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I've learned a few good things from other folks' Best of 2007 lists lately, so I decided to contribute some myself. My biggest surprise from the list is the lack of newcomers on the music front. There just weren't any great breakthrough groups for me this year—but plenty of veterans delivered some of their best work to date, so no matter.
Best Films
Best Albums
Best Games
Favorite Shows
Favorite Netflix Rentals
Favorite Albums Discovered this Year, Released Before 2007
Most Anticipated Coming in 2008
Charles and Ray Eames have been popping up as a regular blog topic lately, and their film works and films related to them have been appearing on Youtube. Beyond anything, the couple's work amazes me for its broad diversity. To make a video as important to education as Powers of Ten, design houses and workspaces as great as their own, and also create modern furniture that reinvented the very concept of the chair and is still considered some of the highest in contemporary luxury--well, I think its safe to say most designers will be satisfied fulfilling any of those roles in their lifetime. So, for your entertainment, I've managed to gather as many of these short videos as I've been able to find. If you want to find more of their films I recommend checking out The Films of Charles and Ray Eames (also available on Netfix).
Videos after the jump...
Continue reading Eames Tubed.
In April this year an exhibition in Madrid titled "Magazines and War 1936-1939" showed an extensive collection of Spanish Civil War era art related magazines. Many of the magazine covers are documented on the exhibition's website, and I definitely recommend spending some time browsing some of the beautiful masthead treatments (Catalans!, Aire), cover illustrations (Nova Iberia), and news layouts (Meridia).
One magazine in particular, for me, is a striking example of the longevity of modernist style. A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporanea was a magazine about modern architecture, urbanism, art, film, and culture. It certainly looks of it's time, but the magazine has a fresh familiarity about it that is not far from certain art and design related magazines today. It especially recalls Below the Fold, Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel's occasional design/culture publication, with its stark black and white photography and spot color overprint.
The exhibition website is flash, so to I've included the A.C. covers after the jump for viewing...
Continue reading Spanish Modernism & War.
Every so often I hear a song, and I see the song happen in my mind. It is usually the odd song--the one that doesn't quite fit the album, the one that is noticeably slower than the rest, odd sounds, new themes. It's the song that takes a life on its own. On the most recent Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible, I immediately identified the song as "My Body is a Cage".
The entire album is a grand, sometimes epic tidal wave of Springsteen-esque narratives. It all has a story. But only this song--the song shoved to the end of the album, the song with an elephant pace in comparison to the run-as-fast-as-you-can beat of most of the album--was cinematic. This song was a film, and I had seen it before. It played vividly in my mind every time the album reached that brooding 11th track.
It was the archetypal golden and dusty spaghetti-western scenario. There were the vast landscapes, the extreme close-ups of wrinkled eyes and sweat, and the burningly slow rhythm of anticipation before the gun draw. All of these things added up, and I finally realized this was a Sergio Leone film.
After a good 2 weeks of listening to this song many times a day, I had figured it out. I dug through my movie collection to find what I considered the archetype of western films, which so happens to be my favorite one, Once Upon a Time in the West. I flew to the end of the film and found it. It had the elephant pace, the extreme anticipation through incredibly long camera shots so signature to Leone's work, landscapes, and close-ups, all in the climactic conclusion to an epic story. The song and the film had everything, and I put so much of the credit to them. I'm just glad I was able to introduce the two to each other. Genius, meet Genius.
I definitely have a few more music films in my mind. Here's to hoping for the day I get a camera in my own hands.
The essay I linked below by Andrew Waggoner about silence comes at an appropriate time, as I've been thinking about silence a lot lately. Not audio silence, but rather visual silence. Recently this city of São Paulo banned all advertising. All advertising. Think for a second about that. I wasn't able to imagine it.
Initially I thought it sounded wonderful, like it would bring an instantly refreshed awareness of nature in the urban environment. Without the bombardment of retouched models, cellphone headsets, screaming typography, and the storm of logos we see every day in our urban surroundings, our eyes would instead focus on what's green, the condition of the streets (litter would be much more noticeable without the distraction of a six foot Gap model beside it on the bus stop), and perhaps even architecture would be a little more beautiful--uncluttered and raw.
But since this ban in São Paulo has taken effect, I've seen only visual evidence that proves me wrong. Without imagery of people, the colors of typography, and glowing signs, somehow the city becomes eerily less human. The lack of these things accentuate how unnatural the existence of architecture is. Granted, São Paulo is not a city known for it's structural achievements. Chicago might not look quite so lifeless, and it already has dramatically less advertising that the former São Paulo, but (and I hate to say it) the city would certainly feel a little less like home.
Here is a commercial (ironic?) for a television station that uses footage of post ad-pocalypse São Paulo to demonstrate how great their channel is without advertising too. Is their station also as creepy as the city?
Congratulations to SABER for his mention in the latest (Sept/Oct) issue of Print Magazine, and to fellow designer and good friend Nice Outfit for the launch of SABER's new website. The article isn't yet, and probably won't be available online, so here's the write-up in case you have trouble finding a copy: 
Los Angeles graffiti legend SABER was barely 20 years old in 1996 when his fellow vandal GKAE challenged him to paint the world's largest graffiti piece. A year of dangerous night missions and 100 gallons of house paint later, SABER's full-color piece on the sloping banks of the L.A. River (a location made famous in Grease) entered the annals of street immortality. Of course, fame, even by the anonymous standards of graffiti, comes with a big bull's-eye. In 1999, the long-notorious New York graffiti writer JA made a special trip just to spray-paint all over it, but SABER (who, to give an idea of the piece's scale, is sitting on the top section of this B in the center of the photo above) soon restored the piece to its former glory. Now 10 years old, SABER's football-field-size section of the L.A. riverbed is a graffiti Methuselah--one you can see clearly on Google Earth near where Interstate 5 and 10 intersect with the river, and read about in Saber: Mad Society, the artist's monograph now out from Gingko Press.
Now between Print magazine and my wildly popular weblog (sarcasm), the new site is sure to soon be overwhelmed with hits. Great stuff guys.
I've been listening to Steve Reich's music, on loop, for almost two weeks now. I'm not sure any other sound could be so conducive to working hours at a time. It walks the fine line that keeps my interest, but disappears as I focus on whatever I'm working on at the moment. It breathes with you... and before you know it you've worked for three hours, you love what you've done, and you have no idea how you did it. I love it.
To give back a little, I've managed to get lost for the last three hours rounding up some interesting videos connected to Steve Reich in one way or another. Enjoy:
Continue reading Reich in Motion.
Wikipedia defines common symbolic connotations of the color Red as:
Passion, strength, energy, fire, love, sex, excitement, speed, heat, arrogance, ambition, leadership, masculinity, power, danger, gaudiness, blood, war, anger, revolution, radicalism, socialism, communism, aggression, summer, autumn, stop, Mars (planet), respect, Gemini (star sign), December.
Red is also associated with the Nazi party, AIDS, Red Cross, emergency, dynamite, and roses. Most of the words are extreme, a lot are even negative. All of them are likely to draw some amount of emotion from a person, and the color red itself can have a physical effect on the body--increased blood pressure and heavy breathing.
The one thing that is clear from all of this is that red is not funny...
Continue reading Red is Not Funny.
I'm not a writer. I think that was apparent with my previous attempt at keeping a blog running on a whopping one (maybe two) posts a month. jtylercity.net was on life support.
Continue reading Year Two.
You've reached the first post ever. You must be bored. Go google something.
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