This is slightly genius. Above piece carved out of Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage by Robert The.

Book art is intimate, fascinating, and transgressive. When we talk about books, we are usually talking about what’s inside, but there is a lot more to a book than reading it. Book art makes those other aspects its domain: the way books look; the way that, with their bent spines and marginalia, they record the history of our own reading lives; the way that these mass-produced objects can seem to hold not just letters but knowledge.

DO WANT. Shelby Daytona coupe reproduction.

Good resource for anyone trying to integrate art and social movement activism.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Came across him while looking up the term “affordance.” Sounds interesting.

“This book is part polemic, part science, part serious and part fun. It examines the effect of poor design and equipment failure on human behavior. Intended for a general audience, it covers user-centered design, the psychopathology of everyday things and the psychology of everyday actions.”

“We are all victimized by the natural perversity of inanimate objects. Here is a book at last that strikes back both at the objects and at the designers, manufacturers, and assorted human beings who originate and maintain this perversity. It will do your heart good and may even point the way to correcting matters.”
— Isaac Asimov

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

NYT

NYT

A long-term study that included more than 100 years of birth, death, health and genealogical records for 300 Swedish families in an isolated village showed that an individual’s risk for diabetes and early death increased if his or her paternal grandparents grew up in times of food abundance rather than food shortage.

“Evidence indicates that what you eat can affect your grandchildren’s brain molecules and synapses,” Gómez-Pinilla said. “We are trying to find the molecular basis to explain this.”

Source

So, what does that bode for our obese, diabetes ridden, genetically modified food-eating, hormone and antibiotic fed meat-consuming, cheap corn-obsessed food culture? We’re already dooming ourselves with unsustainable energy, environmental, and industrial food/farming policies (etc). Are we in the process of creating deeper problems embedded in the genetic make-up of future generations as well?

Random shot in the Fashion District, downtown LA.

Aesthetics and security. Form and function. What’s the difference between a nice looking security gate and a utilitarian one? Who does it avoid offending (who is the audience)? Does it change the perception of the surrounding area? What’s the point? (Alternatively, why not? Why shouldn’t it look good?)

I don’t think enough thought (creativity, culture, wit/humor/irony, style, humanity, whatever) is put into design, especially for mundane things. What if we lived in a culture that could incorporate a sense of humor into the design of security gates as a matter of course? Like, perhaps, Japan and their all-encompassing emphasis on kawaii (see the Japanese defense ministry’s annual report, published as a manga).

Maybe this hints at a deeper critique of industrialized production, monopolization, and/or the cooptation of the aforementioned design aesthetic (and material culture more generally) by a production process that makes it all subservient to marketing, efficiency, and profit.

I think that computers and the ‘net put some of that creativity back into the hands of individuals, atleast for certain things.

[unfinished thought]

I can’t read Japanese, so I don’t know what it says. But I really like the bass emphasis, electronic elements, and blend of styles. The retro 80s cheesiness is also a plus.