A collective experiment in brand perception.

Slash, of the erstwhile Guns n’ Roses (whom I listened to religiously in junior high), and whom I’ve been told is now a neighbor here in our Lower East Side complex, is coming out with an autobiography shortly, a portion of which has been published by the Guardian. Some kwality snips below:

Izzy [Stradlin, Guns N'Roses' rhythm guitarist] made a call and we went over to a friend of a friend who we’ll call ‘Bill’. We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous. When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognisable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of ‘dudes’ who wanted to ‘party with me’ had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into a seductive heroin comfort zone. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991….

Soon I started speedballing heavily and really enjoyed the unique brand of hallucinatory paranoia that comes with it. No one had taught me to speedball; I just thought it would be like a narcotic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Coke and heroin were two great tastes that I knew would go great together. The rush of the coke would send me up and then the dope would kick in and the trip would take a wonderful turn; and the two would weave in and out of each other from there on out. I’d always end up shooting all of the heroin before I’d mowed through the coke, so usually I’d get wired to the point of an impending heart attack. At the end of those nights, I was also often left with the distinct feeling that I was being watched, so I started to think that walking around my house armed to the teeth was a good idea.

There are shades of Hunter S. Thompson (R.I.P.) in Slash’s retelling, in all its maniacal, drug-fueled outrageousness. But the difference therein is that Slash is all about the matter-of-fact; so remarkable is the complete abscence of rockstar pretension. While Thompson’s prose feverishly incarnated his establishment-crashing hijinks and mind-bending freakouts, Slash’s writing is cucumber-cool; in relief against the deadpan delivery, the contours of his hallucinations (which were every bit as far-gone as the Doctor’s) are all the more exaggerated. The madness seeps off the page and contaminates your banal reality …Makes for a highly entertaining read.

Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 this morning.

From the Nobel Foundation’s statement:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

And the response from the Gores:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis – a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Well, after a tremendous year of accomplishments and honors (an Emmy for Current TV, an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth global concert over the summer), this is the final benchmark for Gore; if he doesn’t run for president in 2008 now, then he definitely ain’t runnin’ …

A more literal (har) expression of the aforementioned text/space interrelationship …

Artist Brian Dettmer excavates vintage books and gives dimension to their interior viscera.

Posts from BoingBoing and Centripetal Notion. And links to gallery exhibitions here, here and here.

JG Ballard’s writing room

As an undergraduate architecture student, I often found a strange, ineffable kinship between architecture and english majors.

Maybe it was due to the symmetry between our pursuits of ideal worlds. Or to their difference in kind … The writers, using words, lack materiality of expression yet are equipped with an infinite malleability of meaning. Architects have ‘bricks and mortars,’ but ultimately silent form; it was up to the critics and the theorists (and sometimes, the clients) to derive – often strainingly – the semiotics of their creations. The two occupations revolve around this seemingly exclusive reciprocity, but perhaps it’s this longing, across an unseen, subterranean divide, that fuels and intensifies the mutual appreciation.

Who really knows what it is, but your belief in this mythology of the writer/architect will probably inform your fascination for, and interpretations of, the following photographs, taken of various accomplished writers’ writing spaces.

Alain de Boton

Seamus Heaney

Hanif Kureishi

Mark Haddon

[via The Guardian]

With shades of theme park artificiality and cheeky, faux-nostalgic imagineering (I’d guess that the majority of young LES urbanites who make it here have never spent an evening at a drive-in theater), Grand Opening has installed a 1965 Ford Falcon convertible and a movie screen in its small Lower East Side space, and is charging $75 per private screening.

This is so awesome.

What you have to appreciate is how an atavistic expression of post-war, car-crazy rural Americana is incorporated into the knowing (and winking), urban belly of downtown Manhattan, and the way in which the private-in-public principle of the erstwhile drive-in itself (one in which the audience enjoyed the communal and outdoor spectacle of a movie while sitting inside their separate and insular aluminum cocoons) has been détourned once again; “public viewing” is really a private experience after all.

