Mónica Ferraz = Darty

Same stuff, true story!

Google, can you make your app icons more different from each other?

Eternally in my wish-list...


Lili Lite by Studio Smeets Design.

Tse & Tse Mirza Teapot with Reversible Coat by Catherine Levy & Sigolene Prebois, à venda na fritzsu^®

Beistelltisch Echo by Egon Chemaitis, à venda na MAGAZIN^®

[A while back, in 2007, I wrote about the work of Jonathan Harris, all the websites he has created. While doing some dusting I found this draft from 2009 I must have forgotten to finish or simply to post. I just can't be bothered to finish it now, so I present it the way it was first written.]

Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris' work celebrates the world's diversity even as it illustrates the universal concerns of its occupants. His computer programs scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.

His projects are both intensely personal (the "We Feel Fine" project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world's blogs to collect snapshots of the writers' feelings) and entirely global (the new "Universe," which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same -- to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.

"Jonathan Harris [is] a New York artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web."

Edge.org

...and in this time of the year something magical happens! Vince Guaraldi Trio's music (who made the classic soundtrack to "Charlie Brown's Christmas") gets played again, a lot. Just look at the graphic below taken from last.fm:

If you must play christmas song during the holidays make it Vince Guaraldi's!

Some scenes from the film:

 

HUB footwear (see last post) sponsors the Chalenge the Obvious project - a series of documentaries "about the beautiful minds who 'Challenge the Obvious' every day." The first episode of the series is a film about Dre Urhahn and Jeroen Koolhaas, two dutchmen "who use art in their quest to help change the lives of people who live in socially troubled neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro and Philadelphia" with their project Favela Painting.

HUB is a dutch footwear brand which designs casual but sophisticated and minimal looking sneakers. The orange Z-stich is the brand's characteristic trademark. It's name derives from the eponymous english term for a place where people meet and activities flow.

The brand presents itself as anti-hipster as they say:

Tired of the current obsession with vintage and the unhealthy adoration of the past, they [the founders] wanted to seize the moment and capture the constantly changing nature of 'the city': combining the impulsiveness of urban life and a high standard of style and quality through design. Owing to two of the company's founders, Huub van Boeckel and Tim Rompa, being former professional tennis players, tennis has naturally been an influence on the design of HUB Footwear shoes. The tennis soles are combined with a casual and clean upper look, resulting in a combination of sport, street and fashion elements, a 'sophisticated sneaker'. A central characteristic of HUB Footwear's various designs is the iconic orange Z-stitch, once placed as a physical connection on the sneakers to strengthen the seams, nowadays it's the brand's icon and more a metaphorical connection to challenge HUB Footwear wearers to connect with the worlds around and within them, than a structural device.

Metaphors aside, they make gorgeous looking shoes.

And also for the girls!

      

Ideal & Co - Living Heritage is a 100% portuguese band of leather products made by 100% vegetable tanning processes. Based in functional minimalism, it creates unique and desirable pieces take up the slogan *SOME THINGS STAY WITH YOU FOREVER! 

It was presented last september in the Cirurgias Urbanas space, in Porto.

Check out their catalogue. Their stuff is simply stunning!

Light graffiti? If Picasso was alive he would be like "I did it before it was cool!". And he would be right!

When LIFE magazine’s Gjon Mili, a technical prodigy and lighting innovator, visited Pablo Picasso in the South of France in 1949, it was clear that the meeting of these two artists and craftsmen was bound to result in something extraordinary. Mili showed Picasso some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates, jumping in the dark — and the Spanish genius’s lively, ever-stirring mind began to race. “Picasso” LIFE magazine reported at the time, “gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space.” 

Read more: LIFE

Sigur rós have given a dozen film makers the same modest budget and asked them to create whatever comes into their head when they listen to songs from the band's new album valtari. the idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom. among the filmmakers are ramin bahrani, alma har'el and john cameron mitchell.

The last in the series, film #16 come out today. You can check them all out in this page! If you're lucky there will even be a screening on the weekend of the 7th december near your house.

Here are my favorites. #3 - Fjögur píanó - is directed by Alma Har'el featuring Shia Labeouf. #5 Ég Anda is directed by Ramin Bahrani.

 

I also recommend #2 by Inga Birgisdóttir, #9 by dash shaw and John Cameron Mitchell and #10 by Nick Abrahams

Semi-ready-made sculptures by Michael DeLucia.

Isaac Reina is spanish, has worked for Hermès and does beautiful things with leather!

Nice lamp by Vitamin!

Optimism: The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) 

According to recent research, leaders who become excessively positive can ward off reality. This perspective has been termed by the author, David Collinson as “Prozac leadership”. Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Prozac’, Collinson suggests that leaders’ excessive positivity is often characterized by a reluctance to consider alternative voice. Optimism tends to resemble a well-intended but addictive drug: It promotes artificial happiness and discourages critical reflection, leaving organisations ill-equipped to deal with setbacks and unexpected problems. “Prozac leaders” can wind up believing their own narrative that everything is going well. As a consequence, they ask fewer and fewer questions and become deaf to feedback that is “off-message,” leaving them, and their organisations, dangerously insulated from economic and social realities. 1

Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.

Manju Puri, professor of finance, and David T. Robinson, professor of business administration, both at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, have determined that while moderate optimism is good, extreme optimism is not. “Extreme optimists don’t think savings are good, don’t pay off their credit cards and don’t do long-term planning,” Professor Puri said. “They think the economy will always do better.” They are also more likely to remarry if divorced. Moderate optimists, on the other hand, work longer hours, save more money, are more likely to pay off their credit card balances and believe their income will grow over the next five years. 2

1 - Is there such a thing as too positive? By TESSE AKPEKI
2 - Lean Toward the Sunny Side, but Don’t Overdo It By ALINA TUGEND 

O novo álbum dos Stars está aí fresquinho - a escutar já!!

A capa mostra o Habitat 67, um dos marcos arquitectónicos de Montreal, desenhado por Moshe Safdie.

"This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal."

"TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.

The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.

Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.

And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had.

“This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa.

The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.

Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.

But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.)

Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer, with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues. His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking."

More in:
THE NEW YOUR TIMES

The Capa Cache

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: January 27, 2008

After seven decades, lost work by a celebrated photographer makes a dramatic reappearance.

See also:
The Mexican Suitcase in ICP
The Mexican Suitcase Oficial Website

Robert Crumb

Marc Philbert is a photographer...