zidouta.com

Tarkovsky, by Nathan Dunne (editor)

Creative Review Blog, Andrei Tarkovsky: Film and Painting:

“Over a 25 year period, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven feature films and three student shorts, yet his cinematic work stands out as one of the most significant contributions to moving image history. In films such as Solaris, Mirror and Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky dealt thematically with the notion of memory, childhood and dreams and became a master of the long, unedited shot and distinct formalistic approach to filmmaking. Many studies of his work have also observed the links between his films and the visual arts. Black Dog Publishing is behind a new, comprehensive volume dedicated to his life’s work and we have an exclusive extract to present here on the CR blog. The following essay, by Mikhail Romadin (the art director on Solaris), looks at the relationship between Tarkovsky’s films and painting”

(Via Coudal.)

Positive Sharing, Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong:

“The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim - ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong. (…)”

(via)

Roisin Murphy in The Culture Show’s versie van ‘The reasonably priced car’: ‘The busking challenge’. (YouTube)

Koolhaas Houselife: Trailer.

BêkaFilms - Koolhaas Houselife

“KOOLHAAS HOUSELIFE is a film by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine on one of the masterpieces of contemporary architecture of recent years: the house in Bordeaux designed by Rem Koolhaas / OMA.”

Zie ook Gizmodo, Koolhaas Transforming House Is Worthy of Iron Man, Batman, and Optimus Prime Combined.

Muxtape, a simple way to create and share mixtapes. (via)

Muxtape / zidouta

VVork:

“OVVLvverk« is a weblog of images of various Owls and Owl-related human cultural representations, with minimal commentary.”

OVVlvverk

A Brief Message, The Idea:

A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.

A Brief Message is an edited publication. The staff solicits Brief Messages from individuals of all walks of design life.

abriefmessage.com

Laatste: Paul Ford, No Resistance is Futile.

‘Preliminary traverse map of the landingsite’ - (original - more)

Strangemaps, You’ll Never Moonwalk Alone:

“On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. He didn’t moonwalk alone – ‘Buzz’ Aldrin joined him on the surface – and he didn’t walk far.

After travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football pitch.”

NASA History website

Sam Harris, What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say:

“Barack Obama delivered a truly brilliant and inspiring speech this week. There were a few things, however, that he did not and could not (and, indeed, should not) say:

He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with racism–and, indeed, religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid. As Christopher Hitchens observed in Slate months ago, one glance at the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ should have convinced anyone that Obama’s connection to Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. would be a problem at some point in this campaign. Why couldn’t Obama just cut his ties to his church and move on?

Well, among other inexpediencies, this might have put his faith in Jesus in question. After all, Reverend Wright was the man who brought him to the “foot of the cross.” Might the Senator from Illinois be unsure whether the Creator of the universe brought forth his only Son from the womb of a Galilean virgin, taught him the carpenter’s trade, and then had him crucified for our benefit? Few suspicions could be more damaging in American politics today.”

Zombie Last Supper

Popped Culture, Suddenly Last Supper:

“There’s nothing like a couple thousand years of of repetition and an iconic painting by an Old Master to get story to get lodged inside the heads of the creators of pop culture. Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century depiction of Jesus announcing that one of his 12 disciples would betray him is so iconic that it has been co-opted by those wishing to give weight to their parodies, tributes and caricatures. What I find interesting is who gets portrayed as Christ and who gets to be his Judas.”

The Economist, The science of religion. Where angels no longer fear to tread:

““Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.”

Waxy, Internet Power, Volume 1: Flashback to the VHS-Era Web:

“Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.”

“Killthecliche.com tracks journalistic clichés found in major newspapers and calls out the worst offenders.”

Via FP Passport. Zie ook DMWH’s Media Mammon.

Desire path and desire cycle path, photo by Kake Pugh. Zie Flickr Group Desire Paths. Via Prunings XL.

Fritinancy, Word of the Week: Desire Path:

“Desire Path: A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.”

Lauren Berlant in The Nation, Against Sexual Scandal:

“Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there’s a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous head? What if that was his sexual preference? What if he really was not gay, as he claims, but had sexual desires that seemed incoherent? Some of the response to Craig was like the response to moralists like Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard and now Spitzer–moralists deserve to suffer the same force of negative judgment they wielded on others. Shame on us? Shame on you, ha ha! But lots of the response was sheer homophobia. And all of it was sheer erotophobia.”

Holland Paviljoen Expo 2000 Hannover, anno 2008 (via). Zie ook dit NRC Profiel uit 2000.

Binnen Bantammerstraat. 1972-73. Photographer: Ab Koers

International Institue of Social History, Chinatown Amsterdam:

In 1972, Chinatown in Amsterdam was photographed by Ab Koers. The IISG received this photo collection in 2006. Ab Koers originally took these photographs in and around the Binnen Bantammerstraat for a reportage, which appeared in the magazine Avenue in 1973. This reportage, made together with journalist Nico Polak, was characterised as ’stunning and outstanding’ in the book De rafelrand van Amsterdam (The frayed edges of Amsterdam). In this 1977 publication, the Chinese minority were labelled as ‘not easily approachable’.

Shockwave traffic jams recreated for first time (YouTube)

New Scientist, Shockwave traffic jams recreated for first time:

“Researchers from several Japanese universities managed the feat by putting 22 vehicles on a 230-metre single-lane circuit (see video).

They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.”