The Collection continues with 13 works from over at Regen Projects
Also of note, it was recently announced the Pettibon is the 2010 recipient of the Oskar Kokoschka Prize. As this year’s winner of the biannual prize, the artist will be awarded €20,000. Pettibon will receive the prize in a ceremony to be held at the University for Applied Arts on March 1 at 11:00 o’clock in Vienna.
Published on Feb 26, 2010 at 1:34 pm.“Lately, I’ve been wondering if sitting quietly in a café, pretending to read a newspaper, and not writing is the most earnest expression in our age: no echoes of language, nothing to reblog, just pure unmitigated self sitting with self. I might, after a time of blank staring, find myself constructing sentences in my head, maybe a paragraph, simply letting the words roll around in my mind. I will not. I repeat. I will not write them down. They are my secret sentences, not yours.”
—Andrew Simone (via Amanda Mooney)
Not doing enough of this as of late…
Published on Feb 25, 2010 at 11:19 am.
This struck me as very fresh. A mashup is, more often than not, the sampling of pre-existing media — music, movies, even sport intervews– to create something new. And yet in the case of the Adidas Originals Star Wars ad, the media being used here is entirely new footage shot specifically for the ad itself. What has been mashed up are the cultural narratives of these two iconic pop entities.
Conceived of by the boundary-defying minds over at Sid Lee and directed by new favorite director Nima Nourizadeh, the celebrity house party that has become an infamous element of Adidas’ promotional materials is once again gettin’ busy but this time with X-wing fighters buzzing the rooftops above.
Published on Feb 23, 2010 at 4:27 pm.
Fugazi at the Wilson Center, Washington D.C. on December 29th, 1988.
“I like where we’re going with technology and global integration but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don’t like it. This isn’t the Hollywood I wanted to be part of. This isn’t the version of it that I saw when I was a kid…”District 9″ and every other movie is treated like fast food. It’s promoted relentlessly and then it’s gone. Everything is a flamethrower-intensity and milked for everything it can give and then it’s just chucked away. Everything is judged instantly, too. You look back at something like “Blade Runner” and wonder how a film like that, which doesn’t do well at first, would be treated today.”
Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Brilliant!
The influence of data system mapping is immediately apparent when first confronted with the drawings of Emma McNally. The complexity of lines could represent online chatter, the flight path of starlings, or a new global epidemic. But they are all pencil on paper and any system that is being plotted here exists purely within McNally’s mind.
Bad Brains at CBGB’s, 1982.
“When Dan [Stowell] started tweeting snippets of SuperCollider code he expected a lot of “throwaway waffle” but collated also a bunch of really interesting things…Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.”
—Susanna Glaser at The Mire
writing about the live coding music project Supercollider140, 22 pieces by artists from around the world, each piece created with just 140 characters of code.
This link is blazing across the internets like wild fire but thought it worth posting here: yet another timely and beautiful New Yorker cover by Chris Ware.
The 2nd installment of Interesting Vancouver is taking place this Friday, October 23rd at The Vancouver Rowing Club. Those of us who attended last year were treated to one of the most refreshing and inspiring gatherings that you could hope to experience. This was ultimately due to the fact that the evening was not centered around any particular industry, nor was it trying to get us to upgrade anything, jump on bandwagons or subscribe to hidden agendas. As Brett McFarlane, the founder of IV, states, it is “a multi-disciplinary conference that seeks to impart new knowledge, things you’ve never known, or thought about. Open up parallel thinking ports. Activate parts of your brain that for even the brainiest person may have been neglected or unexplored.”
This year, I will be one of the speakers. I am currently putting together a presentation titled “Mindful Eating: The Biography of a Single Bite” that I have been touting as a somewhat rambling diatribe on travel, buddhism, eating local, slaughterhouses and Oreo cookies. Or something like that. Also on the bill are fellow Foodists Eagranie Yuh, aka The Well Tempered Chocolatier, who will be speaking about her passion for sweet things and Jer Thorpe who will no doubt be blowing minds with his data visualizations.
Check out the IV site over the course of the week as the list of speakers and eclectic range of topics is revealed. After the buzz of last year’s event I suspect that tickets will be going fast so get them while you can. And we’ll see you on the 23rd!
Published on Oct 19, 2009 at 8:16 am.
The calls start coming in on Thursday. Wrong numbers — or so it seems at first. All of them are from the United States. All of them looking for the same person: Tony Johnson. Upon answering the 3rd or 4th call, from Rhode Island, the voice on the other end is that of a frail and elderly woman and I ask her what specifically she is calling about. She reveals that she has received a letter in the mail from Citiwide Bank in Nevada with an enclosed cheque for $3853.00. In order to authorize the cheque, she was instructed to call the bank’s claim manager Tony Johnson at the phone number provided.
“And that phone number once again is…” I ask, already knowing what she is going to say. She repeats back my own phone number.
“I’m sorry, but not only were you given the wrong number but I think that letter is a scam.”
“I think you are right.” She replies and we hang up.
And so it has continued. Around 6AM Pacific Time, my phone will start buzzing every 20 minutes or so for the rest of the day. 19 missed calls this morning from across the States: Arizona, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York. I check my voicemail every few hours. It is always the same story repeated one after the other. I feel strangely voyeuristic, as though given a brief audio snapshot into the lives of people with whom I would otherwise never have crossed paths. I can only guess that I am connecting with America’s most naive, perhaps her most desperate. Lots of older people; plenty of thick smalltown drawls; a man who asks for assistance “cuz I can’t read so good”; another man who just keeps yelling “HELLO?” into my message box. I picture these people sitting in their homes, in their trailers perhaps, ubiquitous cliches of the American lower class inevitably flashing through my head as they cradle their phones against their shoulders, holding their cheques up in front of them like beacons of hope, convincing themselves that it is a sign from God, that in these desperate and trying times this is the break that they have been looking for.
At the same time, I picture “Tony Johnson”, who to his credit must have put a fair amount of time and perhaps even a significant startup investment into this scam — creating convincingly branded bank letterhead, envelopes and cheques; copywriting for all of the documents; acquisition of some form of database; and then the actual trans-American mail out — I picture him sitting in his apartment, staring at his phone and wondering why the hell it hasn’t started ringing. I wonder when he will discover the typo. I wonder if he has a boss.
Meanwhile, I am randomly caught in the middle of these two worlds. I call the police, mainly to assure that my connection to this mail fraud case is not going to result in swat teams smashing through my living room window. The officer assures me that she thinks I am safe. The phone company informs me that they are not able to block calls from the US. In fact, my only options are to block all calls or to get a new phone number, neither of which are all that appealing. So I decide to ride it out for a few more days in the hopes that the initial surge will die down. Afterall, how many dupes can there be in America?
Published on Oct 12, 2009 at 8:12 pm.
“I’m more interested in a photography that is ‘unfinished’ – a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in.”
While there are many references on the web stating that the Death’s Head insignia was designed by long time “Frisco” Hells Angels President Frank Sadliek, Sadliek himself claims this is untrue. The image which appears on the membership card, as well as other Hells Angels ephemera, was drawn in 1953 by a man whose real name is lost or unknown, but was known to those at the time as “Sundown”. Frank had the original printer’s negative from which the “Frisco” Hells Angels membership cards were offset printed. This may be the reason for the attribution. The logo seems to have been inspired by the insignias of the 552nd Medium Bomber Squadron and the 85th Fighter Squadron from WWII (pictured above).
From over at Art:21
I was chatting with an architect friend of mine on the weekend — as we watched our one-year-old daughters unleash havoc upon the playground — about the social component of architecture, that as an architect you are responsible for creating an environment and that your design ultimately has a direct affect on how how people interact within it. He related to me two scenarios: The first one was of a courthouse that was rebuilt and after some time in the new building, it was noted that there were less instances of cases getting sorted out pre-trial, and so, as a result, the courts themselves were much busier. What was theorized was that the lobby of the old courthouse had been adorned with Neoclassical columns allowing for the attorneys from the two sides of a case to step aside and make discreet last minute negotiations that had thus avoided the need to stand before the judge. The new facility, with its cleaner more open entrance way, did not accommodate for such exchanges and therefore more people were doomed to have their day in court.
The 2nd example he gave was of a multi-disciplined research facility. The different departments had been originally quite segregated with separate entrance ways and staircases. But the new design featured a central staircase that all personnel used to access their labs. What began to happen was that researchers from different fields would run into each other coming and going from their days and, in the discussion that ensued, interdisciplinary connections and discoveries were suddenly being made that had previously gone completely unnoticed.
In thinking of these two scenarios this evening and how, just as in architecture, as web designers we can put up unintended barriers to information, or create unpredicted niche communities or a tool that gets used for an unforeseen purpose. What always needs to be accounted for is the human variable and despite all the efforts of content strategists and usability engineers, the main secret weapon in creating a successful website will always be flexibility and a willingness to adapt to your users’ needs.
Published on Aug 31, 2009 at 10:41 pm.
“We worked together like bees — each doing our little bit, apart from the others, but producing something greater and, ultimately, understood by none of us individually”
(via @GreatDismal)
Published on Aug 19, 2009 at 7:26 am.
“I’m transcribing a movie, a film that I see in my mind as best I can in words.” – William S. Bouroughs
(via Quiet Earth)
Even the most cursory glance through director Neill Blomkamp’s early personal projects and advertising work unearths the visual and thematic roots of his first feature film District 9. In fact, “Alive in Joburg” is literally the short film upon which D9 is based. Dig around some more, through the Tetra Val short, the Nike Crab ad or the ‘Yellow’ spot for Adidas and it becomes apparent that there is a consistent “world” being explored in all of his work, at once familiar and extraordinary.
In anticipation of D9’s official opening tomorrow, I’ve compiled a YouTube Playlist of Blomkamp’s work that includes his Vancouver Film School demo reel and a couple of early music videos that prove that even the most brilliant artists have to start somewhere…
One other short film that is also worth checking out that is not on YouTube is “Tempbot”, a lighter, though perhaps equally bleak take on the robot theme that exists throughout Blomkamp’s work. Enjoy.
Published on Aug 12, 2009 at 8:09 pm.
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” — Neil Armstrong
Admittedly, I have not been posting a hell of a lot on this site as of late, let alone posts that push the endless music marketing that flows into my inBox everyday. But this is definitely worth sharing.
Mayday have just released an EP for free download called Technology and it is damn good. Think new-album Gnarls Barkley or Outkast at their best. The stand out track on first listen is Crossroads & Avenues, a hard driving, psychedelic soul/hiphop piece that evolves into what can only be described as beatbox drum n bass. Catchy stuff that pulls no punches. Check it out.
Published on Jun 22, 2009 at 11:44 am.
After a brief hiatus, the Art I Pass By series returns for the summer with this beautiful series found at Pender and Cambie.
In adapting new mediums, there is always a period where the shape of the old form is mirrored in the new form’s space. For example, an early television ad looked like this. Radio had simply repositioned itself in front of a camera. It took years for advertisers to fully realize what could be achieved on the small screen. Nearly half a century later, the highly polished 30 second spot that those early sponsor announcements had evolved into would make the jump online with little change –aside from a taking advantage of more lenient regulations– when internet video came of age. Even today, the “best” viral ads still follow the tried and true format.
In a similar pattern, the online newspaper has always adapted the traditional layout of its printed cousin. The better rags have introduced interactive components and with the onset of blogging, there has been, for better or worse , the ability for reader comments. But the overall structure has remained intact. Meanwhile, sites such as Facebook, Friend Feed, Twitter and, of course, the all-powerful RSS feed have turned our mode of consuming information from categorized columns into a constantly updating flow.
Today, the New York Times, in what is being heralded by the likes of Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) and Dave Winer (@davewiner) as a watershed moment, introduces the Times Wire, an at-a-glance view of the paper’s latest content, in reverse chronological order without any other weighting or sorting. As Winer states, “They’re now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper. Welcome to the NY Times river of news”.
RSS has been with us for 10 years now. And unlike a number of other trends and technologies, it has survived and thrived and essentially become the backbone for the current information revolution. After a decade, one might ask of the NY Times shift in format “So what?” or “Why did it take so long?”. Or, to the more discerning observer, it is a moment to make note: of both the validation of the new form and the prevailing relevance of one of the older forms’ greatest champions.
Published on May 12, 2009 at 9:02 pm.
Be the first on your block to own CONNECT! Marketing in the Social Media Era a book that gives 100 marketers 400 words each to discuss how social media has impacted the way that brands connect with consumers.
I had the honour of not only being a contributor but also of designing the cover which, with the help of the keen photographic eye of Leigh Peterson, turned out quite decent.
Best of all it is for a good cause: all profits will go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation. So order your copy today.
Published on Apr 02, 2009 at 9:04 pm.
It may be the defining position that this book had in my childhood. Or it might be a result of the fact that rumours of this Spike Jonze project have been piquing my interest for what seems like half a decade. Or perhaps I have simply been caught up in the momentum of the Arcade Fire soundtrack. But it took the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are to break me out of my tumbleweed blogging silence. Enjoy.
Simon Reynolds is an English music critic who began writing about the UK’s electronic music scene for Wire Magazine back in 1992. This month is the magazine’s 300th edition and to mark the occasion, the editors have released a 7-part series of Reynolds’ work through the years under the title “The Hardcore Continuum” that begins by profiling Hardcore Rave and moves on through Jungle, Drum ‘n’ Bass and Hard Step to Grime and the Dubstep breaks of the last few years.
The series is remarkable for its immediacy, as a record of a specific time and place in a musical genre that “abolishes narrative” all the while juxtaposed with the more overarching critically theoretical approach with which Reynolds approaches his subject. As he states in the introduction, “It was only in 1999, with the sixth piece … that I really became conscious that for several years I’d been documenting a continuum of musical culture that emerged out of the British rave scene.”
Fascinating stuff. But if the above series leaves you wanting more, check out Reynolds’ lecture on the Hardcore Continuum at FACT Liverpool featuring a discussion with Mark ‘K-Punk’ Fisher.
Published on Mar 03, 2009 at 8:12 pm.
“Like an archeologist I hunt for the words that speak to me with new meaning. Intuitively, one word at a time, they turn into a kind of haiku or philosophical poetry that I can call my own.
“At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.”
—Will Ashford’s Recycled Words
(via coudal)
This weekend’s NY Times magazine features a brilliant article by Michael Lewis that takes a look at the career of NBA forward Shane Battier, a player who on paper appears unremarkable: a low scorer with few rebounds or blocks to his name. But upon deeper investigation, by stepping outside of the normal stats and figures and looking at more abstract reports on player performance, what becomes remarkably clear is this one indisputable fact: when Battier is on the court, not only does his team play much better, but the opposing team plays much worse.
What Lewis determines through his article is that Battier is an unselfish player in a game that creates endless opportunities for selfish behaviour. He compares the game of basketball to that of baseball where, in contrast, the decision that is best for the single player is almost always best for the team. In basketball however, there is a far less defined path en route to scoring points. Decisions are made constantly fed more by ego than by strategy, more by contractual expectations than by rationale.
Battier plays a different game, one based on a sharp attention to detail, a cerebral understanding of opponents’ behavior and a strict adherence to process. His decisions on the court are not influenced by anything outside of this process. He will ask not to start if it means that he will be on court more often against the player that he most needs to guard. The blocks he makes happen before the player he is guarding raises the ball above his shoulders and therefore do not statistically count. He will work tirelessly to keep a superstar like Kobe Bryant out of his shooting zone all evening with the knowledge that when the game is over, all his work will be lost in the statistics: Bryant will still be the game’s leading scorer; but it will have taken him twice at many shots to get there.
This all got me thinking about how such a process could benefit the way that the teams that I work with interact. How many decisions are made every day in the design world for reasons outside of that strict adherence to process? How does ego or the simple need to “be billable” affect our behaviour? More importantly, how can I as an individual act unselfishly in order to improve the overall performance of my team?
Published on Feb 16, 2009 at 10:08 pm.
“…the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism—turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.”
–Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker
“Word has it that the building is close to explosion. Whole thing pretty much toast, all in all.”
“Here we explore whether children can generalize in both directions. Specifically, can children apply a label learned for a real object to a picture of the object, and vice versa? Our interests were twofold. First, are there differences in infants’ generalization of a label from object to picture versus from picture to object? Second, what impact, if any, does pictorial realism have on infants’ ability to generalize between pictures and real objects?”
