Amezaiku is the Japanese art of candy sculpture, dating from the late 700s. See more like the goldfish lollypop above at Ameshin.
Paul Morton interviews Daniel Clowes over at The Millions.
Seymour Hersh claims that the official narrative around the killing of Osama Bin Laden is 90% horseshit.
Every outfit that Alicia Florrick wears in every episode of The Good Wife.
The illusion of control and the buttons that do nothing.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Wes Anderson has created a Wes Anderson-themed bar, paying tribute to 1950s Italian café culture and also to himself, Wes Anderson.
Commissioned as part of Prada's new Rem Koolhaas-designed art complex Fondazione Prada, and decked out in a typically Andersonian pastel green and pink palette, Bar Luce has a few nods to other Anderson projects. See that pinball table on the left, beside the pillar? That is a Steve Zissou pinball table. I can't begin to tell you how much I covet this. The internet isn't giving up any details on the jukebox, but this being Wes, I'm going to assume he hired in Mark Mothersbaugh as Jukebox Supervisor to make sure everything was just-so.
Castello Cavalcanti, an earlier Prada/Anderson short with Jason Schwartzman as a race car driver, seems to be the main inspiration for the bar – watch it below ↓ and check out some more detail shots from Instagram after that. Really, though: that wallpaper has got to go.
"You can sit with WES #FondazionePrada #wesanderson #barluce #inspiring #milan"
"Sweet situation in 50s bar Luce #fondazioneprada #wesanderson #barluce"
"bar luce #wesanderson #barluce #fondazioneprada #milano"
Thanks to Edward Melvin for commissioning many of these stories.
There's been a healthy GIF art scene happening on Tumblr for yonks. Now, because I'm an old duffer and old duffers have to relate absolutely everything to something that happened during the time when they didn't release an involuntary relief-grunt upon sitting down, it reminds me of the Amiga demo scene in its early nineties heyday. There seems to be the same sort of friendly rivalry to push limits inside very particular technical constraints and a love of geometry and psychedelia. Where the contemporary GIF scene differs is that its best practitioners (see below) are much choosier about their use of colour – a lot of Amiga demos liked to throw every possible colour they could render at the screen – oh, and they're possible to watch for extended periods without your eyes exploding.
from The Night Sea
from Zolloc
from mr. div
from Bees and Bombs
from dvdp
Above, a proper widescreen epic for the new Jamie XX track, Gosh.
Below, what it reminds me of every single time I hear it: Terry Wogan's Secret Pirate Radio by Peter Serafinowicz. Easy bruv.
When I was doing initial research for the MusicTown identity I stumbled across this 2009 documentary about the history and design of Liberty Hall. As usual with buildings that I see every day (it's the first thing I see when I get out at Tara Street station on the way to work) I knew very little about it, but this 24-minute short gives a good primer in how the original intent for the structure has been eroded through a combination of neglect and thoughtlessness. The interview sections with architect Desmond Rea O'Kelly are particularly fascinating.
I was long overdue a site overhaul, so here it is. Have a poke around, maybe pour yourself a nice glass of hot white wine, put your feet up, and do let me know if you spot anything that I've inadvertently broken. The blog has been moved off the front page to make way for some big-ass images, but you can rest assured this doesn't mean I'll neglect it any less than I already do.
Oh, and comments! There are comments now! Be nice.
Sure, you could bake your own biscuit alphabet with all sorts of specialist cookie-cutters and ovens and ingredients and suchlike OR you could spend half an hour raiding the biscuit jar and rearranging the contents until you end up with something like the above, from Present / & / Correct
N.b. When the revolution comes and my glorious reign begins, I will make sure that all alphabets are at least 20% Bourbon Cream. You’re welcome.
Some time ago, I resigned myself to the fact that cats have decisively beaten out dogs for full spectrum dominance of the internet. The dog community can spend its time licking its balls in a daze, wondering how it came to pass, but there’s no turning back. If you’d like to read a 6,000 word essay about the ‘online cat-industrial complex’, then Gideon Lewis-Kraus has you covered.
If, on the other hand, you came here to find an alphabet made entirely of cats, then Nekofont is the world’s number 1 web app for cat typography. Citizens may safely abandon all other alphabets; we have a winner.
This isn’t actually a full alphabet – yet – but it’s an interesting project that combines mapping, image processing, architecture and typography.
Benedikt Groß, a data visualisation designer, and Joey Lee, a geographer, are collaborating on a successfully-funded Kickstarter to seek out letterforms in satellite imagery. Whatever typeface comes out the other end of this process will be a neat little curiosity piece, but Groß and Lee’s more serious focus is on offering “non-domain experts (e.g. artists, designers, citizen scientists, etc.) a set of tools to source their own datasets and inspire people from all backgrounds to explore geographic data.”
