The history of tattoos goes back thousands of years. Though how this artistic trend came about is hazy, the evolution of the tattoo is sometimes extreme. So to honor the crazy, the awesome, and the just-plain-idiotic (you can decide for yourself) enjoy this collection of “fan”actical tattoos.

*face palm*

Want more tattoos? Check out “The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide”.

I’ve been obsessed with street art for as long as I’ve lived in New York. I can remember walking around the East Village in the nineties spotting OBEY GIANT stickers and posters everywhere and trying to figure out what it all meant. Years later, Shepherd Fairey is probably second only to Banksy as the world’s most-recognized street artist thanks to the campaign poster that helped galvinize Obama’s base during the 2008 election; but he’s far from the only one transforming wheat paste and paper into transitory, unexpected moments of joy. (And isn’t that the best thing about street art? Stumbling across a thing of beauty–and often provocation–left as a gift in the most unlikely of places, and suffering at the mercy of weather, municipal agencies, and competing provacateurs.)

Among my favorite artists working today is Swoon, a former painting student at Pratt and a Brooklyn resident, she makes life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts inspired equally by the German Expressionists and folk art.

Swoon Poster Art

She’s also known for her more interactive and site specific projects, such as The Miss Rockaway Armada, in which a group of performers and musicians floated down the length of the Mississippi River on rafts made from scavenged and recycled materials. Now she’s turned her eye to New Orleans and along with a group of artists and musicans across the nation is setting out to create a permant sculputural installation out of the remains of a Creole Cottage in the Bywater District. Called The Dithyrambalina, it will look like a house, function like a musical instrument, and be open to all. And while it’s meant as a permanent gift to the city, like the best street art, lord knows how its fortunes will bear out…

Scale Model of the Dithyrambalina

Check out more here:

http://www.dithyrambalina.com/blog/

and here:

Swoon’s Musical House Project

The first book in a three-book partnership to hit stores in December 2011

 
NEW YORK, NY (July 5, 2011) – It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced today that it has acquired publishing rights to the Tiny Book of Tiny Stories series with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s open collaborative production company hitRECord. The new book titled The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume I is scheduled to be published in December.

The ‘tiny’ book will feature a number of (very) short stories and illustrations developed through hitRECord.  With the help of his entire creative collective, Gordon-Levitt will cull, edit and curate the massive number of contributions into a finely-tuned collection.

“It’s very exciting for me and hitRECord – now more than 45,000 artists strong – to be working with It Books and HarperCollins to bring ‘Tiny Stories’ to the mainstream – a dream come true, really,” says Gordon-Levitt.  

“We think what hitRECord is doing is new and groundbreaking. We’re thrilled by the prospect of working with them to capture this mass collaborative art in book form,” says Mauro DiPreta, Vice President and Associate Publisher for It Books. He acquired the project from Creative Artists Agency.

Throughout the month of July, Gordon-Levitt is inviting the worldwide creative community to join in on the Tiny Stories collaboration.  Artists can participate by submitting their writing and illustrations, and they’re also encouraged to edit and remix others’ contributions.  The ‘Tiny Stories’ collaboration is already a hive of activity and can be found at the hitRECord website at:  http://hitrecord.org/records/407384.

Click HERE to see a video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt announcing the Tiny Stories partnership (starts at approximately 9 mins).

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About It Books: Launched in September 2009, It Books is dedicated to publishing exceptional books in entertainment, music, fashion, design, art, celebrity, pop culture and sports. It Books has published numerous New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestsellers including the # 1 New York Times bestsellers Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern and Red by Sammy Hagar as well as Getting the Pretty Back by MollyRingwald, Booky Wook 2 by Russell Brand, The Red Hot Chili Peppers by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead by Neil Strauss, All My Life by Susan Lucciand The EveryGirl’s Guide to Life by Maria Menounos. Upcoming publications include Dear Cary by Dyan Cannon and Beauty, Disrupted by Carré Otis. 

It Books is an imprint HarperCollins Publishers, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world and a subsidiary of News Corporation (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV). It Books can be found online at www.YourItList.com, www.Facebook.com/YourItList, www.Twitter.com/YourItList and www.Twitter.com/ItBooks.

About hitRECord: Founded and directed by Golden Globe-nominated actor and artist Joseph Gordon-Levitt, hitRECord is an open collaborative production company where members can contribute their work in various forms including music, videos, text and drawings. Members are then encouraged to add, edit, remix and collaborate with each other. HitRECord currently has over 45,000 active members worldwide. Over 1,000 creative contributions are added daily and over 100 new artists join hitRECord each day.  As with all of hitRECord’s money-making productions, profits for ‘The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories’ will be split 50-50 between hitRECord and the book’s contributing artists.

• hitRECord website: www.hitrecord.org
Tiny Stories collaboration page:  http://hitrecord.org/records/407384
• hitRECord Twitter: www.twitter.com/hitrecord
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Twitter:  www.twitter.com/hitRECordJoe

“I’m 70 years old . . . So for me $100,000 is very special. It’s incredible really. And I would like to show the quantity of it,” Feldmann said in an interview with the NY Times.

