magpie's shiny things

shiny things in messy little piles

Year: 2011 (Page 3 of 6)

Morning Linkage (Jan 28)

January 28, 2011 /

Transportation

Steam to return to the Salt. An update on the efforts of Cyclone Pow­er Tech to recap­ture the land­speed record for a steam engine. Quixot­ic and wonderful.

Ducati has acquired Eliz­a­beth Raab’s Ducati pho­tographs which match sev­er­al of the icon­ic Ducatis with the form of a nude woman in an explo­ration of shape and sur­faces. Skip the words and go straight to the gallery. They’re love­ly, if a bit trite, and very NSFW.

Undis­cov­ered gem. Trishikh Das­gup­ta shoots the recre­ation of his bike Sil­verblaze. An R‑E Bul­let Machis­mo 500.

Science

Gov­ern­ment spon­sored space porn. Not quite. Remix­es and mash-ups of NASA footage by folks with a bad case of space lust. Some seri­ous­ly space cow­boy good­ness here.

Art, Images, and Design

The inane lyrics of Lady Gaga make a per­fect­ly mar­velous Dr. Seuss-ian non­sense chil­dren’s book. With
vin­tage graph­ics in black and white with blue.

Today’s if I had one-shot-a-week-like-that I’d so hap­py pho­to­graph. The umbrel­la per­fects the image. Max Fomin is some­where in Spain but writ­ing in Russian.

Olaf Hajek’s Antoinettes. A dark, earthy vision of nat­ur­al excess. Many oth­er fine things as well.

Animation and Moving Images

Paint, and sound. Add a cou­ple of cam­eras, and a turn table with a fierce rota­tion, et vio­la, a nifty ad cam­paign for print­ers. It’s so sim­ple and it’s so stunning.

These are so sweet, and so awe­some and so just right. The cut-out ani­ma­tions for the film of Le Petit Nico­las. (1:57, nice music)

Morning Linkage (Jan 27)

January 27, 2011 /

Transportation

Bar­bour does a one minute spot to cel­e­brate their 75th. Black and white video of vin­tage tri­als machines. Bikes and rid­ers cred­it­ed in the post. Flutter.

Today is make the Bear hap­py day. After the tri­als video above, I’ve found these two videos of the Jack Pine Tri­umph Scram­bler. The first is a loud, jagged, too many cut-aways hooli­gans ride through Philadel­phia. The sec­ond a sedate, black and white, nar­rat­ed tour of the bike’s fea­tures. You’ll love one or the oth­er but prob­a­bly not both.

Insan­i­ty gets a real­ly nice 70’s rac­er treat­ment. A Kawasa­ki H1.

Science

I went to the NYT Best Ideas of 2010 arti­cle to get a look at this 1:00 ani­ma­tion about wind pow­er gen­er­a­tion with­out tur­bines. There’s a few oth­er inter­est­ing tid­bits there.

Anoth­er use of the ubiq­ui­tous cell­phone as an imag­ing and sen­sor device. Handyscope. Sold as a mag­ni­fy­ing imager to der­ma­tol­o­gists, but prob­a­bly use­ful for any num­ber of sit­u­a­tions requir­ing a close look at sur­faces. (Met­al fatigue anyone?)

Art, Images, and Design

One of my favorite con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phers is Mark Tuck­er. (yeah — you’ve seen him here before.) In this post he talks about home­made cam­eras. It’s all very geeky and feels too much like farkling your bike with­out rid­ing fur­ther than to the Star­bucks…  Until you see the con­tact sheets he serves up as an exam­ple of what he could do with one of his franken­cam­eras. And then you go look at the Plunger­cam franken­cam­era. Um, yeah this guy would fit right in with this crowd.

I love a good Japan­ese mon­ster movie. They were the rainy day diver­sion of choice at sum­mer camp in my child­hood. There’s noth­ing like a bad­ly scratched film with poor­ly trans­lat­ed Eng­lish sub­ti­tles at the bot­tom. Except maybe these bet­ter than the orig­i­nal Czech and Pol­ish posters adver­tis­ing those same movies. There’s some real­ly great graph­ics here for fea­tures like Godzil­la and Gappa.

Animation and Moving Images

I hate gro­cery day… Well I don’t, but lots of peo­ple do. If you’re one of them here’s lit­tle bit of fun for you. (No, I do not under­stand the grapes thing — just weird.)
Video 0:52 with a lit­tle song.

Morning Linkage (Jan 25)

January 25, 2011 /

Transportation

Spark­ly orange paint and a nitrous tank. I so want to hate this bike, but I can’t quite man­age it. It’s scruffy and over the top, but it’s utter­ly charm­ing in that torn-up eared tom-cat kind of way. But it’s a CB750, so what do you expect?

Hap­py words make a bike. Bicy­cle Typogram.  Bonus, pics of the press and the print­ing of the image.

Page down once, 1929 Nean­der. Per­fec­tion.

