before i forget, i saw two great exhibitions on fashion while in lost angels last week. lacma has a show entitled “Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection”, and moca has a show called skin+bones: parallel practices in fashion and architecture. the lacma show was smaller and just focused on the innovations of the past 25 years in things like form, construction, and materials:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idealized female form in the West was sculpted by artifice, with restrictive corsetry and voluminous petticoats. During the century, with the exception of the 1950s, fashion’s approach to the torso grew progressively more lenient. Developments in elasticized textiles that mold to the body’s natural curves assisted contemporary designers, including Azzedine Alaïa and Hervé Léger, in realizing their respective paradigms of the female form.
Although costume history is rife with sculptural manipulations of the body, the symmetry of the human armature was rarely questioned. Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake, addressing the body as only part of the integral whole of the garment, have used asymmetry as the core design concept in creating garments that virtually stand alone—alternative forms dependent on, but not defined by, the body.
Reminiscent of the architectonic turn-of-the-twentieth-century underwear, contemporary garments also rely on additive structures or structural textiles to create extensions to the natural silhouette and change the perceived shape of the body. The result may be an ingenious twist on the historical figure, a freestanding geometrical model, or a piece of kinetic sculpture.
Since both architecture and fashion are essentially constructed from flat two-dimensional materials, it is not surprising that practitioners in each field find inspiration in the other’s techniques, forms, and surfaces. In recent years, architects have adopted techniques such as printing, pleating, folding, draping, and weaving to develop more complex exterior surfaces, or skins, for their buildings, while fashion designers have looked to architecture for ways to construct clothes with greater volume and inherent structural integrity. The translation ofDesigners in both fields have recently begun to develop structural skins that incorporate
the bones, or structure, into the surface of a building or a garment. Toyo Ito’s Tod’s Omotesando Building (2002–04) and Mikimoto Ginza 2 (2004–05) in Tokyo feature glass and concrete skins that join structure and façade in a single surface to create a distinctive and elegant overall pattern. A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) is a revolutionary industrial process and product created by fashion designer Miyake Issey and design engineer Fujiwara Dai that is a means for producing seamless garments, complete pieces of clothing that do not require sewing.
if nothing else, it’s a nice placebo until project runway season 4 next year…
we saw casino royale last night with jo and her mom.
we likey.
it’s a darker bond, which is nice and refreshing.
although if you think about it, it’s sort of unclear where this sit in the bond chronology. it’s depicting bond just as he’s promoted to 00 status, but it’s clearly in set in the present. so how does that fit in with all of his 60’s adventures? it’s being billed as a restart/rebooting of the franchise, so maybe it’s a reimagining of the concept: here are the bond themes, and let’s go! not unlike what they’re doing with battlestar galactica, with similar fantastic success. highlight for teeny spoiler: love jeffrey wright as the new felix leiter. just the second african-american felix, but the first “official” one. good thing, because didn’t the last one get his legs gnawed off by a shark?
i’d really like to think that it’s the approach that the original spoof casino royale took: that james bond/007 was symbolic of the spirit of the secret service, and when you get 007 you not only get the number, but the name/identity as well. lazenby in ohmss hinted at this, saying “this never happened to the other fellow,” yet in the new casino royale, they make it clear that bond is bond first and just getting 007, so it’s not quite the case. too bad.
in any case, i do like that it’s a more serious bond, ala the early connery films. no gadgets, just tough and edgy.
love:
quick aside: these fancy computer scenes look less fake. is this because they’re getting better at them and making them less stupid (ala mission: impossible mailing the internet) or because we know that computers are getting so powerful that we now think, “i guess that could happen, who knows? these computers got mad skillz now!”
we’re thinking about a trip to costa rica in january. wanna come? perhaps hmc will be done with her job and not yet sucked up onto the james cameron debacle. we’ve got to plan now to stake our claim to recreation! preferably turtle and monkey watching recreation.
the big question is which guidebook should i use? i took ALL of them out from the library and now i have six. betwen lonely planet, rough guide, fodor’s, frommer’s, the new key to…, and an ecotraveller’s guide to…, how am i supposed to decide which one is the best? i suppose if i was al i’d read them all and then make a detailed matrix of each book and what features each has, along with a list of recommended common items, allowing me to compare the deficiencies.