“Doing a double take, one realizes that, of course, this is not a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe. Our philosophe is able to detect some significance in this precious banality, for does not Magritte’s statement that the painting is not a pipe disturb the very illusion of presence that ”realistic” representation pretends to effect? Perhaps the statement also curls in on itself to say, ‘This sentence is not a pipe.’ “
From Flint Schier’s Review of Michael Foucault’s “This is not a pipe” for the New York Times
“In two studies, 9-month-old infants were shown a video of a series of stationary and moving objects. The infants directed the same kinds of behaviors toward objects on a video monitor as children of this age in earlier research directed toward color photographs: They hit at and attempted to grasp the items depicted on the screen. As with pictures, a decline in manual behaviors and an increase in pointing and vocalizing toward the video were found with 15- and 19-month-olds. These results support the notion that very young children must learn about the dual nature of depictions (that pictures are both objects in themselves and representations of something else) and the typical ways in which adults respond to such symbols.”
“The first type of symbolic object infants and young children master is pictures. No symbols seem simpler to adults, but … infants initially find pictures perplexing. The problem stems from the duality inherent in all symbolic objects: they are real in and of themselves and, at the same time, representations of something else.”
From Mindful of Symbols, by Judy S. DeLoache, Scientific American
Published on Feb 03, 2009 at 8:59 pm.
Starting in ‘09, along with my sporadic duties on this blog posting about design, art and culture, I will also be sporadically contributing to a new site that focusses on another one of my passions: food. The Foodists describes itself as “a collective of like-minded food worshipers. We breathe and sleep in order to eat and drink.”
Seeing as I don’t get out all that much these days what with the new family and all, I am planning on posting recipes that reflect the type of meals that I make on an average night, when I’m knackkered from work, my daughter needs to go to bed but I am still determined to sit the wife and I down to a damn fine meal. But the site as a whole covers all things gastronomically related and boasts an eclectic list of contributors. So check out foodists.ca and bon appetit.
Published on Jan 05, 2009 at 10:40 pm.
The moment that I finished Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, I began reading it again, slower this time; often pausing and re-reading a particular passage 10 or 20 times over again. I would spend hours going over a single sentence to the point where the words entirely lost their meaning and the very act of reading became the mechanical exercise of my eyes discerning the white space between the black of the type. At one point in the process of turning page 97 over to page 98, I became so enthralled by the way that the texture of the paper fell away from my fingertips and settled so serenely under my opposite thumb that I spent the rest of the afternoon reliving this moment, practicing that exact transition from 97 to 98 until I could do it effortlessly and exactly every time. Other days I would lie in the bath and simply think about reading the book as it sat on my bedside table and that would be enough.
Any and all of the above methods for fully appreciating Remainder should be taken under strict advisement by the reader however, if you begin to experience black outs or mild seizures, then I must advise that you consult a physician immediately.
Read The Believer interview with McCarthy here.
Published on Jan 04, 2009 at 9:08 pm.
Following up on last week’s post about Digital Kitchen’s title sequence for HBO’s True Blood, DK producer Morgan Henry provides some background for the creative process:
“With regards to “Wrong Eyed Jesus”- it was indeed a source of inspiration. Along with several other documentaries of the south and several that focused on Pentecostalism. We also had on our team a designer/photographer who grew up in the south and his photos from the region served as a great source of inspiration and authenticity. The umbrella for all this imagery was of course our mission to create a sequence that was appropriate to the series- to that end we spent a lot of time watching and rewatching the pilot, reading the series of books that the series was based on and developing a narrative response.
“True Blood is, as I’m sure you’ve seen, is a heady mix of sex, violence, taboo, humor, religion and mysticism. To introduce the viewers to a taste of that, we shot the majority of the imagery to be specific to the sequence. To be clear- there is no footage from “Wrong Eyed Jesus” in our piece, there are a handful of stock shots- mostly of wildlife and archival. The team here shot the rest mostly in Louisiana, with some shots in Chicago and others here in Seattle.”
Published on Dec 22, 2008 at 8:01 pm.
Just started getting into True Blood, Alan Ball’s latest HBO series about a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana who falls in love with a vampire. Like Ball’s previous project, Six Feet Under, the title sequence was created by the talented team over at Digital Kitchen and presents a perverse montage of imagery that perfectly captures the juxtaposition of sinister and spiritual underlying the American South. Better still is the “True Blood Featurette” that links from the same page which I can only assume is a director’s cut of the more twisted material that was collected for the project.
UPDATE: I was showing these clips to my friend Doug today and he directed me to some additional “disturbing deep south fun” from the documentaries Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus (which we both concluded was a primary influence for the DK title sequence, some footage seeming to be directly lifted from this film) and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia of which I can find very little in terms of footage online but did find a gallery of the photographs on which the film was based. Disturbing fun indeed.
Published on Dec 17, 2008 at 9:13 pm.
In 1969, soul music group The Winstons released the single “Color Him Father” which would go on to reach number 2 on the R&B charts and number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and win them a Grammy Award in 1970 for Best R&B song.
However what is most remarkable about this record comes from the song on the B-side, “Amen, Brother”, specifically a six second drum break in the middle of the tune that has since become one of the most heavily sampled drum breaks in the course of electronic music and played a foundational role in the evolution of hip hop, jungle and breakbeat genres.
Nate Harrison provides a brilliant look into what has come to be known as “The Amen Break”.
Published on Dec 08, 2008 at 3:38 pm.
A current obsession of mine is the use of strictly defined colour palettes in films and television shows. Ironically this recent interest comes as a result of a late 90’s TV drama called “Once and Again” that my wife Jane has been watching repeats of on the PVR while she nurses our daughter. The thing is, I can always tell the show from the distinctly grey colour palette that runs through the majority of the scenes. Lighting, costume, and decor all contribute to this effect that is punctuated by out-of-scene reflections by the characters that are filmed in black and white. I find it all strangely curious especially when I consider that this monochromatic character of the program is what makes it seem boring and unremarkable to me.
Anyway I hope to explore this idea further in future posts. In the meantime, my research into this area has turned up Alan Woo’s Pie project which contrasts and compares the colour palettes of movies by running a Processing script that captures each frame of the movie and creates a ‘pie chart’ of the colours contained within.
Published on Dec 03, 2008 at 2:14 pm.“Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – … the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct … is totally awesome;”
Published on Dec 02, 2008 at 11:50 am.
In Tribute to the Beatle’s White Album 40th anniversary, PopMatters is celebrating the milestone with a five day, song-by-song, side-by-LP side breakdown of what Tony Palmer, in The Observer, summed up at the time of its release by stating: “if there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert, then…[The White Album]…should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making. . . .”
Romanywg’s photoset of Faile’s Lost in Glimmering Shadows show in London.
“”With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America.”
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and squirrel’s heartbeat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
Posted with LifeCast
Started following .謀’s photostream on Flickr when he started following me but I have been obsessed with his work ever since with its strange bleached out nostalgia-like feel. Enjoy.
Mark Simonson’s critical analysis of Mad Men typography.
Mad Men illustrated by Dyna Moe.
The Mad Men Guide to New York.
I’m being followed by Betty Draper: Mad Men on Twitter.
Real Mad Men at Wired, Business Week, and the New York Post.
Imaginary Forces’ Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller on the title sequence design and its homage to Saul Bass.
The drinks…
and the Draper’s kitchen.
Published on Oct 19, 2008 at 6:45 am.
I would suggest that the following links were NSFW if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been spending my day at work researching this stuff. Check out the hyper-retro work of Japanese artist Rockin Jelly Bean.
I’ve been working on a project for the past two weeks that has found me immersed in the graphic language of rockabilly, burlesque, punk rock, chopper bikes and hot rod cultures. I can’t reveal much more than this at the moment but thought I would share with you two of the more unapologetically cooler websites that have crossed my path in the course of my research, both of them harkening back to a simpler time when a woman’s place was on the pinup calendar and men were measured by the muscle under their hoods: 60’s & 70’s Funny Cars.
(Now if I only knew where my old Hot Wheels collection got to…)
Published on Oct 07, 2008 at 10:56 pm.
Brilliant poster for the highly anticipated new film by Charlie Kaufman – writing and directing this time around – Synecdoche New York.
David Ehrenstein had this to say about the film:
“This film is a masterpeice. I am in awe. Charlie Kaufman’s previous screenplays indicated a very original and eccentric talent. Now directing his own screnplay for the first time he has upped the ante. It’s three times the size of all his other films put together and infinitely more complex. Imagine a jam session between Philp K. Dick and Raul Ruiz. I don’t know what this film’s chances are in an increasingly — proudly — stupid world. Not good, I expect. Therefore — for the happy few.”
Published on Oct 02, 2008 at 10:34 pm.
On Flickr and over at Wooster.
“Working in the early 1960s with wide strips of cellophane packing tape, Brakhage captured fleeting things — among them, blades of grass, pieces of flower petals, dust, dirt and the diaphanous, decapitated wings from insects. His process revolved around using the tape to produce a series of facsimile filmstrips: wider than the elegant Super-8 that was his hallmark medium (Mothlight, a mere three minutes in length, was actually shot on 16mm) but long and geometric: they’re a suite of attenuated rectangular portraits. The idea of using adhesive tape as a photographic medium (which is effectively what it is, capturing something in time on a single surface) represents the kind of visual simplicity — indeed, the sheer brilliance — of one man’s indefatigable effort to visualize an idea. It is, in a word, astonishing.”
–Jessica Helfand
“Stan Brakhage: Caught on Tape”
The word “redux” is Latin meaning “brought back”. In cinema this has come to mean a reworking of a previously released film, as in the case of Francis Ford Coppola’s 2001 “Apocalypse Now Redux”. By creating a “redux” of a film, the director is in essence overwriting the original version, the new cut becoming the definitive cut. It is moreover a second chance to get it right, regardless of whether or not your audience agrees.
This is, of course, different than a “Director’s Cut” which is the way that a film would have been made if the director had been granted final cut privileges. Seems simple enough until you consider that Ridley Scott released the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner ten years after the original release and then, in 2006 released Blade Runner: The Final Cut (to be fair, the 1992 Director’s Cut of the film was completed in a rush and without Scott’s full attention and therefore didn’t technically fit the criteria. There are, in fact, 7 different versions of Blade Runner in existence).
A redux is apparently also different from what George Lucas did in 2004 to the original 3 Star Wars movies. That treatment, which more or less brought the CGI effects up to par with their more recent prequels, was simply termed a “re-release” even though Lucasfilm would go on to state that the the 2004 Special Edition was now the “canonical” version of the original trilogy.
And so, with all that said, this October, Wong Kar Wai will be releasing “Ashes in Time Redux”, his “re-envisioning” of his critically acclaimed 1994 martial arts epic. So why has Kar Wai decided that his film needed to be “brought back”? From what I’ve read in the fan forums there are hardly any deleted scenes added to this new cut. Indeed, the run time is actually shorter now. The most noticeable difference is the reordering of certain scenes which makes the story tighter, more coherent. As Lee Marshall from Screen Daily states:
The first surprise about Wong Kar-wai’s revamped, re-edited and rescored version of his 1994 cult wuxia classic Ashes Of Time is just how little has been changed. The second is how much these minor tweaks still have helped clarify the Hong Kong auteur’s interpretation of Louis Cha’s historical fantasy novel The Eagle-Shooting Hero, confirming that his most poetic, experimental film belongs not in the curiosity cabinet but on the big screen.
From the looks of the trailer, the film looks to be nothing short of spectacular and in line with the other epic battle styled movies that seem to pervade today’s mainstream cinema. So perhaps “bringing back” a film has as much to do with timing as it does with how you cut it.
Published on Aug 20, 2008 at 3:08 pm.
Currently showing at the San Francisco Art Exchange is Beggars to Exiles: The Photography of Michael Cooper and Dominique Tarle, that documents the Rolling Stones between 1967 and 1971, a period during which the band singlehandedly defined the archetype of the rock n roll star –the fashion, the drug busts, the groupies, the villa in the south of France — for all who followed.
Though somewhat of a pain to navigate, the online version of the exhibit is quite comprehensive and includes such insights as:
To record “Exile on Main Street” Keith Richards rented Villa Nellcôte, the “Gestapo headquarters during the Second World War,” complete with swastikas on the floor vents. The basic band for these sessions is believed to have consisted of Richards, Bobby Keys, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, Jimmy Miller, and Jagger when he was available. Bassist Bill Wyman did not like the ambiance of the Richards’ villa and sat out many of the French sessions.
Brilliant.
Published on Aug 19, 2008 at 8:13 pm.
Trailer for a new BBC series that uses satellite tracking and computer imaging to map the “unseen ballet of Britain”.
Brilliant looking trailer for McG directed Terminator: Salvation
Over, Under, Around and Through
Pinball (one, two, three, FOUR, five..)
Strange little flashback journey this evening. The complete Hale on YouTube listing can be found here
Published on Jul 23, 2008 at 8:58 pm.
A YouTube clip of my new favourite author Tom McCarthy talking about his new favourite author Georg Trakl.
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.
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.
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:
Published on Jul 13, 2008 at 7:29 pm.“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.”
Published on Jul 09, 2008 at 8:49 am.
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?”
Published on Jul 07, 2008 at 10:50 pm.
Amazing work by Zhong Biao.
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.
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.
Published on Jun 13, 2008 at 6:00 am.“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
Published on Jun 10, 2008 at 4:48 am.
Trailer for Alex Gibney’s (The Smartest Guys in the Room, Who Killed the Electric Car) Gonzo.
Published on Jun 02, 2008 at 11:34 am.
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.
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.
Published on May 22, 2008 at 12:09 pm.
Illustrations from various works by Russian science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev
(via Coudal)
Published on May 20, 2008 at 12:30 pm.
“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.”
Published on May 13, 2008 at 3:38 pm.
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.
Published on May 12, 2008 at 8:44 pm.
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?
Published on May 07, 2008 at 7:07 pm.
Found under the Cambie Bridge at Nelson and Pacific.
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.
Published on May 02, 2008 at 7:51 am.
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
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
Published on Apr 28, 2008 at 8:50 pm.
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.
Published on Apr 15, 2008 at 8:47 pm.
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…
THE LOVELY SPARROWS – DEPARTMENT OF FORSEEABLE OUTCOMES
Department of Forseeable Outcomes seems like the perfect song for the last scene of an HBO pilot: A son finds out that his parents are bank robbers when he accidentally blows up his dad’s car while trying to make meth in the back seat and the money from their last heist that was hidden in the trunk now rains down on him. He stands in the middle of the street with his arms stretched up to heaven laughing at the irony of it all.
Camera pulls up directly above him.
Fade to credits..
Alright now, pay attention: this tune Sore is from Annuals’ recently released “Wet Zoo”. It is one of three tracks by Annuals on the EP; the other two are by a band called Sunfold which is the members of Annuals only with guitarist Kenny Florence driving the bus instead of Adam Baker. Check out Sunfold’s mySpace page and decide for yourself whether or not the two sounds are unique enough to warrant the confusion.
LANGHORNE SLIM – THE REBEL SIDE OF HEAVEN
“We ain’t goin’ to hell/We’re goin’ to the rebel side of heaven”
I am still waiting for the lab to get back to me with the results on what is in the Brooklyn water that is producing such consistent musical talent. Langhorne Slim is yet another fresh driving sound to emerge from the burrough. It is great to hear soulful rootsy music like this. His voice reminds me of Maroon 5 only without the disco beats..and not crappy.
More on his mySpace page.
Published on Apr 02, 2008 at 11:02 pm.
For those of us out there tonight who are not at the Bowie Glam Bash at Celebrities, check out this great documentary about the New Romantics/Blitz Kids scene of the early 80’s, A Fine Romance on YouTube in 11 parts.
Erin McSavaney wrote me recently to let me know about his upcoming show of new work at the Atelier Gallery from April 5th to the 28th.
From his artist’s statement:
“Based on rules and parameters, architecture is premised on the
creation of boundaries. But time and usage have the ability to strip
intent and function from a building, revealing its inhabitants’
successes and failures. Surfaces, stained and battered, become porous,
transparent. Evidence of beginnings, middles, and ends are clear.”
Not to be missed.
Published on Mar 20, 2008 at 7:49 am.
