Friday, December 30, 2016

Industrial Designer Raymond Loewy



























The Atlantic - "The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything"

"The world below would soon match his dreamy vision. Loewy would do more than almost any person in the 20th century to shape the aesthetic of American culture. His firm designed mid-century icons like the Exxon logo, the Lucky Strike pack, and the Greyhound bus. He designed International Harvester tractors that farmed the Great Plains, merchandise racks at Lucky Stores supermarkets that displayed produce, Frigidaire ovens that cooked meals, and Singer vacuum cleaners that ingested the crumbs of dinner. Loewy’s Starliner Coupé from the early 1950s—nicknamed the “Loewy Coupé”—is still one of the most influential automotive designs of the 20th century. The famous blue nose of Air Force One? That was Loewy’s touch, too. After complaining to his friend, a White House aide, that the commander in chief’s airplane looked “gaudy,” he spent several hours on the floor of the Oval Office cutting up blue-colored paper shapes with President Kennedy before settling on the design that still adorns America’s best-known plane. “Loewy,” wrote Cosmopolitan magazine in 1950, “has probably affected the daily life of more Americans than any man of his time.”"

...

"Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising."

Kith x Coca-Cola




















For sale December 30, 2016.

Related,
New York Times - "The Champion Logo, in the Hands of Fashion’s Provocateurs, Is Reborn"

Lovely Night Dance

Secret Ops of the CIA 2017 Calendar



























Washington Post - "A CIA calendar the CIA gift shop refuses to sell? Yes, and here’s the strange story behind it."

Thursday, December 29, 2016

The Most Instagrammed National Parks of 2016

A photo posted by Jacob Moon (@moonmountainman) on


Outside Online - "The Most Instagrammed National Parks of 2016"

1. Rocky Mountain
2. Glacier
3. Arches
4. Grand Teton
5. Great Smoky Mountains
6. Bryce Canyon
7. Denali
8. Zion
9. Acadia
10. Grand Canyon
11. White Sands Monument
12. Yellowstone

The Planets, If They Were As Far Away From Earth As The Moon




























































































Reddit thread.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Children of Men 10 Years Later

























Vulture - "Future Shock: Director Alfonso Cuarón revisits Children of Men, his overlooked 2006 masterpiece, which might be the most relevant film of 2016."

Related,
Rolling Stone - "Peter Travers 10 Best Movies of the Decade"

Exploring Communication






















The Verge - "Arrival director Denis Villeneuve on the politics of the year’s best sci-fi film"

Bryan Bishop: "The film pretty openly drives home the idea that humanity cannot survive if it is tribalistic and fragmented, which between Brexit and the US election have become foregrounded concerns. Were you consciously working that into the story?"

Denis Villeneuve: "The main thing I was attracted to was this idea of exploring culture shock, exploring communication, exploring this idea of language changing the perception of your reality. That was gold. The idea of the geopolitical transformation of the world is something I felt we have seen in other movies before, and it was not the strength of Arrival. It was something that needed to be there because our goal was to create a movie where the aliens have a stronger level of realism, so we needed to see the impact of those landings all across the globe. But I try my best to stay on Louise's perspective all the time, so it’s seen from an intimate point of view.

What is funny is that as we were doing the movie, sometimes there were things [in the film] where I was saying to myself, "Oh, come on. People are more wise than that." And then I would open the newspaper in the morning: "No, we're okay. We're not going too far.” Even in the editing room, [editor] Joe Walker and I were sometimes wondering if we were going too far, and reality was always pushing us to stay there."

SNL Set Transition




New York Magazine - "SNL’s Two-Minute Set Transformation From Cold Open to Monologue Is Mesmerizing"

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Steve Kerr's Upbringing





































New York Times - "Tragedy Made Steve Kerr See the World Beyond the Court"

"“He was an observer,” he said. “And he let me learn and experience. I try to give our guys a lot of space and speak at the right time. Looking back on it, I think my dad was a huge influence on me, on my coaching.”"

The Year of Hygge (HOO-gah)



























New York Times - "Wintering the Danish Way: Learning About Hygge"





























New Yorker - "The Year of Hygge, The Danish Obsession with Getting Cozy"


























Apartment Therapy - "Here Are the Top Pinterest Home Trends for 2017"

Ranking Martin Scorsese Movies































The Ringer - "The Five Stages of Scorsese"
By Sean Fennessey

NBA Unicorns


























The Ringer - "Battle of the Unicorns"






















SB Nation - "Kristaps Porzingis is already the Knicks' best player"


























The Ringer - "2016 Internet Slang: A Year in Review"

Clothes as Transformation





























GQ January Issue Last Page – Ryan Gosling

"Leave it to the most subtly stylish actor in Hollywood to hand us an epigraph on the transformative power of shirts, shoes, and suits: "I think, as an actor, I feel the effect that clothes have on a character. You know, seeing the way my uncle [an Elvis impersonator] changed when he put on that white jumpsuit or seeing the way that the men in my family who normally just wore Dickies every day changed when they wore a suit or a sports jacket—whether it was to a wedding or a funeral, it changed their behavior. It just has a transformative effect. Obviously they're just clothes, but..."

Which is pretty much what we at GQ are always saying: You don't have to be an actor to go pro in shape-shifting—you just might want to pick out a new jacket."

Friday, December 23, 2016

Montreal's Christmas Tree


























New York Times - "In Montreal, an Ungainly and Unloved Christmas Tree"

"The idea was to celebrate Montreal’s coming 375th anniversary with a Christmas tree bigger and grander than the famous one at Rockefeller Center in New York."

