Insane art formed by carving books with surgical tools

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.

Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.

"My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception," he says.

"The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge."

Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

---

---

---

Ear on Arm
(from blog: If You Only Knew)



The EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm. By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear.

I have always been intrigued about engineering a soft prosthesis using my own skin, as a permanent modification of the body architecture. The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness. Engineering an alternate anatomical architecture, one that also performs telematically. Certainly what becomes important now is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity- not its mobility or location, but its interface. In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess. As technology proliferates and microminiaturizes it becomes biocompatible in both scale and substance and is incorporated as a component of the body.

---

---

---

Van Morrison singing Bob Dylan's Just Like A Woman live.

---

---

---

The video has a constant drop out of the sound every few seconds; unfortunately, this is the best I could find. Bob Dylan accepting the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award from Jack Nicholson. I post this mainly for his acceptance speech near the end of the video.

"Well," he said, "my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man,
but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said"
- there was a long pause, nervous laughter from the crowd -
"he say, you know it's possible to become so defiled in this world
that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens,
God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways."

Then he walked off. He had managed to get in and out without thanking anybody,
and this night it really did seem as if he owed nobody anything.

from Bob Dylan's Grammy speech 1991.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~



Come Healing, by Leonard Cohen, from Old Ideas (2012)

---

---

---

Phil Rockstroh: A Journey To The End Of Empire: It Is Always Darkest Right Before It Goes Completely Black (Occupy Wall Street website)

I'm not completely on board with this piece, but nice to see poetry and politics brought together.

Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring "concrete" answers to polite dialog--I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?

---

---

---

Q: How should dogs be defined under the law, if you could write it?

A: The way the Common Law is structured there are really only two options. You are either a person, or you’re property, and that’s how we define things.

- Maneesha Deckha, Q & A: Should your pet dog get legal status? (National Post)

---

---

---