DestroyFlickr | Adobe Air-based app for viewing Flickr the dark grey background and the full screen view are killer. It's a bit disorientating at first, but I gotta say, over the half-hour it took to learn how to use this thing, I viewed exponentially more photos than I could with Flickr's site. total score!
I Can't See You, I Can't See You TPM on the wesley clark's statements about McCain on Sunday. i just can't believe how republicans can continually shape the national debate in their own terms. and rather than calling bullshit, obama throws another one of his supporters under the bus.
Final Attigo | ANP Quarterly blog the newest new shit in turntablism. amazing stuff. touch screen manipulation of sound on the fly. including visual scratching. this system makes Final Scratch obsolete, me thinks.
Super Colossal | Ledger super nice, new b+w theme for mint. wow. i like. but maybe it'd be nice in reverse as well? [via daring fireball]
Flexible Layouts: Challenge For The Future | How-To | Smashing Magazine wicked awesome article on creating nice flexible layouts. don't sleep on the graph that says that 1024×768 peaked in 2006 and is now being eclipsed by bigger monitors. woo hoo!!! i wish flickr had an image size in between 500 and 1024.
Word of impending swell had us out at The Usual, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Four sessions in three days. No real swell to be had, but some occasional head high waves with way too much time in between proper sets. Saturday morning’s session was remarkable for it’s small but powerful waves with rides lasting almost right to the beach. I had several memorably floaters and a nice carve or three, the singlefin was in fine form. Sometimes it’s as if the board calls to me to ride it in different ways (as opposed to the regular thruster stance). Feet moving all over the board, feet together - sideways or face forward, crouched stance, hand on the rail. This board has stories to tell.
I awoke on Sunday to little bombs hitting the beach and I knew our phantom swell had arrived, most likely stopping in to Michoacan for a coffee break and chilaquiles and then heading on up the coast, two days late. I headed to La Virgen to find 5 foot backs and off-shore winds. La Virgen’s mushy rollers sometimes lead to nowhere waves - they crash overhead and seconds later you find yourself riding a shoulder with no foam ball. Others lead to wide-open faces of rolling water. I had a bit of both. It was nice to get the singlefin in to overhead conditions, total champ. The left was firing.
John from Vintage Cotton has been in town since the middle of last week, and he’s been joining me on our daily forays. It was nice to have some decent swell come in, so that he could have a taste of how good this area can be. But truth-be-told, he was happy with the solid 2-3 footers at The Usual and their long trimmed out lines. John brought down a gang of shirts for us locals and me and the homies are very thankful for the hook up. You wouldn’t believe how far good schwag hookups go down here. Thanks John.
John was out on Sunday with me for the nice swell and I had to cut my session a little short as my stomach started acting up. I thought it might be from a bad mix of chelas and sangrias the night before, but by the time I got to the house, I had full blown chorrillo. and I was knocked out for the rest of Sunday in a hazed stupor, as whatever bug I had ran through my system every 15 minutes, all day long.
Today, there’s still some leftover swell and Pato just called to drag me out to La Alberca. But I’m still weak from yesterday’s war and I still feel like an alien just hatched out of my abdomen, so I’m taken ‘er easy.
Emil Kozak nices it up again. This time we find this Barcelonian design aesthete killing it on a collaboration with Kelly Slater and Al Merrick, for Slater’s board graphics. These sheets are made by HP and sandwiched in between the foam and glass. You can actually order Emil’s designs here, as well as board graphics by Thomas Campbell. At $60/side, it’s not exactly economical for us mexican contingenters, but if someone were to float one down my way, for like um uh testing purposes, it would knock my stoke level up a few gigometers. hint hint.
