peter callesen: cut paper art

The link takes you to Peter Callesen's online gallery.
Look especially at the cut paper works.
Egad, is I believe the expression.

Audio Cassette Nostalgia

Images of cassette tapes.
That's pretty much what you'll find at tapedeck.org

This. site. is. awesome.

The Poster List

$7.99 each for a series of 12" x 18" posters that make me wish I had a dorm room again.

Visual Treat: Vintage French Ephemera

A blog collection of vintage printed materials from France. Movie posters, textbook pages, trading cards, other random objet.

Yum.

North Korean Mass Games

Along the lines of my previous post of art created from the controlled movements of crowds, are the North Korean "Mass Games", an annual festival of choreographed gymnastics.



Also: in a stadium performance, a brain crushing dynamic mosaic created by more than 15,000 audience members holding aloft various colored sheets of paper:

Street Art: Loro in Sao Paulo, Brazil

[via Wooster Collective]

Calisphere: Digitized California History

The University of California has launched a new online archive of more than 150,000 digitized items, mostly primary sources — photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and more, illuminating the history of California.

Designed primarily as a resource for K-12 teachers and students (in alignment with the California Content Standards), but with plenty of random browsing opportunities.

Someone Else's Vacation Photo

Backpacking trips are temporarily out of our reach. But I can still dream. Here's "Unnamed Tarn near Mono Pass", along the Eastern side of the Sierra, around 4 pm. Photo courtesy of John Beach, who has many other spectacular photos from the same 5-day journey.

Horsemen of the Esophagus

What's better than a week at a rented house near the beach?

A rented house near the beach chock full of magazines.
The grownups passed around back issues of Harper's and The Sunday New York Times Magazine. Liam and Ronan were fascinated by the 3-D cover of the 1000th issue of Rolling Stone. A single copy of InStyle magazine was there to help us "cleanse the palate," and keep us up to date on Jennifer Anniston's New Year's Resolutions.

But the best article I found was in the May 2006 of The Atlantic Monthly. It's a glorious article on the world's top competitors in the International Federation of Competitive Eating, excerpted from Jason Fagone's book, Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream.

The offbeat subject drew me in. The writing hooked me. Fagone knows how to tell a story, and it helps that the IFOCE promoters are great showmen. The final page of the article online captures the amazing drama of the 2001 Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest.

Target/Red Cross Emergency Starter Kit

Stylish AND utilitarian.
(Although ideally you wouldn't be in a situation requiring you to use it.)



Includes gloves, ponchos, blanket, lights, radio, and first aid kit.
$10 of each kit purchased ($29.99) in August goes to the American Red Cross.

[via NOTCOT.]

21st Century Busby Berkeley Advertising

Via Wooster Collective, a collection of advertisements featuring overhead/aerial shots of people dressed in colorful outfits, choreographed to form dynamic shapes.

Of course, Busby Berkeley didn't have access to computer-generated extras.









And as a bonus video by Michael Gondry:



What's great about the internet and YouTube is that we can collect all these things together in a single blog post. What's less great is the lack of context: are any of these by the same choreographer? Are some of these copycats of others? (Three involve liquid being "poured" out of a bottle.)

What's great about modern brand advertising is that there are creatives and account planners persuasive enough to convince companies like Coca-Cola to spend bucketloads of money creating a street art stunt that makes me want to watch their commercial repeatedly, but in the aggregate doesn't really do much to sell more corn syrup water.

At least, not enough to justify the cost of the production, agency fees, and media buys.

Barenaked Ladies: Bluegrass One Week

From 2004: "chickety china the chinese chicken" in (almost) four part harmony... either they don't quite hit it or the mic isn't picking up the bass.

The nerd rockers from Canada bring out the mandolin and bass for an acoustic version of their hit "One Week." YouTube page includes link to mp3 file, if you need it.

OKGO Dances with You(Tube)

So OKGO, of the infamous backyard dance video to "A Million Ways," is holding a contest on YouTube to find an amateur group to join them onstage for one concert to dance to the song.

I have no time to learn the choreography to this song.

Apparently college kids have a lot of free time on their hands to do exactly that, and post the results on YouTube. So far, over 80 videos of different "dance troupes" have been posted.

The reason I don't have time to learn the steps? I'm too busy watching the copycat videos on YouTube.

Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis

From the makers of Grand Theft Auto comes the first game to make me want an Xbox 360.

