There are people wandering along the side of the freeway.
This is my first impression upon our arrival in Beijing. It strikes a deep set horror in me. Caught in the headlights, choked on the edge of the 10 lanes that spew out an air that you wear like another layer of skin, they look displaced, lost, left behind.
My god, I think to myself, 1.3 billion is too many; China’s population is supersaturated; the levee has broken; people are spilling out everywhere.
Modernity has come fast to this ancient capital. It rises …
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Greenland is melting!”
This was how Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto introduced themselves at this year’s ICOGRADA in Seattle. It was early in the conference and the first statement that truly made us sit up and take notice. We would learn that the pair had worked on Bruce Mau’s exhibit Massive Change, a massive undertaking unto itself tackling the world’s most critical problems from a designer’s perspective. They then went on to create Work Worth Doing, a design studio “working at the …
I have just returned home and begun an intensive recovery that is befitting of the work hard / play hard ethic with which I tackled these past four days at ICOGRADA’s Design Week in Seattle. The news has been on the television all evening: looping footage of the escalating tension between Israel and the Hezbollah; of blown out Lebanese neighbourhoods and clips of Anderson Cooper chasing after the next ground zero. After dinner, we rent Syriana, remembering its scenes of a claustophobic and heavily armed Hezbollah-occupied Beirut; trying to make …
READ MOREThis past summer, on the balmy shores of Lake Huron, I took part in a wine tasting where the libations in question were all by the same wine maker, they were all from the same grape and all bottled in the same year. The defining difference between the three bottles was one of geography. The first bottle had been cultivated from the grapes on the southern hillside of the winery; the second bottle’s fruit had matured in the valley while the last bottle had …
READ MORE“The most beautiful chord is made from dischord” -Heraclitus
On May 29, 1913, ‘The Rite of Spring’, performed by Diaghiler’s inimitable Ballet Russes made its world premiere at Paris’ Théatre des Champs Elysées. The physically unnatural choreography accompanied by the atonal, rhythmically ambiguous music of Igor Stravinsky was too much for the audience’s sensibilities. Hissing and booing grew to such a volume that the dancers were unable to hear their cues and the performance eventually dissolved into a state of chaos and rioting in the theatre. …
Climbing into the back of the pickup truck on the dusty street, a trio of tribes women surround us wearing clothes of bright yellows, magentas and cyans, and black hats decorated with jingling tokens and coins. Their smiles are stained red with bettlenut juice and they thrust toward me their handfuls of bracelets and scarves all the while whispering under their breath the mantra on their true intent: “Opium….o..p..i..u..m..”
We were leaving Muang Xing in the north of Laos, thirteen miles south of the Chinese border. This was one of the …
The Collection continues with 13 works from over at Regen Projects
Also of note, it was recently announced the Pettibon is the 2010 recipient of the Oskar Kokoschka Prize. As this year’s winner of the biannual prize, the artist will be awarded €20,000. Pettibon will receive the prize in a ceremony to be held at the University for Applied Arts on March 1 at 11:00 o’clock in Vienna.
“Lately, I’ve been wondering if sitting quietly in a café, pretending to read a newspaper, and not writing is the most earnest expression in our age: no echoes of language, nothing to reblog, just pure unmitigated self sitting with self. I might, after a time of blank staring, find myself constructing sentences in my head, maybe a paragraph, simply letting the words roll around in my mind. I will not. I repeat. I will not write them down. They are my secret sentences, not yours.”
—Andrew Simone (via Amanda Mooney)
Not doing enough of this as of late…
This struck me as very fresh. A mashup is, more often than not, the sampling of pre-existing media — music, movies, even sport intervews– to create something new. And yet in the case of the Adidas Originals Star Wars ad, the media being used here is entirely new footage shot specifically for the ad itself. What has been mashed up are the cultural narratives of these two iconic pop entities.
Conceived of by the boundary-defying minds over at Sid Lee and directed by new favorite director Nima Nourizadeh, the celebrity house party that has become an infamous element of Adidas’ promotional materials is once again gettin’ busy but this time with X-wing fighters buzzing the rooftops above.
Fugazi at the Wilson Center, Washington D.C. on December 29th, 1988.
“I like where we’re going with technology and global integration but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don’t like it. This isn’t the Hollywood I wanted to be part of. This isn’t the version of it that I saw when I was a kid…”District 9″ and every other movie is treated like fast food. It’s promoted relentlessly and then it’s gone. Everything is a flamethrower-intensity and milked for everything it can give and then it’s just chucked away. Everything is judged instantly, too. You look back at something like “Blade Runner” and wonder how a film like that, which doesn’t do well at first, would be treated today.”
