Saturday, March 29, 2008

Progress Report

Granted, there are a million other ways to do such a thing. A diary. A slip of paper. But Time Machiner seems to add a sense of mystery to it all. Like you can literally sneak up on your own self somewhere in the future. And for a single moment, you just might be able to become "two."

Miscellaneous

1. Sweet Singapore Air Concorde

2. Angelo Mangiarotti "Saffo" for Artemide 1967. Blown glass.

3. Sammy Pruett with his Gibson.




Friday, March 21, 2008

Satantango

SATANTANGO, Bela Tarr, Laszlo Krasznahorkai & Agnes Hranitzky's mega-movie, is playing at LACMA tomorrow Saturday 3/22/08 at 2:00 p.m.

If there's any chance you can make it, just go.

It sounds daunting at 7+ hour but it's never boring. It's like Tarr, Krasznahorkai & Hranitzky have a fail-safe button. You'll be swept up by it's profoundly beautiful camerawork and its chronologically overlapping storytelling. Even if you can't stay for the whole thing, stop in and see some of it. You won't forget it.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Daniella Spinat

Yale MFA student Daniella Spinat is getting some nods for her lovely folded-paper typeface. Using shadow and subtle nuance, the type is a refreshing approach, almost a cleansing from of the extremes of Swiss influenced type or the hokey ones that get proliferated about. I can imagine process was key. Stuff this in the mix of a Bauhaus book, chances are no one will call your bluff.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Recent Pickups






Sunday, March 16, 2008

Coffee Table

signed "Cool" here

....also see this beautiful terrazzo table


Saturday, March 15, 2008

Miscellaneous

1. Nice axe. 150 years of use.

2. Carol Christian Poell dress shirt fabric & stitching.

3. 5'1" Hydrodynamica Fish by Joe Baughess.

4. Axal Antas "Cloud Formation Suspended".





Friday, March 14, 2008

Oh, To Be Susan Sontag

Beat Up

Another evening of nothings. For whatever reason, this made sense to me for a short time.



GINSBERG
Oil on wood
120" x 72"
A generous gift of Johnny Depp

The Caterpillar

Early 20th Century steam traction engine by Benjamin Holt.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Coors U.S.A. Laboratory Pottery

In 1910, Adolph Coors used money he made with his Coors Brewing Co. and started Coors Ceramics with porcelain maker John J. Herold. They started out producing just a small line of cooking utensils and grew steadily.

When WWI broke, Germany was then the leading supplier of ceramics in the world. The embargo on German goods left the U.S. labs and factories in need of a ceramics supplier. Coors Ceramics stepped in almost seamlessly, quickly becoming one of the world's leading manufacturers. After war's end, they continued to make scientific ceramics and even started making some decorative ceramics. During WWII, the government asked them to develop advanced ceramic insulators and Coors delivered. This durable ceramic material would be what Coors would concentrate solely on and be known for. Years later, Coors found out that the insulators were used for the Manhattan Project.

From the war on, the ceramic materials produced by Coors became among the hardest materials available in the world, second only to diamonds in strength and durability. Their antique ceramics can withstand extreme heat, corrosive liquids, tremendous pressure, and they don't conduct electricity, making them ideal for a wide variety of industrial applications. Every time you drive a car, switch on your computer or pick up the phone, you are probably putting a ceramic part to use. With that in mind, their scientific pottery's near indestructibity make them a great option for cookware.



Carl Aubock Bottle Opener

Darn. Lost on this. The more I think, the more I wish I put a higher bid in. It's cane & stainless steel.

Nicholas Ray

I’ve always loved the films of Nicholas Ray. Below are clips from his movies JOHNNY GUITAR and BIGGER THAN LIFE.

Do you see how Ray instilled a poker-faced parody of Hollywood conventions inside the films? A kind of “irony”. You may not see it initially. Look at how he subtly pushes up the stylization of the acting (considered the norm then), set design, colors and even music at times. Indeed, sometimes he is utilizing Hollywood conventions, sometimes he is using “parody” to distance the audience from the material and sometimes somehow the films are doing both in stunning and wild combination to masterful effect.

