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- <3
15
May
Walt Disney photographed by Edward Steichen, 1933.
Human condition at it’s worst
(Source: crazycrimeclowns)
Dancers, 1954 by Ferruccio Ferroni
![theatlantic:
Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man
At 11 p.m Monday, the Columbia University Human Rights Review published and posted its Spring 2012 issue — devoted entirely to a single piece of work about the life and death of two troubled and troublesome South Texas men. In explaining to their readers why an entire issue would be devoted to just one story, the editors of the Review said straightly that the “gravity of the subject matter of the Article and the possible far-reaching policy ramifications of its publication necessitated this decision.” […]
The Review article is an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work. And it ought to end all reasonable debate in this country about whether an innocent man or woman has yet been executed in America since the modern capital punishment regime was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1976. The article is also a clear and powerful retort to Justice Scalia in Kansas v. Marsh: Our capital cases don’t have nearly the procedural safeguards he wants to pretend they do.
Read more. [Image: Corpus Christi Police Department]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m42illHuOP1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man
At 11 p.m Monday, the Columbia University Human Rights Review published and posted its Spring 2012 issue — devoted entirely to a single piece of work about the life and death of two troubled and troublesome South Texas men. In explaining to their readers why an entire issue would be devoted to just one story, the editors of the Review said straightly that the “gravity of the subject matter of the Article and the possible far-reaching policy ramifications of its publication necessitated this decision.” […]
The Review article is an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work. And it ought to end all reasonable debate in this country about whether an innocent man or woman has yet been executed in America since the modern capital punishment regime was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1976. The article is also a clear and powerful retort to Justice Scalia in Kansas v. Marsh: Our capital cases don’t have nearly the procedural safeguards he wants to pretend they do.
Read more. [Image: Corpus Christi Police Department]
Lawyer Searches for Missing Moon Rocks
The dark suit and tie that Joe Gutheinz wore set him apart from other customers inside a Texas eatery where the usual attire is jeans and cowboy hats. An appetite for down-home cooking wasn’t what brought the former NASA investigator to the Pitt Grill recently. He was on a quest to identify and maybe recover some of the rarest treasure brought to Earth and then lost: moon rocks.
“We’re educating the states and countries of the world about how much they’re worth on the black market and we need to increase the security in museums and need to put them back on display,” Gutheinz says.
Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Lawyer-Searches-for-Missing-Moon-Rocks-051512.aspx
Image description: In 1817, Karl Drais, a young inventor in Baden, Germany, designed and built a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was straddled and propelled by walking swiftly. Drais called it the laufmaschine or “running machine.”
By 1818, the draisine craze reached the United States, but the high cost of the vehicle, combined with its lack of practical value, made it little more than an expensive toy. The two-wheeled vehicle would not become sustained until pedals were added in the late 1800s.
Photo from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Artist Christina Freeman began her MFA thesis project, Plums for Trash, by taking a suitcase full of odds and ends she didn’t need from New York City to outdoor markets throughout Sofia, Bulgaria. She traded her objects in these markets, often for objects that had been pulled out of the waste stream.
That was just the beginning of a rather fascinating experiment in adding value to objects via exchange, described in full here: Plums for Trash and the Object Ethnography Project: Praxis-Based Value Networks « Discard Studies.
Basically Freeman came home with a suitcase full of stuff that by all appearances was just as useless as what she’d left with. But of course now there was this whole story about the things. Then she made another trip to Bulgaria and did it all over.
And somewhere along the way she got hooked up with someone else’s story/thing experiment: The Object Ethnography Project, which is associated with NYU, and headed by Max Liboiron. The Object Ethnography project also deals with exchange value of useless stuff, but is more explicit about including the object’s story. Basically people donate objects and wrote up the objects’ stories: its history or its meaning to the donor, etc. If you see something you want, you can get it by donating your own object and story.
Somebody donated this light fixture, pictured above, explaining how they found it on the beach and subsequently learned that this particular beach (Dead Horse Bay, in Brooklyn) has a lot of weird garbage because a lot of nearby houses were basically razed to make way for a bridge project; the resulting debris was put in a landfill whose cap failed, and thus it’s plausible that this fixture may have come from someone’s house who didn’t want to leave.
In any case Freeman read that story and she decided to participate in the Object Ethnography Project, so she swapped a taxi top that she’d picked up in Bulgaria.
Now, as the culmination of her thesis, she’s taking all the objects she’s ended up with, is having a gallery show, inviting the public to bring unwanted things, and swap. It opens tomorrow:
May 16-June 16, 2012, at Times Square Gallery, 450 W. 14th St, NYC 10036. The opening reception is May 16th from 6-8pm. Gallery hours are 1-6pm Tuesday through Saturday, and Christina Freeman will be available for trading on Fridays, Saturdays, and by appointment (please contact her at christinahfreeman@gmail.com if you are interested).
Freeman (on the right) trading objects in Sophia.
(via Plums for Trash and the Object Ethnography Project: Praxis-Based Value Networks « Discard Studies)
Tom Tomorrow, “The Austerions.”
15
May
(Source: zero--point)
