Sour Harvest has a nice interview with Stella IM Hultberg in connection with her new show, Raveled, that opened recently at Thinkspace gallery.

Is it me or do these new pieces by Hultberg find her esthetic deepen and darken in very noticeable ways? In contrast to the images from the Silent Spring show just a few months ago, this work seems richer and more emotional. The point of view here is closer to the figures and feels more invasive. The colors are darker and more lush. The figures seem emotional exhausted, twisted in edgy frustration that shows in the higher level of detail.

Don’t get me wrong there has always been a touch of darkness and mystery to Hultberg’s figure painting but the dark emotions here seem less elusive and much more tangible. The sirenesque allure of these beautiful figures is still here but at the same time a dark emotional undercurrent rises off of the taught and twisted flesh and is conveyed through evasive glances. The results are startling and have certainly piqued my curiosity to see what she will do next.

So, while we Tweakers have been distracted by cold beer and warm sunshine, or in Prophane’s case cowering from the warm sunshine, letting this place fall into disrepair in the process, a couple of our friends have been hard at work, taking assholes and self involved mouth-breathers on both coasts to task and generally putting motherfuckers up against the wall in the name of revelatory misanthropy.

Firstly, a friend of the blog, and recent west coast transplant, trading here under the irony drenched handle Mr. Nice Guy, has decided to put his outsider status in the city of angels to use in an essential anthropological undertaking. He will endeavor to name number and file each variant of a particularly nasty strain of asshole native to the Los Angeles area. He explains his mission thusly:

Now, I know everybody likes to say that LA has "the largest number of total douchebag assholes per capita in the United States*", but I'm yet to be convinced. I came from a totally different place, clear across the country, and believe me, 'Asshole' (much like 'Redneck') knows no geographic paramaters. And yet...LA definitely seems to specialize in a certain kind of Asshole. I guess they're best described as the 'Egocentric' variety, in that they seem to actually walk and talk a philosophy which boils down to: "Only I Matter."

And so...In this blog I will attempt to actually enumerate and catalogue -- with a short description -- each of the LA Assholes I meet each day.

God speed in your quest, Mr. Nice Guy, it will be a race against time I’m certain as you struggle to catalog the ever expanding and mutating phylum of LA Asshole before that bedazzled strip mall of a city devours your soul leaving only a well tanned overly medicated husk of the sharp southern gentleman you once were. Our prayers are with you sir (though they be to flesh-eating demons).

Back here on the right coast, swinging a big stick of pathos for the home team, man like Jay Gersh, has begun a regular column for HackNYC aptly titled Memoirs of The Misanthrope. Finally there is a regular outlet for Jay’s boxcutter sharp vitriolic prose. Not only is obsidian black humor like this good fun, and a civic service, it is probably the only thing keeping Jay from picking off yuppies with oversized strollers from the Brooklyn clock tower. In fine misanthropic form he opens the column up by warmly welcoming his new readership:

First off, don’t read it, see if i care. No really, go away. Please. The guys at HackNYC.com post plenty for you to do around NYC, so go. Get out of here. No?

Ok. Won’t lie, wish you had gone but at least you realize at least you realize i can teach you all to embrace your antipathy, or perhaps to be a bit less despicable as you all are. Yes, NYC is a wondrous place, i’ll give you that. The problem is the people. But here i am, finally with a forum for my bitching and moaning, expecting those same people to read me complaining about them. Oh, the human condition. What a hideous image when depicted.

A gloriously hideous image indeed. Stay tuned for more from both these guys as I doubt either will be running out fodder any time soon.

I once made this work called Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It's from a book I read. I actually think Bacon lived like that. There's a nasty, angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror. It's like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the snow.

Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon in the Guardian.

They stood before the door to the guard’s niche in front of Penn Station and the man rolled up his mask again. This time he was smiling an easy smile and the hardness had melted a little from around his eyes. “You want a tip, buddy?”

“Sure.”

“Look, this is New York. We all just want to get along here. There’s a lot of bad guys out there. They got some kind of beef. They want to fuck with us. We don’t want to let them do that. You want to be safe here, you got to show New York that you’re not a bad guy. That you’re not here to fuck with us. We’re the city’s protectors, and we can spot someone who doesn’t belong here the way your body can spot a cold-germ. The way you’re walking around here, looking around, acting—I could tell you didn’t belong from a hundred yards. You want to avoid trouble, you get less strange, fast. You get me?”

