These fine art pieces from digital realist Bert Monroy aren’t exactly my taste, but they’re technical marvels at least. Monroy creates them entirely with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, and without using scans of any kind — which is an amazing if somewhat pointless feat.

Bremsstrahlung Recordings has a nifty Web site designed by Fällt that emulates the old System 6 Macintosh operating system. It’s a slavish imitation, actually, which is pretty amusing, though it would’ve been a home run if they’d done it in Flash and given the interface some real responsiveness.

“The University of Tulsa is one of six schools in the nation that will train elite squadrons of computer security experts — America’s ‘Cyber Corps’ — to form the country’s first line of defense against Internet hackers and terrorists.”Sponsored by the National Science Foundation as part of the Federal Cyber Service Initiative.

Desktop publishing doesn’t really get a lot of press anymore, but it’s truly amazing how far it’s come, even in the past ten years. A Behavior client needed some quick’n’dirty business cards using designs from an in-progress identity development project, so I went out and bought a pack of Avery Clean Edge Ink Jet Business Cards. They're blank, perforated letter-size sheets that run through an ink jet printer. With their ingenious, invisible perforations, and the astonishing print quality of my Epson Stylus C80, it’s almost impossible to tell the end product didn’t come from an offset printing press.

It’s been a slow month for posts, due in part by my trip last week to California to see family. Anyway, I’m back this evening. And feeling jet lagged.

“Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” is one of the last shows that will hang in the current MoMA space before it closes this week for a complete rebuild. If you can catch it between now and tomorrow when it ends, it’ll be worth nearly every moment of your time (make sure to rent the audio tour too). I found the first floor of the show to be a mixed bag, but I left the second floor with a new appreciation of Richter as one of the giants of painting.I had a much less uniform reaction to the Whitney 2002 Biennial, which goes to great pains to present a multiplicity of art world snapshots, with many painful results. I’d say fully one half of the show was dismissable, but there were a few gems in there, notably Jim Campbell’s “Fifth Avenue Cutaway #1.”

It’s true that “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones” is superior to its immediate predecessor, but it’s still not much of a movie.

Lucas, while stubborn as ever in his refusal to completely excise Jar Jar Binks, has nevertheless acquiesced to fan pressure by creating 132 minutes of the stuff that fans have been dying to see for two-plus decades: massive lightsaber battles, the secret origin of Boba Fett (which is a truly superfluous subplot), the inner workings of the Jedi Council, the corruption of Anakin Skywalker, and, most tellingly, one climactic scene in which Yoda kicks ass.

Continue Reading

With every effort, I’m trying to maintain reasonable expectations for “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.” Though I’ve avoided reading any reviews, the critics seem to be dimissive. On the other hand, everybody I know who’s seen it so far thinks it’s a great improvement over the last installment. I just want to get carried away for two hours when I see it tonight at 10:30p.

It’s an off-week for me. Work is a little slow and my personal life is out of whack. With a bit luck though, I’ll be back on my feet tomorrow, or the next day…

“The Real Reality Show” is an idea I’ve got for the ultimate reality television show. Six teams of producers, writers and directors are sequestered on a Hollywood backlot. Their goal: develop and pitch a unique reality television show idea. “The Real Reality Show” follows them through twelve weeks as they develop and produce their concept. At the end, the network selects one show that will appear on the following fall’s programming schedule. After that, I would outlaw all reality shows.

Fortune tells the remarkable story of what it takes to launch a Krispy Kreme franchise: US$2 million startup capital and US$5 million personal net worth, for starters. But you get all the Krispy Kremes you could ever want…

Forbes Magazine has a catty if amusing article on the ugliest buildings in the world. The list rightly includes both the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame and the Experience Music Project, both horrific expressions of dumb, dumb ideas.

I’m not mentioning Spider-Man here because of the movie’s killer box office returns or its disappointingly heavy-handed second half. Rather, I thought I should note that long-time “Spider-Man” comic book artist John Romita, Jr. is continuously sketching Spider-Man right now in Times Square for fans, going for a record of 48 straight hours. That may sound kind of stupid, but he’s selling each sketch for US$25, with the goal of raising money for his niece’s chemotherapy treatment. Pretty remarkable.

Apple has announced the winners of its annual Apple Design Awards for excellence in software design — all Mac OS X programs.

I knew Bridget Cross briefly in the early nineties, when I was living in D.C. She’s run across some terrible luck: while camping in Alaska with her boyfriend, they were roughed up by some local racists and wound up in jail with what could turn out to be US$100,000 in legal fees. This Web site tells all about it, and there’s a link for donations too.

SaveInternetRadio.org: “America's fledgling Internet radio industry could be effectively killed on May 21st if the Librarian of Congress (1) accepts the recommendations of its recent Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (“CARP”) concerning Internet radio royalty rates and (2) sets impossibly-complex recordkeeping requirements.”

In a world in which security now means electronic privacy and 128-plus-bit encryption technologies as much as it means a deadbolt on the door of your suburban home, Hollywood has re-imagined historical matters of national security as the province of seminal geeks, crytographers and math geniuses. Witness the probably overrated “A Beautiful Mind” which looks too awful for me to bring myself to see, or the upcoming “Windtalkers,” directed by John Woo, which tells the tale of Native American human code bearers in World War II. Last weekend I saw “Enigma,” the British version of this same conceit — which features a highly qualified cast but unfortunately amounts to little.