The QuaDror, which was unveiled last week at a design conference in Cape Town, is the culmination of four years of highly guarded work by the designers at StudioDror. The design team is calling the innovation 'a new structural joint' and its potential implications are far reaching, which you begin to appreciate as you watch their introductory video (below). The applications of the design span from bridge support to relief housing, from highway barriers to retail showrooms.
There are many more videos on their website so check them out.
J+A Café was the first café I ventured out to find after arriving in London. I've searched out a lot of coffee shops since that first excursion and J+A remains one of my favorites in the city for its delicious home-cooking and simple, unpretentious (red brick) interior. It is tucked away in one of those lovely back alley courtyards of East London, a short walk from the Farringdon tube. As you sit beside the steamed up windows of the café on a winter afternoon, you can't help but feel that your somewhere close to home.
(Don't let the images throw you -- it's practically always teeming with people. I managed to slip in 15 minutes before closing the other day for a quick coffee and snapped a few photos.)
Over the last week or so I've been walking by this installation on my way home. It makes me stop almost every time I pass it. I did some digging and found some more information on the project, which has British artist Gerard Williams filling several empty London shop windows with 'a specific category of redundant, declining, or outmoded consumer products.'
The Mapping London Blog
there's a great tradition of mapping london and this site features loads of london maps, both historical and contemporary
WhatWasThere
adds layers of historical record onto google maps
27 February 2011
Some friends in London had an intriguing idea that they based a recent set design around: they bought sheets of clear, corrugated PVC roofing and then brushed a light layer of black paint on one side. Simple, inexpensive, and visually compelling. They illuminated them from behind and while the true effect of the lighting design is difficult to capture on film, you can get a sense of it below. Imagine a large space filled with this stuff. I've always been a big fan of using plastic in set designs because it takes light well and holds color so nicely. And it seems like there would be a lot to explore with this particular material and design: the way the plastic is painted, silhouette and, of course, color.
The Museum of London has a great exhibit on London Street Photography. A fascinating look at the city from the 1860s to today and the ways in which London's streets have been documented and imagined over time.
The video documentary which accompanies the exhibit features a series of photographers who comment on the ways that street photography has changed in the past 10 years, especially as anti-terrorism and privacy laws grow tighter. (Last summer, I was told by a security guard to stop taking cell phone photos in front of the Seagram Building in New York City.) There are certainly new anxieties and suspicions about photographing people and buildings, particularly in dense urban areas. Old photos of children playing in city streets have always captivated me and I was struck when one of the artists remarked that today's generation of kids is the first not being photographed in the way city children have been for the past 150 years. The exhibit ultimately makes a strong case that the photography of ordinary people by ordinary people carries inherent social and political value.
AND NOW, A DIFFERENT KIND OF STREET ART: Definitely watch this short video on the fascinating work of French street artist JR -- he is also the 2011 TED Prize Winner. As part of his massive public projects, JR photographs ordinary residents in places like Kenya, Sudan, Israel, and Palestine and then posts the enormous portraits throughout their communities. From the TED website:
JR exhibits his photographs in the biggest art gallery on the planet. His work is presented freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Action; it talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit.
FIRST: An innovative way of putting Mini's new concept car into historical context.
"Director Mischa Rozema returns with another trademark visually unique mixed media film, combining live action with 2d/3d animation, motion graphics, stock footage and visual effects."
NEXT:
This guy's senior project at the Savannah College of Art and Design is pretty rad. It gets particularly impressive towards the end. Yeah -- those are mini post-it notes.
FINALLY:
A phenomenal timelapse captured from a Norwegian ship. The brief clip is taken from a longer tourism campaign the country is releasing -- I'd say that the filmmakers are definitely doing an effective job.
I recently watched Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, which follows a day in the life of a London fashion photographer. While it is his first English-language film, Edward Bond's dialogue is characteristically sparse. No surprise here, though: Antonioni once declared to an interviewer: 'I don't believe in words.' And indeed, Blow-Up indulges the visual; the Italian director is a great choreographer of space.
Antonioni is said to have gone great lengths to enhance the vividness and boldness of color in the film, famously painting the grass of a London park in order to make it greener.
