via design boom.
via web urbanist.
2009/07/31
2009/07/28
Joyteeth
My buddy Jose-Luis Olivares just clued me in to a blog for this (White River Junction-based?) sketch group (excuse me I mean “multi-participant reactive drawing space”) called Joyteeth that he’s a part of.
Here’s a choice Chuck McBuck drawing (damn that guy’s good!) from the blog:
via joyteeth.
2009/07/24
2009/07/21
R.I.P. Heinz Edelmann
Edelmann was the art director for Yellow Submarine. He was a well-known illustrator in Europe.
Zardoz
via locosceles.
My friend Will Sellari showed me the movie Zardoz on Sunday night.
cover of the novelization, via jimthing.
It was a violent movie (starring Sean Connery!) with a barely sensical climax, a weird dislike of penises and an even stranger inability to understand erections, but besides all that, these masks were really amazing:
via the rope store.
Also there were some great inflatables. Trailer:
2009/07/20
Apollo Program Patches
To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s lunar landing, here’s some Apollo program iconography courtesy of the Kennedy Space Center website.
Apollo 11:
Apollo 12:
Apollo 13:
Apollo 17:
I’m jealous of whoever got to design these. NASA, I’m disappointed in your inconsistent usage of Roman and Arabic numerals. Where’s your style sheet? Also, aren’t y’all glad that NASA has a sense of pomp, and wouldn’t let the next moon lander be named after Stephen Colbert? I know I am. Thanks for keeping mythology alive.
2009/07/17
Amy Marie Long
I love images like this last one, that catalogue a bunch of weird, discrete phenomenon by arranging them into some kind of a grid.
thnx allison
2009/07/15
Moon starring Sam Rockwell
I saw Moon Monday night.
It was really refreshing. The last hard sci fi movie that I remember seeing was Sunshine, and that kind of fell apart at the end. Moon, directed by Duncan Jones, definitely follows the tradition established by 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, while also managing to throw in some humanizing bits of humor.
Ditko’s Abstraction at Blog Flume
There’s a great post over at Blog Flume on “Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction.” Here’s a snippet:
[In this panel, there’s] a giant ‘paint splat’ surrounded by a fuzzy ‘lightning bolt’:
Even though a cartoon ‘paint splat’ has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown – it’s just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.
It’s fascinating to me that images in comics can have specific grammatical functions, can be a subject or a verb. It’s definitely something very unique to the medium of comics, and something that I see exploited way more in older newspaper strips than in contemporary comics, which is a shame. When cartoonists play around with visual symbols in this way, reality beings to melt and lose its concrete nature. It becomes “a set of symbols to be manipulated abstractly” as the co-mix blog puts so succinctly.
2009/07/14
What’s up on the Interwebs
In alphabetical order:
We would find any location with a working electrical outlet and set up late-night, poorly organized, anything-goes shows—parking garages, Laundromats, the UT art building. We were really inspired by that famous show with J Church on the Lamar Pedestrian Bridge. Most of the recordings were made in really limited-edition mix-tapes for friends and such, so most of that stuff is out of print. I have a huge amount of unmarked CD-Rs from these kids, super scuffed-up and all. One of them came with a few shards of broken glass.
via malcolm elijah’s flickr.
Paper Rad isn’t a sexy story either. I’d like to be able to talk about it like a young New Yorker might talk about dance parties or graphitti or doing drugs, but when you ask me about Paper Rad I am going to have to tell you about how it was and is just a desperate vital exercise in finding meaning in life.
CO-MIX BLAWG by JASON OVERBY and BLAISE LARMEE (hilariously URL’d COMETS COMETS)
Performance is perhaps the most overlooked element in comics criticism today. It is the boogie man among indie creators who seek “unmediated expression” and it is indistinguishable from nonperformance in super-mainstream comics. In fact it is difficult to say there exists a nonperformative space in comics at all, since the entire reality of comics exists only in the mind of the reader and the creator.
AND
Comics is a reductive medium. Visual forms are presented in the service of an idea and are simplified so that they may convey information clearly and concisely. The cartoon is a type of signifier that can be used to play mathematical games.
BRILLIANT
thnx sam