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.

Morning Linkage (Jan 25)

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)

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…