What: In the Realms of the Unreal
Where: Gallery Gachet
When: March 28th, 7:30pm
This past Saturday evening, local street artists Jerm9ine and Andrew01 engaged in a battle of words and pasteups outside of the Gallery Gachet at 88 E Cordova. I wasn’t able to attend (have i mentioned the chaos engine that is my life these days?) but made it down on Sunday afternoon to survey the aftermath. Brilliant and engaging, more performance poetry than graffiti, it is exciting to see things like this happening in our fair city. Documentation of the event by jerm9ine, cameraman and shallom can be found here.
Also be sure to catch the current exhibition at the Gachet, Internal Guidance Systems: Contemporary Outsiders that includes artists from UK, Sweden, France, Australia, USA and Canada. Until March 29th.
Published on Mar 18, 2008 at 7:17 pm.
Found in the alleyway between 5th and 6th at Quebec St.
I want to live in the world that kokkugia is building.
Got an email from Sneak Attack today asking me how I liked the Say Hi show which, I am assuming, is a polite way of saying “are you ever going to post something on that concert that we got you free tickets to?” Which is a fair enough question. Allow four days to pass by in the blogosphere and you might as well forget it; everyone has moved on to the next great fleeting moment. Hell, the fact that I was not posting photos, video and Twitter setlists while at the show itself would suggest that we are now discussing things long since past. But the truth is I have been damn busy since Saturday night and only now find myself with a chance to bash something out, if it evens matters anymore..
We arrive at the gig at around 11pm, the club’s backlit sign glowing like a beacon for the young hip party set on a stretch of street whose typical clientèle generally prefer to reside in the shadows. It would be fair to assume, given the small closed off rooms that line the hallway to the toilets, that The Royal Unicorn Cabaret was no doubt once a Chiness brothel. These days it has become the homebase of Salbourg, who seem to be charged with promoting the current dance revival here in Vancouver. And doing a fine job of it from what I can tell. Glancing around the club I can’t tell how many people are there to see Say Hi and how many are waiting for the more electronic side of the evening to kick in.
The gig gets off to a sketchy start. The whole setup seems to be put together with the structure of a house of cards. Feedback bleeds out of the speakers throughout the opening songs prompting a mad scrambling and impromptu re-assessment on the wiring. Technical difficulties aside, Say Hi’s set is decent. The drums and guitar drive the tunes with a 4/4 trancelike rhythm that surprisingly suggests shoegazer bands of yore. But his vocals don’t quite make the cut. In the chorus for “Northern Girls” –the modern day equivalent of a first single– he fails to hit the high note and ultimately it is that note that truly makes the song. But from what I can tell from his website, this tour is still fairly fresh (Vancouver possibly even being the kickoff show) so he has many nights ahead of him to tighten the gears. No doubt he will be in fine form by the time he passes through a city near you.
Published on Feb 20, 2008 at 11:30 pm.
James Cauty’s Gasmask Prints.
This month’s Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair features modern day actors, including Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron, photographically recreating classic moments from the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Note the Saul Bass influence on the typography. Super cool.
“[J. Duncan Berry of Applied Iconology] noted the effectiveness of the original Tide package, which communicated “cyclone in a box,” he says. “There’s this great dynamic tension there. The word ‘Tide’ is bursting out of the circle, and the circle is standing out of the box. It’s almost a baroque composition; it’s like what Steven Spielberg would do if he were designing a brand.” The idea was that Tide is “a force of nature — it’s a phase shift.” After all, an effective synthetic detergent was a real innovation in 1947, a result of years of expensive research and development. The bull’s-eye look was actually borrowed from earlier P.&G. products, Dash and Oxydol. But in his memorable culture and design book, “The Total Package,” Thomas Hine noted that “some sophisticated color research” — involving a psychologist who specialized in such things — went into selecting a bright scheme that would suggest “sufficient power,” tempered with the “likable” blue that had a more “sensitive” connotation. Reaching the market just as automatic washing machines were catching on, Tide was a sensation; anecdotal accounts from the time suggest people lined up to get hold of the stuff — as if it were an iPhone.”
From NY Times Magazine’s “Consumed” by Rob Walker
Published on Feb 07, 2008 at 8:55 pm.
via coudal.com
Blogged with Flock
Published on Jan 29, 2008 at 12:22 pm.
THE EPOCHS – OPPOSITE SIDES
Another great band out of Brooklyn, The Epochs are making music that sounds like what Justin Timberlake would be doing if he had skipped his Mickey Mouse Club and Boy Band origins and simply focussed on creating catchy falsetto driven pop songs. Opposite Sides is a gorgeous, rambling track that seems to head out in five different rhythmic and thematic directions over the course of its 4 minute span, jumping between fuzz box dance beats, quiet psychedelic digressions and sweet ethereal harmonies.
More from them can be heard on their MySpace site.
SAY HI – NORTHWESTERN GIRLS
Say Hi is going to be at the The Royal Unicorn Cabaret on February 16, and from what I have heard of them so far, it is going to be well worth checking out. Northwestern Girls starts with a Coldplay-on-Casios riff and simple premise (”Northwestern girls, with their fresh faces. Don’t mess it up this time. They seem so nice. It must be in the air here”) and then builds layer upon layer of analog and digital tracks to a worthy climax. Definitely check out the website for additional tracks not to mention its quirky D&D stylings.
LOUIS XIV – GUILT BY ASSOCIATION
Che Guevara observed that “Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel”. Pitchfork Media, the one time online underdog of indie music has in the course of just a few short years risen to the top of the pile, toppling the old guard publications like Billboard and Rolling Stone to become the new king-maker. Which means that it sucks when they hate you. And Pitchfork Media hates Louis XIV. Their main criticism of the band seems to be that their lyrics are too lewd and they are doing nothing that the Stones, AC/DC and The Strokes have already done a hundred times over. Apparently rock n roll is not just about sex and drugs anymore. It all seems a little harsh in my opinion. Take a listen to Guilt by Association and let me know what you think. You can also catch them on tour with Hot Hot Heat and the Editors. They’ll be at the Commodore on Feb 5.
For some time now, I have been on the lookout for examples of Japanese street art. The uncanny means by which Japan adapts Western culture, reprocesses it and then spins it out as something altogether hyperreal, combined with the ever-prevalent superflat movement suggested that there must exist something extraordinary in the darker corners of the Tokyo streets.
So it was great to read PingMag’s recent piece on The Ghetto, a former love hotel in Shin-Okubo that has been converted into a skater shop/graffiti space. The article also provided links to flickr groups on Tokyo Street Art and throughout Japan. But I found what I was truly looking for in the calligraphy of designer/artist USUGROW which is an incredible hybrid of not just Western and Japanese scripts but also Arabic influences. Kakkoii desu yo!
Published on Jan 22, 2008 at 10:07 pm.
I am fairly convinced at this point that the best places to find art in this city are on the walls of the abandoned laundromat at the corner of Main Street and 14th and the equally vacant warehouse at Quebec St. and 2nd (with a few scattered treasures to be found in between).
The video for “Alice”, the first release from Moby’s forthcoming album ‘Last Night’, is directed by Andreas Nilsson, whose seemingly prolific, eclectic and often disturbing oeuvre includes work with The Knife, Soundtrack of Our Lives and Love is All.
Strains of psychedelic pop goodness ooze out from the seams of this ditty called “Stranger” by UK band Sunny Day Sets Fire. A Remix EP that includes collaborations with CSS, Diplo and Baron Von Luxxury (the latter’s take on the track “Brainless” is well good) is due out on Feb 26th with a full length to follow in the spring. In the meantime, more tunes can be found on their site and mySpace page.
In one of the most blatant epoch incongruities since Spartacus’s Rolex-wearing Roman, Australian artists, The Glue Society have rendered satellite photographs of various Biblical events as though seen via Google Earth. Awesome.
My latest home recording: a cover of TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me” complete with southern drawl and country twang.
More personal musical sojourns may be found here.
Published on Jan 02, 2008 at 10:01 pm.
Found in the alley between East 1st and East 2nd, just off Scotia, Vancouver BC.
“In the form of cached Web sites, evacuated blogs, forgotten MySpace pages and abandoned Flickr feeds, ghosts frolic, beeping and flashing on autopilot. The jolly online zombies look the way they did the day they died, but the light left their eyes the last day their souls logged in.”
–Virginia Hefferman, The Medium
“ok so this is my page for me and all the spooky things that happen to me don’t think Iam crazy and don’t think that I am makenig things up but for the true believers you can find alot of things here that you might find reasoureful of what not.so if your ready you can read my page and chill out…feel free to look around and have fun. “
–first and last entry on iamaloser.blogspot.com, June 18, 2002
“If you like a certain blog, make friends with the blogger, and then later they abandon their blog, and do not respond to emails, should you be worried? Contact the police? Make a missing persons report? Google their name and search for an obituary? What are you ethically obligated to do in this situation?”
from Dropping out of the blogosphere
“Most of these screenshots (many of which are annotated) were collected during the dotcom bust of 1999-2001, but I continue to add new victims to the rolls as they succomb to the forces of cyber-entropy.”
– Steve Baldwin, The Museum of Interactive Failure
“What would cause people to leave such a beautiful place?”
– WebUrbanists.com’s Urban Abandonments Parts I & II
Playing online companion to the retrospective exhibition on Takashi Murakami that is currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, an eight part exhibit tour with the artist himself + bonus videos including the making of the Oval Buddha.
A fontastic (sorry!!) trailer for Typophile Film Fest 4.
In November of 2005 in Paris, a professional clockmaker named Jean-Baptiste Viot, was recruited by a group called UnterGunther for the purpose of restoring the clock in the Pantheon, the 18th-century architectural masterpiece that houses famous crypts including those of Voltaire and Hugo and was the site of Foucault’s pendulum experiment.
UnterGunther are the restoration unit of a larger underground organization in Paris known as UX. I say “underground” in its most literal sense: formed in the 1980’s, UX began as a group of students who threw parties in the tunnels below the city’s Latin Quarter. But the group continued to grow — today it numbers around 150 members — and expand its focus to include subterrenean concerts, poetry readings and crypt restoration; all of this going unnoticed by the authorities until 2002 when police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine.
The clock in the Pantheon had been broken since the 1960’s, and suffered from neglect by the state, and the group was concerned that if it were not fixed now, it would degenerate beyond repair. Sneaking into the building at night and setting up a workshop that included electricity and internet access, the group spent around a year working on the clock undetected by authorities. On October 10 2006, they presented the restored clock to Bernard Jeannot, curator of the Pantheon, who immediately pressed charges against the group for their trespassing and, presumably, the making of a complete ass out of him. The court case just wrapped up last week with UnterGunther cleared of any charges and rumour has it that they are working on a new secret project somewhere deep amid the shadows of the City of Lights.
Published on Nov 27, 2007 at 10:04 pm.
Found at Main and 7th St., Vancouver.
Searching for examples of info graphics from the New York Times, I found this great collection of work by Megan Jaegerman (on Tufte’s site no less). Also worth checking out: Matthew Ericson, the Deputy Graphics Director at the NY Times, recently gave the keynote at an info graphics conference in California. You can download the slides (pdf) for this presentation titled “Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times”. (all of this via: db79.com)
“The water footprint of a person, company or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the commodities, goods and services consumed by the person, company or nation.”
Designer Timm Kekeritz creates something tangible (and beautiful) through his poster design for The Virtual Water Project.
Published on Nov 14, 2007 at 9:55 pm.
“The idea is that one artist takes a hardcover from a book, tears out the pages and draws in one half (or half draws in both halves) of the binder/diptyque. In a nod to Ray Johnson, the two books are mailed (swapped) and each of these will be finished by the other.”
“For the past five hundred years, humans have used print — the book and its various page-based cousins — to move ideas across time and space. Radio, cinema and television emerged in the last century and now, with the advent of computers, we are combining media to forge new forms of expression. For now, we use the word “book” broadly, even metaphorically, to talk about what has come before — and what might come next.”
-from the mission statement of The Institute for the Future of the Book
“The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in England is the only place you are likely to find an Ethernet port that looks like a book. Built into the ancient bookcases dominating the oldest wing of the 402-year-old library, the brown plastic ports share shelf space with handwritten catalogues of the university’s medieval manuscripts and other materials. Some of the volumes are still chained to the shelves, a 17th-century innovation designed to discourage borrowing. But thanks to the Ethernet ports and the university’s effort to digitize irreplaceable books like the catalogues — which often contain the only clue to locating an obscure book or manuscript elsewhere in the vast library — users of the Bodleian don’t even need to take the books off the shelves. They can simply plug in their laptops, connect to the Internet, and view the pertinent pages online. In fact, anyone with a Web browser can read the catalogues, a privilege once restricted to those fortunate enough to be teaching or studying at Oxford.”
-from The Infinite Library by Wade Roush
“The Library Project’s aim is simple: make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically, books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print – while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights. Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers.”
-Google Book Search Library Project
Published on Nov 07, 2007 at 12:04 am.
Found in the alleyway at Lorne St. between 1st Ave and 2nd Ave in Vancouver.
Not since Rob Feenie took down Masaharu Morimoto in Kitchen Stadium to become Canada’s Iron Chef has one of our local darlings entered a battle of such epic proportions.
Today, center court at Coudal.com’s Layer Tennis:
Published on Nov 02, 2007 at 8:06 am.The quote that is tonight’s title is normally attributed to Elvis Costello (although it is typically followed by a parenthesized note giving possible credit to Frank Zappa). The lack of certainty on this point seems ironic in its own right. But when you’ve got your headphones on and you sit down with the sole purpose of writing about the music that injects itself into your ear, this phrase becomes the bitter pill that you must swallow before proceeding to fill the page with similes that liken music to a cherry blossom sky or a razor blade smile. It is true that writing will never succeed in capturing what you are experiencing. Even the best music writers, those who through their turns of phrase actually conjure up cadence and sweet imagined melodies never manage to play me the actual tunes before I have heard them for myself.
So it is a lost cause, but one that we will all continue to pursue in the name of rock n roll. Because sometimes, you get close — you find that one hammer of a phrase that seems to nail it indisputably. And suddenly, dancing about architecture makes perfect sense.
And with that, here are tonight’s offerings:
“There’s a garden outside of my door..” is how this song begins, with birds chirping and children playing and when it kicks in you suddenly find yourself there with the band playing hopscotch and twirling around the barnyard in some lush lilthium-induced stupor. Beautiful music that you don’t want to end.
Annuals are currently on tour with Manchester Orchestra and will be arriving in Vancouver on November 11th at the Plaza. Other listings can be found here.
Manchester Orchestra – Brother
Annuals – Where Have You Been
As well as touring together, the two bands have released a Split 7″ EP on which each band performs cover versions of the other’s songs. Brother and Where Have You Been, posted above, are samples of what has come out of this collaboration. Each band approaches the other’s material very differently with Manchester Orchestra sticking to a pop driven acoustic take while Annuals layer together a more electronic interpretation. AND, for those of you out there with mad mixing skills, Purevolume.com is hosting the official MANNUALS MASHUP CONTEST and awarding an Epiphone guitar, merch and music to the best mashup of the two bands’ tunes.
There is something timeless in the sound that the Drones have going on here. With a voice that seems to barely hang on throughout the song — hell the entire band threatens to tear apart at the seams — the Melbourne group always manages to keep it together creating music that is immediate and raw; qualities that are rarely heard in these more polished and sterile times.
Published on Oct 30, 2007 at 9:46 pm.
She’s a beauty.
Found on/blatantly stolen from my friend Leigh’s site, the description says it all: “taken of the television.”
The Black Panther Logo by Ruth Howard and Dorothy Zellner.
“Alabama was notorious for using the so-called “literacy test” to deny Blacks the right to vote. In truth, the state’s “education system” was so abysmal that many Blacks and poor whites were illiterate or semi-literate. But the white power structure made sure that illiterate whites were allowed to register and vote regardless.
Because so many illiterate whites were unable to read the names of the political parties or candidates on the ballot, Alabama law allowed each party to have a picture symbol, and all candidates were listed on the ballot in a column underneath their party’s symbol. You could vote the straight party ticket by simply marking your “X” underneath the symbol without bothering to puzzle out the names or offices of the actual candidates. The symbol of the whites-only Democratic party was a rooster, so illiterate white voters were instructed to “Vote for the rooster.”
Thus, when the Lowndes County Freedom Organization got their independent political party on the ballot, they had to chose a symbol. They chose a black panther.”
