techyum ::

After seeing the selection of NY MOMA (New York Museum of Modern Art) comment cards as separated out by child visitors, it seems that the museum does please overall, yet still leaves quite a bit to be desired in the dinosaur department. You can see all the “I went to MOMA and…” cards here, but my favorite selections are in the MOMA post where they made a gallery of all the responses from kids. I’ll be the first to suggest that all art, film and TV be critiques exclusively on paper with No. #2 pencils by the under-12 set. Vegetemoose for the win. Someone call Arianna Huffington, as we’ve found a crop of tastemakers to fill the ranks of TV and film bloggers she can’t seem to replace on those AOL brands she’s managing…

There’s a lovely tribute to the late Warhol superstar and sometime Velvet Underground collaborator Nico over at novelist Dennis Cooper’s Blog.

The author, David Ehrenstein, presents it for “Nico Day” — did you even know it was Nico Day last weekend? I didn’t — and I bet Hallmark doesn’t, either. Anyway, the tribute features a great array of images and links to YouTube footage, much of it random-feeling — like the bits and pieces of Nico’s career.

The text is mostly factual and short on commentary until the very end, when there’s a bunch of truly bizarre text at the end that makes me think Ehrenstein mighta cut and pasted this from his Facebook page. It’s interesting on a whole ‘nother level.

The weirdness of the text at the end made me pontificate on the kind of crap I would have gone through in 1987 to find video footage of Nico, or anyone connected with the Velvet Underground, really.

I would have driven to San Francisco and scoured the town’s second-hand record stores finally found a bootleg version of some Italian documentary on Nico on Beta at a vinyl joint in the Haight and then run out of gas on the way back and spent the night sleeping in the back seat of a ’76 Dodge parked in a cornfield, cradling the tape and crooning, “She’s a femme fatale…”

Then, said bootleg footage obtained, I would have hung out with some really creepy weirdo I met through my job at the grease factory who was the only person I knew who had a Beta machine and liked the Velvet Underground, with both of us staring at the screen and asking, “You’re sure you don’t know anyone who speaks Italian?”

Then, halfway through, when the guy’s girlfriend stumbled home from her job at the strip joint out on I-5 and proceeded to shoot up heroin in front of me and then vomit on my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas while the eighteen minutes of Nico interview footage on the $50 Beta tape lapsed into an old half-demagnetized version of “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly,” I would have thought:

“This is it, man. I’m living the Bohemian dream.”

Those were the days, bubba. It’s a hell of a lot easier now; I just sit here drinking coffee and waiting for the Google Alerts to roll in.

Anyway, the piece came to me through a blog called Grounds for Appeal, which promises “Criminal Defense and Rock & Roll.” I’m not sure whether that’s cooler or less cool than “Comedy Traffic School” or tour guides who sing, so I’ll just leave it be.

The official story on Penthouse founder Bob Guccione has always been that he entered the porn business in 1964 with the launch of Penthouse, which would go on to become the slutty rival of “nice girl” Playboy, serving as the #2 nudie mag in the country for a number of years before, in the ’80s, overtaking Playboy.

But according to Talking Points Memo‘s article today based on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Guccione’s FBI file. It seems our man Bob engaged in the charmingly 1950s occupation of selling nudie pics by mail, based on a personal letter he wrote to potential customers, signing it as “Robert Gucci.” The bargain price? Just $2 for 10 photos.

Back in 1956, when he first came to the FBI’s attention, this was called “sending obscene photographs through the mail,” and the FBI dropped the investigation when Guccione’s company went out of business. But the really fascinating thing is Guccione’s “marketing message” in the “personal” letters.

Talking Points Memo has a scanned copy of the letter, and it’s utterly fascinating. In it, Guccione, who started out as a painter, describes how his appreciation for the female form reached the kind of fascination that just, um…couldn’t be copied by a painter. He said this:

I began to compare the effort that my hands had made with the living image of the girl before me. I saw the pink, fleshy tones, the bronze and the umber with which nature had burnished her skin; I saw the full, ripened breast, the eloquent face, the proud, sculptured turn of the hip; I saw the eyes and the mouth and the vivid expression of youth; I saw the complete and perfect form of life and I knew that here was the original and the real masterpiece and that my own was but the poorest copy.

