MONTH IN PHOTOS

I WANT THIS

Some versatile lamps from Kjellgren Kaminsky.

NO WAY

Here's a description: "The record player uses a carrier and dock outfitted with a magnetic and auto-calibrating control system which carries the LP into thin air as it is playing music. A self-running record player shaped in the form of a red sphere, contains a needle, amplifier and speaker, spins around the record, bringing the music to life."

From A-Trak and Designboom because of Rhea Jeong.

IT MIGHT GET LOUD

Whatever Jack White is building at the beginning of this trailer is just about as cool as any riff on Houses of the Holy. Not quite as cool, but just about.

GREAT SENTENCE

"When our children's children train their ocular feeds (our children's children will be sentient avatars) on the video cassette (sentient avatars who are really into retro) of the BET Awards of aught nine, they will look upon it not as an awards-show-turned-impromptu-Michael-Jackson-tribute, but as the historic night when Beyoncé donned a diaphanous uber-tutu, placed a tiara veil on the crown of her head, and finally married a wind machine."

A pop culture love letter from the AV Club's Amelie Gillette.

TOP THREE

1. Bjork's "Joga"


2. Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger"


3. Keane, "Everybody's Changing."

PS22 youth chorus. Amazing.

WEEK IN PHOTOS

CAPTION CONTEST

Why do they call it "a pair" of pants? If I just had one leg covered in fabric you wouldn't call it a "pant," would you?

KENNY SCHARF

From the NYT (via Spike via FF), Kenny Scharf's basement. Is called the "Cosmic Cavern," no less.

Great sentence: "Those were the days Mr. Scharf used to walk his silver-painted, embellished vacuum cleaner along Broadway, like a pet."

THE COOLEST. EVER.

Felix's machines. Seen on Hello You. Download this guys album free here.

COVERS

Catching up on Spike Jonze's blog: check out John Paul Thurlow's blog where he recreates his favorite magazine covers.

TIME WASTES TOO FAST

WTF is The New York Times thinking? This thing is amazing! Maira Kalman, we salute you for creating a new ways to synthesize information from a very old source.

WORDS OF THE WEEK

1. Deuterated
2. Pyhrric
3. Biomimetic

BRILLIANTISM

Believe in anything that's worth it.

THE BOX

Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in Richard Kelly, the director of Donnie Darko and the guileless-but-bizarrely-entertaining Southland Tales. Here's the trailer for The Box, his new movie. I'll see it...

GREAT SENTENCE

Here's the last thing Bill Maher said on Real Time last week:

"Shouldn't there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget, a party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot and steep direct taxing of polluters?"

Italics mine. I don't have HBO. I get the show via podcast.

ALSO WANT THIS

I'm sorry, but it's so handsome.

I WANT THESE

Man, June is like shelving-month. Maybe it's because my apartment just got rented and I'll need a new place to live soon. I think rather than a legit home, I just want a never-ending series of rooms. These are both from Stylepark.

WHOA

Adult Swim has organized every clip of Zach Galifianakis on Tim And Eric. Essential everything.

CELEB CRUSH

Janelle Monae! She's Outkast's prodigal daughter (literally and figuratively). Her last release was a concept record about sentient androids in the year 2719. She just spoke to Terri Gross on Fresh Air, and she's killing the Twitter with updates from the No Doubt/Paramore tour.

BIRDY NAM NAM

BIRDY NAM NAM - THE PARACHUTE ENDING Clip Officiel
Uploaded by Has_Been - Watch more music videos, in HD!

This Birdy Nam Nam video reminds me of Fantastic Planet (the film). The album is solid, too.

I WANT THIS

Rainbow Clock. Seen on Apartment Therapy, but from Etsy. It's probably long gone.

ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY

In spite of the shear volume of stunning images, provocative conceits, and disturbing action, each idea felt out of socket, and that made this one painful.

LANDMARK RECOGNITION

Google released a research paper today. In the paper, the company "present[s] a new technology that enables computers to quickly and efficiently identify images of more than 50,000 landmarks from all over the world with 80% accuracy."

DUBLAB

While I get my music library synced on my new computer, I've been catching up with Dublab. The 1000 Names set from May 26 is like the skylight floating above me: persistent and hallucinatory. Every time I look up it's like a different part of a sublime career.

You can download the mix for free.

CAPTION CONTEST

Careful of those double-D's on the runway behind you.

CHANDLER BURR

This weekend, I spent a good deal of time discussing Chandler Burr, who, among other things, reviews scents for The New York Times. Burr has a complete understanding of perfumes and colognes. He understands the science behind the celebrity names. He appreciated the pedigree of the ingredients and considers the legacy of the creator.

He writes like this: "The result is the house’s two latest launches, Lyric Woman and Man, which are not just technically excellent but also smell like lighter-than-air, Jules Verne-like machines silvering through the sky." (From his piece on Lyric Woman by Amouage.)

