great red spot eats baby!

aaaaa!

photoshop disasters.

i like this blog. partially because of the good-humored snark (probably actually funny or interesting only to those who are serious photoshop geeks or have a serious fascination with counterfeiting) and partially because of its low-key attitude about fakery. this blog gets it right: we want you to photoshop well, not so much because photoshop is cheating and we still hunger for the original article (so make your intervention as invisible as possible on moral grounds); rather, because a certain aesthetic has developed around pshop, and when its disrespected too flagrantly, the work gets laughable. maybe it's an obvious point, but i like what's going on here in terms of a relaxation of anxiety in favor of more craftsman-like criteria. it's not that it's fake that makes it wrong and bad, it's that the fakery is poorly done. that's probably true in most cases where construction is unavoidably at the fore, but i hope this sort of attitude is getting both more common and more explicit.

cheerleaders with nunchakus, since i am too timid to talk about rape.

sometimes, when i'm looking for performancey stuff that might belong on the blog, i start somewhere sort of central, like at salon or the new york times, and go from there. on this particular day, everything i came across was so complex and multi-determined that i couldn't come up with anything responsible to say about it, so i'm going to give you this instead. it's not the most interesting thing i read this morning, but it's handle-able. (and if you have something good to say about the jezebel/lizz winstead/amusing rape stories thing, maybe you could help me out.)

anyway: Peking Opera cheerleaders.

sisters of perpetual indulgence

are in LA on saturday, doing a benefit for Highways. the postcard describes their "Free My Ass!" as "an iconoclastic expose' in drag of the ways in which we are no longer free, in which freer than we know, and in which we invent 'freedom' as a construct." ah, sisters. you had me at ass. $20; $15 for students and seniors.

more from the nytimes on what we don't know.

also, some interesting commentary brewing in the comments section of Miguel Helft's Bits, if that kind of stuff doesn't make you barf.

>>My point is that there are no guarantees that anyones [sic] comments or blogs are actually genuine. Take everything with a very small grain of salt. Enough finger pointing about how Obama’s supporters are so nasty, Clinton’s supporters are so racist, and Republicans are dispicable. You don’t know who is actually saying these things and if they actually mean them or if maybe they’re just trying to spark some anger inside you mischivieously [sic].<< (poster "AHS," july 30)

i believe scarlett johansson is real.

in discussing a [book about a] famous case of forgery involving paintings by Vermeer, one of the new york times blogs today sidles up to a discussion of simulacra, commodification, and performance in terms of identity and reputation. the blogger is hardly first on the scene, here, but it was sort of nice to read without excessive jargon that we never know exactly what kind of clothes the emperor is wearing, and that an absolute picture of the duds' "true" nature may be the least interesting thing about them.

and, we're back.

wow. didn't mean to leave a post about bikes and hymens up there in the on-deck circle for my entire vacation.

summer comes, meaning less school and more pondering. if you have performance- or tech-oriented books to recommend, now is the time to say so in the comments. that means you, the-five-of-you-who-read-this!

back to dailyish posting, assuming performance continues to be, y'know, "important."