The 20-2-40-Style-Syndicate. Interessengemeinschaft für 20er bis 40er Jahre Alltagskultur, Musik und Mode.

Nicolas Bourriaud (co-founder of Palais de Tokyo). Relational Aesthetics (Amazon).

George Nelson Desk

Guillerme et Chambron Settee

Amazing furniture at Orange.

Gaston Bachelard

George Blair is a successful businessman, entrepreneur, and waterskier, known for his barefoot waterskiing and trademark yellow “banana”-like wetsuits.

Joakim Eneroth’s series called Swedish Red.

Most definitely genius animated shorts by Alexei Alexeev.

Electric Fountain by Tim Noble & Sue Webster.

Olafur Eliasson’s Water Fall project.

More sparse design at ‘Sup Magazine.

(Missingbooks) publishes books that have never been (re)printed and are thus unobtainable or only obtainable on the second hand market.

+rosebud is a design magazine that operates with the desire to explore and exhaust the possibilities and potentials that paper and 2D-structure have to offer

0044

02138 was the luxury lifestyle magazine of the Harvard elite, sent exclusively to the school’s top 50,000 alumni. Design by Pentagram.

The brilliant 032c has expanded their web presence.

032c. New issue out!

Large denominations of United States currency

The 1804 Silver Dollar is a United States dollar coin considered to be one of the rarest and most famous coins in the world, due to its unique history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIlI5fhZsxQ&feature=channel

The Travel Film Archive has tons of amazing videos. See Iran in the 50s,  China in the 20s, Portugal in the 40s.

1948 Tucker Sedan. A car ahead of its time.

A megatsunami is defined as a wave reaching more than 100 meters (328 feet) in the deep ocean. The highest wave ever recorded occurred on July 9, 1958 in Lituya Bay, Alaska reaching a height of 524 meters (1,720 feet), 470 feet taller than the Empire State Building.

Black power!

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The 2,500 year celebration of the Persian Empire consisted of an elaborate set of festivities that took place October 12-16, 1971 on the occasion of the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Iranian monarchy by Cyrus the Great. The intent of the celebration was to demonstrate Iran’s long history and to showcase its contemporary advancements under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.

The classic 21 Club in New York City.

Issey Miyake’s research space.

Observations for the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) began in 1997 and were completed in 2001 at two telescopes located one each in the northern and southern hemispheres to ensure coverage of the entire sky. The most ambitious project to map the night sky to date, the final (post-processing) data release for 2MASS occurred in 2003.

Cool Japanese blog, covering fashion.

What a great cover image. Get it here.

Six Scents is a curated project by Joseph Quartana (Seven New York), Six Scents: a series of fragrances by six celebrated designers: Alexandre Herchcovitch, Bernhard WIllhelm, Cosmic Wonder Light Source, Gareth Pugh, Jeremy Scott and Preen.

Exclusive limited edition works from different artists and designers. Based in Toronto.

The Second Coming of Eva.

740 Park Avenue is a luxury apartment building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, which has been the home to many wealthy and famous residents. There’s also a book about all the stories and residents connected to it.

80*81 is a retrovisionary research by Christopher Roth and Georg Diez. Roth and Diez explore in this year-long quest with the collaboration of artists, philosophers, writers, movie directors, actors, astrologists the central question: What happened? In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, Pope John Paul II met Lech Walesa, Andy Warhol had dinnner with William Burroughs at the Chelsea Hotel and John Galliano was a Blitz Kid. And what happened 1981, when the hostages were released by Ajatollah Khomeini and Aids surfaced? Those were years that changed the way the world thought, felt, looked, worked, reacted. And in the eleven volumes that form the 80*81 Book Collection this change is restaged. Each month one volume will be published, each with a distinct timeline of the events of 1980 and 1981, with images, interviews, memories. The first one contains interviews with the Slowenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the artist Robert Longo and the film maker Eric Mitchell, the Blitz Kids as seen by Derek Ridgers, the Green Party and Warhol plus Beuys plus Burroughs. The second will have interviews with the last President of Iran Abdol Hassan Bani Sadr, with the film maker Paul Schrader and the composer Giorgio Moroder. The third will feature the Chinese-American artist Mei-Lun Xue, the writer Don DeLillo and the French comic revolutionaries Pierre Christin and Enki Bilal.

?ubrówka is a brand of dry, herb-flavoured vodka that is distilled from rye and bottled at 40% alcohol by volume. The rye distillate is flavoured with a tincture of buffalo grass. This grass grows in the Bia?owie?a Forest, which is partly in Poland and partly in Belarus, and elsewhere.

http://www.ablogcuratedby.com/

From the makers of A magazine

London store.

The sublime makes us sensitive to the fragile nature of life while giving us the courage to be, what can only be described as, rambunctious. Exactly like this image.

A G Fronzoni

A Guide Magazine

Great article.

In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, ‘I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I’d stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.’ After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic.

AJB is a minute antiquarian, second-hand, rare Japanese book-shop.

A journey round my skull. Great blog.

Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature.

Anne Katrine Dolven. My new favorite artist.

The Belle Poule was a French frigate of the Dédaigneuse class, designed and built by Léon-Michel Guignace, famous for her duel with the English frigate HMS Arethusa on 17 June 1778, which began the French involvement in the American War of Independence. One of the most fashionable hairstyles of the eighteenth century, À la Belle Poule, commemorated the victory of a French ship over an English ship in 1778. À la Belle Poule featured an enormous pile of curled and powdered hair stretched over a frame affixed to the top of a woman’s head. The hair was then decorated with an elegant model of the Belle Poule ship, including sails and flags.

‘A magazine.’ Best fashion magazine available (with an unapologetic Belgian and Japanese skew). Curated issues by Kris Van Assche, Veronique Branquinho, Martine Sitbon, Jun Takahashi, Haider Ackermann, Yohji Yamamoto, Maison Martin Margiela.

A minima magazine

http://www.anewcityguide.com/

This is the official history of an extraordinary institution—the Royal Warrant. Most of us are aware of the Royal Coats of Arms, which appear on everything from pots of marmalade to the shop fronts of fashionable west end stores. These are the outward signs that whoever displays them is “By Appointment” to the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, or Prince Charles. There are some terrific individuals—Reginald de Thunderleigh in 1300; Dr. Schweppe, the 18th century mineral water man; and Mr. Crapper who did Royal WCs. For the book, the author has had access to the archives in London and Windsor Castle, and talked to the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Master of the Royal Household, and such household names as Mr. Twining of Twinings tea.

Great blog about photography (with lots of text, which is appreciated on this end).

http://www.aphotoeditor.com/

A Prior. Art magazine from Europe.

A small world magazine. Members only magazine.

A Summer in St. Tropez is a 1983 French film written and directed by photographer David Hamilton. The film was shot at and around David Hamilton’s own house in Saint Tropez, which is 800 years old. The film contains no dialogue at all, although the characters occasionally laugh and giggle.

À tout de suite by Benoît Jacquot.

Lili is an impulsive, free-spirited art student living a staid existence with her father in 1970s Paris. When she meets a mysterious young Moroccan man at a nightclub, she falls instantly in love. She soon learns he was involved in a botched bank robbery – where a man was killed – and without hesitation allows him and his accomplice to hide out in her apartment. The next morning, joined by the accomplice’s girl, they flee Paris for a dizzying cross-continent escape through Spain, Morocco and Greece. But as the police draw closer, and tensions within the group rise, her adventure takes a sudden and unexpected turn in this dazzling, multi-layered critical favorite from acclaimed director Benoit Jacquot

A-1video.com specializes in collector videos on various subjects from first half of the 20th century.

Great resource for A.C. Milan history and memorabilia. Lots of visuals.

In its homage to America’s most rakish hucksters, Broadway’s “Library of Larceny” series reissues this collection of irreverent “low-life” pieces penned by Liebling, a mid-century fixture at the New Yorker renowned for his intimacy with con culture. Originally published in 1942, this sinewy compendium opens the door to the gritty underworld of grifters, showmen and hustlers from a bygone era of deadpan humor, decadent bonhomie and vigorous one-upmanship. With affectionate aplomb, Liebling introduces us to the colorful if unscrupulous denizens of Broadway’s Jollity Building, whose names alone are reminiscent of Garbage Pail Kids: Paddy the Booster, Acid Test Ike, Lotsandlots, Judge Horumph, Count de Pennies and Marty the Clutch (so named for his “custom of mangling people’s fingers when he shakes hands with them”). The “telephone booth Indians” moniker refers to promoters so pressed for cash that they must conduct their wheeling and dealing from one of the lobby’s eight coin-box phone booths. While it’s riveting to learn about the humble, hardscrabble beginnings of the Shubert (yes, as in theater) brothers, what’s most memorable about this masterpiece is the nostalgia Liebling evokes in his reader for larger-than-life characters such as the sartorial peacock Roy Wilson Howard, a newsman whose self-control on the telephone Liebling irresistibly likens to that “of a fat woman waving away a tray of chocolate eclairs.”

