Whew, glad to hear that the age of ‘bloatware’ might be coming to an end. Apple releases Snow Leopard tomorrow, a month earlier than first announced. NYTimes tech guru David Pogue gives the $30 dollar purchase more than a thumbs up, looks like it’s thumbs up and a wiggle, calling it a “sleek upgrade”;

“In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard). It opens programs faster (Web browser, 3 seconds; calendar, 5 seconds; iTunes, 7 seconds), and the second time you open the same program, the time is halved. “Optimized” doesn’t just mean faster; it also means smaller. Incredibly, Snow Leopard is only half the size of its predecessor; following the speedy installation (15 minutes), you wind up with 7 gigabytes more free space on your hard drive. That, ladies and gents, is a first.”

*P.S. Lets not talk about the box, what happened to the design on the box, that image looks like clip art, Apple needs to hire the group that’s doing the packaging for InCase.

I popped this up on my Tumblr before I left for vacation, in case you missed it, a bit of a recap of Banksy’s show that started June 13 and is soon to close August 31. 2009. The elusive graffiti artist Banksy, unveiled his show at The Bristol Museum on June 13th. The artist filled three stories of the museum building with his art in just 36 hours under tight security, only a few museum staff were aware of the shows’ imminent arrival. In fact, apparently many of the museum guides only discovered that they would be working in a Banksy exhibition two day’s prior to its public opening after being employed via the Job Centre. The artist “remixed” the museum’s own collection by putting more than 100 of his own artworks among it – by far the largest Banksy show to date, of work mostly never shown in the UK before.

In a rare statement Banksy said: “The people in Bristol have always been very good to me – I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum”

Banksy Versus Bristol Museum closes August 31, admission is FREE. Thanks to UK Street Art, you can check out a microsite, where a near complete photo gallery of the exhibit, extensive video collection and selection of articles is now housed.

The staff of Pitchfork take a break from giving Wilco a rim job and unleash their picks for the top 500 tracks of the first decade of the 21st century. Click to skip to numbers 20-1.

Tumblr served 255 million page views in July, according to stats measured by third party analytics firm Quantcast. The NY based microblogging service is projected to serve over 330 million page impressions. That’s 50 million visitors in the last 30 days, 650,000 posts per day (about 6 new posts worldwide per second), and 1.5 posts reblogged every second, with 5,000 new users every day. Tumblr’s adding 5 new servers to keep up with the demand, in recent months an iPhone app was unveiled, there’s audio recording and flash based photoset functionality, great for onboard slideshows.

The Tumblr service is expanding, a new submission button where readers can contribute, via e-mail or the web is now in service; that’s cross hybrid submission/contributed comment functionality. Tumblr founder David Karp notes, “The author starts posting about a topic they care about, the readers start contributing, and before you know it, the author has become a curator. Tumblr has always been uniquely suited for this type of blog.” (Some of these stats paraphrased from TechCrunch)

TumblUpon also launched last week, the more you “like” a post the smarter the service gets, similar to StumbleUpon, the web toolbar recommends other posts of interests that fall within the framework of a users “I like” algorithm.

I’ve been using Tumblr since the summer of 08′ (see my Tumblr here) and the service keeps chugging along, growing in spurts. At it’s best Tumblr is an open-ended indeterminate set of entries curated by a great diversity of intellectual and cultural currents that offer context through a a variety of lenses; ethical, social, sexual, emotional, imaginative, political and so forth. It’s micro-blogging, it’s macro-blogging, it’s twitter streamed into the mix, (lifestream, even though I hate that term) comment and reader participation similar to the js.kit commenting system but with less fuss. No design, yet templates help you sort out a design if you like. It’s easy.

