Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Reanimation Library founder Andrew Beccone.

Made in Chicago: The Chicago Underground Library is one of my favorites of a new crop of DIY libraries springing up around the country. The CUL's primary collection development requirement is that every item it acquires needs to have been published in Chicago, and within that directive it seems that almost anything goes. When I visited the library last summer, its founder, Nell Taylor, showed me photocopied gutterpunk zines, handcrafted poetry chapbooks, and a 10-year run of the quarterly newsletter of Adlerian Psychology Associates, Individual Psychology Reporter. In a recent email, Taylor helpfully noted that that last item "begins very dry and straightforward, but later ones branch out to include poetry, quotes, cartoons, and extended back and forth arguments between readers. Topics cover the applications of Adlerian Psychology, the French Revolution, Chomsky, and paintings of geese."

Art is Cheaper in a Book: Printed Matter may be one of the coolest bookstores on the planet. It was founded in Manhattan in 1976 by a group of artists and artworkers (including Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard and Carl Andre) who embraced publishing as a way to produce and disseminate artwork on the cheap. A central part of their mission is to promote publications made by artists, and to that end they debuted the Research Room in 2007. Geared towards scholarly study, the Research Room features a searchable database of 10,000 titles, critical essays, and curated lists of artists' publications.

Pickle Surprise!: Sometimes I think that YouTube should be banned from social gatherings because it leads people from talking to watching, but had my friends Chris and Paul observed that ban at a party at their apartment I would have missed out on this. Thank you Tom Rubnitz, and R.I.P.

Anitomically Morbid: Joanna Ebenstein runs the rigorously researched and regularly updated blog Morbid Anatomy. Its tag line is "surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture." Prepare to be overwhelmed by a feast of arcane medical imagery; Morbid Anatomy is probably the single greatest resource for images of anatomical models on the web. If you like Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, you'll love Ebenstein's blog. Here in New York Ebenstein has made her personal collection of books available to the public in the form of the Morbid Anatomy Library and is collaborating with a handful of likeminded individuals on the recently opened event space, Observatory.

Gargantuan Playground of Obscure Things: UbuWeb bills itself as "a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts." That hardly prepares you for the site's gargantuan playground of obscure texts, videos, and sound recordings. With it's donated server space, volunteer labor, and commitment to a gift economy, UbuWeb is as close to an online utopia as I've ever come across. Amidst all the concrete poetry and conceptual art, it's hard to point to a favorite, but I was completely caught off guard by a, um, Joseph Beuys music video for his 1982 protest pop song, Sonne Statt Reagan. The web being the web, it turns out you can find this on YouTube too, but there's something about watching it in the quasi-scholarly context of Ubu that makes it that much more bizarre.

Please Take Me to Los Angeles: Nothing has made me want to decamp to the West Coast more than Machine Project in Los Angeles. Housed in an empty storefront in Echo Park, Machine Project apparently has access to a magical elixir that ensures a limitless supply of brilliant ideas. They take advantage of their flexible space by doing pretty much anything that they want. Why not create an indoor forest, or drill holes in the floor to make a secret basement gallery, or host a pie theory lecture + practicum? Last November, the people of Machine Project took over the LA County Museum of Art for a day, an event which included, among many other notable projects, a guitarist performing one minute of speed metal in a replica of the Doorway with Arms of the Count of Chazay at the top of each hour.

Geostationary Banana Over Texas: I gather that it's not quite shovel ready, but good lord—can somebody please launch this giant banana into the sky?

Bio: Andrew Beccone is the founder and director of the Reanimation Library in Brooklyn, NY. He also makes music and works as the Librarian at a contemporary art gallery. The Reanimation Library can be followed on Twitter @reanimationlib.