February 2012
19 posts
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Composers as Gardeners →
By BRIAN ENO
About the time when I first started making records, I was also starting to become aware of a new sort of organizing principle in music. I think like many people, I had assumed that music was produced, or created in the way that you imagine symphony composers make music, which is by having a complete idea in their head in every detail and then somehow writing out ways by which...
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When to Quote Poetry or Moan Like a Moorhen →
By DWIGHT G. GARNER l NYTimes Jan.31, 2012
“Genitals,” Malcolm Bradbury, the British novelist and academic, wrote, “are a great distraction to scholarship.” They’ve been a distraction, too, to our understanding of the Kama Sutra, the classic study of society and sexuality written in India nearly 2,000 years ago.
The book resides in the popular imagination as kitsch, as if it were a series of...
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Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas →
By BENEDICT CAREY
Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache.
Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to...
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“In desiring so aggressively to create ‘one beautifully simple and intuitive...”
– World Wide Webs
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Japanese Design Group Nendo Hones Its Unusual... →
By ALICE RAWSTHORN l NYTimes Jan.29, 2012
“There is a playfulness in Nendo’s work, and a formal simplicity, which is deceptive, because the birth of the products can be extremely complex,” said Jana Scholze, curator of contemporary furniture and product design at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. “I don’t know many designers who have produced such an astounding number of new works in...
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January 2012
57 posts
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The New French Hacker-Artist Underground →
By JON LACKMAN l Wired Jan.20, 2012
Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small cafè near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off...
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Spun by a million spiders, stronger than kevlar →
By DENNA JONES l The Observer Jan.15, 2012
It looks like liquid gold and feels as light as a cobweb in the wind. This golden cape is the stuff of fairytales: the largest garment ever made entirely of spider silk. As it goes on show at the V&A, Denna Jones meets the duo behind the gossamer revival
“The geeks love this,” says Nicholas Godley, smiling broadly. Before us lies...
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The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry →
The idea of the post is simple. When you type a phrase into Google, Google tells you how many hits that phrase gets on the Internet, or how many pages contained that exact line.
Here is the updated list of the fifty most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, including all the readers’ suggestions. We started with a long list of over 400 lines taken from dictionaries of quotations,...
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Watch
Max Zorn’s Tape art
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Check out those videos by Stephen Malinowski.
A composer and software egineer, Malinowski is the creator of the Music Animation Machine, a music visualisation tool inspired by a hallucination he had in 1974. The project took its definitive form in the mid-eighties after friends suggested he animate by computer the visual method he had developed. The Music Animation Machine has been repeatedly...
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Personal Style: Henrik Vibskov
keepsdiary:
Henrik Vibskov is a personal favorite in terms of coolest personal designer style out there.
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The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold →
By BOB PARKS l Businessweek Jan.12, 2012
Late one night in August 1997, 54-year-old inventor Lenn Rockford Hann placed two bottles of Gatorade near Concourse F of Chicago O’Hare International Airport, unlaced his sneakers, removed his socks, then dodged curious maintenance workers for two hours while running 13.1 miles on the walkways. His pace surprised him. He was convinced the springy,...
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Tinker Hatfield on the creation of the Air Max I
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Selling a 300-Year-Old Cello →
By DANIEL J. WAKIN l The New York Times Jan.13, 2012
On a cold day last winter, an ailing Bernard Greenhouse, wearing an elegant bathrobe and attached to oxygen, was wheeled into the living room of his Cape Cod home, which was festooned with paper cutouts of musical notes. Relatives and students, locals and caregivers had gathered to celebrate the 95th birthday of one of classical music’s...
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