Tonista

Booze as Art BevShots image of Belgian Lambic photographed under...

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:20:01 -0400

Booze as Art

BevShots image of Belgian Lambic photographed under the microscope

"Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this...."

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:59:42 -0400

“

Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this. Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being. If they’re a performing artist, I will show you someone who breathes teamwork. I will show you someone who eats healthy critiques for breakfast and grows an inch that day because of it. I will show you a communicator, and a thinker.

I will show you someone you want to hire. And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.

All you have to do, in short, is create jobs built for artists. The result? Instant competitive advantage.

”

- My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists – ChrisAshworth.org

(It’s hard to find companies that take this approach. In my experience, people only want employees whose only loyalty is to that company, not to themselves.)

Joe Deal’s Western Landscapes - Slide Show - NYTimes.com A nice...

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:14:47 -0400

Joe Deal’s Western Landscapes - Slide Show - NYTimes.com

A nice obit for photographer Joe Deal. Unlike Ansel Adams dreamy landscapes, Joe Deal’s photos were as practical as his name, showing, not obscuring man’s encroachment on nature.

Colton, California, 1978. From the series: The Fault Zone Credit: ©Joe Deal, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York

2010 Snowflake #4

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 01:13:18 -0400

2010 Snowflake #4

Color Me A Dinosaur – The History Of Crayola Crayons,...

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 23:40:23 -0400

Color Me A Dinosaur – The History Of Crayola Crayons, Charted

the evolution of Crayola colors

Eyewitness: BP oil spill | World news | guardian.co.uk Surreal....

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:36:39 -0400

Eyewitness: BP oil spill | World news | guardian.co.uk

Surreal. I also keep wondering where the photographer must have be standing to get this shot. I hope it was on a boat.

Dennis Hopper: a life in pictures | Film |...

Sat, 29 May 2010 14:33:39 -0400

Dennis Hopper: a life in pictures | Film | guardian.co.uk

Dennis Hopper dies at 74. As his character says in Apocalypse, now, “What are they gonna say about him? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? Bullshit, man!”

He was one of my favorites and miss not seeing more from him. I didn’t even mind those stupid baby boomer retirement commercials. RIP Dennis Hopper. And Heineken? Fuck that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon!!!

Eco-Friendly Aggression at David Belt’s Glassphemy! -...

Thu, 13 May 2010 00:21:46 -0400

Eco-Friendly Aggression at David Belt’s Glassphemy! - NYTimes.com

I don’t think people are going to see this just cause it’s eco-friendly. It’s more the high-brow equivalent of a Bruckheimer film. Of course I want to go.

"Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And..."

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:57:17 -0400

“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless…”

- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

How Apple Lost the Next iPhone - Leak - Gizmodo

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:04:21 -0400

How Apple Lost the Next iPhone - Leak - Gizmodo:

Even if it turns out Apple sanctioned the “leak”, I’m still glad I’m not this guy.

"Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary..."

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:48:45 -0400

““Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.””

- Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again - NYTimes.com

An Ethical dilemma

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:51:46 -0400

So if you’ve paid for an item in one format, is it okay to download it illegally in another? The NYT says yes. My ethics teacher would probably weep.

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

-The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - Question - NYTimes.com

The Don't Be a Dick License

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:42:00 -0400

This proposal for a “Don’t be a Dick License” came to my attention via a tweet from Wil Wheaton. Of course if people weren’t generally dickish about copyright it wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.

version 0.1 Project: Candy v0.2 Author: Stephen Eley (sfeley@gmail.com) This is a proposed draft of the Don’t Be a Dick license for open source projects. The purpose of this license is to permit the broadest feasible scope for reuse and modification of creative work, restricted only by the requirement that one is not a dick about it.

LICENSE.markdown at master from SFEley’s candy - GitHub

Modern Daguerrotypes by Chuck Close lens culture photo book...

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:44:18 -0400

Modern Daguerrotypes by Chuck Close

lens culture photo book review: Chuck Close

From the review:

Close: “It was more warts-and-all than any other process. Because it’s so red-sensitive, any marks, any flaws are heightened. You have to be pretty comfortable in your skin, and vanity goes out the window. And it’s also physically painful. A normal daguerreotype is a more than two-minute exposure. We’ve made it instant photography by having a billion foot-candles of light go off all at once, and that’s very painful. The flashes are so intense your eyes slam shut. It’s like having an ice pick shoved in your eyeball. You can smell hair burning… Each one of these people who lent me their image with no control over how it’s going to come out, in this act of incredible generosity, had to put away whatever self-image they had of how they looked and accept this other image as being them. That goes beyond generosity.”

Pop Tab Bag: Shamelss plug - If you like the bag please vote for...

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:32:56 -0400

Pop Tab Bag:

Shamelss plug - If you like the bag please vote for it after April 1st in this Project Yarnway thread. Thanks!

