James Birkbeck uses makeup, paint and zero photo editing to transform himself into a living Van Gogh self-portrait.
Via Living Design
How cool is Norman Mailer’s place? The New York Times: “In the author’s raucous younger years there was a hammock strung up between the rafters, a trapeze swing dangling from the ceiling and a rope ladder, providing a more adventurous way to scale the apartment.” More images of it here.
(via booklover)
Via worldsfair:
How Thurston Moore Met Kim Gordon:
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore recalls meeting his wife/bandmate (via Sonic Truth):
Kim wore glasses with flip-up shades and had an Australian sheepdog named Egan. She had an off-center ponytail and wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt and pants outfit. She had beautiful eyes and the most beautiful smile and was very intelligent and seemed to have a sensitive/spiritual intellect.
She seemed to really like me. I definitely liked her, but was scared, as always, to make a move. I was afraid to kiss her. We walked around a couple of times. One night, it got late and we were eating at Leshko’s, and I think she wanted me to ask her over. I only lived up the street. So we parted. She would take the subway, staying at gallery owner Anina Nosei’s place. Before she split, she actually touched my arm (!) and said, “See you later.”
She moved into a raw railway apartment on Eldridge Street, below Grand Street. The artist Dan Graham lived upstairs and had acquired the place for her. She invited me over one evening and I played this beat-up guitar she had. I knew the guitar because it belonged to an associate of the Coachmen gang, who left it at Jenny Holzer’s loft, where Kim had stayed, and somehow it was passed on to her. All she had was the guitar and a foam-rubber cushion for sleeping. That night was the first time we kissed.
(Photo by Rachel Chandler)
(Source: worldsfair)
I am not young enough to know everything.
A few shots of Carolina Fontoura Alzaga’s bicycle chandeliers. Via my love for you, she writes:
In my early 20’s I was completely immersed in and surrounded by bike and DIY culture. My bike was my sole mode of transportation then. I shared a warehouse with a 12 person collective in Denver, CO. Like in many punk houses, in our kitchen we had a bike wheel from which we hung our pots and pans and sitting there one day in 2004 it occurred to me to make a bike chandelier. I ended up making something that resembled more of a mobile and although it was lovely it wasn’t what I wanted. My next attempt was for my BFA thesis in 2007 where I made a proper, traditional form, 5 ft chandelier made out of bike rims, chains, and cassettes/freewheels. I have since made 24 distinct forms.
Instructional graffiti for tourists at Abbey Road. Watch real-time footage of said tourists’ goofy poses here.
Via lickystickypickyme:
Perched on the tendril of a Passiflora plant, the egg of the Julia heliconian butterfly may be safe from hungry ants. This species lays its eggs almost exclusively on this plant’s twisted vines.
(Source: lickystickypickywe)
Via twentyfourbit:
Watch: Grinderman - “Worm Tamer” (RAK Session)
We saw Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, and their fellow Grindermen unleash this scorching new Grinderman 2 cut live on Jools Holland’s show, and now for a more intimate take on “Worm Tamer,” filmed at London’s famous RAK studios — where Radiohead, David Bowie, The Smiths, Pink Floyd, and countless others have put classics to tape.
(Source: twentyfourbit)
The image above is culled from a gallery that contrasts the original photographs of pinup models and the pinup drawings they became. The original Photoshop?
At Buzzfeed, via The Hairpin
Text from oobject:
…[T]he Kirkbride Plan … created a very unusual form of architecture for asylums throughout the Anglosphere that was used until the 20th Century. As a result of their demise, most are abandoned ruins today, giant, rotting testimonies to a bygone era of clinical Victorian discipline combined with neo-Gothic extravagance.
The Kirkbride Plan consists of an enormous a[nd] symmetrical staggered wing, like a bird made out of lego. Men are on the left and women on the right in wings that radiate from the main entrance for increasingly violent or incurable patients. Early mental institutions where patients had to pay for their own incarceration would also vary in class (rich to poor) on the y axis. The staggering of the wings ensured the flow of air through each, purging them of diseased vapors perhaps, such was the Victorian obsession with fresh air, from outdoor tuberculosis wards to seaside promenades and piers.
