As the young heroine of our favorite title in the literary nonsense genre proclaimed, “if I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.” In keeping with the nonsensical theme, we’ve explored one of the weirdest design genres that we can’t quite wrap our heads around: the upside-down house.
We think the architects behind these wacky creations must have had Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in mind; after all, who hasn’t been inspired by Lewis Carroll’s timeless tale of falling down a rabbit hole into a land where it’s always time for tea, solicitous caterpillars smoke hookahs, and turtles, lobsters and fictional beasts square dance. From Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s take on a famous work of uncompleted architecture to a capsized cabin in California to an upside down house complete with an inverted car park, click through to check out our dizzying roundup of overturned architecture. Could you ever live in a house flipped on it’s head?
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In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, writer Alexander Huls offers up an unexpected suggestion for “How to Enjoy Going to the Movies Again”: going to midnight movies. Specifically, he suggests going to those first, Thursday night-at-midnight showings of the new releases that are hitting screens that Friday, in order to be among the very first paying audiences to see a highly anticipated new flick. (Huls even admits turning the start time into a verb — i.e, “I’ll definitely midnight Prometheus.”)
The logic is, at first, a little hard to follow, as Huls is offering up these late-night screening opportunities as a manner to restore a faith in the movie-going experience that’s been sapped by non-stop talking and intermittent LCD screens. “As a committed moviegoer who once treasured the cathedral-like atmosphere of the movie house,” he writes, “I now find myself entering the auditorium anticipating a bad experience — sitting and nervously profiling every person who walks into the theater for their yet-to-be-committed misdemeanors.” This all sounds very familiar. So why would a moviegoer despairing of noise and distractions want to view a film with the rowdiest audience imaginable?
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By 1910, there were 2 million child laborers under fifteen in the US workforce, toiling in factories, mines, canneries and the streets. They were cheap and easily manageable. They wouldn’t strike. They had small hands handy for adapting to particular tools. Of course, being employed at such an early age, they suffered from serious health issues, spine disfigurements, bronchitis, and tuberculosis, not to mention being robbed of a childhood and education, treated as expandable cogs in the industrial machine. It took decades for the labor activists to make some progress regulating this workforce. One of these activists, New York school teacher Lewis Hine, had quit his job to investigate and document these abuses. Before he died in poverty, he created a crucial archive of these abuses. These photos, profiled by American Suburb X, show the scruffy, soot-covered, sun-blistered faces of this workforce. See the scrappy little gents posing in all their depressing precociousness in this gallery.
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Last week, a photo appeared on the Internet of Lena Dunham and Donald Glover sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn, apparently shooting an episode of Girls Season 2. (Groan-worthy NY Post sub-headline: “Dunham films with black actor first week back on set.”) As exciting as it was to see two of our favorite young creative polymaths working together, we were curious: Did Glover really have a role in the HBO series, and if so, who would he be playing? Well, TVline pinned down Dunham, and while she confirmed that the Community co-star/rapper really has joined the cast, she wouldn’t reveal anything about his role. “[W]e really want Season 2 to be a surprise to viewers, because there’s a lot of fun stuff planned, a lot of fun guest stars. I really think with Season 2, we sort of hit new heights of delirium and of fantastically lewd behavior,” she said, joking that she’s adopted the spoiler-protecting secrecy of Lost. No matter what he’s doing on Girls, though, the news that we’ll have an additional way to get our Donal Glover fix is welcome — especially when Sony’s abrupt dismissal of Dan Harmon means we don’t have high hopes for Community next year.
Welcome to another edition of our regular Monday stream-a-thon, wherein we hunt down the best and/or most notable records streaming for free over the Internet. This week, there’s the return of Sigur Rós, which has got us very excited indeed. There’s also the return of Regina Spektor, which will no doubt have gotten her notoriously devoted fans very excited, and the return of Edward Share and the Magnetic Zeros, which… well, yes, anyway. And also, there’s a new album from The Cult (yay!) along with a fine debut from amusingly named producer Chet Faker. Click through and get involved.