A list of predictions about the unthinkable future by Kevin… wow, this is very in tune with my own thoughts on my art. as i grow older, i find myself curating much more than actually producing art, all the while educating myself in all different facets of art making. i'd love to curate art shows.
natasjafourie _ photography if you're gonna have big flash sites for your photo portfolio, you would do well to have one as well put together as Natasja's. amazing, slick, moody site. big gorgeous yummy fashiony photography. NSFW. i like. i like. [via iwanna's tweet]
An Honor That Bush Is Unlikely to Embrace - NYTimes.com "a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant." - awesome
Luke Magee | The Necessity Of Self Imposed Deadlines Luke has excellant advice for those of us that work for ourselves on staying focused, agile and quick. I'm definitely having a little trouble crashing through some of the mental roadblocks i'm encountering along the way. Luke's advice is nice, sweet kick
Joni Sternbach’s Surfers series is absolutely mind-blowing, done with wet plate technique. The images in the series are almost timeless, pulled by the current styles of boards, stickers, hair and clothing styles and contrasted by the old-school technique of wet plate collodian process and the dream-like qualities of the landscapes and background.
My photographs over recent years engage traditions of landscape, seascape, and architecture. Working with a large-format camera and historic process (wet-plate collodian), I have concentrated on locations that are close to or directly on the water. At this juncture between land and sea, I explore subject matter in a constant state of transition.
For the past couple years I have photographed surfers in Montauk and in California. Their activity takes place on the water; the people are persistent elements in a shifting scene. The singular, primitive act of surfing on the water is tempered by the social and negotiated state of human interaction on the shore. The surfers act as a bridge between the sea as an unbridled force of nature and the shoreline, a place governed by social expectations.
My approach is simple: introductions are made, and each person willing to collaborate steps into the water and poses. The sea acts as both a backdrop and a watery stage. As the tide recedes the rocky surface underneath is revealed, looking more like the moon than a beach. Photographing people at surfing locations is a natural extension of my interests, exploring yet another dimension of landscape and its evolving state.
Working with a “wet” instantaneous process that must be prepared and developed on location serves me well. It draws spectators and entices new subjects. Using collodion compels me to compose carefully before sensitizing the plate, yet its very nature is spontaneous and unknowable. The raw quality of the process suits the subject matter, and the distinctive appearance of the finished works echoes nineteenth-century traditions of anthropological photography.
Let the Surfers project be an introduction, for you, to Sterbach’s work, but check out her other projects as well. They’re all really amazing. The first photo in her Sea/Sky series would look lovely, framed up on my wall.
I ran in to Sternbach’s work, while digging through vi.sualize.us (it’s kinda like ffffound, but with better search features)
Sprint | Instinct the site is dumb, but check out the url: http://www.instinctthephone.com/?id9=Ad_2008q2_instinct_launch_phoneporn_728×90
Brother GT-451 Digital Garment printer wanna start your own tshirt business? ondemand digital printer for tshirts. this thing is a work horse! price tag? $20,000
Toddy Maker Cold-Brew… Homie Andrew says that this is the best way to enjoy coffee. no acidic taste and all the under notes of coffee coming through. this is for serious coffee enthusiasts. hopefully he'll pop one in the mail for us of the mexican contingent.
Spreadshirt killer on-demand tshirt printing and fulfillment service. really interesting.
SOFA - Design, Interfaces & Software wicked awesome company website. love the big typography and whitespace. so fresh and so clean. raises the bar for deceptively simple company websites. stellar use of serif fonts.
The Website Is Down hilarious video! a fictional screencast of an IT guy talking to a sales guy. gets better as it goes along.
The War in Iraq costs $720 Million a day.
That’s $500,000 a minute.
That’s $8333 a second.
“I think people are becoming more aware of these guns or butter questions,” said Gary Gillespie, “But when you talk about $720 million a day, even people who work on this issue are shocked by the number and shocked by what could have been done with that money. War has no return — you’re not producing a product.”
Great piece, combines clear narrative and simple/effective motion graphics.
