Capillary Calendar

I discovered a nice design blog the other day--Dezeen--featuring this calendar that uses capillary action and a bottle of ink that colors in the days as they pass. I'd like to have one of these on my wall.

While Dezeen features the usual array of bizarro modern design ideas, there is a healthy dose of wheat amongst the chaff. Happy threshing.

All of your Snuggie questions answered at Gizmodo

If you haven't yet seen the hilarious mess that is the Snuggie, you are missing out. Jason Chen over at Gizmodo has posted an estimable review and comparison of the various monk-habit/Jedi knight/hospital gown products that seem to be designed for lounging in frigid climes. I'll leave it to the article (and its large and growing comments section) to answer the question "whatever happened to wearing a sweatshirt?"

(Be warned: as well as being an excellent technology blog, Gizmodo is dangerously addictive for the gadget-minded and if not used in moderation, becomes a humongous time-suck.)

(photo via Gizmodo)

NOVA: Extreme Ice Survey

The first showing of the PBS NOVA episode "Extreme Ice" was tonight. I am not a scientist, a climatologist or political agitator but the show itself was compelling. James Balog is a photographer and scientist who photographed disappearing glaciers around the world for National Geographic (June 1997 cover story: The Big Thaw"). Since that time he has installed cameras in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland and the Rockies, each taking one time-lapse photograph per hour, every hour, over the course of years. The resulting footage is astonishing, documenting the retreat of glaciers that is claimed to be at eight times the normal historical rate. There are photos and video at Extreme Ice Survey's site. The entire program will be available at NOVA's site beginning March 25th.

(photo via PBS.org)

A quick trip to the U.A.E.?

I know--all the cool people are in Austin, TX, for the South By Southwest Music Festival. But if you happen to be slumming in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, be sure to drop in on the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at the Emirates Palace. Bresson's photos The Europeans, 1929-1991 are on display through March 31.

If you are too, err...busy to make it over, there is an excellent collection over at Magnum Photo's site. Since Bresson was one of Magnum's founders you might expect them to have a stellar collection and the site doesn't disappoint. In addition to Bresson, you can find legends such as Robert Capa, Susan Meiselas and W. Eugene Smith. Magnum does have all the photos stamped with multiple watermarks, which lessons the enjoyment, but these are some of the best photo-journalists in history here, and there's no charge for checking out their portfolios.

If you're not already in Abu Dhabi, that is.

(photo: SPAIN. Valencia Province. Alicante. 1933.
Copyright Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos)

Literary March Madness: TMN's Tournament of Books

There's a book smackdown going on over at The Morning News, a site I keep going back to. In the Fifth Annual Tournament of Books, distinguished critics and authors are asked to compare and contrast two notable books from the past year and declare a winner. It makes for fun reading in itself, and may give the casual reader some bedside stand books to add to their list.

Some of the judges are more entertaining than others. In one bracket selection the late Roberto Bologno's acclaimed epic novel 2666 is pitted against Fae Myenne Ng's Steer Towards Rock:

He drives back up the court, the crashing of his mallet-like feet almost buried beneath the thunder of the crowd. The first book of 2666 involves obscure literary critics devoted to a mysterious, obscure German writer. He’s playing right to his crowd—all the obscure literary critics and wannabe obscure writers in the stands lunge to their feet—they’re eating it up! His victory seems absolutely assured!! Wait a second… he tries a single sentence that runs for six pages uninterrupted! But there’s no reason for it except to showcase his virility and bravado. Some of the crowd bellows ecstatically, but there are scattered groans and boos. 2666 is so distracted showing off that he drops the ball. He had it and he threw it away! Why, 2666, why??

There's a PDF bracket available, and the option to chime in yourself (titled "The Peanut Gallery"). All in all, a lot of fun and cheaper than Cliff's Notes. It's an easy way to brush up your water-cooler dialog arsenal.

Library of Congress Photos at Flickr Commons

There's a gorgeous set of photo-lithographs over at the Library of Congress's photostram at Flickr Commons. Most of these were taken and published between the 1890s and 1910s.

The description at flickr:

Published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, these prints were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches.

Like postcards, the photochroms feature subjects that appeal to travelers, including landscapes, architecture, street scenes, and daily life and culture. The prints were sold as souvenirs and often collected in albums or framed for display.

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division assembled its collection from two sources that provided prints in mint condition. In 1985, the prints of Europe and the Middle East were purchased from the Galerie Muriset in Switzerland. In 2004, Howard L. Gottlieb generously donated the North American views.

Additional photochroms can be found in the online collections of the Zurich Central Library, www.zb.unizh.ch/ and other archives.

