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Fulfilling my quota of quotations.

2008-07-14T17:27:00.002-05:00

"Good design is a dualist state; it exists only because it is better than bad design. Without bad design, there would be no design at all, just objects."

-Jonathan Bell on Industrial Facility for Icon magazine
"How do you feel about the term "design art"?
Mer: I prefer the term experimental design, rather than design art. So many things people label as design art are not truly about art; they're about the user, about the process of making, and they speak about design language in a way that art simply doesn't attempt to. Someone can buy an expensive product, but it's still design. I'm driven by design, not artistic values. Eventually my products can be artistic, but it's a very different starting point.
Alkalay: Maybe our work isn't 100 percent functional and has an element of fantasy to it, but we don't think of it as pieces of art. At the most, we are experimenting with design."

- from "On the Edge", an interview with Shay Alkalay and partner Yael Mer of Raw-Edges Design in Wallpaper Magazine
Another reason I love these guys: Intelligentsia has phased out their "venti" sized coffee. "Drinking our coffee is not like drinking jug wine," said Intelligentsia Coffee founder and Chief Executive Doug Zell on Tuesday. "We're focused on intensity of flavors and providing coffee in the way it tastes best. And it's not in that size." And as a final f-you to Starbucks, he calls 20 oz. espresso drinks "watered-down, Big Gulpish version[s]". I love seeing small business owners with ideals and the conviction to stand up to meaningless industry standards.
"Under the guise of �irony,� hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity."

- From 'Why the Hipster Must Die' in Time Out New York, the first article I've read that actually analyzes hipsterism in an astute and interesting manner that doesn't completely rely on flat stereotypes and tired cliches.

Why didn't it take?

2008-06-05T19:02:00.001-05:00

Grolshit!
BLU is a street-artist who creates stream-of-consciousness surrealistic animations using the city as his canvas. This video is absolutely inspiring-- and the addition of sound makes it hyperreal...
Footworkin.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage
The Biggest Drawing in the World. When I first saw this site, I saw all the documentation of what appeared to be an amazing art project-- artist ships a GPS around the world via DHL and creates a massive self-portrait. When I clicked again a week later, the author reveals that the whole thing was a ruse-- but for his senior thesis in advertising and design. I almost like it better-- it's like he prototyped an idea for an audacious art project, created all the same thought-provoking ideas, but never actually had to do it.

The Prime Minister of Prime Rib

2008-05-15T11:39:00.003-05:00

Martino Gamper does a show this week at Wright gallery in Chicago. And of course I'm in NYC for design week. Cruel irony. At least there's a live webcam to watch the action.

Carrot Pan Flute. Wow.
Musics:

Herman D�ne - Oddly gorgeous and lyrically insightful French band has me addicted. Specifically the 'Not On Top' album, which you can hear the title track from in my muxtape. (and this video is awesome too)

Bon Iver's 'Re: Stacks' is stunningly beautiful. The entire album gives me chills.

MGMT - Time to Pretend. Ridiculous lyrics and bombastic impact. Love it.
And make sure to check out State Bird while you're at my Muxtape. Their live show is impressively energetic. And they all have respectable moustaches.

Hot living room in the summer of 1983. I wish she took more photos.
One of many amazing photos from Ryan Schude.
Nienke Klunder's photographs are powerful and beautiful. I just love her 'Sequence Series'-- really amazing narrative work.
Whitelines - "Non-conflict" graph paper that uses white lines on grey paper. Absolutely brilliant insight-- the current paradigm of lined paper always over does the contrast between the lines and paper, it's about the content, not the guidelines! This solution is so much easier on the eyes... it makes normal lined paper look absolutely uncivilized.

Fuimos a Santiago de Chile (y Valpar�so y etc.)

2008-05-14T13:05:00.004-05:00

Todos las fotograf�as estan aqu�.

Storyboarding Experiences

2008-05-13T12:20:00.006-05:00

Last month my design director and I gave a presentation and workshop on a technique we have developed at gravitytank for designing user experiences. The workshop was during 'Influence', the annual IDSA Midwest conference, held in Kansas City this year. (KC, by the way, actually was a pretty cool town, but more on that later*)

The basic premise of our presentation was that designers are constantly trying to explain concepts to people-- whether it be consumers in a focus group, decision makers in companies, or shoppers in stores-- but the current tools we use to do this often fall short. Imagine trying to express the experience of using the Nintendo Wii through a product rendering (no matter how hot), a few illustrations of how it's used, and some text call outs. Now compare that to an ad for the Wii. Nothing conveys experience like storytelling over time (Notice they don't even show the whole product until the end? The product is definitely secondary to the experience). Now obviously we can't make an ad every time we want to communicate an experience, but as designers we all share one tool that can get us pretty close: drawing. By using our rapid visualization skills to create storyboards of user experiences, we can express more than just what the product looks like, but how it's used, what it's like to use it, and how different people might interact with it. It creates dynamic stories from static objects.