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This fascinating blog specializes in the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations.

The library collection is the oldest in Switzerland, and is one of earliest and most important monastic libraries in the world. It holds 2,100 manuscripts dating back to the 8th through the 15th centuries, 1,650 incunabula (printed before 1500), and old printed books. The library holds almost 160,000 volumes. The manuscript B of the Nibelungenlied is kept here.

Abe Hirschfeld was a Polish-born New York real estate developer known for his eccentric endeavors, love for publicity, $2 neckties, strong Yiddish accent, and murder-for-hire plot against a former business partner.

Abhaneri Step-Well. Borgesian architecture in India.

Abkhazia is a political entity on the eastern coast of the Black Sea and the south-western flank of the Caucasus whose status is disputed. It considers itself an independent state (the Republic of Abkhazia). This is recognised by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru, South Ossetia and Transnistria (the last two are entities with a limited recognition). The Georgian government and the majority of the world’s governments consider Abkhazia a part of Georgia’s territory.

Amazing phenomenon.

Above Magazine. Envrironmental issues. Featuring Jacques Cousteau‘s Underwater House, Post-Apocalypse, by Philippe Parreno, and Stella McCartney on design and ethics.

Some nice interaction graphics / video works for concerts, bands, and events.

Absinthiana are the accoutrements surrounding the drink absinthe and its preparation ritual. Originally, absinthe was served in standard glasses and water was added from a simple carafe. But as its popularity grew so did the variety of implements used, such as specialty glasses and complex brouilleurs.

Academic fencing is the traditional kind of fencing practiced by some student corporations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Académie Royale de Musique was the music academy of ancien regime France, made up of opera, ballet, and music. It was merged into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1816.

Accidental Inventions examines the stories behind 10 extraordinary inventions, using historical photographs, 3D graphics, and interviews with professors and professionals from the FBI to the U.S. Air Force.

Acéphale is both a public review created by Georges Bataille (which numbered five issues, from 1936 to 1939) and a secret and esoteric society formed by Bataille and some other members who had sworn to keep silence. If anyone has copies, I’m buying. E-mail me.

Acid Brass was a musical collaboration between Turner-Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and the Williams Fairey Brass Band. The project was based on fusing the music of a traditional brass band with acid house and Detroit techno.

Listen here.

His first novel poignantly probes a boy’s erotic coming-of-age at his family’s Italian Mediterranean home. Elio—17, extremely well-read, sensitive and the son of a prominent expatriate professor—finds himself troublingly attracted to this year’s visiting resident scholar, recruited by his father from an American university. Oliver is 24, breezy and spontaneous, and at work on a book about Heraclitus. The young men loll about in bathing suits, play tennis, jog along the Italian Riviera and flirt. Both also flirt (and more) with women among their circle of friends, but Elio, who narrates, yearns for Oliver. Their shared literary interests and Jewishness help impart a sense of intimacy, and when they do consummate their passion in Oliver’s room, they call each other by the other’s name.

Acker Merrall & Condit

It’s about time he got included. Nobody has floored me like he has. A true genius.

Lovely back from Acne.

Sublime women’s garments. More here.

Acqua di Parma.

Ada Blackjack was an Inuit woman who lived for two years as a castaway on uninhabited Wrangel Island in northern Siberia.

Nice Adad Hannah show at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

‘Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, has lived in the USA, Israel, and England, studied in Vancouver, and currently lives in Montreal, Canada. Primarily using video and photography, Hannah has worked on his Stills (real-time video recorded tableaux vivants) since 2001, producing and exhibiting them in museums and galleries around the world.  His official website is www.adadhannah.com.’

DADDY magazine (published by Peres Projects)

Although the cover kicks ass, I recommend the over-the-top Damien Hirst version, complete with a rolled up $100 bill hidden inside. Right now, only 999 quid on eBay. Here’s the hidden dollar bill:

That’s just a little selection of the things you can get from this wife and husband team’s store.

Adam Kimmel.

Adel Abdessemed. This guy is so very fucking strong. If he was a bit more pop, he’d make it BIG.

In Mortelle randonnée

Art Director Management. Tons of great art directors represented.

Admont Abbey is a foundation of the Benedictines on the River Enns in the town of Admont in Austria and is the oldest remaining monastery in Styria. It contains the largest monastic library in the world and a long-established scientific collection, and is known for its Baroque architecture and collections of art and manuscripts.

Adolf Wölfli

Adventures in Paradise is an American television series which ran on ABC from 1959 until 1962. It starred Gardner McKay as Adam Troy, the captain of the schooner Tiki III which sailed the South Pacific looking for passengers and adventure. Females in various stages of short skirts and swimming attire populated the screen.

Adziogol Lighthouse is a vertical lattice hyperboloid structure of steel bars, serving as an active lighthouse, about 30 kilometres  from Kherson, Ukraine.

Aerogel is a manufactured material with the lowest bulk density of any known porous solid. It is derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. The result is an extremely low-density solid with several remarkable properties, most notably its effectiveness as a thermal insulator. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, solid smoke, solid air or blue smoke due to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material.

Aesop beauty products.

Way Out. Good blog to understand what makes Dash Snow, Richard Prince, Banks Violette and others tick.

The Afar Depression includes the Danakil Desert and the lowest point in Africa, Lake Asal (–155 meters or –500 ft). Dallol is also part of the Depression, one of the hottest places year-round anywhere on Earth. The climate varies from around 25 °C (77 °F) during the rainy season (September–March) to 48 °C (118 °F) during the dry season (March–September). Only the Awash River flows into the depression, where it ends in a chain of lakes that increase in salinity. The area is one of the hottest places on Earth.

http://afg.typepad.com/afg/ – blog of AFG, an agency that represents people like Dan Forbes, Ryan McGinley, Ari Marcopoulos, Klaus Thymann, Jeff Burton and KT Auleta.

African Blackwood.

African civet

Coolest fucking dog ever.

Four independent designers join forces to offer the everyday man a taste of luxury at this unique Lower East Side shop.

Agarwood

Agate

The Aghori are known for their extreme and outlandish violations of typical Indian and other social mores, as well as their unorthodox, taboo rituals which have caused many mainstream Hindus to condemn them as non-Hindu. They are, for instance, known to engage in post-mortem ritual cannibalism, urophagia and coprophagy; they also often dwell in charnel grounds, have been witnessed smearing cremation ashes on their bodies, and have been known to use bones from human corpses for crafting skull bowls (which Shiva and other Hindu deities are often iconically depicted holding or using) and jewellery.

The world’s most exclusive tea.

Aimee Mullins is an athlete, actress, and fashion model, and has no legs.

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This French guy has an inspiring autistic collection.

Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work. The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.

Akhenaten

Akii Make-up.

Kazakhstan’s only seaport on the Caspian Sea. Aktau has a block address system–the streets of the city have no names, and all addresses in Aktau consist of three numbers: the microdistrict (block) number, the building number and the apartment number. This is because the town was settled first to be the camp of the workers of oil industry from other parts of the country.

Nuff said.

Al-Jahiz. An Arabic prose writer and author of works on Arabic literature, biology, zoology, history, early Islamic philosophy, Islamic psychology, Mu’tazili theology, and politico-religious polemics.

Al-Jazari was a prominent Arab polymath.

Al-Jazari created a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a “robot band” which performed “more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection.”

The elephant clock was described by Al-Jazari in 1206 is notable for several innovations. It was the first clock in which an automaton reacted after certain intervals of time (in this case, a humanoid robot striking the cymbal and a mechanical robotic bird chirping) and the first water clock to accurately record the passage of the temporal hours to match the uneven length of days throughout the year.

Yep.

Alan Abel is an American prankster and jazz percussionist famous for several hoaxes that became media circuses.

Alan Boutwell & Michael Mitchell, Continuous city for 1.000.000 human beings.

Insane idea I heard about at Volker Welter’s talk at CCA.

Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art

Artist-cum-mayor, Edi Rama’s painting of Tirana’s facades.

Anri Sala, Fuera del carrusel

The Taylor Institution Library’s Albanian Collection.

