Category Archives: Art Attack

Andy Warhol eating a hamburger

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It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it’s kind of mesmerizing:

Turns out Andy Warhol folded his hamburgers and dipped them in ketchup. Who knew?

For what it’s worth, I was at the Guggenheim not long ago. In one of the side rooms off the main exhibit space, there’s a huge, green late-period self-portrait by Warhol of his disembodied head. It’s pretty cool looking and I’m generally into giant disembodied heads so I was checking it out. While I was standing there, some dude walked through my eye-line, passing the portrait without giving it more than a cursory glance.

Then, as he stepped past, he noticed the little placard that said the portrait was by Warhol. He gasped, stopped in his tracks, and gawked at the portrait in apparent awe of its grandeur. I tried not to chuckle at the overwhelming and very obvious meta-ness of the moment. Andy Warhol would have loved that s— like he loved that hamburger.

Via George.

This happened

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We removed the last bit of wrapping and there it was: the top half of a Whopper sitting comically upon an epic throne of bacon, with a sliver of lettuce sprouting from the base, suggesting that the bottom half of the burger may be salvaged yet….

Before going to work on the burger, Mr. Sato once again began his primal ritual of psyching himself up, shouting: “This is what real hamburger lovers eat! 10 strips? 100 strips? Like that’s enough! A real man needs 1050 strips of bacon!”

Mr. Sato then plunges his face into the top of the burger, holding on to the top bun and a layer of bacon below the beef patty for support. Eventually he runs out of burger to supplement his bacon and simply begins stuffing bacon into his mouth by the fistful, all the while ranting: “Delicious! This is what meat is all about! This is the taste of a real hamburger!”

– RocketNews24.com.

We’re calling this performance art, right? I know I am. Let’s go to the videotape. Warning: Will only kind of make you want bacon. Also, the Weather Report-y music in the closing credits is perfect:

Yeah, there’s no way that’s not art. Via Boing Boing.

Please help make this happen

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This is news to me but apparently there is an online movement to have American hero Weird Al Yankovic perform at halftime of next year’s Super Bowl. It started with a column in the Daily News, and now Weird Al himself is on board.

For so many reasons, this needs to happen. There are a bunch of online petitions running. This is the one I’m filling out. Join me in making this absurd pipedream a reality. I hope he closes with Harvey the Wonder Hamster.

Also, since you’re filling stuff out online and in a generous spirit, check out the Kickstarter for the Hall of Very Good book started by Sky Kalkman and Marc Normandin. If it gets done, you get the rare opportunity to read stuff I write. Also, it puts me in a book alongside many of the best baseball writers in the world.

Now featured at the analog TedQuarters

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This is not a great picture of the thing, but my dad made me this baseball-card mural for Christmas. For better or worse, the reflection of the living-room light blocks out Willie McGee’s face in the photo:

The cards all came from the duffel bag full of cards in my parents’ basement. Somehow a now-creased 1987 Topps Barry Bonds was in there, even though my brother and I once worked pretty hard to separate the cards we thought might be good from the duffel-bag cards.

I made a couple of similar murals before I first moved to Brooklyn about seven years ago, but I didn’t do nearly as good a job with them so some of the cards were a little crooked and a bunch eventually fell off. I got the idea from the Park Slope music venue Southpaw, which has its basement basically wallpapered in old cards.

Anyway, if you have a lot of old, hilarious baseball cards laying around somewhere, I suggest putting them to this good use. I find myself staring at the thing all the time, transfixed by all the amazing mustaches and awful uniforms of yesteryear.

CFL banquet turns into old-man fight

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In what ranks as one of the most bizarre episodes in the proud history of the Canadian Football League alumni luncheon, former Cal quarterback and head coach Joe Kapp, 73, got into a fight with old nemesis Angelo Mosca, 73, in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Friday.

The fight had it all: fisticuffs, a swinging cane and, of course, flowers.

– Mike Wolcott, S.F. Chronicle.

Apparently these fellows have had bad blood since a dirty hit in a Grey Cup game in 1963. Anyway, the video (embedded below) reveals this to be a pretty serious old-man fight.

My dad’s maternal grandfather was something of an old-man fighter himself, a Scottish soccer hooligan long before that Saturday Night Live sketch ever came out. My dad grew up near a model-train store called “Mulroney’s Trainland,” run by an old Irish guy named Mulroney.

One day, my dad told his mother that he was taking his younger brother down to Trainland. She told him she didn’t think that was such a good idea. “Your grandfather punched out Mulroney outside the bar Friday night,” she said.

Oh and another old-man fighting story: One time a distinguished architect told an architecture class I took about a physical altercation between extremely old-man Frank Lloyd Wright and much-younger Philip Johnson at some architecture conference in the 50s.

Apparently Wright walked in, spotted Johnson and said, “Little Philip Johnson, all grown up and building houses out of doors” — which is a serious architect burn. Johnson got all up in Frank Lloyd Wright’s grill, so Wright went to work on his legs with a cane.

Anyway, here’s that video:

James Franco really pushing it

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Of course, for the true connoisseur, they’ll want to dream bigger—such as spending $100 on a full-scale imaginary steamboat that was used in Franco’s imaginary movie, which imaginarily floats and features imaginary rooms to live in. Or even dropping $10,000 on “Fresh Air,” which is an endless supply of air all around you, forever, that you can actually breathe. Again, all of these pieces are meant to “open our eyes to the unseen universe that exists at every moment” as “we exchange ideas and dreams as currency in the New Economy.”

– Sean O’Neal, Onion A.V. Club.

This has got to be the best evidence yet for the case that James Franco is messing with everybody, right?

And if he is, does that count as performance art or just a funny longform prank?

Via Catsmeat.