broome: ideas & executions

Britain seen from the skies above

2008-08-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

Trailer for a new BBC series that uses satellite tracking and computer imaging to map the "unseen ballet of Britain".

The End Begins...

2008-07-30T16:34:00.000-07:00

Brilliant looking trailer for McG directed Terminator: Salvation

The Animation of Jeff Hale

2008-07-23T21:58:00.000-07:00

Over, Under, Around and Through

Pinball (one, two, three, FOUR, five..)

The Ringmaster

The Fairy Alphabet

Typewriter Man

Strange little flashback journey this evening. The complete Hale on YouTube listing can be found here

Bleeding skies...

2008-07-15T22:23:00.000-07:00

A YouTube clip of my new favourite author Tom McCarthy talking about his new favourite author Georg Trakl.

Sunday Evening Tunage

2008-07-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

COMPUTER VS BANJO

You can be pretty sure that if you meet someone at a party and they tell you that they are "cool" or claim to be "the funniest person you have ever met", they are certain to not deliver on that promise. Indeed they will no doubt prove to be quite boring and you will find yourself desperately searching for a way to escape from the corner that they have backed you into. Such innate traits never require a lead-in and the genuine article will be so oblivious as to wear them like a second skin. With that said, I offer you "Computer vs. Banjo", a band which, as their name suggests, mixes digital samples with a folksy blues sound.

Give Up On Ghosts

Now, my first thought upon being presented with this concept was that there are a shitload of musicians walking the line between the analog/digital worlds these days and doing it very well (Beck, Tunng, Radiohead?!?) but they don't find it necessary to proclaim it in the title of their band. Computer and Banjo seem almost too aware of the fact that they are taking a folksy genre and adding drum machines beneath it. The whole endeavour immediately comes across as "clever " --a trait that is about as shallow as piss on concrete and for this very reason, the two elements never quite gel, instead it remains in the realm of gimmick.

JOSEPH ARTHUR - VAGABOND SKIES

For the longest time now, I have had a tune in my music library called "A Smile That Explodes" by an artist named Joseph Arthur that I find unbelievably sublime. I did not know where it came from (figured it was caught in some late night tuna net style Acquisition binge) but it repeatedly found a place in my mellower playlists.

A Smile That Explodes

But upon the arrival this afternoon of Arthur's EP Vagabond Skies, I can only assume that this above first taste was courtesy of my good friends at Sneak Attack Media.

Now, this would probably be a good time for me to admit that I have really only been listening to Burial as of late with its minimalist-fried-synapse-twitching-hour vibe and other twisted and strained rhythms of a similar ilk. It all just seems appropriate as I'm weaving through my caffeine-fed urban morning landscape. But Joseph Arthur could single handedly pull me back into the world of melodic instrument and human driven tunes again. Aside from Second Sight (which is strangely out of place on this album and really not all that good) this album recalls Neil Young at his best. Give a listen to what is by far the best track, She Paints Me Gold:

She Paints Me Gold.mp3

On The New City..

2008-07-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

"The amount of building becomes obscene without a blueprint. Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you don't have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don't know."

--Rem Koolhaas

Creating a Brand Periphery

2008-07-07T23:50:00.000-07:00

David Armano posted an interesting article today over at Advertising Age about online personal brand presence in which he offers the following 3 guidelines for creating an online profile:

1) Engage in Personal Publishing
2) Be Your Own Agent
3) Be Authentic

Sound advice from the cowboy-hat wearing Twitterer (the man's got personal branding down cold!). But I would like to offer something to the mix on this topic that I have been thinking a good deal about lately, that of creating what I call a Brand Periphery Profile.

Now in order to define this term, I must begin by talking about its opposite, which I don't actually have a name for but logically would be defined as your Brand's Nuclear Profile. This is essentially the online profile that appears when someone types your name into a search engine. This is what Armano is speaking of in his article and, as he wisely advises, it should be kept on as tight or loose a leash as you deem appropriate to your public identity while still always remaining as authentic as possible.

Your Brand Periphery on the other hand is created in the echoes of what you are talking about or linking to online. It is not what shows up when someone googles your name but where you show up when someone is googling something seemingly unconnected to you. For example a search for "gonzo logo design" finds my site in the top 3 as a result of both an authentic and quite calculated association on my part with the good doctor HST and my pursuit of Great Counterculture Logos. Similarly, I take guilty pleasure in the fact that I rank number one for the search string "A new violent conception of life", a phrase derived from the manifesto of an Italian anarchist group who poured red dye into Rome's Trevi Fountain. It is really just creative SEO but in reaching out and connecting to these external personas and images and language, you are also pulling these elements into your Brand's Periphery and in turn, making them a part of who you are online.