but who’s got that kind of time? crikey. if there were only someone i knew who claimed to be a great travel writer, and who maybe would just put up recommendations online. maybe someone who was married to a dirty foreigner, so they’d have another perspective as well? hmmm.
i guess in the meantime, i can just read lots of books on costa rica. or at least watch videos of mannequins coasting:
i flew back to lost angels last night, since i’m taking today off to pre-emptively avoid the thanksgiving travel madness. for this thanksgiving, i give thanks that i’m not travelling on wednesday or sunday. unfortunately, i somehow thought i could slide into the airport with less margin than possible, and between this and bart being delayed and the airbart shuttle bus being filled with conventioneers from the society of slow movers, i ended up checking my bag a scant 26 minutes before the flight.
note: apparently the real cutoff for baggage check in at the counter for southwest flights is 30 minutes. which is dangerous to know, because hmc has been flirting with 40 minutes before already for a few weeks now. also, when you don’t make the 30 minute cutoff time, a BIG SIREN GOES OFF. no kidding. i’m not sure if it’s just to chastise you or to bring attention to everyone else that you should be sneered at and rocks should be thrown your way. then someone comes over and makes it clear to you that your luggage tag should be up to date, because you may never, never, never see this piece of luggage again.
i did consider just taking it on the plane, but i neglected to bring a zip lock baggie for all the LIQUIDS(!!) and didn’t want to fight the TSA or have to throw them out. peering out the window at the tarmac, i kept trying to see if a last-minute trolley would come to throw my bag onto the plane. finally, up came one, and a baggage handler ran up with… what? two panasonic boxes? what the hell?
on the flight i read the last week’s issue of the new yorker. elizabeth kolbert’s article, “the darkening sea” is a frightening, sobering read: it’s basically the underwater corollary to al gore’s message: the CO² that we’re releasing into the air is actually absorbed into the oceans as part of the natural exchange between the atmosphere and the oceans. what this results in is a acidification of the oceans with possible horrifying ramifications to underwater ecosystems:
after finishing the article, i look out over the landscape of northeastern la county as we circle to land in ontario. endless development as far as the eye can see. industrialization and rows and rows of warehouses with hundreds of tractor trailers suckling up under iodine lights. i remember looking upon such sights in the past with awe but right now it’s revolting and shocking to me. i wonder if we really can move back down here in good conscience. but then again, where is actually better? living in a shack in the middle of the woods? buying a home where you think the new coastline will be in 50 years and spending the time learning to speak jellyfish, waiting for our new masters?
after all that, my luggage shows up in ontario, popping out on the carousel. once again my folly has been rewarded. perhaps i have learned nothing.
last night w and i went to this cave concert in marin. only it wasn’t a cave, it was actually a long concrete tunnel. and only it wasn’t a concert but hippy music with bad poetry. ok, the music wasn’t really hippy, but the poetry was really really bad. but really, a cave concert? i know that “long concrete tunnel with only one opening concert” doesn’t sound quite as exciting as a “cave concert”, but still i think it’s a little disingenuous. or at least stretching the bounds of marketing believability. besides, this whole thing was targeted to hippies— wouldn’t they notice, more than anyone else? this is like me charging people for the rainforest experience, where i take them into my apartment, plead them into my bathroom, and as i pull back the shower curtain i reveal my umbrella plant being pelted by the waterpik shower head on the triple massage setting. and then i recite poetry.
earlier in the day, dg and i went over to my friend mark’s house to watch the BIG GAME. he’s got a 52” hdtv as well as all his frat buddies, so it was a raucous time. only we lost. not by much, but we clearly still lost. i can see it, and the end. (L).
all in all not a great week for football. my team lost, and then today one donovan mcnabb tore his acl, which ripped the heart out of both my fantasy teams. good night, folks!
and now after watching the BIG GAME on hdtv yesterday, watching football on my tv at home looks like crap. damn you hdtv!
wanda pointed this out to me, but honestly, i don’t even know what to say about this. snarky comment almost superfluous. from the mainichi daily news:
Growing numbers of Japanese women are afflicted with an illness that gives them orgasms virtually 24 hours a day. And with suggestions that it could be deadly, the women hardly know whether they’re coming or going, according to Shukan Post (11/24).
“If a guy simply taps me on the shoulder, I just swoon. Even when I go to the toilet, my body reacts. I’m a little bit scared of myself,” one woman sufferer tells Shukan Post.