Spanish interaction designer Claudia Mussett has created this typographic tribute to the mighty Monument Valley. Go check out the full A-Z at her website. This is part of a rapidly growing body of MV fan art, some of which you can see over at the ustwo-curated Monument Friends tumblr.
sphere tangle
Here, in the year that the backlash against ‘long form’ began in earnest, is a list of the year’s best writing on the internet according to me. If you enjoy anything linked here, give the author a shout on Twitter and tell them so.
Ten years ago he would have listed 10 things Afghanistan needed to build a new state: rule of law, financial administration, civil administration and so on. “And, then you would say, well, how do you do that? Well, I’d say, by a mapping of internal and external stakeholders, definition of critical tasks – all this jargon talk. And I’ve only now just begun to realise these words are nonsense words. I mean, they have no content at all. We should be ashamed to even use them.”
What has happened here, I suppose, is that a small shard of a fragmentary and difficult work of literature has been salvaged from the darkness of its setting, sanded and smoothed of the jagged remnants of that context. This is the process by which a piece of writing becomes a quote, a saying—a linguistic object whose meaning is readily apparent, useful, and endlessly transferable, like a coin in the currency of wisdom.
These same parents have their own children full time at tonier daycare centers or with a nanny. They also often work far into the night themselves, laptops aglow, making their dimly lit homes look like aquariums. Yet many found it strange to have a child at a facility overnight. A number were surprised that such places even exist.
I just wonder whether, in fact – the Internet won’t go away – but its magic will disappear. Our delight in screens that we can go like that with [AC scrolls with fingers] will disappear. It will become a functional local library, coupled with sort of weird people chatting online, and the stuff that you don’t know is true or not, and another culture will arise separately from it, which might go back a bit to books and newspapers.
Walker’s analysis found that Brooke’s organs and tissues were developing at different rates. Her mental age, according to standardised tests, was between one and eight months. Her teeth appeared to be eight years old; her bones, ten years. She had lost all of her baby fat, and her hair and nails grew normally, but she had not reached puberty.
Just one character in Moominvalley is nasty: Little My. A tart and ruthlessly independent-minded philosopher, she’s the clenched fist incarnate. Given the milieu, however, those very qualities make her an important check on naïveté, a voice without whom the Moomins’ wishful optimism would go untested.
As biotech companies pour billions into life extension technologies, some have suggested that our cruelest criminals could be kept alive indefinitely, to serve sentences spanning millennia or longer. Even without life extension, private prison firms could one day develop drugs that make time pass more slowly, so that an inmate’s 10-year sentence feels like an eternity. One way or another, humans could soon be in a position to create an artificial hell.
No description, academic or otherwise, can quite do justice to the comedy that is bonobo sex. On a hilarity scale of one to ten, most animal sex trends quickly toward ten. Bonobo sex goes to eleven. Throughout the day, males and females, adolescents and elders alike greet one another sexually for apparently almost any reason—and do so with everything from a quick feel, to porn-style choreographies, to elaborately athletic couplings.
The question is whether the strangeness of the idea will keep us from accepting it. If society rejects sleep curtailment, it won’t be a biological issue; rather, the resistance will be cultural. The war against sleep is inextricably linked with debates over human enhancement, because an eight-hour consolidated sleep is the ultimate cognitive enhancer.
As soon as the joy factor of a game is high enough all the fake “pillars for success” like marketing, PR, data analysis and “giving people what they want” crumble away like the mere scaffolding they are. I love to bring up Minecraft as an example of this and it’s only somewhat because I enjoy the terror in mobile developers eyes when I do.
The thing about being an unstoppable force is that you can really only enjoy the experience of being one when you have something to bash yourself against. You need to have things trying to stop you so that you can get a better sense of how fast you are going as you smash through them. And whenever I was inside the dinosaur costume, that is the only thing I wanted to do.
All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses.
Fear is deeply engrained in Israeli society. Fear of the Shoah, fear of anti-Semitism, fear of Islam, fear of Europeans, fear of terror, fear of extermination. You name it. And fear generates a very particular type of thinking, which I would call “catastrophalist.” You always think about the worst case scenario, not about a normal course of events. In catastrophalist scenarios, you become allowed to breach many more moral norms than if you imagined a normal course of events.
I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.
It all comes down, again and again, to the same problem: lonely boys who have no social skills who are wallowing in self-pity.
Citizenship is the right to have rights, and our attitude to citizenship, as states and individuals, defines and produces our attitude to other human beings. As we accelerate into the 21st century and the third millennium, citizenship, or the lack thereof, is going to be one of the defining issues.
