July 18, 2011
BRLN = BRKLN – K
Filed under: Random · Tags: architecture, Art, city life, photography, street art
June 10, 2011
Left Coast
Three months (/forever) ago, I spent ten days in the Bay Area visiting friends and family. Shit weather but good times otherwise… mostly just ate ridiculously well.
Made it up to Napa—iPod video below (looks better smaller)—but not the Wave Organ.
February 4, 2011
Beijing Sim City
Reprise: YACHT – Psychic City (Classixx Remix) (4:13) – 4.2MB mp3 @ 128kbps
Explore Beijing from the comfort of your living room with Baidu’s 3D maps:
I used to live in the future...
I can only assume that Google is still reticulating splines for NYC…
The map ends a few short blocks from Rem Koolhaas' CCTV building...
July 7, 2010
What They Eat Where
About damn time: Very Small Array is back with another instant classic.
Don’t forget to check out the rest of the boroughs…
June 13, 2010
Cities I’ve Called Home
Courtesy of Eric Fischer’s amazing Geotagger’s World Atlas (Locals & Tourists version).
June 6, 2010
Items
I’ve mentioned tilt shift photography before, but it continues to blow my mind.
…it gives the viewer a sense of being in a smaller world, a bit like the way the world looks to a kid.
–Bryan Solarski, GOOD Picture Show, June 2 2010
Equally amazing: photos of the semi-dystopian ruins of Kowloon & Battleship Island & Kowloon (below) (Dark Roasted Blend via Boing Boing)
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
The “How Our Laws Are Made” infographic above is well-executed and fairly clear, if a little busy (GOOD); the Pulp Fiction one below is neat but, as one commenter points out, the story makes more sense the way it unfolds per Tarantino’s script (Flowing Data).
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
Art vs. Art:
Greater New York at PS1: I only got around to seeing about half of the exhibit when I stopped by PS1 last week, but I’m sure I’ll have many opportunities to revisit and engage with the work over the next few months, especially once Warm-Up is underway. Nevertheless, I would imagine that Greater New York stands for everything that Jeff Koons’ BMW Art Car (below) is not. (NYT)
That said, I thought that Koons’ art car (unveiled at the Centre Pompidou) turned out fine, though I was a little disappointed to learn that “the design isn’t actually painted on the car; it’s a vinyl wrap covered with two layers of clear coat. BMW says the wrap was lighter than paint and it could be applied much more quickly. That was a key consideration because Koons had just two months to complete the project.” (Wired)
via Animal
See also: Image gallery of previous BMW art cars via Wikipedia.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Assorted Links · Tags: city life, graphic design, Jeff Koons, Nike, NYC, NYT, photography, PS1, Queens, soccer, Tarantino, words
May 26, 2010
Assorted Links
UPDATED, one last time before midnight.
Os Gemeos & Blu (Works in Progress) in Lisbon
Street art’s symbiotic relationship with the Web makes you wonder whether the genre’s broad popularity stems from the fact that its characteristic features—swift execution, quicksilver response to pop culture and politics, the dominance of quotation and commentary, snarky attitude, fragmented statements embedded in the world rather than meant to stand apart from it—actually reflect the way that plugged-in people process information, more so than “traditional” art. There is something particularly contemporary about street art’s whole M.O., in this sense.
–Ben Davis, Is Street Art Over?, Slate, May 26 2010 (Highly recommended)
Fresh Stuff from Ron English in Queens
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
Two perspectives on Marina:
She and MoMA have brought some magic back into art—the sort of magic that all of our courses in art history and appreciation had encouraged us to hope for.
–Arthur C. Danto, Sitting with Marina, The Stone blog on NYT, May 23 2010
There are euphoric moments and then intensely sad feelings of heaviness. Whatever you’re feeling becomes intensified. Certain truths about things I need to fix in my life are revealed to me. Marina says that in her own life she’s not so disciplined—that the performance gives her structure.
–Deborah Wing-Sproul, The Performer Made Bare, NYMag, May 23 2010
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
- Bill Simmons’ awesome Guide to Mikhail Prokhorov. (Recommended; thanks Tony)
[As Prokhorov] explained to “60 Minutes,” “I don’t use a computer. We have too much information and it’s really impossible to filter it.”
