Total Arts at the Courtyard presents The Imagination of Disaster, Drawings, paintings, prints and installation by Marcelo Guimaraes Lima of the Panoptikon fame and Julia Townsend from May 15th to June 6th 2011. The Imagination of Disaster presents a visual reflection on the experience of catastrophes, cataclysms and disasters in our times: from global to personal. When Susan Sontag wrote her celebrated essay on the themes of science fiction movies of the Cold War period, the “imagination of disaster” in science fiction expressed the unconscious, and historically unprecedented, fear of atomic conflict. Going beyond the neutralization of historical anxiety, the artistic imagination of disaster in the early 21st century may have as a task to deconstruct the compulsory image of fear that paralyzes the historical consciousness of the present.

We love cake and these dudes are patting the hell out it:

In the wiki entry to Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, the formal name of what we call “Want cake now!” is highlighted by both William Wallace Denslow’s classic illustrations and in a gleeful picture named “Two young men playing pat-a-cake”.

Besides making donations personally, I’m donating 20% of all sales to relief efforts for the Japan earthquake and tsunami. That goes for both Mer-chan and Artisanal Soy. Everyone over there is in my thoughts and heart.

May I present this Photoshop of Horrors: the Georgetown Cupcake women for Jones New York. One of the things that makes me sad is the ad campaign is called “Empower Your Confidence” but Jones New York felt the need to whittle down Sophie LaMontage and cut off her left hand in the process (missing appendage circled in pink).

Sophie’s one of the “Power Women of DC” according to Jones New York but they still cut off her fingers (see detail from a billboard that’s around the city) in a sloppy hack job. Would a Power Man of DC be subject to this?

The thing that depresses me is that she’s a baker. Not a model. The woman worked her butt off build a food business, and still she can’t look like she eats. So in a way I guess I was inspired by Jones New York’s slogan “Visions, Outspoken, Always in Style…”
Visionary – Hey! Sophie LaMontage’s missing her left hand!
Outspoken – WTF I’m gonna blog about it!
Always in Style – Fingers are always in style. In this instance I find the middle one most useful.

We already posted that robots are a girl’s best friend, so is it really surprising that Huck Finn want to jump on the bandwagon? Kickstarter, which helps pair sponsors with creative projects, has a page dedicated to Replacing the “N-word” with “Robot” in Huck Finn. The project seeks to update Mark Twain’s tale of river runaways for the cyborg age. What novel would you like to see rewritten for a robot audience?

We sure hope that robot was a water-tight casing!