Take it a step further and this can become a relevant strategy for small companies as well. Coudal.com for example has aligned themselves with film director Stanley Kubrick, dedicating an entire category of their blog to him alongside the more general topics of Art, Architecture, Film etc. That their interest and passion toward the man and his work is genuine is without question; but in creating this connection, by placing Kubrick into the Coudal brand's Periphery, they are harnessing the qualities associated with Stanley Kubrick -- passion, focus, vision -- for their own brand identity (and rightly so I might add).

Of course all of this is seemingly small potatoes in light of what large corporations have been doing for years with celebrity endorsements and lifestyle advertising. But it offers the little guy a similar opportunity and, if done authentically, should come about as a natural side effect of sharing what you are legitimately interested in.

So then, the question becomes "what strange far off corner of the internets do you want to be found?"

"I like to paint people in black and white because people are temporary"

2008-06-24T13:31:00.000-07:00

Amazing work by Zhong Biao.

The Little Give

2008-06-20T00:06:00.000-07:00

4 teams. 4 charities. 48 hours to make a difference. Karyo Edelman's The Little Give kicks off today. Check back to the site as the event progresses for on location Twitter updates and of-the-moment Flickr coverage.

Field Tested Books 2008

2008-06-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

The team over at Coudal.com are back at it with the launch of the 2008 edition of Field Tested Books, a collection of book reviews by a variety writers, each with an interesting twist. As Jim explains:

"We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it."

This year, the ever-experimental crew are trying their hand at book publishing by offering the Field-Tested Books collection (including all three years of FTB reviews) "in a handsome trade paperback". I was quite honored to be asked back as a contributor, and in return submitted a gonzo-inspired review of "The Proud Highway" by Hunter S. Thompson as read in Bangkok. (My 2006 submission, "Siddhartha, on a train between Madrid and Barcelona, Spain" can be found here.)

A perfect way to blow a Friday morning: peruse the website, buy the book and be sure to throw it in your backpack this summer when you light out on your own great literary adventure.

The Politics of Punk

2008-06-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

"I thought punk would fade like disco, and with any luck, be replaced with a musical movement led by artists who could actually play their instruments. But in the ambulance, the maniacal vibrato and caustic quips of Dead Kennedys lead singer Jello Biafra had me gaping.Forever etched in my brain are his Tourettes-like rants about the perils of chemical warfare and the unmitigated cruelty of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, dueling with the wailing siren as my buddy and I wove through rush-hour traffic."

–Patrick Ambrose writes "Jello Biafra and the Politics of Punk" at The Morning News

"Gonzo" Trailer

2008-06-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Trailer for Alex Gibney's (The Smartest Guys in the Room, Who Killed the Electric Car) Gonzo.

Wong Kar Wai Sells Out..

2008-05-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

For Philips Aurea.

For Lacoste.

For BMW (starring Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Adriana Lima and Forest Whitaker).

For Lancome (again starring Clive Owen).

For Dior (starring *cough* Eva Green).

For Softbank (starring Brad Pitt) here, here and here.

Pixel Pointillism: The Art of William Betts

2008-05-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon a brilliant exhibit at the Yaletown Jennifer Kostuik Gallery during lunch break today. Texas based artist William Betts (whose website curiously bares an "iPhone Optimized" icon) taps into the Big Brother omnipresence of our modern world, taking webcam and surveillance video screencaps as his subject matter and, by exchanging pixels for pointillism, reinterpreting them in often abstract and beautiful ways.

Says Betts in his Artist Statement:

"Today we have so many layers between the individual and direct experience, it fundamentally changes how we see the world...I am intereseted in how far removed I can get from the subject and the painting itself and still make paintings."

Definitely worth seeing in person if you get the chance. The exhibit runs until June 8th.

The Communist's Future

2008-05-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

Illustrations from various works by Russian science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev

(via Coudal)

Joshua Davis On Pollock & Dynamic Abstraction

2008-05-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

“Among modern artists I conceptually identify with Jackson Pollock - not that I’m a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There’s something in that disconnect - not using a brush or tool in traditional methods."

and

“Pollock might argue that it’s the process of abstraction that’s dynamic, not the end result, which in his case is a static painting. In my own work, the end result is never static; by making room for as many anomalies as possible, every composition generated by the programs we write is unique to itself. I’ll program the “brushes,” the “paints,” the “strokes,” the “rules”, and the “boundaries”. However it is the software that creates the compositions — the programs draw themselves. I am in a constant state of surprise and discovery, because the program may structure compositions that I may never have thought of to execute or might take me hours to create manually.”

