The Bittersweet Art of Cutting Up Books

"QUANTUM SHOT" #479Link - article by Avi Abrams Unusual Book & Page Sculptures, Part 2 We wrote before about new trend of making art statements and sculptures out of used books (see our Part 1). Some readers complained that they abhor the idea of cutting up books, no matter what value the book might still have or what's printed inside. Without entering this discussion, let us just say that most original art requires an unusual media of expression - and be glad it's not your run-of-the-mill Twitter messages that make it into a work of art... yet. Books being transformed back into trees... sort of We'll start with the book sculptures by Jacqueline Rush Lee, one of the most original "book transformer". (image credit: Jacqueline Rush Lee) And then cube slice is even more impersonal and unnatural shape, more suitable to recycling (you can say these books were "recycled" into art) - These installations also seem to explore the idea of sheer paper mass that went into making all these books. Vases!

Articles: The Social History of the MP3 Considering all the new music we have to sort through so far in the 21st century, we've sure been focusing an awful lot lately on two of the biggest stars of the 20th. Decades after their respective popular peaks, recent events reminded us, neither the Beatles nor Michael Jackson have loosened their grip on our imagination. Yet one particular thing I noticed amidst the nostalgia surrounding the latest (and likely last) Beatles CD reissues, and Jackson's sudden passing was a sense of resignation that the eras within which both stars emerged seem highly unlikely to happen again. The Beatles, in 1963-64 and 1967, and Michael Jackson in 1983-4 arguably represented for pop music what World Cups, the Olympics, and Super Bowls do for sports, and what blockbuster summer hits do for movies: the ability to command everyone's attention at once. The cassette "crisis" seems quaint when compared to the rise of the mp3. Let's not get carried away, though. Next> The MP3 Story Begins

brutal_honesty: Amazon removed its customer-based report Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code". I really hate reputation systems based on user input. I'm logged into Amazon at a far later date and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently. So I script some quick bash.#! There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/. and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon. Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books: Edit:

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