The Criterion Collection has exquisite taste in films, but these masterpieces are brought to life by package designs that are almost always better than the original film releases. I've always been curious about their art direction process and I'm happy to have found a rich documentation on how they came up with the Berlin Alexanderplatz DVD release at their blog, written by Eric Skillman. Link.
Below are some of the studies and comps that I like.... seems accomplished enough, surely it would have gone to final art at places without the high standards at Criterion:
And here's the chosen final art:
(For more on the technique involved in creating the final image, check out his design process blog, Cozy Lummox.)"
Found a comprehensive blog entry by WebUrbanist about Light Art. It's an interesting form of expression that seems to have universal appeal. It's probably more impressive in person than seeing it in stills and videos. I think the current Sprint campaign unfortunately illustrates that point by its slickly executed TV and print.
Just had some tasty Sabarskytorte (Chocolate and rum cake) at Cafe Sabarsky inside the Neue Galerie. One of the few places in New York where you feel completely transplanted away from America. link
An elegant collection of work from my friend and artist Leigh Wells. Her work is beautiful, modern and witty. Wish I was in San Francisco so I can see the work in person. The next best thing is to check out her work here:
Saw a compelling documentary about the American fronteirsman Kit Carson. Credited to be the man who created the grand and often stereotypical myths of the West, his legend and real life often merged together. What was interesting about his life is that he was the first famous American of European decent that truly embraced the idea of a multi cultural community, way ahead of the fears most White people had about non-Whites at the time. He embraced (and seemed to have been mutually accepted by) the Navajo, Apache, and many other native American nations. He truly straddled cultures at a time when all other Whites wanted to do was to assimilate the Native Americans and the Mexicans to European values. And yet, despite the skills in diplomacy, he seemed to be most at peace when he was out in the wild far away from the clusters of civilization. He also orchestrated the downfall of a few Indian nations with much soul searching on his part. In the sum of all his actions, was he a hero or a villain? A compelling life that I'd like to learn more about.
Watch the PBS American Experience program here. Written by Michelle Ferrari. Directed by Stephen Ives.
When something as mundane as the in flight safety video is this much fun, you know you're in for a totally different experience. Cheery flight attendants, wealth of first run movies on demand and actually decent food has made me a convert. I kept flying American for my cross country trips, not because of any sense of loyalty but with the distant hope that my mileage will add up for some sort of free ticket. VA hasn't even ironed out their mileage program but I don't care. I fly them for the same reason I use Apple products, click on Amazon and rent from Hertz. It's all about the carefully thought out consumer experience from beginning to end. Starbucks realized it recently and took action with a highly publicized 3 hour training session for their Baristas. I hope the old guard domestic airlines will start seeing it that way, too.
Here's some pics from my hike to Joshua Tree National Park this weekend. The landscape is so alien yet so inviting. It's one of the few places on earth that I feel completely surrendering myself to the bigness of the sky and earth.
Here's an article and archive of an NPR segment by Elizabeth Shogren that reports on the disappearing Joshua Trees. I really hope they don't go extinct soon.
Ian sent me a link to Bill Pearce talking about Arthur Grace’s ‘Choose Me‘, from the ‘88 campaign trail. I like Grace’s squares a lot. Copies of the book can be found for a few bucks on alibris, or via the author.
I heard about this intriguing book about the psychology of justifying mistakes. From car accidents to invasions of other countries, humans seem to have an amazing talent to "protect" one self from feeling drowned in guilt. I'd be lying if I haven't done my share of this in my life. A description about this book written by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why we justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts:
[CBC radio Quirks and Quarks feature description ] The human mind has a built-in mechanism for helping us escape the painful psychological penalty of bad decisions - mistakes, in essence. The benefit of this is that we can make decisions without paralysis. The cost, on the other hand, is what psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explore in their new book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why we justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. They look at why human decision-making predisposes us to sometimes make mistakes even worse by mechanisms of self-justification and confirmation bias - which causes us to reinforce our decisions and beliefs (even mistaken ones) ever more strongly. The implications of this for our personal lives, as well as for social structure and politics, they say, are important to understand. We spoke with Dr. Tavris, an independent social psychologist and writer.
I just got notice that I logged 500 miles in a little over a year. Wow. I don't think I've ran that much in my other living years combined. And all it took was a little technology and social networking site for me to get motivated. Here's to the next 500 miles.
Above is the live update on how I'm doing in the monthly challenge. Click here for what I blogged last year.
I just got introduced (thanks Brantley) to a blog with a immersive collection of vintage photographs of the American past. The person selecting the shots definitely have an artistic eye and it's refreshing to see these times with a new perspective. The above three photographs seem to have an amazing sense of composition that feels so contemporary.The way the guys are posing along with the car could have been an Annie Leibowitz shot, the second and third must have influenced Sebastian Salgado. Check out the satisfying collection at this link
May 1938. Bench warmers at the cooperative store in Irwinville Farms, Georgia. 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration.
July 1936. "Old-time Negro living on a cotton patch near Vicksburg, Mississippi." Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange.
April 1942. "Sixty-year-old George Lane, former house painter, is a valuable worker in the De Land, Florida, industrial pool [of small machine shops]. He served in the last war with the British Army from Vimy Ridge to the Occupation. Two of his sons are in the American Army, one with the Air Corps in Australia. His daughter volunteered for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. Seven of his nephews are in the British Army. Using his old skill with the brush, he is now painting De Land pool products." Medium-format nitrate negative by Howard Hollem for the Office of War Information.
