Designs good and bad

1. Touchless screen at Vimeo via MotionDesign

Shades of Minority Report.

2. From Dezeen.com

3. And two good ideas deserve a bad:

If you dislike this as much as I do, see my semi-rant at Your House is a Garage.

takashi murakami, tadanori yokoo and mishima yukio

Takashi Murakami. This is not my usual type of stuff but I kind of like it. Slate.com has a decent little slide show of his work here. They title it Japan’s Andy Warhol or is it Walt Disney? Two artists I’ve never much liked but…

I’m happy enough that looking at this stuff reminded me of another Japanese artist, not similar at all, though also described as an Andy Warhol. Tadinori Yokoo.

Tadinori Yokoo initially attracted me simply because the print above featured Mishima Yukio. I went through a phase where I read about ten of his novels (many of them very good like Forbidden Colours where a man’s revenge on womankind takes the form of his paying a beautiful gay man to entrance and then leave women forlorn) and his bodybuilding autobiography Sun and Steel as well as the biography of this right wing militaristic prize winning novelist who eventually committed ritual suicide.

Soon I came to appreciate Tadinori’s works on their merits, the juxtapostion of traditional Japanese elements with contemporary styles.

Another fine spring day: April 22, 2008

The good old fry up

Go to Why the Great British Breakfast is a Killer at the TimesOnline for a wonderful example of vitriolic writing and response:

From the article:

The fried English breakfast was conceived during the Industrial Revolution (probably) as a form of fast fuel for a working class that actually worked. They ate 3,000 calories in the morning, then they burnt 3,000 calories by lunchtime. Or died when the mine collapsed. But you don’t burn 3,000 calories driving a forklift truck, or answering the phone at Argos, or fiddling your disability benefit. The work dies, but the breakfast lives on. Result: obesity crisis. (Knowing this, and fearing the backlash, Little Chef recently moved to slim down “Fat Charlie”, the obese chef who features in its logo, but nothing came of it - presumably because the porky little scrote just wouldn’t stop eating.)

And from a response to the article:

The Times restaurant critic has a masterful way with words and a witty turn of phrase, but strip away the etymological pyrotechnics and what do you have? Preaching, that’s what - and preaching of the worst sort: as practised by the nanny-state control freaks currently turning this country into a joyless puritan hellhole run by cyclists who knit their own tofu, where a glass of wine is a unit and lighting a fag risks summary execution for killing babies.

After smoking and drinking, it was obviously only a matter of time before the health gestapo turned their jackboots on us innocent lardbuckets. A tax on fat? Yeah, right, that’ll work. Just like it does with alcohol and tobacco. We’ll have ferryloads of white vans coming over from Calais laden with butter, cream, eggs and cheese to be sold by dodgy blokes with plastic carrier bags outside Whitechapel Tube station (“Pssst, squire, want a half pound of Normandy unsalted, only a quid?”).

What I didn’t expect was that a man who eats for a living would recommend porridge, a vile, gelatinous slurry made from a crop that civilised people feed only to their animals, eaten chiefly by 18th-century crofters thrown off their land by the English and unable to afford proper food. As for one’s palate being clean and mellow in the morning, speak for yourself, mate. After a night on the lash my mouth is like the bottom of a baby’s pram, and I can rarely taste anything before noon.

Now why do we have to wander over there to get these kind of spirited and brilliantly evocative spats? Lovely stuff!

Spam morphing

Anybody take a look at their Akismet catches lately…the spam is hitching a ride on decent sites but somehow originating and linking elsewhere…still get the gobbledygook list of words to gather my content but from what I think is a legitimate site. Unless the legitimate ones are using dumb strings to gather links.

Two more videos; laffs to be had

Seem to be on a movie kick lately…thanks to Cinematical, I discovered the new parody video for Tetris over at Black20.com

And while there I discovered one of their older ones for Pirates of the Caribbean:

Friday noir and other film bits

From the 99 Cent Chef via ThompsonOnFilm:

Film Noir & The 99 Cent Ribeye

The 99 Cent Chef has a dark, hungry heart; he likes his steak medium rare, Scotch on the rocks and a dame who powders her nose on the inside.

