Category Archives: Art/Style

Marco Brambilla’s Civilization

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The vision behind Marco Brambilla’s Civilization was to take “hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven.”

Alrighty then. And where will we watch this video?

“The idea was this, when you go up in the elevator the content goes down and when you go down it goes up. Not unlike a ride film this project was designed to be synced to the moving environment of the hotel elevators in New York. We wanted to synchronize the footage to the movement of the elevator as best as we could.”

You really need to watch the video to get the idea. I found the link on William Gibson’s blog where he observes: “Stuff’s finally starting to look like the 21st Century. Next, your shower curtain.”

“How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live”

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That’s the title of an article by Steven Johnson in this week’s Time Magazine. Here are a few snippets:

  • “This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.”
  • “Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network.”
  • “It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night’s date. Now you’re compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people’s lives.”

But the real money-shot of the piece (at least for me) is Johnson’s prediction (is it still a prediction if it’s already happening?) on Twitter’s influence on advertising.

“Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer’s eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.”

This is the best thing I’ve read on Twitter to date.

Concrete Man (Director’s Cut)

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Clarence Lee Sherrill and Crista Meyer sell concrete lawn ornaments. Their business is called Concrete Castings and they’re located on I-55 just north of Cape Girardeau, MO. I have a strange fascination with “yard art” and decided to scratch the itch on a recent trip down south.

Clarence and Crista work in a small, cluttered room heated by a big wood stove and covered in cement dust. Gazing in a large window was a magnificent peacock. I didn’t see Miss C, the camel that’s usually in a pen out front, and Clarence explained she was “visiting her boyfriend” but would return in a few days. Gotta be tough to breed camels in this country.

On a technical note, I shot the video with the Casio Exilim FC100, but the battery went dead on me. So I recorded a few minutes of audio on the iPhone and dropped in some stills. You’ll notice the change in audio quality.

Oh my. It appears we need ANOTHER ending

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Young woman (college age) scours flea markets looking for digital cameras and the occasional memory card. She uses the more interesting photos in her art projects. She finds a little point and shoot and buys it, even though she can’t seem to call up any photos.

Later that afternoon she gets the camera to turn on and finds just two photos. One is an amazingly realistic image of the World Trade Center Towers in mid-collapse. The date and time (the following morning) appear in the lower right-hand corner.

Gruesome, but damned good Photo Shop work. She emails it to an art school friend who is equally impressed. Can’t see how it’s done and he can ALWAYS see how it’s done. Really bugs him.

The next morning the world changes forever. She goes back to her apartment and calls up the image on her laptop. The same image she see from her apartment window. Whoa.

The phone rings and it’s her friend from art school.

“What the fuck!? Where did you get that picture? Where did you get a fucking picture of something before it happened.

[later at friends apartment]

Young Woman wants to take the photo to the police. Hold on, says Friend. How can you explain having that photo. No way, have to think this through. Was that the only photo on the camera, asks Friend?

Young Woman pulls up the other image. It’s a store front with a selection of cameras displayed. One is circled in red. But nothing to indicate where the shop might be.

[We’ll fast-forward a bit and assume they see a street sign or address in the reflection or something like that]

They buy the camera and jump back in the car to take a look. Again, two photos. One a disaster (make it as big and as bad as you like) with date and time stamp for a week from that day.

They have to figure out where the disaster is going to take place and how to stop it. I’ll bet real screenwriters have a name for this kind keep-the-plot-moving writing. This sequence repeats a few times with the girls preventing some and not others.

The final camera only has one photo. Of the Friend shooting Young Woman in the head with a large handgun.

Regular readers know that this is where I stall out. No ending. No way to wrap things up. That, class is your assignment. To the comments!

PS: This is only a little like a story idea I posted a couple of years ago.

Fez of Hope

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Barb and I bought some souvenirs from street vendors while attending the inauguration. I kept thinking, “What I really want is an Obama fez,” not that I expected to find one.

This weekend I reached out to the Fezmonger himself and asked if he had considered making a commemorative fez. He politely explained that he had, but decided it would be exploitative. Besides, every Fez-o-rama fez is an original design.

Before giving up, I suggested I could make a contribution to his favorite charity.  As luck would have it, March is when the Fezmonger participates in the 24 Hour Cancer Dance-a-thon to raise money for the City of Hope.

So for a contribution of $250 to a very worthy cause, I am the proud recipient of the very first Fez of Hope. (see photo). I like that Jason’s (treatment of the) design is bigger than the man. His design is more about what our new president represents.

21st Century Dating

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My friend could hear his college-aged daughter talking in another room. He assumed she was on the phone to her boy friend who lives in another city. After she had been talking long enough to cause concern for the family’s shared mobile minutes, he went in to shut down the marathon call.

Only to discover his daughter video chatting with her beau as they both watched the same movie on TV.

I’m not a father but this would seem to be a good news/bad news situation. The good news is dad doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on in the next room. The bad news is the little punk is always virtually present.

This phenomenon has already made it into our media and advertising.

The Denim Factory

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In June I wrote about moving up a waist size in my Levis and lovingly packing away  jeans I’ve had for 20 years. I didn’t think of them as “distressed,” rather just getting good and broke in. I would never buy jeans that were made and sold to look like you’d been wearing them for a long time. That’s just… just… just such a neocon thing to do.

But that should not diminish our appreciation for the men (and women?) who work so hard to make your jeans look like they once belonged to a cowboy.

Boing Boing points us to this photo essay (The Denim Factory) by David Friedman featuring a denim factory in Kentucky that specializes in distressing high-end jeans for a few top designers.

“I used to scoff at paying a premium for jeans that come with holes in them already. Then I saw just how much work goes into distressing jeans, and I realized that these people are artists. You can’t just have any loose threads, you have to have the right loose threads. They can’t just be faded. They have to be the right color. A lot of work goes into making these jeans look just right.”

We’re running low on cow shit! Somebody bring in another tub!