Another adds: “When I got on the train one day, I could feel blood gushing toward a certain part of my body and it felt so good I almost let out a moan. It was sheer murder when everybody got pushed into the carriage.”
Yet another woman has her say.
“Even the vibration of my mobile phone is enough to set me off,” she says. “My friend said there’s something called Iku Iku byo (Cum Cum Disease). I guess I’ve got that.”
What may be afflicting these women, the best-selling weekly says, is an ailment called persistent sexual arousal syndrome (PSAS).
PSAS has been described as an affliction that brings about orgasm through the slightest of jolts regardless of whether they’re aroused, or even thinking about sex. What’s more, orgasms experienced by PSAS sufferers are not just momentary phenomena, instead affecting women over anywhere from a few days to a week, with one reported case seeing 300 orgasms in a single day.
…
Hideo Yamanaka, a doctor at the Toranomon Hibiya Clinic in Tokyo says the disease can be debilitating.
“For women to orgasm, they need to have some sort of sexual stimulation. There are nerves around the female genitals which react to sexual stimulation. The body gradually builds up to a crescendo, that ascends to a climax,” the doctor tells Shukan Post. “However, with this disease, women are mysteriously reaching climax without any external sexual stimulation at all. One possible cause that I can think of is an irregularity in the sensory nerves.”
…
PSAS is not sex addiction and, considering the constant orgasms can be draining, can often be a painful and demeaning experience. Many sufferers are driven to the verge of suicide, prompting medical experts to recommend anybody who suspects they have the ailment to seek a doctor’s advice immediately.
“Anybody who has the slightest suspicion,” physician Yamanaka tells Shukan Post, “should get to a gynecologist or neurologist straight away.”
as you get ready for the holidays, remember the true meaning of christmas: looking fabulous.
i just got back from seeing the 10:35 showing of marie antoinette and the weird thing was that there were only two people in the theatre, the other person being this girl in this huge flowy ballroom gown. i couldn’t figure out if she was just a big versailles fan and was dressing up for the movie, or whether i was underdressed and had somehow skipped the prom. i certainly forgot my wig. on the other hand, i didn’t end up in the guillotine.
apparently they’ve found a Natural-born painkiller found in human saliva:
The substance, dubbed opiorphin, may spawn a new generation of natural painkillers that relieve pain as well as morphine but without the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug.
When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.
The substance was so successful at blocking pain that, in a test involving a platform of upended pins, the rats needed six times as much morphine as opiorphin to render them oblivious to the pain of standing on the needle points.
while talking to jrhythm at the 45th street housewarming on saturday night (rockin! rockin!), he was talking about danger’s heart troubles, and said, “i don’t know if you’ve read her blog recently, but blah blah blah…”
and then i think, “why no, i haven’t read anything she’s blogged about recently. in fact, she hasn’t blogged about anything for a really long time, come to think of it. yet here you are talking as if she’s blogged recently and i’ve missed it. hm…..”
as it turns out, somehow in the transition from bloglines to google reader, danger’s feed got dropped off. i don’t know if it’s just the normal anti-australian sentiment or something more personal she’s done to piss google off. i hope it’s not the latter, because you DO NOT WANT TO PISS GOOGLE OFF. just ask yahoo! how they like it. (i’m in ur clients. stealin ur adwordz!)
so now i’m catching back up with her life, reading about how she’s moving to melbourne and now in melbourne and now hates melbourne and is coming back to san francisco yay! oh wait, that hasn’t happened yet. i read too far ahead.
i’m just glad danger exists again.
everyone else, this means you are officially on notice. be interesting or google might just edit you out of existence!
yes, i love the japanese, but this padded bra that converts into a lacy shopping bag sort of just makes my head hurt:
i went to the dentist today for the first time in a long while, which is not notable in itself, but bear with me. just to set the record straight, my dental truancy is directly related to my past two dentists:
the cool thing is when they took xrays today, it was all digital! instead of sticking painful bitewings with film into my mouth, they used a sensor hooked directly up to a computer, and as they ZAP my head, xrays instantly appeared on the screen for everyone to see. pretty sweet. how long have they had this? how long has it been since i’ve seen a dentist anyway? where are the leeches and horse tongs?
