December 2009
93 posts
Ritz
Simply because it’s new year’s and I find myself watching this far more than I ought to. (click HQ!)
WatchThere ain’t nobody fresher, Im in Maison….uh….Martin Margiela
Maryanne
Alvin Curran recently published a little In Memory of Maryanne Amacher, who died back in October. Though I’m not such a fan of Curran’s writing (he has a bad habit of bringing everything back to him) the article prompted me to get lost for a good while on Amachers online archive. The archive hasn’t been update in a good while and is a bit slapdash, but it’s...
List I Like: Fashion's Ugliest
Refinery29 Bring us the ugliest fashions of the year. Including, on the right, the “Uggs of shorts”
All For Naught
The last ten years in icons, by Phillip Niemeyer. Rather depressing.
In the late 1960s, there were roughly 10 people in the world who could call themselves computer artists; their work was complied in Jasia Reichardt’s ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ exhibition in 1968. By the mid-to-late 1970s, there were about 100 computer artists, many of whom appeared in Ruth Leavitt’s ‘Artist and Computer’ survey book of 1976, Then years later, there were about a thousand, and by...
Decode
A selection of works shown at the V&A’s current Decode: Digital Design Sensations show.
Preserving the Church
A few days after the New York Times offered an architectural tour of churches in New York, it ran an article about the planned demolition of a Catholic rectory in Stamford with the title Finance vs Preservation. Both articles allude to both the importance of church buildings to the architectural landscape and the street-scape, but also the difficulty of maintaining a huge, open building with...
“Pain is temporary, film is forever!”
– P. Jackson
Some of my best friends are cops
First we had this:
So now we get this:
Next thing you know they’ll be making a movie in which everyone wonders who that particular ninja really is.
my GOD →
The BBC is broadcasting live TV online. Fucking amazing.
Does this work in the US?
ed: jN reports that “No,” it does not work in the US. Sorry America, the future clearly isn’t Now. Not quite yet.
So a guy with a leg bomb walks into a bar....
…And everyone gets a whole bunch of new restrictions! I feel that every time shit like this happens it’s simply a lesson in America’s lackadaisical security. National holiday? Busiest time for travel? Let’s wait till after the crazy extremist tries to blow shit up and then bump up security. Wouldn’t it have been nice if the TSA just took a wee bit more time...
Watchvideogum via fourfour
Sisters
A little holiday fashion
Marion Foale
…we just started cutting clothes and making them in our South Ken flat. There was a dining room table; we put two machines on there. We probably cut on the floor in the early days. The first two real dresses we ever showed anybody - you did the red flannel with white frills, and I did the grey flannel with frill and the placket and the kick pleat.
Vanessa...
a little holiday fuck you
Producer Sonia Friedman says,
“Thankfully, I’m talking to another woman, because if I was talking to a man I could not have this conversation. If a woman talks about working in a man’s world, we come across as feminists, and I’m most definitely not a feminist. I’m just a woman doing a job.”
And I’m sure, as a female producer, you’d...
Things That Get Lost on the Internet
Like that site that was a collection of radio interviews on design and marketing (maybe?). I swear I linked to it in See-Saw and having just combed through the back pages it seems to have just up and gone. Fuck, where did it go?
In other news, boy we sure sound smart!
MadUma
Oh come on Givenchy, don’t tell me you weren’t trying to figure if Uma was a Jackie or a Marylin.
What I want for Christmas.
Mark Weaver. (yeah he is cute, but his work is amazing too)
Told you he was cute
buy me prints or send me to him.
In Regards to Avatar
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
-Orson Welles
James Cameron has a nasty habit of predicting the near future of movie making; either it’s a result of everyone scrambling to rip-off whatever Cameron has last made or he’s just so far on the cutting edge that he beats everyone out by a few years. In The Abyss it was the realistically...
SMOOCH
re:This
“Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not...”
– Orson Welles
“The aims of men remain nearly always the same: they still desire to become good...”
– J. W. von Goethe
Well Shit: "It's Still a Man's World" →
A non-judgeyjudge look at some of the better ads...
In regard to this next ad, while I don’t think it’s particularly the best ad ever made (versus the Cadbury ad, which just may be the best ad of all time) the iPod ads have launched a visual branding that’s impossible to get away from. And while the original drive may have gotten a bit lost they are certainly far...
veeANDaey
Current Exhibitions: Digital Pioneers, Decode: Digital Design Sensations, Future Fashion and Designer Bookbinders: Fine Bindings for the Mann Booker Prize 2009.
Font Game
Via SwissMiss.
Conran
For any who happen to be in London this holiday season you may want to swing by my mini-obsession, Conrans, which usually has the best collection of design-aware furniture and downright neat shit ever. Online gifts include headphones, a phone, and the real Facebook.
“Blogs took over [and] manifestos became time based, diary like.”
– Y on Blogging, Tweeting
Book It.
Antique Packaging
Uncredited: Graphic Design & Opening Titles in Movies
Type: A Visual History of Tpyefaces and Graphic Styles
Faber and FaberL Eighty Years of Books Cover Design
Gig Posers: Rock Show ARt of the 21st Century
The Ongoing Moment
Conundrums: Typographic Conundrums
Bibliogrpahic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books
79 Short Essays on Design
How To Think Like a Great...
JCVD
Finally it’s online somewhere.
Art of the Title has the opening of the 2008 film JCVD (which I totally recommend as it’s kind of great) as part of their on-going single take series. I have a special place in my heart for 80s influenced hero-centric strongman movies (T2, Die Hard, Mad Max, Rambo, etc) and while this film lovingly undermines the genre, the titles serve as one of the...
Year In Culture
Thank fucking god for end-of-the-year lists. I don’t know why I love them but I do. There was in the paper one this morning about the year’s best mascara, which I gleefully read. I don’t even care about mascara.
NYTimes is known for wasting an inordinate amount of paper summing up the past year (and this year we get extra devoted to the end of a decade!) but I will admit I...
Grad Guilt
So I’m back at my folks place for the holidays and after one painfully long day of travel I’m already starting to feel antsy about needing to work. When will I get to the point that I can take a good day off and not feel horribly guilty about it?
edit: at around 10:30 I ended up doing work; I couldn’t even make it a whole damn day. I need a decompression chamber.