{ 1968-75: How ‘X-Rated’ Became Synonymous With ‘Porn’ | full story }

{ Agnes B and Colette vandalized by Kidult }

…50-year-old Nobuhiro Komiya who for the last two years has worked tirelessly doing one of the most unlikely and mind boggling of jobs - censoring the unending torrent of hentai manga or pornographic comics which flood Tokyo’s book shops and convenience stores.

“It’s a tough job. (…) It’s totally different to reading manga as a hobby,” he says.

A visit to the Department of Youth Affairs and Public Safety on the 35th floor of Tokyo’s towering Metropolitan Government building, where Komiya and his small team of censors get down to the grisly task of comic book censorship, reveals we are talking about a lot more than the width of Wonder Woman’s bust.

Spread out over the white Formica table-top are the worst of the worst - a hand-picked selection of the weirdest and most shocking examples of hentai from the country which invented it.

“Normal sex doesn’t sell well,” Komiya remarks. School sex, tied-up sex, abnormal sex, sells. So this is what they draw.”

{ NZ Herald | Continue reading }

photo { Asha Schechter }

{ Andro Wekua, Wait to Wait, 2006 | 1 wax figure, 1 mechanized rocking chair, uncolored and colored glass, brazen aluminium, bricks, 4 collages, drawing | Andro Wekua interviewed by Maurizio Cattelan }

{ Meyer Vaisman, Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside, 1993 | Photos: Meyer Vaisman | Facebook }

{ A lamp shade robot, an Auger-Loizeau Carnivorous Domestic Robot Entertainment design, is powered by incoming flies.| Meat-eating furniture | NPR | full story }

Begotten is a 1991 experimental/horror film, directed and written by E. Elias Merhige. The film deals with the story of Genesis. But as Merhige revealed during Q&A sessions, its primary inspiration was a near death experience he had when he was 19, after a car crash. The film features no dialogue, but uses harsh and uncompromising images of human pain and suffering to tell its tale. It also has no music, instead, the movie is accompanied by the sounds of crickets, and occasionally other sound effects such as grunting and thrashing. Plot The film was shot on black and white reversal film, and then every frame was rephotographed for the look that is seen. The only colors are black and white, with no half-tones. The look is described in the trailer as “a Rorschach test for the eye”. Merhige said that for each minute of original film, it took up to 10 hours to rephotograph it for the look desired. The film opens with a robed, profusely bleeding “God” disemboweling himself, with the act ultimately ending in his death. A woman, Mother Earth, emerges from his remains, arouses the body, and impregnates herself with his semen. { Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Antropophagus, released in the UK as Anthropophagous: The Beast and in the US as Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper, is a 1980 Italian language horror film, directed by Joe D’Amato. Plot A group of tourists arrive on a small Greek island, only to find it almost completely deserted. It seems that the only person still alive there is a blind girl who does not know what has happened to the rest of the island’s town, but is terrified of a man who she describes as smelling of blood. (…) They find a diary inside an abandoned mansion, which tells of a man who was shipwrecked with his wife and child. In order to survive, the man was forced to eat his dead family. This act drove him insane and he went on to slaughter the rest of the island’s inhabitants. (…) Almost the entire group is killed until only a few remain, but one of the survivors manages to overpower him and stab him with a pick axe to the stomach, and before he dies, in one final act of insanity, he attempts to devour himself, by chewing violently on his own intestines. { Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Thanks Caitie for the inspiring discussion }

{ Tattoos by Thomas Hooper | more }

Ross utilized the wet-on-wet oil painting technique, in which the painter continues adding paint on top of still wet paint rather than waiting a lengthy amount of time to allow each layer of paint to dry. Combining this method with the use of two inch and other types of brushes as well as painting knives allowed Ross to paint trees, water, clouds and mountains in a matter of seconds. Each painting would start with simple strokes that appeared to be nothing more than colored smudges. As he added more and more strokes, the blotches transformed into intricate landscapes.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | How to | Bobross.com | Thanks Tim }

headline { Too much time on my hands? 90 minutes is too much? I’m a professional concept artist, I make a living doing this, what do you do? }

This paper investigates the relationship between environment and behaviour in a butterfly.

