visual design
Picture you upon my knee, just tea for two
{ Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936 | Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup. | The Erotic Object: Surrealist Sculpture from the Collection | MoMA, until January 4, 2010 }
Palate has a lovely, fine and persistent mousse and plenty of rich, buttery fruit yet a streak of acidity that keeps it fresh
{ Scan processor studies by Woody Vasulka & Brian O’Reilly, generated by Woody using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in the 1970’s | via Creative Applications }
related:
{ Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, 1979 | The front cover image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background. It presents successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, PSR B1919+21. }
While your feet are stompin, and the jam is pumpin
{ David AdeyPump, 2006 | Pump is comprised of a mechanical animal respirator with small breathing tubes attached to a football that has been completely re-surfaced by drywall screws, screwed into it like some overstuffed and oversized pin cushion. | Art As Authority | more }
{ David Adey, Anatomic Particulars, 2007 }
In the muddy street with the fireworks and leaves
Heavy police sawhorses of rough wood with a stenciled warning — “Police Line Do Not Cross” — have been a visible staple of New York’s landscape for decades. But now they are being demoted.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that wooden sawhorses were being phased out. The last ones owned by the New York Police Department, made by inmates in upstate prisons, are being relegated to dull duty at street fairs and other low-impact events.
The glory, the front-row seats to history, will go to the interlocking gray aluminum partitions that the police call “French barriers.”
It’s like a first-grade detective in Midtown Manhattan being busted to overnight patrolman on the outskirts of Staten Island.
From a few hundred French barriers bought in the early 1990s, there are now about 12,000 (seven feet long and $70 each). Just 3,200 veteran wooden sawhorses (14 feet long and $60 each) remain. Other cities like Chicago and Philadelphia also use both types.
related:
{ Top, fake badges for assistant chief and patrolman; bottom, real detective and patrolman badges. | In New York, some officers don’t wear their badges on patrol. Instead, they wear fakes. Called “dupes,” these phony badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay. | NY Times | Continue reading }
Happy Thanksgiving!
Suppose a genie appears and gives you two choices. The first option is that he will [thanks] give you $10 million dollars, but everyone else you know will get $20 million apiece.
Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything.
As a bonus, the genie offers to erase your memory of having made the choice, so guilt will never be a factor. You will simply wake up the next day in the new situation.
Which option do you choose to maximize your personal happiness?
illustration { Jessica Hische }
previously/related { Rude up thy bird, tayi, tayi }
‘For me, the summer will be pure gray — mother-of-pearl gray, very pale gray. To me, this is the big statement for summer. Then we have light blue, light turquoise, lots of pink.’ –Gianni Versace
Donatella Versace, tiny, sculpted and forever blonde, was standing backstage after her menswear show at the Teatro Versace in Milan in June, receiving polite congratulations from a handful of editors and friends. The scene was positively dead compared with Versace shows a decade ago: no celebrities posing with Donatella for paparazzi, no bodyguards holding back the throngs, and no pals swilling champagne. Donatella’s brother Santo, in his usual charcoal suit with black turtleneck, came back for a few minutes to shake some hands. Her husband, American-born Paul Beck, tall and tan, stood alone in the corner; no one even noticed him. It all felt feeble, pathetic—a sad, soulless charade to promote something that no longer exists.
The nonscene is a reflection of how far the Italian fashion house has fallen since its founder’s death. When Gianni Versace was murdered on the front steps of his Miami mansion in 1997, the company immediately announced that his strong-minded sister, Donatella, would take over as creative director and his brother, Santo, would be CEO. The decision made sense at the time. The luxury fashion business was soaring, thanks to the new wealth of the Internet boom, and Gianni Versace was a favorite of the bling set, with his flashy designs, celebrity friends, and lavish lifestyle. The company was poised to become a luxury megabrand like Gucci, Giorgio Armani, and Louis Vuitton.
Instead, Donatella plunged into profound drug addiction and made erratic business and creative decisions. While competing fashion brands turned into global powers, Versace has watched its sales plummet from $1 billion in 1996 to less than half that today. Major retailers such as Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman have dropped the line. The company has lost both its prestige and design influence.
Starting in 2003, after what Santo described as “seven years of woes,” the Versace siblings acknowledged they couldn’t run the company by themselves and hired a string of outside managers to straighten out the mess. But the outsiders failed too—in large part, Versace sources say, due to Donatella’s and Santo’s resistance to change.
photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }
Walk into a drugstore, and the last thing you see is drugs
{ What if you saw the world with your ears? Gameplay footage from Devil’s Tuning Fork, a game created by the DePaul Game Elites team at DePaul University’s College of Computing & Digital Media in Chicago. | Continue reading }
But when I was a man, the wind blew cold, the hills were upside down
{ Mike Kelley, Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, 2009 | Acrylic on wood panels, steel video monitors, DVD players | Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, NYC, until December 23, 2009 }
‘ I love to go to a lot of rock ‘n’ roll concerts. I see the audiences and they inspire me.’ –Donatella Versace
{ The spring/summer 2010 round of catwalk shows, which ended last month, was a watershed moment for the bloggers and the fashion industry. In New York, as photograph after photograph appeared of Tavi, a 13-year-old blogger from the suburbs of Chicago [above photo], embracing famous designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Alexander Wang, it suddenly became clear that the fashion establishment must now share shoulder space with, as one blogger has put it, “outsiders looking in”. | Financial Times | Continue reading }
