Trends / Olympic Preparations
In the lead-up to one of the most anticipated and controversial Olympic Games in Beijing, Boston.com cobbled together a bunch of surreal photos from the wires that depicts the hyper-sanitized, white-washed, and quasi-futuristic city Beijing has become.
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Ambroise Tézenas’s Beijing: Theatre of the People
Right now, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are cleaning up the mess left behind from the millions of people that passed through their city. Their forty billion dollar sporting event has come to a close and fans from around the world will take away memories of an interesting city that opened up to the world like it has never done before. One person in particular, who used China as a backdrop for his phenomenal photography project, was a French photographer by the name of Ambroise Tézenas. Read more
New York-based designer, and sometime Lost At E Minor contributor, Deanne Cheuk visited Beijing prior to the Olympics as part of the New Grand Tour. We touched in with her to see how she found the experience of being over there: ‘we visited some really modern art galleries, which seemed to be on par with with the best galleries in New York City’.
The Classic Edition of the Beijing Olympic Torch
This is first IOC approved three-dimensional torch replica of the Summer Olympic Games. The Torch part is made from the actual steel left over from the construction of the National Stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, and is also certified by the Beijing Notary Office. Worldwide production is limited to 200,000 sets. Yowser.
Also by GERRY MAK
Darkestrah are a kind of perfect storm of everything I look for in music. They’re a German-based black metal band from Kyrgyzstan with a female singer, and they incorporate Central Asian folk elements like throat-singing into their frighteningly harsh yet majestically beautiful and epic songs. When I’m having a crappy day, I go away to a special place with marauding Mongols, wide-open spaces, star-filled skies, and wrathful demons bent on destroying civilization — that’s what Darkestrah sounds like.
I saw pretty rad illustration in a recent Newsweek of a two-headed snake. I think it was an article about the economy, but I honestly can’t remember. I remembered the artist, though, and looked him up online. Chris Buzelli does some pretty great paintings that liven up articles in Men’s Health, Rolling Stone, and many others. They kind of remind me of Mark Ryden, but with a little more restraint. Read more
Seriously, nothing beats good old 35mm film. To me photography isn’t about capturing every pore in someone’s face, or even making slick, magazine-ready images. The imperfections in film put just enough distance between the viewer and the moment that allows room for an emotional and nostalgic response. Digital photos are generally so vivid that it eliminates all the mystery of an image. Check out Jeff Luker’s photostream to see what I mean. Read more
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We love Wooden Toy, a quarterly Melbourne-based arts and culture magazine that is not only beautifully art directed but also casts a wide net for new creative talent to feature. Read more
I haven’t been this excited by a band in a long time. Florida’s Black Kids have crept under — and now over — the radar through a demo and some serious internet buzz from NME and Pitchfork. Not only are they ridiculously good, they’ve also offered their four-song demo — Wizard of Ahhh’s — for free on their MySpace page. Sweet.
Luxury goods have been getting a bad rap lately, and for good reason. Now I don’t know how you roll, but we don’t know many people who enjoy covering themselves head-to-toe in someone else’s initials. Yet for some reason designers think that diamante logos and monogrammed tapestries are the best mediums to communicate their brand. So it’s just as well LA based eyewear label Barton Perreira doesn’t play by the rules. Starting out less than a year ago, you won’t find their designs getting over-excited by insignia. Instead, these guys hand make their frames in Japan to rely on precision, fit and design. And that’s the way it should be.
No I don’t dance. But heck I was tempted the other night. I was at a Foo Fighters gig, deep amongst the sweat-ridden bowels of a 20,000 strong crowd, with a mind-blowing laser show flashing above me and a band on stage so in the zone it was mesmerising. Read more
We have a bunch of new playlists up on our sister site, My Secret Playlist, a music discovery website and weekly email publication in which we invite our favourite bands and musicians to give us the rundown on their eight favourite songs right now. Over the past few weeks, acts such as The B52s, Team Genius, Pivot, Jukebox the Ghost, Moby, Katy Perry, and the Dandy Warhols, among many others, have written about the music that inspires them. To sign-up to receive the weekly My Secret Playlist publication, just enter your email address into the website’s subscription box.
The Dutch, the beautiful Dutch, in terms of architecture anyway. Here they have led the way again with this reuse of an old crane dock. A new glass office building, with a climatic façade of double glazing, motorized louvers on the outside and full length windows on the inside, hovers above the old dock. Read more
This interview with James Lavelle gives a fascinating window into the making of the latest UNKLE opus, End Titles, Stories for Film.
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I love the sense of intimacy about the work of Chicago-based photographer, Brian Ulrich. His retail project Copia ‘is a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live’. We interviewed him recently and asked him what camera he uses once he gets inside a store he’s photographing: ‘For many of the pictures in the Retail project I used a medium format SLR with a waist level viewfinder. Having a finder that you can look down into instead of holding it to your eye calls a lot attention to yourself as well as allows one to hold the camera still at much slower shutter speeds. Regardless of those things though, the majority of the time it takes a combination of patience and boldness. Strangely I don’t run into people having much of an issue with it. Most often I really don’t think people notice. If an employee does ask me not to take pictures I simply laugh and move on, I’m well aware that what I’m doing looks odd. Better to own up and walk across the street to the Kmart’. Read more
I love art that scares me a little. Erica Eyres somehow manages to make subtly unnerving drawings of distorted figures using nothing more than a ballpoint pen and a piece of paper. She renders shockingly realistic hair, yet skews the proportions and features of her subjects, exaggerating their expressions and making them look monstrous.
Micah P. Hinson takes the good with the bad
We said a few weeks back that Micah P. Hinson is ‘like every rustic, broken down, and pieced back together country great that’s ever been. Only hipper and slightly less sombre’. With that in mind, we spoke to him recently and asked him whether his hometown of Texas was a difficult place for a young, aspiring musician to grow up in: ‘The boredom of Abilene [Texas] helped the creativity. There wasn’t much to do to fill a person’s time, so you had to find ways of filling it. So as far as music, this was helpful. But regarding other extralegal activities, it was not so helpful. But you know, you take the good with the bad, mix it up, and see what pops out’. Read more
I’m so digging the work of Santa Monica artist Andrew Hem. Painting seems to have become relegated in the illustration world these days, so I’m pleased to see Hem rocking it in a big way. His bold brushwork, lush colors, puppet-like figures and painted type make for a body of work that really hits the painted spot.
Some friends and I serendipitously stumbled across the work the artist Hiro Kurata the other night and we have been jointly obsessing over it since. Kurata’s work is torrid, moody and fragmented like a restless dream. Bursting with texture and patterns, it’s simply brilliant. As my friend Andrew Degraff accurately put it, ‘It’s like Savador Dali thrown through a plate glass window’. Indeed. Read more
This beautiful ultrachrome print on Hahnemuhle rag paper, measuring nine by twelve inches and in a limited edition of just 100, is available for purchase through the Lost At E Minor store. Read more
UNKLE’s new album, End Stories … Music For Film, comes in a limited edition gatefold vinyl gloss with sculptured panel embossing. We have three copies to give away to randomly selected Australian Lost At E Minor subscribers who leave a comment under this post.
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