Gregor Gaida’s Aluminum Boys Destroy Art Gallery Floors:








Artist Gregor Gaida (previously) lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His figurative sculptures often depict aggressive, even violent people engaging with eachother under unknown circumstances, as with this pair of mischievous aluminum boys titled Attaboys. Gaida says that he often bases his figures off of images found in magazines and books.

The found footage is often no more than an impulse that is no longer discernible in the further development of the shape. Analogous to photography, my objects are three-dimensional snapshots. The characters are frozen in movement and often cropped along imaginary image borders. I transport the fragmented character of photos into the third dimension. Simultaneously, when dealing with color and options of shaping, painterly characteristics appear. Thus, the life-sized special interventions are formally attributed to sculpture but are equally part of painterly and photographic categories.

Attaboys appears to be a reinterpretation of another set of sculptures from 2008, Kind und Kreide II, where two similar boys are seen drawing a line with chalk. I don’t know if the artist intends to draw a parallel between the two works, but I’m going to go with it. It leaves me wondering what they’ll be up to in four years from now. If you happen to be in Germany you can see Gaida’s work at PARROTTA Contemporary Art in Stuttgart through August 4th. All imagery courtesy the artist and PARROTTA Gallery. (via anita leocadia)

[So very very lovely. -egg]
[Boing Boing]
Datamancer modernizes the steampunk laptop:

Datamancer has finally built an up-to-date laptop to go with his legendary steampunk keyboards. It looks like a Victorian music box, but runs like a kick-ass gamer laptop.

We are currently filling orders on the first small batch of laptops, but will be opening up another batch soon. Please subscribe to the out-of-stock notification below to be alerted as to their availability. This exquisitely handcrafted, limited edition laptop features a full-wood chassis, physically-engraved, lacquered brass keys, semi-precious gems that act as LED indicator lights, and a beautiful lid design with a gold foil map (other customizations available). It is the second revision of the ever-famous Datamancer Steampunk Laptop.

This laptop is made to be as functional as it is attractive, using an Asus gaming laptop at its heart with an Intel I7 2670QM processor, NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M graphics, 8 Gigs of DDR3 RAM, a glossy 17.3″ Full HD (1920×1080) screen, and a Super-multi DVD drive.

Datamancer Victorian Laptop

This New Yorker article makes a pretty important point, I think — not only does Obamacare help people who are currently uninsured, it helps people make different life choices — all of a sudden it’s a lot easier to quit your job in order to be a starving artist or found a startup or spend a year doing volunteer work. And that’s good for everybody 🙂 -egg

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

(via Instapaper)

[Note to self: will not be novelist. -egg]
You’ve got to sell your heart:

Late-1938, eager to gain some feedback on her work, aspiring young author and Radcliffe sophomore Frances Turnbull sent a copy of her latest story to celebrated novelist and friend of the family, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Before long the feedback arrived, in the form of the somewhat harsh but admirably honest reply seen below.

(Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters; Image: F. Scott Fitzgerald, via.)

November 9, 1938

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the “works.” You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.