Published on Oct 24, 2007 at 7:10 am.
“Today we give birth to a new violent conception of life and history, which exalts the battle against … the toadies of false power, slaves to the global market. You wanted just a red carpet; we want a city entirely in vermilion…”
“We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.”
– Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Manifesto of Futurism
February 20, 1909
“The art of Pio Diaz and Thyra Hilden is not aggressive and destructive, they do not demolish what cannot be replaced. Their art is a symbolic burn, their fire is an illusion…By projecting live burning flames on the Trevi Fountain and other famous architectural monuments, the artists interact with cultural icons and provide us with a statement to make us feel the power of destruction and consider the aggressiveness of culture.”
– Line Rosenvinge on artists Thyra Hilden & Pio Diaz who projected flames onto the Trevi fountain in 2005
“After gorging himself on various coloured foodstuff. Jubal Brown enters the Museum Of Modern Art in New York and projectile vomits blue over Composition in Red, White and Blue by Piet Mondrian.”
Published on Oct 22, 2007 at 10:05 pm.
Outside our local theatre tonight: a moody noire-like coming soon poster with a war-era Chinese tinge to it and actors Tony Leung and Wei Tang eyeing each other coyly from across the frame. All of which immediately made me think, “Right on, a new Wong Kar Wai flick.” But it turns out that it is in fact for Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution.
I am certainly not the first person to have made the WKW connection. Beth Accomando over at KPBS matched up the two images above and writes in her review of the film:
“Focus Features has given the film an ad campaign that makes it look like a moody Wong Kar Wai film. Wong is the Hong Kong director who’s made the rapturously romantic films Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, 2046 and Fallen Angels among others. Lust, Caution even stars one of Wong’s favorite actors, Hong Kong’s Tony Leung Chiu Wai, a man with deliriously sad eyes. But if the ads lure any Wong fans to the film, they will be sadly disappointed. Wong has a sure handle on what he wants his films to be and to do, there’s no artistic caution on his part. But Wong’s films are not interested in sex as much as they are interested in love. He’s interested in that giddy emotion that can consume people. Lee on the other hand, doesn’t know if he’s interested in the sex, the romance or the passion.”
“Rapturously romantic”…love that turn of phrase. Interestingly, the romance in Wai’s In the Mood for Love is hardly spoken and never consummated; and yet it is one of the most passionate and sexually charged films that you will ever see. Lee’s Lust Caution on the other hand has gained notoriety for its NC-17 rating, which suggests that in the latter film there has been far less restraint. In the end, the marketing angle has worked on its intended audience as I am pretty psyched to check this movie out when it finally makes it into our neighbourhood theatre.
Published on Oct 20, 2007 at 9:17 pm.
Wow. Today’s post at daily dose of imagery bares an incredibly uncanny resemblance to Jeroen Witvliet’s Structures series!
Glen E. Friedman got his start in photography shooting images of the legendary Z-boys skating backyard pools. From there he would go on to take some of the most definitive portraits of early hip hop and hardcore punk pioneers including the Beastie Boys, RunDMC and Black Flag and as a result is considered to be one of the most important photographers of his generation.
Just released this past month, Friedman’s new book, Keep Your Eyes Open, chronicles his pictorial relationship with the band Fugazi, possibly one of the most important bands to have ever entered this writer’s eardrums.
Says the website:
“KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN: The Fugazi Photographs of Glen E. Friedman was released by Burning Flags Press exactly 20 years [after Fugazi's first concert on September 3, 1987]. The 112-page, 9 x11 hardcover book presents the best of Friedman’s unparalleled photographic documentation of Fugazi’s members in almost 200 color and black & white images captured by Friedman onstage and off between 1986 and Fugazi’s last U.S. concert in 2002. As Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye explains, ‘While most photographers were taking photos of Fugazi, Glen was making photos with us.’”
As a final note, while surfing the web on this topic, I also came across this footage of Fugazi performing Turnover outside of the White House in 1991 at a protest against the first Gulf War. Incredible.
Published on Oct 16, 2007 at 10:17 pm.Life has been somewhat chaotic as of late with the wife in Uganda and myself hitting the ground running at a new job. Meanwhile, the mp3’s have been piling up in my inBox like a February snowdrift. So it is time to do a little cleaning house. Which is easy when the music is as it is: all over the spectrum and all bloody good. Perfect for a Friday post.
Robber’s On High Street: Crown Victoria
These guys immediately reminded me of Spoon, which is never a bad thing. Just good rock really, with a perfect combination of retro 60s and 70s AM radio and a cool fresh feel. This track is off of their second album Grand Animals on which the band worked with Italian film composer Daniele Luppi, (Danger Mouse, John Legend) and the album was mixed by Jeff Lipton (Beach Boys).
There has got to be something in the Brooklyn water that is producing such great sounds from bands like The Forms. Their self titled 2nd album is currently only available on pre-order from iTunes so in the meantime, enjoy this lead off track and if you dig what you hear, check out Stereogum’s brilliant tribute album to R.E.M’s Automatic for the People for which The Forms contributed Ignoreland.
I will admit that the vocals on this tune didn’t immediately do much for me. But the backing track is killer and every listen is bringing me a little closer to jumping up and disco moshing with the living room furniture. The album, The Download EP is available on iTunes but even better, check out their website.
Love the groove on this track. Makes me want to just drop everything and drive headlong into the mountains. A little Stevie Nicks perhaps? A little Roxy Music? There is definitely something in the guitar sound that is taking me back a bit but I can’t quite place it. Either way, I look forward to hearing more from her.
Probably the strangest of today’s offerings, this track by Puscifer is off of the album “V is for Vagina” which apparently is cumming soon … I probably don’t need to say much more about that. Puscifer is a side project of Maynard James Keenan of the band Tool. Keenan describes it as “a playground for the various voices in my head,” “a space with no clear or discernible goals,” and “where my Id, Ego, and Anima all come together to exchange cookie recipes.” Check out their youTube page for a better, if not a little disturbing, sense of what this is all about.
Published on Oct 12, 2007 at 5:50 am.
Sweet illustration from South Africa’s Am I Collective.
In a recent interview with indieWire, director Todd Haynes states that the notion of a fixed personal identity is a lie; that “it is something that we are always working on and abridging and using outside influences to keep changing.” No where is this theory better exemplified than in his new movie, I’m Not There, in which his subject, Bob Dylan is played by six different actors including Cate Blanchett and 13-year-old African-American actor, Marcus Carl Franklin. Ultimately, the movie becomes as much a study of identity for the filmmaker himself — of all of us for that matter — as it is of one of America’s greatest songwriters. As Robert Sullivan writes in his cover article in yesterday’s New York Times’ Magazine:
“Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive.”
More from Haynes on the making of “I’m Not There” can be found here and here and here.
Published on Oct 08, 2007 at 6:13 pm.
Mark Vistorino is Flyerman, a real life superhero who possesses the ability to hand out movie extra flyers in the streets of Toronto with the flair & charisma of a Broadway star. And yet, he can’t understand why he is not famous.
From this seemingly absurd premise, directors Jeff Stephenson and Jason Tan follow Vistorino through five years of his life; in the process revealing one of the most engaging and self-destructive personalities that you are ever likely to meet.
Published on Sep 26, 2007 at 9:30 pm.
Probably the only venue that my musical efforts are worthy of entertaining at this point, this weekend saw the exclusive Facebook premiere of the long time coming 5 track demo of First Child: Looping Through the Array. If you are on the Book, then please feel free to join the group. Otherwise, you can download the tracks here:
A Love This Strong (intro)
As an update to my writeup about William Gibson at the CBC Book Club, the podcast of the event has been posted over at Studio One for your listening pleasure.
One of the most beautiful pieces of film I have seen since…well, probably the last video I saw by Sigur Ros… check out this trailer for Heima, a documentary that follows the band as they play various gigs throughout their home country of Iceland.
From the Digital Collection Project at Interactive Publishing:
“This collection of screen shots from over 250 news sites around the world was taken on Sep 11 and 12, 2001. We hope the archive will serve the education of the online news industry and further its quality. Our logs tell us that it also has helped historians, researchers, students, teachers, journalists and many others.”
Published on Sep 11, 2007 at 10:50 pm.
A bit last minute — the result of disappearing for a week in a half into cottage country– but Dawn Landes, who was featured here a few months back with her bluegrass take on Peter, Bjorn and John’s Young Folks, is just wrapping up a week-long tour with one of my current favourite bands, Midlake, so if you have an opportunity to get out to see them, it is sure to be a really great show.
Sept 9 – Paradise Rock Club – Boston, MA
Sept 11 – Grog Shop – Cleveland, OH
Sept 12 – Metro – Chicago, IL
For the rest of us, here is the most recent offering from Dawn, off of her self-released album, Dawn’s Music:
And something from Midlake:
Published on Sep 09, 2007 at 9:53 am.William Gibson’s stretched stooped figure curls over book and microphone under yellow lights that hang like a field of beauty salon hair dryers before an unlit neon sign tracing out the words Studio One on a wall deep within the bowels of the CBC. He has just returned from touring in the States and Europe, hitting a dozen cities in twice as many days while promoting his new novel, Spook Country. He is honed at this point. Listening to him read, you realize that this is how his writing is best taken in. He reads like a jazz musician plays his horn, echoing Kerouac and, of course, Burroughs in the way that the words fall into punched syncopated rhythms, sentences building into what has been described by one reviewer as “miniature aesthetic jolts”.
He will tell us later that the part of the brain that writes fiction is also the part that reads it, that in fact “writing and reading are two halves of the same activity”, that the exercise of reading a book is as active a part of the process as the writing. Only upon doing so, when the words of the writer project their world onto the back of the reader’s skull is “arch of the text” successfully completed.
So went the discussion at tonight’s CBC Book Club, with Gibson delivering poignant, often comic takes on how Google has replaced our memories, the inevitability of blended reality and the “complications” of sci fi, all the while riddled with deep, cerebral observations on the writing process. You got a sense that writing for Gibson — if not for all writers — is an act of discovery. “My own experience with creativity,” he tells us, “is that it is incremental.” The development of a character will begin simply as a point of view, a camera angle. Often characters are not so much created as they simply show up on the scene with their own demands and opinions so that all the writer can really do is try to “keep them on topic”.
He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different times zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I. In fact, as he continues talking, you come to understand his view of the human race as something that has evolved well past nature, that our present “natural state” is more cyborg than animal. Gibson seemed to mark the point of no return down this path as the dawn of broadcast television: “We still have no idea what the impact of broadcast television has had on us and it is pretty much a dead medium”. But none of this is to be interpreted as a pessimistic world view; a writer like Gibson has a tendency to remain agnostic on most accounts:
“I’m kind of ok with where we are,” he say with a smile. “It’s interesting.”
NOTE: A podcast of last night’s Book Club will be available for download in the weeks ahead on World at Large.
Published on Sep 07, 2007 at 8:55 am.
A ways back, I posted an entry about starting a couple of recurring artist series, the first of which commenced that evening on Raymond Pettibon. Perhaps the series itself could have been titled “The Two Rays” seeing as the other artist, for whom this post finally signifies the beginning of his own series*, is Ray Johnson. Chances are you have never heard of him. But once you get a taste of his work and start to grasp his position in the New York art world in the second half of the 20th Century, you realize that herein lies the missing link that ties everything together.
I have posted about Ray before here. That posting was commented on* by one Bill Wilson, a former stagehand of Ray’s who followed up days later with an email asking me for my snail mail address so he could send me “Ray Johnsonalia”. To which, of course, I complied and for my efforts was rewarded with a fairly substantial envelope containing a number of postcard reproductions, exhibit invites and essays on Ray Johnson.
All of which I am planning to finally get around to scanning and posting as part of this series. In the meantime, tonight’s first entry takes form as a stumbled upon flickr group called “New York Correspondence School”.
Published on Aug 21, 2007 at 9:31 pm.
Planet New Year by Sarah Blasko
The Steal Your Face logo by Bob Thomas and the infamous LSD chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley.
From Rolling Stone’s 40th Anniversary Summer of Love Special Edition (July 12 – 26 2007), Robert Greenfield* writes:
“While driving to work one day in his MG, Owsley saw an orange and blue logo with a white bar across it on a building. He thought it would look cool if the logo was red and blue with a white lightning bolt through it, so he had someone spray-paint a basic version of it on the Dead’s equipment. He then talked to Bob Thomas about putting the lightning bolt through the words “Grateful Dead” in lettering, which from a distance would look like a skull. Together, they devised the “Steal Your Face” logo (a.k.a. “the stealie”). Thomas, who died in 1993, sold it to the band as a letterhead for $250, meaning that neither he nor Owsley ever saw a dime from all those Deadhead stickers on the rear bumpers of Volkswagen buses.”
Published on Aug 11, 2007 at 9:35 pm.
It is not often that you receive a CD in the mail on a Monday morning and after playing the first 3 tracks you suddenly have everyone at the studio fully shaken of their weekend slumbers and demanding to know what the hell they are listening to. But this was exactly the effect that Calvin Harris’ “I Created Disco” had this past week. I dare say…the place was going off.
With the official US release of the album not until Sept. 4th (seems you can already buy it in Canada), I am not actually supposed to be saying much more at this time other than “expect big things” and then directing you to the pre-approved online “leaks”:
Ironically — this just in from HQ — Calvin Harris seems to be doing a heck of a job on his own getting his name out there. Already huge in the UK with a sold out headlining tour and successful performances at all the big summer festivals, the 23 year old Scot has created quite the stir in the mainstream media as of late by announcing that as a promotion for his new track Merrymaking At My Place he wants to set a new world record for the most house parties happening simultaneously across the country.
Ah yes, nothing sends the kids running to the iStore faster than their parents screaming ‘bloody murder’. The National BBC news ran the story and both national broadsheets ‘The Times’ and ‘The Telegraph’ have run substantial articles on the contest — the story even made the front page of ABC news online in the US.
As a result of all of this hoopla, Calvin was asked to issue a guide on how to party responsibly. Now that should just about fix everything…
Published on Aug 08, 2007 at 10:26 pm.
In tribute to the deaths of two of cinema’s greatest artists, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni this past week, Liam Lacey compiled an extensive* list for the Globe and Mail, organized by age group, of living filmmakers who could potentially fill their formidable shoes.
Sitting there on the screen as static ‘old guard’ media, the article begged to be given a little dynamic context. So, as the third installment of Auteurs on YouTube, I have reprinted the text in its entirety with links to related interviews, trailers and clips from YouTube whenever possible.
Published on Aug 06, 2007 at 10:14 am.
From Visual Complexity:
“Using information design principles and graphical techniques, the 85+ recorded covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is mapped in relation to the original recordings by the band.”
The requisite soundtrack…
…and the trailer for Anton Corbijn’s Control.
Published on Jul 12, 2007 at 9:05 pm.
Fields’ “Everything Last Winter” is possibly the best album that you haven’t heard this summer. They remind me a little of The Stars in the way that the male and female lead vocalists seamlessly trade off between tracks but their sound is its own distinct cachophony of folky acoustics merging with showgazer white noise, dead catchy riffs and ethereal harmonies. Highly recommended.
Anyway, they seem to be getting some due attention from the current crop of hipster dj’s running the circuit including Ewan Pearson, Sebastian of the Ed Banger crew and Badlands. These three tracks arrived in my inbox on Friday to pass on to the blogsphere. Enjoy:
“Song for the Fields” (Ewan Pearson Remix)
“If You Fail We All Fail” (SebastiAn Remix)
“If You Fail We All Fail” (Badlands Remix)
Published on Jul 02, 2007 at 9:49 pm.
I stumbled upon the above image while researching a project that I am currently working on for a youth organization based out of Rwanda (Note: the above image is not in the least related to or suggestive of the direction that I am going on that project. Think complete 180°). I guess Boing Boing threw this photo into the blog feedpen a couple of years back causing a bit of a frenzy and inciting a number of very wrongly assumed explanations for why this man is standing in the middle of the street with a chained up hyena for a pet (a particular favourite caption was that he is a debt collector; another alluded to undisputed “badassitude”).
The photograph is one in a series by Pieter Hugo called The Hyena Men of Nigeria. Turns out that the subject is a member of a group of entertainers from Nigeria, who travel across the country with three hyenas, two pythons and four monkeys. As innocent as that sounds (well, more innocent than the debt collector scenario at any rate) I can’t get over the apocalyptic vision that is composed in these shots. Totally surreal.
