Canadian Neighborhood
October 13, 2014Fine Frontiers
August 7, 2014Little Gobbets
July 22, 2014Masthead Contender
June 25, 2014Sounds Like a Tin Can Up Here
May 14, 2014Missing Foundation
April 6, 2014From a blog post that Sam McPheeters wrote about them:
Anyone living in the bottom quarter of Manhattan in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s is probably familiar with an eerie bit of graffiti that, for a few years, seemed to earmark every building on the lower east side. This Pynchonesque insignia – an inverted martini over a three pronged tally – often accompanied equally cryptic slogans: “Your House Is Mine”, “1988 = 1933”, “The Party’s Over”. In both design and placement, the logo seemed less like the cartoony tags of graffiti gangs than the cryptic markings utilities crews leave each other. These markings meant something.
Having moved to New York in mid 1987, it took me an embarrassing six months to learn that the symbol actually was an upside down cocktail glass, its author the industrial band Missing Foundation. MF claimed the logo as a tool of uglification (“property devaluation”), in a campaign to halt the high downtown rents creeping out towards both rivers. It’s unknown if the tagging ever hindered a single real estate deal; would a true or even prospective New Yorker balk at a spot of spray paint? But as guerilla marketing, it was magic ,the kind emulated by thousands of corporate “street teams” in the years since. For two or three years, Missing Foundation was the scariest band in the city. Their early shows occurred in vacant lots, powered by generators and abandoned, Viet Cong style, at the first whiff of police. In January 1988 the band trashed CBGB, setting fire to its stage and destroying some or most of its sound system. Actual damage, in dollar amounts, has been lost to rumor. As dealers of confusion, Missing Foundation were hard to beat.
Adios Hermanos
March 22, 2014Long Tall Sally
February 9, 2014This blooming search engine
January 29, 2014Maps
January 24, 2014Check Please
January 11, 2014Un Canadien Errant
December 27, 2013§44 – The key to modern life
November 20, 2013For the mayor mr rob ford
November 3, 2013Bado Kidogo
October 4, 2013Swedish prog band made an album with Afro 70.
“Bado Kidogo” translates as “Not Yet.”
Which is the most beautiful?
September 28, 2013Abba might be “glam rock”, but they weren’t.
August 11, 2013Stevie Wonder: Working
August 6, 2013…and a bun
July 8, 2013On July 10 Sotheby’s is auctioning Samuel Beckett’s autograph manuscript of “Sasha Murphy”—what would become Murphy (1938). The handwritten, heavily-edited draft fills six school exercise books and is sprinkled throughout with hundreds of doodles, in pen and crayon, “of women with huge, globular breasts, of bicycles, syringes and astronomical figures, of a mermaid and men in bowler hats” along with caricatures of Charlie Chaplin, James Joyce and others. But, to my taste, the best sidebar doodle (noticed by Peter Leggatt in his preview of the manuscript) is a rhetorical question scribbled in the margins:
What is my life but a preference for the ginger biscuit?
Taco Tidbits
July 8, 2013From Harper’s Index:
From the NYT:
And, from our recent visit to Longfellow/Dante:
There was the Aretine, who from the arms
Untamed of Ghin di Tacco had his death,
And he who fleeing from pursuit was drowned.
























