POINTS OF ENTRY


The Payola Chronicles

What do you do when a music marketing company out of Brooklyn asks if they can put you on their promo list and send you music and concert tickets in exchange for you writing reviews on your blog? You start a new series called The Payola Chronicles.

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Redesigning the Towers and Turrets*

For the past few months I have been posting a series called Great Counterculture Logos and getting feedback from the likes of Paul Pascarella of Gonzo lore, PD at Skull Skates and Jordan Cooper at Revelation Records on how their respective marks came to be...

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It's All Around You...

Some of the best artistic inspiration that crosses my path on a daily basis is not in the galleries (although I post on that here as well) but on the walls and back alleys I pass through on my way to work. The best of these pieces are posted in the aptly titled ongoing series Art I Pass By On My Way to Work. Cooler still, they are all geotagged.

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WORK WORTH DOING

An Interview with Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto
as featured on blog.industrialbrand.com and eco.psfk.com

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Greenland is melting!"

This was how Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto introduced themselves at this year's ICOGRADA in Seattle. It was early in the conference and the first statement that truly made us sit up and take notice. We would learn that the pair had worked on Bruce Mau's exhibit Massive Change, a massive undertaking unto itself tackling the world's most critical problems from a designer's perspective. They then went on to create Work Worth Doing, a design studio "working at the intersection of the business, cultural and philanthropy sectors bringing design thinking and design processes to a host of social and environmental challenges".

Yes, Greenland is melting. This can interpreted as a catastrophic event, threatening ocean circulation patterns and Europe's climate. But from a different perspective, it also stands as an untapped economic resource for Greenland and a potential water supply for Africa. From this latter view, the Greenland issue no longer becomes a problem, but a solution. It is all in how you approach the challenge.

We recently interviewed Lorraine and Alex to further discuss the potential of design in creating positive change in the world.

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ICOGRADA 2006

Defining Design on a Changing Planet
(the writer's cut)

I have just returned home and begun an intensive recovery that is befitting of the work hard / play hard ethic with which our team tackled these past four days at ICOGRADA’s Design Week in Seattle. The news has been on the television all evening: looping footage of the escalating tension between Israel and the Hezbollah; of blown out Lebanese neighbourhoods and clips of Anderson Cooper chasing after the next ground zero.

After dinner, we rent Syriana, remembering its scenes of a claustophobic and heavily armed Hezbollah-occupied Beirut; trying to make some sense of it all; but, of course, it only serves to underline the point that there are no simple answers, no defined lines that clearly separate right from wrong, the good guy from the bad guy; and a harsh reminder of what we are up against as we return from this conference back to reality with our heads full of optimism and ideals.

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DESIGN

A Sensitive Dependence: The Search for a Canadian Identity in Graphic Design

This past summer, on the balmy shores of Lake Huron, I took part in a wine tasting where the libations in question were all by the same wine maker, they were all from the same grape and all bottled in the same year. The defining difference between the three bottles was one of a very specific geography. The first bottle had been cultivated from the grapes on the southern hillside of the winery; the second bottle's fruit had matured in the valley while the last bottle had its roots in the acreage just across the highway. Within these controlled settings, the differences in taste seemed ever more apparent and strangely, more relevant. By reducing the variables to a matter of a few square kilometres, we had derived from the wine its true essence.

This experiment came to mind as I listened to the debate at the launch of the GDC's Graphex 2006 National Design Competition. The panel of international and highly qualified judges consisted of Rick Poynor, Min Wang, Debbie Millman, Robert Sarner and Tan Le. The topic was "Is there a definitive Canadian style in our graphic design?"

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IDEAS

Music for the 21st Century

"The most beautiful chord is made from dischord"
-Heraclitus


On May 29, 1913, 'The Rite of Spring', performed by Diaghiler's inimitable Ballet Russes made its world premiere at Paris' Théatre des Champs Elysées. The physically unnatural choreography accompanied by the atonal, rhythmically ambiguous music of Igor Stravinsky was too much for the audience's sensibilities. Hissing and booing grew to such a volume that the dancers were unable to hear their cues and the performance eventually dissolved into a state of chaos and rioting in the theatre. It was in this fashion that Modernism in music was born and in this sense did Stravinsky foreshadow all that would follow in the tumultuous 20th century.

So it seemed darkly fitting that tonight, nearly a century later, with the world's eyes once again focused on Paris as the major themes of our time play out against the fiery backdrop of its poorest districts, that Stravinsky would feature on the roster as symphony-goers in Vancouver Canada were treated to an evening of new sounds and new ideas which also included Michio Kitazume's Ei-Sho and John Adam's 'The Dharma at Big Sur', a piece that was inspired by Beat writer Jack Kerouac's novel 'Big Sur'.

