As BB readers know, machine artist Todd Blair suffered a catastrophic brain injury after the recent Survival Research Laboratories performance in Amsterdam. Todd has not awoken since the accident and remains in an Amsterdam hospital surrounded by family and friends. To help with his medical expenses and the recovery, our friend Karen Marcelo has organized a special Dorkbot-San Francisco session this Wednesday night, October 10, at Kyle Minor Design Studio. — Read the rest

LA Weekly has a great profile of prankster artist Jeffrey Vallance, who has a new exhibition called Relics and Reliquaries in Santa Ana, California.

I first learned about Vallance from Re/Search's Pranks book, where he recounted his now-famous 1978 art stunt of taking a thawed frozen supermarket chicken to a pet cemetery in Los Angeles and straight-facedly requesting it be given a proper burial. — Read the rest

Salvador Dalí created this untitled painting in 1942 for the campaign against venereal disease.
Link (via V. Vale's RE/Search Newsletter)

Previously on BB:
• Salvador Dalí TV commercials Link
• Salvador Dalî on "What's My Line?" Link
• Dalî in Smithsonian Link

At a small party a few weeks ago in Los Angeles, Devo co-founder Gerald V. Casale and V. Vale, of countercultural chronicler RE/Search Publications, performed an impromptu cover of Devo's Mongoloid. Vale tickled the ivories and Gerald gave great voice accompanied by piano-pounding percussion. — Read the rest

For more than four decades, prankster artist Joey Skaggs has been tweaking the media, thumbing his nose at the bourgeoisie, making fun of The Man, and performing random acts of sensible mockery around the globe. With a resume that boasts such brilliant gags as a "Cathouse for Dogs" (1976) that landed him on ABC News, a 1992 lottery with a first prize of renaming rights to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Final Curtain (2000), a funeral company enabling artists to create their own tombs and memorial exhibitions before they die, to dozens of other hoaxes and pranks, Joey is the quintessential culture jammer and reality hacker. — Read the rest

Legendary Moog maestro Jean Jacques Perrey will perform live in San Francisco tomorrow evening, August 29, at 8pm. The intimate concert is presented by RE/Search Publications who have done wonders to turn on multiple generations of Incredibly Strange Music fans to the tripped-out tunes of Perrey, a true electronica pioneer. — Read the rest

Many of you may remember Irene McGee from the Real World Seattle. Physically sick with Lyme Disease and feeling misunderstood and misrepresented, she left the show (but not before getting smacked by one of her male roommates.) Appropriately, Irene is now a student of media literacy. — Read the rest

My friend Charles Gatewood is a photographer best known for documenting the sexual underground and helping launch the Modern Primitives meme into popular consciousness through his images that were featured in the RE/Search book of the same name. In the early 1970s though, Charles explored New York's financial district. — Read the rest

My friend Paul Spinrad just published a new book called "The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance." (Paul is also the author of the classic RE/Search Guide To Bodily Fluids and an editor at MAKE:) Even if you're not into making video art, the book has great history and interviews with the likes of filmmaker Craig Baldwin, Laserium creator Ivan Dryer, and curator Kathleen Forde. — Read the rest

If you're an incredibly strange music fan in the Bay Area, don't miss this. RE/Search Publications is hosting a record release party Thursday evening for French composer Jean Jacques Perrey, creator of some of the most amazing moog pop and musique concrete of the 20th century. — Read the rest

Our friends at RE/Search, publishers of the excellent "JG Ballard: Quotations" and the forthcoming "JG Ballard: Conversations," point me to Ballard's take on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Television today is an ageing theme park, which we visit out of habit rather than in hope of finding anything fresh and original.

In the 1980s, fine art photographer Bobby Neel Adams contributed photos to classic RE/Search Publications books like Modern Primitives, the Industrial Culture Handbook, and the William S. Burroughs/Throbbing Gristle/Brion Gysin compendium. Here's a gallery of Adams's later work, including a series titled "Age-Maps":

Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together.

Just a reminder that the JG Ballard event at City Lights Books is tonight at 7pm. RE/Search Publications' V. Vale spoke with Ballard today and will play a tape of the conversation this evening. If you're not in San Francisco, you can of course still order a copy of the JG Ballard Quotes book. — Read the rest

To celebrate the publication of the excellent JG Ballard Quotes book, RE/Search Publications and San Francisco's City Lights Books are hosting an event tomorrow night. I'm honored that I was invited to read my favorite Ballard quotations along with SRL's Mark Pauline, former BB guest blogger and hacker Karen Marcelo, research scientist/artist Eric Paulos, Counterculture Through the Ages author RU Sirius, photographer SM Gray, and writer Joe Donohue. — Read the rest

I'm eagerly awaiting the release next month of JG Ballard Quotes: Does The Future Have A Future?–a pocket-sized book of profound and mind-bending JG Ballard-isms. My all-time favorite fiction writer, Ballard is the prophetic British novelist behind such dark, twisted, noir masterpieces as Crash, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights. — Read the rest

Boing Boing pal R.U. Sirius interviews Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger (Editor of Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult) in the latest issue of R.U.'s online magazine The NeoFiles:

"Most people have this assumption that magick is all about some kind of 'hocus pocus' or 'eye of newt, tongue of toad' thing or the sort of 'incense and affirmations' school of thought that a lot of New Agers and Wiccans are into.

In the tradition of RE/Search press — an annotated collection of scans of LP artwork from terrific novelty discs. Wish they had downloadable MP3s!

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Higgins!)