our army and police are Shia, so every checkpoint represents a serious threat to Sunnis. During the last three weeks, two of my friends were killed at check points belonging to the police. They first asked to show IDs and when they saw the Sunni family name, they killed them.”

    There, in plain enough English, you have it. The Iraqi Army and police whose proposed reinforcement lies at the center of the Iraq Study Group’s plan for American extraction are often less neutral institutions supporting the nation than a flimsy camouflage for Shia to settle accounts with Sunnis, while the Kurds bide their time and hope the child of chaos will be an independent Kurdistan.

    The Iraqi Army and police are indeed overwhelmingly — but not exclusively — Shia. Most recruitment took place at a time when Sunnis had opted out of the new Iraq. Much has been made of the American error in disbanding Saddam Hussein’s army. More might have been made of the errors committed in creating the new force.

    Here.

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  • NYT:

    Lately, the major labels have in effect tried to move into the talent management business by demanding that new artists seeking record contracts give their label a cut of concert earnings or T-shirt and merchandise revenue — areas that had once been outside the labels’ bailiwick.

    “They’re all starting to ask for the same things,” said Theo Sedlmayr, an entertainment lawyer based in New York who represents acts like 50 Cent.

    There has also been a scramble to squeeze revenue from other unconventional sources, including amateur videos posted to YouTube that incorporate copyrighted songs. Universal Music threatened to withhold its huge music catalog from Microsoft’s new digital music service unless it received a royalty of more than $1 on each sale of the technology giant’s Zune portable music player.

    Here.

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  • Washington Post:

    A few blocks from Ali Farouk’s three-story home, an empty house provides a glimpse of what he fears will be the future. Once owned by a Sunni Muslim, the paint is peeling, the windows are blown out. Two scarlet X’s mark the pale blue front door.

    To the door’s right are the words: “Not for Sale. Wanted.”

    According to neighbors, “Wanted” refers to the former owner, who fled after crossing paths with the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The gunmen accused the owner of killing four of their own at a checkpoint. Then they took over his house.

    To the door’s left, the words: “This is vengeance for the other day.”

    Here.

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  • From VII, photographs by Antonin Kratochvil:

    It is estimated that at least one million Africans earn pennies a day in the backbreaking and increasingly fruitless search for diamonds – a $60-billion-a-year industry that, back in the 1990s, rebels in Sierra Leone and Liberia financed their carnage from diamonds plucked out of the rivers and traded for arms. During a decade of war about 50,000 people were killed, and thousands had their hands hacked off by rebels. Now, a new Hollywood movie is raising tough questions about Africa’s bloody diamond trade.

    Here.

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  • Featuring Jeremy Harmon, Darren Soh, Matt Burden, Matt Eich, Per Jose Karlan, Ramin Rahimian, Concepterrorism, Lars Borges, Troy Boman, Douglas Baulos, G.J. McCarthy

    Check it out here.

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