• Nice interview with Raf Simons (WWD via HB)
• Lengthy inverview with David Andrew Sitek (BV)
• Awesome interview with Bill Murray (GQ)
• Telling interview with Penn & Teller (Telegraph)
• Decent interview with Ari Marcopoulos (Dossier)
• Hip interview with Pedro Winter (Busy P of Ed Banger) (OC)
• Strange interview with Spike Lee (Gothamist)
• Passable interview with Rafael de Cardenas (S×H)
• Brief interview with Tara McPherson (PSFK)

China:

• Urban China, ever the work in progress (NYT)
• China’s Banks: Great Wall Street (The Economist)
• Bad PR for the nouveau riche in the PRC (WSJ via Gawker)
• The other oil spill (NYT / Salon)
• A green movement grows in China (The Economist)
• The Economist also draws an ophidian metaphor for China’s growth / lack thereof.

Music:

• That’s Cool But Can You Make It More Shit?—short James Murphy interview (Nowness)
• The Antlers were amazing at Pier 54 last week (pics / video / new song @ BV)
• Why Music Is Good for You (via 3qd))
• Lil’ Wayne on a typical day in the clink.
• (More on) the Gaga Effect (NYT)
• Trent Reznor scores David Fincher’s The Social Network (NIN via Pitchfork; trailer)
• Inception, musically (NYT)

Media & Technology:

• When cars fly: Wired / n+1 / Bits (Recommended)
• Pure CSS Fail Whale
• Meta-commentary on Old Spice’s post-racial social media marketing.
• Paywall doesn’t pay (The Guardian)
• Apple’s Antenna(e)gate (The Economist / Daring Fireball)
• AWAD items: Frenemies by tongue (NYT); Tech-neology (NPR)… also, autocorrect in theory and in practice.

Food:

• 101 quick grilling recipes. (NYT; Bittman also talks watermelon)
• From table (or kitchen, at least) back to farm; also, a pig in a blanket, six feet under, etc.
• Salon asserts that Top Chef is in top form this season, though I find that the casting and challenges for D.C. have been less-than-inspired.
• Um. (AdFreak)

NYC:

• The High Line, continued (Revs!) (Highly[ne] recommended)
• Diller Scofido + Renfro’s Culture Shed (PSFK)
• The Economist marks George Steinbrenner’s passing with a rough analogy between the man and the city he came to represent.
• The Times wants to know how we do in Brooklyn.
• Hotels host Manhattan’s nouveau nightlife (NYMag); compare and contrast to : “It is part of the legend of New York, real or imagined, that vastly different cultures can thrive quite separately on the same block.”

Random:

• An older article on Messi. (Wired)
• Do Typefaces Really Matter? (BBC News) (Yes; highly recommended)
• Um. (NYT)
• Yoko D is back (Racked)
• Galen Strawson on moral dilemmas; it’s another version the ‘Original Choice’ (which is not chosen but embraced, or ‘owned’) in Sartrean ontology… (The Stone)
• Moral dilemmas, again (3qd), which (sort of) leads to…
• Lebronicles: He got game theory; the China factor; Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is tragic sans his two-time MVP (is the original online anywhere?), but perhaps not as bad as some outspoken critics might suggest.
• What Caravaggio means to me (The Guardian)
• Where America Really Came From (via 3qd)
• 52 architects choose the 21 most important buildings from the past 30 years. (VF)
• Denzel Washington on Wesley Snipes (who is going to jail): “Wesley is like a mighty oak tree… Many who know him have witnessed the fruit of his labours. I have sat in his shade and even been protected by his presence.”

Ines Brunn after Li Wei

Some notes on the People’s Republic before the second chapter on the Fabled C[hinese]hipster…

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Wu Yulu’s amazing mechanical men:

After suffering a series of life changing set backs such as a burnt down home, spraying himself with battery acid, and experiencing great financial debt—all in the name of art—Chinese farmer Wu Yulu is finally gaining some recognition for his homemade robots.

–Designboom

DB also has a gallery of Wu Yulu’s ‘Peasant Da Vincis’ for Cai Guo-Qiang’s inaugural exhibition at the newly restored Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai; some images interpolated below (cue egregiously ironic juxtaposition of images + text):

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Click image to see Robo-Pollock in action at DB

Chinese news site Southern Weekend recently sent intern Liu Zhiyi undercover at the Shenzhen site of Foxconn, “the world’s biggest contract electronics maker and a major supplier to Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other companies,” which has been under scrutiny for the suicides of nine workers this year (more background info at NYT):

I know of two groups of young people.