In Poor Albania, Mercedes Rules Road

Albert C. Barnes was an American inventor and art collector. With the fortune made from the development of the antiseptic drug Argyrol, he founded the Barnes Foundation, a museum created from his private collection of art. Barnes was known as an eccentric, larger-than-life figure who had a passion for educating the underprivileged. He created a special relationship with Lincoln University, a historically black college in the area.

After founding the Dada journal Sic, which printed his poems and those of more famous writers, Albert-Birot invented his joyously erotic hero, Grabinoulor, whose earliest exploits appeared in Sic in 1921. The irrepressible Grabinoulor performs his fantastic epic feats in an onrush of perpetual motion, which this slim book presents in rivers of unpunctuated prose. When Grabinoulor moves a statue in his apartment, trying to restore the parallels and perpendiculars of the furniture, he topples the earth. With his unconventional poetry, he squashes a grammarian. When unleashing his sexual fantasies, he produces poems shaped like bellies, breasts and phalluses. For some of these verses, the French text is included to reveal plays on words. Albert-Birot celebrated the erotic as a means of freeing the artistic imagination from bourgeois constraints. For him, sexuality represented poetic creation.

Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities

Albrecht Fuchs. Artists portraits. Here, Richard Prince.

The Alcázar of Seville is a royal palace in Seville, Spain.

Aldo Nadi. The greatest fencer of all time. The Living Sword (perfect title!!!) is his autobiography. In a literate, well-read, elegant, haughty, and vain voice, Nadi describes a stylish time that is now long gone. The author’s life was one of fencing, womanizing, traveling, gambling, and dueling. He crossed paths with the beautiful people of 1920s and 1930s Europe and fancied himself a great artiste and lover.

Ulisse Aldrovandi

Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban novelist, essay writer, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous “boom” period. He was among the first practitioners of magical realism and exerted a decisive influence on the works of younger Latin American writers.

Alessandro Cagliostro was the alias for the occultist Giuseppe Balsamo (also called Joseph Balsamo), an Italian adventurer. The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda and mysticism. Some effort was expended to ascertain his true identity when he was arrested because of his possible participation in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. Cagliostro claimed to be the son of the Prince and Princess of the Anatolian Christian Kingdom of Trebizond, orphaned and reared by the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and, for several years, in the household of the Sheriff of Medina (who brought him up as a Christian.)

Alessio Zero makes some of the coolest leather boots available under the label Layer-0.

Interview with photo critic and collector, Vince Aletti.

The Aleutian Islands are a chain of more than 300 small volcanic islands forming part of the Aleutian Arc in the Northern Pacific Ocean.

Amazing film composer, responsible for scoring A Streetcar Named Desire, The Dead, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

A distinguished Soviet psychologist’s study of a young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him.

Nobody does it better than Alexander Wang.

Some okay jokes from this artist.

Alexandra Owen outfit

The Black Tulip is a historical novel written by Alexandre Dumas. The city of Haarlem in The Netherlands has set a prize of 100,000 guilders to the person who can grow a black tulip, sparking competition between the country’s best gardeners to win the money, honour and fame. The young and bourgeois Cornelius van Baerle has almost succeeded, but is suddenly thrown into the Loevestein prison. There he meets the prison guard’s beautiful daughter Rosa, who will be his comfort and help, and at last his rescuer.

Alexey Brodovitch. Legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar.

Alexis Soyer was a French chef who became the most celebrated cook in Victorian England. He also tried to alleviate suffering of the Irish poor in the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849), and improve the food provided to British soldiers in the Crimean War.

Alfred de Quervain

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock

The Algonquin Round Table was a celebrated group of New York City writers, critics, actors and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of “The Vicious Circle,” as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929.

Alhambra.

I’m in love with Ali Bosworth‘s aesthetic.

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, first published in 1954, is one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time. Written by Alice B. Toklas, writer Gertrude Stein’s life-partner, Toklas wrote this book as a favor to Random House to make up for her unwillingness at the time to write her memoirs, in deference to Stein’s 1933 book about her, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This work is as much of an autobiography as it is a cookbook, in that it contains as many personal recollections as it does recipes. The most famous culinary experiment contained therein is a concoction called Hashish Fudge. Made from spices, nuts, fruit, and Cannabis, Hashish Fudge quickly became a sensation in its own right.

Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn is a 1986 film directed by Lasse Hallström, and also the name of a 1989Swedish family television series based on the movie and its sequel, based in turn on books by Astrid Lindgren.

Allen Ruppersberg.

Dede Allen was an American film editor, well-known “film editing doctor” to the major American movie studios, and one of cinema’s all-time celebrated ‘auteur’ film editors.

Best action sequence ever!

Along the River During the Qingming Festival is the title of several panoramic paintings; the original version is generally attributed to the Song Dynasty artist Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). In the 5.28-meter long picture, there are 814 humans, 28 boats, 60 animals, 30 buildings, 20 vehicles, nine sedan chairs, and 170 trees drawn.

Alpenglow is an optical phenomenon. When the Sun is just below the horizon, a horizontal red glowing band can sometimes be observed on the opposite horizon. Alpenglow is easiest to observe when mountains are illuminated but can also be observed when the sky is illuminated through backscattering.

Rock chic dressing. Real dressing.

Albrecht Altdorfer

Alte Pinakothek. It is one of the oldest galleries of the world housing one of the most famous art museums for the old masters.

Ama are Japanese divers, famous for collecting pearls. The majority of ama are women. Japanese tradition holds that the practice of ama divers may be 2,000 years old. Traditionally, and even as recently as the 1960s, ama dived wearing only a loincloth. Even in modern times, ama dive without scuba gear or air tanks, making them a traditional sort of free-diver.

Amanda Harlech.

Great design experiments.

Does anyone know where it’s from?

The Amber Room in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg is a complete chamber decoration of amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors.

Ambergris is a solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull gray or blackish color produced in the digestive system of sperm whales. Ambergris has a peculiar sweet, earthy odor. The principal historical use of ambergris was as a fixative in perfumery, though it has now been largely displaced by synthetics.

An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, is a typographical design or artform that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction or orientation.

Attila Ambrus was a gentleman thief, a sort of Cary Grant — if only Grant came from Transylvania, was a terrible professional hockey goalkeeper, and preferred women in leopard-skin hot pants. During the 1990s, while playing for the biggest hockey team in Budapest, Ambrus took up bank robbery to make ends meet. His opponents: a police chief who learned how to be a detective via dubbed episodes of Columbo; a deputy so dense he was known only by his Hungarian nickname, Mound of Asshead; and a forensics expert-cum-ballet teacher who wore a top hat and tails on the job.

Amedei Porcelana is made from translucent, white cocoa beans of a variety now called “Porcelana” due to its porcelain-like color. This cocoa bean, a genetically pure strain of the highly-prized Criollo, is native to Venezuela and may have been grown there in the Pre-Columbian era.

Nigel Village invested six months working in a Malta fireworks factory, which gave him the insight to the secrets of these masters of aerial pyrotechnics. The superb craftsmanship and superlative breaks characterize the intricate multi-break shells that are the legacy of the Malta people to our world of fireworks. Whether multi-break star shells or patterned salutes, these marvelous aerial shells are the epitome of fireworks craftsmanship.

Lots of great DVDs and books on fireworks.

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American Radiator Building in NYC.

Tall tales

The America’s Cup is a trophy awarded to the winner of the America’s Cup sailing regatta match, and the oldest active trophy in international sport.

Levi Fisher Ames decided to make his environment portable. A Civil War soldier, musician, carpenter, maker of musical instruments, prolific woodcarver, and animated storyteller, Ames hand carved his own impressive menagerie of over 600 domestic, wild, and mythical animals, carefully encasing each in a glass-fronted folding box. He exhibited them at regional fairs as a comprehensive sideshow in the belief that they needed to be seen as an interrelated work and that his storytelling was a central component of the whole.

Thomas Ammann was a leading Swiss art dealer in Impressionist and Twentieth Century Art and major collector of Post-war and Contemporary Art

Ammolite is a rare and valuable opal-like organic gemstone found primarily along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains of North America. It is arguably the rarest gemstone on earth, rivaling the rarity of such gemstones as alexandrite and red diamonds. It is made of the fossilized shells of ammonites, which in turn are composed primarily of aragonite, the same mineral that makes up nacreous pearls.

German sniper rifle.

Fascinating website. Be sure to read the introduction, which starts like this:

A Phoenician Fortress in Oklahoma?

