Searchable text: Material Girl: I'm not the wife of a dictator. I'm an artist, so I have the freedom to bounce around, to try different things. The way I dressed in the beginning of my career was a reflection of me being incredibly poor. I just wore things I had left over from my training as a dancer. And then I sold a few records, made a few bucks, and bought a few clothes. In the Sex book, we were influenced by everything from Visconti to Warhol to a kind of Valley of the Dolls aesthetic — you know, the sort of drunken, bored housewife wandering naked down a street hitchhiking in her high heels. I pushed that as far as I could, and then I started exploring the opposite end of the spectrum, which was asexual, minimalist.
— Madonna, quoted in Vogue, Oct. 1996.
Material Guy: The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an 'immense collection of commodities'; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity. The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies a man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e., an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.
— Karl Marx, based on Capital, Vol.I, beginning of chapter 1.
December 1996 (reformatted 2003)
Searchable text: My uncle is Morton Feldman
December 1999
Searchable text:"Explanation of the T" Shirt: Given two lines of equal length, one line vertical and the other horizontal, human vision will unfailingly perceive the horizontal as shorter. The world contains far more variety in the size, shape, orientation and location of objects than any single formula for vision could address. The brain receives an image of possible interpretations and "sees" the most probable one in the light of previous visual experience. A database of natural scenes was built using a laser range scanner to record 3-dimensional location of each point in each scene. Then, in a statistical analysis from 15,000 images, the relationship between retinal and real length was determined. Real-world objects with vertical lines in the retinal image tend to be longer than those than give rise to horizontal lines.
— based on S. Ackerman in HHMI Bulletin [PDF]. June 2003, discussing the work of C. Howe.
December 2004
Searchable text: Great Moments in the History of Rhetoric, No. 346: Alliterative Counter-Attacks by Artists Against Ignorant Critics.
If he can't hear and doesn't know it, he's a mental-musico-defective… if he doesn't try to hear and knows he doesn't know, then he is getting money under false pretenses! In other words, these commercial pansies are either stupid or they are liars.
— Charles Ives
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today… — D.H. Lawrence
December 2005
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Teeshirts were designed by J. Ochshorn for personal use and are not for sale.
last updated: 28 November 2016