Note the powerful psionic waves emanating from the claw. I, for one, welcome our new crab-men overlords

I know, at first blush, the claim that Le Corbosier secretly engineered a race of crab-men hellbent on the enslavement of all mankind may seem far flung. Maybe you think I’m just misinterpreting the silhouetted figure.

A few weeks later I spotted this drawing by a 19th century French biologist:

A perfect match in claw proportions and posture!

I rest my case.

Photographs showing the lego concentration camp set.

Unfolded boxes for the lego concentration camp sets.

The holocaust is such a hard thing to understand on a personal level; the scale is just too big.  Different approaches can help make the problem relatable for different people.  The combination of mass produced children’s toys and assembly-line genocide was surprisingly powerful to me.

We were lucky that the Gemäldegalerie had two of his 30 odd works while we were in Berlin.  Here are a couple close-ups from St. John the Evangelist and The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

Maybe not your typical transit, but it beats sitting in traffic

“Yeah, I’m a nearsighted lizardman with angel wings. So what?”

Fish Knight to the rescue

The main attraction is a collection of objects Vlad has collected over the years that he has put together in really nontraditional ways to create surreal scenes.  For example:

The doctor will see you now.

Much of the collection is made up of sports equipment, old cameras and lights, and medical instruments.  The overall effect is…weird.  Vlad says the main point of the museum is that we all love fantasy and science fiction books and movies but are much less interested in history.  However, the history of these objects (e.g. an iron lung) is sometimes more wild and fantastical than any science fiction story.  He wants his visitors to be creative and imagine stories behind the objects, and he promised us we would leave two times smarter!  While I don’t know if we succeeded on that front, we were very amused by the museum and appreciated Vlad’s personal touch telling stories and even trying on some of the items in his collection.

Here are some more photos.  Perhaps you too can use your imagination and be twice as smart when you finish this blog post!

What is going on here?

We went up on a hill

Proof that Tiara was actually there, for all you conspiracy nuts

It had a fake waterfall.

This is a crazy artificial waterfall

We went into a museum

It had mediocre light sculptures that for some reason look much better on camera.

Honestly, this looks twice as cool in the photo as it did in person.

I also look twice as cool in this photo than in person.

It also had some sick sculptures:

Why doesn’t unicode have a character for metal horns? \m/

I think I saw this on a Pantera album cover

We also went on top of the museum

This time we were both there.

Scenic vista belies 95 degree heat.

And people say I’m a huge blockhead…

We also went to the beach. Mostly at night.

We’ve previously established that we love musuems. The Centre de la Vieille Charite was no exception. Here are a few favorites from the collection.

Dried Dead Things

Some ancient Egyptians dressed up a little bird like a person and mummified it. I love it.

He looks like a little bird buttler

This next one looks straight out of a certain Tool video from the 90s (Parental Advisory: contains images of disturbing claymation, shitty music).

So metal.

I picture some Egyptian taxidermists, or mumifiers, or whatever you call them, sitting by the Nile on a hot day.

Egyptian 1: “So, what are we gonna do now? We’re at the top of our game. We mummified that bird, embalmed the goat; what could possibly be a challenge worthy of our talents?”
Egyptian 2: “How about, I dunno, A FREAKING CROCODILE!”
Egyptian 1 and Egyptian 2 fist bump. A legend is born.

#1 on the list of things I hope never come back from the dead

Hatception

This is a hat that is the head of a man wearing a hat that is a stool with another man sitting on it. That other man is also wearing a hat.

It’s hats all the way down.

Skulls

I think these speak for themselves.

I’ve already asked Tiara to bury me with sweet goggles.

Tron Pit

I think this effect is just accomplished with a series of mirrors. Either that, or it’s a portal straight to the ENCOM mainframe.

Let me just grab my light cycle, and I’m ready to go.

Our favorite thing about Nice was that the ocean water was calm and warm.  We spent a couple evenings at the beach, skipping rocks and swimming at sunset.

We also escaped the heat in the air-conditioned MAMAC for a couple of hours, which has a solid contemporary art collection, including a special exhibit highlighting Nice artists.

On our last night, we were able to meet up with my friend Jesse’s brother, Cole, who is a pastry chef living in Nice.  He invited us over to dinner with friends and he cooked an impressive dinner while Ian served some excellent cocktails.  It’s so fun to watch a professional manage a bunch of different pans on the stove at the same time and work so confidently.  It will be good inspiration for me when we return home!

Artception!

A few weeks ago I was fascinated by some Google researcher’s post on how they took computer networks trained to recognize images and tweaked them to generate/morph images instead. It’s fascinating, and worth a read even if you’re not hip to the computer science.

On my todo list is to get their code running on my computer, but in the meantime someone saved me the work and made a website for transforming  photos. You can try it yourself at https://dreamscopeapp.com/

I picked an already trippy picture from Marseille, and it came out looking pretty neat. Here’s the original:

Just about equally trippy, actually.

Here’s another transformed version for your nightmares:

250lbs of metal and glass makes for one hell of a light fixture.

This guy makes things that are just too cool (sometimes literally). I kind of want to be him when I grow up.

Bonus video of the terraced watefall from Foundation Louis Vuitton. Watch it on loop to achieve nirvana.