[Link.]

To anyone who’s ever read copy from the “collector’s market” from those years, this is classic doublespeak for “These girls are naked!” but it carries such a retro charm that it makes me wax nostalgic. Ah, the fifties…a more innocent time, before any mother in America had to face the horrible news that her son was the marketing guy who invented the term “ball snot.”

More important to the FBI in later years, however, were their investigations into Guccione’s reputed Mob connections, which were many and varied. He tried to open a casino in Atlantic City in the eighties, but was foiled by an investigation into his connections to organized crime.

Later FBI investigations involved a Reagan-appointed Congressional investigator (whose name was redacted), and an investigation into whether Guccione knowingly allowed Penthouse to hire underage models.

One thing he certainly did was sell an issue of Penthouse with a 16-year-old Traci Lords as a centerfold — but Penthouse was certainly not alone in being duped by Lords. TPM points out that the Lords incident and Guccione’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI when he published the Unabomber’s famous letter in Penthouse are — curiously — missing from the file.

It’s a long article, and damn good reading. It came to me via Susie Bright, whose post on her memories of Guccione (and observations about the Penthouse empire and its place in publishing in general) also makes damn good reading.

Apparently it isn’t illegal to buzz the Statue of Liberty, the sides of condo buildings, container ships or traffic crossing the Brooklyn Bridge with a remote-controlled plane, as this chap proved when he decided to record this stunning video.

It turns out that as long as you maintain line of sight with the plane things are ok. And if you have a vantage point that affords you a long line of sight along with a capable plane, then you too can create footage like this.

[via HackerNews]

The New York Times has a great article today on the Subway Art History project by a collective called Slavery that recreates some of NYC’s classic graffiti with a modern twist — like “Joan of Arc” image here, a recreation of a famous subway painting, “Hand of Doom,” that you can see in the accompanying Times photo gallery.

[They are] the works of a newly formed collective of (mostly) former graffiti writers in their 20s and 30s, who have embarked on an unusual citywide campaign to summon 50 or more of the most famous pieces of old-school graffiti out of the history books and back onto the streets. The project, called “Subway Art History,” is unusual not only because the artists are making the pieces with the permission of businesses, schools and other perhaps nostalgic owners of blank vertical space, but also because of the nature of the pieces themselves. They are expressions of homage in a subculture that has almost always been defined by fierce competition, intense striving for originality and a kill-the-elders attitude toward the past.

…In New York the idea is to use the pieces to try to teach a two-part history lesson. The first is about the glories (as the collective sees it) of the early days of graffiti and the invention of a vernacular art form that has swept the world. The second lesson is about world history itself, in neighborhoods where education remains low on the list of priorities for many struggling teenagers.

[Link to NYT Article]

[Link to NYT Photo Gallery]

[via Streetsy]

Former Colombo crime family captain turned born-again preacher Michael Franzese gave Nightline a meaty interview yesterday about his departure from the Mob and why he still won’t testify for the government against his former Mafia associates.

When Franzese was a member of the Colombo crime family, his operation reportedly skimmed $8-9 million a week from the illegal transportation of untaxed gasoline. In the 1980s, Franzese was probably street boss of the Colombo family for a time, following the incarceration of Carmine “The Snake” Persico and Franzese’s own father, Mob legend John “Sonny” Franzese.

Oh, and speaking of Sonny Franzese, Michael here also discusses his attempts to save the soul of his father, whose favorite method of disposing of corpses reportedly involved a kiddie pool. After years in and out of prison, Sonny was convicted again when, at the age of 92, he was recorded on FBI wiretaps discussing the extortion of profits from NYC strip clubs. In that case, which finally put Sonny away for good, wanna know who wore the wire? Michael’s brother John Franzese. All in the family, indeed.

The FBI reports that despite his incarceration, the elder Franzese remains the Colombo Family’s underboss.

Now outta the Mob — and still never having testified — Michael runs the lecture circuit, talking to professional athletes about the dangers of gambling. He’s also written books with the greatest subtitles ever, including “How the Yuppie Don Left the Mafia and Lived to Tell His Story” and “Business Tips From a Former Mob Boss.”