-Joshua Davis

Swedes Invade the Red Room

2008-05-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

Sweeping in on the coattails of whistling pop sensation Peter, Bjorn & John and rockers the Hives amidst what is being declared a Swedish invasion (or is it a Scandanavian invasion: there were 42 acts from the region at SXSW this year; 11 of which were Swedish), two acts from the land of beautiful people and generous social welfare touch down at the Red Room this Wednesday night.

First up, 22 year old music-blog darling Lykke Li whose lilty tunes and airy vocals are produced by the Bjorn of prior-mentioned PB&J into unabashedly catchy pop creations. The big push online right now is for Dance Dance Dance but I am groovin more on the diskJokke remix of Everybody but Me from over at Recrdlbl.

The second act, El Perro Del Mar, I am less familiar with. The one piece of trivia that I dug up was that TV on the Radio invited her to open for them in Spain last summer which seems like an odd pairing. But I trust their taste. Take the easy pop tracks of Lykke Li above and let them mature for a few years like a fine wine and you would have something sounding somewhat like El Perro. The lovely collection of songs on her new album, From the Valley to the Stars includes this one, Glory to the World.

Should be a good show. Be sure to look up my review later in the week.

iTunes by the Numbers

2008-05-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

Found this cool meme on Sean Klassen's blog and thought I would apply it to my own bloated iTunes collection:

Total Length:
» 16307 items, 50.7 days, 87.24GB

First and Last Songs (by title):
» A-Tisket A-Tasket by Chick Webb v/Ella Fitzgerald
» (|||) by DJ Ey3

Shortest and Longest Songs:
» "The End" by Maceo Parker, 0:04
» "Dj-Set 23.06.07" by Justice at PinkPonyParty, 2:00:54

First and Last Albums (by title):
» "Abbey Road" by The Beatles
» "Writer's Block" by Peter, Bjorn & John

First and Last Artist (by title):
» A.C. Newman
» !!!

Top Five Most Played Songs:
» "Manifesto" by Gonzales
» "Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois" by Sufjan Stevens
» "Winters Love" by Animal Collective
» "Andy Warhol" by David Bowie
» "Southern Anthem" by Iron and Wine

Search for the following words. How many songs show up?:
» Sex: 96
» Death: 78
» Love: 815
» You: 1588
» Home: 145
» Boy: 411
» Girl: 167

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle:
» "Speakeasy" by Swayzak
» "The Gal from Joe's" Duke Ellington & His Famous Orchestra
» "Johnny B. Goode" by the Sex Pistols
» "Wagon Christ / Spotlight" by Aphex Twin
» "Death or Glory" by the Clash

What's on your playlist?

II Pause

2008-05-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

Art I Pass By - #17

2008-05-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

Found under the Cambie Bridge at Nelson and Pacific.

Black Kids and Cut Copy at Richard's on Richards

2008-05-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

There is a black guy in the men's washroom of Richard's on Richards dispensing soap and hand towels. He also has an assortment of colognes and prophylactics available for purchase. His outfit suggests that of a hipster bellhop.

I should point out that the men's facilities at Richard's on Richards are not large. There were perhaps eight others taking care of business in there at the same time as me and we were choked for space. Nor are we talking about a grand country club restroom with marble walls and golden chalices in which to urinate. This is a good and dirty rock n' roll WC with key-scratched obscenities on the cubicles and grime in the tiles. Our poor bellhop would be privy to a whole *ahem* shitload of industry fallout over the course of an evening.

I should also point out that the year is 2008, not 1925.

Whatever the case, I had flown in on the red eye from Hawaii the night before and barely stumbled through my first day back at work. And here was an email from HQ in Brooklyn offering guest list status for a concert that had been sold out for weeks and figured prominently in the status of every Vancouver hipster's Facebook page. And so there I was at the Black Kids and Cut Copy show, bleary and delirious and struck by the surreal nature of a black guy dispensing soap and hand towels in the men's washroom of Richard's on Richards.

The show itself was, as expected, quite brilliant. And since I've already used up my word count on complete irrelevance, I will let the YouTube coverage tell the rest of the story:

Footage of the Black Kids from mowchar.

