shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: Shinya Kimura

Morning Linkage (Jan 24)

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 (Jun 28)

Transportation

One of the nec­es­sary but con­fus­ing parts of trav­el­ing is fig­ur­ing out the taxi sys­tem in var­i­ous coun­tries. How do I hail a taxi? Do I nego­ti­ate? Do I tip? Is it safe for sin­gle females? What the heck does a taxi look like any­way? In Japan they might just have one of these cute lit­tle signs on top. (Pho­to gallery nav­i­ga­tion challenge.)

Cus­tom scoot­er. No clue. No com­ment. Well, okay, maybe that he should trim the tie-ties. Equal­ly bizarre trans­la­tion of the web­site by Google here.

Pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned here for a video of a cus­tom bike arriv­ing at a tea cer­e­mo­ny (seri­ous­ly.) This new vid of cus­tom builder Shinya Kimu­ra cap­tures the mood and atti­tude of the builder and his bikes. Pure Mon­day morn­ing inspi­ra­tion. My favorite of his bikes, for the moment. The Bar­racu­da.

Maps

Think­ing about air­space and air­space reg­u­la­tions. The  ref­er­enced arti­cle is good. The pro­posed “muse­um” is intriguing.

Map­ping the degree of touristy. No, I did­n’t make that word up, some­one else did. Heat map of photo-tag fre­quen­cy gives you an idea how many cam­era tot­ing dweebs you are like­ly to encounter.

Art, Images, and Design

Tim Flach high­lights the exag­ger­at­ed, almost freak­ish, per­fec­tion of his sub­jects — show dogs, bats, and oth­er ani­mals. Watch the dog walk across the screen and then click on Port­fo­lio. NSFW after image #38.

Cathy Gat­land gives a quick look at the World Cup fever sweep­ing SA with a cou­ple of street cor­ner por­traits.

Animation

A nice set of black and white inter­fer­ence illu­sions. Sooth­ing music.

Not real­ly ani­ma­tion but pup­pets. The coarse­ly vio­lent ori­gins of the mup­pets; Hen­son did ads for Wilk­in’s Cof­fee. Poor Won­tkins gets done-in in amaz­ing ways.

Off you go now…