The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be
Thus spake Yogi Berra. Surely, the meaning behind this yogism pearl of wisdom, can be seen in the visions of the future as seen through commercial artists of 1950’s USA. Beyond the fallout shelter, technology promised to help us find a better tomorrow.
Many more of these entertaining images, a kind of retro Jetsons art gallery can be found at Plan59.com.
Oddly enough my gallery of R.E.M. photos has low visibility under Google’s image search, so here is where you can find them. These shots are from an early tour by the band, R.E.M. was just gaining traction in 1981. Have fun on the new tour guys… I don’t think I could get any better seats than these.
So here is my implementation (click image above to run) of the Weber Design Labs open source Flash coverflow app loading JPEG files and links from an XML file. The app was posted last September 2007 and there are now over 250 comments providing code enhancements and variations on the original Actionscript code.
Of course along the way there are fun things to be found. One is flame, a CoverFlow built using the PaperVision3D engine. Another fine diversion is the wise ass, You Suck at Photoshop series of online video tutorials, a slice of life of a Photoshop using human. Must be seen to be liked or disgusted by.
This hasn’t happened to me in awhile: getting caught up in the flow of Internet exploration. It all began when something drew me to go visit tumblr which is a website full of all sorts of mini-media blogs, I guess they’re called tumblelogs.
So, there are all these cool photos posted there, linked to other places, such as FFFFOUND! which is a very fun place to get lost in. Which is where I found the image above, at Jim’s collection of Worst Album covers of all time (plus some).
Speaking of vintage artwork inspired by sound and music, I’ve been receiving scans of 1920’s Grebe radio ads which are being posted at greberadio.com.
OK, I’m out of the wormhole for now.
Oil is king, oil is god, and oil must be prayed to be merciful upon us poor miserable auto drivers. We witness a sign of the times in this SF Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn of Kendall Guy, an Oakland pastor (left), and Rocky Twyman praying for lower gas prices after filling Guy’s car.
Praying to higher powers tends to be one alternative employed by humans when dealing with situations beyond their control. Who knows? It may help, although finding inspiration to invent more energy efficient modes of travel may make God and Mother Earth smile upon us.
Recently, I’ve had two graphic design encounters invloving church and religiously influenced themes. The first was an offer through an IT recruiter to work in Flash on a large website. The work was to be performed on location at the production facility, Golden Era Productions, which is the promotional media arm of the Church of Scientology. Plans leading up to the assignment in remote Hemet, CA including paid room and board were nebulous, and after a few days the offer was withdrawn and I was told by the disappointed recruiter “the project had been put on hold.” Perhaps somebody was praying for me, or against me. I’ll never know what unique adventure I may have missed.
The second anecdote is a bit more of a hands on experience. A stock photo agency I often work with requested a 3-D rendering to be used for a breast exam publication. The breast image was to have the nipple removed at the request of the client.
In professional visual design you learn that revisions are a part of the job, so after submitting the first image (below left), I was advised to try and cover over as much of both breasts as possible by crossing one arm over them (below right). The client turned out to be a religious institution, and perhaps too much 3-D simulated, de-nippled breast could be fertile ground for Satan’s tempatation. Approaching breast examinations in the church is a delicate undertaking.
Version 2 and further revisions were still found to be too revealing for the client. (How do you show a breast exam without showing breasts?) So that my efforts were not a total loss, I decided to innovate, and insert a cross to aid in concealing the terrible breasts. In this version (below), I employed the cross style used by the Scientologists, perhaps giving this image some kind of blessed double whammy.
Flash Forward: Coverflow and Papervision3D
Recently worked on a Flash splash page for the Kapow Technologies web site that involved a lot of hand animation that could probably be done in Actionscript2 or 3… if I knew the code! So, working on expanding my Flash horizons and found these cool examples, some with source code. Most of these are in my pursuit to deconstruct the iTunes coverflow image browsing interface, and a few are purely inspirational. Here are the links:
Heading into SF on BART last Tuesday on business, noticed the growth and development of the Lafayette Crosses memorial. Here are a few photos of how it looked.
My appointment in SF took me near the Moscone Center, where the Web 2.0 Conference was readying for its open on Wednesday. It seemed quiet. Not much to shoot photos of. Looked at the Web 2.0 program and did not see companies listed that I perceive to be collaborative, social networking websites. Instead I noticed large computer and telecomm corporations, and Disney.com. Since when is Disney collaborative?
