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)

Morning Linkage (Jan 27)

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.