The following pages of this website are the photographic documentation of various unusual phenomena my wife, Sue, and I have found in southern Oklahoma and north Texas. What you see is what we saw and with the exception of some graphic arrows in one of the photos, no manipulation of the visual facts has been done.

More suggested reading:

Trans-cultural diffusion (Wiki)

Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair

Yohji Yamamoto

Martin Margiela

Ugly website, but good finds at Anastasia Boutique. Apparently they carry Cosmic Wonder, too.

Insane anatomy theatre.

Anchor Stone Blocks are stone building blocks made in Rudolstadt, Germany. They are so precisely cut and polished that they fit together perfectly. They are made in three colors in imitation of the red brick, tan limestone, and blue slate of European buildings.

Anchors

Valentin is a criminal mastermind, but his exploits don’t prove much in the way of satisfaction. Thus, he sets out on a one-man sailing trip around the world in a last attempt at finding meaning in his life. Meanwhile, in Morocco, a burned-out jazz singer named Jane is trying to forget a fizzled love affair. And so begins the journey of these two lost souls who are destined to cross paths.

Roy Andersson’s You, The Living.

Eugene Andolsek was an American stenographer, who, to escape the humdrum existence of his daily life, created dazzling, complex drawings in his spare time whilst in a trance-like state.

Great aesthetic.

Andrea Palladio’s Italian villas.

Andrea Pozzo was an Italian Jesuit Brother, Baroque painter and architect, decorator, stage designer, and art theoretician. He was best known for his grandiose frescoes using illusionistic technique called quadratura, in which architecture and fancy are intermixed. His masterpiece is the nave ceiling of the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome. Through his techniques, he has become one of the most remarkable figures of the Baroque period.

Ocean series at Gagosian.

De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books) is a textbook of human anatomy written by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) in 1543.

The artist and collector Andreas Züst (1947–2000) was not only a legendary figure in the Swiss and European art field but also a dedicated book lover. The mixture of his associative interest in Weather, Geology, Astronomy, Physics, Botany, Art history, Antropology, Polar expeditions, Photography, Painting, Music, Kitsch, UFOs, the Hell’s Angels, Psychedelic experiences and many more indicates a structure of our culture.

The woman who broke Nietzsche’s heart.

Andree Putman.

Parisian, born in 1925, is one of the contemporary world’s
leading interior designers.

Andrei Tarkovsky – Elements of Cinema. Just the cover is mind blowing.

Andrew Wyeth.

Andrzej Wróblewski (1927 – 1957) was a Polish painter who died in a tragic mountaineering accident in 1957 when he was only 30. He is recognized by many as one of Poland’s most prominent artists in the early post World War II era, creating an individualistic approach to figurative painting.

The height of the fall is so great that before getting anywhere near the ground, much of the water is evaporated or carried away as a fine mist by the strong wind.

The Angel Oak is thought to be one of the oldest living organisms east of the Mississippi River. It has survived countless hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and human interference.

The legendary paparazzo’s private photo album.

Angelo Plessas has some nice net art projects:

http://www.shenevertoldherlove.com/

http://www.alldaydoingnothing.com/

http://www.thetasteoftears.com/

www.angelosensinicommunication.com/

Some anglerfishes employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were highly reduced male ceratioids.

Ani is a ruined and uninhabited medieval Armenian city-site situated in the Turkish province of Kars, beside the border with Armenia.

Yes, ostrich racing is real.

George Morland – Fox hunting.

Francis Bacon – Study for Bullfight No.1, 2nd Version

—

How dandy.

Amazing blog. An exploration of the finest in art, illustration, crafts and design from around the world featuring animals, both real and fantastic.

Anita is a girl of only 16 years, and while she has developed early physically, to a mature woman, she is psychologically completly ruthless.

Kippenberger show invite meets Helmut Lang ad from a few years back. And her sensibility for slogans is insane:

My details struggle with your panorama.

Form follows Vision. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll give you a call.

Kyoto yourself!

I fall in love to easily with pretty thumbnails.

Anna Magnani

If Caravaggio had been into women?

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ev2gePFcRyM&feature=related

Great blog from graphic artist. Lots of inspiration.

Pretty Big Dig video of dancing excavators, by Canadian choreographer/director Anne Troake. After watching, you’ll find construction outside your bedroom window cute rather than annoying.

Anno Birkin (9 December 1980 – 8 November 2001) was an English poet and musician. With adolescence, Birkin discovered poetry, in particular Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and, latterly, Kenneth Patchen. In 2003, Dreams of Waking — a 2-CD album of songs by Birkin and KjD — was released. Rock Sound called it an “art-rock adventure with hints of early Radiohead and Sonic Youth. … Anno’s lyrics are poetic masterpieces in their own right.” Later that year, a selection of Birkin’s poetry — Who Said the Race Is Over? — was published and sold over 4,000 copies. Tom Payne reviewed it in the Daily Telegraph as “this proud, fresh Romanticism. … Yet for all their brilliance, the poems feel unfinished. It is not just that the words have been left behind as a kind of consolation to those who mourn the author; it is as though they are still going about their tasks, asking the same questions and insolently refusing to settle.”

The American artist collaborative, Anonima Group, was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1960 by Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski. Propelled by their rejection of the cult of the ego and automatic style of the Abstract Expressionists, the artists worked collaboratively on grid-based, spatially fluctuating drawings and paintings that were precise investigations of the scientific phenomena and psychology of optical perception.

AnotherMag now uses Sublime Things as one of their resources.

The idea behind this endeavor is to make a magazine that will educate and inform openly and without the social or financial restrictions that plague many publications today and contribute more often than not to the “same old thing” again and again.

Not always the best photos, but the guy’s vibe is sick. Reminds me of forgotten no-wave bands, whose members went spiritual after the crazy years.

An ant mill is a phenomenon where a group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion.

Antaeus was a literary quarterly founded by Daniel Halpern and Paul Bowles.

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, was founded in September 2006 by Giovanni Aloi, a London-based lecturer in history of art and media studies. The Journal combines a heightened level of academic scrutiny of animals in visual culture, with a less formal and more experimental format designed to cross the boundaries of academic knowledge, in order to appeal to diverse audiences including artists and the general public alike.

Anthony Blunt was a British spy, art historian, Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74), and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (1945-72). Blunt was an acclaimed art historian and the “Fourth Man” of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s.

Anthony Vaccarello

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known mechanical computer).

Antimonide.

Great store in Paris.

Anton Van Dalen.

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

Antonio Canova (1 November 1757 – 13 October 1822) was an Italian sculptor who became famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh. The epitome of the neoclassical style, his work marked a return to classical refinement after the theatrical excesses of Baroque sculpture.

Antonio Ligabue was and was an Italian painter, one of the most important Naïve artists of the 20th century.

Antonio Porchia (1886 – 1968) wrote one book, a slender collection of poetic aphorisms that became a classic in the Spanish-speaking world. With affinities to Taoist and Buddhist epigrams, Voices bears witness to the awe of human existence.

Apparently loved by everyone from André Breton, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Juarroz to Henry Miller. Here’s a selection:

When I come upon some idea that is not of this world, I feel as though this world had grown wider.

He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.

Great boutique in Milan

AN-225. Gigantic Russian jet.

The Antonov A-40 Krylya Tanka was a Soviet attempt to allow a tank to glide into a battlefield after being towed aloft by an airplane, to support airborne forces or partisans.

Love the new Dior Homme face.

Nice scarf from Anuschka Hoevener.

Apartamento magazine

http://www.apartmentberlin.de/

Great design from A Practice For Everyday Life.

Apicius is the title of a collection of Roman cookery recipes, usually thought to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century AD. the recipes are geared for the wealthiest classes and a few contain what were exotic ingredients at that time, e.g. flamingo.

Roland Barthes.

Calligrammes

Apollo

More

New fall collection.

And so it begins: Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than a monastery, and the post comes but once a year… A member of Campbell’s party [a sub-expedition within Scott's] tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic…Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.

Aquascaping is the craft of arranging aquatic plants, as well as rocks, stones, cavework, or driftwood, in an aesthetically pleasing manner within an aquarium.

That’s what I call a coat. From the understated British elegance of Aquascutum.

Aqui! Magazine.

Young mysticist Zoltan Ará and the Indo-Hungarian green of his eyes.

Jaime de Mora y Aragon, a flamboyant Spanish aristocrat whose amiable antics made him the toast of the Costa del Sol.

The arapaima is a South American freshwater fish. It is a living fossil and one of the largest freshwater fishes in the world. Because the arapaima produces large, boneless steaks, it is considered a delicacy. Commercial fishing of the arapaima has been banned by the Brazilian government.

