Culture Archive

The Poetry Brothel

By Amy Thibodeau, June 18, 2010, 12:00 am in Art, Culture, Past

Poetry has always been passionate and even a wee bit sexy. From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Kissing Helena, “Kissing Helena, together/With my kiss, my soul beside it/Came to my lips, and there I kept it …” to Dylan Thomas’s In My Craft or Sudden Art, “When only the moon rages/And the lovers lie abed/With all their griefs in their arms …” sex and love have been a natural theme throughout the ages.

In an excellent acknowledgment of this fact, a group called the Poetry Brothel are looking to throw off the shackles of black, itchy woolen turtlenecks and berets, and reclaim the fun, quirky spirit of poetry:

The Poetry Brothel is foremost interested in showcasing a diverse roster of emerging and established poets. However, our events are also interactive performance art pieces based on the concept of the prewar brothels in the United States and Europe. Each night The Madame presents a rotating cast of both male and female poets engaged in a night of literary debauchery and private poetry readings. The poets act as “whores,” making audience members “johns,” but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry in private, one-on-one readings. For a small fee, all of the resident “whores” are available for these sequestered readings at any time during the event. Of course, any good brothel need a furtive “front” or cover; ours is part saloon and part salon, offering a full bar with absinthe, live music, live painting, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and gamblers with newly integrated performances and installations from our poets and other artists at each event. (source)

Where can I sign up?

Image: The Poetry Brothel xxx by mirosim

0
Comment Tweet

Want To Be a Zombie™ Super Hero™? You’ll Need to Ask Marvel™.

By Dan Zambonini, June 15, 2010, 12:43 am in Culture, Language, Present, Print

Some 'real' super heroes

Marvel Comics, like many businesses in creative industries, relies heavily on trademarks and licensing to generate revenue. As evident from the popularity of Marvel-licensed films – X-Men, Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Blade, etc. – it’s clearly working for them.

The company – also known as Marvel Publishing, which is part of Marvel Entertainment, which since December 2009 is part of Disney – has registered some interesting trademarks in its time.

Super Hero and Super Heroes are both Marvel trademarks, as is the less commonly used Super Villains. From 1975 to 1996, Marvel also owned a publishing trademark for the word Zombie. Perhaps understanding that this trademark wasn’t enforceable, in 1996 they registered Marvel Zombies, which states in the registration document, “No claim is made to the exclusive right to use zombies“.

According to the ever-dubious Wikipedia, Marvel Comics also own trademarks on two sounds that their characters make: the “thwip!” of Spider-Man’s web shooters, and the “snikt!” of Wolverine’s claws. Our searches of the US Trademark database have yet to uncover proof of these claims, however, and no citation is provided on the Wikipedia page.

Photograph under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Sam Howzit

0
Comment Tweet

Living Well with Less Space

By Amy Thibodeau, June 8, 2010, 10:15 pm in Architecture, Culture, Present

I am living a life of extremes right now. I’ve spent the last six weeks in a very large, luxurious home on the edge of the desert in Arizona. There are three large bedrooms all with en suite bathrooms and walk-in closets, an enormous ‘great room’, media room, etc. I’m not complaining – it’s been great – but it isn’t how I’m used to living and was certainly not possible in London, UK.

On Saturday, we’re heading to Mexico for six weeks to live in a small bungalow near the ocean with no air conditioning and fairly basic amenities. After our time in the land of air conditioning, SUVs and golf courses I have been a little apprehensive about how we’re going to adapt. Then I spent some time getting inspired by how much some creative people are able to make of tiny spaces. Here are some of my favourites:

Paul Elkins Tiny Mobile Shelter
“The shelter is lightweight, water tight and able to collect rainwater, and includes an area for displaying and selling handmade wares.” (Text and image from Apartment Therapy)


Gary Chang – 24 Rooms in One
“This room — the “maximum kitchen,” he calls it — and the “video game room” he was sitting in minutes before are just 2 of at least 24 different layouts that Mr. Chang, an architect, can impose on his 344-square-foot apartment, which he renovated last year. What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.” (Text from the New York Times)