Comes with a recipe for a ribeye for someone on their way to the local noir film fest and a definitive clip from Double Indemnity which I still cannot believe I don’t yet own. Its a perfect film really and why should we be surprised with the talent in every aspect of this production both in front of and behind the camera. If you are too lazy too wander over there, here’s the clip. They just don’t write dialogue like this anymore (they try but they don’t quite get there):

And on HollywoodElsewhere:

“The little girl’s performance is insanely brilliant. From the q & a, Tarsem revealed that she hadn’t acted before…and didn’t really understand what was going on until about a third of the way into the shoot. She was convinced that Lee wasn’t an actor and that he truly was a paraplegic. (This isn’t a spoiler) But when she did catch on to the whole acting thing….she thrived and nailed her scenes. Every time. This, according to Tarsem.

“The film is tragic, surreal, hilarious, epic. It captures his brilliant artistic production design while remaining true to the narrative that builds with empathy to the very end. It is Ford, Chaplin, Dali, Del Toro, Brooks, Tarkovsky….and so on. I have no faith in Roadside Attractions to market this film. They will step and then kill it.

“Please see this. It needs great word of mouth. Particularly yours. I have no connection to this film. I’m simply an earnest cinephile who wants to scream in angst when something this beautiful is put through the ringer. But there is no question….The Fall is one of the great films of our time.”

Great praise indeed, and quite possibly true given The Cell’s indication of potential. Some time ago I posted the trailer which you can find here.

MusicPage: Articles on Music

Best cds of 2007: Best videos of 2007
Bluesfest the day before
Boll weevil 3
Boll weevil revisited

Brotherhood: the first season
Bunch o stuff (Mississippi Gary)

Collage (Jim Bryson)

Damn you, Todd Storz
Donnie Darko: Modern classic (Tears for Fears)

Early August 2007: music(Bjork)

From othersFrank Black; or if you think you can control your audience
Fringe day four and assorted notes

Gavin Crawford does Rufus Wainright
Great new music, the clashing cultures theory

Holger Czukay: Fusion (Can, Beatles)

Labels
Late Saturday gatherings
Leonard Cohen
Looks sell everything, why not books, why not music

Mix CD runner up #2 (Josh Ritter, Rhett Miller, Joseph Arthur, Peter Bjorn and John, Arcade Fire, Elliott Smith, Madeline Peyroux)
Muse
Music 1: Sounds good to me
Music project - colours - black (Joan Osborne, Santana, Calexico, Nirvana, Eric Burdon and War, Black Keys)
Music project - colours - blue (Vienna Teng, Melissa McClelland, The Who, Chet Baker, Arcade Fire, Lucinda Williams, REM)
Music project - colours - purple (Hole, NIN and Beatles, Tragically Hip, Of Montreal, Jeff Buckley, Sarah McLauchlin)
Music project - colours - red (King Crimson, Duke Spirit, Neil Young, Elliott Smith, New Pornographers, Stars, Eric Truffaz and Ed Harcourt, Spoon)
Music project - colours- yellow (Garbage, Okkervill River, Jan Garbarek and Keith Jarrett, Beck)
Music project - days of the week
Music project - Fridays (Goldspot, Hawksley Workman, Rilo Kiley, Josh Ritter)
Music project - Monday Monday (Ysabel, Boomtown Rats, Carpenters, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King)
Music project - Saturdays (Eels, Chicago)
Music project - Sunday (Mark Lanegan, Screaming Trees, john Cale, Sonic Youth, Donovan)
Music project - Thursdays (John Lennon, David Bowie, Morphine)
Music project - Tuesdays (Marianne Faithfull, Wilco, 3 Dog Night, Real Tuesday Weld)
Music project - Wednesdays
Music resources
Music: Sky Rockets In Flight
Music 2: Me and my arrow
Musical interlude
Music videos with an emphasis on music

New music, well, new to me anyway(Laura Marling, Bend Sinister, Guest Bedroom, Diableros, Wolf Parade)
New tunes

Oh ohm on the range and cold cuts

Ripping music doesn’t always burn artists

Saturday morning music musings (Luke Doucet; Desert Sessions)

The horror, the horror
Thinking about food again (Blue Seeds)
Time to ring the changes again
Two accidents: one good and one not so bad

Valentine’s Day: A song and a card (John Prine)
Videos for the dark (The Kills, Grinderman)

We are ugly but we have the music
What I’m listening to and what I saw (Nathan Wiley; Joel Plaskett)
Will get fooled again
Worst album covers ever