Leisure Town

Tristan makes some of the funniest and darkest comic strips I've ever seen, like a modern-day R. Crumb, using toy animals, great location shots, superb photoshop skills, and, most importantly, a thoroughly twisted sense of humor. Excellent writing. Particularly hilarious are "Pussy Driven," "American Masturbator," not that I would have any first-hand, so to speak, knowledge of either subject, and "QA Confidential," an extremely insightful send-up of the computer industry and Silicon Valley/Multimedia Gulch mentality.  I have heard some odd stories about him—he is a local boy well-known to some friends of mine ... apparently, he mines his own life for much of his material. Let us leave it at that.

A panel from American Masturbator

Stop-action Super-fast Freeze-frame Bongo-beat Photography

A bullet piercing, penetrating, pulverizing an otherwise placid pear, from the IDF Tactical Logic website.

IDF Tactical Logic a bunch of cool bullet-going-through-things pictures, along with panoramic shots of destroyer fleets and ads for glock holsters. Definitely a Peace-Through-Superior-Firepower kinda site. 

Now let's use the same technology for art. Alva Bernadine 's Slap  
 

Not a bongo, but more fun to slap.

Which do you prefer? 

"A friend phoned me one lunchtime and asked what I was up to. I told her I was taking portraits of people bursting balloons, shooting bottles and smashing panes of glass using a sound activated switch. I could freeze the moment of impact rather like the famous Harold Edgerton picture of a bullet passing through an apple. In a dark room you attach the switch to the flash then open the shutter of the camera. The sound of impact fires the flash freezing the action at several thousandths of a second.
"She was a submissive and immediately offered her bottom for experimentation. She already had a video of arses wobbling in slow motion. She and her partner came round with a bag full of flagellation implements and we tried them all.
"Subsequently, I decided I wanted to try it on a variety of different shaped arses and asked female acquaintances and women I met at parties to aid me in my objective scientific experiments by having there arse spanked. To my surprise 50% agreed."— Alva Bernadine

From the WomenSing website: "Believing that music is transformative and enlightening for both singer and listener alike, WomenSing is devoted to the study and performance of great choral repertoire and to sharing it with a broad audience."

The evening's repertory did not disappoint, ranging from Vivaldi's Beatus Vir to Haydn's String Quartet in Eb Major to the Snow Birds—Words by Sri Ananda Acharya (born 1883 to the Brahmin caste, later renouncing the world and settling in Norway) and music by Michael Head (1900-1976). The lyrics for the song cycle came from an early edition of Sri Ananda's poetry, entitled "The Snow Birds."

The lyrics to "Only A Singing Bird" I found particularly wonderful.

I am not God nor His messenger.
I am only a singing bird.
I am not Poet nor his Muse.
I am only a singing bird.
I am not Prophet.
I am not Sage—
I am only a singing bird. 

I fly in the heav'ns across the seas.
And come to sing at thy door.
Each dawn when the morning God
smiles on the ocean,
Each eve when the twilight God
sings at earth's end,
Each night when the God of thy heart
sits in silence alone with the God of my heart.
I am only a singing bird.