If you love throwing money at vaguely worded, half-baked Internet “performance art projects” as much as you love Who’s the Boss, do we have a Kickstarter for you! Meet Louis Crisitello Jr. and Hugo Ball, the creators of the $2,100 fund-raising campaign for something called “
We swear to God, if this turns out Read More
They say that a new Kickstarter campaign is created every five minutes (or something), and 7 p.m. last night was no exception. As the page for “Run Free 2013” went live, you could watch 26-year-old Kyle Scheele, the director of Ridiculo.us, makes his pitch for why you should donate to the $999 goal* of putting on a global marathon. Sorry, make that a fake global marathon.
” There’s a saying on the internet,” Mr. Scheele began. “Pics or it didn’t happen”.
“In other words, if something is real, if it actually happened, there will be pictures to back that up.
But what if something DIDN’T actually happen, but there are STILL pictures of it? Does that mean it DID happen? If something is fake, how much evidence does it take before it becomes real?
That’s the question we’re trying to answer.
So, on February 2, 2013, we are faking a marathon. “ Read More
Last week, +POOL, that brilliant, crazy, possibly over-designed, possibly perfectly designed project that places a floating, self-filtering pool in the East River announced it was going to try and raise $1 million in the next six months to make its aquatic dreams come true. It is a prospect, which makes The Observer giddy with child-like joy. Swimming in the river, in river water no less.
That youthful excitement is infectious, especially when talking to Dong-Ping Wong, one +POOL’s founders. “It’s a simple idea that didn’t really come from anywhere,” he explained in an interview. “As for ‘Why the idea?’ It was a combination of a few things, a hot and sweaty summer looking at the water, taking the train over the water, and riding my bike over the water but never really seeing it at all. I’m from San Diego, we use and view water very differently than we do from here.” Read More
Arthur Russell might have been the most important musician you’ve never heard of. Cellist, pianist; composer of extraordinary classical, folk and disco music; friend (and one-time lover) of Allen Ginsberg: he legitimized New York’s burgeoning disco scene in the 1970s and 80s, and became one of the East Village’s queer culture figureheads before his AIDS-related death in 1992. Twenty years on, Pitchfork and AIDS awareness charity Red Hot—responsible for the hugely successful compilation album Dark Was the Night—hope to honor and unite the late New York composer’s diverse, fragmented discography with This Is How We Walk on the Moon, a covers compilation of some of Russell’s finest songs. Read More
The saga of Broken Angel House, the hand-crafted Clinton Hill mansion of bizarre angles and strange art, has taken a somewhat odd, though not altogether unexpected twist.
Christopher Wood, the son of artists, house-crafters and erstwhile owners Arthur and Cynthia Wood, has launched a kickstarter campaign to transform the house into a museum, thus staving off the last stages of foreclosure proceedings, Curbed reports. Read More
“The old paradigm that I’m trying to get rid of is that space is for governments and the super-rich, and it takes years, and it costs millions of dollars, and I say this is just wrong” said Peter Platzer, an Austrian-born former CERN physicist and hedge fund quant who was in town to promote his Read More
Efforts to raise money for the Delancey Underground–also known as the Low Line–have taken off, thanks to private fundraising on the website Kickstarter.com. Back in September, when we talked to the founders of the project, ex-NASA scientist James Ramsey and RAAD partner Dan Barasch, they had low expectations about raising any money from the city.
It’s predecessor, the West Side High Line, had gotten some public money, but was built in a different era, Mr. Ramsey told us. “The recession hadn’t hit, and it was right after 9/11, when the city was looking to put money in an urban renewal project.” Read More
This is the best idea for a web series we’ve heard in awhile. Inside the Actor’s Studio Apartment like Cribs, sort of, if Cribs was just one messy room inhabited by some of your favorite comedians. And let’s face it: Who doesn’t want to see how semi-famous New York actors live?
Take it away, Kristen Schaal! Read More
New York architect Alex Pincus was, like most architects, daydreaming about a mundane problem—unattractive wall sockets—when he had a touch of divine inspiration.
“It’s an architectural problem that bothers me, because it’s ugly, there’s no good solutions, and even the ones that are out there aren’t very compelling,” Mr. Pincus told The Observer earlier this week. “And I was thinking about different patterns of sockets that were interesting to me, and I tried to change it up. And I had this vision of a cruciform grid of plugs, on the floor or on the wall. At some point, I remember looking at this standard, 1990s, sorta cream-colored power strip, thinking of how ugly it was, and that’s when the idea came to me.”
What came from this design daydream was Higher Power, a cross-shaped power strip that is both arch and attractive, not to mention functional. By adding two armatures to a standard-looking power strip, those bulky plugs for the laptop and the alarm clock now all fit without blocking any of the other sockets. Mr. Pincus described it as the dumb idea that he simply could not shake, so he created a rendering and posted it to his website last year. Someone at Boing Boing noticed it, and from there it got picked up by Wired and bounced around the Internet for weeks. “When it shut down my website, that’s when I realized this could be real.” Read More
Yesterday a Kickstarter announced the arrival of The Classical, yet another daily web publication dedicated to the burgeoning world of alternative sportswriting. This one is the brainchild of a cerebral fraternity of sports and culture bros, including Bloomsbury editor (and rumored pub-trivia powerhouse) Pete Beatty, Pitchfork and Village Voice vet Tom Breihan, Yahoo! blogger Read More