This is on the quick Post Modern curating at it’s finest (wait, did I just use the term Post Modern, wtf?!), try for the new, experiment and explore, test against subjective and objective consequences, learn from your mistakes, take nothing for granted, treat all as provisional, assume no absolutes…or something like that. Sure you get “dick tumblrs” and “muscle tumblrs” and “everything under the sun”. At it’s worst Tumblr is the domain of hunters and collectors, those manic personalities that used to underwhelm myspace comment sections with bandwidth munching animated gifs of kittens carrying ak47s. The question begs, where did you get that, perhaps what it is or is not is less important than where it came from. A little context please and yes, attribution at the very least.

The future of Tumblr, stay tuned, even SixApart/Typepad are rolling out a microblogging service that looks a bit like Posterous.

Photobomb is a collection of snapshots (and videos) gone wrong for one reason or another. Wholesome holiday snaps interrupted by drunk strangers, group shots crashed by a scene stealing crazy, or cute animals and wildlife that pop up unexpectedly in the foreground. Personal favorites are those well meaning, camera shy shutterbugs, attempting to capture a self portrait at home, over focusing on the flash, unaware they’ve snapped an embarrassing item in the background.

All in good fun and sometimes NSFW, but what’s most astonishing is online entrepreneur, and owner of Photobomb, Ben Huh is cashing in, to the tune of seven figures (and probably more) from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales, on his 20 or so odd websites (yes he also owns FAIL and I Can Has Cheezburger). Thanks to our desire to ‘overshare’ and network, there’s a never ending supply of personal photos ready to be mined from sites like Myspace, Facebook and YouTube.

Time Magazine recently profiled Huh in “Building a Media Empire Around I Can Has Cheezburger”

Warhol’s Time Capsules are a serial work spanning a 30 year period from early the 1960s to the late 1980s, they consists of 610 standard size cardboard boxes which Warhol, beginning around 1974 filled, sealed and sent to storage in New Jersey. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what made it into the time capsules, it seems like everything under the term “ephemera” was game, from photos, newspapers and magazines, to fan letters, business and personal correspondence, art work, source images for art, books, exhibition catalogues, and telephone messages, along with countless other objects.

Archivists, hired with $600,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and several other smaller grants, are sifting through all of the boxes, taking 6 years (that’s their deadline) to comb through everything. In the 18 months since the project began, the archivists have opened 177 boxes — each with an average of 400 items, some with as many as 1,200. What’s been found so far; a mummified human foot belonging to an ancient Egyptian; a piece of wedding cake from Caroline Kennedy’s wedding in 1986, a Ramones’ 45 record signed by the punk rock band’s lead singer Joey Ramone, orange nutbread sent to Warhol by one of his Pittsburgh-area cousins with a note telling him to enjoy it with a cup of coffee and an autographed picture of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

According to an article from the CBC, “Now the spouses of the 19 heads of states and representatives of the European Union coming to Pittsburgh in September for the Group of 20 global economic summit may also get a peek at the papers, stamps, photos, gifts and nicknacks that made up Warhol’s life. ‘I would like to give them a Warhol experience,’ says Thomas Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum, who will host the spouses for lunch during the Sept. 24-25 summit.”

Thank You.

This isn’t new, but I had to post it, Directors Simon Gesrel and Xavier Ehretsmann’s non-official video for electro-band Zombie Zombie (made up of mad scientists Professor Etienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman). Filmed entirely in stop-motion using G.I. Joe action figures, the short is a tribute to John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Title track is “Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free”. Audience Award & Best Technical Quality Award – Protoclip 2008, 4th Sevres’ international independent video clip Festival, France.

Taschen’s soon to be released “Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of AMG’s Bob Mizer” is the first book to celebrate the full-color late-period photographs of beefcake entrepreneur Bob Mizer. Mizer, the founder of The Athletic Model Guild or AMG in 1945, is often called the Hugh Hefner of gay publishing. Pioneering the fitness and muscle genre, during the Post-war years, U.S censorship laws allowed women, but not men to appear nude in photographs and magazines, under the guise of “Art” photos. Mizer started taking pictures of men he knew, both gay and straight under the term “fitness” and “health” i.e. full frontal tips for the um err health conscious.