While one could say some vaguely poignant things about the piece’s interrogation of symbolic value, systems of display, and the wild inflation of the art market, what the curator of the exhibition and the NY Times art critics overlooked was this: dollar bills make great wallpaper (you’re welcome Apt Therapy). George Washington is a babe no matter how many times you see his face, and comparing the different signatures of United States Treasurers from the 80s to present day is more fun than you’d think (apparently no money was printed before 1983). Because the bills were pinned to the wall willy-nilly, the varying strings of front-facing bills and the backsides of bills created lovely, organic patterns connoting ivy-covered walls or palm trees.

Unfortunately for Feldmann, this cash-money wallpaper shtick is not new. It is, in fact, old news.  See below 69 Bayard, my favorite late-night Chinese restaurant which has been open for at least twenty years:

69, located on Bayard and Mott, serves the greasiest food your beer-coated stomach can handle

So after schlepping up to the Guggenheim (in the pouring rain might I add, remember that monsoon on Friday?), I realized I could have just walked a couple blocks from my house to 69 Bayard and spent that 18 bucks on Lo Mein, fried squid, and Tsingtaos for the whole table. There the walls are covered with personalized bills, reading Jack <3s Jill, this butt likes that butt, or X has mad swag/bling/racks—these bills aren’t just “used” and anonymous as in the Feldmann piece, but singular and inscribed, their messages taped to the wall for posterity.

By the end of the weekend I was cashed out in every sense of the phrase. The excursion to the Guggenheim cost me a bus fare, admission fee, a new umbrella, and a dire Lo Mein craving, but as the museum guard so aptly put it, “It’s just money.”

Do you know about The Burning House? The brainchild of Foster Huntington, it’s a deceptively simple premise that provokes some elegant and profound responses: If your house were on fire, what would you take? In the mere month and a half that the blog has been in existance, its attracted enthusiastic responses from around the world. Among my favorite items spared the flames: a great grandmother’s prom dress.

We here at It Books are thrilled that Foster has agreed to let us publish a collection of the best entries from the site, along with never before seen installments. It will be the kind of book that sparks endless conversation. But for now, you’ll have to satisfy your curiousity here.

Longtime novelist Howard Jacobson was plucked out of relative obscurity this week when he was awarded the 2010 Man Booker prize for his novel The Finkler Question. While American publishers scramble to buy up Jacobson’s backlist, It Books is proud to be publishing his next piece of writing in Eli Horowitz and Roger Bennett’s Everything You Know Is Pong: How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World. The book is a highly illustrated, beautifully designed tribute to ping pong, which, Bennett (co-author of Bar Mitzvah Disco and Camp Camp) and Horowitz (senior editor at McSweeney’s) argue, is the world’s most popular yet least appreciated sport.

“The Life Pursuit,” Jacobson’s 2,000-word contribution to Everything You Know Is Pong, is a cerebral meditation on the game of ping pong. To whet the appetites of all you paddle-wielding fanatics out there, here’s a brief excerpt of what Jacobson has to say about the sleeping giant of fast-paced fun:

“I have never met an ex-table tennis player. Once you’ve played table tennis you go on playing no matter how old you are or how long it’s been since you competed seriously…Table tennis, once you have played it with any purpose, becomes the very model for experience itself.”

You can read the rest of this essay, as well as writings by fellow ping pong aficionados Nick Hornby, Will Shortz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Davy Rothbart, and Harold Evans when Everything You Know Is Pong goes on sale November 2nd.

But to find out the real meaning behind the hit show you’ll need to read Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, the woman behind the highly popular blog The Footnotes of Mad Men.

In the book, Vargas-Cooper turns her eye to everything from Lucky Strike to Madienform, gray flannel suits to Burt Cooper’s Japonism, Grace Kelly to John Cheever — and examines iconic morsels from the show and the error. Very Short List agrees, Mad Men Unbuttoned is like a little time machine that takes us, as Mr. Draper so elegantly put it, ‘to a place where we ache to go again.’”

Still need more Mad Men in your life and on your computer screen? You can download two Mad Men wallpaper designs for your computer: What’s in Don Draper’s Desk and What’s in Joan Holloway’s Purse.

Buy the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders or Books-a-Million.

The John Jasperse Company has the New York debut of the brilliant new work, Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, June 16-19 at the Joyce.  If you’re in or around NYC you definitely don’t want to miss this one.

Via Joyce.org:

“When Jasperse makes a new work, it should be seen: end of story,” says Claudia La Rocca of The New York Times. You can see Jasperse’s latest work when the company returns to The Joyce for the first time since 2000 with the New York premiere of Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies. The evening-length piece explores the often fluid boundaries between fantasy and reality, and features a commissioned score by composer Hahn Rowe and live musicians from the critically acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble.

Buy tickets here.

(Photos via Joyce.org and JohnJasperse.org)