nike has the most fantastic web interface for their entire history of basketball shoes. it traces all nike models from way back in 1972, you can highlight by family (e.g. flight, jordan, force), and even will show you the genealogy of a modern shoe, linking all of the older models from which it descended.
it’s beautiful.
while i was down in lost angels this weekend, i caught the tim hawkinson exhibit at lacma.
go see it. it’s fantastic.
he’s got these brilliant conceptual pieces, that are not quite rube goldberg-esque, but use levers, tubes, dials, and all sorts of antiquated devices to make fanastic creations.
so says lacma:
Since the late 1980s, many of his important works in photography, drawing, printmaking and painting have been constructed from found objects and handcrafted materials and machines to create distinctive works that are personal yet seemingly scientific. Many of these materials are common or store-bought and endow his pieces with a mysterious sense of familiarity and accessibility, while also bringing a sense of inventiveness that inspires surprise, wonder, and even awe. Two prominent pieces on view that demonstrate this sense of inventiveness on both small and large scale are Feather (1997) and Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years) (1995). Feather (1997) is a tiny feather made from the artist’s own hair, while Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years) (1995), in contrast, is a 24-foot-long row of interlocking gears, the smallest of which is driven by a whirring toy motor that in turn drives each consecutively larger and more slowly turning gear up to the largest of all, which rotates approximately once every one hundred years. Several of Hawkinson’s other mechanical works function as eccentric musical instruments, whistling, honking, and clacking to the artist’s own scores or popular songs.
i loved the plastic tree thing that made noises by dripping water on aluminum pie plates.
i loved the giant exploded monster truck tire made out of foam and wire and tape.
i loved the plastic soda bottle tuvan throat singer.
i loved the 360° model clipper ship.
i loved the fractal tree arm finger man.
i loved the tiny little hidden clocks.
i loved the automated signature machine.
the tiny bird skeleton made out of his fingernail clippings was incredibly creepy.
i loved that if you go to lacma after five, it’s free. courtesy of target.
i love that this means target supports plastic ear baby wombs.
oooooh check it out:
the new copy of the ethnologue is out! do you have your copy yet?
what? not yet? what are you waiting for? someone to translate it for you?
you don’t even know what it is?
well, duh, it’s just the encyclopedia of all the world’s languages, that’s all.
what can you learn from this thing? well, ask the ny times:
Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.
you can look and marvel at all the nearly extinct languages, such as xipaya, chamicuro, or hukumina, also known as bambaa. “bambaa” in hukumina means “there isn’t any”. the one last speaker of hukumina was 89 years old in 1989.
uh-oh.
bambaa hukumina!
how about boruca, which is only spoken by five women? how much of their conversation is lamenting the lack of eligible bachelors? bambaa! or maybe it’s a secret language for women, to spread a secret lesbian agenda in costa rica.
sweet.
it’s nice to read up on my only other (sort of) fluent language, taiwanese, which is classified as min nan chinese:
Language use: Speakers of other languages use this for commerce. Most domains. All ages. Shantou and Chenhai varieties of the Chao-shan dialect are considered to be cultured. Chao-shan speakers may speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or English for buying and selling, Mandarin to outside Chinese and government purposes, English to foreigners. Those under 30 are more bilingual.
Language development: Literacy rate in first language: 30% literate in Chao-shan. Many older people cannot read Chinese, but all young people can read standard Mandarin Chinese. Roman script in Taiwan. Poetry. Dictionary. Grammar. Bible: 1884–1933.
it occurs to me that i’m illiterate. doh! i am an old person, after all.
how was willits?
tired.
or more correctly, ti-ARD.
if you’re insisting on proper grammar, then strictly speaking i’m the one who’s ti-ARD. that makes willits ti-ARDing.
i’m reading emails from other people who went and how lovely their time was, how all their cares melted away in the sun and in the pond, listening to the groovy music and dancing their troubles away.
for me, not so much.
not to say that there weren’t good things. reconnecting with friends. making new ones. and seeing all these beautiful people run around nekkid all weekend isn’t bad either. plus my jazz set got lots of raves, especially that ridiculous paul anka cover of smells like teen spirit.
on the other hand, the worrying over when/if/how hmc was going to show was a little stressful.
she finally did show, late saturday, which is fantastic. but then that meant jumping into production mode, as we were covertly filming her film #3 up there. which might have not been a big deal, but with this community it’s sometimes (always) better to do it and ask forgiveness later. or plead ignorance. witness the webcam, right?
all in all it turned out fine, but it wasn’t relaxing.
in case any of you are wondering what it’s like to try and act while wearing full dress clothes up in the mountains under the midday sun in 100° heat, i can tell you.
it’s FUCKING HOT.
now i know why that gingerbread man was running so fast.
damn you xz and danger.
they got me watching that damned new battlestar galactica series.
i guess it’s payback for getting them hooked on lost and 24. i really had too much in my head earlier in the year to pay attention, but now that it’s summer i pissed off 13 hours last week watching all the episodes after tivo recorded the marathon recap.
the season premiere’s tonight, and instead of watching it on a big fat tv, i’m going to be out at willits. where there’s no tv. and no cylons. there will be people walking around half nekkid, though.
who knows, maybe there will be cylons. do cylons like breaks? trance? glitchcore?
where’s the daggitt? maybe we can get it to do some pop locking. for peace. yo.