But beyond using storyboarding to explain ideas, it's also an excellent tool for designing experiences from the ground up. We showed some video from behind the scenes at Pixar-- how they use storyboarding to create scenes in their movies. Some of the most important details from this clip are how they work with storyboarding: each shot is on its own page, and they will collaboratively shape their story by physically moving, adding, and removing pages from a tack wall in hectic critique sessions. Using a similar storyboarding process, design teams can document an experience "shot-by-shot". In attempting to capture an experience accurately, teams will shuffle pages all over and add new touch points as they define them. Once the "scene" is completed, the team can easily see pain points in the process that they should focus their design attention upon, and the ideation begins...

So, what's great about using storyboarding in design is that it:

Combines speed and clarity - it's a rapid process that conveys ideas in their purest form.
Focuses on benefits not features - it keeps teams looking at the overall user experience, instead of novel details.
Conveys experiences - it can portray a timeline of use, instead of a slice of time.
Forces decisions - because they can see all of the touchpoints at the same time, design teams can begin to prioritize them.
Connects with emotions - just like any good story, you can empathize with characters as the story unfolds.

We shared a basic framework for how to work through a process like this, we showed some examples of how we've been using it in recent projects, and then the workshop portion started. We had our 70+ participants break into teams and storyboard the airport security experience. Obviously this is a painful experience for the average traveler, but also interesting would be storyboarding this process from the viewpoint of the TSA worker, the child in the baby carriage, or the man-handled suitcase (not a person, but why not?). Sharpies, 1/2 page storyboard sheets, and Mr Sketch Fruit-Scented Markers exploded around the room and pages were tacked to the walls and torn down in a whirlwind frenzy. (Maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but roll with me here). In the end we had the teams present their experience storyboards back to the workshop, and we wrapped it all up. From the feedback I heard from participants, the workshop helped them understand why and how to use storyboarding, but also was successful in arming them with a basic feeling for how a collaborative storyboarding session might run, and the methodology behind creating successful storyboard pages. We had a lot of fun sharing it with everyone, and hope to present it again to other groups. I can think of many other uses from consumer products, public space, transportation, events, and on and on...

Man I love getting paid to draw.

Apologies to this anonymous guy-- I don't know your name-- but you illustrate the workshop pretty well, and you happen to frame the storyboard sheets and my graphic facilitation quite well.

* Yeah, so like I said earlier, KC is actually a pretty cool town. Sure it's pretty spread out, but in my few days there, I saw some great old buildings, a firm with a great Brooklyn-style loft space, a great bar with a great band in a strip mall, a nice cozy jazz bar with a modern jazz trio performance, and some really bitchin' BBQ. (Although I was told the BBQ at a certain gas station across town would have been the best. Next time.)

Top Down/Bottom Up

2008-05-02T16:43:00.000-05:00

Jasper Morrison's Basel Chair. Supernormal, super gorgeous.
Morrison's aforementioned chair reminded me (on a visceral level) of the iconic Thonet Chair. I had no idea that it was designed in 1859, as a flat pack (almost 100 years before IKEA existed), and has sold over 30 million to date. Michael Thonet was bentwood, before bentwood was even cool.
Joris Laarman's Wirepod decorative power strip, the first in a series of Artecnica products called Wiremore, which will make electrical cables more, rather than less, visible. Interesting concept, even if more than a bit idealistic.
I love this song off the first Wackies Sampler: Wayne Jarret "You and I"
"Nah pop, no style." Uptown Top Ranking by Althea & Donna is such a tight tune. Ever tighter is watching these two classy ladies perform it live.
Summer 2008 is the summer of mankles.
Fuck the pig away.
Brilliant new work from Aaron Koblin (& Takashi Kawashima): "Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.
Allstreets by Ben Fry is, of course, a gorgeous visualization. However it's also a depressing documentation to the car-obsessed culture that America has fetishized since WWII.

Anyone can be free.

2008-04-23T14:02:00.005-05:00

It's been awhile since we've talked about design.

