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.

Alt Wire   is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Eyeteeth and Minnesota Independent editor Paul Schmelzer.

Seed bombs: We've all heard of seed bombs—clumps of seed-embedded earth tossed into abandoned lots by guerrilla gardeners—but here are two new takes. Korean artist Jin-wook Hwang imagines actual cluster bombs that disperse seeds in the air to combat desertification (via Another Limited Rebellion), likening the action to that of Gale "Candy Bomber" Halvorson, an American World War II pilot who dropped candy from his plane for the children of Berlin. Japanese-born Hiroshi Sunairi, an NYU art professor, is sharing hibaku seeds—literally, "A-bombed seeds," ancestors of those affected by the bombing of Hiroshima—for people around the world to plant and tend. The persimmons, Japanese holly, jujubes and other varieties have been sprouting in places as far flung as London, Geneva, New York, Holland (Mich.), Joetsu City (Japan) and Minneapolis—where I'm tending my persimmon. The project's documentation will be exhibited at the New York Horticultural Society this December.

The Visual News: Two of my favorite sites for considering the visual aspects of the news are Michael Shaw's BAGnewsNotes and No Caption Needed, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The former recently republished an MSNBC photo entitled, "Last-second Escape"—which shows a U.S. Marine diving to avoid an explosion in Afghanistan—noting that the headline misleads: while one escaped, two other Americans were killed by the IED. Shaw calls it "an example of the disconnect between these wars we keep getting ourselves into and the all-too-familiar tendency to deny or romanticize." The latter has recently looked into news imagery of fallen soldiers returning to their home countries, finding that too often this somber ritual reflects a "radical isolation."

Street screeds (and other free-culture gems): UBUWEB is a wonderful trove of cultural resources, from the just-posted 1983 video, "Martha Rosler Reads Vogue" (in which she deconstructs messages in the ads and content of the fashion magazine), Craig Baldwin's film-collage Sonic Outlaws (a must-see for culturejammers, DJs and copyleft activists), and an incredible gallery of NYC street flyers—hand-made posters that range in theme from the political to the philosophical (here's one by a woman who thanks supporters for helping her win the U.S presidency three times—in 1973-1/2, 1976-1/2 and 1999-1/2.)

Pity the Nation: While it feels like a Bush-era remnant, Staceyann Chin's reading of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem Pity the Nation—with its reference to a "nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves"—never fails to give me chills, and should serve as a reminder to stay vigilant.

Mashups for peace: If Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" can peacefully (and rhythmically) coexist with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (thanks to DJ Morgoth), can't we all? Here are two more new lion-and-lamb mash-ups: Yes-meets-Sir Mix-a-Lot in "Owner of a Lonely Butt" by Minneapolis artist Richard Barlow. And Jay-Z meets Thom Yorke in New York DJ Max Tannone's Jaydiohead: The Encore.

Bio: Minneapolis-based writer and editor Paul Schmelzer blogs about art and activism at Eyeteeth: A Journal of Incisive Ideas; by day he is editor of the Minnesota Independent. He recently moderated Designing Obama, a panel hosted by the Walker Art Center.

 Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Believer editor Andrew Leland.

I first used an internet search engine around 1994, when as a 13-year-old I had a dial-up Internet connection and my own home page, "Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack," which featured SNL- and Simpsons-derived jokes, done up in rudimentary HTML. This was pre-Google, of course, but once I'd gotten the hang of using Webcrawler or Lycos or whatever engine I was using, I began performing what I immediately recognized were impressionistic internet searches. This is to say: rather than searching for relatively utilitarian subjects such as "Tutankhamun," or "Matt Groening biography," I'd feed the Internet strings like "feast of sadness, whispered pumice vampire, jiggles milk" or whatever shards of language I happened to be "feeling" at the time (and as a 13-year-old, as now, these emotional, surrealistic phrases regularly surf into my consciousness—usually on a board carved from hormones).

And then I'd delight in seeing what the rowdy, teeming, brand-new World Wide Web could spit back. (In this sense, the experience resembled a psychedelic, doors-blown-off version of chatting with Eliza, the early "interactive" Freudian psychoanalysis bot.) Most of the hits my impressionistic searches returned would be pages, usually hosted by computer science departments at large research universities, that simply listed (for some arcane database-related reason) every word in Webster's. These pages were interesting enough (at least knowing they existed, and wondering why), but if I refined my search a little, down to just, say, "feast of sadness, whispered pumice," then real strange treasures would wash ashore. These usually came in the form of fan fiction (I recently discovered, for example, the wealth of online erotic fan fiction devoted to Xena: Warrior Princess), full texts of inscrutable books, and heated discussion boards for topics I'd never otherwise have the pleasure of running across—places where text accumulates in eccentric formations.

Bio: Andrew Leland is the managing editor of The Believer and founding editor of Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack, which we would link to if we could.