I have a couple of friends in this one, if you’re in the LA area:

Laurenn’s new art project, a massive thing:

In February, I’ll be presenting a gallery show that I’m calling Speaking to Las Vegas in the Language of Las Vegas. This is going to be an art installation that combines sculptural elements, performance, audio, video, photo documentation, and illustrated portraits of Las Vegas sex workers. The purpose of this show is to investigate the connections between the Las Vegas economy & the legal & illegal sex work that happens there….

Laurenn McCubbin

• Archaeologists find a 10,000-year-old weapon at site of new Ontario arena
  "She said the artifact comes from Paleoindian hunters often called the ?first people of Ontario.?"
  (tags:history )
• World around us: Prohibition of death – There are really some places where death is illegal
  "Prohibition of death is a political social phenomenon and taboo in which a law is passed stating that it is illegal to die, usually specifically in a certain political division or in a specific building."
  (tags:history culture )
• Rainbow trapped for the first time – physics-math – 26 November 2009 – New Scientist
  "Oh, to catch a rainbow. Well, it's been done for the first time ever ? and with just a simple lens and a plate of glass at that. The technique could be used to store information using light, a boon for optical computing and telecommunications."
  (tags:sci )

Do projects. Books and art and things. Available as paid print object or free digital object.

Do is Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield, "accompanied by a loose network of friends and collaborators", and I love their statement of purpose:

Some of our ambitions are to:

- develop words and images that make the people who encounter them re-see themselves and the world around them;

- find the most appropriate containers for our ideas;

- craft the kind of books that please their readers in the details of their conception, design and construction as much as in the things they say;

- and figure out what “do-it-yourself” might mean in an age when new production technologies, informational and logistical networks give the independent amateur producer unprecedented power to reach out and make things happen.

First up is Nurri’s TOKYO BLUES:

Now available for purchase or free download, Tokyo Blues is a photographic record of Nurri Kim’s 2002-2003 investigation into this humble industrial material and the very wide variety of uses to which it’s put in the everyday life of Japan.

From construction sites and homeless settlements to cherry-blossom viewing parties in the park, the ubiquitous blue tarp is a constant of Japanese life and a bearer of multiple registers of meaning. In sixty-four images from the boulevards, alleys, sidestreets and interstitial spaces, Tokyo Blues explores these dramatically different contexts, returning something “we see too often, and then forget to see” to full, vivid visibility.

http://www.asofterworld.com

My neighbourhood is full of former corner shops, now used as homes or offices. I imagine these shops were pushed out of business by the abundance of huge grocery stores just a few blocks over. I love to see how a space is slid along the continuum from public to private, the plate-glass windows obscured, sidewalks held at arm's-length with fences, gardens, hedges. See my collection (so far) on flickr, or all together here.

(thanks to Andrew Ducker for making me look at this, you fucking bastard)

Well, a bunch of people asked for SHIVERING SANDS as a download edition. So we’ve turned it into a PDF and put it on sale for USD $7, a little less than half the price of the print edition. And you can find it here at the IEU/Lulu storefront.

Discovered Xela just the other day. If you come across an EP by Xela called THE DIVINE, grab it. This is from the album THE DEAD SEA:

Out from this Wednesday, several pages up for your inspection at this link.