Paris-based designer/artist Arik Levy gave a lecture at the MCA last night, and it turns out he coincidentally has a show opening at Wright this Friday, entitled "Absent Nature". As well as a Martino Gamper (?!!?!!) exhibition in May. Very nice to see global design talent being exhibited in Chicago galleries. Up next: the Bouroullecs at Monique Meloche gallery?
Chen & Karlsson's "trash can" is one of those products that's so simple, so obvious and so painfully smart that it makes me want to quit. Fucking brilliant.
Maarten Baas: Plastic Chair in Wood. I'm so glad Maarten is able to take his crazy furniture dreams and make them a reality. I'm just happy his pieces can exist.
Parisian hipsters 5.5 Designers made a broom from a branch. (detail view) Nice.
Sawed-off USB key. Brilliant. The USB key is the new designer-staple-- everyone is designing one and formal and conceptual possibilities are most likely endless.
W�stberg. A new Swedish lighting company with a great opening 'manifesto' on how man overilluminates his spaces, as well as 4 remarkable new lamps. Sublime minimal forms from James Irvine and Claesson Koivisto Rune, but an especially notable lamp from Ilse Crawford... oddly awkward and strangely beautiful.
Twine Table by Wis Design. Cute as a button. (Sorry)

Toughguy

2008-04-07T21:43:00.001-05:00

Deadliest Catch

2008-04-07T16:41:00.001-05:00

On a recent flight back to Chicago from Virginia I sat next to the most inspiring and interesting dude. We were flying on Southwest, a budget airline that boards with a first-come-first-served method as opposed to a seat assignment. Luckily we get our own row, but near the end of boarding a twenty-something guy takes the aisle seat next to me. Right away I can tell he's a total Virginian gentleman: in a mild Southern accent he asks if he can take the seat, and he offers to grab some pillows from the overhead bin for Emily (who was still getting over the flu). What a decent dude, I think. I also noticed he had a sleeve of sailing-related tattoos on his arm, but I wasn't sure how that played into his obvious Southern-Virginian persona.

After he starts to strike up some conversation, (the typical 'where ya headed, whattaya do' stuff) it turns out he's from Lynchburg, VA but actually makes his living as a commercial fisherman on a boat in the Bering Sea. I was seriously impressed-- the guy's a real-deal fisherman on the high seas! He was on his way to Seattle, where he'll board a vessel and fish for halibut and black cod in the Pacific, all the way up to Alaska (and dungeness crab when the fish season's over). Not only is this one of the worlds most dangerous jobs, it's also quite lucrative, apparently. He's been doing it for 6 years-- spending the majority of the year on the sea and coming back to VA at the end of the season-- and says he's well on his way to 'retire' someday soon and buy a house in Virginia with cash. Brilliant. At this point, I'd never seen the show Deadliest Catch, but I began to get a sense of how seriously dangerous the job is-- as he said it, "It's not if the boat will sink, it's when". In fact, he lost some friends last year when their boat, The Ocean Challenger, when down-- he was actually a member of of the majority-Virginian crew mere weeks before the tragedy, but had decided to take a week off, since it was the end of the season. While he was getting some work done on his tattoo, the boat he just left was hit hit by a storm and capsized in 3-story-tall waves. Truly chilling.

What inspired me was the realness and honesty of his profession, but also interesting was his ability to talk about his career choice in almost a philosophical manner-- not only was he a hard working guy, but he had really figured out his philosophy on life. It was the most interesting airplane conversation I have ever had, and I'm still inspired. Best of luck Jeff, may you stay safe on your future voyages, and may the fishing season treat you well.

Whispered secrets

2008-03-25T18:50:00.001-05:00

I love the emptiness captured in Peter Baker's photography.
Carlo Rossi bottles = furniture.
Do this.
Band name of the week: PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE BIG!
Pole's latest podcast set for Resident Advisor is an absolute must-download. A brilliant blend of classic dub reggae & chest-crushing dubstep, all blended within Pole's minimalist echo-chamber.
Naz of Weightshift + GB (and a friend as well) uses Pinch as an example in his recent South By Southwest presentation on "Design is in the Details". I'm flattered!

Bike Lock 2.0

2008-03-19T12:11:00.004-05:00

Core77.com's One Hour Design Challenge: Design a better bike lock in one hour or less. I figured that since hipsters love to post pictures of their bikes on the web, why not let them post pictures of the thieves that steal them?

This image has been resized. Click for the full version.

Slink & Stop

2008-03-05T23:30:00.002-06:00

The Design Trust for Public Space is "dedicated to improving the design, utility, and understanding of New York City's parks, plazas, streets, and public buildings." I'm obsessed with the idea of doing design for the public space, so this organization hits right in the sweet spot for me. Their most highly profiled project thus far has been the research and redesign surrounding the NYC Taxi Project-- an amazing project (involving many designers, including Smart Design) that they have published entirely online in PDF format. It's quite a read-- theres a lot of sharp insights and smart recommendations in that document! The work and ideas on this site are so prolific and interesting, that I'm a bit overwhelmed at trying to sum it up in a micro blog post-- just click the link and see how design can actually affect peoples lives in a non-consumer context. I hope that someday I can use my passion for design-thinking to focus on public spaces.

BARACK OBAMA IS YOUR NEW BICYCLE.
Nicholas Felton is an amazing communication designer who does gorgeous info graphics for publications like Metropolis and the New York Times (as megafone), and creates really sharp "Annual Reports" about his life every year. I love it.
I'm addicted to Bee Comix-- specifically Motel Art Improvement Service.
Garfield Minus Garfield: "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let�s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb." A sheer genius concept.
Album of the month: Pole - Steingarten. Pole's first three albums have always been favorites of mine-- crackling and hissing, barely-there, minimal dub that's always entranced me with its nuanced textures. This album builds on those days-- it's definitely influenced by minimal dub-- but now it has a discernible backbone. One of my favorite tracks is the album closer- Pferd: Massive sub-bass, a tight snapping rhythm line, delicate synth tinkles, and droning loops build over time... with melodica, distorted bits, and snippets of-- (could it really be) guitar form a mild feeling of paranoid tension. Brilliant.

The Mixologist

2008-03-03T18:45:00.002-06:00

He feels really bad, and he should.

2008-02-11T18:08:00.001-06:00

My new favorite local Chicago band: Rue Royale. Guy/girl harmonies, acoustic guitars, ambiguous relationship outside of band, really nice songs that get stuck in your head. The whole package. And a record release party this weekend at Sub-T. Edit: Turns out they're a thinly veiled Christian band. This realization smacked me in the face during the third song of their show. I realized that the use of the word "you" was meant in the Biblical sense.
Speaking of local music, Chicago weirdo group Mahjongg is streaming their new album Kontpab, for free over at K Records' website. It's a pretty nice disc chock full of polyrhythmic drumming and David Byrne-influenced jams.
A Japanese TV spot for MUJI's ash bed & chair. This matched set is so perfect (and at the same time so perfectly obvious) that when the line "What happens naturally" appears on screen it makes my brain twist.
Rent the movie L'Iceberg. Don't read any reviews, just know that it's a dead-pan Belgian comedy, that it's almost completely silent, and has a very unique point-of-view. Also know that it's sheer genius.
My friend Evan, who photographed Pinch for me this summer, just launched his photography portfolio site over at Studiothomas.

Packing Vertically

2008-02-04T18:29:00.000-06:00

Totally

2008-01-25T18:39:00.000-06:00

Plastic Eraser

2008-01-24T17:58:00.000-06:00

Did I mention Emily has a new website where she sells her wares and blogs about the process? Her latest project-- the Audubon Series-- are collaged paintings that combine vintage prints of birds with rich texture. I'm biased, but I'll say they're gorgeous anyway.
Panopticon. So effing cool.
One of my favorite new webclips for the iphone is Seeqpod. It's like adding a whole other library of random songs on your phone. You can search or browse (in list format, just like the iPod/iPhone) and stream MP3s that are scoured from all over the web. A nice way to listen to embarrassing music without having to actually have it on your mobile device.
Simplify media for the iPhone? I can't wait until Apple opens the iPhone up to developers in March-- then I can do this without risking the brick.
I absolutely love Inga Sempe's 'Upholstered Metal Chair'. An iconic silhouette paired with a unique construction detail: extruded metal channels with inset "upholstery". Gorgeous. The second photo showing her assembling the chair is brilliant, too.
Album of the week I: Vampire Weekend. Intelligent and upbeat indie rock (Clap Your Hands... comes to mind) with an afro-pop (ok, maybe more like Paul Simon) twist, this stuff is smart as hell and catchy as all get out. A prime example is the track Walcott-- the string quartet break in the beginning absolutely floors me every time. The track A-Punk borders on ska, and that just makes me happy. that someone can pull that off these days, and not make me cringe with awkward memories. Highly recommended to ward of the winter blues.
Album of the week II: Bruno Pronsato - Why Can't We Be Like Us? A fresh perspective on minimal techno in 2008? Yes. And it's amazing. With *real* handclaps, *real* drums, Spanish conversations, piano riffs, warped/maniacal voices and all the dark minimal techno rhythms you might expect. Absolutely righteous.

What filled my ears the later half of 2007?

2008-01-20T13:39:00.001-06:00

So, not only did I skip my usual end-of-year music wrap-up, but I also didn't even mention what I was into for the last few months of the year. It's a little late, but I wanted to breeze through the albums that filled out my fall and early winter 2007.

When the leaves were turning into blazes of orange, red, and yellow, Emily and I went on a road trip from Chicago to Virginia. Along the way through the flats of Indiana & Ohio, and the mountains of West Virginia, the soundtrack consisted of the delicate acoustic melancholy of Jose Gonzales' In Our Nature, the sappy but endearing Burt Bacharach-stylings of Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala, and the 70's-inspired classic-rock of Iron & Wine's The Shepherd's Dog. Months later I haven't touched much of Gonzales' album (although it is quite good), but the Iron & Wine album has proven to be a strong one-- I would never guess that the minimalist guitar tunes of a younger Sam Beam could translate into maximalist rock tunes, but it really works.

A co-worker tuned me on to his friend's musical act, White Williams a few months prior to an amazing show consisting of Battles, Caribou, and White Williams in the Fall. William's remarkable Brian Eno-injected album, Smoke, bounced its way around my iPod shuffle for a few solid months. The new Caribou album, Andorra, was slow to catch my attention, but after an especially wonderful wall-of-sound performance, began to get more regular rotation.

The new Mum album, Go Smear the Poison Ivy provided the melodramatic soundtrack for the late Fall to early Winter-- their old formula of warm and clicky IDM evenly mixed with an Arcade Fire emotional treatment. Appropriate for me at the time.

An interesting mix of Mathew Jonson's unique electro-house and improvisational jams resulted in a notable Cobblestone Jazz album. Mixes from DJ Koze & Ricardo Villalobos filled the headphones, but dubstep really reared its head in the latter half of 2007 with some amazing releases from Vex'd, Boxcutter, and most importantly Burial. Burial's Untue, is most likely my 'top album-of-2007'. I'm not sure much more could (or should) be said at this point about this much critically-acclaimed album from an anonymous London producer, but I will say that this album's ability to capture the essence of 4am in a dirty, lonely and hazy urban dystopia is absolutely brilliant. The muffled-yet-emotional cries of an unknown voice over top of a sub-bass low-end rumble, layered with shuffling 2-step beats are absolutely moving on the track Etched Headplate. This album captured an aesthetic and an emotion that I haven't felt like this since I first heard DJ Shadow's Endtroducing over a decade ago. Powerful.

There was plenty of other music in there, but that was the new stuff that I normally would have interspersed in my posts. Here's to a new year of more frequent posting.

Washburne Trade School, Chicago Ill.

2008-01-20T13:09:00.000-06:00

Washburne is an abandoned school in the decaying shell of a factory on Chicago's West side.

Synthetic Funk

2008-01-18T17:47:00.000-06:00

Jolly Pong. Crank up the speakers for this one, kids.
Ben Katchor on Hello Beautiful, Chicago Public Radio. This interview has a few great nuggets that perfectly sum up why I love Katchor's scratchy comics which bring observations of minutiae in the modern world into a short storyline. His slightly detatched narrative runs above in almost an anthropological manner... or as the host of the radio show puts it, "The vaguely melancholic stories in his 8-panel comic strips reflect a fondness for the forgotten, the obscure, and the merely overlooked." And now a great quote from Katchor himself on where he gets his ideas for this work:
"I have this list of things I notice. Most of the good strips are based on some observation in the real world. You see something... going through your day, and it just resonates, with some sociopolitical/poetical meaning... and you just want to figure out what it all is... and you've seen the thing all your life, and you've never really looked at it... you gotta start by seeing it."
The Civil War in Four Minutes - I learned more from watching this cartographic animation than I did in 4 years of public school history class. Brilliant!
Sola - Float. This simple and striking music video is lo-fi brilliance.
Mathew Jonson on converting creative ideas into actual content:
"[Mathew] Jonson... talks at length about how the process of production is an attempt to recreate the music in his head: "If I go into a museum or art gallery, I'll hear music in my head - not a song, but a non-stop progression in real time. Often I hear something in my head which is far better than anything I could conceptualise or write ... I'm hoping as I get older I'll be better able to capture that."
I can certainly empathize with that.

Onion Fingers

2008-01-09T17:49:00.000-06:00

Pixelator by Jason Eppink is a beautiful subversion of public digital advertising.
Click & swirl. Click & swirl. Obtuse & brilliant.
Linked By Air - Ran across this interesting graphic design studio while doing some research at work. They seem to teach at Yale and Columbia and collaborate with Pentagram and 2x4 for a lot of their physical interactive work (like the interactive 'mirrors' in the SoHo Prada store). Not a bad resume. I also really like the concept for the AIGA Show: "We dropped the work off in the middle of the gallery, along with a pinup board, a bookcase, and a couple trolleys, and waited to see what would happen to it�" I like the oversized typographic encouragement to "MOVE ANYTHING/ BUT WITH CARE"
And speaking of 2x4, a great quote from their website:
"When we recently designed an exhibition of our work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, we were pressed to lay an illusory grid of order over our meanderings. That process forced us to accept certain things about our work. Its not coherent, how could it be? If there is any coherence it is a coherence of inquiry."
Scarred Street Low - Sizzling hot shoe from Alexander McQueen for Puma. The scarring bump detail is so nice.
The following is for reference only: nabe_logo.jpg
The 2007 Kokuyo Design Award winners have been announced. Unfortunately the site seems to only be in Japanese (Luckily Axis magazine had the descriptions in English), but most of the designs are so typically Japanese (intuitive and elegant), they speak for themselves. The Beetle Head marker would be amazing to use and the Number Clips are so obvious it hurts.
Practise studio. Lovely.

Magic Slippers!

2008-01-04T14:12:00.001-06:00

(See it larger)

So simple it's almost stupid.

I wish for this every morning as I groggily sweep my hand around under my bed searching for my slippers (a pair of wonderfully minimal linen slippers from MUJI). Then I put the left one on my right foot and the right one on my left foot. I realize this halfway to the kitchen to make coffee. I'm not a morning person.

This post was never posted, so I post-dated it and posted it, posthaste.

2007-12-20T09:04:00.000-06:00

Nijmegen, 1999
Jan Jelinek avec The Exposures - My Favorite Shop. Gorgeous video for a gorgeous song. It's like extending the moment after you awake in the morning, but beofre you open your eyes into a three and a half minute song.
MUJI world watch project especially nice is Industrial Facility's watch-- the numbers are engraved on the underside of the glass, so the hands pass beneath them!
Marina Bautier's work is so good it made me want to curl up in a ball. So I went to bed.

The ratio of turntables to microphones is 2:1

2007-11-30T12:48:00.000-06:00

From the Palms Out Mix Series: Zombie Disco Squad - "We'll House You" . Super tight British electro mix that's just dirty and down. The best track by far is Hijacks's Trouser Jazz, about halfway through. Totally recommended.
Caribou - Niobe - The euphoric final track from Caribou's latest record, Anadorra. Every album builds on the last, with this latest amping up the wall-of-sound shoegazer influence and mopey 60's pop melodies. I'm always amazed at how Caribou has grown and morphed over the years, and the live show has done the same-- I remember seeing him (them) play the empty bottle almost 5 years ago, wearing bunny masks for the entire show, and projecting eerie animations while two drummers banged out breakbeats. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when they co-headlined a show at the Metro with Battles, and they absolutely fill the room with a wave of sound and really show that they can control a crowd, even with relatively slow and subtle songs.
Philadelphia, 1963
"Taking the eco-piss": phrase coined by a coworker, which refers to using the urinal without turning on the lights in the restroom.
This absolutely gorgeous (and cinematic) short film by Sarah van Gameren about her Big Dipper chandelier elevates the process of creation to the level of fetish. (Almost Matthew Barney-esque?) The chandelier is of course beautiful, but the process by which it's created is really what gives it it's poetry. This is certainly one of the best examples of this recent wave of process-forward design that's been channeling out of England-- most of it straight out of RCA in London. (Max Lamb, Tom Price, to name only a few)
This STUHLHOCKERBANK (translation: chairstoolbank) is really breathtaking.
Chicago-centric urban planning nerd stuff: How a city street was erased from existence-- what once was the intersection of Ogden/Clark/Armitage, and why it dissappeared. Amazing stuff. Forgotten Chicago, is fairly new on the scene, but is certainly looking to be a treasure trove of cool stuff like this.

Autumn passed us by.

2007-11-29T18:38:00.000-06:00

At least there's still liquidity.