Arcana Books. Rare and out of print art books. Amazing selection ranging from Beuys to Basquiat to Burden.

ARCH+. German architecture magazine. Beautifully designed.

Archaeopteryx is the earliest and most primitive bird known.

Archerfish are known for their habit of preying on land based insects and other small animals by literally shooting them down with water droplets from their specialized mouths.

Archery

A.R.C. poster c. 1975

Alcatraz architectural plan.

Arcosanti is an experimental town that began construction in 1970 in central Arizona, 70 miles (110 km) north of Phoenix, at an elevation of 3,732 feet (1,130 meters). Architect Paolo Soleri, using a concept he calls arcology (a portmanteau of architecture and ecology), started the town to demonstrate how urban conditions could be improved while minimizing the destructive impact on the earth.

Volker Hinz’ photos from the legendary NYC nightclub Area.

The Arg-é Bam was the largest adobe building in the world. On December 26, 2003, the Citadel was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake, along with much of the rest of Bam and its environs.

Argo is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean.  This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.

The argonauts are a group of octopuses unlike any other. The females secrete a thin, white, brittle shell called the paper nautilus. Nestled with their arms tucked inside this beautiful, translucent home, they drift through the open ocean while other octopus species crawl along the sea floor.

Ariel Schlesinger

The unmoved mover is a philosophical concept described by Aristotle as the first cause that sets the universe into motion. As is implicit in the name, the “unmoved mover” is not moved by any prior action. In his book Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: itself contemplating.

Based in the Russian city of Archangelsk, ex-gangster Nikolai originally intended the building to contain two floors but couldn’t help himself when he realised there was nothing to stop him adding more on top.

Zora Arkus-Duntov was a Belgian-born American engineer. His work on the Chevrolet Corvette earned him the nickname “Father of the Corvette.”

 Armando Testa (in Italian)

Review

A beautiful armillary sphere.

Armin Linke

Arne Quinze (born 1971, Belgium) is an artist, self-taught designer, futurologist, visionary and businessman, best known for his giant public art installations.

Crazy pickpocket!

Arnys, Paris.

Don Aronow was an American designer, builder and racer of the famous Cigarette, Donzi, and Formula speed boats. He built speedboats for the His Imperial Majesty Shah of Iran, Charles Keating, Robert Vesco, Malcolm Forbes, and George H. W. Bush. President Lyndon Johnson – in retirement – owned several 16 ft. Donzi speedboats on his Texas ranch with which he would race his Secret Service agents. The great speed of Cigarette boats also made them a popular choice among cocaine runners. On February 3, 1987 Aronow was murdered in his car at the end of 188th Street in Miami (the famous Thunderboat Row) where his boat companies operated. Read about the murder.

Around the World in a Jeep. In 1975, Orvis CEO Perk Perkins and his then college roommate, Will Parish, hatched and executed a grand plan: to drive around the world in Will’s beloved red Jeep. Over the next 20 months, Perk, Will, and their trusty Jeep crossed five oceans and seas, exploring 35 countries and covering enough road–miles to circumnavigate the earth twice.

In addition to cementing their relationship as lifelong best friends, the trip also generated some 2,000 pages of journal entries, which make up the text of this remarkable volume. Illustrated by stunning full–color photographs taken by Perk, Will, and the people they encountered, this beautifully printed and bound adventure book belongs in the collection of everyone who has a yearning to explore, travel, and discover the richness our world has to offer.

Created by Maurice LeBlanc during the early twentieth century, Arsène Lupin is a witty confidence man and burglar, the Sherlock Holmes of crime. The poor and innocent have nothing to fear from him; often they profit from his spontaneous generosity. The rich and powerful, and the detective who tries to spoil his fun, however, must beware. They are the target of Arsène’s mischief and tomfoolery. A masterful thief, his plans frequently evolve into elaborate capers, a precursor to such cinematic creations as Ocean’s Eleven and The Sting. Sparkling with amusing banter, these stories—the best of the Lupin series—are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate.

ART&IDEA was founded by Robert Punkenhofer in 1995 as a not for profit institution devoted to promoting and facilitating a cultural dialogue by organizing contemporary arts programs of international scope.

Art & Research

Art Culinaire.

http://www.artdata.co.uk/

Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall

Angela Bulloch.

Damien Hirst

Gerhard Richter

http://www.artpartner.com/

artrebels.com - Danish fashion/art/music collective.

Art Tatler.

Commentary and surveillance of more than 2000 current and recent art exhibitions around the world, organized geographically with archives of exhibitionsfrom the last 24 months, including architecture and design.

Best source of artist films online.

Cutting edge ’70s New York art rag is devoted to images from popular culture culled & assembled by Alan Suicide; one half of the cult New York No-Wave duo “Suicide”.

RUSSIA’S LEADING MAGAZINE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, ANTIQUES AND FINE ARTS

 Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music: 1930 – 1973

http://www.artfag.ca/

Interesting journal.

Perfect aesthetic from fashion photographer Arthur Elgort. Following women on sidewalks, shoulder strap down. Killer insight.

Here’s a 20st century man: Koestler began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn’t die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.

http://www.artlistparis.com/ – Portfolios of creative professionals.

Artzybasheff was born in Kharkov as son of the writer Mikhail Artsybashev. He is said to have fought as a White Russian. In 1919 he arrived in New York City, where he worked in an engraving shop.

Legendary art director.

Isaac Asimov’s The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.

Aspen was a multimedia magazine published on an irregular schedule by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Described by its publisher as “the first three-dimensional magazine,” each issue came in a customized box or folder filled with materials in a variety of formats, including booklets, “flexidisc” phonograph recordings, posters, postcards and reels of super-8 movie film. Issue #3 was designed by Andy Warhol and David Dalton. Published in December, 1966, the issue is housed in a box with graphics based on the packaging of “Fab” laundry detergent. Among its contents were a flip-book based on Warhol’s film “Kiss,” and Jack Smith’s film “Buzzards Over Bagdad,” a flexidisc by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, and a “ticket book” with excerpts of papers delivered at the Berkeley conference on LSD by Timothy Leary and others.

John Aspinall was born in Delhi, India, but was a United Kingdom citizen. He was a zoo owner and agambler. He was also a self-declared misanthrope and reputed co-plotter of an extreme right-wing conspiracy against Britain’s Labour government.

The Asse II pit is a former salt mine used as a deep geological repository for radioactive waste in the mountain range of Asse in district Wolfenbüttel in Germany.

Founded by K. Michael Hays.

Giorgio Brato Double Zip Leather Coat.

Soccer referee, responsible for inventing red and yellow cards.

The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849 at the Astor Place Theatre in New York City and left at least 25 dead and more than 120 injured. Its genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, the first great American star, and William Charles Macready, the greatest English actor of his generation, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

An astrolabe is an historical astronomical instrument used by classical astronomers, navigators, and astrologers.

By Christian Astuguevieille. (Also creative director of the Comme des Garcons perfumes since the beginning).

Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before.

Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous range of interests, and has been honoured with the title “master of a hundred arts”

Athenian pederasty entailed a formal bond between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family, consisting of loving and often sexual relations. As an erotic and educational custom it was initially employed by the upper class as a means of teaching the young and conveying to them important cultural values, such as bravery and restraint.

Alfie Atkins is a fictional character created by the author Gunilla Bergström from Sweden in 1972.

Atlas Press specialises in extremist and avant-garde prose writing from the 1890s to the present day. We are the largest publisher in English of books on Surrealism and have an extensive list relating to Dada, Expressionism, the Oulipo, the College of ’Pataphysics, among others.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” – Oscar Wilde

Amazing, amazing site.

An atoll is an island of coral that encircles a lagoon partially or completely.

AtomAge magazine was a fetish magazine published in Britain by the clothes designer John Sutcliffe.

A permanent shadow left by atomic bomb explosion. More.

Kazuyuki Kumagai’s Attachment label.

Lovely indie pop band from Brooklyn. Their website has a great graphic identity as well.

Carl Aubock. Sick Austrian designer.

John James Audubon

An adolescent boy sails to the remote monasteries and hermitages of Mount Athos. His spiritual and erotic wanderings in the picturesque surroundings of the Holy Mountain take both the author and the reader on a journey of self-discovery. Augiéras described Athos as a place where you find everything within yourself , and the experiences in this book as a sojourn in the Land of the Spirits according to the strictest Buddhist or Pythagorean Orthodoxy.

Danish ballet master, August Bournonville

Auguste Piccard was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer.

The Complete Costume History from TASCHEN

Aula Contemporanea

Lots of good MP3s available here.

