Dear Hollywood, you absolutely suck at making Weird Westerns

♪♫ Augustus Pablo - Pipers of Zion (Live in London 1989)

Neville Brody gets graphic in Ginza

Receive a New Year's card from the Royal Family of Jordan last year? No? Perhaps you recently opened a bottle of Dom Perignon, or read a copy of the U.K.'s Times newspaper, or saw the Johnny Depp film "Public Enemies"?

If so, then you have been exposed to the work of one of the most important graphic designers of our time, Neville Brody. And if not, then you have a chance to rectify the situation this month, by getting along to the Briton's solo exhibition at Ginza Graphic Gallery, in the upmarket Tokyo district.

Brody swept to fame in the 1980s for his bold designs for The Face magazine (a 1983 cover featured a photo of New Order's Stephen Morris — cropped to show only the musician's right eye and fringe) and album covers (Cabaret Voltaire's "Don't Argue," from 1987, has just its title superimposed on a red cross).

But don't go to "NB@ggg" expecting any of that work. The designer's first show in Japan since 1999 focuses on more recent jobs. The font and masthead he and his office, Research Studios, made for The Times in 2006 is included, as is the font he developed for "Public Enemies."

The real treats, though, are Brody's self-expressive posters. His "Free Thought" work is digital, but looks like it was made with a calligraphy brush.

And, if you want to see the New Year's card Brody did for the Jordanian king, you're going to have to just try to get on the list for next year. There's still six months left, and when the card comes, celebrate with a bottle of Dom Perignon — Brody did their label revamp in 2007.

"NB@ggg" continues at Ginza Graphic Gallery until June 28. For more information, visit
http://www.dnp.co.jp/gallery/ggg_e/index.html

Edan Corkill @'The Japan Times'

More photos at Neville Brody's Flickr stream
HERE

If anyone reading this is in Japan - I would love to get hold of a copy of the book published to coincide with this expo...

Please contact me at the e/mail address to the left or leave a comment.
Research

Smoking # 72

Me want...

The man flying it is Chen Zhao Rong a farmer with only a primary school education who had always dreamed of flying.
He made and welded all the body parts himself, checking his design against photos on the internet and bought a second hand motor. Overall the cost amounted to about RMB70,000 (less than US10,000).

Unfortunately after a few months of flying, when flying to another village, the engine stopped while doing 70km/h and he crashed into a field. While unhurt his wife threatned to leave him unless he stopped flying and the police made him sign a document stating he will never fly it again. He sold the chopper to a friend for RMB20,000.

Now on Facebook...

Mona Street

Road Tripping With Sufi Mystics

Nearly a year ago British author William Dalrymple set off on a world tour with Sufi mystics and stoned Bengali musicians to promote his new book, Nine Lives. He tells the story of his hilarious adventures from getting them through customs to calling forth a deity in Australia.

@'Daily Beast'

Soul Of A Man

"A simmering gumbo of hypnotic beats, wailing voices and shivering guitars" Uncut

Skip ‘Little Axe’ McDonald, the legendary blues guitarist, might not have sold his soul at the crossroads, but he’s looked both ways down the road of the old blues, up the highway of the future before proceeding. After a series of studio-based albums, Little Axe have returned to their roots on Bought For a Dollar, Sold For a Dime. For the first time in seventeen years the original crew came together in the Big Room at Real World for this rare and privileged session, with McDonald and his co-producer, British dub maestro Adrian Sherwood.
Featuring soul singer Bernard Fowler, drummer Keith LeBlanc, bassist Doug Wimbish, all of whom made up the seminal British outfit, Tackhead, a band whose pioneering devices are now integral aspects of rap and pop. LeBlanc, Wimbish and McDonald had previously blazed a trail as The Sugarhill Gang, house band of the famed early ‘80s rap label Sugar Hill Records; they were, quite probably, the most important rhythm section on the planet.
Real World’s state-of-the-art facilities opened its arms to other collective regulars, and the result is a live album, Little Axe-style.

“Soul of a Man” (mp3)
from “Bought for a Dollar / Sold for a Dime”
@'Mundovibe'

Your brain sees your hands as short and fat

Knowing something like the back of your hand supposedly means that you’re very familiar with it. But it could just as well mean that you think it’s wider and shorter than it actually is. As it turns out, our hands aren’t as well known to us as we might imagine. According to Matthew Longo and Patrick Haggard from University College London, we store a mental model of our hands that helps us to know exactly where our limbs are in space. The trouble is that this model is massively distorted.

To keep track of where your various body parts are, your brain maps your posture by processing information from your muscles, joints and skin. Close your eyes and move around a bit, and you’ll still have a good idea of what position you’re in even if you can’t see or touch yourself. But there’s no such direct signal that tells your brain about the size and shape of your body parts. Instead, your brain stores a mental model with those dimensions mapped out.

To visualise this model, Longo and Haggard asked volunteers to hide their hand under a board and use a baton to indicate the position of ten landmarks – the tip and base knuckle of each finger. Their answers were surprisingly inaccurate.

They underestimated the lengths of their fingers by anywhere from around 5% for their thumb and over 35% for their ring and little fingers. In contrast, they overestimated the width of their hand by around 67%, and particularly the distance between their middle and ring knuckles. Our mental hand is a shorter, wider version of our real one. Longo and Haggard found the same thing if they asked the recruits to angle their hands at 90 degrees under the board, and if they tested the right hand as well as the left.

These distortions actually reflect how sensitive each part of the hand is. The skewed mental map is remarkably similar to another map called Penfield’s homunculus, which charts the areas of the brain’s somatosensory cortex (the bit that processes touch information) that is devoted to each body part. Regions that have a more acute sense of touch correspond to larger parts of the homunculus, but they also loom bigger in our mental map. Regions that are less sensitive are smaller on both charts.

As we move from the thumb to the little finger, our digits become less sensitive and the mental map increasingly underestimates their true size. The back of the hand is more sensitive to movement across it than movement along it; accordingly, our mental map depicts a wider, shorter hand.

And we have no idea about this. Consciously, the volunteers had a pretty good appreciation of the size and shape of their hands. When Longo and Haggard showed them a selection of hand images and asked them to select the one that best matched their own, they did so very accurately. But even though they passed this test, they still failed to place the baton in the right place when their hands were hidden.

If we hold such a distorted depiction of our own hands, how is it that we ever grasp things successfully? It’s possible that our motor system uses a different model but Longo and Haggard put forward two more plausible ideas: that cues from vision are strong enough to override the warped map; and that we learn to correct for the misshapen model. Only by removing both of these factors did they finally reveal how skewed our perceptions actually are.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003483107

Image: Hands by Toni Blay

@'Discover'