Tiny Apartments in a Hong Kong Housing Estate
Michael Wolf has documented many of these small 100 x 100 spaces. Some of residents make better use of their space than others. (Photo by Michale Wolf)

Living in a Yurt
“We talk all the time about living with less; Dave lives in 706 square feet with off grid power, a composting toilet, a shower and a full kitchen and didn’t give anything up at all to live in comfort and style. When you live in 706 square feet you don’t need much to run it; he collects water from his roof, power from the sun and wind, heat from sustainably cut wood. He spends about six hundred bucks a year for his propane barbeque, gas for his chainsaw and log splitter and that is about it.” (Text by Treehugger, Yurt image by Bill Janis)

Update!

Supertramp’s Bicycle Caravan

Via Twitter GoldenGus has pointed me to a really cool, alternative use of small space. “Jacob aka ‘Supertramp’ is embarking on a voyage around London exploring the concept of micro-sized living; inspired by a more minimal, fluid and socially aware approach to future living, the project seeks to promote and inspire leaner, more livable life forms … His new mobile house doubles up as an agency and a social facility point, offering a unique, intimate and conversational platform where people will both inspire and be inspired.” For more on this project visit Nell Osbourne on Posterous (which is also where the image is from).

1
Comment Tweet

Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

By Dan Zambonini, May 31, 2010, 1:10 am in Architecture, Culture, History, Past

Smoke / Pollution

Many older cities rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, as workers flocked to the urban centers. As the towns and cities expanded, the residential areas for the workers tended to be in the east, with the middle and upper-classes in the west.

The reason for this is that in much of the northern hemisphere, the prevailing winds are westerlies – blowing from west to east. The massive, unchecked pollution from these early industries would therefore drift eastward, making the air quality much lower in the east end of cities, lowering the desirability (and price) of the housing. Middle classes preferred the cleaner west ends.

The issue was probably even pre-Industrial Revolution, as smoke from personal chimneys would still have caused problems to the east.

In many cities, this will have been compounded – or confused – by the direction of the main river in the environment, which would have been relied on for many uses, including sewerage. London, as an example, displays a massive east/west divide, caused in large part by both early industry and the west-to-east flow of the River Thames.

Smoke image under Creative Commons license, by Flickr user Señor Codo

41
Comment Tweet

UK MPs Can Earn Over £1000 Per Hour

By Dan Zambonini, May 28, 2010, 2:51 am in Culture, Present

How much UK MPs earn, per hour, on 'external' jobs

The annual salary for a UK MP is currently £65,738. This income is often topped-up with payments from other jobs; one-off consultancy projects, board member salaries, or media appearances. Using the Register of Members Interests raw data provided by the invaluable They Work For You, we can see how much extra they earn.

The graph above plots many of the individual payments we extracted data for, normalised by £/hour – how much the MP earned for each hour worked. The highest hourly wage goes to William Hague, at £7,331 per hour (£14,662 for a two hour talk).

You can see a clear plateau at £150/hour in the graph (click for a larger version), with slightly smaller £200/hour and £100/hour plateaus either side. The average rate was a little over £250/hour.

Although many of the tasks appear to be costed at a low hourly rate, it should be noted that we gave many MPs the benefit of the doubt: for those that recorded ’1 day’ (rather than the standard number of hours), we assumed this was 24 hours, not a 7.5 hour working day.

Ten MPs managed to record a rate of £infinity/hour, by receiving payments for 0 hours worked: these include three payments of over £3,500 to John Gummer and three payments of £3,500 to Edward Leigh.

23 MPs managed to earn over £1000/hour, and 46 managed over £500/hour.

Of the top 10 highest paying items (in terms of £/hour) – each of which was between approximately £1500 and £7000 per hour – only Vince Cable, who appears twice on the list, donated his fee (in both cases) to charity. All other MPs – including William Hague, John Greenway, Michael Gove and John Gummer, appear to have retained their payments.

0
Comment Tweet
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »