Mustachoed Sensationalist

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosophy of the West, when applied to Christianity, tends to be affirming of its values. However, you can deconstruct it so far as to destroy it, and we haven’t replaced it with any universal set of morals. So when it’s gone, what then? Chaos. The individual will reign and justice will be a self-centered entity, with every person will see the world as their oyster. Perhaps, as in Plato’s Gorgias.

Keytars

These key covers from GAMA-GO are most definitely a needed purchase in my life. I just wish I could justify the shipping cost (it’s over $1 more than the cost of the item). $6 is one thing, $14 is another..

Link to GAMA-GO.

“I am closing after the SB Lady Daphne has passed upstream.”

I have real mixed feelings about Twitter. One on hand, it could be useful for keeping tabs on friends without having to check in via text messaging or IM; on the other, absolutely no one I know uses it, and I’m not about to follow a bunch of strangers online. And let’s not get into the idea that Twitter’s service could be used for stalking or harassment.

However, I have often overlooked the other uses of Twitter- which mostly turn out to be a really poor version of someone’s blog- and this one’s simply wonderful.

Over on http://twitter.com/towerbridge, you can follow along as London’s Tower Bridge opens and closes to allow various vessels access to the river Thames. Pretty useless to anyone not piloting those ships, but still fun to imagine the Tower Bridge multitasking to post to Twitter while it mindlessly cranks the draws up and down all day- talk about a monotonous job!

Found via this Ask MetaFilter thread.

The Biggest Drawing In The World: Updated

On the 17th of March, 2008, Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar sent off a briefcase containing a GPS unit with the express transportation company DHL. 55 days later, the package returned to Stockholm with its journey around the world recorded on the GPS. What the data translated to was a giant self-portrait of the artist, which had traveled through 6 continents and 62 countries and comprised of one 110,664 km long stroke.

On his site, you can find his travel instructions given to DHL (which is extensive, and also available as a poster-size PDF), a video of the briefcase’s journey (and at times even Nardenankar himself accompanies the case wearing a ‘VISITOR’ DHL vest and pushing giant pallets of cargo around in their warehouses and planes), and of course the drawing itself. Below is a video showing highlights of the trip:

Truly a remarkable piece of work, and sort of reminds me of Chairface Chippendale’s failed attempt to carve his face in the moon, though obviously more successful.

UPDATE:

Thought a pretty neat idea, this project has been (to my understanding) logically debunked over on MetaFilter.

Beagle notes:

If you blow up the map by clicking on it, the scrolling line of the drawing becomes a series of straight line segments. The end points of those segments match the coordinates in the “instructions to DHL” chart/poster, which can be blown up as a PDF via the link below it. So, if this is to be believed, DHL followed instructions to make a long series of pointless flights (refuelling in mid-air?) all over the world. Not to be believed, clearly.

By the way, DHL, FedEx and the rest don’t ship stuff point to point like this. It all goes through hubs. I don’t know where DHL’s hubs are, but anything you ship by FedEx in the US flies to Memphis overnight, gets sorted, and flies out to the destination airport. So a series of multiple shipments would result in a starburst-shaped drawing, not a portrait.

Dave Faris comments on the unbelievably short amount of time it supposedly took to complete the project, given Beagle’s observation above:

Not to mention time. If this is some dude’s senior project, he had to have conceived it in, oh, 1969.

The Joker defaces the Dark Knight trailer

It helps if you see the original (hi-definition) trailer first, but either way fans of the eternal Batman/Joker rivalry will appreciate this.

About three weeks ago, Warner Brothers began a phase of their Dark Knight viral marketing campaign where teams of 300 gathered in 12 different cities to hunt throughout their respective domains, counting things like trees and stairs according to their appropriate instructions. Along the way, they were to gather information needed to unlock an online safe, and ultimately be rewarded with the then-unreleased Dark Knight trailer in a local theater.

One winner in each of the 12 cities also received a 35mm print of the new trailer- a nice surprise, especially considering studios rarely hand out film prints. But there was something unusual about these prints. Apparently, every last frame had been defaced (by hand!- thumb prints on the film to prove it) by the Joker.

Take a look:

Yes, that is a light saber you see at one point. It really is hilarious to think of the Joker sitting there yawning through the trailer scribbling things like “BORING PART” across the screen until his own mug shows up- at which point he lights up and draws dozens of arrows pointing at himself, effectively blocking out the rest of the scene. It’s so maniacally in character.

The world’s most important 6-second drum loop

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential sound byte than that of the six-second drum break from the 1969 song “Amen, Brother”- known as the Amen Break. The clip was usurped by sample-based music such as hip-hop, spawned entire underground cultures such as the jungle and dub scenes, and has finally has become ubiquitous in the world of advertising. Nate Harrison’s 2004 video on the loop is interesting, using the clip to explain the relationship between creative culture and copyright, among many other things.

From the video:

Why do I bring any of this up? What is significant of the Amen Break? I’m talking about it here because I think its story is a good example illustrating the rise and subsequent problematic of digital sampling in relation to today’s increasingly stringent copyright and trademark laws.

To trace the history of the Amen Break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression.

Where cultural production, at least musically, was full of possibilities by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past. To make new combinations, and thus new meanings.

The story demonstrates that a society “free to borrow and build upon the past is culturally richer than a controlled one.” To use the words of Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, copyright reform advocate, and co-founder of Creative Commons.

More resources on the Amen Break:

Wikipedia page on the Amen Break
The Amen Break and The Golden Ratio

The Creative Process of Finding A Motif

Tonight I’ve opened a new blog in the saturated ‘blog-o-sphere’ to rekindle my creative impulses, and to help shape them into a focused initiative.

Tonight I was introduced to Charlie Harper’s (1922-2007) amazing geometrical wildlife illustrations. To make a point, and to parallel this blog’s creation with his work, let me introduce you to a immediate favorite of mine, Quail Safe:

Harper’s work is, at first glance, complicated; while at the same time maintaining an amazing simplicity. To me, this seems to call for extreme control and careful planning. He must have spent years crafting his style, working through various stages of impulse and refinement, until he arrived at the misleadingly simple technique.

When I first saw this piece, I thought ‘I wish I had come up with that style- so simple and yet so elegant’, as though it was something that immediately came to him when he touched pen to paper. It was only after browsing a few other pieces of his that the obvious occurred to me- that this was a complex execution of elements he had worked out over a good span of time. This is what I call The Creative Process of Finding A Motif.

I’ve always understood, but rarely took into account, that an artist’s style is cultivated as he grows. No one (or extremely rarely, in the case of exceptions) does one start with such a solid, personal vision in mind that they don’t alter it in the course of things. Perhaps one might refuse to abandon their style they begin with, but this can only be seen as stubborn and stunting.

And so to draw on that process as a parallel to this new blog, I’m starting with a veritable mish-mash of styles running through my head right now, and only over the life of this blog will they come to be refined. Right now, this blog is purposeless- in the sense that it has every purpose open to it. I will post interesting videos, articles, and other such bytes as well as personal work, journal entries, and random entities. Only over time will that motif come out of the e-woodwork, you could say.

If no one follows this blog, its main purpose will not suffer. It will remain my favored tool in this round of the creative process. If anyone chooses to stick with me, my experience can only be augmented. It’s not clear how things will shape up, but until then (and beyond) I’ll certainly enjoy it.

Cheers.

for more information on Charlie Harper, check out the resources (found on this Drawn! article) below:

Charlie Harper on Wikipedia
Audio interview with Todd Oldham
Charlie Harper illustrations fanclub on Flickr
Video interview on Handmade Modern