[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL5Nnay5sKY&hl=en&fs=1] Christian Dior took a cue from Hitchcock in the first chapter of this film noir short, complete with femme fatale Marion Cotillard. All is Dior, all is gorgeous.
This is just the latest example of luxury brands going fashionably viral and harnessing the power of the internet to gather a vast audience. Fly16x9 remains the best.
This article in The Atlantic has been steadily making the rounds since 2003. Still appearing on the 'most emailed' list, Jonathan Rauch explores life for an introvert. "Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking..."
For several months now, the New York Times has been featuring the life stories of unique New Yorkers in the video collection One in 8 Million. From Alexandra Elman, the Blind Wine Taster, to Joel Karp, the Corner Druggist, these stories are anything but typical. They reflect the charm and character of the 'average' person on the street through first-person narratives and stunning black and white photographs.
This PBS interview with the producers of One in 8 Million gives added depth to the work behind the production.
I will be on a trans-Atlantic flight next week to go from one home to another. Not quite the road trip experience, but any trip is a good time for Kerouac. My favorite quotes from 'On the Road'.
"How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so."
"...I told him about a strange dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City. "Who is this?" shouted Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn't it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind. I told it to Dean and he instantly recognized it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because we're all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him then."
"...I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I have nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5SdTX4PRvU&hl=en&fs=1] It's hard to choose my favorite work by the Seoul-based artist Joo Youn Paek. Her self-sustainable chair concept comes in at the top though. With each step, air pumps styled as shoes inflate the backside of the dress. Once the dress is completely filled with air, the wearer sits on it for a moment of reflection and to deflate the dress for another round.
The age-old concept and stopping to ask for directions has died off a bit, with the ubiquity of navigation devices. Kacie Kinzer's experiment with Tweenbot, a cute cardboard robot, reflects on the romantic notion of strangers helping strangers. Her experiment? Drop a robot, donned with a 'Help Me' sign, off on the northeast corner of Washington Square Park and see if New Yorkers will help it get to the southwest corner (as specified on the sign). It's just cute.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gvOVWKKxmo&hl=en&fs=1] Lucinda Schreiber's chalk animation is a testament to the beauty of patience. To make this, she had to shoot around 1900 frames in a project that took six full months to complete. Many have compared it to Blu, but I think the Firekite song gives it an edge. Impressive.
Sunday morning reading the New York Times. I read this one aloud:
Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud by Verlyn Klinkenborg
"Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading."
A beautiful article in The Atlantic about a long-term research project at Harvard, explores the lives of 268 Harvard students over the course of 72 years.
"The study began in the spirit of laying lives out on a microscope slide. But it turned out that the lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.” Arlie Bock had gone looking for binary conclusions—yeses and nos, dos and don’ts. But the enduring lessons would be paradoxical, not only on the substance of the men’s lives (the most inspiring triumphs were often studies in hardship) but also with respect to method: if it was to come to life, this cleaver-sharp science project would need the rounding influence of storytelling."