In Blow-Up, I combined colors to make them appear more real...I had to intervene directly on reality...I had to manipulate reality.
But the film is not as pretentious as all this. Antonioni has an engaging and sensual way of storytelling that satiates the audience while leaving the dots unconnected. Despite its day-in-the-life conceit, the film's narrative is not a linear progression. As David Hemmings, who plays the photographer, retrospectively noted,
The story for him [Antonioni] is the way it is told in visual terms. It is not the linear story that we all would expect of normal filmmaking. It is a series of pictures.
(Of course, all this had me thinking even more about storytelling and Taymor's Spider-Man -- the tension between a story that is overwhelmingly visual and expectations of linear storytelling. Blow-Up has many narrative gaps but I think we are more willing to forgive Antonioni because his concept is so grounded in questions surrounding photography and the extent to which the world around us can be accurately represented and interpreted -- they are ideas which feel organic to the film and its main character.)
Some Blow-Up highlights include a stunning 29-year-old Vanessa Redgrave and a famously sexy photoshoot scene with the Prussian model Veruschka.
An artist called Rafaël Rozendaal has a series of websites which create simple, self-contained online worlds...net-scapes, if you will. Many of them are interactive and surprisingly engaging. His bio says he 'makes websites as art pieces'. Some people will no doubt roll their eyes at this notion but his websites have a nice of way of requiring the viewer to figure out how to engage with the creation -- you can manipulate and animate the graphics by moving the cursor, clicking, double-clicking, dragging, tilting your head, squinting, and sometimes by simply waiting. At times -- as is the case with hotdoom (bottom right) -- you feel as though you must not have any control over the scene ... until you realize you do. Some pieces feel cinematic, some feel like games, some like moving paintings, and others feel like a waste of time. Overall, though, they are cool experiments in interactive online artistry. His work has been circulating for several years now (he's snatched up some great domain names in that time as well), but it remains engaging. Here are a few to get started with:
Inventables: Find new materials
bizarre and wonderful things waiting to be made into other things TypeNavigator
finally. a way to search for fonts visually -- without having to know the obscure name or category it might be associated with. GUSTAV JOHANSSON
film and art director
A trailer for Danny Boyle's production of Frankenstein (a new play by Nick Dear based on Shelley's novel) at the National Theatre went up on Tuesday. The play will only be staged on two nights: 17 and 24 March. But in a brilliant move by the NT, the production (which has been sold out for months) will be broadcast at cinemas around the world. Part of the intrique of the Boyle's concept is that the two actors playing Victor and The Creature will swap roles for each of the two nights. Check to see if its playing anywhere near you and when.
McSweeney's imagines the SparkNotes version of Goodnight Moon:
Themes
Materialism in American Culture — Post-WWII economic boom figures heavily in Brown's sharp critique of our newfound prosperity. A careful Marxist examination might suggest a strong anti-capitalist sentiment. She carefully chooses to set the story in a "green room." While surely the overly materialized room of the bunny excites and overwhelms his senses and severs his relationships, Brown finds fault more in our inability to extricate ourselves from the clutches of capitalism—(think Thoreau)—then in the systemic trappings of the American economic system. [See note on Red Balloon.] However, the title of the book put in the context of the impending space race gives credence to Brown's polemic warning that we—perhaps both Russians and Americans—should say "goodnight moon" and focus our attention on rebuilding relationships.
Search for the Masculine Self —As in many other bildungsromans, i.e. The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, Brown adopts the voice of a young male protagonist trying to find himself. While lacking the acerbic wit of Holden Caulfield and the taut homoeroticism of Finny and Gene, the young bunny's voice is, at the same time, quite powerful. He is dismissive of the world. His complete nihilism and rejection of his parents are ripe precursors to the era to come (1950s).
Get the rest of the themes, symbols, and analysis associated with this great American work of by following the link below.