as for dr. kadosh, he seemed plenty nice, and very careful and meticulous. we’ll know for sure when i meet with him next week to go over this master agenda…
despite all the right-wing furor and fear, it looks like our own nancy pelosi will now be speaker of the hiz-ouse! what’s funniest to me is the representation of how crazy liberal she must be since she’s representing sf. sure, she got 80% of the vote, so she certainly has our support, but what the rest of the country doesn’t realize (or maybe it’s better that they don’t) is how EVEN MORE wacked out liberal the city is beyond pelosism. i mean, you’re talking about a city where the reigning mayor, the democratic candidate, was by far the most conservative choice. because if it’s not green, then it’s mean. or some hippy shit like that.
meanwhile, i love this:
caught a screening of shorts by the fantastic cartoonist/animator nina paley last night. i was mostly there to see her incredible work sita sings the blues which is basically the ancient indian epic the ramayana but told from rama’s wife sita’s point of view, using the 20’s era songs of annette hanshaw. it’s beautiful and just works incredibly. she’s got some episodes online so check that shit out!
she also showed some older stuff, including some pieces from an abandoned work called thank you for not breeding. there was one piece in particular, the wit and wisdom of cancer, that made the case that humans inhabit the earth exactly like cancer cells inhabit a human body: unrestrained growth, valuation of themselves over other types of organisms, and uncontrolled metastasis. it’s an interesting point, akin to that documentary the corporation. except that we’re the crazy ones.
now excuse me while i go browse the real estate listings.
i have to admit that i’m tantalized by the idea that low-calorie diets are the key to long life, as described here in the nytimes:
How this drastic diet affects the body has been the subject of intense research. Recently, the effort has begun to bear fruit, producing a steady stream of studies indicating that the rate of aging is plastic, not fixed, and that it can be manipulated.
In the last year, calorie-restricted diets have been shown in various animals to affect molecular pathways likely to be involved in the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and cancer. Earlier this year, researchers studying dietary effects on humans went so far as to claim that calorie restriction may be more effective than exercise at preventing age-related diseases.
…
In 1935, Dr. Clive McCay, a nutritionist at Cornell University, discovered that mice that were fed 30 percent fewer calories lived about 40 percent longer than their free-grazing laboratory mates. The dieting mice were also more physically active and far less prone to the diseases of advanced age.
Dr. McCay’s experiment has been successfully duplicated in a variety of species. In almost every instance, the subjects on low-calorie diets have proven to be not just longer lived, but also more resistant to age-related ailments.
“In mice, calorie restriction doesn’t just extend life span,” said Leonard P. Guarente, professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It mitigates many diseases of aging: cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease. The gain is just enormous.”
…
“Calorie restriction has a powerful, protective effect against diseases associated with aging,” said Dr. John O. Holloszy, a Washington University professor of medicine. “We don’t know how long each individual will end up living, but they certainly have a longer life expectancy than average.”
Researchers at Louisiana State University reported in April in The Journal of the American Medical Association that patients on an experimental low-calorie diet had lower insulin levels and body temperatures, both possible markers of longevity, and fewer signs of the chromosomal damage typically associated with aging.
These studies and others have led many scientists to believe they have stumbled onto a central determinant of natural life span. Animals on restricted diets seem particularly resistant to environmental stresses like oxidation and heat, perhaps even radiation. “It is a very deep, very important function,” Dr. Miller said. Experts theorize that limited access to energy alarms the body, so to speak, activating a cascade of biochemical signals that tell each cell to direct energy away from reproductive functions, toward repair and maintenance. The calorie-restricted organism is stronger, according to this hypothesis, because individual cells are more efficiently repairing mutations, using energy, defending themselves and mopping up harmful byproducts like free radicals.
on the other hand, i just ate at the front porch this week, which is the new soul food restaurant opened by the chef at emmy’s. now that i have delicious fried chicken just a block away from my house, it seems that my life expectancy is sure to plummet one way or another.
i still think these lebron ads are very bizarre and a little unsettling, but i have to admit that i love this one…
according to the bbc, the world’s fish supplies may collapse in 50 years:
Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.
Writing in the journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity.
But a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks.
“The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we’ve completely gone through the last one,” said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada.
“What we’re highlighting is there is a finite number of stocks; we have gone through one-third, and we are going to get through the rest,” he told the BBC News website.
Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project, added: “Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood.”