It doesn't sound particularly sexy, but the photos are incredible. If you are at all visually oriented, mosey on over to the collection and check it out. Bonus: images are copyright-free.

"I Screwed Up" Take 2

You have to love politics. I guess. Thing is, it was supposed to be different this time--the O-man was supposed to have all of his bases covered. He knew how not to bait the Iranians, how to smooth ruffled diplomatic feathers, right? He has PEOPLE.

So, it actually brought a smile to my face to learn about the faux pas that has the British press in an uproar (well, as close as they get to one over there). Apparently, the Obamas' gifts to UK head cheese Gordon Brown were entirely inadequate. To put it in perspective, Brown's gifts were a pen holder carved from the wood of the sister ship of the Resolute. The famous oval office "Resolute Desk" was carved from the wood of the eponymous ship, an abandoned British vessel that was found by an American ship and returned to England. Queen Victoria commisioned the desk from a master Brit wood-smith and presented it as a gift to President Hayes in 1880. Brown also presented Obama with a first-edition of a seven-volume Winston Churchill biography. Entirely fitting gifts sure to win the heart of any sensible statesman who has probably spent too much at Levenger lately, anyway.

So, what to give in return? Let's see...how about a 25 DVD set of classic USA cultural imperialist movies? Yes, our diplomatically savvy leader had a special collection of Yankee cinema assembled by the American Film Institute. I won't go over the whole list but included were The Grapes of Wrath and Casablanca. Now, I'm no culture snob--I love cinema--but really...really? I have to think that the task of gift-buying was outsourced to some Congressional page or other (maybe it was a GOP dirty trick).

And I can't resist free-associating:

Original Brain-Storm (Gifts for G. Brown):

• One-year Netflix subscription with deluxe package (monthly:4 packets Orville Reddenbacher microwave popcorn, Papa Murphy's pizza pack with 2 liters of Coke, cheezy bread, cinnamon bread).
• 24: The Complete First, Second and Third Seasons (bonus Abu Ghraib special features edited out).
• Guest-star for one year of The Hollywood Squares.
• Two-year! subscriptions to: Reader's Digest, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal.
• A weekend at Disneyland for the whole family (airfare sadly not included).
• 1-Month supply of Extenz, the simple pill that makes a man 'larger'.

You have to love politics.

Really.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Long Day's Journey: David Foster Wallace piece in The New Yorker

If you page back through this blog you will find an entry on David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in September last year. You'll also notice it knocked me off the rails enough to stop blogging for awhile.

Now comes an article titled "The Unfinished" outlining Foster's career and his long battle with depression. It is a sad tale, but not a particularly surprising one. Still, it is compelling for a fan of Foster's work to get some more insight into not only his death, but his writing habits and career. There is also an excerpt from the manuscript Wallace was working on for years prior to his death, "The Pale King".

"The Unfinished" is long, as per TNY standards, but worth the reading. Wallace's battle with depression and his search for a solution are somewhat depressing in themselves--it is not as if those around him weren't aware of his condition. Indeed, his wife and family went to extraordinary lengths to monitor his psychic state.

It is only the more disappointing that Wallace seemed to have found a new style he thought may have been more honest.

The Pale King is to be published later this year.

The Genius of Photography &c

A friend's Facebook upload of Dorothea Lange photos sent me to YT to browse around photography documentaries, whereby I stumbled on some of William Klein's stuff.

I have to admit to being a photography neophyte, so the recent BBC 4 series "The Genius of Photography" was revelatory. Though the US network Ovation chopped the show up into bits and pieces, some of the YT uploads appear to be more complete. Episode 4 was a favorite. Here's the first part:



The show introduced me to William Klein, Robert Frank and William Eggleston, for which I remain eternally grateful to the BBC and the producers of the series. While watching the Genius clips, I also ran across a William Klein vid that was quite good--Klein speaking about his work:



Lastly, I video montage of Robert Frank's photos (mixed with some photos taken of him). Set correctly to period tunes (Charlie Parker, I believe).



I'm waiting for the DVD of the Genius series to be released here. Until then the YT clips will have to suffice.

Strangely compelling video

I don't normally steal stuff directly from BoingBoing, but this video is just too good to pass up. When I saw the time was over seven minutes I was sure I wouldn't watch it all the way through, but it has some of the linear storytelling of the best films sort of built-in. The Netflix preview would read: an American student in Japan gets the whacky idea of putting her video camera on a sushi conveyer belt. Various reactions from the diners make up the heart of the film. PG.

