Mad Quickies: Nirvana Trolls Buenos Aires Crowd, Kinetic ‘Insecta’ Lamps, The Immortal Hydra and More!
You were expecting our Dearest Donna this Monday morning. But, like an unexpected substitute teacher, you have to deal with Mr. George now. So pencils down it’s time for your Monday Quickies.
Artist Charles Pétillon presents Invasions. Lots of balloons piling and flowing out of places they are clearly not supposed to be.
Elgin Park is a retro city. It also doesn’t exist. It’s an optical illusion built and photographed by Michael Paul Smith.
One of my favorite artists, U-Ram Choe, has some new bio-cybernetic, kinetic sculptural organisms to share with us. Behold these wee lamps in Insecta.
Why does the dollar sign look like this ——-> $ ? Here’s the most probable explanation.
Wired’s Absurd Creature of the Week is the (possibly, maybe?) immortal hydra. Love the pics.
I am getting this. In the current incarnation of her project Seeing Networks, author Ingrid Burrington outlines the infrastructure of New York’s internet. It’s called Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide Check it out at her website here.
This is legendary. I have read about this particular Nirvana concert many times, and always admired them for what they did here, but I’ve never seen it before. Read below for some context.
Kurt says:
“When we played Buenos Aires, we brought this all-girl band over from Portland called Calamity Jane. During their entire set, the whole audience — it was a huge show with like 60,000 people — was throwing money and everything out of their pockets, mud and rocks, just pelting them. Eventually the girls stormed off crying. It was terrible, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once.” -From Nirvana: The Chosen Rejects by Kurt St. Thomas and Troy Smith
Keep in mind it was 1992, so Nirvana’s only albums were Bleach and Nevermind.
So what did they do? They trolled the audience for the whole show. They opened with a jam (which some people awesomely call Nobody Knows I’m New Wave) that has lyrics like “I promise to shit on your head”; “I’m new wave/I’m old school”. They played the intro to Smells Like Teen Spirit before a couple of the songs, but never played the actual song. In fact they played almost every song from Nevermind and they play them badly. Kurt kept changing up lyrics and pretending to not know how the songs were played. He sang the whole first verse of Come As You Are saying only the word ‘hey’, over and over again. They played lots of songs from Incesticide (which had not yet been released), Bleach and other unknown (at the time) songs, like Spank Thru and All Apologies and the fantastic Endless, Nameless. All the b-sides are played as normal. It just gets funnier the longer it goes on.
Featured image Mutation 2 by Charles Pétillon
