Carb Couture

Carb Couture looks like it's open for business and taking pre-orders. I'm getting me the shirt on the left. And yes, that's Jean on the home page. And yes, I did design the website. Though my friend Patty and her friends came up with the idea. So go and order some shirts! And apologies for being out of touch on this blog a little bit. I was travelling and posting on my text blog.

Spinning

I've been in a hip hop mood all of a sudden. Digging the last Non Prophets album Hope and the leaked Jaylib and MF Doom Are Madvillain album. The first has a nice laid back beat and solid production work by Joe Beats which reaches back towards an earlier era of hip hop. The latter is a series of cuts Jaylib had put on a mix tape to take to Brazil with him. The Madvillain album is out now and I'll have to get that soon. Rounding things out, I've been listening to Oval's 94 Diskont, a glitch electronic album with an ethereal initial 24 minute track that barely seems a song at all until it slowly reveals the music's patterns, and Nigasa Ni Te's Feel. The latter is a Japanese indie rock duo whose stripped back lo-fi album owes a bit to the Velvet Underground and Nick Drake.    

The Gates

On Feburary 12, 2005, Christo and Jean-Claude will launch their first project in New York City. 7500 gates, each 16 feet tall will follow the edges of the walkways and will be perpendicular to the selected 23 miles of footpaths in Central Park. Free hanging saffron colored fabric panels will be suspended from each of these gates, drooping to seven feet above the ground. The name comes from Frederick Law Ohlmstead's reference to the various arches already located throughout the park as "gates." I'm already trying to think of places above the park from which to take photographs. If there's a reason to stay in New York for another year, this would be it. Read more about the project here.

New music

O.K. I've been bad lately with updating this site. I'll try harder in the coming weeks. As far as recent music, I've been listening to Stars' Heart, Depeche Mode's Black Celebration, and Club 8's The friend I Once Had. At least those are the albums in heavy rotation. Lately, I've been having some trouble finding something else to listen to. The DM infatuation lingers, however. I actually rented 101 a week or two ago and was surprised how popular they really were. I also finally realized that the final concert was not in the Hollywood Bowl. For some reason it always played there in my mind. Stars is a somewhat twee indie rock band, and Club 8 are a poppy rock band where the lead singer bears a passing resemblance to Dolores O'Riordan.

New (and not so new) Music

Lately I find myself drawn to the electronic/rock mix of things. This time it started with the Morr Music compilation Blue Skied an' Clear, which then got me back into Ms. John Soda's No P. or D, mainly through the song "Solid Ground," which has a beautiful woody bass. Most recently, I picked up Lali Puna's new album Faking the Books, which starts off with a Radioheadesque sliced vocal sample over a song that has shades of Notwist in it. Rounding things out is Mum's Finally We Are No One. A friend was using "K/Half Noise" on the soundtrack of a project she was working on and I got sucked into the album itself.        

More penguin games

No. three here.

Weekly roundup

This week started with The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone. Somehow this seems to fall into a similar Velvet Underground influenced rock that informs Interpol and, to a certain extent, The Strokes. I don't have their new album yet, but I'll probably get it sometime soon. Alirio Diaz's Five Centuries of Spanish Guitar Music is recorded by one of the masters of Spanish Guitar. Invited to become assistant and substitute for Andres Segovia in 1957, Diaz spent seven years working with the Spanish guitar master and sharpening his skills. Michel Legrand's score for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg bring back the movie with every note. As the entire film is sung, you could probably follow the entire plot without having seen the movie. If you could speak French. Salif Keita's Mouffou brings it back to his roots. The Malian singer combines African, jazz, funk, Europop, and R&B to fashion his own brand of Afro-Pop.       As far as singles are concerned, I'm listening to a lot of Vienna Teng's songs from her website. It's like a cross between Vanessa Carlton and October Project. Or something like that.

NY Songlines

Virtual walking tours of New York. (courtesy littlerabbit).

New Nickel

The U.S. mint is rolling out new nickels in addition to all the other new money that's coming out.

Spaced Penguin!

Try to get the penguin back to his ship. (courtesy littlefluffy).

Baa Baa black beats

Instead of counting sheep, let the sheep count the beats for you. You can also add keys and bass. I'm just happy with the drum and bass. I wish you could speed up the tempo . . . (courtesy to here knows when).

Railroad Tycoon

Remember Pipe Dream? Here it is with trains and a cool harmonica soundtrack.

Tunes for the week

Kanye West's College Dropout is one of the best hip hop albums to drop in a while. I can listen to it from beginning to end without feeling that there's a ton of filler taking up space. And even the skits are funny. For the most part. Between this and The Grey Album, 2004 is already shaping up to be a pretty good year. Burger/Ink's Las Vegas is a collaboration between Jorg Burger and Mike Ink. It's an electronica album bearing some resemblance to Monolake, but with a little more going on. Xiu Xiu's Fabulous Muscles mixes electronics and experimental rock into a fascinatingly creepy album. Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik is an album I had heard in the past but for some reason this past week I was suddenly into it in a way I'd never been in the past. The mix of metal and funk was exactly what the good doctor ordered.             Most of the singles I've been rocking are from the Kanye West album, including "We Don't Dare," "Family Business," and "All Falls Down."

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music v.2.0

It's back and it's bigger than before. Check it out and learn the difference between Happy House and HiNRG.

Heads I win, tails you lose

Apparently, flipping a coin is not as fair as it might seem. Statistician Persi Diaconis built himself a machine to flip coins and determined that "if a coin is launched exactly the same way, it lands exactly the same way. You can listen to the story on NPR.

Leaving No Child Behind redesign

After sending in the original design of this (left) I was told that the book should have larger type and indicate more of a policy bent. They felt the original design was too quiet, focusing on the individuals in question too much. And they wanted an all-cap title. So the option on the right.    

Evening's work

I spent the weekend in New Jersey attending a baby shower and now I'm trying to finish up some designs before the week starts. The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature explores Japan's role in shaping Chinese cultural modernity by comparing and contrasting what appear to be similar narrative modes between the shishosetsu and work coming out of the Creation Society, studying how Chinese writers both appropriated and reconceptualized this Japanese approach. The Turkish-Israeli Relationship examines the historic, geo-strategic and political-cultural roots of the Turkish-Israeli relationship, from the 1950s until today.    

Speaking of the Grey Album

Grey Tuesday is creating coordinated civil disobedience. On Tuesday, February 24, websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work. Read the site for the full story.

Esquire magazine covers

I was reading design observer's article about the decline of magazine covers. The article specifically references George Lois and his 60's Esquire covers. I followed some of the links and realized that Esqure has all of its covers posted online. I love those old covers, before, as the design observer article says, celebrity took over from design.

Weekly faves.

DJ Dangermouse mixes Jay-Z's vocals from The Black Album with beats culled from the Beatles' White Album and creates The Grey Album. It's such a vast improvement over The Black Album you wonder why Jay-Z didn't hire Dangermouse in the first place. And I'll never hear the Beatles in the same way. Brilliant. I started listening to Sinatra because I was working on a book on the subject. Come Fly With Me marks his first outing with arranger Billy May, and together they take a swinging trip around the world. I've always loved Sam Cooke. The Rhythm and the Blues collects a number of early 60's sides and remasters them. Cooke has never sounded better. The sound is crisp, the vocals clear. A-mei is a Taiwanese singer. I saw her in concert on Christmas Day, and picked up her album to prepare myself. Some great Chinese pop music, though she still hasn't quite ascended the heights of her hit single a few years back.             Singles this week I've been returning to include Tori Amos's "Taxi Ride," Pizzicato Five's "Baby Love Child," and Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me."