art of picture gallery: August 2006

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The return of the automat.

Hey, Herwig - they're coming back, man.

NYT :: Hyperion Starts Imprint to Help Women Whittle the Book Choices

Voice is specifically focusing on women from their mid-30’s and older and will have a resolutely anti-chick-lit bent, said its founders.

Ms. Archer said she wanted to start Voice, in part, to publish books that addressed issues she felt were largely ignored by the news media. “I felt that I, as a 44-year-old woman, working, married and a mother, did not see my life reflected in any of the media stories,” she said, referring to newspaper and magazine articles chronicling the battles between working and stay-at-home mothers and the choices that educated women were making to quit their careers to raise families. “I wanted to create a demographic of women in their mid-30’s to later that could better illustrate the landscape of a woman’s life.”

NYT :: Hyperion Starts Imprint to Help Women Whittle the Book Choices

(via mediabistro.com)

Normal Timepieces.

I love these. I'm giving a detail shot of my favorite.

Normal Timepieces

(Via MoCo Loco - Modern contemporary design & architecture)

Photos: Styleshop NUTS

Monday, August 28, 2006

Travel + Leisure Design Awards | 2006

A few interesting picks on this one. I was so intrigued by the Cultural Spaces choice that I looked up more info about it.

There is something brutally beautiful about these rows of massive concrete slabs in central Berlin. Eisenman's Holocaust memorial was embroiled in controversy at the outset, but it has transcended politics to embody the sheer weight of history. "The effect is visceral rather than didactic," the jury concluded. The grand scale and uncompromising austerity of the design have refigured the heart of the city, bringing visitors together only to enforce a kind of solitude as they wander single file through the maze.

T+L Design Awards | 2006

More information about The Concrete Memory memorial here.

French Heart-Shaped Sugar

Delicate molded hearts are notched to hang elegantly from the side of coffee and tea cups. Includes white, amber and ebony cane-sugar hearts. Product of France. 9-oz. total weight.

Sur La Table :: Sucres Accroche-Coeur

(via the fabulous Fabulist!)

Flat Christmas trees.

I don't decorate for Christmas - I figure everyone else does, so I'll just enjoy the fruits of their efforts. If I did, though, I might consider these.

Back4 :: flatpack xtree light

Prague mirror memorial.

As far as I can tell, this is a memorial/monument to the fall of Communism in 1989. It's located somewhere around/in Prague. It looks stunning. (Czelt, can you shed any light on this?)

sporadical s.r.o. :: Pomník obětem komunismu - Liberec, realizace, 1. cena ve veřejné soutěži

(via Eric Morehouse's eye candy)

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Defamer tells it like it is.

Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank will put their ambisexual chemistry to the test in P.S. I Love You, a movie we will not see because it is called P.S. I Love You.

Defamer, the L.A. Gossip Rag

Arson as disclipline?

I wonder if this is actually true or just a crazy artist's statement.

In certain parts of rural Sweden an old traditional law still stands. If a child under the age of 18 commits a serious offence and is convicted of the crime, he or she is NOT sent to a correctional facility. Instead, state firemen show up at the child's home and ceremonially burn the house to the ground.

It is hoped that by being made an example of, other parents will keep control of their children's behavior. The system seems to work as a house is only burned once every 12 to 15 years.

Sean Rogg :: Wood

(via VVORK)

" Fuckin' PLUTO, bitches."

Not much makes me laugh out loud at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, but this did. Matt Fraction goes off about Pluto's non-planetary status.

See? Right there, on the bottom-right. Fuckin' PLUTO, bitches.

We've already TOLD THE ALIENS we think PLUTO IS A PLANET. Now if they FIND THE PLAQUE and come say hello, and suddenly we're all, "What, no, we're an eight-planet solar system, buddieth; we have a selection of dwarf planets you might have seen on your way in, but those, in spite of having sufficent mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces to assume hydrostatic eqiulibrium, haven't cleared the neighborhood around its orbit and that little insignificant speck there you saw on your way in overlaps with our REAL last planet, Neptune..."

Way to go. Way to make us look like a bunch of dipshits to the spacemen.

Read the whole tirade here.

(via linkbunnies.org)

Friday, August 25, 2006

I look like Serena Williams.

Ha! Wow. I *love* that.

MyHeritage face recognition :: Find the Celebrity in You

(Many thanks to fusenumber8 for the laugh.)

Graniph German bags.

I can't tell what to make of this company. They're in Japan, but they have loads of German language goods. I particularly love these.

graniph :: bag

It's all about the boxes and lines, baby.

Since this is the meat of my job, I get very excited when I see this sort of list...

Vitaly Friedman's Notebook: List of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flow-charts

(Again, via Design Observer.)