You know what? He’s not necessarily wrong. Do we REALLY need all this information? Like, right now—you’re reading this column and hopefully enjoying it, but ultimately, could you have survived the weekend if you missed it? I say yes. Just about everything online fits that mold—you have to sift through loads of bad writing and irrelevant information to find the occasional entertaining/funny/interesting thing, and even then, it’s not something that’s making or breaking your week. Ever been on a vacation and had little-to-no Internet access that week? You survived, right? Maybe the big Russian is on to something.
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
Candy reminds us of the postmodern notion of self-creation—the way we don social signifiers with the same ease as clothing, constructing our selves bit by bit from cultural cues and images. Rather than the solid frameworks we cast them as, our selves are more like sweaters we put on and take off. When it comes to social identity, we’re all a wee bit in drag.
–Caroline Hagood, New Documentary Tries to Solve the Riddle of Andy Warhol’s Candy Darling,
The Huffington Post, May 21 2010
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
- With the 2010 World Cup just 16 days away, Nick Hornby and Sean Wilsey debate the U.S. vs England match on June 12. (GQ)
- Five Bold Predictions for the 2010 French Open.
- Jamie XX’s [dubstep] mix for Colette.
- Play Me I’m Yours: public pianos in NYC this summer. (Animal / BV)
- Michael Pollan on the Food Movement, Rising.
- Eddie Huang of Baohaus on Foodies and Hypebeasts.
- Carl “A.C.” Newman of New Pornographers fame talks maple syrup with T Magazine.
- The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells.
- Alber Elbaz of Lanvin on the Future of Fashion.
- Magritte’s Missives (The Economist)
- McSweeney’s via Salon: 20 Fascinating Self-Portraits.
- Sony’s roll-up digital display (Bits)
- Don’t Ice Me Bro! When Memes Meet the Marketplace. (Thanks Em)
- AT&T / BBDO Worldwide vs. Christo & Jeanne-Claude. (Media Decoder)
- Pay what you want to see the Whitney Biennial for the next 48 hours (Artsbeat)
- Wired has a feature on traffic theorist Charles Komanoff, who makes an ironclad case for congestion pricing. (Highly recommended—seriously, I love shit like this.)
The problem of negative externalities [refers to] costs that accrue when the self-interested actions of one person leave bystanders worse off. The biggest example of a negative externality is global warming: When we burn carbon-based fuels, we benefit ourselves while imposing a great cost on billions of other present and future inhabitants of the planet.
–Felix Salmon, The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic, Wired, May 24 2010
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
GOOD Picture Show has a gallery of J. Bennett Fitts' incredible photos of Middle America
Filed under: Assorted Links · Tags: advertising, Art, Blu, Candy Darling, city life, fashion, food, graphic design, KAWS, Lupe Fiasco, maps, Marina Abramovic, marketing, Music, NBA, NYC, NYT, Os Gemeos, performance art, photography, public transportation, Ron English, soccer, Sports, street art, Technology, tennis, The xx, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
May 23, 2010
Photos
Amy Davidson of the New Yorker responds to Conor Friedersdorf’s critique of NYC narcissism for Atlantic. It’s a fairly accurate assessment all around to mark my upcoming two-year anniversary here.
Photos (click for full-size):
Filed under: Random · Tags: Atlanta, Brooklyn, city life, LES, NYC, photography, street art
May 4, 2010
Images: Super Deluxx Follow Up
More on the Images (below), as well as several new ones; as always, too much, too much. But seriously, how often do you see something like this.
Hyères, France, 1932 / Magnum
First of all, the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at MoMA is really quite remarkable, and I echo Kottke’s rave review (he mentions the image above, which was the first of many that caught my eye).
What he excelled at was seeing things in a different way from most other people.
–A Father of Modern Photography: A Hunter and His Prey, The Economist, April 15 2010
The retrospective has a personal resonance on several levels: I’ve become increasingly interested in photography, journalism and photojournalism in the past couple years; his photographs of early and mid-century China are vaguely nostalgic (probably because I recently spent a couple months living in Beijing with my grandparents, who lived through it); and I recognized HCB’s portrait of Sartre from a book cover.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Discovered while eating a turkey hoagie and contemplating the meaning of life at a roadside stand. Also, admit it: he’s cute as a goddamn bug!