The Aurora Pyramid of Hope is the most comprehensive natural color diamond collection in the world. Aurora Pyramid of Hope was put together by Alan Bronstein and Harry Rodman over 25 years.

“Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity.”

The Autochrome Lumière is an early color photography process. Patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907, it remained the principal color photography process available until it was superseded by the advent of subtractive color film during the mid 1930s.

Autumn Ball. How can you not love a film that drops Cassavetes’ Love Streams in the film poster?

Romantic drama about an aging playboy who falls for a sweet, but terminally ill, young woman.

Edited and designed by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp from 1970 to 1976, the journal Avalanche was a forum for the presentation of art work and ideas dedicated to conversation and exchange

The legendary magazine that lasted 14 issues.

Great shoes.

Richard Avedon.

Avicenna. Brilliant Arab polymath, who discovered that eyes do not beam light, they receive it.

Avshalom Cave is a 5,000 sq m cave in Israel, unique for its dense concentration of stalactites. Some of the stalactites found in the cave are four meters long, and some have been dated as 300,000 years old.

Munthe was a true Renaissance man a scientist and doctor as well as a poet who was a friend of Henry James, Somerset Maugham, and others. In this 1929 volume, he offers an account of San Michele, a house he built on the site of Roman emperor Tiberius’s villa on the Isle of Capri off Italy’s southern coast. His weaving of the story of the house with Italian history, mythology, and culture is reminiscent of 18th- and 19th-century travelogs.

the online resource for contemporary art

Alice Aycock, Sand/Fans, 1970-2010

The master of high concept.

Azulejo covered church in Portgugal.

B. Traven was the pen name of a writer who wrote his books originally in the German or English language and whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are unknown or are subject of dispute among literary scholars. What is only certain is that B. Traven lived for the most part of his life in Mexico, where the action of the majority of his novels and short stories is also set. There are many, sometimes fantastic, hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven. Scholars usually identify him with the theatre actor and anarchist known as Ret Marut, who lived in Germany in the early 20th century and who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924. There are also speculations that Traven’s real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus, modern day Świebodzin in Poland.

First published in 1978, this book turns Babar fans into detectives. Babar shows children that detective work is fun but not easy. When he, his family, and the Old Lady go to town for the unveiling of a gold statue, they soon find that a thief is on the loose. First, a piano is missing, then Babar’s car disappears, and finally the statue isn’t where it’s supposed to be!

A grand statement, that actually is true in my case. Look at the selection:

Backyard Bill, nice Sartorialist-like blog.

A site dedicated to 60s garage punk.

New York No-Wave archive.

Bagan is an ancient city in Burma.

Nice bags from Bag’n’Noun.

Bahariya Oasis is an oasis in Egypt. It is approximately 360 km away from Cairo. It has an art museum and the main agricultural products are guavas, mangos, dates, and olives. The people of the oasis, or the Wahati people ( meaning “of the oasis” in Arabic), are the descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the oasis, Bedouin tribes from Libya and the north coast, and other people from the Nile Valley who came to settle in the oasis.

If you’re travelling through Russia, why not take the Baikal Amur Mainline? It runs north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian railway.

Balaklava is a town on the Crimean peninsula. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was one of the most secret towns in the Russia, closed off from the outside world and home to a Nuclear Submarine Base.

Fall 2010 from Nicolas Ghesquire. Another ground breaking collection from one of the most forward thinking people in fashion.

Hands down, Balenciaga does the best perfume ads of the season. Amazing sensibility.

Ball’s Pyramid is an erosional remnant of a shield volcano and caldera that formed about 7 million years ago. Balls Pyramid is 20 km (13 miles) southeast of Lord Howe Island in the Pacific Ocean.

Ballantyne Cashmere was founded in 1921 in a small Scottish town called Innerleithen in the Borders region.

Ballistic Recovery Systems is a company that was formed in 1980 by Boris Popov after he survived a 400 foot fall in a partly collapsed hang glider in 1975. Boris invented a parachute system which would lower a whole light airplane to the ground relatively safely for the people inside.

Bam, Iran.

Foreword by the ubiquitous Glenn O’Brien.

Tallulah Bankhead

More

Wiki

Kay Pollak’s film from 1980.

Barnstorming was a popular form of entertainment in the 1920s in which stunt pilots would perform tricks with airplanes, either individually or in groups called a flying circus.

Baron de Redé was a prominent aristocratic aesthete, collector of French eighteenth-century furnishings and decorative arts, and socialite both in European circles and in New York.

It has a transparent head!

The crying artist that makes anyone with a heart do the same.

‘I’m too sad to tell you’

Baseline. Typography magazine.

Bat Masterson was a figure of the American Old West known as a buffalo hunter, U.S. Army scout, avid fisherman, gambler, frontier lawman, U.S. Marshal, and sports editor and columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph.

Batyr (1969–1993) was an Asian elephant claimed to be able to use a large amount of meaningful human speech. Living in a zoo in Kazakhstan, Batyr was widely reported as having a vocabulary of more than 20 phrases. A recording of Batyr saying “Batyr is good”,”Batyr is hungry” and using words such as “drink” and “give” was played on Kazakh state radio in 1980.

Russian silent film director.

Bayonne Ham is an air dried salted ham that takes its name from the ancient port city of Bayonne in the far South West of France.

Beach party movies were an American 1960s genre of feature films created by American International Pictures (AIP) with their surprise 1963 hit, Beach Party, and copied by virtually every other studio. Precursors to the genre were Columbia Pictures 1959 release Gidget, starring Sandra Dee as a teenage surfer girl, and 1961′s Gidget Goes Hawaiian. American International’s films took the Gidget idea, added more music and far more bikinis, and removed nearly all references to parents. The films helped popularize surfing and surf music, and they often included on-screen performances by well-known pop groups.

The Beach Pneumatic Transit was the first attempt to build an underground public transit system in New York City.

Felice Beato was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first photographers to take pictures in East Asia and one of the first war photographers.

Edgar Degas – Dancers at the Bar

Synchronized swimming.

Sharon Stone.

Guy Bourdin.

Great magazine. Contributions from Neville Wakefield, Bruce Weber, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Allen Ruppersberg, Elfie Semotan, Bill Viola and Helmut Lang.

The Big Spenders was Lucius Beebe’s last and many think his best book. In it he describes the consumption of the Gilded Age. Beebe enjoys it all immensely, and so do we his readers, whether it is James Gordon Bennett buying a Monte Carlo restaurant because he was refused a seat by the window, or Spencer Penrose leaving a bedside memo reminding himself not to spend more than $1 million the next day.

If you haven’t seen it. Rather sublime in it’s own way. NSFW.

Carlos de Beistegui was an eccentric multi-millionaire art collector and interior decorator and one of the most flamboyant characters of mid-20th century European life. His ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice in 1951 is still described as “the party of the century”. He was often referred to as “The Count of Monte Cristo”.

Belgian Blue cattle are a beef breed from Belgium.

In September 1979, a young guy stole a Porsche 911S Targa. He was driving crazy on Slavija, central square in Belgrade for 2 weeks. Every night he was there, to do at least one lap. Police was useless, they weren’t able to catch him with their Zastava 101′s and Fiat 1300. His name was Vladimir Vasiljevic, and his nickname was “Vlada Opel”. People liked him, and you could see 10 000 people on the street every night, waiting for him, and he never let them down. That was not just crazy night ride – some people say that he was protesting aganist Tito’s regime in his own way, but I think that more likely he was some kind of “Rebel With a Cause” One night police set him a trap on Slavija, and he crashed in one of the buses, but he managed to escape – crowd blocked the wreck until he got out. He was arrested later because someone snitched him. He vas sentenced to 3 or 5 years in prison (you can find various data on internet). He got killed in mid 80s – he crashed into a truck trailer on highway. He was driving an old Lada.

So cute!!! Totally kawaii! ♥♥♥

Beluga caviar.

The Benezit Dictionary of Artists is an extensive publication of bibliographical information on painters, sculptors, designers and engravers created primarily for art museums, auction houses, historians and dealers.

Benham’s top is named after the English toymaker Charles Benham, who, in 1895, sold a top painted with the pattern shown. When the disk is spun, arcs of pale color — called Fechner colors or pattern induced flicker colors (PIFCs) — are visible at different places on the disk. Not everyone sees the same colors. The phenomenon is not entirely understood. One possible reason people see colors may be that the color receptors in the human eye respond at different rates to red, green, and blue.