The man arrested last night for scaling San Francisco’s 60(ish) story Millennium Tower — that’s the big one that screws up your view as you come in over the bridge — is 54-year-old veteran climber and cancer survivor Dan Goodwin, a Lake Tahoe resident who’s also climbed the Sears Tower in Chicago. Here’s the story in the NY Daily News, the Examiner, KGO Channel 7, and definitely don’t miss the Chron’s slideshow, linked above.

Goodwin wasn’t exactly cynical enough to be doing it to promote his self-published book, which came out at the beginning of 2010, with a foreword by Stan Lee; Goodwin said on his website he does it to promote skyscraper defense against terrorist attacks, and to inspire other cancer survivors. But let’s just say the thing’ll probably sell briskly in San Francisco.

That’s the good news. The great news? Welcome to the digital age! KGO-TV streamed live footage of Goodwin climbing. I haven’t been able to find the entire ascent, or at least the entire KGO stream, online, so if anyone finds it, please post a link in the comments.

Goodwin climbed without ropes, using suction cups to make it up the side of the 645-foot apartment building. The feat took him about three hours, from 2:30pm to 5:30pm yesterday. He put up an American flag before authorities took him into custody. The Millennium Tower is either 58 or 60 stories, depending on whom you ask.

Goodwin, also known as SpiderDan or more commonly SkyScraperMan, has climbed a lot of buildings. Here’s some TV footage of him climbing John Hancock Center in Chicago — 100 stories, 1,127 feet:

And his legendary Sears Tower ascent in 1981:

In the 1980s, Goodwin also climbed the Renaissance Tower in Dallas, Simon Bolivar Center and Parque Central Complex in Caracas, Venezuela, the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Nippon Television Tower in Tokyo, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles and the CN Tower in Toronto. 1986 was his last major ascent.

We can only imagine the hell which hath no fury like the cats who were dressed up like Raggedy Ann, Carmen Miranda, Elvis and more humiliating acts of “cat fashion” than were previously imaginable — someone had their closet full of YSL and Manolos pissed and shredded in somewhere in New York last night. This much is certain.

In a bizarre yet hilarious and perverse ritual, the New York Algonquin Hotel had a 15th birthday party / cat “fashion show” for their famous resident kitteh, Matilda (gallery link). Possibly because Matilda delights in nonconsensual pedigree humiliation, fancy cats were dressed in fancy pants for the occasion. Our advice: don’t try this at home, unless you didn’t need that extra quart of blood.

Gothamist has the hyooge gallery from the fashion show. In case you need it.

Every time someone poops out an item about a celebritard joining Twitter, we all die a little inside — especially when they then tweet in all-caps, or troll their followers for stuff (especially validation of their fragile, fragile egos). Case in point with Kanye West, who discovered that Hollywood celebs can easily troll for even more attention by doing social media publicity stunts. While this passed like another short storm of mediocrity through the neighborhood, something unexpectedly intelligent and funny came out of it: Twitter user @JoshACagan has been remixing n00b Kanye’s tweets with cartoons from The New Yorker and the results are pure pleasure.

See the whole collection here (twitpic.com, via The New Yorker’s Tumblr, newyorker.tumblr.com)

About 7 hours ago the Coast Guard released its video of the US Airways crash, and while it’s about 10 minutes long, it’s well worth watching. In one moment, you can see what looks like a flight attendant slip off the wing of the plane and into the water, quickly noticed by someone nearby who rushes to pull them from the water. The close-ups are really cool. The video is on several news sites which have it proprietarily embedded, but who needs the NYT? Not us. Yes, there was live coverage once the news crews arrived, but seeing the splash is intense.

Image of plane seats and life preservers by toolaidback.
There is also a Miracle on the Hudson River pool (full of fantastic photos), which I find unfortunately named. Why? Because I attribute the success of the passengers’ survival to the unbelievable skill and experience of the pilot and crew, not by divine intervention. These people were the best trained, of highest technical skill, and worked all their lives to be able to perform the way they did. They deserve the honor of being heroes for their hard work and bravery, not because divinity intervened. Unless one thinks the geese were also an “act of God”. And that would be weird.