Hemachandra

According to Wikipedia, Hemachandra was an 11th century Jain poet and scholar in Gujarati, who we remember mostly today for discovering the Fibonacci numbers fifty years before Fibonacci did.

But that's not the Hemachandra you'll find on YouTube

This Hemachandra is a college freshman in Hyperabad studying Animation and Multimedia, and more importantly, for YouTube users, the 2nd runner up on Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge 2005, an Indian reality TV show kind of like American Idol (Although Sony and Fremantle media do run Indian Idol in India, and even though Sa Re Ga Ma Pa looks like a blatant rip off of Idol, it's actually a re-brandingof a singing contest that's been running for 13 years). The producers are trying to position the show as a search to find new talent for the film industry... and not a pop music poster boy.

So Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge 2005 really is a singing contest, searching for excellent playback singers (who won't appear onscreen after this show), which means "Chandu" (his nickname) and his competitors really have to nail the vocals... and apparently having no stage presence whatsoever is not a liability.

Watch as the camera pans and swoops and cuts to the excited audience and Hemachandra sings one of the big dance numbers from Main Hoon Na while pretty much not moving.

FYI: Debojit Saha and Vineet Singh were the final two contestants (Debojit won). I haven't had time to check them out on YouTube yet. All three finalists are under contract to Zee TV for three years. Chandu, a former wedding singer, now has three films under his belt, two in Telugu, Vamsam and Premante Intena, and one in Hindi, Dil Diya Hai (opens August 25!).

Michael Pollan writes, Whole Foods writes back

Partly in response to Michael Pollan's latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Whole Foods is rejiggering its regional supplier chain to incorporate more locally grown foods.

This is a pretty lengthy SF Gate/Chronicle story, with references to blog entries by the CEO of Whole Foods and Pollan himself.

Separate from the content issues themselves (which do make for interesting reading), what I find most remarkable is that a company the size of Whole Foods would so publicly respond to the work of a single author, and that it would do it using the CEO as the primary communicator, and the internet as the primary zone of communication--rather than hiding behind a corporate press release sent to media outlets, or even a one-way interview by the CEO.

Granted, Pollan was reaching readers within Whole Foods' target demographic--both with his bestselling book and his columns for NYT TimesSelect. So these challenges to Whole Foods' values were having a real impact on the company's image.

What's interesting at a meta- level is how this exchange points towards future shifts in the ways businesses communicate, as articulated in part by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book Naked Conversations.

Pollan remarks in the article that using this public arena to create a dialogue was a shrewd decision by Whole Foods, and builds credibility among those who care about these issues.

Scoble would argue that the companies who are open and honest will be the shrewdest, and the most successful at building lasting relationships with their customers. Those, on the other hand, who use "openness" as a PR device will fail, because that is still about attempting to control the conversation.

Pollan will still continue to study and write about Whole Foods, so he'll be there to help keep them honest.

Or, maybe Whole Foods knows a guy who knows a guy who can, you know, take care of it.

Temporary Personal Assistant

Alamedan Sarah Deutsch's Pinkleberry Services will do your shopping, errands, gift-wrapping, party planning, organization, or just wait at your house for a delivery to arrive.

$25 for the first hour, $20 for the second, $15/hour after that.

I wonder how she is at applying metadata in iPhoto.
Or logging videotapes.

MDA's Esquire columns

Perhaps you haven't taken time each month to saunter over to the "Men's Lifestyle" section of the newsstand, pick up the latest edition of Esquire, and flip past the malodorous monochromatic advertisements to the latest film column by our good friend Mike D'Angelo.

His past columns are now appearing online on the free side of the subscription firewall, so now you can go back and catch up.

Note that these are columns, not reviews. Esquire's lengthy editorial lead time is such that Mike has often not seen the movie he's writing about (unless he saw it earlier at Sundance or Cannes), and must therefore use an actor or director's previous work as examples.

Also check out his annual "Alternative Oscars" column, in which they let him run wild for a couple extra thousand words to celebrate and/or trash the year in review.

The Daily Show on the Stem Cell Veto

[via Crooks and Liars.]

I thank Stewart &Co. for reminding at least its few viewers that to claim belief in a "Culture of Life" is such evil f___ing bull@#$% when you're 3+ years into a WAR.

Inhabitat: Chilean Prefab House

Piggybacking on Christa's recent interest in shipping container housing, here's a post on a Chilean architectural firm and its prototype house, la Minga.

And while you're there, you can check out Inhabitat's archive of "PreFab Fridays", highlighting the latest trends in prefabricated and sustainable housing.