Pike’s Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue Of Optical, Mathematical, And Philosophical Instruments. More comprehensive than any previous catalogue, Pike’s encyclopedic work devoted as much space to imported instruments as to those manufactured in America, making this catalog a reference work of nineteenth-century European instruments as well as the most complete illustrated description of American scientific instruments in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Berg publishes a range of academic journals on seemingly unacademic things, including textiles, fashion, and food.

Berg films

German photographer

The Bering land bridge was a land bridge roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north to south at its greatest extent, which joined present-day Alaska and eastern Siberia at various times during the Pleistocene ice ages.

Busby Berkeley was a highly influential Hollywood movie director and musical choreographer. Berkeley was famous for his elaborate musical production numbers that often involved complex geometric patterns. Berkeley’s works used large numbers ofshowgirls and props as fantasy elements in kaleidoscopic on-screen performances.

Bernal Spheres. A type of space habitat intended as a long-term home for permanent residents, first proposed in 1929 by John Desmond Bernal.

Bernd Kuchenbeiser

Check his models walking backwards.

Bernie Madoff is a former stock broker, investment adviser, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

Fanfare. Dutch film from 1958. After a fight the brass band in a small village splits up into two separate bands. They both want to win a contest and will do anything to prevent the other band from winning it.

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia and educated in Moscow and Paris, architect Berthold Lubetkin (1901-1990) practiced primarily in the United Kingdom. His designs were characterized by clear geometric figures, technical ingenuity, and a vision of modernism inspired by Le Corbusier.

Berton Roueché was a medical writer who wrote for The New Yorker magazine for almost fifty years.

Interview.

Bertrand Duchaufour is the in-house perfumer at L’Artisan Parfumeur.

Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan horse trainer and adventurer. She was a record-breaking aviatrix in the pioneer days of aviation, and is primarily remembered as the author of the memoir West with the Night.

Berlin fashion store.

Just a ‘curatorial’ thought.

Beuys, 1966, piano covered with felt and leather, 100 x 152 x 240 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris

Christo, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95

Hussein Chalayan – Airmail dresses, 2004 – André Morin, Collection Groningen Museum

Bevel and Boss. Great blog.

Published in 1951, this example of “garden literature” relates how author Nichols constructed a massive garden on a run-down estate.

A bezoar is a mass found trapped in the gastrointestinal system.

World’s largest book. Get yours for 30K. I like one of the Amazon reviews: This book didn’t fit on any of my shelves. If you are considering this for your library, I suggest you measure first. The return postage is pretty steep.

BIBABIDI is a music blog focused on the independent, the undiscovered, the under -rated, and the unloved.

Grolier Club. – Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club of New York is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts.

Carl P. Rollins discussed on YouTube. – Carl Purington Rollins became manager of the manufacturing department of Yale University Press in 1918, and over the next thirty years he designed and supervised the production of more than two thousand books for the Press.

Nice binding.

Considered one of the most beautiful and prestigious binding collections in the world, Bibliotheca Wittockiana was created by a passionate booklover, Michel Wittock.

Arts and culture from in and around the Middle East.

biehl. parfumkunstwerke.

biehl. parfumkunstwerke considers itself to be an olfactory gallery. a free space for perfume artists who can
present their extraordinary creations to an audience without having to take market research, marketing, and
maximal margins into consideration. quality and exclusiveness count and not just in regard to the used
ingredients.

This films looks really interesting, although I haven’t seen it. Just looking at the poster we are in Stranger Than Paradise/Twentynine Palms territory, and if you like slow moving road movies (not necessarily slow moving vehicles) from the land of freedom, that should be a plus.

A 168-year old apothecary.

Bigert & Bergström – Swedish art duo.

Prior to the explosion of the first atomic bomb on the island, the lagoon at Bikini was designated as a ship graveyard during World War II by the US. Today the Bikini Lagoon is still home to a large number of vessels from the United States and other countries. The dangers of the radioactivity and limited services in the area led to divers staying away from one of the most remarkable potential diving sites in the Pacific for many years. The dive spot has become popular among divers in the last 10 years . However, oil prices have severely curtailed diving operations to the point of being suspended since August 2008 and through 2009, restricted to fully self-contained vessels by prior arrangement. The lagoon contains a larger amount of sea life than usual due to the lack of fishing, including sharks, increasing the fascination with the spot as a diver’s adventure spot. Food including fish is contaminated, however, so tour boats must bring all their own supplies.

Bilitis. David Hamilton again. Him and Tinto Brass can do no wrong.

The work of San Francisco, California balanced rock sculptor Bill Dan and the art, discipline and craft of rock balancing and balanced stone stacking.

Japanese maagzine.

Biondi Santi

Biosphere 2.

Bird – fuckin’ amazing women’s fashion store in New York.  Selling gems like this:

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world. MORE at NYT

On Sunday night, over a quiet Somerset house, scores of swooping starlings tumbled out of the sky and fell, dead, into a single front garden. Covering an area 12ft across, more than 100 birds carpeted the garden, each with blood oozing from its beak and curled up claws. FULL STORY

Biscúter was a microcar manufactured in Spain during the mid-20th century. Biscúter flourished for about ten years and the cars became a common sight on Spanish roads, as well as a part of popular culture. (“Ugly as a Biscúter” was a common joke.) Amenities such as doors and windows did eventually appear, and several different bodystyles were produced, including trucks, an elegant woodie station wagon, and a toy-like sports car called the Pegasín (little Pegaso).

Bismuth crystals.

Bitis nasicornis is a venomous viper species found in the forests of West and Central Africa. A big viper known for its striking color pattern and prominent horns on its nose.

Irina Björklund is a Swedish-Finnish actress.

Afro beat.

Okwui Enwezor.

Chris Ofili.

Koolhas on Lagos.

Ousmane Sembène.

Alabaster

Black Chandelier. Candles of imaginary botanicals.

Black garlic is a type of fermented garlic used as a food ingredient in Asian cuisine. It is made by fermenting whole bulbs of garlic at high temperature, a process that results in black cloves. The taste is sweet and syrupy with hints of balsamic or even tamarind.

Nice stuff from this showroom/store. Our Legacy, Rickard Lindqvist, Cassette Playa, etc. Based in Stockholm.

Huge sapphire.

During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above.

More amazing phenomena here.

By Gregory L. Blackstock

The Blackwing 602 is a discontinued model of pencil that has developed a cult following as “the best pencil ever made“. It was produced by the Eberhard Faber company until 1998. Initially sold for 50 cents, Blackwings were being sold for $20 in 2006, and as of 2009 cost about $35 on E-Bay.

Caroline Blackwood was a writer and artist’s muse, and the eldest child of Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Caroline Blackwood was equally well-known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as “a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers”.

Nebuchadnezzar is a colour monotype print with additions in ink and watercolour portraying the Old Testament Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake.

Blancpain watch.

Cool Dutch lifestyle magazine. They’ll usually feature stuff like Cosmic Wonder, Peter Pilotto and Bless.

Bless Nothingneath collection.

The conceptually wonderful BLESS has a museum retrospective at Kunsthaus Graz

http://sedulia.blogs.com/

http://www.paranaiv.no/

http://www.preik.no/

The blue mutation of the Yellow-naped Amazon is a most incredible bird. Found naturally in the wild (Honduras) about 15 years ago, only a few birds were ever imported into the United States, but breeding has been fairly successful and young birds are available from time to time.

BMW 2002

Bo Harwood’s songs for Cassavetes’ films are famously hard to find. However, here’s a neat little article and an audio clip of I’m Almost In Love With You. And the clip above is from Love Streams, Cassavetes’ best film. Check the opera sequence, it’s the closest he ever got to directing a musical of Crime and Punishment as he said he wanted to.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Fitzcarraldo.

Aral Sea in Kazakhstan.

Shipbreaking at Gaddani beach, Pakistan (still from amazing Working Man’s Death).

Twin brothers Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan are American professional tennis players. Between 2005 and 2006, they set an Open Era record by competing in seven consecutive men’s doubles Grand Slam finals, three of which they won.

Bob Beamon is an American former track and field athlete, best known for his long-standing world record in the long jump at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, which remained the world record for 23 years.

Bob Munden is a former Fast Draw competition shooter who now undertakes fast draw exhibition shooting.

Belgian-born Bob Verhelst is one of the world’s leading scenographers in the realms of fashion.

Amazing blog from New York stylist.

Bobby Fischer‘s achievements are legendary. At 13, he won a brilliancy that became known as the Game of the Century. Starting at age 14, he played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a point. At 15½, he became both the youngest Grandmaster and the youngest Candidate for the World Championship up until that time. He won the 1963-64 US championship 11-0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament.