I can only hope that there’s a breeze machine and some glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

[via Racked]

after a long and hard summer, and after a losing fight against his ibd despite months of treatment, we made the difficult decision to let popeye go. he left us peacefully and gracefully last night at around a quarter to eight.

we are not exactly sure how old he was, but our and the vet’s guess is around eight years old. jane plucked him up from a pound in temple, tx, in april of 2002 — popeye was the stud at a boston terrier breeder farm there which burned down in a night fire and killed its proprietor. all his little bostons were sent to the local pound, and it was from there that we brought popeye to the mean streets of new york. manhattan is a million miles and change from texas hill country, but we do think he eventually got used to the garbage trucks, the pitbulls, the screeching brakes, the pigeons, the police sirens, the hard concrete. and the rats …

but no matter how street-wisened he became, he nevertheless betrayed his country roots whenever he laid eyes on, and then made a determined beeline for that rarest of new york rareties — a patch of grass! i like to imagine popeye hopping off the sidewalk and on into endless fields of green.

he will be in our dreams, as we hope we will be in his. we’ll miss you, buddy …

In an effort to muster up an adequate escape velocity to leave my end-of-summer doldrums behind, I have been re-reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. There are too many memorable snippets to excise, and anyway it’s the exuberance and vividness of the sometimes stream-of-consciousness writing rather than individual, underlineable passages that matter (Miller, like Nietzsche, refers to his writing as song. And if that is so, then Tropic of Cancer is an opera inverted; extended arias interspersed with the occasional recitative).

BTAIM, two bits that I love:

Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. There mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health, good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal.

And this:

Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fangwhorl and star cluster.

Whatever one thinks of Henry Miller (and the courts didn’t much, as Tropic of Cancer was banned in the US for a good 30 years on grounds of obscenity), that motherfucker can sing.

In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

While it’s easy to smile at stories of people changing their lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, or choosing to ride to work on a bike over driving a car, it takes more than anecdotal blips at the grass roots level to feel confident that a sea change in attitudes and behaviors is happening in the face of our looming environmental crisis. Sometimes it takes knowing that Big Capital is playing on the same team — a dicey proposition however you cut it, given that powerful corporations are the worst offenders and their political influence and financial machinations ensure that their loyal politicians sit out badly needed regulatory measures to keep those very corporations in heed.

All of which is why stories, such as this one in Vanity Fair about General Electric and its young and dynamic CEO Jeffrey Immelt, seem so encouraging. When the second largest company in the world, after Wal-Mart (which too has recently embraced sustainability). His emphasis, for better or worse, is not ‘about being trendy or moral. It’s about accelerating economic growth.’ Green must beget green, in other words. Schmarmy as that may seem, it is realpolitik; for a shift in the environmental practices of major corporations can’t be catalyzed unless they are convinced of that shift’s benefits in terms of the bottom line.

 

The August 21 issue of the New Yorker profiles the posthumously influential Jewish-German critic Walter Benjamin. The article, called ‘The Philosopher Stoned’ and written by Adam Kirsch, is ostensibly an essay on Benjamin’s attempt — an unsuccessful one by any measure — to gain inspiration and insight through the use of hashish. The discussion of the drug’s effect on Benjamin’s life and thinking aren’t particular valuable and merely form bookends for the more interesting central substance of the article, which describe Benjamin’s move away from academic philosophy towards popular criticism (a deflection which would have a positive effect on Benjamin’s thematic and stylistic accessibility), his shallow and facile flirtations with Marxism, and the state of his thinking towards the end of his life in the early 40s, as he struggled to finish his unwieldy Arcades Project with Nazism expanding rapidly across Europe.
 

A profile in the recent Sunday times of China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya. As China’s economic and political might have grown, so have its interests in ensuring that international policy, as directly by an assortment of Western nations at the UN, works to its advantage. Through Wang’s wiley diplomacy, China has evolved from a awkward, quiet, shadow player to a major rival to the US at the United Nations.

Read the piece here.

A retrospective survey of five formerly thriving gaming companies which have since gone under, including Ken and Roberta Williams’ Sierra On-Line, author of the classic King’s Quest series, which I spent much of my childhood enthralled by.

Read the article here.

Atypyk, a Paris-based design shop, offers an array of cheeky, Chindogu-like (warning: link contains seriously bad flash) yet elegantly designed products.