(last season spoiler follows)
speaking of peace, in the last episode lieutenant martin castillo declares martial law and arrests president stands-with-a-fist for being a nutty religious type. since we know that eventually the prophecies are more or less correct and that earth is the 13th tribe of kobol, we sympathize with the president and her staff and their motivations. however, without that information, essentially the government is being run by a bunch of religious nuts who are letting their belief in scriptures interfere with the running of the government.
sound familiar?
of course, in our case, that government also controls the military.
frack.
to paraphrase kent brockman, “I, for one, welcome our new cylon overlords. I’d like to remind them as a trusted blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.”
it’s hmc’s birthday today.
i’m up here, not with her, not down in lost angels. stuck in meetings all day, and have to go to willits tomorrow morning.
not that she’d even have time to celebrate it today at all, since she’s going to be in the editing room all day long, wrasslin’ with avid and trying to edit music and voice tracks together into one harmonious symphony.
i might see her tomorrow, as she might either drive up and drive up (6 + 3.5 hours) or fly and drive up (1 + 3.5 hours). or maybe not. nothing seems for certain. i don’t know what’s going on and she’s too exhausted to decide.
where’s her cake? where’s the party? where’s the bouncy spongebob squarepants castle and the pinata?
how did we end up with this life? this makes no sense at all.
went to lost angels this weekend.
the flight down was notable for one thing, which was that the girl who sat next to me had only two carry-on items: a pink purse with a red star, and an oil painting which depicted either two people walking along the seashore. or jesus with a crew cut and jerry garcia in heaven. or maybe it was timothy leary and a shaggy john lennon? it’s hard to tell from the back. and from heaven. are they supposed to have wings? are they supposed to be so bland and two-dimensional? maybe you give up that third dimension for eternal peace.
saturday we thrifted props for hmc’s film of the week. this week’s goal: baby items. literally, part of babies. like different baby arms, different baby legs. it’s funny how people look at at the children’s hospital when you ask them certain questions. actually, we ended up at big lots comparing different size baby dolls, how their arms and legs would look on camera, and how hard it would be to dismember them once we got home. the big score was at the new out of the closet thrift store off of hollywood and western, where we found a baby stroller for $20! this is a lucky find, as goodwill won’t carry strollers due to recalls and liablility, and we had been resigned to buying on at target and trying to return it later.
spottings of the day: lotr and sin city boy elijah wood, who was eating a late lunch with his boyfriend(!), and later, “rocker” dave navarro who looks as girly and fidgety as he did on celebrity poker showdown, but really, where’s carmen? not she’s anything to drool over (plastic and pneumatic), but how often do you get to see a sex symbol and former playmate?
sunday i spent married to someone else. we had a baby with dismembered limbs that turned evil and then drove a wedge between us, breaking up our family.
i guess you can’t have everything.
i just stumbled upon this treasure trove of superhero hostess ads on seanbaby:
so those nutty scientists sent a space probe to crash into a comet, just to blow shit up and see what was inside. oh and yeah, “for science”.
despite being named (ironically?) after the second crappiest comet-tries-to-destroy-the-earth movie, it was apparently a big success. they didn’t miscalculate anything, and they smashed stuff up, producing a big dust cloud of stuff in the middle of nowhere. just like the two accidents i saw on the bay bridge on my way to oakland yesterday, only this one will probably cause less congestion. but who’s going to clean all that shit up?
is it just me, or was anyone else secretly worried that they would accidentally destroy the entire universe? i mean doesn’t this fit every disaster movie to a tee, where scientists are just doing some tests of something they think is a huge leap in knowledge and will unlock the secrets to the universe, and instead they end up unleashing a) untold destructive power b) a terrible omnipotent supervillian c) hordes of supernatural undead. isn’t this how general zod got free in the first place? someone check demi moore: how many signs is she holding? has mimi rogers raptured yet?
weren’t you expecting the fabric of space and time to be ripped apart when we smashed that comet, just a little? as the world was being destroyed, you’d think, “DAMN YOU SCIENCE! NOT AGAIN!”
what i’m really surprised at is that none of the christian fundamentalists had these thoughts and tried to stop this whole thing. what if it turned out that the comet was actually the physical manifestation of heaven? or maybe the shuttle to heaven, and we’ve now just broken the door? oh sure, science says that it’s got nothing to do with that, but since when do they believe in science anyway? if they don’t believe in things like dinosaurs, evolution, pollution, or genetics, why should they believe in deep space science? it seems like that would be even more dubious to them, wouldn’t it?
well, i guess it doesn’t matter, as we didn’t blow up the universe after all.
unless it’s still coming.
or maybe we did blow it up, but we just don’t know it yet…
while today’s the day to be proud to be american, i’m also gratified that there’s also reasons to be even prouder to be taiwanese:
The Martun, or toilet in Chinese, restaurant in the southern port city of Kaohsiung boasts lengthy queues on weekends as diners wait for a toilet seat in its brightly colored tile interior.