Other work by Hugo can be found here.
Published on Jun 27, 2007 at 8:57 pm.
Back in March, an article in Advertising Age criticized the hypocrisy of (Product) Red for raising a “meager $18 million” while spending $100 million on marketing. Since then, the project’s CEO Bobby Shriver has responded to this clarifying that the Red Campaign does not actually have a marketing budget (its manifesto states that it “is not a charity.it is simply a business model”) and that the companies that are affiliated with it (Motorola, Apple, The Gap, and since then, Armani, Converse and American Express) are not spending any more on marketing then they normally would; it is simply that a portion of their budgets have been allocated to raising public awareness of the health crisis that is AIDS in Africa and raising money to deliver the needed medication to the women and children who can benefit from it most. Personally, I find it near genius that the campaign’s focus is not so much on changing the public’s moral actions as it is simply tapping into the pre-existing materialistic culture and its obsession with brand names and celebrities in order raise its funds. It is exploitation in its most noble form. Bono must be having a good chuckle about it all.
Most recently from the campaign comes this month’s Vanity Fair. Guest edited by Bono, the issue features 20 different covers, shot, of course, by Annie Lebovitz, with portraits of a diverse but united-to-the-cause group of famous faces including Desmond Tutu, Brad Pitt, Maya Angelou and George Bush. By purchasing a copy of the magazine, I am informed on the (Product) Red website that I have generated “enough money to provide 74 single dose (nevirapine) treatments for mother and baby, to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child”. Which is a mere drop in the bucket when 5500 Africans are dying of untreated AIDS everyday. But as Bono writes, “Our habit–and we have to kick it–is to reduce this mesmerizing, entrepreneurial, dynamic continent of 53 diverse countries to a hopeless deathbed of war, disease, and corruption…From here, what’s needed is a leg up, not a handout. Targeted debt cancellation and aid mean 20 million more African kids are in school, 1.3 million Africans are on lifesaving drugs. Amazing.”
Published on Jun 24, 2007 at 11:18 pm.
If you can stand the minute and a half lead in by Paul Reiser –it is amazing to think that he actually had a career after the eighties– this is a rare and beautiful performance of what might be one of the most perfect songs ever written: Brian Wilson singing God Only Knows.
Mike Watt (yes, that Mike Watt) has posted a great gallery of photos that he took in Raymond’s studio a few year’s back as well as a collection of Black Flag gig posters.
“My intention is to create work that asks questions about the implications of urban sprawl and its impact on the environment. I am interested in creating psychological narratives set in closed systems that express the behavior of and the interaction between humans and animals. The dystopian model creates a dynamic playing field where I can experiment with these ideas and forms.”
The stunning, isometrically-inclined work of Josh Keyes.
Published on May 24, 2007 at 4:46 pm.
A current favourite online visit, Bryan Finoki’s Subtopia is a discourse on military urbanism, the architecture of occupation and oppression, and the overarching question of why we, as humans, have it in our nature to build walls between ourselves.
To give you an idea of the subject matter, a recent entry features Jonathan Olley’s stark, haunting photos of Northern Ireland’s police stations, barracks and watchtowers; structures from a troubled past that are quickly disappearing to progress; to be too readily forgotten rather than stand as a reminder/memorial of how very wrong the world can sometimes turn.
Finoki writes:
“While [these] photos are evidence of a distinctly terrorized Irish landscape the more frightening truth about them for me is that they could almost be, in so many regards, the filmic traces of any number of places around the world today.
If we were just to focus on the brutish walls and violent features of defensive accouterment, it wouldn’t be that inconceivable to mistake N. Ireland for, say, parts of Jerusalem or Gaza, or even Johannesburg, maybe downtown Manilla for that matter – possibly a neighborhood in central Egypt or Lebanon; conflicted places which are facing some of their own most cruel histories with political walls and entangled battle urbanism still today.”
Below is a link to the video of Dawn Landes’ beautiful bluegrass cover of Peter Bjorn & John’s “Young Folks.” Dawn recorded the song with WST (We Sorta Tried) Bluegrass Band from Austin, TX. Kind of ironic as apparently, the youngest “folk” in WST is 67.
More on Dawn Landes: She hails from Kentucky but she lives in NY, performing and recording with the musicians from Hem and The Earlies. She’s supported José Gonzalez, Suzanne Vega, Shannon Wright, Feist, Le Tigre and Andrew Bird and she has worked as a sound engineer with the likes of Philip Glass, Ryan Adams and Joseph Arthur.
Watch Dawn Landes with WST Bluegrass Band covering “Young Folks” on YouTube.
Here’s the mp3.
Published on May 21, 2007 at 7:31 pm.
My friend West keenly observes that it is a rare case to see a street kid downtown that doesn’t bare some form of the Misfits skull, which is how the logo came to be the 8th addition in our ongoing series Great Counterculture Logos. As for its own origins, the image was adapted by Glenn Danzig from The Crimson Ghost, a 1946 movie serial about a cloaked villain’s attempts to obtain a counter atomic device known as Cyclotrode X.
It is still early. The shades at the Commodore have been drawn to hide out the May late evening light. The opening band, Photo Atlas, pours its heart out on stage to a dozen or so kids swaying back and forth on the dance floor while others bide their time sipping cocktails in the shadows of the surrounding booths. It is the first night of the tour. Headliners, the Bravery have a new album coming out in a week’s time, so in the interrim it is all about gaining momentum and honing one’s chops. Vancouver serves as a testing ground; a litmus paper. There are bigger, brighter times ahead for these bands. As Photo Atlas’ singer, Alan Andrews would tell me later on in the evening, “I can’t wait to get to New York!”
Which is right fair. This is a solid lineup which will no doubt evolve even more in the weeks to come. The second act, Test Your Reflex, falls within the expected nu-rock dance band roll out but puts on a decent show in the process, pushing their recently released debut The Burning Hour, and seeming sincerely grateful to be on stage and a part of it all. By the time the Bravery comes on, the club has filled up and the crowd seems resolved on making the most of a Monday night. While the set remains thickly padded with tracks from their first album, there are new efforts, such as the first song off the album, Believe, that play out well and seem to promise a far more interesting sophomore effort than their first single “Time Won’t Let Me Go” might suggest. Overall, they are tight as hell, and for the same reasons that the music critics love to tear them apart — for writing easy to like, formulaic dance rock — their set is instantly accessible and ceases to lag through to the encore.
With the final chords carpeting my inner ear, we step back out onto Granville Street. It has been a hell of a week, one that played out at both ends of life’s extremes; of death and new life and the stirrings of greater challenges on the horizon. I had found myself getting caught up in all of this throughout the course of the evening; the music pulling me into the moment, reminding me inevitably that I am here and that nothing should ever be for granted.
On the way home I find a king of diamonds playing card on the sidewalk. I throw it off the Cambie Bridge and watch it slowly twirl down into the dark abyss of the waters below until it is swallowed completely.
For James Lee.
One of graffiti’s most dependable traits is its temporal nature. Disgruntled property owners will inevitably get around to hiring someone to rid their walls of what is, from their perspective, pure vandalism and defacement of property. That is partly why I started the “Art I Pass By On My Way To Work” series in the first place, to capture the moment however fleeting and provide the work with a more permanent exhibit.
Anyway, the collection finally has a Flickr Set which I will continue to add to and – this is cool – has been Geotagged as further record of where these pieces can be found – assuming, of course, that they still exist.
Published on May 09, 2007 at 8:01 pm.
New York rockers, The Bravery are going to be at the Commodore in Vancouver this coming Monday toting their yet-to-be-released sophomore effort, The Sun and the Moon (in stores May 22nd). Chances are if you were deep into the “nu-rock” wave that washed through a couple of years back with the Icarus-like rise of Franz Ferdinand, The Stills and The Killers, then you may have picked up The Bravery’s self-titled first album in the process. It was a listenable collection of tracks, with high points arising typically when the song sounded like someone else’s, but good for padding out that skinny tie playlist for that special hipster sweetheart nonetheless.
More interesting, in my opinion, is the opening band in next Monday’s lineup: The Photo Atlas. At this point I know little more than what is offered on their mySpace site and the 30 second sound bites off iTunes but I like what I’ve heard so far. Their sound is fresh, angst-laced dance-rock with roots which, to their credit, seem to dip into the coffers of Fugazi and Gang of Four. I can only hope that the energy that boils over their album No, Not Me, Never is fully channelled into their live performance.
Tickets for the show can be had at Ticketmaster.
Published on May 07, 2007 at 10:57 pm.
Chris Jordan’s photographic essays seem to always be preoccupied with uncovering beauty in the spoils of our society. Discarded circuit boards take on a patchwork air, while a rack of waterlogged dresses hints at a rainbow in the otherwise twisted wake of a post-Katrina New Orleans. In his series Running the Numbers, he uses statistics as his subject, producing compelling large scale photographic collages that serve as visual representations of societal numbers that are often too collosally abstract to even try to comprehend.
As Jordan states: “I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.”
Published on May 02, 2007 at 11:15 pm.
“Tom Sawyer got it right. Why paint a fence when you can get your friends to do it for you for free? He would have been the perfect new-media mogul. Spending time and money creating content on the Internet is so hopelessly dated, so dotcom, so very, very 1.0. The secret of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies: build a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content — thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff…”
– Time, May 8th 2006
Hmmm…case in point: Facebook; which I finally caved in and signed up for this weekend and which has been consuming my spare time ever since. I noticed that there are 12 step programs to get off the bloody thing.
More mentions of the Tom Sawyeresque 2.0 labour exploitation practices at the NYTimes.
Published on Apr 30, 2007 at 6:41 pm.
The Revelation Records logo by…well, a few different people actually. Jordan Cooper explains:
We used stars on the first few releases as a background which was Ray’s idea. He liked how Dangerhouse had black and yellow bars as their background on the labels so he wanted us to have something to identify Rev with like that. We got a Letraset sheet of stars and used it on the first three records we put out. The fourth record was going to be the Gorilla Biscuits 7″ and their friend (who would later join the band as a second guitar player), Alex Brown offered to do the layout for them. Alex took the star concept and put the letter “r” in a star and had the label name under it inside a box. Ray, Alex and Porcell all lived together in Brooklyn at the time so Ray saw the artwork before I did. He really liked the idea and called me to tell me about it. From his description over the phone I re-created it. That was the logo we ended up using because we had already used it on a few things (probably flyers, catalogs and ads). We used it on the GB 7″ and the Side By Side and No For An Answer records and repressings of the Sick Of It All 7″ too. Then we were working with Dave Bett at our main distributor Important on the layout for the New York City Hardcore – The Way It Is compilation and he offered to clean it up for us. He did and that’s basically the logo we’ve been using ever since.
Published on Apr 24, 2007 at 12:02 pm.
Young, local artist Erin McSavaney’s collection of gritty, urban canvasses opens at the Atelier Gallery this coming Saturday and runs through to May 12. Looking forward to it.
A pair of articles by Derek Richardson of SFGate that inspired a lengthy and most rewarding music search: the first on current fave San Fran band Vetiver that provides a rather comprehensive who’s who of their surrounding scene in the process; and the second on Freak Folk in general, which succeeds in filling in the rest.
Published on Apr 13, 2007 at 10:22 pm.
Those of you who visit this site on a semi-regular basis will be aware of a series that I have been posting to since this past November titled Great Counterculture Logos (the irony of this moniker has never been lost on me btw) and, more recently, of the email that I received from artist/designer Paul Pascarella in which he descibes a little of the process that went into the creation of the Gonzo Dagger (Part 5 in said series). There was also mention in that correspondence of a portrait that he did right after HST’s death, a tribute of sorts to the Good Doctor which I subsequently expressed interest in, whereby Paul forwarded along to me this sneak preview of what he calls, Hunter’s World.
So there you go. As far as the purchasing details for this work: there are prints of the painting still availlable in two sizes and editions. The memorial edition of 40 prints, 32x 26 for $950, and Hunter’s World Edition of 75 prints, 24×18 for $350. Purchase of the original canvas itself is currently only available to the Hunter “inner circle”. Selah.
Published on Apr 09, 2007 at 7:38 pm.
I’m starting a new series tonight, one of two new ongoing artist features that I aim to keep posting to in the weeks, months, decades that follow. Raymond Pettibon, in my opinion is punk rock’s answer to Andy Warhol, cynically stoking his work with such truly american made pop culture references as handguns and baseball, celebrity murder and mickey mouse. It is brilliant and dark and always provoking. But what makes me a fan most of all is his use of text and the hand drawn representation of design layout in his work. He is a designer’s artist to be sure.
We’ll get started this evening with this small gallery as well as a series of interviews from Art:21. Enjoy, and if you know of other great Pettibon links, be sure to send them my way.
Published on Mar 28, 2007 at 10:15 pm.
The Public Image Ltd logo by Dennis Morris and John Lydon.
The warped and uncalibrated state of the first 20 seconds of this video seems a fitting start to the contents that follow as though serving to open a portal into an entirely different reality, one hosting the clash of two titans of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll ethic.
It really does not get much more legendary than this. Amusingly, as one of the comments points out, it is Keith Richards that comes out seeming the most sober. But despite a good few moments of drug addled babble on both sides, exchanges on such topics as the events of Altamont, and the second life of J Edgar Hoover are truly priceless moments.
Published on Mar 22, 2007 at 9:49 pm.
A great collection of punk rock flyers from the early 80’s to the present.
“The first video news I watched on a cellphone was a smoke signal. I saw it in the back of a cab. The Pope had died, and CNN had its cameras trained on the chimney over St. Peter’s Square. Viewers were told to expect white smoke when the cardinals had elected his replacement.
The sight of this primitive signal on a screen the size of a Saltine in a taxi in New York City was mind-blowing. I peered into the machine in my hand. I could make out the image. I could understand it. It needed no translation.”
Published on Mar 20, 2007 at 10:59 am.
It started as a joke during the research phase of a current project, but I was just informed that my t-shirt design Puma Vs. Unicorn has passed the Threadless submission phase and is now up for voting in the public sphere. Help make this shirt a reality. Vote now. Or at the very least chime in on who you think would win a battle of such mythic proportions.
History has proven time and again that if the powers that be put up a wall, the people will eventually tear it down. Such was the case at last night’s Bloc Party concert at the Orpheum when 80+ fans, grown tired of the formal sit down theatre setting of the venue, rushed the stage for the final song of the night.
The Bloc Party is not a sit down kind of band. I caught their act two years ago at the Commodore when they came through town pushing their epic debut Silent Alarm. What I remember most from that experience was the energy. They had the crowd dancing to be sure, and they were tight as all hell.
Both of these qualities were somewhat lacking at last night’s performance. The former for reasons already mentioned — taking the crowd’s energy out of the equation tends to crater the momentum. And in the case of the latter, the new songs just did not come across as polished as the Silent Alarm tracks, of which they played a good number including Banquet, Like Eating Glass and Positive Tension.
It seems an admirable feat these days to see a show where when a band builds their set from their entire repertoire; it feels more like a concert and less like album promotion. But after the show, we debated whether the near 50/50 cut of old songs to new was more a reflection of their musicianship or the need to flush out the setlist with a few energetic tunes.
The crowd definitely seemed to respond more to the older offerings, but perhaps that’s because A Weekend in the City has only been officially out for a month. It does take a little getting used to. Back in October, Stereogum.com had started posting rumours of an album leak for Bloc Party’s highly anticipated sophomore effort and within days, it surfaced in our music library at the studio. So I was well acquainted with the tracks. It is a different record from Silent Alarm, more produced – some have said overproduced – with others commenting that it was noticeably “slower” than the first. But while it did seem to need to grow on me, along the way came brilliant revelations that there are some really damn good songs, all with that underlying feeling of anxious jubilation that seems to run through Bloc Party songs as though taking in the beauty of a nuclear sky.
Some of the most compelling moments of the night actually came prior to the Bloc Party taking the stage in the form of the second act, Final Fantasy. Armed with violin, keyboard and various effects pedals, Owen Pallett, the band’s sole member, unleashed an array of classically inspired riffs that looped in, around and beneath his self-proclaimed “thin, stupid vocals”. Truly something unique to see for yourself, his live act being a much different animal from his most recent release, the difficult but brilliantly titled “He Poos Clouds”. Equally brilliant were the accompanying background visuals, provided by a female artist introduced simply as “Steph”. Using only an overhead projector of the style that would be found in most high school science classrooms, she overlayed transparencies on top of one another creating rudimentary animations and juxtipositions, often with the shadows of her hands playing a role in the composition. Now this was an act suited to the Orpheum’s setting.