‘Bear rug’

‘Pizza slice plate’

‘Cheese sponge’

‘Time is money’

 

 

There is a branch of commercial design out there now being roughly categorized as ‘motion design,’ which in almost all instances describe ‘motion graphic design,’ a screen-based artform used in tv bumpers and commercials, flash-heavy interactive websites, and street signage (check out Motionographer for good coverage of this emerging practice). But designer Ben Hopson wants to apply an aesthetic of motion in physical, product-based applications:

My goal is to add beauty and interest to products by investigating the different ways that movement can be designed. While designers have numerous techniques and tools at their disposal to improve the appearance of objects, when it comes to creating ways for objects to move through space, designers are often at a loss.

To remedy this problem, I have developed methods for sketching kinetic concepts and a working vocabulary to discuss them. What you will find recorded here are my initial investigations into this approach to product design.

Check out his work here.

[via Core77]

The works of these two painters (first linked to via the prolific Neatorama), remind me of M.C. Escher (and a handful of other artists and visual tricksters), in a sort of user-friendly, low-calorie way.

 

Goofy, playful, graphics-laden 3D isometrics and sections permeate the work of Josh Keyes.

And the pop surrealism of Robert Gonsalvez reminds me of a cross between René Magritte, Norman Rockwell, with a dash of Maxfield Parrish.

[via Neatorama here and here]

 

I had come across this animation before, but infosthetics recently posted on it so it got foregrounded for me again. It’s a charming Maya visualization of John Coltrane’s short jazz sketch, Giant Steps, rendered and animated using an appropriate architecture metaphor. Writes the author of the piece, Michal Levy:

Coltrane made a major break through with his album “Giant Steps” in the year 1959. It was the first time in the history of Jazz music that someone based his music on symmetrical patterns, which stemmed from a mathematical division of the musical scale.

The structural approach of John Coltrane to music is associated with architectural thinking. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space.

Hi-res flash version can be view on Levy’s site here.

 

Infosthetics also linked to a more diagrammatic illustration of the Giant Step’s tonal structure here.

The picture says it all, really. Holla.

To be honest, I don’t really give a shit about Dane Cook. Whenever I came across one of his performances on Comedy Central or HBO (which happened often, because his taped gigs and his on tour reality show Tourgasm continue to get heavy rotation on cable television), I’d watch for a few minutes, develop a mild irritation / low-grade loathing, then simply change the channel. My feelings about him, though vaguely negative, were alway imprecise, unformed. I never bothered to ask why, but then Heather Havrilesky, my favorite columnist from the halcyon Suck days (nom de plume Polly Esther), crystallized it for me when she wrote:

From his sloppy college kid look to his avoidance of anything political, cultural or remotely critical, Cook aims at appealing to those vast numbers of kids who haven’t really developed any interests yet, and are most of all focused on having fun with a big group of people. While Seinfeld or Rock or Carlin or Miller react against the world, working themselves into a lather over just how idiotic and bizarre other people’s behavior is, Cook’s stories all boil down to the most familiar, relatable experiences he’s had. His humor doesn’t require even a glance at the wider world; it strengthens the bonds within a homogenous group. “Isn’t it crazy when you…” or “How weird is it when…” By celebrating the myopia of the young, Cook has become the hottest comedian around.

Not only is his comedy opaque and totally uninteresting, but he’s an embodiment (or worse, a stereotype that turns out to be real) of common denominator imbecility masquerading as embracing accessibility. He’s the dumb kid in class who’s acts a clown and sticks pins on the teacher’s seat and ‘kick me’ stickers on people’s backs and adores the adoration he receives from his snickering comrades but is still in the end too dumb to know he’s dumb. The dumb kid who thinks he’s a riot whose antics are now amplified by television and loved afar by a country of feeble-minded fans who feel they are all in on the same big, dumb, unfunny joke.

Polly — err, I mean Heather Havrilesky – slams the overhyped and overrated pseudo-comedic buffoon in Salon here.