This wasn’t just back room, dirty old man stuff, Mizer influenced figures in art and society; David Hockney was hell bent on meeting Mizer on his first trip to America, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, modeled for him in 1975. That’s what I call “real class”.

The book, hardly what I would call porn, is retro beefcake in all it’s wild and weird manifestations. Writer and editor, Dian Hanson (remember The Big Penis Book) put together a package containing over 250 photos, an oral history by artists David Hockney, Jack Pierson and John Sonsini, interviews with photographers David Hurles and Hal Roth, models Ben Sorensen and Andrew Sears. A one-hour DVD of Mizer films spanning 1958–1980, specially edited for this edition is also included.

INFO: Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of AMG’s Bob Mizer, Hanson, Dian (ED), Hardcover + DVD, 24.5 x 32 cm (9.6 x 12.6 in.), 288 pages, $59.99 (ISBN: 978-3-8365-1230-5), Multilingual Edition: English, French, German, Availability: September 2009

Now that I’m completely confounded, absolutely freaked, and slightly angered by Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Pygmy”; oh yes, the Columbine-like shooting spree by a closeted kid who has fallen in love with the teenage terrorist who raped him in a shopping mall bathroom, is indeed a quirky story line, but I ask you, just when does ridiculous veer headlong into super-duper ridiculous? There better be a huge climax to a novel that appears as a classified document, whole paragraphs available for deciphering as complete sentences are blacked out. Stay tuned about 100 more pages to go…

So yes, apocalypse seems to be on my tongue as of late, end of summer blahs, I dunno, lets continue with something I started yesterday (you really don’t want to read my snarky notes on picking a good barbershop).

Technology For The UnDead Part 2. About half of the New York Times “photos of the day” cover Afghanistan, if you’re not looking, you should be checking out The Lens Blog, only part of the story can be told in words, you’re getting so much more dimension with great photos.

Sgt. Joshua Engbrecht 18, of Riverside Calif., left and Pfc. Jack Shortridge, 21, of Long Beach Calif., of the U.S. Army’s 1st Platoon Apache Company, 2nd Battalion 87th Infantry Regiment, part of the 3rd combat brigade 10th Mountain Division based out of Fort Drum, NY, gave each other haircuts under the stars in Wardak Province in Afghanistan. David Goldman AP.

Transmissions from “It’s a Wonderful Life” Everytime a bell rings an angel get his wings, or Every 15 Minutes a Celebrity (or microcelebrity) Dies. Joanne McNeil makes a few good points regarding the technology of the (soon to be) Dead over at The Tomorrow Museum. Plucked from her article “The Daily Death: When A Celebrity Dies Every 15 Minutes”

“In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes. Already it’s happening. The ascent of the microcelebrities, the 24 hour news cycle, citizen journalism, and our darkest fantasies all collide on Twitter now. The website’s question “What are you doing?” sometimes feels more like “Who died today?”

Emerson said, “There is properly no History; only Biography.” I would extend that to autobiography too, but video obituaries; that’s something I need to think about, yet it seems like a natural progression, technologically.

Since 2005 the online version of The New York Times has been producing video obituaries in collaboration with influential artists, politicians and newsmakers. The series called “The Last Word” are elegantly produced affairs where subjects get the last word on their life. 30 videos have been shot, but only a few have actually had their run. Last Thursday, virtuoso guitarist and inventor Les Paul got The Last Word.

Australia’s national rugby union team, the Wallabies, have the backs of the Sydney Convicts (Australia’s only gay rugby union team, and current title holders of the Bingham Cup) and agreed to take part in the This Is Oz campaign, ACON’s social inclusion initiative aimed at fighting discrimination against Australia’s GLBT communities. The Wallabies decided to take part after meeting with The Sydney Convicts, club founder and former president Andrew Purchas told SX news;

“We’re very pleased that the Wallabies and the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) has been so responsive and willing to support us and come on board with This Is Oz. Having these kind of high level professional sportsmen giving their support goes a long way to breaking down barriers , and countering the stereotypes and supporting diversity and acceptance … Kids really look up to these guys and follow their lead, so it really does a lot of good.”

