Morning Linkage (Feb 4) Friday

Transportation

A con­cept bike should push an idea out beyond the run of the mill and what’s already on the show­room floor. Built for the imag­i­nary pur­pose of run­ning (the old ver­sion of) the Milan-Taranto endurance race and using such new-fangled com­po­nents as a tur­bo diesel engine and car­bon fiber wheels. What you get is Paolo di Giusti’s rad­i­cal sin­gle cylin­der Moto Guzzi.

I’m not sure I want to hear the word steam­punk applied to any motor­cy­cle let alone one that is sup­posed to be rid­able. And in fact I find the brass accents to be all wrong on this bike. But the idea of build­ing a cafe start­ing with the Aprilla RSV motor?  That makes me hap­py. And Welsh to boot. Taimoshan.

Science

Murphy is a right obnox­ious bas­tard, but he seems to have let loose of the NanoSail‑D solar sail project at last.  And, no, I did not know that the aim of the project is trash sweep­ing in low earth orbit either.

A video that demon­strates the pow­er of the pow­er of 10. By mov­ing out­ward from a square meter of an image of a nice cou­ple hav­ing a pic­nic in Chicago and end­ing up at the every edges of human abil­i­ty to see into space in an image 100 mil­lion light years across.   Old IBM film but still rel­e­vant and still fun.

Art. images, and Design

Nice com­bos of sim­ple graph­ics and unso­phis­ti­cat­ed type. Steve Powers explored the glo­ry and gory of rela­tion­ships on the walls of Philadelphia. I’ve shown you sev­er­al of them before but this is my new favorite.

And now I’m lov­ing his “Daily Metaltation”

This is as good as any place to start explor­ing the work of Dan Mountford. Double expo­sures made in the cam­era. The world before photoshop.

Animation and Moving Images

Chain-gang tap dance. Okay it’s a lit­tle hard to explain why two girls — the Holst Sisters — are tap danc­ing while attached at the ankle. But they’re good at it.

I have no idea who the band is or what the song is about or any of that — I don’t speak Japanese. But the music is cheery and vague­ly jazzy and the ani­ma­tion ranges from live­ly to over the top.

Morning Linkage (Feb 3) Thursday

Transportation

I love this Ducati cafe for no bet­ter rea­son than the brass bezeled clock. le sigh

This one is hard to post. Copenhagen has a live­ly cus­tom scene with some of my favorite builders. Many of them not­ed the cat­a­stroph­ic fire that result­ed in loss of Frank’s one of their HD go-to parts sup­pli­ers. James posts some pho­tos of the after­math. Sad, haunt­ing, beau­ti­ful pictures.

Art, Images, and Design

More for the qual­i­ty of the pho­to­graph of the first piece than the oth­er pieces in the series. String on a wall in Ravenna IT. By Moneyless.

Catwoman. (SFW) Yum. Bengal’s ver­sion is both coy and dark. Excellent com­bi­na­tion. More of Bengal. (NSFW)

Okay — these are just cute. And a lit­tle sil­ly. They’re all exam­ples of cre­at­ing a purpose-built device for what is a com­mon house­hold impro­vi­sa­tion. Orange rinds on the radi­a­tor, a small dish of cof­fee in the fridge… but the designs are min­i­mal and straight forward.

Animation and Moving Images

Nick Cross’s Pig Farmer. Violent and trag­ic. (Video 5:05 NSFW or Children — real­is­tic vio­lence and squealing)

Morning Linkage (Feb 2)

Transportation

The 2 door sta­tion wag­on (or is that 3 doors?) has always been a bit of an odd fish. But Ferrari thinks that it’s the answer to the demand for a four seat super-car, the FF. And Pininfarina can make just about any­thing beau­ti­ful. I think 12 cylin­ders is all the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion it needs. With Ferrari-in-the-snow video good­ness Woot!