Library rock!

One of the most charming stories I've heard on This American Life.

Act One. Dewey Decibel System. Alex Blumberg tells the story of an audacious act of rebranding done by a group of people who aren't normally thought of as very audacious: public librarians. In Michigan, they've started staging rock concerts in libraries. The band that's been thrown into the experiment – The High Strung – couldn't be more perfect for the job. (22 minutes)

This American Life | Image Makers

The High Strung official web site.

(fyi - This one's going out to my new fave librarian, fusenumber8.)

New Helmut Krone book.

There's a new book out about one of the advertising design greats. Check out this great Design Observer article about it.

Design Observer :: Helmut Krone, Period.

Do the trees get a commission?

I've run across this story a few times in the last few months, and keep stopping to look. I hope he put bow ties on the trees the day of the opening.

Tim Knowles will create a large scale tree drawing where multiple pens are tied to the tips of tree branches, as the tree sways in the wind the pens draw onto a panel of paper below. These will be presented alongside, amongst other things, works from a recently completed series of Full Moon photographs which document the path drawn by each of the twelve annual full moons reflected on undulating water, which although completely beyond the artists control are reminiscent of Surrealist photographic experiments.

Rokeby :: Tim Knowles

The kind of contest I love.

Powell's Books :: Win a Trip to Portland

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Another book on the wishlist.

I've seen two reviews of this today, and it sounds great. Has anyone out there read it?

U.S.! is a playful, darkly comic novel that imagines the serial resurrection and assassination of tireless muckraker and writer Upton Sinclair. In Chris Bachelder's wonderful world, Sinclair is repeatedly brought back to life by beleaguered but optimistic leftists (whose refrain is "Hope and Shovels Forever"), and then gunned down (and once harpooned) by those seeking fame, fortune and American business as usual. As he grows more and more politically and culturally insignificant, Sinclair keeps writing his embarrassingly bad muckraking novels and continues risking his life for the Socialist revolution, which is perpetually just around the corner.�U.S.! is not only a satire of American politics and culture, but an exploration of the possibilities and problems of political art.

Bloomsbury.com :: US!

Catchy headline.

Hundreds Of Human Body Parts Recalled

Josh Keyes :: Paintings and Drawings

I'm kind of ambivalent about the paintings and drawings, but I LOVE his tiny plastic models.

Josh Keyes: Paintings and Drawings

Vamos a Ironyland.

Banning a book because it doesn't accurately portray repression??? Heaven forbid this book actually incite discussion with children about the difference between opinion and fact or truth and fiction.

Their oppressor is a 32-page book from the Vamos series, which had been in Miami-Dade public school libraries for five years before anyone complained. During that time, no one had questioned why Vamos a Colombia fails to mention decades of kidnappings by leftist guerrillas or why Vamos a China omits any mention of the millions who starved during Mao's Great Leap Forward. But after one parent's initial complaint, critics of Vamos a Cuba came out of the woodwork. The book's reference to July 26 as a dance-happy "carnaval" was off-base, critics said, because under Castro, the day had become little more than a joyless, speech-filled commemoration of the revolution. Rock paintings described in the book as 1000 years old actually dated to the Sixties. And as for chicken and rice being the favorite dish in Cuba: How are you going to eat chicken and rice if there's a shortage of both?

[...] Amador was hardly the first parent to object to a book his child brought home from school. Works such as J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye are frequently challenged. The past few months alone have seen school district challenges to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in California and Calvin and Hobbes, a cartoon collection by Bill Watterson, in Illinois. (On April 4, the day Amador filed his complaint, Miami's national book-reading campaign, the Big Read, opened; the book chosen for mass consumption was Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, the story of a future totalitarian state where books are banned and burned by the government.)

Removing a book altogether is another story, said Deborah Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom. Federal courts have upheld children's rights to access books, except when they are deemed to contain 'gross inaccuracies or age-inappropriate subject matter or vocabulary,' Stone said. But removal of books is not unheard of: Since 1993, 257 books have been temporarily or permanently banned from school libraries, while 35 have been banned from public libraries since 1995.

Miami New Times :: Commie Book Ban

(And, as a side note, who let a title like "Commie Book Ban" go to press?)

Art by Darran.

A terrible site, and pop art that's just this side of cheesy -- but I can kinda see Columbo or The Krays looking quite fab on my walls. And you can't really go wrong with Audrey.

Darran Slater

Oh, man. I need this book.

The nonist is absolutely right. It IS hot enough to be porn. At least for book lovers.

Yesterday I came across a truly gorgeous book of photographs by Candida Höfer titled, Libraries, a title which pretty much says it all, because that is just exactly what it is, one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another.