–Mike Sacks, Famous Philosophers and How They Were First Discovered,
McSweeney’s, May 2010
(More on HCB at Vanity Fair via 3qd.)
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
Liu Bolin at Eli Klein: an excellent show despite the blue-chippy crowd at the opening. It might be more of the same and it probably has a certain loaded cultural content that can only be appreciated as someone who has recently spent time in China, but I would still say that the pieces in On Fire are visually compelling even without the political subtext.
His works have been communicated via emails, blogs, magazines and journals on a massive scale.
Liu Bolin’s earlier Hiding in the City photography series, in which he paints himself into the urban landscape, was inspired by the Chinese government’s demolition of the Suo Jiacun Artist Village in Beijing in 2006. He drew attention to great landmarks in China, both old and modern, while highlighting the lack of recognition which was paid to the citizens that built them. He portrayed the tragedy of the increasing insignificance of the individual in China as the government focused on presenting a modern commercial and industrial image. Rather than trying to fight, people attempted to hide and adapt to these forced changes.
–Liu Bolin’s On Fire press release & additional images via Eli Klein.
Click images for larger versions.
索家村 – Suo Jiacun [Artist's Village] (apparently, Liu Bolin reps it); 中国当代 – Contemporary China
折 – fold, discount, break, bend, snap, lose, roll over, convert, rebate, twist, double up, be convinced, turn back, turn over, lose money in business, change direction, be filled with admiration, suffer losses (Google Translate)
Dude's shirt (bottom right) matches the photograph...
Liu Bolin
On Fire
Eli Klein Fine Art
462 West Broadway (near Houston)
New York NY 10012 [map]
212 / 255-4388
April 30, 2010 – June 4, 2010
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
I didn’t make it to the Scott Campbell opening, but it made it into other “emails, blogs, magazines and journals on a massive scale”: TBWE has a nice gallery of the work and the opening; OC has a gallery of the work itself; HB recap; Interview studio visit via HB; Terry stays relevant.
I did make it to Faile & BAST’s DELUXX FLUXX NYC opening (after stopping by Liu Bolin), but my photos didn’t turn out so well. Again, you can find more/better coverage elsewhere.
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
Keith W. Bentley – “Cauda Equina” (1995-2007)
The New York Times has an interesting article on the kind of organic art that is currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Jan Fabre – "Skull" (2001); Fabián Peña – "The Impossibility of Storage for the Soul I (Self-Portrait)" (2007)
Of course, people have always used natural materials to make their art, for the simple reason that until recently nature was all they had, said Ellen Dissanayake, a scholar on the evolution of art [who notes that] from the beginning, art demanded transformation. “Even in hunter-gatherer societies, they tend to make their stuff look not organic,” she said. “When they’re painting, they’ll use geometric shapes, make a row of triangles or circles, as though to show humans are more than nature.”
…
As Ms. Dissanayake sees it, when people make art, or “artify,” they follow several “aesthetic principles,” whether they know it or not. “They simplify, repeat, exaggerate, elaborate and manipulate expectations,” she said.
–Natalie Angier, Of Compost, Molecules and Insects, Art Is Born,
The New York Times, May 3 2010
Billie Grace Lynn – "Mad Cow Motorcycle" (2008)
---- --- -- - -- --- ----
I didn’t particularly regret missing the Shepard Fairey opening until I saw this:
Classic.
More Shepard Fairey and many more after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Art, Assorted Links, Events · Tags: architecture, Chelsea, Chloe Sevigny, city life, Deitch Projects, Design, Events, Faile, Faile & Bast, gardening, graphic design, green, HCB, images, Lady Gaga, LES, Liu Bolin, Mark Ryden, NYC, openings, Os Gemeos, photography, review, Sartre, Scott Campbell, Shanghai, Shepard Fairey, Soho, Tim Barber, Werner Herzog
April 20, 2010
The Tallest Building On Earth
» Ratatat – Shempi (3:58) – 5.5MB mp3 @ 192kbps
Theoretical Block from Aron Lorincz on Vimeo.
“Shempi” is easily my favorite track from Ratatat’s LP3 and I’m a sucker for overtly arty, washed-out, high-contrast cinematography and hyperreal hypothetical urbanism/architecture, so this video basically has my name on it.
Bonus pic:
Homemade wildcat stencil