The Lost Format Preservation Society catalogues the rapid obsolescence of information technology, although we wonder if this sentimental geek’s delight is any more than the conservative myth of a “simpler time.” But we miss our 5″ floppies, too, not to mention command line role playing games, keyboards that spring and click, and beta’s totally unfair loss in the video cassette wars.
Don’t get my wrong. I shindig till 2am, I tip my cap to random strangers, I do my very best to infuse the world with punchlines and good cheer. My social algorithms are cribbed from something a little more polysyllabic than Jugs and Barely Legal, and I’d like to think that I’ve passed the evolutionary watershed of ‘Ugg, me hungry.’
But damn is it hard to discuss quality books during happy hour.
To wit: I am a veteran dork of endearing proportions. I make obscure references to mixed, sometimes blank-faced results. I’m prone to grooving randomly to quality Elvis dance remixes. And I have this nasty, recurring habit of cruising half-price bookstore shelves like an old-skool leatherman cruising a bathhouse.
Tell me you can relate.
You are a girl whose below-the-equator bloodflow skyrockets at the sight of a textbook. You treat episodes of Jeopardy like a performance of Chippendales. You think knowledge is an aphrodesiac, like powdered rhino horn meets sun-kissed strawberry. You probably own a t-shirt that says, ‘Librarians do it in the stacks.’
We should discuss.
Why do bookworms get me hot? Because dumbasses get me ice cold. I love and lust after women whose brainpower could lay the smackdown on Deep Blue, whose thumb and forefinger callous from rampant dogears, whose personal libraries could pistolwhip an ox. If you’ve ever discombobulated a boy/girl in mid-coitus with a tangent about biotechnology, let me say two things:
A) That’s fucking hilarious, and B) You’re my kind of girl.
Honestly. I have friends with fetishes for everything from feet to blindness. Like somebody out there in the internet void doesn’t get all excited over the Dewey Decimal System?
With all the pontificating and punditry these days about Peacocking and DHV amidst the triple-layered ironical viewing of The Pick Up Artist, Suggested Donation presents the following artifact for examination:
“Have you ever been to a museum on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon? Well you should check one out! Museum’s are jammed with chicks standing around looking at art. Girls…like art. It appeals to their fantasies. Maybe that’s why girls who hang out in museums are such perfect pick up targets…”
If this blogger crossover trend keeps up, we should be given a seat on the board of the Museum of Something We’re Into (MoSWI) any year now.
Btw, the Higher Pictures Gallery manages all copyrights for The Estate of André Kertész, so you may want to think about licensing one when you stop by the show. They make a great stocking stuffer.
Yale artist-in-residence Richard Gans has developed a creepy “talking head” technology which animates mannequins via a projector. The technology, codenamed L.I.P.S (get it?!?~?), has been installed in New Haven’s Peabody Museum. Does the docent’s demise loom near? Follow us on a joyous sleigh ride down the uncanny valley:
Paleo-Future, a blog which collects images and video clips of visions of futures past, lead us to the Museum of Modern Marvels, an imaginary institution from a 1937 Donald Duck short.
The Skyscraper Museum–which actually exists in Lower Manhattan–has their own take on the quaint futurism of yesteryear in an upcoming exhibition called Future City 20 | 21: New York Modern. (Nothing says futurism like alterna-punctuation marks.) True to its titular ethos, the Museum looks at the high-minded imaginations of architects and pop artists in the early 20th century through a skyscraper-centric lens. The show opens October 24th.
Not included in the Museum’s show but relevant nonetheless is the work of Hans Bacher at Animation Treasures. Bacher captures panoramas normally calculated by the perception of the moviegoer by stitching together stills from old cartoons to create large canvases of illustrated landscapes. His extraction of the Metropolis skyline from a 1942 Superman short is a revelatory presentation of pop-culture background as content.
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities features new acquisitions, unique documents, and visual and textual curiosities from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This ongoing exhibition is curated by Tim Young, Associate Curator of the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection, and Nancy Kuhl, Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature.
A blog about Museums, Archives, and Libraries: and the poor suffering lot who work in them. Vanity projects, public-private partnerships, despised boards, crass development initiatives, and the occasional burst of good news. Public-private edutainment, inside and out, thanks to the generous support of two starving archivists, Lockheed Martin, and you.
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