Stereo Stack

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A collection of amusingly enthusiastic banners promoting stereo technology, captured from old vintage records. I bet something similarly entertaining could be compiled from contemporary computer and electronics packaging, where logos and insignias tout quickly outdated technologies.

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2010 Additions to the National Film Registry

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The Library of Congress announced the addition of twenty-five films to the National Film Registry today. Some of them, like “All the President’s Men” seem overdue, but others, like “Airplane!” are inspired and welcome. It was a big year for George Lucas, too; both “The Empire Strikes Back” and his legendary 1967 student film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” were also added. Read the full press release.

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Basic Maths Post-Xmas Sale Starts Today

Last year my friend Allan Cole and I decided to put Basic Maths, our Subtraction.com-based theme for WordPress, on sale for the week right after Christmas. We figured it would be a nice opportunity for people who might have had the week off of work and were thinking about overhauling their blogs to get their hands on our theme for a third-off the normal pricing. The response was unexpectedly strong — who knew so many folks would have blogging on their minds during the quietest week of the year — and so this holiday season, with a new update recently released, we’ve decided to do it again: Basic Maths is on sale through the last day of the year for 33% off the regular price, bringing it down to just US$30. If you haven’t already got your copy — and remember, the new version includes a terrific mobile-friendly version of the blog theme — here’s your chance to get a great deal. But hurry, it only runs for a few days and we won’t put it on sale again for at least another year. Click here to read more or buy a copy.

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A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

In general I enjoy the holiday season, but I have a tepid relationship with Christmas music. That is, unless what’s playing is the phenomenal album “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector.” This 1963 release features a dozen sterling tracks from a few of Spector’s then-current stable of artists: The Crystals, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans, The Ronettes and Darlene Love, whose definitive performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is probably my favorite holiday song of all time. This is a wonderful, wonderful record.

Read a little bit more about this album over at Aquarium Drunkyard, or download the tracks from Amazon.com for a mere US$5.00. That’s a gift in and of itself. And have yourself a merry little Christmas, everyone.

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A Sketchbook Book

If you’re still looking for a great holiday present, It’s not too late to run down to your local bookseller or order overnight delivery for this terrific book I just got my hands on: it’s called “Graphic: Inside the Sketchbook of the World’s Great Graphic Designers,” and it’s another production from the prolific Steven Heller, who co-edited the book with Lita Talarico.

Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to be included within the 352 pages of drawings, doodles, paintings, collage and random visual goodness from over one hundred prominent graphic designers. On page 340 (the book is organized alphabetically by last name) you’ll find about a dozen sample pages taken from the many sketchbooks that I’ve kept over the years. In addition to my own work, there are samples from a ton of amazing luminaries including Gary Baseman, Michael Bierut, Henrik Drescher, Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, Bruce Mau, Christoph Niemann, Art Spiegelman and many others.

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Big Active Music “Packaging” for Mark Ronson

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Eye Magazine spotlights London design studio Big Active’s amusing response to the challenge of contemporary music packaging. Digital music formats have essentially destroyed the album cover, so for a release from Mark Ronson & the Business Intl, Big Active created a barrage of record covers embedded with the music via the capable but little-promoted iTunes LP format. The experience approximates flipping through Ronson’s record collection (which explains why the designs are cheekily reminiscent of the 1980s), a recreational activity that is becoming fetishized as quickly as it disappears.

Read more, including a link to an interview with Big Active, at Eye Magazine’s site.

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Real Estate

Real Estate

Via screen sharing, nested views of my two older Macs from my new Mac.The outermost Mac is my new i5-powered 27-in. iMac with a resolution of 2,560 by 1,440. That’s 60% larger than the Intel Core 2 Duo-powered 24-in. iMac that it’s peering into, which has a resolution of 1,920 by 1,200 — which is itself some 125% larger than the 1,280 by 800 resolution of the MacBook Air at the center of this image. (That nifty desktop picture is by my friend Alex Cornell.)

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What’s Old Is New Again on iPad

There’s a brief article over at The Atlantic about “Fresh Flowers,” a current show of David Hockney’s recent iPad and iPhone paintings. Using the popular painting app Brushes, Hockney is creating a new painting every few days, then electronically transmitting them to the exhibition space in Paris where they’re displayed on screens. I find the paintings themselves very unremarkable (some are quite bad, even) but I do think they’re interesting for a few reasons.

First, they imply an endorsement of the touch devices like the iPad as a tool for making art by a big (huge) name artist whose fame was forged in the pre-digital world. That credential matters to some people, because it demonstrates, however weakly, that this new and unfamiliar device is not just a passing fad. Hockney’s motivation for creating these paintings was presumably that he found the iPad interesting and worthwhile; he certainly doesn’t need it as a gimmick to burnish his already sterling reputation. When a leading light of the art world shows interest in a medium so young, it speaks volumes. To some people.

More telling I think is the kind of work that the artist decided to create. You can argue over their artistic merits all you want, but what strikes me about Hockney’s iPad paintings is that they’re surprisingly unimaginative emulations of another medium. The iPad is a full-fledged computing device capable of doing many, many different things. But reproducing the quality, texture and aesthetics of analog paper, canvas and paint seems to be one of the least interesting of them all, at least to me. Someone like David Hockney, you’d expect, would be able to show us entirely new worlds through drawing on a device like the iPad. Instead the works in “Fresh Flowers” are faint echoes of a world we already know very well. They’re pretty, but they’re boring.

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Moving to a New Mac

The 24-in. iMac that I’ve owned for four years is now retired. In its place, I’ve got a brand new, 27-in. iMac with a speedy i5 processor and a capacious hard drive. I’ve actually had this new machine since just after Thanksgiving. I didn’t set it up until this past weekend, partly due to my hectic work and family schedules and partly due to the fact that I was dreading the setup process.

In the past, it’s been my habit to take the route of many conscientious geeks, opting to build each new system from scratch. That’s always meant manually installing every application and every utility, re-creating every preference or setting from scratch. Very time consuming, yes, but it always gave me peace of mind that my new system was truly a fresh start, free of the cruft that had accreted in my previous system.

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The Other “Contempt”

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The Spanish and Italian releases of Jean Luc-Godard’s 1963 film “Contempt” — an almost perversely gorgeous exploration of disaffection — featured an alternative and somewhat unofficial musical score by composer Piero Piccioni. Apparently, no currently available releases of the movie — whether authorized or bootlegged — feature this alternative score, so in many ways it’s a nearly forgotten footnote of cinematic history. Thankfully, the excellent film site Mubi has five pieces from the score that are available for listening over here. They’re delightfully evocative of the playfulness of the era, as well as of the underlying, vague sense of dread that the film touches on. Worth a listen.

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