Materials:
About 540 pop tabs
2 soda can bottoms
1 chain
material for lining
1 zipper
Total weight: 305g

Tools:
Hammer
Wire cutters
Pliers
Heavy duty scissors
Hydrogen peroxide
Darning needle
Awl

I’ve been collecting these tabs for years and realized that if I didn’t step up and try to use them for this Project Yarnway challenge, I’d probably never use them and I should just throw them out. Getting this bag done nearly killed me. March was a crazy busy month and I wasn’t even able to get started until the month was half over. As of last night I was seriously afriad I’d pulled an Emilio and would be sending my model naked down the runway. But - I made it and here I am sliding in just under the wire. My model’s still metaphorically naked, but she’s got a damn cool bag.

I had intended to use dental floss instead of the crochet thread, but (probably not shockingly), the metal tabs acted exactly like the metal tabs on floss packaging and cut the floss. That also ruled out sewing thread. Thin wire was too brittle to use and thick wire would have taken me a year to work with and killed my hands. So I just broke down and used thread. I hope it passes the 20% rule.

This is my first time working with poptabs though I’ve wanted to do it for a long time. After my first swatch I realized I’d have to change my idea for the bag drastically. The “fabric” was much more flexible than I expected. (It’s really quite cool, I can see why people use it for clothes) The first idea, a backpack with triangle motifs can be seen out of focus in the sketch photo. I wanted the look of the bag to be as tidy as possible so I experimented with a few ways to attach the tabs. The final bag uses a few different techniques.

Crocheting with the tabs was challenging, but what took even more time was the prepping. The tabs had to be cleaned, flattened and in some cases I had to rip extra aluminum where the tab was pulled. The extra prep was worth it though to have the tabs lie flat.

All in all I really like the bag and would love to make another. Just not anytime soon!

How to sell out the cool way

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:55:00 -0400

Interesting take on the rise of Lady Gaga.

We’ve abandoned dogmatic No Logo, but we’re not really pro-logo either. We just want logos that look and sound the way we want them to.

Maisonneuve | Lady Gaga’s Pro-Logo Video

As I mentioned on my twitter account, the Telephone video is the most interesting, fun and watchable that I’ve seen in ages. It used to feel like all the adventurous film was in music videos. Now most videos feel as formuliac and insipid as the music the are trying to sell. That is, when I get to see the videos in the first place. They all seem relegated to the ghetto of triple digit programming, while cheap reality programming is on the so-called music stations.

Yeah I know, wah-wah-it-was-better back-in-the-good-ol’-days-bitter-fogey-cake. Though what I really want is less old retreads and more something new, good and different.

Telephone has some classic references, but it looks new, and it definitely looks different and it’s got the budget to do some seriously playing around. It’s also blatantly commercial, but doesn’t seem corporate - no suit committee sat around trying to package “cool”. It feels like Gaga tricked the suits into forking over money without no creative control, which most know is tricky at best. I think the article above was right about the ad placement. We’ve finally arrived at a point where we’ve accepted advertising as inevitable and enjoyable even, as long as we like the package. Maybe we’ve just accepted that in these patronless days, companies with products to sell are the artist patrons now.

Mad Men taps into this by celebrating the golden age of the Madison Avenue ad man. In fact, it cuts right to the notion that the ad is the art itself. Creation of this type of ad chic as art. Conveniently leaving out the dreck, of course, but romanticizing reality is what advertising does best.

Lady Gaga’s telephone video isn’t really notable in that it uses product placement to fund her vision. She’s not the first of course, to have accepted embracing the commercial to make art or just do their jobs, if you think “art” is too precious a word. Warhol was particularly notable for it. It does seem notable in the gleefulness of the mutual using, sort of like the Trills in Star Trek, two organisms living in symbiosis. They can survived just fine alone but are so much better when they work together.

Fiesta Snood

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:26:38 -0500

Fiesta Snood

"…surveillance and surveillance cameras don’t make us safer. The money spent on cameras..."

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:55:53 -0500

“…surveillance and surveillance cameras don’t make us safer. The money spent on cameras in London, and in cities across America, could be much better spent on actual policing.”

- Spy cameras won’t make us safer - CNN.com

I agree. Giving up privacy sometimes makes us safer, but if it doesn’t we should take our privacy back.

"It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most..."

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:49:32 -0500

“It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.”

- Stand Up While You Read This! - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

Interesting. Not surprising, but it’s nice to see studies back it up and some easy suggestions.

UCSD Fratboys prove racism and stupidity are thriving

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:05:36 -0500

Apparently, members of Pi Kappa Alpha corralled a couple of hundred socially tone-deaf friends to celebrate Black History Month by pantomiming ghetto life and the black underclass.

I was going to quote what the invite actually said, but ignorance on that level is not something I care to preserve in my own space. Excerpts are provided thru the link.

-Racist frat boys will be racist frat boys … on Facebook | Opinion L.A. | Los Angeles Times