Jeez, Greg. Take the hint

[via Burbia]

Making sense of the money mess

I suspect that most people outside the money industries don't really understand why the financial system collapsed and how pervasive it is. That's why all the various elements of it have just been put in one big conceptual box and called the "economic crisis".

This video, made by Los Angeles–based designer Jonathan Jarvis, is the best graphic visualisation of how this all came about I have seen, and I highly recommend it to you.



Jarvis is currently practicing in the Graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. You can see some of his other projects – including a brilliant demonstration which makes all the mobile phones in a room ring simultaneously – at his website, here.

Why I love 30 Rock. Why I love Tina Fey. Why I love Alec Baldwin

Jack + Elisa = Jalisa. Because they went here for one second: Jack's pink and blue Jalisa T-shirts.

And as Liz and Kenneth came out of the subway: the X train to Zorgonia Avenue and a "coming soon" poster for Jenna's movie, Janie Jimplin.

Well, hello, fellow Grits to Glitz listeners!

 

There's been a spike in my reader numbers lately and it's all Amy and Bay's fault. Hello, Amy! Hello, Bay! Thanks for the shout out!

To all my fellow G2Gers, welcome to my sandbox on the web. It's a pretty random affair, and I do encourage you to try out the Lucky Dip button to the left because the more randomly you are willing to face it, the better. Just like life.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about – and believe me, your number is legion, at least in my daily life – I'll back up and explain. There will be a test at the end, so please pay attention.

Way back in the heady days of winter 2006 (remember, I live in the upside-down hemisphere), I was in the grip of The Devil Wears Prada fever. I was scooching around the net and there was a reference to a review on a tiny, unpopulated site. Just a single entry: "Episode ONE: July 12, 2006".

Abandoning what little caution I possessed, I clicked a link. Something strange was happening with my iTunes. What? This is an audio file? (Yes, I confess was a total podcast newbie.) I hit play and within minutes, an international love affair began.

Amy and Bay are sisters. They both lived in East Tennessee until Amy moved to Las Vegas. Life in Las Vegas is not like life in East Tennessee, and the differences between the two places, an eternal compare-and-contrast conversation, was worth broadcasting.

Since then, they've covered a lot of ground in their weekly podcasts. There have been dogs and Disneyland, cocktails and Vegas shows, holidays and birds and recipes and grammar lessons and pigeon-squirting machines, three seasons of Project Runway and weeks of obsession with Tim Tams – a very funny international saga that culminated in this moment – and a big-ass Christmas wreath. Contests and scrapbooking and April Fools pranks and lots and lots of dish. And I now know what grits are and what the boonies are, too.

They might be on opposite sides of their country, and I'm so far away that it takes a whole day to fly here, but their podcast always makes me feel like the three of us are just sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee, having a chat. I don't get to say much, but I laugh the whole time.

It's hard to believe that a tiny bunch of pixels could lift my spirits, but when that little blue dot turns up in iTunes next to Grits to Glitz, that's exactly what happens. Like standing in front of a birthday cake, I know there's some fun to be had.

For the uninitiated, start your journey into Amy and Bay's world at the Grits to Glitz site, here. Have a look around. Download an episode or two. Subscribe in iTunes. You'll be a better person for it – trust me.

Grind up some greasy, greasy coffee beans . . .

Design by committee

My friend David was working on a logo for a mining company that started out with this completely on-brief sketch:

and, thanks to everyone at the client end weighing in with their fascinating opinions, somehow ended up, at one point, with this horror:

His entire sordid history of what happens when you let clients keep making changes is here.

As if public transport wasn't scary enough

Those devilish pranksters, Improv Everywhere, filled a subway carriage with identical twins, creating a human mirror simply to delight people or freak them out, depending on their disposition. Genius! Video and more photos from the event here.

Vertigo-round

The Coen brothers are channelling the spirit of Saul Bass in the poster for their new film, Burn After Reading.



By the way – quite the cast, isn't it? It opens the Venice Film Festival at the end of August, arriving in cinemas swiftly afterwards. The trailer's here.

Movie star morphing

Two excellent videos by Phillip Scott Johnson. How many faces can you name?

