As a kid, I was fascinated by the patterns (and occasional lingering dot) that different TVs would produce in the instant when they were switched off. Stephan Tillmans has a series of photographs that capture that moment. I’m also just old enough to remember when the networks went off the air and into a test pattern at the end of the night, starting up early the next morning with the Star Spangled Banner…

“Cowards. Criminal toadies. Chickenshit pimps who would sell their mothers into forced prostitution for a buck. That is Merrill Lynch, and the fact that a single goddamned dollar of my tax money went to these spineless, money-grubbing parasites makes my stomach turn. If Goldman Sachs is a vampire squid, then Merrill Lynch is Escherichia coli of banking. Whatever they touch gets sick, and occasionally dies.

I’ve said this before, and I will repeat it here: If you are a Merrill Lynch client, and they lose you money, you have forfeited the right to complain to anyone — its your own damned fault. Anyone who gives money to these incompetents, fools and weasels gets exactly what they deserve . . .”

– Barry Ritholtz, from his must-read blog The Big Picture, summing up Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair piece on Merrill and Ireland.

More info and clips at Quayola.

If there was one person I wish would tag my house (it happens in Venice) it’s Futura. (via Dangerous Minds)

My brother has been sending me photos of City Gardens, a venue in southern New Jersey where we witnessed all manner of punk/hardcore/ska bands in the late 80s/early 90s. Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, Leeway, NY Citizens…all of the photos are essentially a scrum of unrelenting energy, almost violent save for the few smiling faces in the crowd. Dan Witz faithfully captures a flash of these moments – in oils –  in his series “Mosh Pits”, where humanity crushes together into a fluid and dynamic expulsion of energy with nowhere to go.

Kevin Cyr conceptualized and ultimately built this self-powered Winnebago. The whole of his work – particularly the Van paintings – is amazing.

If you grew up in the 80′s and spent time in the school cafeteria sketching typography, logos and stuff you just thought looked “cool”, chances are you were influenced in some way by the cholo/asian calligraphy hybrids that Chaz Bojórquez was pioneering. For a kid growing up on the other side of the country, his work in part epitomized the magical and crazy place that we pictured Southern California to be. He’s got a book out now.