This Is Oz is an online photo gallery where people can help fight discrimination against Australia’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community. Part art project, part human rights campaign, making Australia a place where everyone belongs.

*Players featured are from top l-r, David Pocock, Stephen Moore, bottom photo l-r, Al Baxter and Stirling Mortlock. See more of the Wallabies.

“With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on to say what they’re interested in. That’s not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It’s exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It’s openness, and it’s great in a way, it’s people letting the community into their homes. But it’s not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself. People don’t have the tools for using the Web for their homes, or for organizing their private lives; they don’t really put their scrapbooks on the Web. They don’t have family Webs. There are many distributed families nowadays, especially in the high-tech fields, so it would be quite reasonable to do that, yet I don’t know of any. One reason is that most people don’t have the ability to publish with restricted access.”

This weekend marks the 6th Anniversary of The Great American East Coast Blackout, having a blog means that you get to look back a little and dig through the archives. Here’s what I had to say on August 15th 2003;

“Blackout…exactly 12 hours and 2 minutes from the time we were plunged into darkness….light. Awwwww, it’s over, and you know, it wasn’t so terrible at all, it was actually very amazing, more to follow.”

“4:11 pm. eastern standard time, the lights blinked, computers shut down, subways screeched to a halt, elevators stalled, anything and everything plugged into that giant Niagara power grid came to a complete halt across the U.S and Canada. Over 52 million people were left without electricity as an outage cascaded throughout the northeast shutting down the entire New York, New Jersey/Connecticut area, Detroit/Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, and all of my home town, Cleveland. Work stopped in almost every city, as workers poured out onto the streets or the highways in a mad dash to get home before nightfall. A massive gridlock resulted on the city streets.

NYTimes Voices In The Dark – Scenes From The 2003 Blackout (Now found Here)

This will long be remembered as the biggest blackout in North American History, of course city leaders were quick to address concerns that this was not a terrorist attack, yet the exact cause of the failure is still unknown. I was (surprise) working on the computer, finishing up a few items when the screen went black and everything else began to power down. The slow down was immediately maddening, but I didn’t see it as that unusual given our outrageously humid weather. I thought it a momentary failure, one that would give me an early start over to ‘Little Italy’ for the beginning of ‘The Feast of the Assumption’ (a.k.a food fest and annual oggling o’ italo-beef) Damn, I completely underestimated the severity of the outage, which was from my vantage point, a minor inconvenience.

Life at a standstill was quite nice, at least for a short time anyway. The white noise of day to day living powered down, first a slight hum, then silence. Without the glow of the lights, stars were visible from every area of the city, tilting my head back I could easily spot the big and little dippers. Neighbors poured out onto the sidewalks sharing news updates and chatting about the disturbance, it was funny to see some of the ladies about in their slippers and curlers.

Many people sat out on their front step to cool off and listen to battery operated transistor radios. Sure the heat was indeed a bit stifling but not that horrible and definitely survivable. The media kept exaggerating the concern of the ‘general public’, wondering if we were under a terrorist attack. It was a big power outage, the biggest ever, and sometime 30 years from now, I’ll be an old coot saying, ‘I remember the blackout of 03′! New Yorkers, American’s and Canadians alike are a resilient hardy bunch, and not as hyper-sensitive as we are portrayed in the news. It’s just that in this modern world, we are painfully dependent on infrastructure.

I wish I could say that I managed something exciting, but I did not. I managed a dark mountain biking trip around my neighborhood to check out the status of things, but mostly to cool off, then I feel asleep…sans headphones and radio, listening in on the airwaves.”