I stumbled upon these incredible hand-drawn typographicalizations over at flickr’s hand-drawn type group (awesome resource). The illustrations are by Natasha at vemod.no. amazing illustration work, both hand-drawn and vector. Her site also includes physical projects (zines, rings and other non-digital objects) photography. Peep her photography project toy cities, insane. There’s a whole slew of this on flickr, but Natasha does it extremely well.
How to Talk Like Christopher Walken. Clip of the Day "Meet Naathan, an Asian-American posing as a British-Asian, who does a great Walken. And in this near-30-minute video from a couple years ago, he teaches us just how he does it." this kid is fascinating.
Op-Ed Contributor - Leader of the Pack - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com "AS the Democratic primaries revealed, Barack Obama is having a hard time winning the support of blue-collar voters. So here?s a piece of strategic advice for the candidate: Lose the Nicorette. Light up instead." You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Simple Truths - Parkour on Vimeo "I am an average traceur - I train two to three times a week, and have been doing so for over 5 years now. Pretty average skill level considering." awesome parkour training video. makes me want to do this in mexico. [via waxy]
A friend of mine has started a local civil association, here in Nayarit, called “Caminos Al Mar”. Literally translated it means “Roads to the Sea” and he took this name for the group, as all of the access roads and paths to the places we surf are all being closed off, one by one. The groups stated goals are to work directly with governments, municipalities, developers and other civil associations to maintain and ensure proper access to beaches for everyone; beach and surf break protection; clean water initiatives and education on conservation/environmental issues.
To make a long story short Nayarit and Jalisco are both going through massive development. All development is supposed to be under the control and direction of the urban planning wings of local municipalities. Unlike places like the United States, Mexico’s constitution explicitly states that beaches are the property of the people and that access to beaches can not be denied. This is exactly what’s happening to large stretches of coast that up until now, have been largely undeveloped.
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This friend asked me to create a tshirt design promoting the group and this is the result. I had to distill the groups message into something as (relatively) simple as possible. The “Save The Waves” / “Salvar Las Olas” message seemed to work and he gave me the tagline “Seamos realistas, lo pidamos lo imposible” (We are realists, we ask the impossible).
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The association’s logomark is respectfully borrowed from the Huichol symbol for the Ojo de Dios (God’s eye), Birri came up with that inspired thought. and the tagline means “supporting the rights of surfers in México”.
In México, the “sweet 16″ birthday celebration is actually the “sweet 15″, it’s called the “quinceañera”. My wife’s sister (mi cuñada) recently turned 15 and rather than throw an insanely lavish and expensive party, as is the norm, she opted for a nice simple dinner at the local sushi joint and a little backyard lip-sync and foosball action with close friends. add a large camera and everyone’s a star.
I was perusing my rss feeds this morning, when I came across a post on the PUERTO VALLARTA SCENE (a relatively new blog on what’s happening in PV - good information resource) about a John McCain poster contest. Apparently the McCain campaign wants you to design a cool poster for his campaign, that’s an original idea [ed- insert dramatic irony pause here], the PV Scene post is tongue-in-cheek at best.
Let me stop here for a second, to say that I thought it was common knowledge that anyone with an IQ high enough to be able to “design” a poster (or even to know how to open photoshop), would never vote for John McCain, never mind making (propaganda) posters for his axis of evil campaign. I’m pretty sure there’s only one category of human being that would gladly try to organize type and imagery in to something resembling a poster for John McCain: the CEOs of Exxon / Chevron / Halliburton / Kellogg Brown Root / JP Morgan / AT&T / etc… and they would most surely never use photoshop. They’d use MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint to do it, like good business people would.
Absentmindedly I thought of the original Bush/Cheney bumper sticker, an idea popped and 20 minutes later I had put together this new version for McCain, since basically he’s taking over Bush’s same policies, in exchange for disregarding everything he’s thought and fought for his entire life. They say “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. McCain has already subjugated his beliefs just to get a shot at that power, you wanna imagine what he’d be like if he actually won? He’d make Napolean look like Ghandi.
