Thursday, July 10, 2008

Potty Mouth

I've aways found bathroom graffiti fascinating.

Spring break

Why do people scrawl their thoughts in such an exclusive place, for intimate viewing only? Are they just bored?

It's the only place where striking insights share the wall with random phone numbers.
P1010032

Anyways, I've started a collection.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Anger + Art = Change?

My first year at Adcenter, we were assigned a project: "Anger + Art = Change" in our Creative Thinking class. Being irked by the snowballing violations and dismissals of habeas corpus, I created this.

Anger+Art=Change

In the same spirit, I found a piece which reminded me of several reasons why jumping on the Beijing 2008 bandwagon might not be so hot.
Fifteen reasons, to be exact.

Beijing 2008

In a consumer culture, money speaks louder than words. I recommend boycotting tyrants.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Smile, You're on Closed Circuit MTV

In Manchester UK, Big Brother's watching, and so is everyone else. A rookie band with zero budget created a great-looking music video using the city's surveillance cameras. Well done, guys.
(The song's okay too.)


The best part is that they obtained the videos through the Freedom of Information Act. Use that surveillance state to your advantage!

Very clever use of media: playing to cameras in the street, in taxis, even on a bus. Videos capture reactions from passersby, and the use of frames warps space and time in smart ways. I guarantee this mechanism will be used to execute an ad or viral video (if it hasn't happened already).

Read the full article and band interview here.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

I want one.

I officially "finish" my book (portfolio) in the next 37 days.
Meanwhile, I look forward to buying this book a few months later:



Holy cow, that's so smart it's sexy.
And kudos to the marketing smartypants who put this video online.

In other news, I'm officially back from hiatus. Greetings, world.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

What Lies Underneath

Everyone see the Superbowl? Good. (Go Giants)
and... those ads. hunh.

Specifically, the Victoria's Secret ad.
A classy execution and cute, but also entirely predictable. Will men really rush out to buy women's lingerie because of this ad? Will they even remember? Or will they just squeeze their wife/girlfriend's knee in between bites of spicy bbq buffalo wings?

I enjoyed Gregg Easterbrook's take in his article, Super Bowl Ads: $90,000 Per Second, who begs for energetic, athletic VS girls - suggesting (among other things) that Adriana Lima go drink a milkshake. She definitely lost some serious weight recently, which is unfortunate. She's been my favorite VS girl for a long time specifically because she used to sport a few real curves. But not any more. Check out her new cheek hollows and rib bones:

Whatever happened to Heidi Klum bringing the playfulness back to lingerie? That spoke to me a lot more than the Superbowl spot. Who're we selling underpants to, anyway?

Frankly, Victoria's Secret could use a little updating, and I'm not talking about the teeny-bopper "Pink" line extension. I'm talking about the wonderful interface at KnickerPicker.com, still in beta but already at the top of my shopping list. After all, I'm never gonna look like Adriana in underwear, so why should I buy based on her body type? I'm gonna look more like these fine gals. Different models make the dressing-room interface relatable to a decent spectrum of body types.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Tell it, Captain.

This morning, Patrick Stewart surprised me.
He echoed what's been rattling around in my head lately.

Musing on the two halves of his Shakespearean career, Mr. Stewart said that acting feels different to him now. He kept himself in check in the early years, he explained, acting with deliberation rather than passion, faking rather than feeling.

“I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time,” he said. “A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is ‘telling beautiful lies,’ and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way.”

More than anything, he has Shakespeare on the brain. “I have this theory that these roles, the really great roles — there are elements of them in all of us. And that is part of the greatness of this dramatist, that he taps into something which is entirely human. You feel him reaching out his hand and saying to you as an actor, ‘Come on, it’s easier than you think.’ ”


Read the whole NY Times article. It's fantastic.

Special thanks to Beth for finding this.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Only Yesterday

New resource for all you art directors and history-philes out there:
the Library of Congress now has a blog.

And a FLICKR ALBUM.
No Photoshopping. These are the real deal.
Hi-res, full-color photographs.
Taken in the 1940's.
Preserved in impeccable condition.





The RPG forums have already leapt on this as a character and location resource. Historical fiction novelists can't be far behind.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

WANT.

bumper sticker:



And a close runner up:




Nerdy, perhaps. But c'mon, SO COOL.