And some rather shaky coverage of Cut Copy by chasingphantoms.

Absolute Silence

2008-04-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

1) You are sitting on a stage, wearing a blind-fold. 2) Every electrical device in the building around you is on. 3) Suddenly, you detect a slight difference, a vague change in sonic pressure somewhere, as if an extremely distant mosquito has been swatted – a spot of silence, as it were, has appeared in the room. 4) "Toaster, fourth floor!" you call out – and you're right. Someone turned off the toaster. 5) You win a trip to France.

Space as a Symphony of Turning Off Sounds
at BLDGBLOG

Night Diving with Manta Rays

2008-04-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

The sunset that night does not spread itself out like a stain across the sky; it does not explode into great symphonies of crimson and mango but remains strangely minimalist, like a Japanese flag, a simple red disk descending beyond the Pacific. Our boat captain signals its primal retreat with the call of a conch shell and on its note we prepare our own descent into the waters below.

On our journey out to this spot, earlier that afternoon, just off the black lava cliffs that edge the Kona airport, a troop of dolphins had raced our hull, breaking away to leap and spin in the air like exclamation points to the anticipation that we all shared staring out over the bow. For we were going out to night dive with manta rays, a major notch on any diver's bedpost; an experience that defied comparison I had been told, that was "of an other world."

From wikipedia:

"Mantas are most commonly black dorsally and white ventrally, but some are blue on their backs. A manta's eyes are located at the base of the cephalic lobes on each side of the head, and unlike other rays the mouth is found at the anterior edge of its head. To respire, like other rays, the manta has five pairs of gills on the underside...Distinctive "horns" (from which the common name Devil ray stems) are on either side of its broad head. These unique structures are actually derived from the pectoral fins. During embryonic development, part of the pectoral fin breaks away and moves forward, surrounding the mouth. This gives the manta ray the distinction of being the only jawed vertebrate to have novel limbs ... These flexible horns are used to direct plankton, small fish and water into the manta's very broad and wide mouth. The manta can curl them to reduce drag while swimming."

We have placed lanterns on the ocean floor within a tight square of rocks. Like a campfire around which 20 of us will swim down to and sit, each with our own torch shining up towards the surface; meanwhile, a handful of snorkelers circle above us, they too baring torches that they shine down, all of this creating a concentrated single column of light amidst the fathoms of black. Into this column swarms plankton, the moths of the deep, tricked into the worship of a false god, they in turn become the evening's sacrifice as we summon our own winged spirits.

And they come, appearing like phantoms from above, like the bat signal over Gotham, soaring in and out of the light and then, suddenly, they are directly in our circle, two rays spanning 8 and 10 feet across swoop down, at times mere inches away, their wide gaping mouths all but swallowing us up along with their microscopic prey. So eerie in the glow of the torches, our campfire ghost stories come alive. And yet they are gentle, nonthreatening, even delicate in the way their hulking bodies navigate the space. At one point the larger of the two begins swimming in grand backward vertical loops, to such an extent that one could almost begin to believe that it was for our benefit.

Our two species make strange bedfellows, and yet there is an amiable exchange between us: an easier night's meal traded up for a glimpse into a different realm; Never has the world seemed more alien to me and yet at the same time never have I felt more aware of its wider plan. To be a stranger in this world and realize that it is not ours. To be the humbled guest in another creature's sphere. And so, with our tanks at half, we bid farewell and kick back out into the jet black depths.

Photos (hopefully) to follow. In the meantime, makai.makai's collection of videos on Flickr does a damn good job of capturing the surreality of the evening. For more info, rates etc. check out Jack's Diving Locker

Criterion's Mishima

2008-04-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

I was quite taken tonight by the cover of Criterion's re-issue of Paul Schrader's Mishima. Interestingly, from what I've found online, not everyone approves, my favourite pan being "this thing reminds me of the make-up gun that Homer invented in that Simpsons episode."

The design is by Tadanori Yokoo, a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter who was not just a contemporary of Mishima's but also a friend and collaborator (he actually makes a brief appearance in the movie). All of which makes his contribution of the DVD art appropriate not to mention that his design and art are fantastic. A decent survey of his work can be found with a Flickr search.

"No global reasons.."

2008-04-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

It was only after seeing the rendering for the Hines tower next to a photo of the Institut du Monde Arabe in today's NY Times Magazine article that I made the connection and realized, holy shit, Jean Nouvel is hands down my favourite architect. Then I got lost in his website for about 3 hours...