Jean-Luc Godard declared “The cinema is Nicholas Ray”. And watching a lot of early Godard, you can see how Godard would use similar techniques of “alienating” and distancing the audience. The big difference is that, with Godard, the use of irony is used to draw attention to its own technique and as an affront to status quo. With Ray, on the other hand, the technique is less artful, more agile. His uncontrollable emotions are ready to burst out in every frame but he had an obligation as an entertainer and as a hired hand and these intuitively conflicted works were the result. Also, Ray would never admit to this but I also believe he realized how dated Hollywood filmmaking (and narrative filmmaking) was and would eventually be perceived so his language of filmmaking was built to last past the period.

It is this egolessness and timelessness that make his work so great.





* Some interesting biographical notes. Before filmmaking, Ray studied architecture briefly under Frank Lloyd Wright before leaving Taliesin due to "creative differences". After his career, he served as mentor to Jim Jarmusch (STRANGER THAN PARADISE, DEAD MAN) and Wim Wenders (PARIS TEXAS, KINGS OF THE ROAD) and used his leverage and creative input to help get them both started.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Miscellaneous Stuff

1. Russell Moccasin Bespoke Fishing Oxfords. These are the ones with the Plantation Crepe soles. The ones with the Mariner Boat soles are even nicer.

2. Terrazzo Coffee Table

3. De Sede Lounger












Thursday, March 6, 2008

Nieves at Ooga Booga

An exhibition of the entire library of Swiss publisher Nieves opens tonight March 6, 7-10pm at Ooga Booga. New zines by Geoff Mcfetridge and Mari Eastman.

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors










by John Tierney
for the NY Times

The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

Why were they so attached to those doors? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.

They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”

Dr. Ariely, one of the most prolific authors in his field, does not pretend that he is above this problem himself. When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.

“I’m just as workaholic and prone to errors as anyone else,” he says.. “I have way too many projects, and it would probably be better for me and the academic community if I focused my efforts. But every time I have an idea or someone offers me a chance to collaborate, I hate to give it up.”

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Emotion

Andree Putman Coffee Pot

1987 for Sasaki
Here

Dendrosicyos Socotrana

The cucumber tree (Dendrosicyos Socotrana) is one of my favorite trees and a great example of island evolution. Until 10 million years ago, when Socotra was still attached to Africa, any broad-trunked tree would have been destroyed by large herbivores like elephants and rhinoceroses. Since the island of Socotra broke away with no herbivores, the shrubs found a safe ecological niche to grow and grow. The Dendrosicyos Socotrana is a kooky example of this gigantism. All other members of the cucumber family is a shrub or a climbing plant. The Dendrosicyos Socotrana is a tree that can grow up to 4 meters high and grows cucumbers from its branches.

They can grow indoors with access to sunlight but it takes some experience.


Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Recent Pick-Ups...




Monday, March 3, 2008

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jonathan Rosenbaum, arguably the world's greatest film critic, retired from the Chicago Reader on February 27. His influence on film criticism cannot be understated. Some of his stances on film are so prominent now that we take them for granted. For instance, he was the first U.S film critic to register the previously minority opinions that the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Resnais and Bela Tarr/Laszlo Krasnahorkai/Agnes Hranitky were masterworks and he was the first to openly question the canons of Woody Allen, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman & Eric Rohmer. His controversial criticisms of both the distribution of foreign films in the U.S. and the dectractors of modern filmmaking are finally starting to gain steam also.

Check out some of his old capsule reviews here

I owe Jonathan so much! He almost singlehandedly taught me how to think about films. I went from reading his reviews as an alternative to "mainstream" reviews, to aping his opinions and calling them my own, to finally being able to make my own opinions that I otherwise may've never attained without his pushing.

Thank you Jonathan and enjoy your new ventures!