Earlier this month, GOOD put together this map, which celebrates craft breweries across America. Now they've launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing and delivery of 500 limited edition posters and to spread the message of great-tasting, local beer. This image deserves to be checked out in detail, so give it a click:
John Lahr's New Yorker review/commentary on Spider-Man goes at the musical's narrative structure in some of the ways I alluded to yesterday:
In The Lion King, Taymor had strong producers to oversee her and a solid-gold piece of Disney business art, from whose plot she could not veer. Here she has neither. The result is a triumph of narrative indulgence over theatrical expertise. Taymor is no storyteller. The corny conceit of “Spider-Man” is that we’re watching a show that is being dreamed up by Marvel comics nerds—the coyly named Geek Chorus—who deconstruct and construct the character even as the story comes to life before us. The activity mimics a spider’s weaving—doing, undoing, redoing—but the musical doesn’t know how to integrate the device or how to make it pay off.
Of course, I don't agree that Taymor is not a storyteller, just that she finds herself stuck among many stories and many ways of telling a story. The presence of the Greek Chorus which 'deconstructs and constructs' the comic book character signals that Taymor is conscious of the play's fragmented, vignette structure, but she hasn't taken this unique mode of storytelling far enough or made it clear enough ... yet.
Lahr's write-up is an outstanding portrait of the show; he mounts a justifiable critique of the musical's current form but praises Taymor in respects other reviews have conspicuously glazed over:
As a stager, however, Taymor is bold, elegant, and eloquent. Although it takes a while for Peter to get airborne, when he does the flying is thrilling, a full-tilt leap into the extraordinary ...Taymor has a dynamic, painterly sense of space; she can marshal all the sensual elements of movement, light, and perspective into amazing stage pictures. ...Before our eyes, for instance, the New York sky line is tipped ninety degrees, so that what begins at street level ends up a bird’s-eye view, with buglike yellow cabs skittering below; in another scene, the spider chorines dance before us, with their eight syncopated limbs. In these moments—and there are plenty of them—the audience finds itself exactly where Taymor wants it to be: in a waking dream.
A company called EducationFirst, which coordinates study abroad programs for students across the world, released a series of short videos (elegantly titled 'Live the Language') that spotlight four incredible international cities and why you should be there. The London and Paris episodes are below but I highly recommend checking out their Vimeo page for Barcelona and Beijing. Wonderfully affecting...
Yesterday, Roger Friedman, over at ShowBiz411, spoke to Julie Taymor, the director of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and confirmed what many of us had already suspected: the musical is getting neither a co-director nor a new writer.
The rumors that the show would be bringing another writer on board had me thinking a lot about the musical's current story. Everyone is hung up on Spider-Man's story. And with good reason. The musical's coherence and clarity of narrative are by far its weakest elements. But I began to think: how important is story? At the risk of sounding glib, I'll clarify my own inquiry: what are the different kinds of storytelling that a piece of theatre can engage in?
In the course of his article, Friedman compares Taymor's Turn Off the Dark to Cirque du Soleil's Beatles-tribute, Love.
I kept thinking how amazing it was that Taymor was trying to pull off something similar in a Broadway house. If Turn off the Dark had opened in Montreal with Cirque du Soleil, it would have been hailed over and over.
The comparison to Cirque du Soleil is interesting if we're thinking about story. Certainly the kind of storytelling that the Montreal company does is quite different from that which we expect in Broadway musicals. My narrative expectations when I enter the circus are entirely distinct from that which I expect in a Broadway house. At the circus I probably expect a governing creative aesthetic that should translate across music, design, costume, etc. but I also expect mini-narratives, many entirely unrelated, that will codify around recurring characters as well as that overarching aesthetic. On Broadway, however, I largely expect linearity and cogency of story: major and minor characters which consistently interact and engage in a unifying structure of rising action-climax-intermission-falling action-finale.
Herein lies the tension. Taymor and her team definitely do not give us this arc. In its current form, Turn Off the Dark is largely disjointed and fragmentary. There are flying sequences, rock concert set pieces, and sporadic (often unrelated) bursts of narrative. Even Taymor, in an advert for the production, says:
We can't really tell you what this is, but it has rock and roll, it has drama, and it has circus. [video below]
The show is all of these things and that is part of what makes it so fun to watch. (It’s okay to like spectacle!) However, the show seems too hesitant to embrace this multi-faceted, circus-like storytelling -- frankly, it doesn't go far enough. That the musical is fragmented is not its problem. Nor is the problem, as some have claimed, that the show tries to do too much. In essence, the vignettes are actually both a compelling and inventive structure, as in to say: 'we all know the story of Spider-Man but look at all of these ways that this simple story can be imagined, re-imagined, and framed'.
