UK photographer Nick Stern's "You Are Not Banksy" series recreates many of Banksy's iconic, humorous graffiti images. I've always thought that Banksy recreations made excellent cosplay (as this old post showed), but they're great as photos, too:
The project sees Stern meticulously recreating a handful of Banksy’s masterpieces using real-life models and photographing their mimicking poses. The results are extraordinary. Stern himself is a fan of the elusive guerilla street artist: “I have always admired Banksy – I love his cheek and humour,” said the London-born photographer. “Much of art is a recreation or interpretation of real life, but this is the other way round – I wanted real life to recreate art. I hope he likes what I’ve done.”
AP reports that "packages containing a human foot and hand were discovered at two schools in Vancouver on Tuesday, in what could be the latest gruesome twist in the case of a Canadian porn actor suspected of dismembering and eating his former lover." As noted in a previous BB post, murder suspect Rocco Luka Magnotta, also known as Eric Clinton Newman, has been arrested in Berlin.
— Xeni
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In a series of self-produced internet ads for the California senate campaign of prominent "birther" Orly Taitz: "Anyone who knows Dr. Orly Taitz knows she has no 'off' switch. She's like the Energizer bunny on steroids, and she's ready to rid California of its corruption and drain this swamp once and for all." They add up to one of the finest bodies of 'outsider' performance art ever. — Xeni
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[YouTube Link] One of the funnier and more beautifully produced book trailers I've seen in a while! It's for the just-released book "Me the People," by Kevin Bleyer. Via Jason Wishnow:
Kevin Bleyer (Emmy Award winning writer for the Daily Show) personally rewrote the Constitution of the United States and needed his author’s portrait painted in the neoclassical style. I’d never been to a life drawing class before but heard they involve nude models.
Faces familiar to Daily Show fans include Kevin Bleyer, Jason Jones, and Samantha Bee. Directed by Jason Wishnow.
Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds introduces us to Call of the Giles, which he describes as a "gun-totin’, Bible-quotin’, homo-hatin’, and obviously over-compensating for sumpthin’ macho, macho man douchebag Doug Giles and his “kickass” Christian family’s low-brow version of Keeping Up With the Kardashians." — Xeni
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This week, Boing Boing is presenting a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists. See all the essays in the Mind Blowing Movies series here. -- Mark
Mind Blowing Movies: Bimbo's Initiation (1931), by Jim Woodring
[Video Link] I might have come to grips with the overwhelming mystery of life in a rational, organic manner if it weren't for a cartoon I saw on my family's old black and white TV in the mid '50s when I was three or four years old. This cartoon rang a bell so loud that I can still feel its reverberations.
It was "Bimbo's Initiation," produced by the Fleischer Brother Studios in 1931. I won't attempt to describe it; you can see it online. It's an ingenious piece of work, made by men who I now realize were well aware of its metaphysical content, as evidenced in part by the use of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld in the soundtrack. Perhaps its creators were trying to amuse themselves by making a cartoon that combined madcap whimsy with philosophical depth. Or maybe they were just high. Whatever their motivation and intent, "Bimbo's Initiation" became my prime symbolic interpreter, the foundation of my life's path and endlessly exploding bomb at the core of my creative output.
The reason that cartoon affected me as strongly as it did was that I thought it was real, that it depicted events that were happening in my neighborhood. I set out to find those rooms, those implements, that bicycle, that pool. I got a reputation as the little boy who looked into everything. Whenever I went into someone else's home the first thing I would do, if I could, was look behind their drapes.
Consequently I missed a lot of things that were actually going on, which caused me a lot of grief, one way and another. The pleasurable intensity of the delusion was well worth any trouble that resulted from it, though... and as I say, it gave me a livelihood.
Matthew Modine will play the man who fired Steve Jobs.
Film actor Matthew Modine has signed on to the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic entitled jOBS, which stars Ashton Kutcher as the late Apple founder. Directed by Joshua Michael Stern (Swing Vote), the film will chronicle Jobs' life from 1971 through the 21st century. Modine has been tapped to play John Sculley, the former Pepsi-Cola CEO whom Jobs recruited to lead Apple in 1983. Sculley has longbeen known as the man who "fired" Jobs two years later. The two had clashed in their respective roles at Apple, leading up to Jobs' removal fromthe company in 1985. Sculley served as Apple CEO from 1983 to 1993. Book of Mormon star Josh Gad will portray Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the film, due out this fall. The movie began principal photography in June. Early scenes will be shot in the actual Los Altos home where Jobs grew up and in thehistoric garage where he founded Apple.
In 1769, Captain James Cook was part of a massive, coordinated effort to document the transit of Venus from multiple spots around the globe. It was all part of calculating the size of the solar system, and you can read about it in Andrea Wulf's new book, Chasing Venus.
The project sees Stern meticulously recreating a handful of Banksy’s masterpieces using real-life models and photographing their mimicking poses. The results are extraordinary. Stern himself is a fan of the elusive guerilla street artist: “I have always admired Banksy – I love his cheek and humour,” said the London-born photographer. “Much of art is a recreation or interpretation of real life, but this is the other way round – I wanted real life to recreate art. I hope he likes what I’ve done.”
In a series of self-produced 