“I get you,” he said. “Thank you, sir.” Before the Securitat man could say any more, Lawrence was on his way.

Tor.com has a new Cory Doctorow story. A cube farm of socially dysfunctional coders as a monastic order in an authoritarian society obsessed lost in a sea of surveillance, Doctorow succeeds yet again in tweaking everyday life just enough that our current reality snaps violently into focus. New Yorkers do not get a very flattering portrayal here. Though I'm not entirely sure we deserve one, it is upsetting to think that the classic stereotype of New Yorkers as fast talking, rude sociopaths is giving way to one of world weary wage slaves complicit in out own subjugation.

Also I absolutely love the illustration to the left from Red Nose Studio. Absolutely perfect.

Some people look at Coney Island and see a paradise of carefree entertainment. Others see a cesspool of gritty squalor. Few are those who gaze upon its shrieking kids, grizzled wanderers and fast-talking flimflam artists and see an opportunity for engaged political discourse.
But it was just that improbable impulse that drove the artist Steve Powers to open the new “Waterboard Thrill Ride” on West 12th Street, just off Surf Avenue, in the shadow of the Cyclone and a mere corn dog’s throw from Nathan’s.

It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam — in this case there’s SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “It don’t Gitmo better!”

If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!



I know we've been looking for an excuse to go to Coney Island, so hear is another.

via NY Times

The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France.

If the Holy See doesn’t comply, the warrior knights, renowned for liberating the Holy Land, will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish legal system.

via Charles Stross who believes this to be too silly to be believed even by the mad P.K.Dickian standards of the early 21st century.

Tweaker fave Sylvia Ji has some prints available from TheArtPrint including the gorgeous Rosa shown above.

via Juxtapoz.

Breaking news about breaking wind: the world's oldest joke is a one-liner about flatulence, researchers say.

Academics have compiled a list of the most ancient gags and the oldest, harking back to 1900BC, is a Sumerian proverb from what is now southern Iraq.

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap," goes the joke.

Randy pharaohs, thirsty ox-drivers and barbers also feature in the list.

The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century, and uses the traditional question and answer format to suggestively poke fun at Anglo-Saxon men.

"What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? A key."
Jokes have varied over the years, with some taking the question and answer format while others are witty proverbs or riddles," said Dr Paul McDonald, who led the study by academics at the University of Wolverhampton.

"What they all share, however, is a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion."

As today, world leaders make good foils for ancient humour, particularly Egyptian pharaohs, as shown by this 1600BC joke:

"How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? Sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile - and urge the pharaoh to go fishing."

One Roman jape dating back to the 1st Century BC details the Emperor Augustus touring his realm and coming across a man who bears a striking resemblance to himself.

Intrigued, he asks the man: "Was your mother at one time in service at the palace?"

The man replies: "No your highness, but my father was."

A small menagerie of new Damien Hirst pickled animals took a bow yesterday, including a new shark, a zebra, a calf with solid gold horns and hoofs valued at up to £12m, and even a unicorn - a white foal fitted with a resin horn, rather than an apparition from a fairytale.

There have to be more than a few nervous art dealers about, as Hirst pulls a “Radiohead” and skips the agent/dealer hierarchy to deal directly with the auction house.

No matter how I try to expunge the urges, I’m still a sucker for re-appropriated catholic imagery. Thanks Pope John high school. So this piece left, titled The Immaculate Heart – Lost, is my favorite of the new lot.

MURAKAMI LIKES CATS

His jazz bar was called Peter Cat, and cats appear in many of his stories — usually indicating that something very strange is about to happen. It’s a missing cat that starts off the whole surreal chain of events in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, while Kafka on the Shore features a confused and possibly brain-damaged pensioner called Nakata, who, after a mysterious incident involving a strange silver light at the end of the second world war, fell into a coma and woke to find that he had telepathic communication with cats. This, it turns out, is fortunate, as a conversation with an unusually bright member of the species, who is on the run from a strange cat-catcher called Johnnie Walker, ultimately leads to Nakata preventing the living embodiment of pure evil from destroying the planet.

As I said, something very strange.

From the amusing 10 Things You Should Know About Haruki Murakami at Times Online.