Bits: 10.14.09

Japanese town logos often incorporate typographical elements like "kanji, hiragana, katakana, and Roman letters." Via Pink Tentacles.

• New York art critic and street-art historian Hrag Vartanian lauches a new site, Hyperallergic, today and a Twitter account to go with it.

• Greg Allen writes about "dazzle painting," a pattern used in Word War I naval camouflage and the inspiration for a Jeff Koons yacht paintjob.

• "Omission is the beginning of history writing."

• Not new but fascinating-looking documentary: Guest of Cindy Sherman, which chronicles artist Paul H-O's breakdown after he interviews Sherman for his NYC cable-access TV show, they fall in love and he finds himself subsumed by Sherman's fame. (YouTube has some clips.) Via the Art Collectors.

• Minneapolis hosts the American Craft Council's “Creating a New Craft Culture” Conference this Thursday through Satruday. Speakers include illustrator Kate Bingaman, NYT "Consumed" columnist Rob Walker and others.

• Merkins! The Textile Center in Minneapolis is showing Intimate Apparel, an exhibition of artist-designed merkins ("artificial covering[s] of hair for the female pubic region"), through Oct. 24. (Thanks, Ellen.)

• Jen Graves talks with Stelarc, "The Man with the Ear-Arm."

• BBC: "A school has been fined £16,500 after a 16-year-old pupil lost eight fingers when her hands got stuck in a bucket of plaster of Paris during an art lesson." Only £16,500?!

• Waxy looks at Nikolai Sutyagin's wooden skyscraper.

• There's now a crater on the moon named after John Lennon -- the John Lennon Peace Crater. And, no, it's not the one left behind after last week's "bombing."