Despite all of my criticisms, it was a pretty sweet show. No doubt if the Bloc Party continue on their current rise, their next visit to Vancouver could very well be GM Place. But I’m hoping it will be back at the Commodore. The energy is good there.
Published on Mar 13, 2007 at 10:11 pm.
Canstruction is a fundraising event for the Food Bank where teams compete by building 10′X 10′X 8′ sculptures out of cans and non-perishable goods. The two day competition ended this afternoon with our team (Industrial Brand Creative and Legends Memorabilia) taking the top prize of Juror’s Choice for the third year in a row with our entry PiniCantics. More photos and our usual timelapse QT of the build are soon to follow in the days ahead. But in the meantime, if you are in the Vancouver area, I encourage you to drop by the Cruise Ship Terminal at Canada Place to view the structures and show your support.
UPDATE: More photos have been posted at Flickr and
The timelapse of our build has been posted over on Todd’s site.
Can inspiration occur after the fact? Yesterday’s post, the first in a new series entitled “Art I Pass By On My Way To Work” could very well have been born from a website that I stumbled upon today. Written On The City, a project by the troublemakers over at Language In Common “celebrates the conversation that’s happening on the walls and sidewalks of the places we live.”
The Gonzo Fist by Paul Pascarella .
Paul Pascarella writes:
I would just like to be clear on the logo that you are refering to, the Gonzo fist, or the actual Gonzo logo with fist, name and dagger blade. The two thumbed fist with peyote button was originally designed by Hunter and a local Aspen artist named Tom Benton. It was first used I believe as a Freak Power symbol when Hunter was running for Sheriff in Aspen in 69′ when Benton designed the poster.
The actual Gonzo logo that you see around in Rolling Stone, Hunter’s books etc. is what I designed for Hunter in the early 70’s. Designing logos is what I did such as the Lorimar logo, United Artists and many more. Hunter wanted a logo for the Gonzo way, Gonzo Journalism and so on. So I took the two thumbed fist and redesigned it along with the logotype and knife blade. I remember the knife blade was roughly fashioned after one of Hunter’s throwing knives and if you notice carefully the negative spaces in the type and knife blade all match up and relate well to each other, atleast if you are looking at the real one.
That was only one of many graphic and art projects I worked on with Hunter and working with Hunter is always much more complex than it need be, but also can be more fun than usual. The most recent was a kind of Hunter’s World portrait I did right after his death. It is mixed media almost all in black and white 5′x4′. I also made a six minute film on the making of the painting and soon will be putting the painting up for sale.
Years later I didn’t think the Gonzo logo was my best design, but it may turn out to be the biggest.
Published on Feb 27, 2007 at 2:28 pm.
Expressing similar sentiments and political slant to Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, check out the beautifully realized, infographic-inspired piece on America’s involvement in Iraq, What Barry Says by Knife Party.
At the end of the fifties, at time when the bohemians still ruled the East Village, a New York artist named Ray Johnson began corresponding w/ the others of the Avant Garde scene through a prolific series of collages that he sent through the post. These collages, which Johnson labelled “moticos”, created a network with thousands of fellow artists around the world, laid the foundations for Pop Art and came to be known as The New York Correspondence School. And yet despite this influential position Johnson, once considered to be”the most famous unknown artist in America”, remained an enigmatic figure residing determinedly in the underground; far beyond the gallery circuit; known of by many but never known very well by anyone.
Johnson’s life and work is the subject of the documentary “How to Draw a Bunny” (2002) which frames its retrospective between the mysterious events of January 13th, 1995 when Johnson’s body was found floating in Sag Harbour. To this day, no one has determined what happened. Some say it was suicide, his “final performance” that, as with his life, Ray Johnson tackled death under his own conditions.
Published on Feb 18, 2007 at 4:50 pm.
As a followup to yesterday’s entry:
Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics
From this morning’s New York Times, graphic designer Alicia Cheng’s gut-churning visual depiction of the reported 1900+ deaths in Iraq during the first month of 2007, a toll that has markedly increased from 800 in January 2006.
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.
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”
Published on Jan 24, 2007 at 8:06 pm.
“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.“
Published on Jan 23, 2007 at 7:49 pm.
The Donald discusses Citizen Kane over at the extremely engrossing site of the great Errol Morris.
(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.
The Public Enemy logo by Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, aka Chuck D.
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.
Published on Jan 02, 2007 at 11:53 pm.
Cinematographer extraordinaire, Christoper Doyle talks about his craft on the streets of Bangkok and Hong Kong PLUS a series of commercials by collaborator Wong Kar Wai over at Girl With a Movie Camera.
My wife Jane and I launched The Ox Project today, a holiday fund raiser with the goal of purchasing 2 oxen and a plow for the Kenyan village of Kanyawegi.
The Obey Giant logo by Shepard Fairey.
One of the best YouTube moments for me this year was the recut trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Lately, trailers have become mockeries of themselves, either giving away too much of the movie (I feel like I’ve already seen all I need to of the new Bond) or falling into a formulaic pattern that often renders a good flick into generic drivel. It seems that very few films are willing to take a risk and get creative with how they promote their work, instead surrendering to the tried and true.
But all that aside, it turns out that the recut trailer as an online genre is alive and well with dozens of titles going under the knife for a new spin. Some are dreadful; others brilliant. Here are a few of my favorites:
Sleepless in Seattle as a horror.
Garden State as a thriller.
Swingers as a psycho drama.
Taxi Driver as a romantic comedy.
Published on Nov 30, 2006 at 10:45 pm.
A very cool collection of Russian covers of Bret Eason Ellis novels, the above being for The Informers…
…a Kubrickesque fake trailer for Lunar Park on YouTube…
…and Bret Easton Ellis on the Why the Teletubbies are Evil.
More on Ellis over at Not An Exit.
Published on Nov 29, 2006 at 11:32 pm.
Snow is a rare thing in Vancouver especially in November. Normally it stays up on the mountains enticing us to strap boards to our feet and hurl ourselves downhill. But for the past 24 hours, this city has been getting dumped on.
Feeling somewhat ill-equipped to tackle the winter wonderland outside my window, I’ve chosen to spend the afternoon holed up with a roaring fire, a glass of beaujolais and the task of figuring out what killed our garburator. But there have been many others out enjoying this uncommon event and Flickr, as always, is the best place to see what’s been going on.
(above photo by Americanuck)
Published on Nov 26, 2006 at 5:01 pm.
The Black Flag logo by Raymond Pettibon.
Currently showing at the Met and corresponding with a book of the same name, Robert Polidori’s New Orleans After the Flood: Photographs hauntingly documents the post-Katrina devastation of the once Big Easy. With the same passion that affected his photographic essay on Chernobyl in 2001, Polidori once again succeeds in capturing the magnitude of loss and human folly in each frame.
For more info check out John Updike’s review of After the Flood in the New York Times Review of Books.
Published on Nov 15, 2006 at 8:40 am.
I have been well aware lately that my media viewing habits are turning increasingly from my television to the computer. Even those few shows that I do enjoy from the paltry mainstream offerings are generally viewed on my own time by downloading episodes from p2p and watching them on Quicktime.
And then there’s the Youtube phenomenon. I am a complete addict. The variety, freedom and sheer excitement of hunting down some rare or nostalgic clip takes the concept of channel surfing to a whole new level. It comes as no surprise that Youtube was just named Time Magazine’s “Invention of the Year” and its recent acquisition by Google for $1.65 billion only confirms its projected significance in the grand scheme of online evolution.
But the beautiful and possibly most important effect from this influx of available media is the availability in itself. An old clip of Laurel and Hardy for example suddenly finds new life. Great classics are discovered by a new generation. And footage that might have been lost forever, is digitally preserved (albeit in a compressed format that often makes it barely viewable).
Stepping away from Youtube for a moment, check out this contributor at Dailymotion named Alternativa who has over 150 videos featuring an amazingly rare and eclectic selection of music footage from artists ranging from the Pharoah Sanders Quartet to The Roots, to Art Blakey; not to mention a long time personal favorite: Santana live at Woodstock featuring one of the best drum solos I’ve ever heard. Far out.
Published on Nov 08, 2006 at 8:39 pm.
On June 13th, 2006, artist Jeroen Witvliet bought a number of newspapers and proceeded to cut out images from their pages. From this collection, he would select those which he responded to most and paint them. In doing so, they became something new; stripped of its context and caption, the painting forced you to confront the image for what it was.
As Jeroen writes:
Jeroen’s exhibition, “In this light…whisper, 24″, opens tonight at the Cristall Gallery from 6 – 9pm and runs until the 22nd.
Read my interview from last year with Jeroen here.
Published on Nov 03, 2006 at 12:57 pm.
A search for “skateboarding” on YouTube garners almost 70,000 results, which is not surprising seeing as the hand held video camera has been a required component of the sport since the very beginning. Most of the clips that you’ll find are homespun amateurs documenting clumsy kick flips off the sidewalk curb. But others such as Rodney Mullen, Daewon Song or Stefan Janoski, are pure poetry.
I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying: “Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.”
“I’ve been somewhat disappointed with my creative output as of late. So, with a day off of client work, I set out this morning to make something interesting before the end of the day.”
So begins Jer Thorp’s entry over at blprnt introducing his latest personal Flash project, Plumage which takes a Flickr tag and creates a set of feathers from the colour data in the image. Very cool.
Published on Oct 25, 2006 at 2:18 pm.
After taking a crack at Viking’s Stationery Movies Contest (scored 18/20 while playing fair), I was reminded of Kristan Horton’s Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove photo project in which he ingeniously replicates stills from the film using everyday objects from around his studio.
Ninja Tunes Podcasts featuring Coldcut, Big Dada and Solid Steel.
Riding the London Tube can be a cold & claustrophobic experience. Down in the underground the rat race stops for no one; so it is best to keep your head down, find your place in the flow, and shuffle on.
In this mindset, imagine the ethereal, childlike effect that happens upon the commuter who stumbles out of the train and discovers the mural installation, City Glow, Mountain Whisper” by Superflat artist Chiho Aoshima at the Gloucester Road station. Part of the Platform for Art initiative, and her first solo project in the UK, Aoshima states that her work “feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialise”. Ethereal indeed.
A further glimpse into Aoshima’s world can be found here.
Published on Oct 18, 2006 at 3:50 pm.Just ducked into the London Apple Store on Regent Street. We are heading to Italy tomorrow, spending a couple of days in Venice, then on to Bologna and then finally meeting up with our friends Jen and Adam for seven days in the Tuscan countryside. I will be back online on the 17th with a full account of the adventures. Until then, ciao!
Published on Oct 02, 2006 at 5:09 am.
As premature as it might be, GQ magazine has released its Top 10 list of The Most Important Buildings of the 21st Century. PSFK has the details.
If you like a little more history with your architecture, check out Lisa Rochon’s Seven Wonders of Architecture from entries past.
Published on Sep 28, 2006 at 11:50 pm.
Immediately rising to the position of blog du jour for its name alone, If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats hosts an incredibly wide range of rare and sometimes utterly poignant pop culture references from decades past. I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface on this one…
Update on Christian Volckman’s Renaissance.
Filmed by La Blogotheque, current favorite band Grizzly Bear performs an acapella version of “The Knife” while walking through the streets of Paris and then retires to their hotel bathroom for a rendition of “Shift”. If you haven’t checked out their new album Yellow House yet, I highly recommend it.
It is a strange juxtaposition to go hunting for clips of master filmmakers on youTube. But they are there to be found.
In the great democratization of media, a clip from Fellini’s 8 1/2 stands on even par with clips as monumental to the history of cinema as Brandon Davis and Paris Hilton’s crude comments about Lindsay Lohan’s nether regions. That any one of these great film pioneers foresaw this highly compressed small screen fate for their work is asking too much even for such visionaries.
In the end, it makes for an enjoyable evening surfing through these clips. Here are but a few. I invite you to add more via the comments.
The trailer for Godard’s Breathless (with Japanese subtitles no less).
The swing scene from Kurosawa’s Ikiru.
Two classic 60’s rock n roll moments: the Yardbirds in Antonioni’s Blow Up and a great early rendition of Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones in Godards’ One Plus One.
Film historian, Peter Cowie talking about Bergman’s “Winter Light”.
The wonderful Saul Bass title sequence and opening scene of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
And finally, one that always gives me chills with the first strains of the violin, the French trailer for Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.
Published on Sep 20, 2006 at 7:24 pm.
Environmental arms developers.
Print & patterns & more patterns.
And the return of the Sugarcubes.
Published on Sep 19, 2006 at 8:54 am.
Photos from Banksy’s LA exhibit, Barely Legal.
UPDATE: An interview with the elusive artist over at LA Weekly.
Published on Sep 18, 2006 at 1:11 pm.
September 23 – 30 is Banned Books Week which recognizes those great works of literature that society for one reason or another has taken issue with. Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, all of these works at some point have been put on trial for the ideas they advance. In fact, 42 of 100 books listed by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as the best novels of the 20th century have been challenged or bannd.e
As part of this celebration, Google has posted a page that allows you to explore passages from some of these classics and get a sense of what makes them read as dangerous to some and revelatory to others. (via Forward)
Published on Sep 14, 2006 at 8:23 am.
Jacque Fresco designs the civilizations of the future; and in the process, he defines how the human race will need to change in order to get there.
Two legends, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (above right) and linguist Noam Chomsky meet for the first time in their respective careers to discuss the topic of deceit over at the always curious Seed Magazine.
From Diplo’s Mad Decent Worldwide Radio: “its crazy here in Rio.. guns go missing and police go to war with poor people and then i get kicked out of my apt and i got no internet access.. but heres a random mix.“
It was Diplo’s show with Brazilian acts, Cansei de Ser Sexy (who win the title of Dance Hit of the Summer with the brilliant “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above”) and Bonde do Role a few weeks ago at Celebrities here in Vancouver that first made me take notice and begin to wonder “what the heck is going on in Brazil?” The energy from both of these bands was raw and unrefined. These were acts that would never have seen the outside of the Brazilian club scene if it weren’t for MySpace.com and the endorsement of a worldclass dj like Diplo who, it seems has made Rio his second home.
Another discovery via Diplo that churned up while surfing the net this evening: the work of Leandro HBL, a director, photographer, designer etc. who did some time at Fabrica. Great, great work.
The next stop on my journey, an old favorite: the fantastic art of Alexandre Orion, which combines street art and photography to create often comic and poignant stories. This led me to consult a source who knows far better than me of other instances of Brazilian street art which ultimately brought an end to my surf as I settled in with this enchanting video entitled “Brilliant Tyger”.
Whew! So the answer to “What the heck is going on in Brazil?”, it would seem a whole heck of a lot!
Published on Aug 30, 2006 at 4:23 pm.
This video, found over on William Gibson’s blog this morning made me immediately nostalgic for my old Tokyo ‘hood.
The digital world gets pulled from the screen into our own in the work of artist Aram Bartholl.
The classic movie titles of legendary designer Saul Bass brought to you by my new favourite site, Not Coming to a Theatre Near You.
(Indirectly via Coudal.)
Published on Aug 13, 2006 at 4:21 pm.
I always tend to venture beyond the local borders when it comes to searching for inspiration, looking to what is big in Japan, or germinating in the New York streets or rising out of Europe. So it was a pleasant surprise to find myself spending a good chunk of my afternoon pouring over the work of local designer Marian Bantjes.
With a whimsical and organic style that suggests that she spends more time with a pen and paper than in front of a computer screen, Marian has been described by Stefan Sagmeister as “one of the most innovative typographers working today” and the legendary typographer Doyald Young told me that he has “only the greatest admiration for her work”.
You can read more about Marian Bantjes on Design Boom and be sure to check out her work on the cover and an 8 page spread of the July/August edition of Print Magazine.
Published on Aug 11, 2006 at 2:34 pm.
“This interview began with an email exchange in which Soderbergh outlined the various topics he’d be most interested in talking about. The short list included pornography, Chris Rock, how the Olympics relates to the killer instinct, and the cost of panda bears as compared to the cost of getting off (in the legal sense).”
