“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 …

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 …

This link is blazing across the internets like wild fire but thought it worth posting here: yet another timely and beautiful New Yorker cover by Chris Ware.

The calls start coming in on Thursday. Wrong numbers — or so it seems at first. All of them are from the United States. All of them looking for the same person: Tony Johnson. Upon answering the 3rd or 4th call, from Rhode Island, the voice on the other end is that of a frail and elderly woman and I ask her what specifically she is calling about. She reveals that she has received a letter in the mail from Citiwide Bank in Nevada with an enclosed cheque for $3853.00. …

In adapting new mediums, there is always a period where the shape of the old form is mirrored in the new form’s space. For example, an early television ad looked like this. Radio had simply repositioned itself in front of a camera. It took years for advertisers to fully realize what could be achieved on the small screen. Nearly half a century later, the highly polished 30 second spot that those early sponsor announcements had evolved into would make the jump online with little change –aside from a …

“…the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism—turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.”
–Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker
“Word has it that the building is close to explosion. Whole thing pretty much toast, all in all.”
–@DavidFeng

“Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – … the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct … is totally awesome;”
-BldgBlog

“”With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
-MLK
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to …

“The amount of building becomes obscene without a blueprint. Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you don’t have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don’t know.”
–Rem Koolhaas

Stumbled upon a brilliant exhibit at the Yaletown Jennifer Kostuik Gallery during lunch break today. Texas based artist William Betts (whose website curiously bares an “iPhone Optimized” icon) taps into the Big Brother omnipresence of our modern world, taking webcam and surveillance video screencaps as his subject matter and, by exchanging pixels for pointillism, reinterpreting them in often abstract and beautiful ways.
Says Betts in his Artist Statement:
“Today we have so many layers between the individual and direct experience, it fundamentally changes how we see the world…I am intereseted in how …