A Rainbow of Books

Seth Malis at Adobe Books

Someone favorited the above photo in my Flickr stream last night. This is one my own favorite photos but it slipped by in my photo stream unnoticed by anyone for two years until last night. I walked into a little independent book store in the Mission one night because there was a rumor that the Extra Action Marching Band would be doing a guerrilla show there to interrupt some guys scheduled book reading. So I arrive at Adobe Books and there is this author Seth Malis and 4 or 5 other people there. I'm immediately struck by something as I walk in. There's a sort of surreal cognitive dissonance. It actually took a minute or so, but suddenly I realized that all of the books on the wall were arranged by color. That realization was an incredibly visceral moment! Moments later Seth started reading this great beat poet style work, throwing each page over his shoulder as he finished. After a few minutes of that the EAMB slammed into the store and it was utter chaos. It's one of my most treasured moments in a decade of living in San Francisco. The horizontal photo above is a stitched together panorama of several individual photos, so view it at the largest size for the best image.



Via the Flickr group Rainbow of Books, I discovered today that there is a KQED Spark segment available that goes over the installation of the rainbow of books project by artist Chris Cobb. Mie and I don't watch a lot of TV, but Spark is one of the shows we enjoy regularly.

Comments

[treb]

Did Seth do something to piss them off or was it more of a "for fun" type of thing?

[cutiebiscuit]

Ah!  Thanks for the explanation! 

[ed]

[this is good] So this is vox. Interesting, sorta a myspaceish blogger.

[ed]

hmm, Is there a way to add your own code or must you use the standard templates? Even MySpace, crap that it is, can be manipulated-myspace.com/blankspace2


It says- "Vox has hundreds of professionally designed themes or you can create your own." but I'm having difficulty finding the 'create your own' bit.  

[Dav Yaginuma]

Yeah, it's more like a Friendsterish Blogger. Not nearly as customizable as myspace in terms of page layout. However, that may be why the mean quality of the Vox pages is higher than MySpace's. The variance is lower as well, but then I've yet to want to gouge my eyes out after clicking on a Vox page, compared to 50%+ of MySpace pages.

[ed]

Oh, MySpace blows, no doubt about it, sorry i even mentioned it. But i'm having difficulty finding my way around this thing. I miss the control. Look at that post above, I pasted from the website and it took over the font size.

Check your profile-

http://dav.vox.com/profile/

I don't know how it looks to you, but in every browser i have it shows the html. Its unreadable.

 Here, I tried to put it on my vox blog -

http://ed945.vox.com/library/post/huh.html

http://tinyurl.com/2jw7uz

That's a screencapture- Firefox 2.0.0.3 on  OSX10.4.9.

I don't know, man, I'm all with you on the quality thing, but this system has problems.

[ed]

In case that didn't work, like I'm sayin' having some difficulty findinfg my way around theretry <a href="http://edthecat.com/random-picture3.html">this</a>


wonder if it allows links?If not 

http://edthecat.com/random-picture3.html

[ed]

Dav, sorry for being negative, before I got all caught up in the minutiae of blog design, I originally meant to say, "That's a really cool picture, Thanks".