Adult butterflies are highly visual animals, relying on their keen eyesight to locate and identify appropriate mates by looking at and comparing their wing colours and patterns. Many butterflies show variations in wing colours and patterns depending upon the season they experienced as caterpillars or whilst cocooning. Knowing this, it is reasonable to assume that differences in wing colours and patterns (known as polyphenisms) could affect how adult butterflies interact with each other. But do wing polyphenisms affect adult butterfly behaviours? If so, how?

Dr Katy Prudic, and her postdoctoral advisor, Dr Antónia Monteiro, researchers in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, investigated the relationship between the environment and behaviour in the east African butterfly species, the squinting bush brown butterfly, Bicyclus anynana.

Even though this butterfly species has been bred and raised in captivity for 30 years, Dr Prudic was the first person to notice that female B. anynana appeared to be colour-coded according to season. When the adult butterfly holds its wings closed, as when perched on a flower, the exposed dorsal wing surfaces show distinct seasonal differences: adult butterflies that experienced a wet warm season as caterpillars have brighter and more numerous eyespots (figure 1A) than those seen in the cooler dry season form (figure 1B):

{ Nature | Continue reading }

{ www.mta.me turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument }

more to watch { Documentary on American composer Milton Babbitt, who died Saturday, Jan. 29 }

{ flash animation | impkerr.com }

{ A Look Back at Memorable Covers From Felker’s Career | NY mag }

{ 1 | 2 }

{ Dominic Episcopo, Meat America | more }

{ Valerija Ilchuk }

Flag ʻwavingʼ has become more prevalent in many liberal democracies. In such societies, flags occupy not a religious role, but a quiet and quotidian place in what Billig terms ʻbanal nationalismʼ. As a cipher for the whole, a particular flagʼs design is relatively unimportant; what lends it power is a mix of the gravity bestowed by its official designation and the easy commodification lent by a flagʼs easy reproducibility and portability. Unlike other state symbols such as the currency, coat of arms and honorifics, the state does not seek to monopolise the flagʼs use, let alone define its meaning.

Analysis of laws governing flag designation, observance and ʻdesecrationʼ reveals that the law accords the flag distinct status yet only equivocal protection. While the state may crave its citizensʼ fealty, a flag is not a symbol of some distant governmentality. Rather, it is gifted to ʻthe peopleʼ and relies for its relevance on its organic proliferation. As both object and image, people attribute a power to the flag - a power they recognise over themselves and others with whom they share a body politic. A key source of this fetishisation is its official, legal designation. Though it embodies no particular values, a flag is valued, even fetishised, by flag-wavers and flag-burners alike.

{ A Fetishised Gift: The Legal Status of Flags | PDF }

artwork { Gilbert & George, Big Ben on Flag, 2009 }

{ IHOP commercial, 1969 }

{ 1 | 2 }

{ 1. Luke Stephenson | 2. Romain Laurent | In Western Europe, military bows became obsolete during the C16th as firearms evolved. But in China, guns and bows coexisted for almost a millennium. Now one scientist thinks he knows why. | The Physics arXiv Blog | full story }

The longest-lived of camera films has just ended its 75-year history. The only laboratory that still processed Kodachrome, the first commercially available colour slide film, stopped doing so at the end of last year. Kodak progressively withdrew the film from sale between 2002 and 2009, though many photographers loved it enough to buy large stocks to keep in their freezers. Amateurs cannot develop Kodachrome, which requires a large number of carefully controlled treatments, so, with the end of laboratory processing, the film is finished.

Kodachrome is made up of layers of black and white film, each of which responds differently to coloured light, and a series of filters. Only during processing are the appropriate dyes added to each layer to produce a colour transparency. Compared to other colour films, at least up until 1990 when Fuji introduced the garish Velvia, Kodachrome had unique advantages: its colours were rich and naturalistic, its blacks did not have the greyish cast of so many colour films, it had remarkable contrast, its greys were subtle, and the lack of colour couplers between its layers (which tend to diffuse light) gave the film extraordinary sharpness.

{ London Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Arnaud Pyvka }