2012-11-21
post/36179066030
Andy Warhol eating a hamburger (via):
Andy Warhol finally did arrive at the studio, of course along with his bodyguards, and when he saw the selection of burgers the assistant had brought he asked “Where is the McDonald’s?” and Leth - slightly in panic - was immediately like “I thought you would maybe not like to identify… ” and Warhol answered “no that is the most beautiful”. Leth offered to let his assistant quickly run to McDonald’s but Warhol refused like “No, never mind, I will take the Burger King.”
2012-11-14
post/35723649705
Team BlackSheep’s TEATIME in London (by nastycop420)
Also via Dan W, this comment:
Please act safely and stop flaunting the reasonable legal constraints. You are at risk of spoiling this for the rest of us.
2012-11-12
post/35546552882
Amazing video of London in 1941, commuting in from the Suburbs,
City Bound (1941) (by British Council Film)
Well worth ten minutes.
2012-10-30
post/34612906001
Hurricane Sandy: How do we ride out the storm?
See also: How Do Large Ships Deal With Massive Hurricanes? at Forbes (via):
When a hurricane approaches port, ship captains must make hard decisions about speed and direction of approaching storms. The worst place for a ship to find itself is in the eye of a major hurricane, but the second worst place is the harbor.
For this reason, the United States Coast Guard recently closed most ports along the hurricane path and ordered all ships to leave port and head east at the best possible speed.
2012-09-20
post/31942106292
Chicken Cottage advert, Iraq (indirectly via Chris).
(Source: youtube.com)
2012-06-16
post/25195649571
Paul Raftery, architectural photographer, and Dan Lowe, director, have collaborated to create a timelapse film showing the final weeks of construction of The Shard tower in London Bridge, the tallest skyscraper in the United Kingdom.
It was shot over many long days during the early months of 2012, from locations spanning from Greenwich Park to Hampstead Heath.
Music by George McLeod.
I was sort of hoping for a time-lapse sequence of the entire construction, but this is nice anyway. Seen on the Guardian, in a feature on the building and an interview with Renzo Piano.
2012-05-08
Three Point Landing
Today, @dunkr premiered this supercut at @ROFLCon and blew my mind: Three Point Landing. youtube.com/watch?v=mgOtPX…
— Diana Kimball (@dianakimball) May 5, 2012
(Source: youtube.com)
2012-04-16
post/21192218331
Mad Men: Bittorrent Edition, by Conor McGarrigle (via, via):
the video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.
It also avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete.
There are some interesting reactions to this on a Metafilter thread. For example, here’s Malice (#):
I’m not so sure that’s the “bittorrent edition” so much as the “online streaming of pirated tv shows” edition.
I also just don’t get how this is lovely at all. It’s rather annoying. Why anyone would voluntarily watch that is beyond me, this is the sort of thing that happens on rainy days to satellite subscribers, or when Netflix is being shitty.
It’s very pretty! And the theme of damage and incompleteness being wreaked upon a background of superficial aesthetic appeal works really well for its source material. Coupled with the (also very pretty song), I found this to hold a compellingly melancholy kind of charm for me — far more so than the AMC show holds, in fact.
shakespeherian added (#)
I think you’re missing what the draw is here for some folks, myself included. One of the ways that art functions is to draw attention to the overlooked, to find weird little spaces in common experience that people tend to skip over impatiently when they’re looking for the Real Meat Of Life, and to say: What if we just look at this one little thing? What if, instead of skipping over it, we acknowledge its commonality, we indulge it in the things we recognize about it, we allow it to play out and examine what it has to offer? Is there anything it can reveal, any way its random parts can accidentally work in concert to make something interesting? This process that so many of us participate in— torrenting episodes of a glossy-looking teevee show— what alternative results can spring from that same activity, and what happens if we just look at those results as if that was what we were trying for?
Also in the thread, as Kevin Slavin noted, there’s a good description of how the effects emerge by Rhomboid.
2012-03-29
post/20120095152
Daniel Zalewski: How Christian Marclay created “The Clock” in The New Yorker (via).
It’s a longish article that’s worth the read, although this point did rather leap out at me.
2012-03-20
post/19631333647
A timelapse of the construction of the roof of the new Kings Cross western concourse. I’d rather have embedded the longer BBC version, or their second video of the main railway shed roof renovations, or even the single shot version of the latter at Network Rail, but unfortunately they don’t seem to enable embedding.
If you’re interested in the new station: more words; more pictures; even more pictures. Why there are no water fountains. Previously: my review of new northern concourse of the Underground station.
