Surfing some tumblr while listening to the latest Music for Programmings at 6 AM, my eyeball was caught on the top photo of a relaxing morning with breakfast in bed. Following this magical scene to its source I found Glen H’s photo sets and saw that he has other collections that I really can get into like these recipe book photos that include this cabbage holder (below), cutaway illustrations, and cars from the past-future which I still don’t understand why we aren’t driving today. Back when I had “time” to “pursue” my “interests” I scored some sweet stacks of old magazines off of ebay and loved to look at disgusting pictures of food in the ads. If the color printing was slightly off-register, all the better. This is the perfect time to remind you of a featured item in my library, Basic Microwaving which has some exceptionally realistic images of what happens if you try to cook with a microwave in 1978.

So I was in Alaska for a bit with a solid crew to celebrate a wedding and otherwise to experience some new things. Do any Alaskans read this blog or our Meathaus books? Maybe if you are here on this blog you could tell me more about this guy in the top photo. I was watching the public access channel and only caught the last few minutes of his motivational messages which I didn’t understand, but I could tell that he had something to say, and a TV show to do it on, and some cool lights and cones and a vest. Also here is a photo of the bear warning on the trail of the 3rd hike we did and a marker for some guy who died up there in 1940. What was he doing up there in February? I’ll take a sweet Alaskan summer day up on Crow Pass over being there in the winter, I don’t need to experience any of that business.

Here I’ll try embedding a map, because why not?

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There has got to be a serious chub-on connection lurking somewhere in the motivation for this very specific and funky hobby. Or am I projecting chub-ons? We’ll never know. Anyway, dig this tumblr full of Zentai suit inventor (I think I read that somewhere) and “Tight fit LIFE” enthusiast, Marcy Anarchy.

As Randy Kennedy notes in The Times, these rare photos “show an artist – even in a job for hire – turning a dark, often lonely gaze on the city.”

The first Asger Carlsen‘s photo I saw was posted here and I knew I wanted to see more from the same artist. Asger Carlsen’s work includes even more photo-real, grotesque imaginary scenes often involving nudes or modified body parts, and some reappearing mutant characters. Briefly when checking out the “Hester” section of his portfolio I thought that this was the same artist that we had posted here a few years ago, but is is not. That artist, Benoît David takes a different approach to the same idea, as I wrote on the earlier post:

“Benoît David uses digitally manipulated photography to create humorous and repellant mutant structures out of the human form. The work is not fussy and precise like a glossy magazine’s photoshopped cover model, but more expressive and loose, sometimes incorporating drawing and multiple exposure effects.”

Asger Carlsen instead takes the glossy approach and modifies his images to precise magazine-quality grossness. Both artist’s work attracts and repels my attention at the same time. Asger Carlsen’s work also goes beyond just the humorous piles of mutated flesh and features a few reoccurring themes such as the wooden box and legs lower body and the strange man with double stacked eyes. These fictional mutants allow the viewer to indulge in staring, which is a natural reaction but socially unacceptable when involving any real-life disabled or disfigured person, or people of a drastically different shape or stature from what is “normal”. In the case of Asger Carlsen’s oddities, their differences are causing no consternation at all to the people around them and it is only the outside viewer and stranger that feels uneasy.

I found my new favorite photo website, Internet K-Hole. It’s like the blog author got everyone’s uncle’s personal photo album from 1977-1992 and posted their party pics and family fun shots. They all take me to somewhere familiar.

The ESA/Hubble spacetelescope.org website has photos of deep space that are free to use for any creative project provided you include attribution in the proper format. You can download the 4GB “top 100″ images zip like I did and get right into the photos of globby space blobs and gigantic piercing space eyes watching your every move on your pathetically insignificant home planet. Which reminds me to go check out this sweet compilation of UFOs in NASA footage again:

Credits for images:

“Star Forming Pillar of Gas and Dust”: NASA, Holland Ford (JHU), the ACS Science Team and ESA
“Mystic Mountain”: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
“A New View of the Helix Nebula”: NASA, ESA, C.R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), and M. Meixner, P. McCullough, and G. Bacon (Space Telescope Science Institute)
“Looking Down a Barrel of Gas at a Doomed Star”: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA/ESA)
Crab Nebula: NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester (Arizona State University). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)

I’ve previously mentioned that now in the digital age we have instant access to loads of the neat visual stuff that the government has been commissioning for its own purposes. Artists can use any of the material without fear of rights conflict or resorting to a fair use defense because the work is in the public domain. Today @USGS on twitter, the U.S. Geological Survey mentioned that you can download print resolution files of aerial photography and more here. The above image is of the neighborhood that I live in in Philadelphia, resized smaller here. The original was 5000 by 5000 pixels, which is almost 16 inches square at 300ppi. I bet you could stitch a few adjacent images together and go super large. Awesome. You know how interesting Google Earth and Maps are? Well here’s all the same stuff without their watermarks all over everything, and they’re for you to have and use.

Mr. Brian Maryansky, late of such celebrated rock outfits as The Van Pelt and Jets to Brazil, is also a talented photographer. The fella has the eye. He just started an informal tumblr site titled Sight.Seen, and you can check out more work–all of it full of nuance and subtle beauty–at his website.

A new blog straight from Philly to your computer screen: That’s Not a Trash Can. Now it is! Photos and observations from Andrew Jeffrey Wright and other contributors, such as the above trash can by Ashley Robb-Crockett.