Bill Plympton

The Mad Baron

"For the next six months, a surreal existence fell over Mongolia as the Baron and his army, now dubbed the Order of Military Buddhists, performed every type of atrocity imaginable including torture and cannibalism. He believed himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He became a convert to the eightfold-path. Interpreting the Buddhist scriptures in his own manner, he believed that in the act of killing the weak he upgraded their position in the universe and they would be reborn as greater beings. He therefore felt that by washing Urga with the blood of innocent people he was saving the world in a cosmic sense, one bullet at a time."

Baron Ungern von Sternberg

Ekaterinburg, Russia

"The unusual graveyard in the industrial Uralmarsh area of Ekaterinburg, Russia, sits in a tree-lined reserve in what became one of Russia's most violent gangster zones following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Now the gangsters who operated around the nearby complex of military factories stare out at the world from a special area of the cemetery - reserved for mafia bosses and henchmen.

In true gangster style the showy tombstones display many of the men they symbolise wearing clothing preferred by mafia men during the bloody era...

"Some of them even had their speciality etched on the tombstones such as 'judo sixth dan' or an 'expert in the use of knives'."

- Russia's gangster graveyard

William Hope spirit photographer

"At the very beginning of the 20th century, and after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while he was photographing a friend, carpenter William Hope became interested in spirit photography and founded the Crewe Circle. When archbishop Thomas Colley joined the group, the spirit photographers started to publicise their work.

As the grieving relatives of those lost to the Great War sought ways of contacting their loved ones, the Crew Circle became quite succesful and by 1922, Hope moved to London and started a professional medium business.

The Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate the work of the Crew Circle, and he collected evidence that William Hope produced his spirit photographs with a little help from some glass plates and the spooky images on it. Price exposed Hope as a fraudster, but many of his supporters defended him fiercely. Among the most famous was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the spiritual father of Sherlock Holmes and an ardent spiritualist."


William Hope

More "Phantom" Photographs

"Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time."

"I'm into swing. I get that from the American Indians like the Sioux, the Arapahoe and the Apache. They have this drum-beat, heart-beat. Bom, bom, bom... The beat is always in the background. I sit down at my desk and write as I get different ideas and phrases. I don't compose at a piano, it's mostly in my head. The classical masters, like Mozart and Hayden, would sit at their desk and write a string quartet like somebody would write a letter... I was in Hamburg in '75 and I was working on the overtones and I finally realized that I had something interesting here. It was a code. I didn't know it was a code but I cracked the code and found out how to develop it. Ten years later, I found out what it was. I wasn't looking for a code.

That code proves that not only whoever created the universe does exist but he, I call him the mega-mind, wants us to know he exists. Within this code, it also proves that contraction must come before expansion. It also proves that a cause can become an effect and an effect can become a cause. It proves the two-directionality of time. It proves that the past is the future and the future is the past. All this flys in the face of what Hubble did, saying that there was a big bang and an expansion of the universe. His is a theory but mine is a fact. A fact incontrovertable, as I call it. They talked about these theories of mine on National Public Radio." - Moondog

Courtesy of Adelle Stripe

The BQE

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is an incidental 12.7 miles of urban roadway built over the course of several decades (1939-1964), spear-headed by the master architect Robert Moses to accommodate for the increase of commercial and commuter traffic in New York City's outer boroughs. The roadway was a painstaking piecemeal project, poorly planned, badly built, and relentlessly encumbered by the obvious obstacles of the era: red tape, neighborhood protests, World War II, and a congested borough whose sequestering layout proved ill-fitting for the automobile. The resulting expressway-a pockmarked, serpentine, congested BQE-has become one of Brooklyn's most notable icons of urban blight. And, for Sufjan Stevens, an object of unmitigated inspiration.


The official album release of The BQE follows nearly two years after its original performance at BAM, providing the songwriter (and his various collaborators) ample time to wrestle out all the thematic incarnations of the project, and to attempt an appropriation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work"). The resulting album might be best described as a grand creative franchise-incorporating movie, symphony, comic book, dissertation, photography, graphic design, and a 3-D Viewmaster® reel-in which a songwriter's interrogation of one of New York's ugliest landmarks expands athletically to forums and formulas outside of the song itself. In fact, the BQE is everything but a song...

Sufjan Stevens - The BQE (Asthmatic Kitty)

Serge Gainsbourg - animation des graffitis sur 5 ans du mur rue de Verneuil from Arnaud Jourdain on Vimeo.