 

Bully for MSNBC’s Ken Olbermann and his classy and eloquent primetime response to Rumsfeld’s recent speech, in which he compared critics of the botched Iraq war to Chamberlain-style appeasers of Hitler during World War II. Although the cynics out there might fault his speech as presumptuous for its evocation of Murrow, but I can more than dig the attempt for its ambition and earnestness in this otherwise craven day and age of lapdog journalism.

Crooks and Liars has the video posted here. Richard Greene offers strong praise for the piece in the Huffington Post. And the ever-on point Frank Rich calls Rumsfeld out by invoking this damning image of a smiling Rummy himself shaking hands with Saddam 20 years ago. Sets up an amusing parallelism to the image of Neville Chamberlain swapping skins with Adolph Hitler, no?

 

As depressingly doubtful as it often seems, however, Olbermann is not the only one working in television news who hasn’t completely lost their sense of up and down. Two others, while not journalists themselves, carry the burden of journalism’s supposed commitments to rigor and investigation (noble commitments that since Murrow’s day seem to have mutated into a kind of vampiric and solipsistic pursuit of ratings and ad revenue; news has turned into an empty, anodyne, complacent, PR- and quote-friendly form of mythmaking) by mercilessly satirizing TV news journalism itself. Of course, I am talking about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Here are some other seminal, declarative moments of television news which have cracked and rolled like heavy thunder in the fuzzy white noise of the contemporary mediasphere, seeming to stop, if only for a moment, everything in their tracks.

Jon Stewart’s brilliantly acerbic appearance (which struck a notable contrast with his warm and congenial host persona on The Daily Show) in 2004 on CNN’s erstwhile ‘debate’ show Crossfire resulted in CNN’s termination of the program shortly after this broadcast. Jon Stewart derides the left-vs-right debate format of the show as political theater, a spectacle of soundbites and crude witticisms more akin to verbal pro-wrestling than with real debate, with its hosts shilling and spouting rhetoric in their roles as partisan henchmen.

Then there is Stephen Colbert’s famous dinner roast of Bush — delivered to the president’s dazed and reddening face! — back in April.

Colbert, in a virtuoso and magnificently unfazed deadpan, delivers a ballsy calvacade of broadsides against the administration over the course of 20 earth-stopping minutes, including this one:

“I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, has he stood on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

This stuff that Bush, in his insulated bubble, never gets to hear, let alone hear live and in person and in front of a public. But moreover, just as he’s shielded from criticism, he is also consitutionally impervious to it; Bush, after all, believes in Divine insight, in his personal connection to jesus. Did Colbert’s lancing of his imcompetence and hipocrisy grant the Decider-in-Chief one iota wisdom, thoughtfulness, or humility? Seems unlikely (in fact, the fiercely supportive response among the blogging world was a world away from the MSM’s tepid coverage of the event). Did Stewart’s plea strip down the propagandistic facades of television news and inspire a revision in its intelligence-deadening practices? Not really (though, but Crossfire did get canceled and Fox’s ratings are declining). Will Rumsfeld watch Olbermann and take a minute to reflect, rethink his choice of words, let alone worldview? Again, doubtful. And even if our SoD suddenly ‘gets it,’ isn’t it too late for the broken Iraq and the thousands dead he’s helped create and the hubris, professional ineptitude and moral callousness he’s already displayed?

But of course to ask Olbermann, Stewart and Colbert those things is unfair. They are for their own part and in their own ways and by their own degrees rousing a sleeping country, slumbering in front of its televisions, into a state of reason and alertness. One only wishes that in 2006, as far as wider tv news culture is concerned, they were the rule rather than the exception.

A nice post today on Motionographer likening the experiential and technological melding of web / interactive with motion graphics design as Kid Convergence, the unformed but quickly maturing love child between two distinct (at least until recently) but lovingly compatible mediums.

The post offers up two recent examples to underscore the convergence: Designgraphik’s (designer Mike Young’s — one half of the excellent YWFT – ongoing web experiment) — a mostly linear flash and video clickthru experience – and the Nike Air campaign minisite (a showcase of Nike’s upcoming line of 180 and 360 performance kicks), employing a VJ-like keyboard interface to activate psychedelic video effects, produced by DUMBO-based Big Spaceship.