Fascinating story about nature's way of fooling predators. I also heard recently that squirrels pretend to bury food in order to protect them from would be thieves (Telegraph article) What next will we find out about these amazing furry things?
by Barbara Clucas
[Excerpt from mongabay.com]
Squirrels use snake skin to disguise themselves from predators
By Andy Fell, UC Davis
California ground squirrels and rock squirrels chew up rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur to mask their scent from predators, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis.
Barbara Clucas, a graduate student in animal behavior at UC Davis, observed ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) and rock squirrels (Spermophilus variegates) applying snake scent to themselves by picking up pieces of shed snakeskin, chewing it and then licking their fur.
Adult female squirrels and juveniles apply snake scent more often than adult males, which are less vulnerable to predation by snakes, Clucas said. The scent probably helps to mask the squirrel's own scent, especially when the animals are asleep in their burrows at night, or to persuade a snake that another snake is in the burrow.
[full article]
In the old roll of film I recently developed, I found this seemingly mundane photo I shot in Tokyo.
I was having coffee with my sister at a Starbucks that day. As we were about to leave and throw my ice coffee cup away, she pointed out that I should pour the remaining liquid into the a separate trash can first (shown above). It made immediate sense to me. By taking the liquid out, the trash weighs less, it's easier to take out, it emits less carbon to haul the trash to the landfills. I already pour liquid out from containers before throwing out bottles at home as many of you might as well. So why isn't it more common in commercial environments? All the sodas swishing around in tightly sealed garbage bags probably gets broken by the time it gets compacted on the back of garbage trucks but that water weight gets carried to the dump, wasting fuel. It seems like a good idea that we can quickly implement in this country as well.
Radical and intriguing solution for the ongoing energy crisis. Politics will ultimately get in the way but even if it generated a fraction of the energy needed, then it'll be a brilliant path to provid energy for the rest of Africa as well as other wind rich continents.
Last week, The Guardian reported that Europe is looking to Africa to serve its energy needs by basically turning the continent into one giant solar power plant.
Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
Of course, one is compelled to wonder here what would happen if Africa provided Europe with all of its electricity?
Most likely that won't happen; no European countries would want to subject their whole energy security to regional volatility. On the other hand, one could imagine a fairly optimistic scenario wherein this energy cooperation would provide a stabilizing force to unstable states, help cure both continents' post-colonialhangover, counteract China's growing geopolitical influence in the region — and all the while reducing carbon emissions to zero.
But, as always, what we are immediately most interested in is: in what ways would this energy pact be physically manifested in Africa?
As but one illustration of how energy consumption is spatialized, there is the so-called mountaintop mining, whereby whole mountains are leveled off, literally grounded down, to get at coal deposits instead of using tunnels. The erased geology would then be dumped nearby, chocking streams and old growth forests.
In one of the best (and certainly longest) articles on the subject that we have ever come across, Eric Reece, in Harpers Magazine, writes:
Where once there were jagged forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of plateaus, staggered grey shelves where grass struggles to grow in crushed rock and shale. When visitors to eastern Kentucky first see the effects of this kind of mining, they often say the landscape looks like the Southwest - a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas.
In other words, heating up your ex-urbian McMansion is right now turning Appalachia into Arizona and New Mexico.
One can easily picture Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio, like ambulance chasers circling a scene of devastation, salivating over photos of negative mountains, scheming away at plans to reclaim them from destruction, waiting for that commission.
But returning back to our question: what will Google Earth tourists see when they point their vigilant eyes towards an electrified North Africa? Will they come upon vast plantations of coronal fields, perfect geometries arrayed in similarly perfect arrangement, irrespective of terrain but nevertheless finely attuned to the sky?
And what about the people on the ground? Where once was desert, might they now enjoy newly sprouted oases, which are fed with water from solar-powered desalination plants? An Emerald Necklace of Olmstedian design inscribed in the Saharan landscape.
Will foreigners descend en mass to undertake a Bowlesian journey, trekking from one incomprehensible terrain to another equally unfathomable recess of the desert, utterly unprepared for the otherness of it all but obviously so seduced that they travel on, even while in the grips of dysentery, losing themselves psychologically and literally to the sands? All bearings and comfort are lost.
And then just as things couldn't get any stranger, they will come upon a stand of solar updraft towers; there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands, forming a kind of arid rainforest mechanically evapotranspirating.
But in their parched and hallucinatory conditions these adventurers will mistake them for Persian tower tombs, divining the surrounding air into a vortex, the whirring blades resonating ghostly howls.
Saw a satisfying thriller, No Country For Old Men, the latest film from the Coen brothers. Hauntingly acted by Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. Tommy Lee Jones was also superb. How refreshing to see a thriller that engross you without conventions of a "thriller." No menacing music to tell you where you should feel scared (I don't think there were any music at all?), and no hollywood ending to give you the familiar closure that the good guy always gets the bad guy (woops, did I just put in a spoiler?). It's definitely Ethan and Joel Coen's best film since Fargo.
Thanks for checking out my blog. A little about me... I'm an Art Director and Photographer in New York City. Born in Tokyo, I've had happy detours in Toronto, London, Singapore, Austin and San Francisco. Would love to read your comments on the posts or hear from you at haj718(at)mac(dot)com.
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