Now someone has to take this to kinkos and get it printed out a million times on that cheap poster board and take them to the republican stockholder meeting convention.
Toyz for Toobz | Sissy Fish video of remote control surf toyz. awesome! when the surf is dead, at least you can get some sliding in with your surf toy. this could be an explosive trend.
Zebra free font | TypeNeu wickedly excellent free font of the month. so good. go grab it now. maybe this can replace Brush Script in your font arsenal.
Every cliche ever uttered about Mexico is simultaneously true and false at the some time. I can’t explain it. It’s just how it is.
Still in GDL, Tzahui called last night asking if I wanted to take pics today, from the boat. Waves are at 3 meters. I shat me ponties with regret. What am I doing in this concrete jungle?
Late to the party as usually, I just read Sissy Fish’s End-of-Nau post. wow. amazing read. what a bummer. peep the comments. one part bad business plan, one part bad economy = disaster. Chum has my condolences.
Now up to date on BSG. great freakin season despite its early, questionable episodes. Ep10 was insane!
Half-way through Gerry Lopez’s Surf Is Where You Find It. great read. love talkin story. Admittedly, I’ve actually never read any of Lopez’s articles before. He’s a great story teller with a very direct and undecorated writing style. His pre-70s Hawaii and early Uluwatu/G-Land stories are my current favorites. The Buzzy Trent and Miki Dora stories are stone cold classics. required reading.
File under “Did you know that”: Swell sells a pretty good priced reprint of the exhibition poster for the Pre-War Surfing Photographs of Don James at Danzinger Gallery? I have my mouse on the “buy” button as we speak.
The Solitary Arts has a blog and it’s good! Their whole site is filled with interesting imagery and the blog is no exception. lots of interesting posts, usually about goings-ons and what-have-yous. but always on point.
movie-oke vs karaoke this is awesome. i'll be The Dude and you can Walter Sobchak. suwheet.
Scientists See Squid Attack Squid | LiveScience “The Humboldt squid is a voracious predator that will eat anything it can get its tentacles on, Benoit-Bird says. We put a pair of 10-pound squid into a tank and one immediately beheaded the other. These are fierce little beasts.”
Gringo. a brazilian ad agency their main website interface is a user-generated flash card/video thingy that teaches you really good/bad curse words in foreign languages. submit your own! god, i love the internets sometimes
Frank Darabont's Shia-Free 'Indiana Jones 4' Script Leaks Like You Knew It Would Darabont wrote the original script for Indy4. Lucas hated it and canned it. Re-wrote the script while keeping many Darabont elements in. erases Darabont's name from the script. makes a good action movie with several glaring, crappy moments.
THE TOYBOIZE ARE BACK!! web episode tv show in a fakeumentary style about a british boy band that comes back together years after their #2 hit. funny as shit.
I respect my elders. There’s always two or three ‘Old Guy’ longboarders out in the lineup. If you’re over 60 and still in the water on a regular basis and you have the conditioning to be able to catch Burros’ slow, mushy waist high donkey waves, then you gotta be doing something right. Most of these guys have probably been surfing longer than I’ve been alive. And they’re often salty/sweet and filled with smart quips and good stories. Old Guys help contrast the local groms and their lack of basic surf etiquette and rules.
A few days ago, I was out surfing the chest-high peelers coming in at the beginning of a recent swell. There were a few Old Guys (OGs) in the lineup, every one getting their fair share of righteous slippage.
I’d just gotten a nice ride and was paddling back out to the lineup. Old Guy#1 drops in on a broad-faced peeler. Old Guy#2 drops in on OG#1 (obviously not on a trip together). OG#2 has several looks at OG#1 and with about 15 feet between them, OG#2 decides to stay on the wave. Both working their way down the line. Without special legwork or grace, OG#2 isn’t exactly an “arbiter of style”. Just some schmoe who won’t get off someone else’s wave. OG#1 is making the ‘mush’ face.