Scott Indrisek, the New York editor for Anthem interviews Steven Soderbergh for The Believer.
Published on Aug 09, 2006 at 3:12 pm.
No one wants to play Sega with Harrison Ford.
Via IBC.
Published on Aug 07, 2006 at 8:00 pm.
“On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the … Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.”
A colleague of mine recently went on somewhat of a diatribe about how the movie industry has gone to crap, that he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a good movie. I suggested that he was only partly correct; that perhaps he was simply looking in the wrong direction and that in actuality it would seem there has never been such an abundance of quality filmmaking coming out of a single era. It simply exists – surprise – outside of the realm of the big budget Hollywood blockbuster. Case in point, here are three very different soon-to-be-released films that look absolutely phenomenal:
The Science of Sleep
Long awaited, The Science of Sleep seems to approach the subject of dreams much in the same way as Gondry’s previous work Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did memory. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane Miroux, a young man whose inability to differentiate between dream and reality wreaks havoc on his romantic interests. The naive stylings of the stop motion work in this film is like nothing else. Visit the official website for an equal bout of absurdity.
Babel
Before this latest effort, Alejandro González Iñárritu has made films that examine wrenchingly heavy subject matter from a personal, almost microcosmic perspective. 21 Grams for example was almost claustrophobic in the way that we were entrenched in the lives of its characters. With Babel, it is as though Iñárritu has maintained the intensity but opened it up to “a range never seen before in his films”; to a global-spanning storyline that links Morocco, Tokyo and the Tijuana border. As stated in the synopsis: “This film brings back the ancient concept of BABEL and questions its modern day implications: the mistaken identities, misunderstandings and missed chances for communication that, though often unseen, drive our modern lives.”
Half Nelson
I read a review of this movie in the New York Times this weekend and it immediately caught my interest. Ryan Gosling plays a white Brooklyn schoolteacher named Dan, who shuns the set curriculum to instead engage his students in “dialectics and realpolitik”. But before you dismiss this as yet another take on “Dead Poets Society” or “To Sir with Love”, it turns out that Dan is struggling outside of the classroom with crack addiction and the demons that come with it. Defined boundaries blur between teacher and student, innocence and experience; out of which an interesting friendship develops in what looks like a powerful and intense ride.
Jeroen dropped me a line today to let me know that he has a new series posted on his site called Untitled Days. As timely and thought provoking as ever.
More info on Jeroen can be found here.
Published on Jul 31, 2006 at 7:20 pm.
“Something had gentled the rain, taking the madness out of it.”
From today’s New York Times: the “unmistakable prose” of Micket Spillane (1918-2006).
Published on Jul 22, 2006 at 11:35 pm.
Here’s a new one for the daily visits: Feanne’s Daily Drawings is exactly what the title promises. Well, sort of. It actually seems to be more like once a week or so with a sporadic entry of two or three drawings at a time. But what does get posted is worth checking out. Even more great work can be found on her main site.
Apparently Henry Rollins has his own show on IFC. Which is cool. Even cooler still is this performance on the show by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser comes out tomorrow – and, of course, there is a strange & dislocating website to go along with it. The art work for the album is from woodcut prints by Stanley Donwood inspired by the floods in Cornwall, England, two years ago.
“[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
These cautionary and prophetic words from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech as President of the United States on January 17, 1961 serve as the starting point for Eugene Jarecki’s powerful exploration of the American Military Industrial Complex in Why We Fight. As we learn, the answer to this question is convoluted, misguided and never easy; but rarely does it seem to be for the right reasons.
Published on Jul 05, 2006 at 9:50 pm.
• As a follow-up to my review of Vidfest, I met up with Ben Burden Smith, the producer of Tony Hawk and the Boom Boom Sabotage after its world premiere screening and got his take on what is was like working with the Hawk, the local pros, and the challenges of capturing all of the action for 3D. The interview has been posted on the Industrial Brand Blog.
• Also, it seems that the Industrial Brand Blog has won another award. Well, two in fact from Portfolios.com. We received a Bronze for Best Corporate Blog and a Merit for Best Self Promotional Blog.
• Finally, I just learned that I am going to be going down to Seattle, once again as a correspondent for TAXI Design to cover the ICOGRADA convention from the 9 – 15 July 2006. My attourney has advised me to rent a very fast car with no top…
Published on Jun 29, 2006 at 11:43 am.
Douglas Coupland doesn’t want to end the Book Club meeting on a positive note. They always end upbeat he explains. For once, he wants things to end darkly. “Doomed. We are all doomed.” He throws this out there as his final words. “Quit your job. There is no hope.”
It is this topic of life’s darker edges that seemed to continue to be addressed over the course of the two hour discussion tonight that was being recorded for an upcoming episode of North By Northwest, hosted by Sheryl MacKay and Georgia Straight’s John Burns for CBC Radio Studio One’s Book Club.
Vancouver, as much as we wish to ignore it, has a rather notorious underbelly – and not just the open and festering wound exposed on the Downtown Eastside. As Coupland pointed out, we don’t really make all that much here aside from pushing a few pixels around on a screen and some high-end real estate. And yet, no one asks a lot of questions about where all the money is coming from; instead we remain complacent, like a good mafia wife. “We are living in a unique place, at a unique time” Coupland stated. That is one of the main reasons that he based his latest novel J-Pod here. (Well, that and the fact that he was feeling too lazy to travel).
So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the discussion tonight veered onto such topics as “where is the best place to dump a dead body” It was in relation to the passage he read in which the main character’s mother kills a biker who tried to extort her for a share of her basement grow op. But Coupland is visibly pleased to be sitting up in front of us, relating his experiences during the research phase of driving around Vancouver looking for the perfect place to get rid of a corpse. From the novel:
It’s strange how everything in the world changes the moment your focus becomes extremely specific. Hmmmm….is that a good place to bury a body? No, soil’s too thin.
Mom suggested Stanley Park, on the edge of downtown. “If there was ever a place to dump a body, the park is it. At this point in history, there are probably more bones there than soil.”
His choice of reading, he told us, was inspired by a report on NEWS1130 of three grow ops exploding out in New Westminster earlier in the day. “This is the only place in the world that they don’t have to explain the term ‘grow op’ on the news” he wryly observed. And then, in the same way that he had done at the last reading I had attended, he stumbled over an explanation in the attempts to set up the scene of the selected passage, loose thoughts trailing after one another with starts and pauses until suddenly it all seemed to gracefully take flight and you realized that he was reading.
There were a lot of those tonight, trailing loose thoughts and quirky starts and pauses, as Coupland took questions from the audience about his take on programmers, micro-autism, the Google phenomenon and our divorce from history. This is the first time in the world that we have nothing to look back on and learn from, he told us. “History cannot help us anymore. We must begin fresh and figure it out as we go”. Which is exciting, in my opinion, and optimistic. And it ultimately ends this entry ..on a positive note.
Published on Jun 26, 2006 at 10:35 pm.
“For many, including myself, the voice at the start of “The Trees” belongs to Kafka’s letters themselves, speaking directly to the reader: “we are like tree trunks in the snow.” Picture a field after a recent snowfall.”
A beautiful article by Rob Giampietro on the relationship of Zen Buddhism, Franz Kafka and typography over at the newly redesigned Design Observer.
Published on Jun 25, 2006 at 9:31 pm.I’ve made a few changes to the site over the past week, flipping the layout of the homepage so that the nav now sits to the right; combining the primary and secondary navigation into one column in the writing section; and giving the portfolio pages a vertical structuring that is more consistent to the other pages (not to mention solving a really annoying menu structure).
I’m still in the process of debugging but if you notice anything peculiar please send it my way. Otherwise, positive feedback is always welcome. 
While down on Granville Island at Vidfest last week, we stumbled upon The Fourth Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition (BIMPE) on display at the Federation Gallery. The exhibit is exactly what its title suggests: an eclectic range of small scale etchings, woodprints, linocuts, mezzotints, metal engravings, and digital prints. Very inspiring. Not only that, the prices for the prints are equally miniature in comparison to other artwork in this city. If you are on the Island before June 25th, be sure to check it out.
For the next couple of days (June 15 – 16), Ben and I are covering Vidfest for the TAXI Design Network out of Singapore. Our review will be posted on their site later next week but in the meantime, for images and a few infrequent postings check us out at Industrial Brand Creative.
There was a true rock n roll buzz flowing through the bar of the Yale Hotel last night, as though one might expect Bono or Neil Young to step onto the small hallowed stage and play a solo set. Tickets to the event had been hard to come by. If you listened close enough, you could catch tales of backdoor dealings and namedropping to gain access. The only other way had been to write an online 200 word essay on why you deserved an invitation to this most heinous meeting of… the CBC Book Club?!?
Without question, the new rock star of the 21st Century is the Celebrity Chef and no one out there is keeping up the hells bells persona better than last night’s guest, Anthony Bourdain. Somewhat ironically, this rebel of the gastronomic realm has come to represent the voice of more traditional bistro fare. He has no time for kitchens that offer “Wasabi Sorbee” or “Green Pear and Lychee Reduction”. And don’t even bother sitting down at his table if you are anything close to being vegetarian. His tastes are carni-centric and the more of the beast that you consume, the better.
Above all else, food for Chef Bourdain has become a means of communicating and breaking down cultural barriers. For the past five years, with only a few small breaks, he has been traveling to the farthest and most remote corners of the world in search of “the perfect meal”. When you are on the road for such an extended period, you come to learn that ego and attitude do not translate as well as sincerity and gratitude. Likewise, you find yourself quickly humbled by the generosity of your hosts who will often sacrifice a week’s worth of food to assure that you are well fed. As Chef Bourdain talked of his experiences, extolled the ethereal nature of Vietnamese cuisine and read passages from his new book Nasty Bits, you could glean from him the wisdom that comes with seeing so much. He repeatedly told us that he had the best job in the world; and we believed him.
From the Preface to The Nasty Bits:
“It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there – with your eyes open – and lived to see it.”
Published on Jun 12, 2006 at 11:22 pm.
The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience.
My experience: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha on a train between Madrid and Barcelona. Check it out here.
Published on Jun 08, 2006 at 10:08 pm.
A documentary on the artistic subculture that emerged in the early 1990’s influenced by skateboading, grafitti, pop culture and the D.I.Y. aesthetic.
Published on Jun 05, 2006 at 9:01 pm.
We saw Michael Haneke’s film Cache the other night. It is definitely the type of movie that lingers in your head for days after viewing it leaving more questions than answers in its wake.
Focussing on the deception and guilt that arises when the past of a well known TV intellectual comes back to haunt him, the movie takes for its backdrop the current unsettled divide between Paris’ rich and poor giving the viewer a subtle but threatening sense that the tensions could boil over at any moment. Hanneke takes this further by linking the main plot line to an incident from 1961 in which Paris police officers attacked a passive demonstration by 30,000 Algerians, killing up to 200 people by drowning them in the Seine.
The film moves along in a slow, almost menacing manner, forcing the audience to immerse themselves completely in the emotional and complex interaction that is taking place on the screen. Within this calculated pace lie two very unsettling scenes of violence; so much so that the first prompted the couple in front of us to leave the theatre while the other extracted an ear piercing scream that had the rest of us jumping in our seats. It is not often that such genuine emotion is experienced at the movies these days especially without the aid of a sappy Hallmark-card musical score. Cache is strikingly devoid of any music whatsoever.
Cache was awarded Canne’s Fipresci Prize and The Ecumenical Jury Prize while Haneke was acknowledged as Best Director. Go see it, let it linger for awhile and then let me know what you think…
Published on May 29, 2006 at 9:17 pm.
I was recently interviewed for a short piece in the Globe & Mail by Nicholas Dinka on the importance of having a good logo. You can read my rather harsh take on some recent Canadian logo design here.
Lisa Rochon of the Globe & Mail has just finished her Seven Wonders series for the newspaper with a focus on architecture “both historic and modern … but only if the works are still intact and accessible to visitors.” It is a great list, but one which immediately had me searching the net for more images and information on the celebrated structures.
So after reading Rochon’s choices and her rationale behind each one, check out these links for further insight into what makes these seven so wonderful:
1. Casa de Barragan, Mexico City
2. Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp, France
3. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
4. The Great Pyramid, Giza, Egypt
5.National Assembly, Dhaka, Bangladesh
6.Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
7. Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia
BONUS: Check out this sweet Angkor panorama.
I would suspect that there are few people out there who would proudly post the entire laundry list of their Google search queries on any given day. Sometimes the wee midnight hours can inspire some twisted cyber journeys. Being on the receiving end of such quests can be quite amusing. I use tracksy to check this site’s traffic records and every so often I get a very enlightening glimpse into the stranger habits of some of my visitors. For example, I take great pride in the fact that broome:ideas and executions is the number one search result for surfers looking for this. Such moments are such a positive affirmation that I am really connecting with “my people”.
So with that in mind, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome – since my last post on the French film Renaissance- all of the searchers of “castration pics”. They join the surprisingly large number of people looking for “photos of executions” in being so incredibly and completely blown off course. (But I hope you enjoy your visit here nonetheless 
I hate to admit that I wasn’t a huge fan of Sin City. It was a visually stunning and oh-so-cool piece of cinema to be sure. But I lament the moment when post-modern irony became synonymous with gratuitous ultra-violence and storyline fell sway to pure style. I love a good and bloody castration scene as much as anyone, but I want it to lead somewhere further than another good and bloody castration scene.
So perhaps I am setting myself up for a similar end with Christian Volckman’s Renaissance. But with a setting of Paris in 2054 and a visual aesthetic that is even more stark than Sin City, this looks absolutely phenomenal, plot or no plot. The website alone is worth a good evening of exploration (especially if you understand a little French). I only hope that this doesn’t take too long to get to Vancouver.
22.09.06 UPDATE: The english version of the Renaissance trailer is now up at Apple and the website can be found here. It does indeed appear to be “Coming Soon”.
Published on May 08, 2006 at 7:32 pm.
It seems Jeroen Witvliet has been busy with a new series called Text and more panels added to his Pan-orama series. Enjoy.
For more info, check out my interview with Jeroen here.
Published on May 08, 2006 at 7:21 pm.
Sometimes it really does pay to look in the complete opposite direction to find what you are looking for. Case in point: after a solid half day of typing in search queries like “mathematical models” and “processing genetic animations”, I took a break and followed a link from 3 Quarks Daily to Seed Magazine to read an article about Science and the Simpsons. In doing so, I discovered this flash experiment called Phylotaxis by Jonathan Harris, which is pretty much exactly what I was searching for in the first place. Harris’ work in general is a really nice mix of scientific theory and clean design aesthetic. Very inspiring.
As for what I’m working on, it is still very much in the concept stage. But I hope to have a few new pieces up in my portfolio soon.
Published on May 05, 2006 at 4:38 pm.
A fantastic and rare collection of footage over at YouTube on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation.(via Coudal)
Another fantastic and rare collection, this time of William Burroughs book covers. (via BibliOdyssey)
Published on Apr 23, 2006 at 8:59 pm.
Just over a year ago I posted an entry about my experience acquiring a fotologue.jp account for Industrial Brand Creative. As I reported, at that time there was no English whatsoever on the site and one required an invitation in order to join. Almost immediately after our success with acquiring an account, I began receiving emails from people from all over the world asking me how I had done it and could I help them in securing one of their own. Unfortunately, I could not offer them an easy answer.
Recently however, fotologue has launched a new site that is open to the public and has been translated (with typical Japanese accuracy) into English. There are still a few bugs but it also has a number of new features that should make it even more user friendly. At the very least, it offers an aesthetically pleasing alternative to flickr.com of which I have never really been a fan.
And so to commemorate my own new fotologue account, I have posted a few photos from my recent trip to Los Angeles. Enjoy.
Published on Apr 18, 2006 at 9:04 pm.
Washi is a traditional paper made in Japan using fibers from the bark of the gampi tree, the mitsumata shrub, or the paper mulberry but can also be made using bamboo, hemp, rice, and wheat. It is everywhere in Japan. But the structures that Eriko Horiki creates with this paper are anything but common or traditional.
From giant glowing installations to smaller organic lamps to the stage art for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Eriko and her team are reinventing this 1000-year-old craft, by developing advanced production methods that cope with today’s architectural and lifestyle demands. The results are magical, inspiring and, it goes without saying, illuminating.
If you are in the Vancouver area, you can find Eriko’s work at Kozai Designs at 1515 West 6th Ave.