To have considered scents so thoroughly is compelling. The tactile descriptions journey around the world to make olfactory nuances seem actual. It's instantly educational to read these reviews, as Burr is such a natural at measuring the science with the economic mechanisms that allow the industry of scent to exist at all.

Most of all, he's not above his own expertise, unafraid to mutilate the beast the bears his own bread. He disembowels the entire process behind the celebrity scent Danielle by Danielle Steele thusly: "[The perfumer] Loc Dong winced, but that was the way low-quality mass-market celebrity scents were created, so he gathered up the paltry number of cheap, low-quality raw materials at his disposal and, crying bitter tears, began to assemble the perfume." Finally:

For the first four seconds it smelled sort of vaguely like a kind of flower that you get in a gallon of floral-scented laundry detergent, and then for five seconds it reminded you of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Then it evaporated, like the prose in a novel by Danielle Steel evaporated from your memory the moment you read it. It was a perfume that, instead of being made by human beings, was made by a faceless, soulless committee like Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team. And at that point there was nothing more to say about it.

The combination of pointed intelligence, detail, and utter fearlessness describes a type of journalism that is, frankly, too difficult to come by.

WEEK IN PHOTOS

I WANT THIS

Another sweet shelving unit. I'm going to need a big house.

WORDS OF THE WEEK

1. Photodegrade
2. Odalisque
3. Immiserated

GHOSTBUSTERS III

This is the firehouse used in the original Ghostbusters films, from Google street maps.

In light of the spectral rumors of an Appatow-ian production of the next Ghostbusters sequel, BLDGBLOG imagines a script. It's heavy on architectural reference points, obviously. It is also insane. "People, horrifically, even call themselves – but it's the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection."

Turns out, "halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan."

It's a pretty amazing, hilariously flushed out idea, careening through all sorts of mythologies and showing how modern copper wiring "also correspond to materials used in pre-Christian burial rituals throughout Mesopotamia."

"So the movie will involve everyone from Guglielmo Marconi to Thomas Edison to Alexander Graham Bell (he's the "ultimate sorcerer," Dan Ackroyd exclaims, laughing along with the rest of us), and it will make reference to the hundreds of architecturally interesting telephone substations scattered throughout the greater New York region."

I'd greenlight it.

241543903

241543903.com is an experiment where you take a picture of your head in a freezer, then save the image somewhere on the web with this specific number as the tag. That way, when you Google that number, you see a bunch of people with their heads in the freezer! It's an idea from artist David Horvitz, and Spike Jonz's blog told me it was awesome.

VOODOO DONUTS

Anyone that's been to Portland, OR has been to Voodoo Donuts. Anyone that has been to Voodoo Donuts will appreciate Anthony Bourdain visiting with Chuck Palahniuk.

I must be hungry.

ESSENTIAL READING

From the AV Club's rehash of the Lost-themed Top Chef Masters (gotta start watching this): "Once again, all eyes were on Wylie Dufresne, who broke out a vaporizer and an immersion circulator to do his playful twist on the chicken and the egg paradox."

TIME MACHINE

I saw this on Rian Johnson's Twitter. Because of Pictures for Sad Children.

I DID THIS

Changed my Twitter time zone and location to help hide Iranian Tweeters from the authorities:

"If every Twitter user in the world is suddenly based in Tehran, that means a lot more accounts for Iranian security operatives to comb through as they try to figure out who to track down and threaten—or worse."

Even better, set up a proxy server!

I WANT THIS

On the other side of this bag is a solar panel. Real talk.

I WANT THIS

Veja shoes: "In a time when crazy-colored kicks continue to dominate sneaker culture, Veja stands apart from the noise with their simple, subtle, eco-friendly sneaks. Veja shoes are produced in Amazonia, and made from natural latex rubber, vegetable-tanned leather and organic cotton. Feed your shoe fetish in green style! The Veja Grama Leather comes in Cafe Velour ( all brown), and in Black and White."

WHOA

If you're not following the terrifying Iranian election, you should. I recommend the Dish, as usual. Amazing comparison of Ahmadinejad and Karl Rove.

"Ahmadinejad's bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove - the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin"

ESSENTIAL READING

From the Gizmodo article How an Intern Stole NASA's Moon Rocks: "Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on earth constructed under Class 100 standards-it is a structure that can withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon."

The main character in this (true) story is Thad:

"But while Thad was school smart, he also has an almost unquencheable adrenaline-seeking side, and was consumed with a strange Excel spreadsheet of personal goals that read like he was trying to prove himself to Evel Knievel and a rocket scientist at the same time: Experience zero gravity, check; experience severe dehydration, check; find dinosaur tracks, no problem."

Unbelievable.

WEEK IN PHOTOS