He had a strange, on-the-spectrum inability to see when he was becoming boring or demanding. He talked as if the world needed him to talk and never to stop. Oddly for a dissident, he had no questions. The left-wingers I have known are always full of questions, but Assange, from the first, seemed like a manifestation of the hyperventilating chatroom. It became clear: if I was to be the ghost, it might turn out that I was the least ghostly person in the enterprise.
As Wise became the face of Tupperware, sales and press continued to skyrocket. In 1954, she was the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week. But as glowing as the magazine’s profile was, it contained warning signs about the future of her partnership with Tupper.
“He’s not supposed to smoke,” his mom says. He can’t get sunburn. He can’t get a cold. He can’t drink. He can’t fall and risk injury. He can’t afford to tax his immune system at all. Even a cut could trigger rejection. It starts as a blotchy rash; it means his body is winning the fight to reject the transplant, and Richard has to be flown to the hospital to receive rounds of emergency drugs intravenously.
Here, after all, was a group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009. And they were laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark.
The homicide numbers are especially important, says one cop: “You should see these supervisors, like cats in a room filled with rocking chairs, afraid to classify a murder because of all the screaming they will hear downtown.”
When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
Bands now have default control of their exposure. It’s no longer necessary to pay people to pay other people to play your records on the radio, only to have those people lie about doing so. It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically.
Lindsy Van Gelder, the New York Post reporter who coined the phrase “bra burning,” wrote in Ms. in 1974 that when she became a journalist, she “avoided the women’s-angle assignments through a maniacally macho willingness to cover train wrecks, riots, anything else, and an unfeigned ignorance of conventional women’s-pagey topics.”
As Sierra Leone’s infrastructure has crumbled, the upper classes have hidden behind ever higher walls, bigger SUVs, and more powerful generators, grumbling but unwilling to engage – to all intents and purposes acting as if the Sierra Leone outside our walls was another country from the ‘Sweet Salone’ that we’ve inhabited.
In Alphabet Topography, Caspar Lam and YuJune Park of Synoptic Office take a linguistic high concept, add a dash of autocorrect magic, and end up with a beautiful modular sculpture. The relative height of the letterforms is determined by how often each letter is used in English.
I read this story about Andrew Shannon, the man who punched a hole in a Monet painting, and it reminded me of the brilliant opening scene to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
Copyright restrictions have meant that the 1972 series will likely never be released on DVD, but you can watch all four episodes – if you don’t mind the dodgy picture quality – via this YouTube playlist:
⁋ Conservators at the National Gallery of Ireland repaired the damage to ‘Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat’ at a cost of a “five figure sum” and a lot of work.
This is a story about a BBC press release. A press release that promised a “trilogy of documentaries about hypocrisy, deception and corruption in contemporary Britain” by Adam Curtis would arrive in July of this year.
But this was a fantasy.
Instead, we’re getting a 140-minute film – initially only available on the BBC iPlayer – about America, Britain, Russia, Saudi Arabia and, most of all, Afghanistan. The trailer below is notable for the absence of Curtis’ distinctive voiceover. We’ll have to wait until Sunday 25th January (update - Bitter Lake is now available to watch on the iPlayer here) to find out if he’s letting those big titles do the heavy narrative lifting. Watch for the second-to-last shot; it’s a treat.
⁋ Update: Curtis had an interesting 5-minute segment on Charlie Brooker’s 2014 Wipe. He looks at Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov and “a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that’s unstoppable because it’s indefinable.” Here it is:
If that whets your appetite for more sustained Surkov weirdness, check out this profile by Peter Pomerantsev for The Atlantic: The Hidden Author of Putinism.
All this week (8th-15th December) we’ll be donating the proceeds from sales of our Lonely Beast apps to Temple Street Children’s Hospital, Dublin.
My daughter spent a week on the neonatal ward in Temple Street last year. It’s pretty terrifying to have a child that young in hospital, especially as first-time parents, but the staff were incredible. Full of humanity, dedicated and professionally curious, they went out of their way to look after the families as well as the children affected by illness.
Spend any time in Temple Street and you’ll inevitably bump into families in vastly more difficult situations than your own. These are the people who need all the care and love they can get – and every donation makes giving that care a little bit easier.
This week is our tiny gesture of thanks.
Get the apps and help Temple Street Hospital:
If you’ve already got the apps, you can donate to Temple Street here: Donate Today
Some of David Whyte’s Dots
More after the jump…
Paolo Čerić’s Night Sky - full screen interactive version here.
Walker, by David Whyte.
140302, by David Szakaly
Globulus, by Matthew DiVito
Photographer Peter Defty finds the letters of the alphabet in the spaces and structures of urban architecture.