Published on Apr 03, 2006 at 7:22 pm.
SIGGRAPH hosted a talk this evening called Art by Number:Generating Dynamic Art with Flash with presenters Jeremy Thorp of Blprnt.com and Gary Stasiuk of Liquidjourney.com. I am a hack coder at best so I should let the work speak for itself, although I do suggest checking out Jer’s DarwInstrument which essentially applies a combination of genetic theory, selection of the fittest and mutant variables to the evolution of a more pleasing musical sound — yeah, exactly.
I won’t pretend that I know what I’m talking about here but I do love the art and the philosophy behind it. Anyone who has read “Chaos” by James Gleik will have an understanding of how complexity is responsible for the patterns of nature; and anyone who is an artist will know what I mean when I refer to the “happy accident”. Both of these ideas play a role in Generative Art. It is a matter of setting initial conditions without a predetermined outcome and then observing what becomes of the end result.
There are a great number of artists that are practicing similar forms of generative art. I have been a fan of Joshua Davis’ algorithmic creations for years and his recent collaboration with BMW is pretty damn cool. As is the work of Jared Tarbell of which I blogged about a few months back.
But what caught my attention the most this evening was a reference by Jer to the artist Manfred Mohr, who was creating beautiful and minimalistic computer-generated algorithmic art as early as 1969. Considering the direction that we have since taken in our culture and techonology, it is amazing that Mohr has not earned a more recognized place amongst the great artists of the 20th Century.
Published on Mar 29, 2006 at 11:39 pm.
Jane and I checked out Dianne Bos’ Verre et Mer exhibit at the Jennifer Kostuik Gallery this afternoon which showcases pinhole photographs from the Southwest of France. Beautiful and haunting imagery with an amazing sense of nostalgia filtering through the light of the photographs. In fact, Bos writes that “Viewers have said that my work evokes the memory-image that remains for them long after they have viewed a familiar location.”
It was interesting timing when I first made contact with Catherine Morley (Cat) a few weeks back. I had submitted my site for consideration at designers-who-blog.com and received some very positive and encouraging feedback from Cat. I also became privy to her most recent project and passion: the NO!SPEC crusade.
This hit very close to home. The Canadian design community was recently looking down just such a barrel when the Design Exchange in collaboration with the Department of Canadian Heritage released a speculative national competition for the redesign of the Canadian Cultural Gateway Website. A number of the more vocal outlets (including our own over at Industrial Brand) immediately called foul. In fact, it was the commentary posted over at Slashdot’s ideasonideas that served as the final straw for Cat and spurred her on to creating the NO!SPEC movement.
And a movement is exactly what it seems to be shaping into. It appears that this time around, the design community is not only circling our wagons, but we’re also packing a hell of an arsenal. What it comes down to is that it is no longer acceptable for a company or organization to presume that it has the right to ask for a designer’s time and talent without the guarantee of proper payment. Simple as that.
So be sure to check out the NO!SPEC site, learn more about the crusade, have your say and pass it on to others. “It is time to take a stand!”
Published on Mar 21, 2006 at 11:17 pm.
While on a completely unrelated search, I stumbled upon this fascinating website titled They Still Draw Pictures. Apparently during the Spanish Civil War, the Board of Education and the Carnegie Institute of Spain collected the drawings of school children throughout the country and in the refugee camps in France as a means of documenting the experience. While the images speak entirely for themselves, they are also accompanied by a wonderful introduction by none other than Aldous Huxley. Of note, he writes:
“If we look at [the drawings] with the eyes of historians and sociologists, we shall be struck at once by a horribly significant fact: the greater number of these drawings contain representations of aeroplanes. To the little boys and girls of Spain, the symbol of contemporary civilization, the one overwhelmingly significant fact in the world of today is the military plane – the plane that, when cities have anti-aircraft defenses, flies high and drops its load of fire and high explosives indiscriminately from the clouds; the plane that, when there is no defense, swoops low and turns its machine-guns on the panic-stricken men, women and children in the streets. For hundreds of thousands of children in Spain, as for millions of other children in China, the plane, with its bombs and its machine guns, is the thing that, in the world we live in and helped to make, is significant and important above all others. This is the dreadful fact to which the drawings in our collection bear unmistakable witness.”
This discovery led me to search further for other children’s drawings from other, more recent wartorn areas which turned up results from Darfur, and Chechnya.
Looking at these images, it is at once heartwrenching and at the same time serves as a testament to the universal spirit of childhood; that even in the turmoil and terror of their lives, they found a way to express themselves through the simple act of a crayon on paper.
Published on Mar 20, 2006 at 4:33 pm.
Jeroen Witvliet sent me a link to his latest project entitled Pan-orama, a collection of paintings that are intended to wrap the viewer in the pop culture imagery and those similar themes that Jeroen has explored separately in his previous work.
No show dates as of yet. For now we must be content with the online version.
Published on Mar 15, 2006 at 11:09 pm.
My own personal experience has taught me that China is a force to be reckoned with. As it careens forth into this century – a century that most have already conceded that it will dominate – gaining momentum at every turn, one is left to ponder how anyone is going to keep a hold of the reigns.
Edward’s Burtynsky’s photographs, recently compiled in the book Burtynsky – China, document the harsher side of this burgeoning rise and provide a rare glimpse into the hefty price of progress.
Published on Mar 13, 2006 at 9:35 pm.
You know that you are a true design geek when you are listening to Doyald Young recount the moment in 1950’s Paris when Adrian Frutiger showed him the early drafts of a font called Univers, and you have goosebumps on your arm.
Last night’s talk by Mr. Young, a legend and master of typography and logo design was full of such moments as he showed samples of his utterly perfect hand drawn wordmarks and shared the wisdom of a sixty-year career in graphic design to a packed house at the HR MacMillan Space Centre.
From his book, The Art of the Letter:
I have felt an enormous challenge to justly draw letters with a two-millenia history — the frivolous and the avant garde simply can’t compete. The challenge, as always, is to redraw them with fresh insight, while respecting their tradition.
and
Of all the stems that make up a sans serif alphabet, none is more critical or troublesome than the diagonals.
This is truly beautiful stuff, almost Zen in its philosophy. I love the topic of typography for the same reason that I love books like Salt or Zero; books that uncover the entire history of humankind by concentrating on one tiny but crucial element. Typography bears this same relationship to design. It is so focussed and minute and yet it is the building block of all communication and ultimately serves as a microcosm for every rule and point of etiquette that exists in the greater design process. More than anything it is a true craft, that which separates a dedicated designer from the hack with a copy of Adobe Suite.
Doyald Young encouraged us tonight to not forget this craft. The computer is a wonderful tool but it did not replace the pad and pen. Both have their rightful place.
“If you improve your drawing skills,” he tells us, “you will become a better designer. Period.” Sound advice from a true master.
Published on Mar 10, 2006 at 9:55 am.
Okay, so “phenomenon” might be a little overstated, but there has been a pronounced trend online lately towards using or replicating a tilt-shift lens effect to make a normal photograph look like a miniature. Sam Javanrouh over at daily dose has produced some really interesting results with it here, here and, with a slight twist, here. So has his friend Shahin. And this morning, PingMag featured images of a “Tiny Tokyo” inspired by the work of Olivo Barbieri.
Very cool effect. You can learn how to do this to your own photos from this tutorial over at Receding Hairline. Here are a few of my initial attempts.
Check out the submissions that we received over at the Industrial Brand Blog for more examples and links.
Published on Mar 07, 2006 at 9:56 pm.
I made a pact with myself at the beginning of the month that during my stint as guest editor over at Coudal.com I would not post duplicate entries either on this site or at Industrial Brand. However, today’s entry breaks rank and has been posted on all three.
One of the freshest and exciting books to capture the world’s imagination in the past decade was Yann Martel’s Booker prizewinning novel Life of Pi. Since October, The Times and Canongate Books have been running an international call for submissions for a new illustrated edition. A shortlist of 15 artists has now been announced and the diversity in style of the entries is amazing. It will be a difficult task for the judges to choose who provides the visual skin to such a magical and captivating story. (Props to Drawn for this).
Published on Feb 23, 2006 at 9:56 am.
A posting on Coudal’s Fresh Signals caught my eye and imagination this afternoon. It was regarding Alphabet 26, a simplified English alphabet system designed by American type designer Bradbury Thompson in 1950. The underlying concept is a sound one: “it is misleading for a letter, or for any graphic symbol, to have two different designs.” Of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, 19 use different symbols for uppercase and lowercase while the other 6 use similar ones. Bradley eliminated what he deemed the extraneous symbols and created the system displayed in the image above.
My immediate thought was that this would make a beautiful title font for some yet to be determined future project. But after a fairly extensive search, I could only find one available font called Bodoni Twenty Six that bears a similarity to Bradley’s design. If anyone out there knows of others, please post the links in Comments.
Published on Feb 20, 2006 at 8:28 pm.
One of my wife’s colleagues, who is working as a teacher in Dubai stumbled upon this image in a 1972 British text book entitled “America”. He writes, “When I first saw the picture I almost dropped the book in disbelief. One of my students, after seeing the publication date, said: ‘How teacher? Is it magic?’”.
Not magic, but it is amazing how such an innocent watercolour illustration could inherit so much horror and historical importance to turn it at once into a globally understood icon.
Published on Feb 12, 2006 at 8:48 pm.
The *ahem* Bradgelina paparazzi angle of this story still has me leery to post this but the whole “life imitating art imitating life” on multiple levels was just too much not to. Plus, the Sonic Youth “Goo” album cover is sweet. The play by play from WFMU:
A paparazzi photo of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the back seat of a car from 2005, Raymond Pettibon’s artwork for Sonic Youth’s album “Goo” from 1990, which is based on a paparazzi photo of David and Maureen Smith (two people named Mr. and Mrs. Smith) driving to the Ian Brady and Myra Hindley trial in 1966. Plate of shrimp, anyone?
Be sure to note the boyfriend stealing reference on the SY album. Too perfect.
Published on Feb 06, 2006 at 5:17 pm.
Just got word this morning that I will be taking the wheel of the guest editor bus over at coudal.com for the month of February. Those of you who have been visiting this site for some time will certainly recognize their name as having topped my list of the Top Ten Most Important Websites from a year ago (and again this year on the IBC “Top Ten Blogs of 2005″). Coudal.com is one of the major influencing factors as to why we got messed up in this blogging racket in the first place so this invitation is a true honour. Thanks to Jim and the entire team. I am looking forward to it.
For those of you who have just found this site via coudal.com, this is more of a hobby / portfolio site than my day gig over at Industrial Brand Creative but it does get updated on a weekly basis at the very least and you are more than welcome to hang out and explore. Thanks for coming.
Published on Jan 31, 2006 at 8:20 pm.
Mike Goedecke, Founder and Executive Creative Director of the California motion graphics company belief was recently in Vancouver for the Canadian premiere of his short film “Embryo” at a SIGGRAPH event. The next day, Mark and I met up with him and his lovely wife Lisa at Cassis for a brilliant lunch and an interview on his process and passion.
In “Touch the Sound” we are challenged to reconsider the way our senses interact with the external world. This relationship is a fundamental component of existence to be sure, and one that few of us take the time to understand. In fact, it is only when one of our senses is lost or damaged that the impact is truly felt.
Evelyn Glennie has mastered the art of listening and also creating sounds. She is a world class percussionist, composer, musician and teacher. She is also almost completely deaf. When people ask her how it is that she can hear she explains to them, with a wisdom that has been gained through years of practice and application, that sound vibrations enter not just the ear but the entire body and she is able to read and decipher them in this way. Ironically, when she then asks the same question back to the person, the answer is little more than “Well, with my ears, of course!”. It is apparent immediately in this film that Glennie hears more than most.
The film is centred around an improvised recording session by Glennie and composer/musician Fred Frith in a massive derilect industrial building in Germany. The rest of the segments follow her from New York to Scotland to Japan, meeting and performing with percussionists at each stop.
Visually the filmmakers approach the subject matter brilliantly using patterns and movement as metaphors for the world of vibration that Glennie inhabits. Cars crossing a bridge, pigeons alighting from the rafters, a flag waving in the breeze, stilettos on a marble floor, ice cracking on a pond, these are the rhythms that surround us.
And for Glennie, no object is above or below harnassing for its percussive potential. In one scene in a nightclub in Japan, Glennie shocks her Conservatory-trained accompianists by playing the opening number using chopsticks, an ashtray, wine bottle, dirty plates and a Kirin beer can as her instrument. The resulting performance is magical.
This is an inspiring and lifting movie. I recommend it highly. It is playing at the Vancouver International Film Centre until January 26th. You can view the trailer here.
Published on Jan 23, 2006 at 10:56 pm.
I saw an illustration by Andrew Zbihlyj (pronounced “ZI-BEE-LEE”) in an old issue of Nuovo magazine while eating lunch the other day and immediately shouted down to my colleague Steph to throw his name into the google search. His work, a mix of “acrylic paint, black ink, various papers, tape, some harmful chemicals and…fire” reminded me very much of gonzo artist Ralph Steadman with a more sombre palette. Beautiful work.
In my attempt to dissuade a client from her preference toward the font Arial, I came across a wonderful account of this homely typeface’s origin and proliferation titled The Scourge of Arial over on Mark Simonson’s site.
In short, Arial is like an invasive species, the English Ivy to the font world’s Stanley Park. We need to rip it out by the roots.
Published on Jan 05, 2006 at 10:37 pm.
The Adventures in the Blogosphere continue over at Industrial Brand Creative as our blog gets named one of How Magazine’s Top Ten Websites.
Our perspectives on ethnology, consumerism and culture will be spun on their collective heads at the end of this month when Brian Jungen arrives back in Vancouver with his New York exhibition in tow. At first glance, his work seems more fitting in a Museum of Natural History: whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling; glass cases displaying First Nations ceremonial masks. On second look, one realizes that these artifacts have been created entirely out of materials from our present day disposable consumerist culture. The masks are skinned and splayed Nike basketball shoes; the whales bones no more than backyard plastic chairs. Everyday objects become sacred while at the same time, the mythical properties of nature and tradition are suddenly cut down to size.
Jungen has been receiving a great deal of exposure as of late, the New York show certainly serving as the pinnacle of this assertive rise. Vancouver will no doubt welcome him back in full prodigal son fashion. This is stimulating and important work that should not be missed. It will be on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery from January 28 to April 30, 2006.
Published on Jan 02, 2006 at 7:26 pm.The hectic pace of December finally subsided on this other side of Xmas and left me with a little time to relax and work on some music. You can check out the demo track that I recorded tonight called “The Autumn Days of Disco” over at 15 Megs of Fame.
Published on Dec 30, 2005 at 11:58 am.
These past couple of weeks over at Industrial Brand Creative have seen us scrambling to put together the creative for the GDC’s holiday event titled “The Colours of Cuba” this Wednesday night. Along with invitations and posters, we have designed a cool little website to promote the event. Considering the weather that we’ve been stuck with lately in Vancouver, this event is sure to be the hottest ticket in town.
I’ve been searching for a decent link to photographer Dave Maisel’s series “Oblivion” —brilliant and terrifying aerial photos of the LA sprawl—ever since I fist saw it featured in the September issue of Dwell Magazine. On his subject, Maisel writes:
“In his book “Warped Space,” the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler speaks of the ‘paranoiac space of modernism,’ a space which is ‘mutated into a realm of panic, where all limits and boundaries become blurred…’ These words come to mind when considering the urban aerial images of Los Angeles and its periphery shown here, excerpted from my photographic project called Oblivion.”
Published on Nov 28, 2005 at 11:03 pm.
Organic meets robotic in this sweet CG from 1st Avenue Machine.
Reminds me quite a bit of Neill Blomkamp’s work.
Published on Nov 21, 2005 at 7:19 am.
There is something eerily resounding in the utter silence of abandoned buildings. No longer with purpose, emptied of their human charge, they stand as physical prophecies to the conquest of time and the inevitable reinstatement of nature.
Check out these spectacular images of Abandoned Japan (via the Skinny). And if you are left wanting more there is a very comprehensive listing of similar urban skeletons at Ruins and Urban Exploration.
Published on Nov 17, 2005 at 9:34 pm.
The White Stripes continue their video production relationship with the brilliant and – in this case more than others – warped director Michel Gondry on their latest single Denial Twist.
The