The musical runs into difficulty when it too feebly holds on to some false notion that a traditional narrative arc (beginning, middle, and end) actually exists. The first act, in particular, seems to constantly remind the audience of its narrative failings by inadequately staging dramatic scenes from the film franchise. Instead, the show should embrace its free form and a differentkind of storytelling, something closer to the spirit and mythology of the comic book hero.
In the musical's current draft, Taymor and her team don't give the audience a steady prism through which to see and understand the production. The musical needs a conceptual framework that does for the audience what walking inside a circus tent does. Audiences don't go into Cirque du Soleil expecting cohesive narrative and, in a sense, these disjointed expectations is what critics and audiences are struggling with. If it clearly and visibly embraces circus, and the many stories of Spider-Man, as a governing structure then the conversation surrounding the show's story might be realigned entirely.
In many ways, this is the conceptual direction the show is already leaning in but the device of the nerdy Greek Chorus lacks precision. Turn of the Dark has apotentially unique, fragmentary identity that needs to be fully embraced. I’m excited to see where Taymor takes it.
The good fellows over at Warby Parker have released their new collection. These guys sell great, qualityeyewear for $95 a pop (prescription lens included). Plus, they have a pretty outstanding business model to boot -- they'll send you up to five pairs of glasses for you to try on and test out at home for free.
Last week what seems like every major paper and critical body in the theatre world got together and decided to print early reviews of Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Frustrated that the production's opening night has been regularly postponed, the critics broke with convention by publishing reviews while the show is still in previews.
After seeing Spider-Man myself in early January, I can't help but feel that there's something disappointing and inadequate about the conversation surrounding the production.
The New York Times review was particularly harsh and ends up sounding like its chief theatre critic, Ben Brantley, primarily has an axe to grind. He has almost nothing positive, or even constructive, to say about the production. Across the board, reviews of the show go after Taymor in a remarkably personal way. After expressing dismay over the visibility of the harnesses used to make the actors fly, Brantley condescendingly continues:
Ms. Taymor and her collaborators have spoken frequently about blazing new frontiers with “Spider-Man,” of venturing where no theater artist (pardon me, I mean artiste) has dared to venture before.
I feel stuck because the show is flawed and there is no question about that. But I also have too much respect for Taymor and her creative team to accept the barrage of criticism. Brantley and others make it seem like there is little worth seeing here and I can't agree. Frankly, I haven't seen these guys lodge any real, original criticism that we haven't already heard. I think they are caught in their own echo chamber here.
Scott Brown at New York Magazine is the one guy I've read and thought maybe he's onto something. He says:
Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud whether Spider-man will ever be finished - whether it is, in fact, finishable. I think they're onto something: I saw the show on Saturday night, and found it predictably unfinished, but unpredictably entertaining, perhaps on account of this very quality of Death Star-under-construction inchoateness. Conceptually speaking, it's closer to a theme-park stunt spectacular than "circus art," closer to a comic than a musical, closer to The Cremaster Cycle than a rock concert. But "closer" implies proximity to some fixed point, and Spider-man is faaaar out, man. It's by turns hyperstimulated, vivid, lurid, overeducated, underbaked, terrifying, confusing, distracted, ridiculously slick, shockingly clumsy, unmistakably monomaniacal and clinically bipolar.
It isn't as precise, commanding, and certainly not as quotable as Brantley's zingers but his jumble of thoughts feels more in line with my experience of the production. There is something frustrating but also uniquely alluring about the fact that Spider-Man is so clearly unfinished and something captivating about the image of what it could be. Taymor is reaching for things that she may not always get at fully formed but you see where she's going and what she could accomplish with some more time and, dare I say, money. It is a production that I really don't want to see 'frozen', which is what the critics and Broadway keep asking for. Taymor hasn't arrived yet -- and I wish that we could let her throw out the rule book governing previews and openings and keep exploring.
There is something about Spider-Man in its current (imperfect) state that makes you consider where it could go without (and I think this is important) making you feel that you've been robbed blind.