This book from 1788 could be yours for only $3,087.13.

Marinus Boezem, The Green Cathedral (1978-1996)

Bog bodies, also known as bog people, are preserved human bodies found in sphagnum bogs in Northern Europe, Great Britain and Ireland. Unlike most ancient human remains, bog bodies have retained their skin and internal organs due to the unusual conditions of the surrounding area. These conditions include highly acidic water, low temperature, and a lack of oxygen, combining to preserve but severely tan their skin.

Bollinger champagne

More pictures here.

Bone china is a type of porcelain that is composed of bone ash, feldspathic material and kaolin. Bone china is known for its high level of whiteness & translucency, and very high mechanical strength and chip resistance

Bonnier de la Mosson’s cabinet of curiosities

By All Means Necessary – cover after Malcolm X image.

Rare book maven Andrew Roth has turned his powers of judgment toward photography in The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the 20th Century. Given two full pages each, the selections receive a bibliographic and physical description and a publishing history, as well as cover images and a few choice samples of their contents there are 500 color illustrations in all.

Japanese bookstore. Interesting selection of things you usually don’t get in the West.

Books at home. Great blog about bookshelves.

The use of human skin as a medium may be as old as human history itself – the flaying of defeated enemies or prisoners and the use/abuse of their skin dates back to ancient and perhaps even prehistoric times. The ancient Assyrians, in particular, were known for flaying their captives alive and displaying the skins on city walls. Legends and folk tales unavoidably contaminate the factual history of human skin use; books or parchments made of human skin are rumored to have been created as early as the middle ages. FULL ARTICLE.

Amazing project. Favorite books matched against average SAT scores reveals people who love Nabokov’s Lolita are…fucking smart.

More great boomboxes here.

Mel Johnson was the visionary behind the utopian BoozeTown. His city would be comprised of dozens upon dozens of bars and nightclubs, all with different themes. He was meticulous in his planning and fleshed out every detail. Street names would allude to alcohol, such as Gin Lane, Bourbon Boulevard, and 21st Amendment Ave; there would be a moving sidewalk and an electric trolley system which would help escort staggering drunks home (or to another bar); much of the alcohol would be brewed or distilled inside the town which would produce revenue; every bar and liquor store would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; drinks would be allowed everywhere, even banks and places of worship; the city would have its own currency, BoozeBucks; there would be a police force, the Party Police, but instead of harassing drinkers they would be there to assist them

Borghese Hermaphroditus

Boris Bidjan Saberi. Insane stuff.

Borsalino is the name of a hat company known particularly for its fedoras. Established in 1857, Borsalino produces felt from Belgian rabbit fur at its factory in Alessandria, Italy.

“Kidnapping”. Dark humour in 30 second spot for upscale fashion shop U&I. They carry Comme des Garcons, Vivienne Westwood, Philip Lim, etc.

Nice Japanese architecture studio. CCA is showing Japanese living stuff too.

The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, where males build a bower to attract mates. There are two main types of bowers. One clade of bowerbirds build so-called maypole bowers that are constructed by placing sticks around a sapling, in some species these bowers have a hut-like roof. The other major bowerbuilding clade builds an avenue type bower made of two walls of vertically placed sticks. In and around the bower the male places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass. The males spend hours arranging this collection.

Bowls

http://www.brainstormmanagement.com/

Russian photo agency.

It’s called charisma. (Austrian actor)

brandstrom stockholm. Nice Swedish gallery.

This photo will go down in history. It is genius.

L’étrange cas de Monsieur K. Amazing image.

Carving in books.

Brian Duffy documentary.

Brine pools are large areas of brine on the ocean basin. These pools are bodies of water that have a salinity three to five times greater than the surrounding ocean. Brine pools are sometimes called seafloor “lakes” because the dense brine does not easily mix with overlying seawater. The high salinity raises the density of the brine, which creates a distinct surface and shoreline for the pool. When submarines dive into brine pools, they float on the brine surface due to its high density. The motion of a submarine can create waves across the brine-seawater interface that wash over the surrounding “shoreline.”

British Lawnmower Museum

Nice work from Swedish agency BrittonBritton. Their hands deep into the art/fashion industry.

Been making leather bicycle saddles since 1866.

Brownian motion (named after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown) is the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid (i.e. a liquid such as water or air) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called a particle theory. The mathematical model of Brownian motion has several real-world applications. An often quoted example is stock market fluctuations. However, movements in share prices may arise due to unforeseen events which do not repeat themselves, and physical and economic phenomena are not comparable.

Pioneer of surf film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXq5iwl5WwM

Polygons have been trendy for a while. Now they’re on the catwalk too. Bruno Pieters – S/S 2010

Japanese magazine

http://www.bryanboy.com/

Some good stuff.

Bryce Canyon National Park. Despite its name, this is not actually a canyon, but rather a giant natural amphitheater created by erosion along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau.

Bstore in London has some great things (like these sneakers), also a cool blog. And they carry some of the best emerging and conceptually skewed designers around.

Great idea.

Barney Bubbles, graphic artist.

Buckypaper is a thin sheet made from an aggregate of carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes are approximately 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Bud Ekins was one of the foremost stuntmen of his generation. Born James Sherwin Ekins in Hollywood, California, he is known to most as the actor who jumped the fence on a disguised Triumph TR6 Trophy 650cc motorcycle in The Great Escape, and who drove the Ford Mustang 390 GT in Bullitt. He also coordinated the stunts for the popular 1970s motorcycle cop show CHiPs.

Alex Wiederin’s design agency Buero New York.

Over recent months, the 1925 Bugatti Brescia Type 22 Roadster has become one of the most celebrated of all Bugattis, having lain submerged beneath the waters of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland for more than 70 years.

Today I saw a banker father with his child on the street, and when they passed a group of homeless, the father put his around arm the child. It was disgusting and Hank would have written a poem about it. One love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSyhDbV9wHo

Bunraku is a form of traditional Japanese puppet theater, dating back to the 17th century.

bdv (bureau des vidéos) is a contemporary art video distribution and production company created back in 1994 by Stéphanie Moisdon and Nicolas Trembley.

A blog about book burning.

Buster was a dog belonging to Roy Hattersley, a British politician and former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Buster was a mixed-breed dog, as his father was a German Shepherd, and his mother a Staffordshire Bull Terrier. He was a former rescue dog adopted by Hattersley from Brent Animal Shelter, in 1995.

In 1996, Buster attacked and killed a goose in St. James’ Park, London. On 6 April, Hattersley was stopped and questioned by the police while returning home after walking Buster in the park. Buster was suspected of killing the goose, while not under Hattersley’s control, and a quick check revealed blood around his muzzle. As the goose was located in a Royal Park, it was the property of the Queen. The Royal connection, coupled with Hattersley’s prominent public position, led to national media coverage of the incident. He was charged with contravening Regulation 3(5)(b) of the Royal and Other Parks and Gardens Regulations 1977. On 20 November 1996, Hattersley pleaded guilty by letter, and was fined £25 for letting Buster off the lead (although he claimed that Buster had pulled the lead out of his hand), and £50 for letting him kill the goose.

In 1998, Hattersley published Buster’s Diaries (as told to Roy Hattersley) which were purportedly the dog’s own thoughts on his life and relationship with his owner, and in which Buster was characterised as having acted in self-defense.

Butoh is a contemporary avant-garde dance form which originated in Japan and which was first performed there in 1959. It combines dance, theater, improvisation and influences of Japanese traditional performing arts with German Expressionist dance (Neue Tanz) and performance art.

Byredo is a new fragrance brand from Stockholm, Sweden, that will launch five scents this summer. More info.

Byssus means both “a rare fabric, also called sea silk” and its fiber source “a silky filament by which certain mollusks attach themselves to hard surfaces”.

Liber Novus - NYT article

C.R. Cockerell, The Professor’s Dream, 1848.

Gianni Caproni built the “Ca.60 Transaero” in 1921. The fuselage was a giant boat, it had eight wings (with an area of 9,000 feet), eight engines, and the whole looks like something cooked up at Disneyland that you might want to go out in. If it were carefully tethered. It weighed in at 55,000 pounds. It flew, Scott tells us, once, from Lake Maggiore.  “After reaching an altitude of 60 feet the flying houseboat took a nosedive and broke up when it hit the water.” Where it sank. And, presumably, lives to this day, giving flying lessons to fish.

They had fun the 70s.

Calliste. Hair and make up agency in Paris.

Banned ad from the 90s. Calvin Klein was FUCKING AMAZING!