Brightwash

The Sixth Sense. “It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.” Created by the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT, it’s really neat! But just a prototype for now – it currently looks like a bird cage toy! Oh and you get to paint your nails different colors (a la ice truck killer!) OR wear marker caps on them. Sounds like my kind of future.
See the video from the TED conference.

It feels wonderful, for once, to be so unoriginal, to be lost in this enormous planetary crowd and to share this crowd’s wishes, its excitement, its probable coming delight.

– Momus

Photo from an excellent series by Callie Shell

Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists – musicians, writers, poets, painters – are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

Taken from “The Creative Personality” via The New Shelton Wet/Dry

Image by Wang Qingsong

Quietly wait for the catastrophe of your personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Tell that punk to find a cardboard box, put all his things in it and get out of here.

One reason concerts are alive and records are dead is that there’s a new value in things which can’t be uploaded as digital content to the internet. I call this phenomenon “the post-bit atom”. It also explains why the art market is booming. Art and music have become social occasions. An art opening or a concert (or, even better, an art opening with a concert included) is a chance for people who spend all day in front of computer screens to see their fellow human beings and share an intense, loud, colourful, real experience with them.

Art and music are also “distinction machines”: efficient ways for people to sum up complex clusters of values — social, political, aesthetic and ethical — and connect with like-minded souls. None of this is going to become less important any time soon.

The golden ratio and it’s occurrences in nature, math, geometry and art is interesting stuff. As far as math goes, the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are so easy to wrap your head around:

In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.
A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden spiral.

It’s said that aesthetically people prefer shapes that employ the golden ratio for proportion. I’ve never tried using this number in design, but last week I came across the Phiculator, it’s a simple flash application that does the math for you. You enter in a dimension and it will calculate the corresponding dimension based on the golden ratio. I know it’s not hard math to do (divide your larger side by 1.618), but the calculator makes it funner.

At some point I created a point system, like breaking my life down into categories, and then in each category trying to achieve certain things in a week’s time. Every Sunday night I would tally up what I had achieved, for a total possible of 35 points. It was mind, body, career, personal management/ relationship contribution. It was pretty funny. It was really ambitious in retrospect. The stuff I set out to do each week was pretty much impossible.

– Demetri Martin

Today I found out two things. #1: Lou Reed is playing the Norva on April 25th. I’m into old Lou Reed and want to go out of curiosity, although I’m not real current on the goings on of Lou Reed. I hate it when the classics only play their new stuff even though I can see why they would. #2: Stefan Sagmeister is giving a presentation, I assume in support of his new book, on April 18th at the Contemporary Art Center in Virginia Beach. Interesting: These two have collaborated a couple times, here is a link to a kind of old interview/conversation.

Whenever I do something that needs a little bit of my guts, it turns out fine and whenever I go the wimpy way, it doesn’t.

– Stefan Sagmeister

I also “found out” (realized) the ladies at the bagel shop actually look like bagels. As close as people could look to bagels – pale and doughy and the same everyday. That’s probably mean, but they are too, I guess the bagels and me make them cranky.

And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he’s such an unprecedented figure in American politics—so much so that everything he’s trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal.

I think it’s much more incontrovertible that he’s actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that’s not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition—but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

– Michael Beirut

Our generation has no choice but to indulge in a revised futurism beyond the historically-anchored concept of Futurism. Uninhibited time-shifting and multi-directional time-travel are more advanced than constantly pushing the seams of forward progress. With no new territory, we cannot simply be the New Adventures of Lewis and Clark to etch our names in heavy tomes. We must move back and forth, side to side in our honest attempt to break new ground.

-W. David MARX, Neojaponisme Manifesto

Despite it’s narrow color scheme, Neojaponisme covers a wide range of topics in depth. I love essay blogs, even if this one calls my blog content into question … “#5. We refuse to abandon the Net to hollow carbohydrates!” Also see it’s less formal companion, Meta no Tame.