One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and kept company by libraries and lake views. The other group works alongside steel machineries and large containers, all inside a factory of high-precision manufacturing environment.

–Liu Zhiyi, Southern Weekend via Engadget

The translated article is definitely worth reading, though the Apple connection clearly raises the profile of these otherwise-overlooked incidents.

Skeptics (or fans of Apple) have taken to pointing out that this suicide rate, in a plant with four hundred and twenty thousand workers, is no higher than that in a Chinese city of comparable size.

–Evan Osnos, Items of Interest, Letter from China blog on the New Yorker, May 25 2010

Again, clickthrough for sweet vids on DB...

On a lighter note:

“I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

–Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans, The Onion

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Essay Question (10 pts): To what degree does electronic music reflect the alienation of technology and hyperindustrialization?

Let me take this opportunity to explain my music. At first I liked drums, they were fast and noisy and that’s what I first produced. After a while I listened to more electronic, quieter music. I like fast music, but it’s more melodic as a general rule. I added more melody into my music, more baritone. My latest work has slowed down in comparison to my older music. In the past it’s always been very young, punkish, full of joy. Now, I like slower, blacker, darker music. Also, I like the Chinese influence. I cant explain it, I just like it. I add a little bit of Chinese music in everything.

–Sulumi, via Intel×Vice’s Creators Project

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A few more for good flavor:

• Wild Wild Westernization: “16 Items They Only Sell at Chinese Walmarts” (Buzzfeed)

Henri Cartier-Bresson – Shanghai, 1948

• A glimpse into a Chinese toy factory.

Li Wei via the Guardian

Apple’s iconic “Get a Mac” ad campaign is no more: Jobs & Co. have pulled the plug on the cheeky TV spots that pitted stuffy-button-down-middle-aged-guy John Hodgman against relatable-young-hip-dude Justin Long (human representations of PC and Mac, respectively).

Here’s a montage of some memorable moments between the two titans of technology:

It’s an easy metaphor for the shift from the PC vs. Mac decade to a full-fledged, multi-platform war between Apple and everyone from Google to Adobe to Amazon—not to mention Microsoft ever-looming in the background—though it’s far to early to tell who will be the next Hodgman.

It’s true for the most part, though the 3,274 seems a bit over the top.

In any case, here are a few of the better infographics I’ve seen lately:

Julian Hansen has created an extremely thorough visualization of typography for dummies.

Click the image for the full, unadulterated 1983×1402 version.

Inspiration Lab

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Yesterday, before I discovered the video above, I came across a dollar bill with a red “Where’s George” stamp on it and I decided to enter it into the database (I’ve logged a couple in the past). It seems that I’ve since spent said dollar, as it is no longer in my wallet, but I managed to find it in my Firefox history. Apparently, it was in Greenpoint almost exactly a year ago; who knows what sort of wonderful adventures George #B2078 7046J has had in the mean time…

Follow the Money via Visual Complexity via PSFK

Almost (but-not-really-at-all) related: Redesigning the Dollar Bill; UPDATE: The new $100 bill.

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Gizmodo’s guide to the current fronts where the Big Three are vying for tech/information world domination.

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This one on the correlation between digital music sales / artist revenue also surfaced in the past week; click the image for the full infographic (my one complaint about a lot of these: they’re huge image files. You’d think these supposedly tech-savvy types would think to break it up a little…).

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Sha Hwang’s subway ridership visualization, via Flowing Data’s traffic thread.

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Cartographies of Time is getting rave reviews from the likes of NYT and Kottke.

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While we’re on the topic, a classic:

So I happened to be in Midtown on Saturday morning (long story short: I was trying to get to MoMA early enough to see Marina Abramović) and I decided to swing by the cube.

While I didn’t have a chance to see the iPad in person, I’ll probably swing by an Apple store some time this week to check it out. I don’t plan on getting one at this point but I’m intrigued by the device, which may or may not revolutionize computing and media consumption as we know it. If the iPad has been criticized for being some kind of hedonistic Swiss Army Knife for entertainment at the cost of productivity (citation needed?), I should think that it is rightfully billed as more of a grown-up supertoy than anything else—it is neither overgrown iPhone nor underpowered laptop; the iPad is something else entirely.

Furthermore, insofar as the iPad represents Apple’s foray into the space(s) currently occupied by netbooks, e-books, textbooks, regular books, magazines, newspapers, television, digital picture frames, portable gaming devices, board games, and (lest we forget) tablets, I think it has the potential to redefine media in new and possibly unexpected ways. The fact that it is an easy point of entry for a mass audience to own a piece of the Apple brand (/marketing machine) almost certainly belies its true significance, whatever that may be.