I’m a total suck­er for Nick Clements videos. Pretentious as hell and too hip for their own cool. Still… pret­ty scenery, pret­ty bikes, and gor­geous cin­e­matog­ra­phy. Featuring Cro Custom’s BS1.  (Video)

Chopcult  pro­vides a fine set of images and info on the BS1 and the builder, Cro Custom’s, site has a cou­ple of oth­er more typ­i­cal­ly chop­per bikes.

Arty inte­ri­or shots fea­tur­ing motor­cy­cles, and the bikes are for rent to use in your own shoots. The care­ful­ly dis­tressed Crossbones is, well… actu­al­ly, a real­ly appeal­ing piece of rolling sculp­ture. Gentry Dayton is cre­ative direc­tor of EvaGentry.

Art, Images, and Design

Ray Caesar is one of the many painters cur­rent­ly doing pal­lid, big-headed girls in per­il. Much of a much­ness, except that once in a while he does some­thing that stops me dead. Like the sleigh and courtier in  Homecoming. (Pardon the hell­ish URLs — they are shortened ;)

View the full show, A Gentle Kind of Cruelty, at Jonathan Levine Gallery’s web­site. (Some NSFW when zoomed)

Elaborately com­posed pho­tographs can go either way for me. Some are just noise, oth­ers like the first two of these from Simon Proctor’s Daystar series cap­ti­vate me. The videos cre­at­ed from the stills and oth­er ele­ments I’m very much on the fence about.

I’ve always loved the Burr puz­zles. Now there’s this… Burr tables!

More about the Burr puz­zles. (oh lordy that’s one seri­ous­ly ugly web­site but it’s all I’ve got…)

Moving Images, and Animation

Did you know that there was a Japanese ver­sion of the Flintstones pro­duced in the 1980s? Nope, nei­ther did I. It’s a giggle.

Dancing robots… I said, Dancing Robots. New ident spots for (UK) Channel 4’s, T4 pro­gram­ming. (Video and loud music)

Morning Linkage (Feb 1)

Transportation

Limits pro­duce the best design. The Metamorfosis Masiva is a Spanish cus­tomiz­ers chal­lenge that begins with SR250 and lim­its the cash out­lay to 1000 euros. No lim­it on time. The wrench­es detail is beyond cool. You can get more Metamorfosis cool­ness at their blog.

What to do with a wrecked Hypermotard…

Sales brochures have always been a part of auto­mo­tive mar­ket­ing. And col­lect­ing those brochures is a sub-hobby all its own.  Charlie White has helped a col­lec­tor put up scans of a com­plete binder of the mate­ri­als sent to Porsche deal­ers for the 1955 line-up. 43 pages of Continental, Speedster, and Spyder lust.

Art, Images, and Design

Crucial news for pho­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts. Alan Taylor is mov­ing to the Atlantic and launch­ing a new pho­to blog there. The Big Picture will con­tin­ue to be pub­lished by the Boston Globe but Alan’s par­tic­u­lar eye and vision will be mov­ing on. He talks about it here.

Bright, bold, and full of life. Danni Xi’s paper col­lages put my in mind of Mattise’s lat­er work, but with a strong hint of trib­al vitality.

Low relief paper sculp­tures by Cheong-ah Hwang aka: Papernoodle. Birds, still-lifes, sea crea­tures, Red, and Alice. The flickr stream is full of process shots as well. And you can buy the prints at the etsy shop.

My nom­i­nee for best eye­brows on an imag­i­nary crea­ture. Phlegm’s sea mammal.

Animation and Moving Images

You may be hav­ing a bad day but not *this* bad. Part  2 of a high­lights reel from a Tamil film called ROBOT.  Wait ’til you see the cobra… and the drill… and the mega-robot.  Cartoon vio­lence and insane robot may­hem. (Video 9:49)

There’s a part 1 as well. More com­e­dy but less insane robot awe­some. And heav­en only knows why the Borg cube is there. (Video 9:49)

A bit more sooth­ing­ly. Beach sand as a medi­um for stop-motion ani­ma­tion. Sea tur­tles, mer­maids, and a mon­ster. (Music video 3:43) Yuval and Merav Nathan

Morning Linkage (Jan 28)

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)