Cyberpunk’d: Cornell’s Boxes are Gorges

So a few months ago went all nerdcore and ordered $3 paperbacks of all of William Gibson’s old books. You know, guy who coined the word cyberspace, was writing about “the matrix” in the 80s, imagined we “jack in” to the internets through literal sockets in our skulls.

Anyway, we’re reading Count Zero at the moment, and a nodal point in the plot references Joseph Cornell boxes. Being embarrassingly unversed in art history, we looked ‘em up–little boxes of composed ephemera and second hand objects–french maps, cut outs of birds, newsprint–it’s like this guy is channelling an inner aesthetic we could never quite put our finger on. Here’s a little write up on a nice meta-collectors blog that we came across in our digging. We are amazed and inspired.

Atlas Obscura

We’d turned off our twitter, ignored our to-blog bookmarks, and generally gotten-the-fuck-outta-dodge when erstwhile SD contributor JC sent us a link to a new project from some old favorites. It’s Atlas Obscura, a wiki-like compendium of the odd by…

sorry for the troubles, we will be back

this memorial day, remember that we’ll be blogging again soon, we promise!

just in time for beach season

An encyclopedia of novelty & variety performers & showfolk.

Fat Folk, “Ethnic Curiosities”, Hairy Folk, Her or Him, Giants, Circassians, Bearded Ladies, Thin Men, Wolf Boys, Crab People, and More!!!!!!!

Uncommon Economic Indicators: Museum Edition

Brian Lehrer was talkin Museum budget cuts this morning, featuring several guests, including interviews with Laura Urbanelli of the Montclaire Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold Lehman. You can listen to the interview on the site.

Some things we learned:
- Limited exhibition display times (alternate days, mornings only, etc)
- Staff layoffs! (But are the directors taking pay cuts?)
- Four day workweeks, reduced hours
- Everything Must Go: current trend of “De-accessioning” material (aka selling off your collection). There are supposed to be guidelines, that are not always followed: Sell art to buy art, rather than to pay off debt.
- It’s a “Perfect Storm” of museum monetary shittiness
- “voluntary separation agreements” = buy outs

thanks and you’re welcome

A big SD welcome to our newest contributor, Laura, coming at us LIVE from Austin Texas. Her first post, KEEP OFF THE ART, is below. Welcome Laura. We look forward to more Museum reviews and generally droppin’ the Library Science.

BOMB the Borough

Just discovered B.O.M.B. — Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn. This glorious fake Museums seems to have a real location on Wallabout street, and a bunch of “artifacts” promoting good local causes, along with other articles of vague historical import or curiosity.

We’re especially curious about the physical space itself, anyone been?

We also learned about the long-gone Wallabout Market, formerly the largest produce market on the East Coast from 1801 to 1939, before it was destroyed and swallowed up by the Navy Yards, never to return.

fans in a flashbulb

Great vintage photography site, Fans in a Flashbulb.

Featuring:
45 RPM
The Butchers of Fort Greene Place
Let’s Eat

and more!

serving pirates and people

Ah, the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology has acquired an old server from The Pirate Bay for their collection. Last week the founders of the ‘Bay were sentenced to a year in prison. But the site’s still up, of course. We did, however, hear that a prime investor in the site is a member of an extreme right-wing anti-immigrant party in Sweden.

The Museum’s got it right:

The museum says making copies of copyright-protected material is nothing new and that music tapes were also controversial in the 1970s.

See also: Home Taping is Killing Music

rip judith krug

Judith Krug, Librarian Superhero, passed away on Saturday. Per the Times Obit, she fought against banned books since the 1960s, defending the public’s right to read and access “Huckleberry Finn,” “Mein Kampf,” “Little Black Sambo,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and sex manuals. More recently, she fought against restricting children’s access to the internet.

Thank you, Judith Krug. We are sure you will be missed.

nice reference

Library Journal has just released a comprehensive list of ‘best of reference’ 2009. Nice! We definitely plan to reference this list of references. For cheapskates/lazy home office bloggers like us, they’ve also included best of free web reference, which we’ve copied wholesale and pasted to the inside of this post (sticky, gross).

Clickhereformorenowjustdoit

cover me bad

This one’s too easy, and it ain’t a museum or a library, but we’re filing it under personal collections, as we tend to do with weird galleries and such that we find around the webs. The Worst Album Covers.

We want to have a stuffparty sometime, for the record.