What a joke. The best way to get into Web 2.0 is to use it on the web. The rest is just hype. Back in Lafayette stands a truly collaborative work, low tech, with heart and humanity… but at what a cost.
No sooner had I completed my LinkedIn profile, then I began receiving e-mail nudges from my Plaxo account. How socially, professionally networked must I be?
Through the serendipity of search engines, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch found my Social Networking image and posted it in a thought provoking article, I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day. Nice.
If you have not read TechCrunch before, you are missing the bouncy beat of new software announcements and Silicon Valley startups.
Ghost on the Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Gun Club is out on DVD.
For me, viewing the DVD was a highly entertaining experience on many levels. Before his show at Merlyns Club in Madison, WI, Jeffrey was sitting quietly at a table. I asked if I could take a few photos. At the time I was at the top of my Tri-X shooting and lab processing game, and the resulting shots are still stunning to this day (see photo below with links to more from that date). Only after watching this excellent documentary by Andrew R. Powell and Kurt Voss did I make the connection, that Jeffrey was a huge Marlon Brando fan. Hence the intense brooding captured in this photo (part of collage left), complete with the leather jacket.
The DVD features many interviews with ex Gun Club band members Kid Congo Powers, Ward Dotson, Terry Graham, Jim Duckworth and Dee Pop, as well as close friends John Doe, Dave Alvin, Henry Rollins, Mike Martt and Peter Case that render a fascinating portrait of the complex personality of Jeffrey Lee Pierce.
On another level it was fun to watch the DVD and see where Powell and Voss chose to weave my photos of Pierce into the narrative. The filmmakers effectively resurrected one of the murkier, yet dramatic, photos of the batch (right) to describe Jeffrey’s collapse into alcohol abuse.
In the end, it is the intense recollections by those who knew Pierce that makes this a fascinating character study and interesting addition to the legends of modern pop, rock and punk music history. I was not a big fan and did not know much about Pierce, and I am grateful to the filmmakers to learn much more about the intense brooding character whose image I captured back then.
You can read more about the DVD and see video clips of the trailer at GhostontheHighway.com.
If you’ve got, flaunt it, but it might attract a crowd. Lindsay Lohan’s provocative poses overwhelmed New York magazine’s Web site and readers complained of not being able to load its pages, which contained nude photos of Lohan posing as Marilyn Monroe. Nice, a sexy girl brings a computer to its knees.
Meanwhile, over in The New Yorker magazine, Adam Gopnik wrote about French existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir tout ensemble and spared their webmaster some grief, by not publishing the photo. So, I had to look it up, naughty boy that I am. 
Here it is, and others by photographer Art Shay are at the Stephen Daiter Gallery website. I like his 1980’s photo of cartoonist Robert Crumb too.
Of additional interest to nude lovers, also in The New Yorker, is an excellent review by Peter Schjeldahl about The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ten new galleries dedicated to nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century art. About the painting below Schjeldahl writes, “The lovely, small “Bacchante by the Sea” (1865) is like a Rosetta Stone of painting, in which a studio nude and a landscape differently translate a singular, poetic imperative.” Click on the nude below to see a slide show portfolio of work on display in the new Met galleries.
The shock and awe of it began while paging through the self-congratulatory pages of CREATIVITY magazine, the trade publication celebrating the exploits of today’s advertising movers and shakers. Forever looking to capitalize on how to grab people’s golden attention and sell stuff, CREATIVITY’s madmen and women take note of Brad Neely, the writer/director/animator of The Professor Brothers series of cartoons playing on SuperDeluxe.com, an adult humor website.
Super Deluxe is sure to push your limits of acceptable taste, if you have any left, for example take Disnutskin. Is it an age of enlightenment we live in or just an ever spreading cesspool? When you wrestle away from the noise, be sure to recenter back into your own song.
The Annual KPFA Grateful Dead Marathon is scheduled for Saturday, February 9, 10am to 1am Pacific Time. Support KPFA by calling toll free: 1-800-439-5732 or 510 848-5732.
They will webcasting Grateful Dead music all day via kpfa.org, DeadNet, nugs.net, gdradio.net.
Many musical treats, of course, and a fine array of thank-you gifts including CDs, DVDs, books, and DeadNet Store gift cards. Mark your calendars and spread the word! Deadheads (and others) can call any time to volunteer to work in the phone room: 848-6767, x618. It’s a lot of fun, and the food is usually pretty good, too.
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