Food arrives in bowls shaped like Western-style toilets or Asian-style “squat pots.”
Manager Hung Lin-wen said the original inspiration came from a toilet-shaped spaceship in a Japanese cartoon. The theme has attracted droves of novelty-seeking young people who come to play with their food and gross out their friends.
“We think the theme is special, and the food is tasty,” Hung said.
But no matter how delicious, a few customers still find the combination a little hard to swallow.
“The taste is good, but I still feel disgusted when I look at it,” said diner Lin Yu-may.
it’s the fourth of july long holiday weekend, and i unexpectedly don’t know what to do.
sure, it’s not like i didn’t have any warning. repeatedly people would come up to me and make conversation in passing, asking “what are you doing for the 4th?” to which i would reply, “uh, what? oh, i don’t know. it’s too far away.”
only it’s not because it’s here NOW.
honestly, i kept expecting the call to come out: come down to lost angels. your number is up, you’ve been called up to the big game, you’ve been drafted, you’ve won the last-minute holiday lottery. you see, hmc is down there taking a digital video film production class at usc, and she’s shooting her first film today. i thought for sure i’d have to go to help out or something. or at least, i thought that maybe i should go for moral support.
yet the call never came, and it turns out all the flights were booked anyway.
so i find myself here on this long weekend, oddly unexpectedly.
with nothing to do. not even in a good way like, “hey man, i got nothing to do! i can kick back and relax!” more like, “what am i going to do with all this time? I HAVE NO LIFE OF MY OWN! I AM AN APPENDAGE!”
thus i went on a errand frenzy:
although honestly, despite the domesticity, most of my time was spent in the lengthy process of transitioning everything from my old laptop to my new laptop. which if you’ve ever done this yourself, it’s not just your data, but it’s all of your programs and tweaks and tricks and everything. as well as the requisite improvements and culling and deciding what not to bring over or only to archive for “just in case”.
the funny thing is while my old laptop is an ibm thinkpad t30, the new one is an ibm t42, but a lenovo ibm thinkpad t42, made post-chinese firm lenovo buyout of ibm’s laptop business. there’s now a big LENOVO sticker on the box, as well as a strange part of the tag on the bottom of the laptop where it honestly looks like someone xacto knifed the labed, removing the ‘IBM’ tag and putting on a ‘LENOVO’ tag. what the hell? i can get better fakes on the street in new york!
it’s the fourth of july weekend, i’ve been granted unexpected freedom, and i waste it staring into not one, but two computer screens.
god bless america.
or that part of america that china bought.
i was in colorado this week again for work. which is not notable in any way except for the fact that 1. colorado is a lot warmer in the summer than sf, and 2. i’m back now and therefore now colder.
one thing that i did think about was soap. not soap in the “fight club-tyler durden excuses for making homemade explosives” soap, but more in the “man this hotel soap is a cheap piece of shit” soap. so cheap that i didn’t even bother opening the ones in the bathroom but instead used some body gel that i had in my toiletry kit.
hmc went to lush recently and bought us some fancy smelly top shelf soaps, and i’ve been puzzling over these as well. certainly the expectation is that the ingredients are of much higher quality and there’s less soap “filler” (what is that, exactly? dirt?), all of which justifies you paying almost an order of magnitude more than the bar of dial you’d get at slaveway.
what’s funny to me is that along with all of this, you end up buying soap in large unwieldy and oddly shaped bricks that have jutting edges and pointy parts. this is supposed to convey a sense of hand-made craftsmanship, to assure you that these bars are carefully constructed by a soap craftsman for you in particular. it’s like you know someone who makes soap and they gave you a bar. but you paid them a lot of money for it. and they won’t let you come to their house.
isn’t this a little backwards? why does the “cheap” soap have nice rounded edges, and the “fancy” soap have pointy edges? decades of progress since the industrial revolution are suddenly ground to a halt because rounded edges are no longer seen as luxurious? how did everything get turned around?
it used to be that machine-made things were actually a mark of quality, that to be able to afford things made by others was a privilege of status, instead of having to wear clothes mom sewed from a pattern or use some item that we had to construct ourselves.
yet now machine made is bad, and homemade is good. witness this manifesto:
maybe it’s all just about rounded soap. if i’m paying that much for some soap, can i not have pointy edges? enough with the faux-homemade already.