Two reasons Calexico is my favorite band

I have to admit being a little worried when Calexico released Garden Ruin. Yes, I'm supposed to be open minded and allow artists to go their way, but GR just didn't hit me like any of the previous records did. A sigh of relief, then, when Carried to Dust was released last year. I hate the "return to form" tag as much as anyone, but it really is just a grand record.

Since is the first mention on surethings, I'll go ahead and post two iconic Calexico songs. The first song up is, for me, the embodiment of the band and its inimitable sound: Crystal Frontier. No other song so perfectly combines all of the elements: subject matter, sound and style, that make up the Calexico sound.



Secondly, The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Honestly, could anyone else pull this off? Je taime, baby!:



The band has many great songs, and there is a bunch of video over at YT. If I were to recommend a record I'd have to recommend at least 3-4: Hot Rail, the ep Even My Sure Things Fall Through, Feast of Wire and The Black Light. I also love their collaboration with Iron & Wine: In the Reins. Google, surf and enjoy.

Why We Buy 101: Creativity Magazine

I don't know the hierarchy of advertising journalism, but I'd think that Creativity would be near the top. A bewildering phantasmagoria of television commercials, photography, agency coverage and design ideas, Creativity is the anti-Adbusters.

Though much of the content is limited to subscribers of the print edition (at $99/yr), there are many options to receive content via email and feeds. It is a great site to keep tabs on what might soon be hurtling at you from your television screen, your computer, radio or magazine pages.

I've embedded this video from YouTube because the Creativity one becomes unavailable after one week (the Creativity resolution seems much better, though).

Bogart That Blog: Noir of the Week

For anyone who ever took a college film course there is Noir of the Week, a blog dedicated entirely to films noirs, those dark and sometimes brutal films that date roughly from the 1930s to the 1950s. The blog is a great read and a great resource, obviously a labor of love.

It's a particular irony that noir, a largely American phenomenon, was not recognized by Americans as a trend or movement. It took a pair of Frenchmen to recognize and give a name to the violent, dark-themed films that were being churned out by the hundreds. The experts on Noir of the Week and its related forum Back Alley Noir will break it all down for you: the European origins, the periods (proto, classic, neo), but if I might offer a bit of amateur advice, just watch Double Indemnity first. If you don't like that flick, then most of the rest of it will probably not appeal.



There are also strong feelings about one of my favorite small films of recent years, the neo-noir Brick. Some of the Back Alley regulars think it is too schtickey to have high schoolers talking like characters from a 1930s gangster film, but I'm not a purist about too many things. Especially pop culture. Brick is clever, fast-paced, smart and just a lot of fun.



So, for a cool, slow Saturday, watch these two flicks back-to-back and get your inner Robert Mitchum (or Veronica Lake) on. You may need to take up cigarette smoking and bourbon drinking to fully engage.

Geekasm-inducing Netbook: Dell Mini 9 running MacOSX

For those of us waiting for Apple to release a truly compact netbook, this is an unbelievably cool project courtesy of Gizmodo: a $400 Dell Mini 9 hacked into running Mac OSX with virtually no hardware/software/driver glitches.

I love my 12" G4 Powerbook but it is getting a bit long in the tooth, and the G4 chipset is being left behind by the newer Mac OS. And as sleek as the Air is, it is still too big. I suppose Apple feels you should be happy with the iPod Touch or the iPhone as web machines, but I don't relish blogging with them.

The Dell is almost perfect: small, quick and apparently totally compatible. Also, the 3G enabled version is available for net US$99 after a mail-in rebate, the catch being you have to subscribe to a 2-year, US$60/mo. wireless plan with ATT.

The only thing cooler would be a Sony Vaio P running OSX, but that is unlikely. Sony loads their 'books up with so much proprietary crap-ola (give up on the Memory Stick, for God's sake!) that is is difficult to hack.

Someday there will be a totally open netbook that will run whatever 'wares you decide to load. Until that day, this hack looks pretty, pretty ideal.

(photo via Gizmodo)

Mark Ruwedel's Desolate Western Rails

I was very pleased to see photographer Mark Ruwedel's work highlighted over at The Morning News, a smart and pretty web mag. Ruwedel is a large-format photographer who spent 12 years traversing western North America's abandoned railway lines of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a very nice gallery of large photos over at TMN, with a brief interview of Ruwedel by editor Rosencrans Baldwin.

The Yossi Milo Gallery in New York is hosting a solo exhibition of the project through March 7th, and the book Westward the Course of Empire was published last year.

There is also a sizable collection of photos at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, including some of Ruwedel's related project on abandoned western desert houses. If you've never lived in the western US, these photographs represent a more realistic impression of the landscape outside the cities than any others I've seen. Much has been written about the myth of "The West" as the land of sun, sand and new beginnings. Ruwedel's work, though, is more beautiful in its own desolate way: it speaks to the reality that remains when myths vanish.