You can get b&w prints of his multi-city Alphatecture series over at Occhi.
“I wanted to write something that was about power. About the powerlessness of childhood. It’s the fact that, as a child, you are living in somebody else’s country. You are a guerrilla force: there’s an army of occupation, they’re all giants and they’ve got some kind of baffling agenda.” Neil Gaiman’s account of the gulf between adult life and childhood – the one that would be perfectly bridged in adolescence if life, hormones and “icky things like kissing” didn’t get in the way first – is droll and sad in equal measures, particularly in the context of recent events in Soham.
The bitter irony – that Gaiman’s new novel Coraline, his first venture into children’s fiction, is about child abduction, parents stripped of their protective role and the fear of the familiar – is not lost on the author. Sipping the first of many cups of tea in the lobby of the Clarence, he’s just been on the Gerry Ryan Show to talk about the book, following a 90-minute segment on the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. When he was doing interviews in America, there was always a point where some nervous journalist would ask “but don’t you think this book is too dark for children?” But the focus has shifted: now, he says, “it’s like there’s a sudden collective understanding of what fairytales are for. There are some really important lessons in something like Hansel And Gretel, including the fact that you may one day have to make it on your own; that if you were ever put in a really dangerous situation that you should never give up hope, and that you should be prepared to do something quite horrible if you have to. Child psychologists have been saying for years that we shouldn’t tell children these things, that we should tell them the world is pink and everybody should hug like Barney at the end. But you know what? There are fucking monsters out there, and they kill people. And it’s not a bad thing for kids to understand that.”
Gaiman leads by example: there are plenty of monsters in Coraline, the tale of the eponymous heroine’s journey into a frightening inverse Narnia through a bricked up doorframe, replete with sinister doppelgänger parents with shiny black buttons for eyes. Coraline’s name came about quite by accident – a brief stumble on the keyboard (“I have a terrible feeling I was writing to someone called Caroline”) and Gaiman’s heroine was born. “Serendipity takes care of you, especially as a writer. The only thing you can almost guarantee is that when you desperately need a piece of information, and you’ve reached the point where you’ve given up looking, the book that falls off the stack onto your head will fall open at the page that contains exactly what you need. Although it’s never what you thought you needed – it’s always something slightly at right-angles.”
Now in his mid-forties and the author of numerous novels (most recently American Gods), graphic novels, screen and stage plays, Gaiman will be forever known for the dark, literate and mythically sophisticated opus that was Sandman. The Vertigo comic book series had the traditional lit-crits eating crow and arriving at the late conclusion that some comics could indeed be elevated to high art. After writing with adults in mind for so long, I ask him if had to approach Coraline from a whole new direction. “I tried not to waste any words. Somebody once said to me that the best way to write a short story was to write as if you were paying them by the word, and that’s very much the approach I took with this book. If there’s a word there, it does something; if there’s a sentence there, it does something. Especially when something is going to be read out loud, you don’t need that extra fatty adjectival froth on the top.”
Gaiman’s deliberate economy with words doesn’t mean his lost his enthusiasm for well-turned descriptive prose, mind you: the quiet menace of Coraline’s button-eyed “other mother” is hinted at early on with eerie imagery like “the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea,” and these encounters grow ever more frightening and unsettling as the book progresses.
Coraline has been frequently likened to both Alice In Wonderland and to Roald Dahl’s writing – certainly there are superficial likenesses to Carroll’s dark fantasy (the little girl in trouble, the hidden world just beyond our vision) and Coraline’s determination to prevail in the face of horror (and grown-up folly) recalls some of Dahl’s singleminded child heroes – but that’s where the similarities end. “It’s journalistic shorthand; it’s laziness. I don’t see much resemblance, except that they were all written in the classic English storytelling voice. The other thing is, it was always important to me that Coraline would win whatever battles she fought in a way that any smart eight year old could win those battles.”
The best children’s fiction, of course, never condescends to its natural audience, never assumes that kids are imbeciles, and it’s to Gaiman’s credit that he refused to forget the lessons of his own childhood. “I have very very vivid memories of being a kid, and reading books, and I remember feeling deep loathing and irritation whenever I encountered a children’s book which patronised. The Just William books, for example, were spiritually correct in every way – they may not have been exactly mapped onto my world, but I knew who these people were, and I knew why they did what they did. The fact that William put a frog in his pocket because he didn’t have anywhere else to put it – that just felt right, it made sense to me. Whereas you’d read these other books… usually European for some reason, about these ‘dear children’ who will now be detectives and, oh how nice for them. And you’re just thinking: this is wank.”
⁋ Neil Gaiman photo by Sam Javanrouh.