Men in Film

Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Errol Flynn, Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, William Holden, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck, Richard Burton, Jack Lemmon, Sean Connery, Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston, Steve McQueen, Peter O'Toole, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Roy Scheider, Warren Beatty, Dennis Hopper, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Harrison Ford, Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, Michael Douglas, Christopher Walken, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, John Travolta, Antonio Banderas, Tim Robbins, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Matt Damon, George Clooney.

Women in Film

Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer, Ruth Chatterton, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Deborah Kerr, Judy Garland, Anne Baxter, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy Dandridge, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Janet Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Ann Margret, Julie Andrews, Raquel Welch, Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Bisset, Candice Bergen, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver, Kathleen Turner, Holly Hunter, Jodie Foster, Angela Bassett, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Salma Hayek, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Diane Lane, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry.

Anonymous delivers

“For its part, Scientology is seemingly powerless to stop this underground warfare because members of Anonymous could be anyone.”
— reporter Bryan Seymour, Today Tonight

The /b/ thread that led to today's anti-Scientology actions is archived here.

Kon. Ich. Ee. Wa.

Andy Warhol demonstrates his mastery of the Japanese language in this ad for TDK from 1982.

Eye candy

Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka studies the psychology of vision at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. His work centres around visual illusion, visual completion, motion perception and stereopsis (binocular depth perception). He is a scientist but I think his work is art.

His current research is about "anomalous motion illusions": static images that look like they're moving.

Click these pictures to bring them up to full size and you'll get the drift. Literally.

Modern childcare

[More delicious comic goodness at Married to the Sea.]

Petrol and porn

I saw the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch last night. (It's the ninth show I've seen this year - yes, it's Sydney Festival time!) It's about the famous Black Watch Regiment and their deployment in Iraq. The play moves between their active service and their homecoming, and all the contradictions of the two.

It begins in a pub with the boys recounting stories to a journalist. When a knife comes up through the felt of the pool table, followed by a hand, followed by a soldier in full combat gear, then another, you know you're in for some gripping theatre. And it doesn't let up for almost two hours.


While it's anti-war, it respects the tradition and comraderie of the regiment, even if it's out of step with today's muddy politics. One of the characters sums it up perfectly: "It takes 300 years to build an army that's admired and respected round the world, but it only takes three years pissing about in the desert in the biggest Western-policy disaster ever to fuck it up completely."

Later, an officer tells a soldier to leave the photos of cars and centrefolds up on his wall: "It's important that we have a reminder of what we're here fighting for: porn and petrol."

O'Mer? Oh, my!

I went to see La Clique in The Famous Spiegeltent last night as part of the Sydney Festival. It's mix of cabaret, burlesque, vaudeville and circus.

The highlight, for me at least, was David O'Mer, the bathtub acrobat.

Lordy.

Amazing trompe l'oeils

The works of Swiss painter Felice Varini are magical illusions. They can only be viewed from a single point in space, otherwise they make no sense. In person, the pieces appear two-dimenensional and floating. In photographs, they seem to be superimposed.

Here is a simple example. This painting appears to be a cross over a doorway.

When the point of view changes, you can see that it's painted onto the walls, floor and ceiling.

This work appears to be a set of concentric circles floating in space.

It is, however, painted on all surfaces of the corridor.


He also does huge works on buildings and even whole cites. These circles look superimposed on a photo of this castle.

Again, they are painted onto the walls.


Many more examples of Varini's extraordinary work can been seen on his website, here.

Armoire amour

This cabinet is from a collection of five pieces in editions of five from the Dutch design group Studio Job. The pieces are all for the imagined residence of a robber baron and represent industrial power, wealth and corruption. It's made of polished bronze with a black patinated "crater" with gilded reliefs. It weighs a couple of tons but the doors are functional thanks to a ball-bearing mechanism. A collector bought a set of all five pieces last week for $700,000. You can see the other pieces here.

Strictly No Photography

Strictly No Photography is a new photo-sharing site for photographs taken in places where you are not allowed to take them.

It also has a great album of photographs of No Photography signs, here.

Tom Luscombe, photographer

My friend Tom Luscombe has a new site showcasing some of his brilliant photographic work.

Go take a look, here.