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Rupert Everett clearly has a thing for Oscar Wilde. He’s starred in two movies adapted from the fin-de-siècle author’s works, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, and has been active in the restoration of his tomb. Now, Variety is reporting the news from Cannes that he’s directing and starring in a Wilde biopic. Titled The Happy Prince, after the writer’s children’s story of the same name, it will follow Wilde’s dark final days, with a tone more comic than tragic. The film, which will be Everett’s directorial debut, will shoot next summer, with a cast that also includes Emma Watson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson, and Edward Fox.
Using colored pencils to create art is nothing new — unless you’re talking about the work of Federico Uribe, a Miami-based conceptual artist who uses the writing instruments as his material in Pencilism, a series of strange, eye-catching portraits of people and animals. Whether he’s fastening them together with plastic zip-ties to make sculptures or laying them out flat in textured “paintings,” the results are equally bizarre and stunning, revealing Uribe’s skill in repurposing common objects in surprising ways, a process that he compares to playing with clouds as a kid.
“Growing up, I never thought that this was art — I thought it was just entertainment,” he explained in this recent interview. “It took me a long time to understand that it was what other people considered art. I painted traditional paintings related to religion and sexuality, painful paintings, and then one day I decided that I couldn’t do that anymore and decided to start playing with objects… With time I learned that celebrating life was better than complaining about it, and so I do work that is intentionally celebrating life. Making people smile and remember that there is beauty out there, if you’re looking for it.”
Visit Uribe’s website to be delighted by more of his fascinating work, which includes elaborate pieces that he has constructed with athletic shoes, plastic forks, and coins.
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We know what “women’s fiction” means — or what the book industry has made it mean, anyway: family novels or girl-in-the-city tales with pink covers and swirly font. But what puts a book in the “men’s fiction” category? Well, we only have to wait until June to find out — that’s when Esquire will release the first volume of their new e-book series entitled “Fiction for Men,” which has a pretty self-explanatory purpose. So if “women’s fiction” is based on stereotypical ideas of what women are most interested in — family, romance, Cosmopolitans — will Esquire’s series of “men’s fiction” be rooted in beer, sports, and cooking outdoors? Well, maybe, but if so, they’re not telling.
Esquire editor in chief David Granger explains his idea of fiction for men as prose that is “plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another… And also at the same time, dealing with passages in a man’s life that seem common.” The first volume in the series will feature new short stories by Aaron Gwyn, Luis Alberto Urrea and Jess Walter (don’t get excited: Jess Walter is a man), so they’re definitely working with some quality authors — but will that make this moniker any more useful? Or do you think the series might actually get a few previously fiction-shy guys to read? [via Media Decoder]
Kitty Pryde is an apparently teenage white-girl rapper with a Tumblr and YouTube presence, who took her name from an X-Men character. Her songs are mostly about boys, and she sells them on a Bandcamp page alongside Mediafire links with notes like, “U CAN DOWNLOAD IT 4 FREEC UZ IM NOT GAY AND I HATE MONEY I GOT ENOUGH HAH.” Pryde is cagey about her age, leading fans and detractors to speculate that she’s either a frighteningly precocious 13-year-old or a 20-something impersonating a high schooler. The extent of her self-deprecation rivals that of Tyler, the Creator. So there’s no mystery to why her name is suddenly all over the Internet, often in the same sentence as Kreayshawn’s (as in, “Kitty Pryde is just another no-talent Kreayshawn” or “Kitty Pryde has come to save us all from no-talent girl rappers like Kreayshawn”).
The only thing that’s shocking about her sudden rise to fame is that her newest song, “Okay Cupid,” actually justifies the hype.
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When you get beyond the cocktails and the costumes and the showy emotional breakdowns, what makes any given episode of Mad Men memorable is the dialogue. Matthew Weiner and his staff are particularly wonderful at crafting one-liners — funny quips, penetrating realizations, earth-shattering statements that cause time to stop and personalities to crumble. This season, we’re keeping track of which characters get each episode’s five best lines, assigning points to winners, and posting a cumulative leader board to determine Season 5′s pithiest mad man (or woman). The results of last night’s episode — which featured the long-awaited and thoroughly bizarre return of Paul Kinsey, as well as some excellent Don/Joan bonding — are after the jump.
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