Bikes and The City: morning escape

Bikes and The City: morning escape: I received a message a few days ago with the info and link to this video, which features long time online buddy and bicycle enthusiast Manny...

Curious about Home

http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20120307/curious-about%e2%80%a6-home#.T2lv5FWke8c.gmail Curious About… Home By Paul Bennett Wednesday, March 7, 2012 8:00 am It hit me really hard about a year ago when I walked out of Changi Airport in Singapore: that particular combination of cloying orchids, dried fish, durian, drains and that peculiar acrid-yet-sweet smell of wet tarmac after the monsoon rain, all carried on a humid tropical breeze right up my nostrils to that most primal and limbic part of our brain: the olfactory system. The part of the body that is said to hold memory. This memory was overwhelming. I was home. I grew up in Singapore, a classic Army Brat, enjoying as many did in the sixties the halcyon days of equatorial colonialism, my parents spending their evenings playing canasta and drinking jugs of martinis, my mother swimming in an expat all-girls synchronized swimming troupe during the day. I spent my own days with hair tinted green from the heavily chlorinated pool, foraging for strange insects in the monsoon drains that surrounded our house. We left when I was in my early teens, to go back “home” to where my father grew up, in chilly Newcastle in the north of England, a culture shock to say the least. Now here I was, having the most visceral and vivid sense memory almost thirty years later, smelling the wet monsoon drains as if I had never left. My knees buckled slightly as I walked to the taxi. In my current job I travel relentlessly, priding myself as many of us today do on being nomadic, on having airmiles stacked up on every airline, on knowing the best udon restaurant to go to in Tokyo, the coolest bar in Copenhagen, the best hairdresser in New York, the quaintest small hotel in Paris. I am a walking Monocle magazine. Lest I come across as spoiled, I realize how privileged a job this is and am very grateful, believe me. However, it does come at a price: practical issues such as a doctor that knows my history or getting my copious bills forwarded to somewhere that I can open them is a challenge to say the least; I spend an inordinate amount of time convincing myself that it is worth the sacrifice. I am very lucky in that my partner, a photographer, travels with me most of the time and we get to have wonderful adventures together. But something has started to nag. What and where is my home? One of my closest work colleagues, Dana Cho, is Korean, and she turned me onto the construct of Third Culture Kids. We had a conversation about it with a group of designers at work and no surprise, many of them, like me, consider themselves nomadic, excited by pluralistic points of view, of being inspired by a multiplicity of things, drinking in cultures and reveling in the weird and the wonderful. We were all, it seems, TCK’s. Wikipedia describes TCK’s well: “A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of their developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.” I became obsessed with this topic, and started devouring media that related to it. Columnist Anne-Sophie Bolon nails it firmly on the head for me in a piece she penned for The New York Times: “To many sons and daughters of business executives, diplomats, military officials and missionaries, a passport is little more than a travel document, for it does not necessarily denote where “home” is.” What Of It? To be clear: I have a house, with stuff that we own in it, that we go to for Christmas. It’s in Montauk, at the windy and quiet far end of Long Island. We’ve been going there for twenty years and we come back after our elliptical global forays and usually say: “We’re home.” But then after a few weeks the itchiness kicks in and we’re off again. I am starting to think that home is less about where you live and more about nodes on a personal life journey, the same way I and my fellow TCK’s view our passports as interesting travel documents and less as signifiers of our cultural identity. Better said: perhaps home is not a place but a process; if we have reconfigured the idea of the traditional family structure in favor of today’s ‘modern’ family - an assemblage of friends, colleagues, communities, siblings, some virtual, some actual, is the ‘modern’ concept of home the same - a process of dropping bookmark pins in a mental map and creating our own scrapbook, assembling a group of smells, places, things, memories, some real, some tangible, some completely imaginary? I wonder if home today is more akin to an ever-evolving digital scrapbook like Pinterest and less like a locked-in-stone leather-bound family album. As I travel around the world I keep in touch with many people, see and do many things in many places, collect memories, some decidedly analog (I obsessively buy vinyl music wherever I go, for example) some virtual (nothing beats Instagram for romanticizing places and memories, making them instantly vintage and nostalgic) and assemble my own aggregate collage of home-ness. This sounds unbelievably corny, but I am starting to think that I am carrying home around with me, in my brain, on my back and on my laptop, and that ultimately home is a process that belongs inside me. Having a house is not, for me, a home; having a happy life is. And inhaling Singapore’s air brings me as close to home as I can get, remembering as I do the smell of monsoon-wet concrete and the clink of martinis being stirred. I Am Curious: What and Where is ‘home’ for you? Paul Bennett is Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer of IDEO. Among his many contributions to the firm’s evolution into a global practice he’s worked on consumer experience design; helping to establish IDEO’s presence in China; and co-founding the New York office. Paul is based in Shanghai and is focused on bringing to market commercially viable, socially significant new businesses and consumer products, services, and experiences. He is responsible for company-wide content excellence, and he actively develops ideas (and publishes articles) related to the field of human-centered, design-led innovation. Follow the link for Paul’s other Curiosity Chronicles.

Quotes from New Year's Eve

To reflect the year that has gone by. To remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken. The times we opened ourselves up to great adventures, or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt. Because that's what new year is all about: getting another chance. A chance to forgive. To do better, to give more, to do more, to love more. And to stop worrying about "what if" and start embracing what will be. Sometimes it feels like there are so many things in this world we cannot control: Earthquakes, floods, reality shows. But it's important to remember the things that we can, like forgiveness, second chances, fresh starts. Because the one thing that turns the world from a lonely place to a beautiful place is LOVE. Love in any of its forms. Love gives us HOPE. Hope for the new year.

artntheapple: German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse exhibiti...

artntheapple: German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse exhibiti...: "(Images coming soon!!) 'German Expressionism:  The Graphic Impulse' exhibition just opened this weekend at MOMA and it is an absolut..."

