"The one good thing about space being the same as time is that if you travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends will be dead when you come back, but you will not need Botox."

— From the short story “Strung Out” by Woody Allen. Read it here.

Norman Mailers’s Limited Edition MoonFire

If I could ask Santa for one thing alone, it would be this book: Norman Mailer’s MoonFire. I caught wind of this from Katie while she was at Art Basel. Yes, it’s $1,500. But it’s worth it! Artnet tweeted about it too. Only 12 come with an actual moon rock (though I’m not sure how legal that is). However, prices vary depending on the size of the rock. Another selling point for buying the moon rock edition is that you get dinner with Buzz Aldrin! AND… the normal edition is limited to 1969. Nice touch, eh? Keep it in mind. Hint hint. Just saying.


An inside spread from the book. Image courtesy of Taschen.


A view of the book in its limited edition stand for the book and an actual rock up for sale with the edition. Image courtesy of Artnet’s twitter.

"But outer Space,
At least this far,
For all the fuss
Of the populace
Stays more popular
Than populous."

— Robert Frost

"At the same time, the very vastness of space acts as a strong discouragement; people complain that they cannot visualize the interstellar or intergalactic scale, and so refuse to investigate the matter further. This is as short-sighted as it is sad. In the first place there is no need to ‘visualize’ the universe in order to gain some idea of its workings—for no astronomer can really comprehend the enormity of his field of study. It is simply a matter of getting used to dealing with very large units of distance. On the Earth we might arbitrarily define 1 foot as a small distance, 1/1,000th of a millimetre as a very small distance. The astronomical equivalents of ‘very small’ and ‘small’ could be 1 mile and 1 light-year (5,880,000,000,000 miles). We can no more imagine 1/1,000th of a millimetre than a million miles—but no one is afraid of looking through a microscope! And at the same time there is no doubt which is the more impressive."

— James Muirden, from Stars & Planets: An Introduction to the Wonders of Modern Astronomy (1964). I found this book at a thrift store this weekend. The style of writing is very much like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."

— Flannery O’Connor

Current reading list:
Collecting Contemporary Art
Flight of the Intruder
And It Came to Pass—Not To Stay
Seven Days in the Art World
Let’s See
Unsettling “Sensation”
It’s ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English
Spacesuits

I was sitting at Barnes & Noble yesterday reading Air and Space Magazine and saw that a book is being published in June about all of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacesuits at the Smithsonian. It is being put together by Amanda Young, the Smithsonian’s Museum Specialist of the spacesuit collection. The book, Spacesuits: Within the Collections of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, features an x-ray of Alan Shepard’s Apollo 14 suit used to determine how the materials break down over the years. There will be a book signing in July, which I hope to be in town for.

I made a post a while ago about NASA’s Art Program and forgot to mention that they have over 500 pieces in their collection. You can purchase a book, which just came out (October 2008) called NASA Art: 50 Years of Exploration. With a foreword by Michael Collins, the forgotten third astronaut of Apollo 11 (read about him and his journey to the far side of the moon while waiting for Neil and Buzz). Anyway, 65 pieces by artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, Annie Liebowitz, and Nam June Paik will make their way across the country over the next two years making a final stop at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2011. I am so excited to see the collection! I have no idea why I don’t own the book yet. You can view most of the work from NASA’s collection here. (Photo is the front page of the Exhibition Prospectus)

Current reading list. For research and for fun.

William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin
“All God’s Children Got Space”
Green Scrapbook, c. 1971-1973

INTERVIEWER: How did you become interested in the cut-up technique?
BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in ‘The Camera Eye’ sequences in USA. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done. (via)

I first found out about Sanjay Patel when I went to San Diego Comic Con back in 2004. Sanjay works for Pixar and you may even recognize his work from the drawing above. Anyway, I stumbled upon a booth that was shared by Pixar artists and he happened to have a neat little book called Little India, “a simple guide to all your favorite Hindu gods.” I also bought three of his prints from the book that are hanging in my apartment. Penguin reprinted it and you can buy it all over now! It’s probably fancier than the version I have.