With the Olympics on my brain and in the culture, I can’t help but feel awe struck at the prospect of China: it’s size, it’s culture, the vast number of unknowns. It’s all so much deeper than the menu at Congee Village.
Like, why don’t we ever get to see the dirty pictures, the messy remnants of the building of these insane Olympic structures? Why is every angle so postcard perfect? And if there were thousands of Chinese working around the clock for months — years — to get Beijing all gussied up, where are they now?
The show includes several large format photographs of construction-in-action on the Olympic Village, as well as one of Beijing’s performing arts center (“the Egg”) from an angle I knew had to exist: There it rests, in all its gleaming glory, in the distance behind a cluster of drab, tile-roofed houses littered with the remnant scraps of life. It’s refreshing to see an architectural icon like the Egg from such an ordinary angle. It’s how city dwellers most often encounter them, that’s life.
For more China mania check out: Beijing 2008, a photography exhibit at the China Institute through August 17. And then, of course, there’s always Tiki, Phelps and the rest of crew who haven’t yet even hit the halfway mark in Beijing. Game on.
Being one with friends in the Industry, I was long ago cajoled, brainwashed and otherwise convinced to watch commercials for fun. While the bulk of commercials do blow, they also have the potential to be 30- and 60-second poppable morsels of comedy (Bud Light’s “Magic Beer Fridge” spots, anyone?), pathos and even art.
See United’s new “It’s Time to Fly” campaign. Lang Lang, Herbie Hancock, Robert Redford, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and creatives from Japan, Norway, South Africa, France, Poland and elsewhere teamed up to animate this six-spot series, each short vignette put to a clip from one of the 20th century’s finest compositions, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The animators used hand-drawn textures, computer animation and photographs of water, reefs and skies (“Sea Orchestra”), stop-motion animation and paper puppetry (“Heart”), and for “Butterfly,” Aleksandra Korejwo “manipulated colored salt using shed condor bird feathers on a black canvas positioned under a downward-facing camera” — a method so beyond paraphrase that I’m quoting the press release.
“Sea Orchestra” debuted during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. To quote YouTube user worddigger, “Not exactly the “Little Mermaid” and Sabastian’s orchestra, but good for a one time view (best at 3:00am while high on drugs).” No lowest common denominator here.
I have a soft spot in my heart for typography. We can “feel the difference when sommething is set in one typeface,” rather an another, says says Ina Saltz, a professor in Electronic Design and Multimedia at City College NYC. “There’s a visual distinction that sends a visual message.” Saltz was one of more than a dozen interviews that I spent more than a month on (just prior to starting this blog), for a story exploring the rising trend of typographical/word tattoos. I interviewed several “words” in Shellly Jackson’s Skin project, a typeface designer in Las Vegas whose whole torso is covered in Latin tattoos in antique typefaces, Saltz, editor of Body Type, the first photographic book of word/typographic tattoos, among others.
So I was thrilled to read unBeige’s blog report on the world premiere of the feature-length documentary film, Helvetica, held at SXSW last week. The film “just might be the best history of graphic design we’ve ever seen,” reports unBeige. Helvetica, that [in]famous font, turns 50 this year.
Festival organizers had to turn away more than 150 people at the SXSW premiere. I think that’s going to be the precident as the film begins touring the international film fest circut. It’s coming to New York for a screening at the New School on April 6, and guess what? Yep, sold out. The film’s website has the complete—and oft updated— tour schedule. In the meantime, I’m gonna try to get into the screening, guerrila-style.
The realization that the second episode, cleverly named “the girl who went to prom”, of the new cycle [why cycle and not season, I've never figured out] of Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model was filmed at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys–the alma matter of several very close friends of mine–inspired a flurry of internet searches on models, the San Fernando Valley, America’s Next Top Model, and so on. Here are a handful of pleasing, albiet quick, reads on Birmingham High’s fifteen minutes:
