In the Open Air

pluk de nacht panorama It's my favorite time of the year in Amsterdam, the end-of-summer open air film festival season! Tonight Pluk de Nacht begins with the Estonian film Autumn Ball. Located at Het Stenen Hoofd, Pluk de Nacht is arguably the best of them all with a view of the water, comfy lounge chairs, and a great selection of international films.

Missing Artist

keiichil Every Saturday in Seoul, when I was living there at least, there was an artist's market in Hongdae where the students from Hongik University would drag their latest creations to the street corners and put them up for sale. In this creative hub, I came across Keiichil who had an extensive collection of sketches and drawings featuring a sole angel shrouded in a black veil. Doing my part to support the apprehensive Korean art scene, I frequented Keiichil's collection over the period of a few months and sent black angel-etched journals and prints, along with other finds, to friends in other parts of the world. A few years later, as I realize his email is unsurprisingly outdated, I wonder if this emerging Korean artist still exploring the angel motif on the streets of Hongdae?

keiichil3keiichil2

Forget the Clothes

coco

Chanel famously said: "Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street. Fashion has to do with the ideas, the way we live, what is happening." Do you believe in this idea and was it important for the film?

I think fashion is not important. It is the style of somebody - the way someone moves and thinks. To have a personality, you have to forget the clothes. Chanel's instinct and sense of elegance was natural. When you forget the clothes, it is only the style that stays.

Simon Chilvers interviews Anne Fontaine, director of Coco Avant Chanel in The Guardian.

Unbranding

starbucks1 Starbucks' attempt to go local starts tomorrow when it unveils its latest venture in Seattle called 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea, an artisan-esque café filled with rustic wood and straight-back chairs. The sign outside reportedly reads 'Inspired by Starbucks', but the truth behind it is 'Owned and operated by Starbucks.' I don't think anyone is missing out on the fact that it is a corporate venture, but I can't shake a sense of cynicism as they try to take two steps left. An interesting exercise in unbranding, or the business version of an extreme makeover, that reads as a desperate attempt to back away from a business model that has turned stale and cliché. I could applaud a return to their Northwest roots. But while the Seattle Times explains that it will sell a rotating menu of beer and wine alongside the usual offerings of coffee, tea, and food, the Seattle Metblogs reports that only one wine is from the Northwest (Oregon to be precise). Not so convincing for a local venture.

It's Supposed to Feel Small

This week, I sat in a room with a very smart technologist. As I heard him describe the shiny new, the new new…For a moment, the other ideas we’d brought in our little deck felt small. But I reminded myself: they’re supposed to be small. They’re supposed to be real. They’re supposed to build a relation(I won’t even say it because it’s become such an overused word that’s a little tasteless at the moment because we’re sick of saying it and hearing it). Yes, technology empowers. Technology is incredible these days. But don’t lose sight. At the end of the day, small, often, real, honest, respectful of real needs, of real yearning little desires that only you and your nice little set up can provide… that matters. That surprises. That means something. Use technology. Love new technology. But don’t lose sight.

(via wearethedigitalkids)

The Glass Delusion (aka Scholar's Melancholy)

The Glass Delusion was an external manifestation of a psychiatric disorder recorded in Europe in the late middle ages (15th to 17th centuries). People feared that they were made of glass “and therefore likely to shatter into pieces”. One famous early sufferer was King Charles VI of France who refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself from accidental “shattering”. The sufferer could believe or claim that he was any sort of glass object. A 1561 account reported a sufferer “who had to relieve himself standing up, fearing that if he sat down his buttocks would shatter… The man concerned was a glass-maker from the Parisian suburb of Saint Germain, who constantly applied a small cushion to his buttocks, even when standing. He was cured of this obsession by a severe thrashing from the doctor, who told him that his pain emanated from buttocks of flesh.”

Concentration of the glass delusion among the wealthy and educated classes allowed modern scholars to associate it with a wider and better described disorder of Scholar’s Melancholy.

(via unicornology: colporteur)

Book Snobbery

my books Cleaning out my horribly overloaded inbox led me to unearth two great finds. This photo of the bookshelf of a writer with the initials E.W. The bookshelf of his holiday home is laden with books that, unfortunately for his friends, aren't up for grabs. The second discovery was this NY Times article Essays about Love and Literary Taste, describing how similarity in favorite authors and books can be the start (or dissimilarity the end) to romance.

"Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility."

The World Atlas of Innovation

WAINOVA Innovation is a word that gets tossed around with such frequency these days that it sometimes carries less impact than it should. In comes the WAINOVA visualization of the hubs of innovation around the world to breathe fresh air into the word. This project from the data visualizers Bestario (via infosthetics) illustrates the many centers that comprise the World Alliance for Innovation, a collection of science parks and business incubators around the world. The visualization brings to life the numerous players that create a network of knowledge focused on change and progress.

Tangible Media and Digital Technology

New Yorker cover I recently enjoyed a Vanity Fair article by James Wolcott on the demise of public displays of cultural snobbery as "Kindles, iPods, and flash drives swallow up the visible markers of superior tastes and intelligence." Wolcott described the process of observation, analysis, and judgment we make (often mistakenly) on others and the media they consume in public spaces.

"A tall, straw-thin model glides into seated position and extracts a copy of concentration-camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning from her bag, instantly making an onlooker (me) feel rebuked for assuming she was vacuous and self-centered based on her baby-ostrich stare."

This reminded me of a New Yorker cover by Adrian Tomine, a beautiful example of the connection strangers feel when they discover a shared sensibility, literature in this case. The awareness of a missed connection is eclipsed by the warmth of a momentary intellectual affinity.

Some may value the reclaimed storage space over the mounds of books or old records, while others resist the push to digitize their media sources entirely or partially. For my part, the convenience and accessibility of digitized information is without dispute. But when it comes to books, part of my appreciation for reading stems from the sensory experience that the materiality of the hard copy brings. Yet, electronic paper and eInk are fascinating technologies in themselves, and it's impossible to separate even a hard copy from a technological process entirely, something N. Katherine Hayles discusses in her book My Mother was a Computer. Her article on Electronic Literature emphasizes that instead of a debate over print or digital, this emerging genre deserves a discussion of its own while acknowledging its historical relationship with the print world. And we can happily keep our shelves lined with books while still recognizing a new manifestation in the field of writing.

These were some of my thoughts as I read through the article, so I was quite pleased when Simon told me about a book-sensitive reading lamp.  The lamp is illuminated when uncovered, but turns off when a book is placed over it. It's a nice example that the relationship between tangible media and technology can sometimes be reversed, with the former dictating the use of the latter.

Lamp OnLamp Off