As they come toward me, I’m assuming OG#2 will get off at some point and I will safely move over the shoulder before OG#1 rides the crest by. OG#2 in a jenky manner decides to keep riding the shoulder, over me, instead of ducking off or riding the face down and around me. Just before he makes it over, a second peak forms and pushes his board down the face a bit and he misses me by a few feet. In a parallel dimension, his board hits me directly in the head and splits my forehead open and I received 24 stitches*. OG#1 is still making faces and wondering what this guy is doing on his wave.
On his paddle back out, I lean over my shoulder and say to OG#2 that he should be more careful and that he almost creamed me in the face. OG#2 stutters a bit, with internal indecision on how to handle the situation, a second later he gets all red in the face and says to me “You have got to be fucking kidding me?!”. I toss an unbelieving grin his way and casually say “Fine, be that way” and continue on with my paddle back to the lineup.
Now this is the rub: This guy had two choices. He could take the tack he took, or he could be civil, acknowledge his wave theft and near fuck-up. His option is the nuclear option and never begets friends. The second option would most surely reward him with a smile and respect. OG#2 chose the wrong option. And by choosing the wrong option, he fucked up in three ways, in a matter of seconds:
1. He dropped in on someone else’s wave
2. He almost creamed me in the face
3. He didn’t have the balls to acknowledge his bad judgement.
Incidents like this happen all the time. The differences is how you choose to deal with them. We all make mistakes and I’m sure this guy, deep down, wanted a way to say sorry in some little way, after all that ‘confrontation adrenaline’ wore off, but his first reaction kinda fucked up the vibe in the water. I’ve done this before, I’m sure everyone has.
If there’s a message here, it’s that regardless of age, we can all learn a thing or two. Rules aren’t arbitrary and try not to be an asshole, unless someone egregiously drops in your wave, than you can be a jerk.
– * this actually happened to my good friend Julietta, a few months ago, surfing the very same spot, in very similar conditions.
Serena Mitnik-Miller just had her art opening at Mollusk SF and her pieces are for sale through the shop. The work is gorgeous, what looks to be a combination of photography, painting and wood-block printing, with a presentation style to match.
For those of us that are geographically challenged, Mollusk has a nice photo gallery ’simulating’ the show, complete with piece groupings and wall-direction markings. Go to the Mollusk site and click on “art” (no deep link).
Bogus | Morgan Maassen amazing surfing photo and video work from 17 year old Morgan Maassen. A wealth of good stuff on his site and his blog is cool too
Dear and Yonder, An Ocean Odyssey of the Female Kind. A new surf film coming out in ‘09. No trailer quite yet, but an impressive list of surfers are captured in celluloid, including Kassia Meador, Prue Jeffries and Sofia Mulanovich. And it’s directed by Tiffany Campbell (wife of one TMoe Campbell).
Could it have been Tiffany shooting Kassia that day, out at Burros, a few years back?
Julius Shulman is probably the greatest architectural photographer of all time. At age 97, Taschen has published a three volume set of books called Modernism Rediscovered on his extensive body of work. The set contains over 400 architectural projects and over 260,000 images.
Think of any significant Modern building in Southern California and chances are that Shulman has documented it at one stage in his career. His photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, the one with the two girls looking over the Hollywood Hills, has arguably become the most widely published image in the history of architecture. Ask him about an iconic house and he’s not likely to talk about its aesthetics—the way most midcentury Modern architecture is fetishized today—but to focus instead on its innate connection between indoors and out. “The reason why this architecture photographs so beautifully is the environmental consideration exercised by the architects,” Shulman says. “It was the sense that here we have beautiful canyons, hillsides, views of the ocean. Everyone loves these photographs because the houses are environmentally involved, and this was before the emphasis on what everyone is calling green.”