Junior beefcake, or super tweencake, good line meets good humor with Barcelona based illustrator David Buisán’s take on Superhero Pin-Ups for Vanity Teen Magazine (Free Download). Check out more of David’s work via his portfolio site and shop for prints through his shop on Etsy.

I parked my motorcycle beside the tree and headed toward the crowd. The moonlight caught the sheen of my black leather jacket, my 501 jeans, the steel tips of my boot caught the taunting smile on your lips as you stood waiting. Take it easy, I told you, but knew better. I remembered how you jumped the blog ship for twitter and tumblr and passed that news around like some juvenile delinquent. I couldn’t let you get away with it, I just couldn’t, I had to fight, I had to do something, right here, right now, I had to edit

… seriously though, I cleaned up some of the links on this page, and yes tons of tinkering under the hood. If I inadvertently deleted you, or you’re elsewhere, or perhaps I don’t have you linked at all, hit me up.

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival, the mobile, hallucinatory-extended family concert put on by Porsche driving counter culture capitalists Mike Lang and heir to the Block Drug fortune; John P. Roberts. This time the revolution will be televised, with an endless loop of the Aquarian Exposition no doubt, a virtual onslaught of books, films (even poor Ang Lee with his abberation “Taking Woodstock” I’m gagging already), press releases, myth building, and revisionist history aimed squarely at baby boomer bloodlust for nostalgia regarding their famed social landmark.

Wait, let’s get this out of the way right now, Director Michael Wadleigh’s “Woodstock” is hands down the greatest-ever concert/documentaries ever made with it’s epic visual grandeur and magnificent split screen effects, and despite the years, holds up quite well as a true classic. But anyway, allow me to continue…

Sure, I get the 3 Days of Peace, Love and Music part of Woodstock, although I would say that most of “that” music is what I consider bloat rock, minus a few choice performers who I believe were/are genius’. But I wonder, how much of a revolution can one have with an unlimited supply of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll keeping concert goers peaceful, placid and altogether passive. What’s really revolutionary is a generation that initially thumbed it’s nose at materialism, would grow to worship consumer goods, materialism, and slap “He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins” stickers on their Be Em Double Yous. Nothing wrong with success and wealth but I have a hard time connecting the dots between Peace, Love and Utopian Frontiersmen to the Venture Capitalist.

Yes, Woodstock was all good vibes and anti-establishment until the chemical co-op went dry and near starvation had the crowd munching on their love beads. Wavy Gravy and commune “The Hog Farm” could only do so much until the local Women’s Group, and The Jewish Community Center were called in to feed the crowd some 30,000 sandwiches, even so those supplies soon dwindled and despite what Nixon and the National Guard were unloading in ‘Nam, their 300 pound food drops were welcomed.

For me, and I suppose for my generation, Woodstock is, and always will be fastened to the murky depths of yesteryear, a hedonistic past hinged at an inaccessible point somewhere in print, on television and iTunes downloads. Social experiment…hmmmm maybe, but then again, let’s put this in perspective; when Woodstock ended, Sharon Tate had been dead for 7 days.

I’ll take the pessimism of the Velvet Underground over the optimism of Woodstock any day. It’s so much easier to understand urban paranoia, smack glorification and sadomasochism. Sure there’s no chart toppers, but there’s plenty of notoriety and nihilism to go around.

It’s June 1st. and I wanted to post a note to say that I’m taking time off to travel, spend time with family and friends, make some art and take some photographs; I’ll return after Labor day, on or about September 7. 2009. Please, keep up with me via my Twitter account or my Tumblr page (which life-caches a ton of other stuff too). Enjoy the summer.

The California Supreme Court handed down its decision to uphold Proposition 8. Iowa, Maine, and Vermont have made same-sex marriage legal, while the rush to ban the practice by popular vote slowed in 2008. The latest Transparency: KNOT TIED, is a collaboration between GOOD and Timko and Klick it’s a time-line of the changes to same-sex marriage laws in the U.S. showing where laws were changed via legislatures, courts, or voters.