Drive-Thru Democracy
Lance Trammell leans out of his car for drive-through voting outside the Orange County Registrar of Voters office in Santa Ana, Calif. on Monday, Oct. 20, 2008. -AP Photo
Orange County now offers an electronic drive-thru voting service. By 2012, the Federal Election Commission will have successfully merged with Wendy’s. Vote Republican - get a bacuhn chzbrgr, vote Democrat, get some nuggets.
A lion riding a horse.
Finally.
Photographer August Sander and the World Beard & Moustache Championships
There is no connection between the work of German portrait photographer August Sander (1876-1964), who captured onto gelatin silver prints everyone from members of Parliament to Bohemians, gypsies, and the blind, and the Biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships, which will next be held in Anchorage, Alaska in May 2009. No connection until now. Nikita - 1, History - 0. More hair here.
Policeman, 1926
Willi Chevalier, Sigmaringen, Germany. Three time Winner of the Partial Beard Freestyle category
Alpha-Theta Border
Extended periods of freeway driving have a hypnotic effect on our mental state. Group meditation at 80 mph. Our brainwaves lengthen and slow to a Theta frequency between 7-8 hertz. On the freeway we are all somewhere between waking and asleep. The car’s windshield is like a movie screen, and everything behind it is not quite real, more like a projection coating our consciousness, which is sitting in the passenger seat. The wheel symbolizes the eternal return, as does the box of donuts on the dashboard just bought for $4.95.
Masakatsu Sashie’s Junk Planets
A spherical junkyard phoenix.
Japanese artist Masakatsu Sashie’s paintings are a fantastically eerie reaction to today’s technological clusterfuck. Televisions, radios, vending machines, smokestacks, car parts, and other 21st century detritus are all smashed together and crushed into junkspheres that float above ruined cityscapes in dismal weather. Each sphere creates a number of possible narratives. Are these floating smog-spewing orbs responsible for the destruction of the metropolis, or are they a recycled Phoenix, emerging out of the ruins of a dead civilization? There is a disconcerting absence of human figures or living creatures of any kind in the city-scape. Oddly enough, these dismal post-human worlds still manage to exude some kind of cuteness. Sashie’s creations borrow from the Otaku culture of video games, toys, and anime, and combine them with less saturated, dustier Western visions like The Road Warrior or Harlan Ellison’s A Boy And His Dog. I’d like to see one of these things battling Ego, the Living Planet.
Ego The Living Planet
LA is Vietnam
Welcome to Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a wrecking ball filled with confetti. You arrive, you get destroyed and showered in prizes. A weird bartering system is created between you and the City. Things are randomly stolen from you, things are randomly and magically given back. Your happiness and misery are no longer yours. They belong to the City, and it will do with you as it wants. What keeps you alive is style points. Go sailing. Stay at the Venice Beach Cotel, meet the world. An Indian computer programmetrix will teach you to Salsa.
You pay unseen dividends:
to the Twilight Zone perfect plastic women & weather - Your hair turns Blondie. You comb the boardwalk for the right sunglasses to make you anonymously famous.
to the freeways, to the sprawl - Your lungs lurch and heave for weeks as they’re candy-coated in smog. You develop a dance routine of maneuvers, routes, rendezvouses. You get rid of your wallet and just keep your money in your hand to save time.
The people are secret agents with dual identities and citizenships. Pharmacists are stand-up comedians. Mattress salesmen are masseuses. CEO’s write science fiction.
She is a dangerous two-in-one muse/con artist who gives you something to write about at every corner but, given the chance, steals your craft and takes your inkwell to the cleaners. She is the city of gorgeous mothers, outdoor pianos, grumbling Ukrainian pawnbrokers, beach-side murders, and black Aston Martin engines revving over the rumble of earthquakes. A city of listless writers writing lists. Living in Los Angeles is the closest I think a person can get to witnessing a physical representation of stream of consciousness.
“New York is like World War Two. At least you know where the enemy is, you know who to shoot at,” a TV producer tells me, “But LA is like Vietnam. It’s an overgrown jungle. You don’t know where they’re hiding. They could be anywhere.”
Words are being pressed.
Now I’ll fall asleep to the soothing sounds of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
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