Sunday, 20 June 2010
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
http://www.dnp.co.jp/gallery/ggg_e/index.html
Edan Corkill @'The Japan Times'
More photos at Neville Brody's Flickr stream
HERE
Research
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
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).
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.
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.
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”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
U.S. Testing Pain Ray in Afghanistan
OK, OK. Maybe that isn’t precisely the logic being employed by those segments of the American military who would like to deploy the Active Denial System to Afghanistan. I’m sure they’re telling themselves that the generally non-lethal microwave weapon is a better, safer crowd control alternative than an M-16. But those ray-gun advocates better think long and hard about the Taliban’s propaganda bonanza when news leaks of the Americans zapping Afghans until they feel roasted alive.
Because, apparently, the Active Denial System is “in Afghanistan for testing.”
An Air Force military officer and a civilian employee at the Air Force Research Laboratory are just two of the people telling Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger that the vehicle-mounted “block 2″ version of the pain ray is in the warzone, but hasn’t been used in combat.
[Update: "We are currently not testing the Active Denial System in Afghanistan," Kelley Hughes, spokesperson for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, tells Danger Room.
So I ask her: Has it been tested previously? She hems and haws. "I'm not gonna get into operational," Hughes answers.
Hughes also disputes the assertion that Active Denial creates a burning feeling. "It's an intolerable heating sensation," she says. "Like opening up an oven door."]
For years, the military insisted that the Active Denial System — known as the “Holy Grail” of crowd control — was oh-so-close to battlefield deployment. But a host of technical issues hampered the ray gun: everything from overheating to poor performance in the rain. Safety concerns lingered; a test subject had to be airlifted to a burn center after being zapped by the weapon. (He eventually made a full recovery.) And then there were concerns about “the atmospherics” — how the locals might react — when they learned that the United States had turned a people-roaster on ‘em. “Not politically tenable,” the Defense Science Board concluded.
I pinged Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff about the use of Active Denial in Afghanistan. I’ll let you know if I hear anything back. But a few months ago, a source told me that a representative from the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was in Afghanistan. Did that mean Active Denial was about to be put into action? Nope, the source said. “She’s just out getting some atmospherics on the use of non-lethals.”
Update 2: “The active denial system is in the country,” e-mails Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for Gen. McChrystal. “However, it has not been used operationally and no decision has been made at this time to deploy it.”
HA!
The England team visited an orphanage in Cape Town today. "It's heartbreaking to see their sad little faces with no hope" said Jamal aged 6.
ChasLicc Bad news: #Socceroos back to 1-1 against Ghana. Good news: They're still 1-0 up against the Animal Kingdom in the Optus ad.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Coming soon...
This is the first official poster for The Social Network — David Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.
The film opens on October 1.
The film opens on October 1.
Essay by Naomi Klein
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism
‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.’ Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters
Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world
SageFrancisSFR Warner Music Group had my "Best of Times" video blocked from Youtube. No proper cause. We'll fix that
“Kill Switch” Would Give Obama Power To Turn Off The Internet
Why doe it seem like it’s always Joe Lieberman who thinks of these great ideas? From the Sydney Morning Herald:
US President Barack Obama would be granted powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a US “national asset.”
The proposed legislation, introduced into the US Senate by independent senator Joe Lieberman, who is chairman of the US Homeland Security committee, seeks to grant the President broad emergency powers over the internet in times of national emergency.
Titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act,” the bill stipulates any internet firms and providers must “immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by a new section of the US Department of Homeland Security, dubbed the “National Centre for Cybersecurity and Communications.”
Lobby group TechAmerica told ZDNet it worried that the bill would give the US “absolute power” over the internet and create “unintended consequences.”
Jacob Sloan @'Disinfo'
Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton is a brainy actress who swings easily from passion indie projects (The Deep End, Julia and the upcoming I Am Love) to studio fare, from arch-villains to objects of desire, and from mother in the Scottish highlands to glamourous globe-trotting movie star. She won an Oscar as George Clooney’s nemesis in Michael Clayton, made love to Clooney in Burn After Reading and Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and keeps turning up in Narnia as ice queen Jadis. (After her cameo in The Limits of Control, she’s committed to star in Jim Jarmusch’s next, whatever that turns out to be.) She’s as beautiful without makeup as she is with it. The next passion project she is developing is in collaboration with this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul. They’ve known each other for years. (UPDATE: He talks about her at Cannes.)
In our three-part flip-cam interview, Swinton talks about her long-in-the-works Italian film I Am Love (a trailer is below), which opens limited this Friday. (Erica Abeel writes a rave.) She’s extraordinary as an Italian aristocrat who thinks she knows who she is but falls off a cliff when she falls in love with a young friend of her son. Sensual and erotic, the film is an art house hit in England and Spain (less so in Italy). Next up: the July 23 reissue of Swinton’s breakout role as the androgynous lead in Sally Potter’s movie of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I first saw at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. (The film earned two Oscar nominations, for Sandy Powell’s costumes and best art direction by Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs.)
Also fascinating to many of us is Swinton’s love life, which is less exotic than it appears: John Byrne, the father of her children, is not her husband and remains married, technically, to a Catholic. Swinton and Byrne broke up six years ago, after fifteen years together, and stayed friendly and for a time under the same roof for the sake of their twins; he now lives in a house nearby. While her boyfriend, painter Sandro Kopp, has occasionally stayed with her in Nairn, for the most part they travel together, and she spends time with her kids when she’s in Scotland. Every three weeks she’s home or the kids come to see her, is the rule.
When she’s not acting or producing or mothering, she has long enjoyed film festivals and performance art and has combined them playfully (in league with film historian Mark Cousins) in a series of events, from the 2008 and 2009 Cinema of Dreams to the upcoming Edinburgh Film Festival’s Flash Mob. As you can see from this interview, Swinton is both serious and great fun.
Find more videos like this on AnneCam
Find more videos like this on AnneCam
Find more videos like this on AnneCam
FuckFonts
Tony Grieger takes the photographic alphabet a step further with some abstraction. The full alphabet was first published in Menschenalphabete (Human Alphabets) by Fritz Franz Vogel. Here's Q:
The French painter Joseph Apoux created an alphabet in the 1880s of decorated capital letters that manages to offend both the general sense of decency and commit blasphemy at the same time. Here, in the C, a nun gives a blow job to a hooded, elderly monk holding a whip.
Peter Flötner's all-caps human alphabet of 1534 is the earliest example, with its classically nude figures (he later added briefs). There are only a few interactions, such as in the A, where two women kiss while holding each other's arms, or the H, which is a man and woman holding hands.
In this dedicational drawing, Salvador Dalí writes the names of two friends, Paul Eluard and his wife (and Dali's mistress), Gala, using explicit poses.
Full story
@'Playboy'
@'Playboy'
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