…
In 2003, 29% of open sea fisheries were in a state of collapse, defined as a decline to less than 10% of their original yield.
Bigger vessels, better nets, and new technology for spotting fish are not bringing the world’s fleets bigger returns - in fact, the global catch fell by 13% between 1994 and 2003.
Historical records from coastal zones in North America, Europe and Australia also show declining yields, in step with declining species diversity; these are yields not just of fish, but of other kinds of seafood too.
…
“The benefits of marine-protected areas are quite clear in a few cases; there’s no doubt that protecting areas leads to a lot more fish and larger fish, and less vulnerability,” he said.
“But you also have to have good management of marine parks and good management of fisheries. Clearly, fishing should not wreck the ecosystem, bottom trawling being a good example of something which does wreck the ecosystem.”
But, he said, the concept of protecting fish stocks by protecting biodiversity does make sense.
“This is a good compelling case; we should protect biodiversity, and it does pay off even in simple monetary terms through fisheries yield.”
Protecting stocks demands the political will to act on scientific advice - something which Boris Worm finds lacking in Europe, where politicians have ignored recommendations to halt the iconic North Sea cod fishery year after year.
Without a ban, scientists fear the North Sea stocks could follow the Grand Banks cod of eastern Canada into apparently terminal decline.
“I’m just amazed, it’s very irrational,” he said.
“You have scientific consensus and nothing moves. It’s a sad example; and what happened in Canada should be such a warning, because now it’s collapsed it’s not coming back.”
interesting analysis to see how green your mp3 player is:
When Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy reached number one in April, it made history as the first song to top the UK singles chart on download sales alone. Downloads now account for 78% of all single sales, up from 23% in 2004; there are now about 1m digital tracks bought legally each week in the UK - and an unknown amount, no doubt much larger in total, illegally downloaded, too.
This, in theory, is great news for the environment (less so, perhaps, for the copyright holders). Instead of all those CDs - thin discs of polycarbonate plastic, aluminium, gold, lacquer, and dye - being produced and shipped around the world, we are purchasing “virtual” tracks, each taking up just a few megabytes of disc space and being “transported” down copper wires or across the ether. For those strolling the streets nodding to the beats of their MP3 player, there has, for some at least, been the added satisfaction that this is the more eco-friendly way to listen to music.
In reality, there has been precious little research into this subject. But what does exist suggests that downloading tracks isn’t quite as environmentally pure as it might at first seem. It all hangs, it seems, on how exactly we use our MP3 players. In 2003, Digital Europe, a research project looking at the sustainability of our new “networked world” and conducted by three institutions in Germany, Italy and the UK (here it was Forum for the Future), published its findings. Working with EMI, it looked specifically at the environmental impact of digital music, by analysing three methods for acquiring 56 minutes of music (the average length of an album).
The research used a concept called the “ecological backpack”. Similar in thinking to a person’s ecological footprint, it is a measure used to calculate the amount of resources - fuel, minerals, water etc - that must “be moved” throughout the full lifespan of a product. For example, a 10-gramme wedding ring has an ecological backpack of five tonnes, whereas a 3kg laptop has a backpack of about 400kg.
The first purchasing route the study looked at was buying 56 minutes of music on a CD at a high-street store. It then looked at buying the same CD online, and then finally at downloading all the music. Buying a CD at a shop produced a backpack of 1.6kg, said the study, whereas buying it online reduced the impact to 1.3kg. But by downloading the music, the backpack fell to 0.7kg. In other words, a clear advantage - although hardly a “zero-impact” approach. The need to have a computer and an MP3 player, both of which need producing then powering, increased the weight of the backpack considerably.
But the study also noted some other important factors. It based its weight for downloading on the assumption that a broadband connection was used and that the music was never burned onto a CD at a later date. If this is the case, and a slower narrowband connection is used, the backpack leaps up to a whopping 5.5kg. In other words, “rematerialising” your downloads into a CD at home not only completely negates any environmental savings, but is actually about three times as damaging as just buying the music on a CD in the first place.
Of course, after an initial push to “rip” all their current CD collection into a digital format, most people probably do a mixture of all three to keep their MP3 players full to the brim with music. But it would seem that the ideal scenario would be to never buy a CD again and to always download music (a rather bleak, anodyne world that many musos are not keen to step into, it would appear).
