Alice's Tea Party
(Tokyo 2006.07)

Nendo, the group responsible for what's above, is the brainchild of designer Oki Sato. Instead of trying to explain what they do, I thought I would share their cool mission statement:

Giving people a small « ! » moment.
There are so many small « ! » moments hidden in our everyday.

But we don’t recognize them.
and even when we do recognize them,we tend to unconsciously reset our
minds and forget what we’ve seen.

But we believe these small « ! » moments are what make our days so
interesting, so rich.

That’s why we want to reconstitute the everyday by collecting and
reshaping them into something that’s easy to understand.

We’d like the people who’ve encountered nendo’s designs to feel these
small « ! » moments intuitively.

That’s nendo’s job.

Meanwhile, over at the always interesting Eyeball Hatred, I found a great link to:

LITERATURE FROM THE “AXIS OF EVIL”: WRITING FROM IRAN, IRAQ, NORTH KOREA AND OTHER ENEMY NATIONS

If you click on that title you can pick up the book and you can also read excerpts from a few of the stories and poems in the collection. One good example comes from a paragraph in "A Nation behind Bars," by the Sudanese scribe Khalid Oways:

"A greeting at the door. A slap on the right cheek. I spat blood. His face is like a fried fish that just came out of the oil. His eyes are pools of pus and rotten blood. I stood opposite him."

And lastly, I wanted to mention this HBO documentary I watched called Slam Nation, which follows a group of poets to the National Poetry Slam. Whether you like slam poetry or not, this is worth renting just to see the superfantabulistic Saul Williams perform like a word magician. Plus, it was filmed back in the mid 90s, so it takes place before his movie Slam came out, and before he published his books and records.