Microsoft Office 2010: The Movie

Ratings

1 of 5 stars
What’s this?

I just got around to watching this tongue-in-cheek, movie trailer-style promotional for a forthcoming new release of the behemoth productivity suite. Its surprisingly high production values and not so surprisingly embarrassing action movie conceits belie the core truth about anything Microsoft does: they have more money than they have sense. Or rather, they have more money than they have taste.

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Drawing Power at The Times

Sketchbook Obsession at The New York TimesThe latest exhibition at The New York Times art department’s 7th floor gallery space is called Sketchbook Obsessions, and it opens tomorrow evening, Thu 16 Jul, at 7:00p. If you’re in New York and can make it, you’re more than welcome to do so — just send an R.S.V.P. as soon as you can.

This show is all about sketchbooks, and it features a blizzard of pages from the sketchbooks of some of the brightest names in design and illustration. I’ve been watching my colleagues here as they’ve been hanging the show over the past couple of weeks, and it looks great. The wall is literally covered with countless amazing doodles, and it really captures that immediate, raw energy of unconstrained sketching, the instantaneous transmittal of ideas to paper via pencil. It’s going to be a fun show, and best of all it’s free.

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A Good Day’s Busy Work

Here’s a rant. Thanks to the power of randomness and that old ‘my ears were burning’ sensation, I somehow happened across a comment on a blog the other day in which my Twitter habits were called into question. The remarks, which were about me only in part, contend that “although [Khoi] hasn’t Twittered in months (again), he’d be worth following if he ever embraces the medium.” Well.

First of all, I’m flattered, really, that anyone considers what I have to say interesting enough in any medium to lament my absence from it, which is one way I interpret what this commenter meant. However, my other interpretation goes a little something like this: “Khoi is not keeping up with his busy work. Tsk. Tsk.”

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Photographic History of the “Paul’s Boutique” Corner

Ratings

1 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Two decades of changes to the corner made famous by the cover of The Beastie Boys’ much-heralded second album, as seen through photographs submitted by fans. Now nearly unrecognizable, maybe the most interesting thing to note is how unremarkable the change has been — the original ’Paul’s Boutique’ was a completely unassuming sporting goods store, and today it’s a completely unassuming shawarma and falafel joint named Three Monkeys.

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Minimalism, Michael Mann and Miami Vice

Public Enemies“Public Enemies,” the new film about the notorious bank robber John Dillinger, is an amazing movie. Then again, I freely confess a predisposition to liking the work of its director, Michael Mann. I’ve seen nearly every movie he’s released, and there’s not a single one of them that I’ve found to be less than completely engrossing.

Over the course of his career, Mann has produced a taut, stylistic and often brutally impersonal filmography that seems most interested in the concept of work. His movies are preoccupied with how men (almost always men) of extraordinary skills practice their craft — and the price they must pay for doing so. “Public Enemies” is no exception, and for those who are expecting a florid character portrait set in a bygone era, make no mistake: this movie is about how John Dillinger robbed banks and about how G-men hunted him down, and only that. It is resolutely disinterested in its principal subjects’ family backgrounds, romantic histories or psychological makeups.

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NYT: Nicolai Ouroussoff on Niko Kurokawaњs Nakagin Capsule Tower

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

The Times architecture critic makes an impassioned case for preserving this exemplar of the postwar Metabolism school of Japanese architecture. Nakagin Tower is fascinating at least as one of the most fully-realized expressions of modern design’s love affair with modularity: “Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.” However, over the years, it has decayed from disuse and impracticality, which leaves me conflicted on whether even architectural failures deserve preservation. On the other hand, in photographs at least, Nagakin Tower has an unearthly, almost perverse beauty like few others buildings, and what a shame it would be to lose that forever.

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The Living Room Problem

I’ve been trying to think if there’s ever been a consumer experience that’s quite as much of a mess as watching video at home is today. What was once so simple now seems inordinately, hopelessly complex. The old paradigm of simply buying a television set, attaching an antenna or a coaxial cable and turning it on seems like a ritual from a lost epoch, something far less evolved humans settled for in order to enjoy scraps of primitive entertainment. In these more sophisticated, digitally-enhanced times, the living room has become a mess.

Now, watching television requires a complex orchestration of sources, devices, meta-systems, cables, asset management and general confusion. Currently in my living room, I have a veritable cat’s cradle of a setup, including two DVD players, a home theater system, a secondary speaker system, an Apple TV, a MacBook, and a putative ‘universal remote’ that nevertheless fails to obviate the many additional remote controls that linger on the coffee table. (Yes, there’s a lot of redundancy there, but sadly there’s some kind of resigned argument for all of it.).

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