Thursday, November 08, 2007

on how to make a statue fly...

flyingstatue1

flyingstatue2

i was cleaning out the archives over the weekend, and found these two photos which i picked up at a flea ages ago. the first shows a pair of photographers with a table of statues, setting up a shot. you can see one guy is attaching a post to the back of a statue so it will hang a good distance off the black cloth background. the second photo is the result... i'm guessing they were working on a kid's book.

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Saturday, October 20, 2007

his city's voice...

Agiantnipper

a tiny picture from the 1940's, of "the newest addition to the albany, ny skyline." a four ton 25 and 1/2 foot tall statue of "nipper" the rca victor dog... probably the largest of such statues ever made.

the original idea behind the logo was that the dog with his head cocked to one side above the phrase "his master's voice" meant that the recordings were so clear, that the dog thought he was hearing his dead master speak again. one wonders what this giant dog, looking out over the cityscape in a state of heightened audio awareness, was listening to, or listening for.

atop a four story building, the listening dog could supposedly be seen for a distance of five miles, and even had an airline warning light mounted to his right ear "to serve as a guide for pilots". one hopes that the blinking red light was silent, otherwise i think this poor fellow would've gone insane with a perpetual mechanical click attached to the surface of his ear... unless the repetition somehow became its own little lilting immersive drone... nipper's little doggy dreamhouse...

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