(photo courtesy of TMN)

The Hipster Must Die? Adbusters article generates 3000+ comments

I'm not an anarchist but I still like to read Adbusters, the sometimes frothing-at-the-mouth "anti-consumerist" magazine. It's good to keep an eye on the extreme ends of any debate, and Adbusters seems like the extreme left to me. I sympathize with some of the anti-consumer mentality but the occasional "death to the capitalists" rants send shivers up me timbers.

I didn't have the time or inclination to pore through the 3000+ comments on this article about the hipster-as-demise-of-the-counterculture, but I read a page or two. Basically the argument is that the self-absorbed, dance-club-frequenting, thrift-store-apparel-wearing cool kids should be fomenting some kind of social rebellion rather than pissing away their nights trying to get laid (or failing that, trying to get their pictures taken by "social bloggers"). Yawn. The comments were more amusing: one forwarded the economic thesis of the "productive" vs. the "consumer" hipster--the productive hipster buys his clothes from thrift stores, somehow subverting their original symbology. Imagine that! The consumers, of course, buy the same clothes from the consignment shops that the producers sold them to. I'll have to run that one by my micro-economist friend to see if it makes more sense to him than it did to me.

When I first ran across the magazine a couple of years ago on the newstands I was impressed by the graphic design and the thought-provoking and thought-out articles, but pieces like this are something of a letdown. Being so passionate that you are beyond hip or in denial of your desire to be hip seems to me the essence of one-upmans(hip).

Flight 3400: A Few Good Links

There is an interesting Flash graphic over at the NYT. Kind of clunky but it gives you a visual on what happened. Also, over at Inquisitr there is a short piece on the Bombardier Q400 and landing gear problems that led to its being scrapped by Scandinavian Airlines. And finally (I'm not one of those airplane crash/conspiracy/pr0n freaks, honest!) a video of what looks to be one of the actual incidents the Scandinavian CEO was citing:

Fracture Landing (Scandinavian Airlines System & Bombardier Q400 turboprops) @ Yahoo! Video

Pulp Friction: Hard Case Crime's Retro Cover Art

When I was a kid I read whatever I could get my hands on, which meant trips to thrift stores. The books were dirt cheap and I could (and still can!) buy whatever I wanted. Of course, what I often wanted was gritty detective fiction written by Ross Thomas, Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane and a passel of others. Can't say for certain, but the lurid covers may have had something to do with the initial appeal...maybe?


Covers like this one (left) from the 1970s also had to be removed--surgically cut off and preserved for, uh, storage. If my parents had seen these covers it would have been bye bye, blackbird. As I often had my nose in a book, my parents either assumed I was reading something harmless or they got tired of asking.

The original covers from the pulp magazines of the 1920s-1950s were both tamer and more provocative. The art was painted by legends like Robert McGinnis and Frank R. Paul. Beautiful art of heaving bosoms and barely constrained/restrained flesh, but not the soft core photography of some 70s covers. The women-in-peril (and women-AS-peril) themes of these earlier incarnations seem both more subversive and more gothic--qualities I didn't recognize at the time. Today there are volumes of this art available and possibly university MFA programs. I'm not a student but I am a fan, though the covers still have to remain hidden--this time from the kids rather than the 'rents.

Niche publisher Hard Case Crime has made a mission of resurrecting the pulp covers of the earlier era--with a twist: their covers are original commissions, not reprints. Many of the books are also originals and you can view the covers and read sample chapters here. These days I am spending more time in the fictional worlds of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, but I am a member of Hard Case's book club--you should always feed your inner curious-eleven-year-old.

Amazing TED demo: Siftables--mini interactive computer blocks

I have nowhere near the tech savvy to even ponder the implications of "Siftables", alphabet block-sized computers that can sense their relationship with each other. The demo shows the blocks used as math and paint tools, word games (a la Boggle), storytelling tools and music mixers. I've seen earlier videos from MIT's Media Lab but this latest iteration seems more advanced.



There's more info over at the Media Lab's website. You can learn more about fourth-year doctoral candidate David Merrill there, as well.

TypeBound: Deconstructing the book

An interesting project/exhibit over at the University of Central Florida Art Gallery. Titled TypeBound, it is a deconstruction of the book as object, including everything from sculpture to typewriter art. The site has some irritatingly fast (and small) animated GIF displays but there is a catalog download link available to peruse at your leisure. There's also a Flickr gallery of the exhibit's opening.

It's only a matter of time before someone at Make does something more interesting with a Kindle.