凌晨3點 • 悟

原來,這趟美國行
需要被拯救的,不是我的愛情, 而是我的恐懼
恐懼再一次出乎意料地臉歪,然後只有70%治癒的機率
恐懼再一次那種 無能為力感
恐懼因為恐懼 帶來的負面情緒, 猜忌懷疑,憤世嫉俗
推開了一個個曾經愛我的人

因為恐懼 我畏畏縮縮 我怕這怕那
限制式不僅框在身上 更框在心上
意志不知道哪兒破了洞 心有餘而力不足

原來 黑洞是恐懼
恐懼 不自覺地讓我帶上有色眼鏡 看到的都是人性的黑暗面
更加讓我躲進保鮮膜裡 對這個世界懷疑 保持距離

原來,What matters most to me? 不是健康
而是健康背後 限制式框架下
如何在是(臉歪)與不是(臉歪)之間
調整意志面對恐懼的態度
不擔心恐懼尚未發生的未來
活在當下,活出人生的最大值

相信everything gonna be alright的天真的傻勁
相信這個世界如泡泡般美好的畫面
在黑洞之外.....

John Baldessari

Baldessari將一系列現成的靜止影象並置, 其中有許多應該是電影影像
藉此創造出一組謎樣的意義
每個各別影像都是某個未經解釋的大敘事中的一瞥,
而這些彼此無關的景框結合起來則創造出一組新的故事

此外, 每個影像也都暗示著一組可能的故事正在景框之外發生
也就是發生在"銀幕之外"
這件影像拼貼創造了一個多層次空間和許多可能的潛在敘述

Using multiple images to construct a new sense of order. Whilst many of the images are mundane and meaningless on their own, by carefully placing them together, Baldessari is able to construct narratives, emphasise a specific viewpoint or emotion, and encourage different ways of looking at the world.

Baldessari began his career in the 1960s as a painter, then in 1970 took the rather theatrical and Duchampian step of cremating all his paintings (he folded some of the ashes into cookie dough and displayed the baked goods at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the 1970 survey “Information”). From that time on, he was known for a certain fluidity and hybridity in his art, working at the intersection of photography and painting, and of image and word. “He always loved text as a kind of image,” explains the poet David Antin, an early friend of Baldessari’s. “He would use a line of text in such an isolated way, as if it were a painting.”

Often the artist’s combinations of photographs and text creates a sense of narrative as well, if only by magnifying the most subtle or uneventful of events. The Pencil Story, 1972–73, for example, juxtaposes two shots of a pencil—the first dull, the second sharp. Beneath the pair, a caption reads: “I had this old pencil on the dashboard of my car for a long time. Every time I saw it, I felt uncomfortable, since its point was so dull and dirty. I always intended to sharpen it and finally couldn’t bear it any longer and did sharpen it. I’m not sure, but I think this has something to do with art.”

Baldessari’s engagement with the film and television industry was fuelled by his proximity to Hollywood, as well as his realisation that film and video helped him to synthesise and understand his own thoughts. Movies reinforced the importance of time and sequence that he had begun to explore in his photographs. The film industry also yielded a ready-made repertoire of images and gestures to choose from. Not only did Baldessari play with the idea of a script, he also appropriated the format of storyboards, displaying images in sequence to explore different scenarios and suggest multiple narratives.

In The Overlap Series, Baldessari continues to construct relationships between disparate images. He combines two unrelated photographs - a melodramatic film still and a snapshot of a mundane urban vista - using a minimal amount of brushwork to continue elements of one image into the other.

In recent years, Baldessari’s appropriation and manipulation of found images has become increasingly sophisticated, with the subtle use of recessed and raised surfaces, adding further depth and interest to the picture plane.

In the Goya Series Baldessari returns to the relationship between language and image, pairing photographs of banal objects with non-specific, yet evocative words derived from titles used by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya. In isolation both image and text are meaningless, but when combined they generate the possibility of multiple readings.

The Prima Facie series tests whether a word can accurately describe a facial expression. Applying words to film stills and therefore to acted emotions, Baldessari sought to show that while we may think we understand something at first glance, it becomes more complicated when we try to prove it. Baldessari’s investigations follow through several states until the facial expression is replaced with a square of commercial paint, with the manufacturer's name for the colour inscribed beneath it.

The face and facial features are recurring subjects for Baldessari. In the series Noses & Ears Etc. the whole face is coloured and flattened, except for the most bizarre appendages, a nose or an ear and sometimes both. While humorous, there is an element of aggression in these works. Faces are disfigured, titles mention fists rather than hands, and blood trickles from an isolated nose on a green head-shape.

Chuck Close (July 5, 1940)

攝影的出現有助於解放繪畫風格, 讓它從寫實往抽象邁進
但到了20世紀末, 藝術界興起了照像寫實主義風格
許多畫家自覺地以"照片般的"繪畫風格進行創作 (photorealist)

Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. As he explained in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before."

Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object.

Best known for the monumental heads he has painted in thousands of tiny airbrush bursts, thumbprints, or looping multi-color brushstrokes, Close has developed a formal analysis and methodological reconfiguration of the human face that have radically changed the definition of modern portraiture