Art, Images, and Design

Late­ly a lot of things in my life have been appear­ing in twos. Odd linked images that tie across media. Here’s a mys­tery pho­to of a build­ing that appears to be float­ing in the air (prob­a­bly a load­ing shed for fer­til­iz­er trucks) and one of my favorite movies “Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle” tied up together.

The first time I heard of a pan­golin it was on the cov­er of a text book in school (Mary Dou­glas’s Implic­it Mean­ings.) The ani­mal fas­ci­nat­ed me. Still does. And I’m not the only one. A back­pack and an over the shoul­der bag inspired by the spiny anteater cre­at­ed by Cyclus and made of recy­cled inner tubes. Goth? Punk? I’m vot­ing new-animist.

Oh wow. You can still license Jim Flo­ra art for your album/CD. I may have to go back to plan­ning on being a rock­’n’roll star when I grow up.

Culture and Its Institutions

And trav­el­ing on from the oh wow jim flo­ra… to ARC, Artist’s Record­ing Col­lec­tive. A new busi­ness mod­el for pack­ag­ing, dis­trib­ut­ing, and pro­mot­ing music. One of sev­er­al ven­tures attempt­ing to make the new media and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels serve the artist first.

Final Thought

Infor­ma­tion you need, a female demon who forces men to speak when they should­n’t. Uh huh.

Morning Linkage (Jan 24)

January 24, 2011 /

Transportation

Oooh, this is gonna make some folks cringe. If the point of spend­ing all that trans­porta­tion mon­ey is to cre­ate jobs then maybe we’re not doing the right thing? Bike paths for the win.

Is this the mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tion of the cafe rac­er? A striped down, almost purpose-built bike with out­sider street cred? No. It is a street fight­er — the bike class that has replaced the cafe rac­er as the mad man’s built to suit machine. I have to agree with the com­menters on this one though. The Scoop maybe very pret­ty but it is not as adver­tised on the package.

Yes, I have a seri­ous case of idol wor­ship when it comes to Shiny Kimu­ra. Any­thing I can find that offers an insight into his artis­tic mind is cat­nip. Today’s dose, an inter­view and pho­to set from Paul at Vintagent.

Science

Through­out his­to­ry the sud­den appear­ance and dis­ap­pear­ance of fea­tures and fig­ures in the night sky have been tak­en as por­tents and omens. I can’t wait to see what hap­pens when Betel­geuse goes super nova. The sky will sud­den­ly seem to have a sec­ond sun in it. Could be as ear­ly as, well, like today. Okay 640 years ago but inter­stel­lar tele­graph sys­tem being what it is we won’t know until this evening at the ear­li­est. Or it could be anoth­er mil­lion years or so. Still some­thing to look for­ward to, no?

Art, Images, and Design

It’s Mon­day, I’m in the mood to gut some­thing and leave steam­ing piles of entrails about the place to fright­en and con­fuse the interns…

The first time you see one of these words fold­ed into, or is that out of, a book, you think wow, that’s so cool. About the fifth image you yawn. But still, every­one should get to have the first — oh wow.

Sev­en Irv­ing Penn por­traits. I nev­er tire of Pen­n’s work. No mat­ter how many times I have seen an image it always says some­thing more to me the next time. This Selvedge Yard piece is a nice intro­duc­tion to Pen­n’s work that ends with the artist’s words. “In por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy there is some­thing more pro­found we seek inside a per­son, while being painful­ly aware that a lim­i­ta­tion of our medi­um is that the inside is record­able only so far as it is appar­ent on the outside.’

car­ry on…

Morning Linkage (Jan 20)

January 21, 2011 /

Transportation

A lit­tle classier than most junk yard scrounged house­wares. Tri­umph teamed up with the Birm­ing­ham City Uni­ver­si­ty’s Insti­tute of Art and Design to get stu­dents design­ing home fur­nish­ings built out of bike parts. A cou­ple of these are ‘teh awesome.’

CB 750’s redone as cafe rac­ers. I love ’em but it takes some­thing a lit­tle extra to catch my eye late­ly. I think the stripped down, low chrome con­tent of Mil­i­tary Gold by the Span­ish house Cafe Rac­er Dreams might have just that.

Art, Images. and Design

I do not know what to make of the sto­ry syn­op­sis for Fur of the Glacial Mouse but the image of two fox­es watch­ing a train run through a val­ley on a pale moon lit win­ter’s night is a good one.

Giant creepy Russ­ian fairy tale night­mare with a king, a cat, a frog, and a ginor­moust all-seeing eye. Yup, I still love Steven Dai­ly. Covenant show­ing at La Luz de Jesus in LA.

Not every­one here is a fash­ion fool like I am. Does­n’t real­ly mat­ter. If you like the idea of there being peo­ple on this earth who look intent­ly at what’s going on around them every sin­gle day, then you’re going to like this inter­view with Scott Schu­mann a.k.a. the Sar­to­ri­al­ist. (Video 7:11)

Animation

The wrong things… scary clown heads may be a good sub­sti­tute for the flames com­ing out of the anti-aircraft guns but the egre­gious use of Christ­mas items, rib­bons, bows, and glass tree orna­ments… Kaboom. PES again (Video 1:10, audio is loud)

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