An interesting interview with Peter Saville. He did the graphic design for Factory Records as well as a few album covers for Pulp (J.C. is Dan’s boy). It’s been my opinion that Saville is little overrated and arrogant, but this interview changed my perception of him a bit.

On Factory and designing record covers:

Complete liberty… Strangely out of disinterest. It was New Order’s disinterest and agreed policy of disagreement that allowed it.

I had this kind of autonomous moment, which arose within the context of Factory, for a decade, which was unlike any similar situation that I have experienced since and it’s very unlikely to happen again. The many circumstances of Factory itself; Ian Curtis’ death, the whole range of things that happened, created this autonomous platform, with a very large reach, to do what I wanted.

Referenced in the interview is the Style Mixer, which I just discovered in flash format.

John from Cincinnati is this new show on HBO that I initially resisted. I started watching it because A. I’m home most Sunday nights and B. my parents watch anything on HBO.

Mitch Yost is an aging surf legend, forced to retire after a knee injury, who now runs a surf shop in Imperial Beach and broods over his failure. His son, Butchie, was also a huge star in the family business — but is now a bitter heroin addict, living in a run-down hotel. Butchie’s surfing prodigy son, Shaun, lives with Mitch and his wife, Cissy.
Into the lives of this dysfunctional family comes John Monad, a mysterious young man with a habit of repeating what other people say. Immediately, strange things start happening — a dead parrot comes back to life, Butchie doesn’t suffer withdrawal symptoms, and Mitch starts to spontaneously levitate.
Slowly, other people around the Yosts are drawn into the strange happenings — a sleazy surfing promoter, a starstruck young filmmaker, an eccentric lottery winner, a Vietnam vet.
The new series, created by Deadwood producer David Milch and surf noir novelist Kem Nunn, examines the connections that tie people together, and shows what happens to damaged people when a force of healing comes into their lives.

The interest in this show for me (aside from the good music and filming) is speculating about who/what John Monad is or represents. Initially it seemed like he was either: retarded, psychic, god, or the devil. He doesn’t eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom. So that rules out retarded or psychic. Currently I’m leaning towards Jesus or John the Baptist.

(from Greek monas “unit”), an elementary individual substance that reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived. The term was first used by the Pythagoreans as the name of the beginning number of a series, from which all following numbers derived. Giordano Bruno in De monade, numero et figura liber (1591; “On the Monad, Number, and Figure”) described three fundamental types: God, souls, and atoms. The idea of monads was popularized by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Monadologia (1714). In Leibniz’s system of metaphysics, monads are basic substances that make up the universe but lack spatial extension and hence are immaterial. Each monad is a unique, indestructible, dynamic, soullike entity whose properties are a function of its perceptions and appetites. Monads have no true causal relation with other monads, but all are perfectly synchronized with each other by God in a preestablished harmony. The objects of the material world are simply appearances of collections of monads.

Cincinati, the city, was named after a society of sorts that took its name from Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus of Ancient Rome, who left his farm to accept a term as Roman Consul and then served as Magister Populi for a short time, thereby assuming near-dictatorial control of Rome to meet a war emergency. When the battle was won, he returned power to the Senate and went back to plowing his fields. The Society’s motto reflects that ethic of selfless service: Omnia relinquit servare rempublicam - He relinquished everything to serve the Republic.

Yes, I know I shouldn’t think about TV this much.

This past Wednesday Anna-Claire took me to see Gogol Bordello at the 9:30 Club for our birthdays. They played for 2 hours and it was the most energetic event I’ve ever seen. This put me into a Eugene Hutz google frenzy which led to the Pied Piper of Hutzovina and “Music on the Bones”:

At that time, you could only buy Soviet music on vinyl. But the bootleggers had figured out a way to make contraband records by getting old x-ray plates, which were then made of vinyl, through connections at various hospitals. Then they’d get hold of the equipment to cut the record grooves into the x-rays.