The book set’ll run ya $300 and I’m not big pimpin’ like that, so I wouldn’t be madatcha if you float a set my way gratis.
BMW's fascinating GINA Light Visionary Model design study - (37signals) "The GINA replaces the traditional metal/plastic skin with a textile fabric skin that?s pulled taut around a frame of metal and carbon fiber wires." pretty amazing, but I can't help thinking that all that fabric is gonna be loud on the road, from the wind speed.
Big Ideas (don't get any) on Vimeo amazing remix of Radiohead's "nude" using antiquated technologies. read the accompanying text for context. beautiful. and once again, vimeo serving up the fatty quality video. [via waxy]
I see he’s been adding high quality quicktime versions of the Burma spots he’s directed to his portfolio site. nice, big, juicy versions. There are people in your life that you are compelled to tell other people about. Isaiah is one of those people. Go stop by his blog, Ninja Pleaze!, and say hi.
The giveaway is now over as of Sat. June 21st. Heather was the winner, chosen completely at random. Thank you to all who participated.
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Flor makes really gorgeous modular carpet tiles, if you read Dwell, you’ve seen their products for sure. Flor is introducing a collection of designs based on Alexander Girard’s La Fonda del Sol series. The collection comes in 4 flavors and they are carpet tiles elevated to an art form.
A little bit on Alexander Girard:
Working smack in the middle of the hey-day of mid-20th century American design was Alexander Girard. Many consider Girard the most influential textile designer of the modern era. But to many more, he remains relatively unknown. To FLOR, Girard is everything we could ever hope to aspire to: functionality made better by a blended balance of vibrant color, whimsical design and pure sophistication.
Girard’s La Fonda del Sol restaurant project put the emphasis on sol with bold, color-saturated graphics of the sun revving up the walls, the furniture, the floors, the tableware, the menus, even the matchbooks. Though the restaurant closed in 1971, Girard’s work there maintained an iconic status - each piece thoroughly beautiful, all supremely functional. And it’s that work that has inspired the FLOR Girard line of modular carpet tiles.
In conjunction with the launch of the Girard collection, Flor has been gracious enough to bless readers of this blog with some free product. How cool is that?!
We’re giving away one 3×5 area rug (6 tiles) in the Verde colorway (pictured right), with a street value of approx. $160. And it couldn’t be more simple, just drop a comment on this post, waxing poetic, on why you think Girard’s designs should be gracing your floors (truth-be-told, I’d put it on the wall). After a few days or so, I’ll pick a winner and Flor will mail the piece directly to you in about 2 weeks. Unfortunately, the giveaway is only open to people within the United States (for shipping cost reasons). Don’t forget to leave your name and email and when I pick a winner I’ll notify all commenters by bcc email that a winner was chosen and I’ll update this post with the winner’s name (to make it all official-like). good luck!
The US Campaign for Burma is still kicking with daily videos showcasing Burma’s fight against its military junta.
The above video is a collaborative effort. Isaiah Seret wrote and directed the video. Our nomadic homie Alexander Kori Girard created the drawings and hand-drawn type. I put all the pieces together, added the type cards and laced it all with a bright shiny ribbon. Jesse Klein edited it. and that’s Beirut on the track with “The Penalty”.
Again, do yourself a favor and watch it in high quality, under the lower right hand side of the video.
More on Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced kinda like “on son sue chee”).
Hi, my name is Ed Fladung, I'm a recovering web-designer who moved to Mexico about 4 years ago. Learned to surf, got married and bought a nice camera. This is my weblog/photoblog. It covers broad subjects like becoming an ex-pat, surfing, photography, graphic design, music, art, architecture, living in mexico, all things Apple and WordPress related, etc... You can find more about me here. I hope you enjoy.
Powered by WordPress and my own home-rolled flavor of the Qwilm! theme. I call it the QPwilm! theme and you can download it if you'd like. This is my 4th iteration past the publicly available QPwilm! theme.