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OPINION

Build Your Homes in Factories

Two years ago, while in Ontario visiting with friends and family, I was kindly invited to my cousin's new home for Thanksgiving dinner. Getting there required taking the subway out to Kipling, its westernmost stop and then driving another 40 minutes until we arrived literally on the edge of the GTA sprawl. Only a block away lay acres of razed land, once the fertile soil of farms and orchards, now reallocated to the purposes of souless and sterile suburbia. Is this what we were all striving for? I asked myself. Working our lives away for a carving of these spoils?

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JOURNEYS

The Beijing Dispatch

There are people wandering along the side of the freeway. This is my first impression upon our arrival in Beijing. It strikes a deep set horror in me. Caught in the headlights, choked on the edge of the 10 lanes that spew out an air that you wear like another layer of skin, they look displaced, lost, left behind.

My god, I think to myself, 1.3 billion is too many; China's population is supersaturated; the levee has broken; people are spilling out everywhere.

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MARKETING

Digging in the right yard: The viral marketing of It's All Gone Pete Tong
As featured on if.psfk.com, ihaveanidea.org and blog.industrialbrand.com

There was little coverage to be found in the mainstream media upon the release of the independent mockumentary "It's All Gone Pete Tong". Not that it deserved to be overlooked. The movie, about an Ibiza deejay, Frankie Wilde, who has to deal with going deaf, is not your average party flick. Picking up awards at a number of festivals, it is beautifully filmed and touches on a far deeper level than just spinning records and snorting lines. There is redemption in this movie. And everyone likes a little of that in their lives once in a while.

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CATALYSTS

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Look Again
One World
As a follow up to last week's post on the Whole Earth Campaign it seems that at this rather crucial juncture in the relationship between ourselves and our planet, we are again being encouraged to observe, contemplate and allow ourselves to be overcome by the profound image of the Earth from outer space.

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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Great Counterculture Logos - Part 4
Great Counterculture Logos
The Skull Skates Logo by Peter Ducommun.

Peter Ducommun (PD) writes:

the skull portion of the logo was originally cut from grip tape with an exacto knife which gave the design a jagged look ...the black and white shadowed skull mimics the yin yang symbol which was actually our companies' original mark al a town and country surf designs... the connected letters symbolize the flow of skating... the broken strokes of the "E" are a take off on the ancient I ching tri-gram meaning the creative...the skull was chosen for the universal connection [we all have one] and as a representation of the inevitability of death...skates because we always considered our self "skaters" rather than the more stodgy term "skateboarders"

...our friend jesus came up with a more complete interpretation of the mark on our site in the articles section under the title " subliminal imagery"

=pd=

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Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Before The World Was Whole
Whole Earth Button
"It was one month after the Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall when the “whole earth” in The Whole Earth Catalog came to me with the help of one hundred micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide. I was sitting on a gravelly roof in San Francisco’s North Beach. It was February 1966. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were waning toward Mexico. I was twenty-eight...

"...The buildings were not parallel—because the earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; it closed on itself. I remembered that
Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecture—that people perceived the earth as flat and infinite, and that was the root of all their misbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred mikes, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it."

-Stewart Brand

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Friday, January 19, 2007

Rosebud Works
ENTER TITLE IF IMAGE
The Donald discusses Citizen Kane over at the extremely engrossing site of the great Errol Morris.

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Sunday, January 14, 2007

Coaxing Light To Caress
The Photography of Jim Marshall, Michael Zagaris and Baron Wolman
(Pictured above: Robbie Robertson, Michael McClure, Bob Dylan & Alan Ginsberg) Regardless of whether the Sixties revolution changed the world, the dirt and the details have long since blurred into myth, once again allowing the ideals of the time to appear untarnished (though perhaps a little too naive), and its characters to rise to the realm of legend. No where is this more evidant than in the work of the era's great cultural photographers: Jim Marshall (above), Gene Anthony, Baron Wolman and others are featured over at Wolfgang's Vault.

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Saturday, January 06, 2007

Great Counterculture Logos - Part 3
Public Enemy
The Public Enemy logo by Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, aka Chuck D.

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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

DMZ
Brian Wood's DMZ
There's nothing quite like starting off the new year with a little post-apocalyptic anarchy care of Brian Wood's beautifully rendered graphic series DMZ, in which the U.S. has plunged back into civil war, and Manhattan serves as the figurative "line in the sand". The first issue can be downloaded for free from Vertigo.

More of his work, including links to other comics can be found on his website, brianwood.com.

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