Of course, I suppose that anyone who is curious about said significance has already been inundated with news, reviews, photos, videos, etc.—the iPad has been broken, jailbroken, jailbait, photoshopped and photo-opped—from the likes of Engadget, Gizmodo, TUAW, et al. Love it or hate it, we’re far past the point of making jokes about its name.

For superbly-curated and less overwhelming opinions and aggregation, I recommend John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Similarly, I still think that Dan Hill’s essay on the iPad is the best analysis of the its true significance (I buried a link to it in another post, but here it is again).

There are tons of demo (and demolition) videos already out there, but I happen to like this overview of magazine app art direction:

Slow strings set a maudlin mood for Philip Bloom’s visually stunning time-lapse footage of Dubai—my own admittedly predictable/uninspired soundtrack would be “Red Sky,” a chilled-out techno track by Shanghai’s B6 (Sulumi’s labelmate). Other contenders included AC’s “What Would I Want? Sky,” either of Dam-Funk’s sky-related tracks, Kid Cudi’s “Sky Might Fall” and M83’s “We Own the Sky.”

» B6 – Red Sky (B6 Mix) (7:06) – 12.8MB mp3 @ 251kbps

The iPad was unveiled to mixed reviews as pundits and Macolytes questioned its lack of multitasking and flash support. The rest of the world just couldn’t get past the name: NYT, Gizmodo, droves of snarky commenters, etc.

To cap it all off, the Knife is now streaming Tomorrow, in a Year on their website. ]]> http://idolizeyourkillers.com/2010/01/media-2/feed/ 0 http://idolizeyourkillers.com/2010/01/items-2/ http://idolizeyourkillers.com/2010/01/items-2/#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:37:10 +0000 Ray http://idolizeyourkillers.com/?p=1084
–Pingdom has some web usage stats for 2009, such as:

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Nice to know that IYK is among 47 million new websites. There’s also numbers for e-mail and social networks. Definitely worth checking out: Internet 2009 in Numbers.

Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.

–The New York Times recently announced that it is going to start charging online readers (in 2011) with a ‘paywall’ system. Or, as Gothamist bluntly puts it: “the Gray Lady’s going to start making bitches pay.”

–Apple has announced that it will unveil its “latest creation”—the digital world is certain that it will be an Apple tablet—at an event next Wednesday, January 27th. (Engadget; also on NYT, the Guardian, etc.; rumormongering has also caused a backlash in the world of tech journalism)

–P.S.1 just announced that Brooklyn’s SO-IL (Solid Object Idenburg Liu) is the winner of this year’s Young Architects Program design competition. Arch Daily has more pics and info.

–Stephon Marbury has signed to China’s Shanxi Brave Dragons in hopes of making everyone happy for once. (SC / NYT)

–Pioneering graphic designer Bob Noorda, best known for his work for the MTA, recently passed away. (NYT)

–David Coggins laments the fact that Richie Tenenbaum sold out. (ACL)

–Google has filed a patent to replace unsightly billboard ads with unsightly Google ads in Street View. (Breadcrumbs style: Telegraph via Gizmodo via MAKE via PSFK)

A quick (Google Image) search yielded the billboard (stock?) photo that accompanied Gizmodo (and MAKE and PSFK) article. And I didn’t even need a patent to do it.

–Google vs. China, the Saga Continues: Wired is somewhat optimistic about Google’s move, but the general consensus on NYTimes.com’s Room for Debate blog is that censorship has deep roots in China’s authoritarian culture, and Google simply does not have the clout to punish (or at least expose) the PRC for its controversial Internet censorship policies insofar as Google (/free speech) must win the hearts and minds of the Chinese populace.

–Work by Wang Qingsong. The second piece, “Home”, reminds me of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s Black Acid Co-Op installation at Deitch Projects over the summer (which I worked on). (Designboom)

–New Lil’ Wayne: “Drop the World (ft. Eminem)” from Weezy’s forthcoming Rebirth, slated for a Feb. 1st release. Related: Gucci Mane is the new Lil’ Wayne? Is this what I’ve been missing in American music in the last two months? (HB)

–Nike × Maharam. Beautiful. (The Times T Magazine)

–Stanley Donwood lends his Eraser aesthetic to Oakley. I wonder what Thom thinks? (HB)

–”World’s Largest Solar Energy Office Building Opens in China” (Inhabitat)

–Holey MacBook Pro, Batman! (Lily Sussman via Engadget)