...

"How did a holiday celebration became a municipal punch line? Chalk it up to (perhaps too much) ambition, inadequate financing and Murphy’s law.

“We have good intentions,” said Jean-David Pelletier, one of the principals of Sapin MTL, the company that came up with the idea of rivaling New York’s tree. “But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we had problems.”

Sapin MTL is in the business of home-delivering normal-size Christmas trees, and it proposed the big one as a promotional gimmick. Mr. Pelletier said the company had a more majestic, shapely tree in mind. It researched the typical height for recent Rockefeller Center trees — 74 to 76 feet — and found a 78-footer in Ontario that Mr. Pelletier described as “amazing.”

But its narrow height advantage vanished in early November when Rockefeller Center announced that its 2016 tree would be a 94-foot Norway spruce.

Mr. Pelletier and his partners then had less than a month to come up with a new, taller rival, and they appealed to the public, which suggested about 100 candidates. The balsam fir they chose came from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, near the border with the United States.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s authentic and it’s a real tree that you find in the forests of Quebec,” Mr. Pelletier said. “We’re not pretending this is the most amazing, beautiful tree in the world.”

Facing a Nov. 30 deadline for unveiling the tree, the Sapin crew had to hurry. The tree was harvested, placed on a special flatbed truck and brought to Montreal under police escort within 72 hours. But a tight schedule and a tight budget meant that some corners were cut — and so was the tree.

Somehow, the tree that reached the closed-off section of St. Catherine Street where the market is held measured just 88 feet tall, six feet short of the one in Rockefeller Center. Mr. Pelletier’s brother Philippe, another principal in the company, said a bit sheepishly on Friday that they had simply settled for the tallest tree they could find in time.

And there was no time or money to give it the extensive arboreal spa treatment that the New York tree gets; all the workers could do was reattach, sometimes rather obviously, a few of the larger branches that had broken off in shipping."

Who Didn't Lose 2016?























By Rembert Browne.

"And it was the clutchest NBA shot ever."


























Wall Street Journal - "The Biggest Shot in NBA History"

Whose Money?





















Washington Post - "Famed poker pro with ‘remarkable’ $9.6 million scheme has to pay it back, judge rules"

"Huge sums could change hands over a game of baccarat. The Las Vegas Sun reported that, in 1990, Japanese high roller Akio Kashiwagi waged an “epic baccarat battle” with Donald Trump at one Atlantic City table. The gambler risked $12 million in a bid to double it. During the course of the games, Kashiwagi managed to get halfway to his goal before the Trump casino won $9 million from him."

...

"Given the opportunity to make massive amounts of money, casinos can be unusually accommodating to wealthy baccarat players. Ivey was able to use this to his advantage. In each of his visits to the Borgata, the casino accepted the same five requests. Ivey asked: that he play in a private area; that the dealer speak Mandarin Chinese; that he play with eight decks of purple Gemaco Borgata playing cards shuffled together; that the decks be shuffled with an automatic shuffler; and that Ivey would be allowed one guest at the table, a woman named Cheng Yin Sun."

...

"Ivey’s attorney Ed Jacobs emphasized that Hillman did not describe the poker player’s actions as fraud. “What this ruling says is a player is prohibited from combining his skill and intellect and visual acuity to beat the casino at its own game,” the lawyer said, according to the Associated Press. “The casino agreed to every single accommodation requested by Phil Ivey in his four visits because they were eager to try to win his money.” The gambler was only using observation, the defense went, and rotating the cards was within the rules of the game. Jacobs added Ivey will appeal the ruling."

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Blade Runner 2049




Official Synopsis: "Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years."

October 6, 2017
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford

The Super Mega


The Verge - "The story behind The New York Times’ largest and most ambitious crossword puzzle"

"On Friday, The New York Times Magazine dropped a surprise for crossword obsessives everywhere: its latest Sunday edition would include a puzzle-oriented special section of the newspaper called Puzzle Mania. Among the neat collection of puzzle maker interviews and number and word games is a particularly unprecedented challenge, a puzzle larger than any The New York Times has ever constructed. The 50 x 50, 728-clue monstrosity covers two entire broadsheet pages. It may take even experienced puzzle solvers many days to complete.

Jake Silverstein, the current editor of The New York Times Magazine, told The Verge that the goal of these special sections is to reimagine the possibilities of print ...

The goal is to take advantage of the tactile, aesthetic, and nostalgic qualities of ink on paper, at a time when the death of print news is but a foregone conclusion for publications whose digital operations cannot keep them afloat. "

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Friday, December 16, 2016

The Burger King Whopper Exchange

























Creativity - "Burger King Will Exchange Your Unwanted Holiday Gifts for a Whopper"

"This holiday, you can put your unwanted gifts to good use -- and get some free food at the same time. Burger King is offering customers the chance to exchange unwanted holiday gifts for a Whopper on Dec. 26.

In the U.S., its restaurant located at 910 Arthur Godfrey Road, Miami Beach, Florida will be offering the deal between 10:30am and 5pm on the day after Christmas, and restaurants in London and Brazil will also be running the promotion. Burger King will donate all the unwanted gifts to charity.

If you don't live in one of those places, you can still take part on social media; the first fans to post a picture on Twitter or Instagram with their questionable gifts using the hashtag #WhopperExchange will get a "surprise" from Burger King's social media accounts.

AKQA Brazil is responsible for the campaign."

"SNL Host Casey Affleck & Chance the Rapper Decorate the Christmas Tree"

Dunkirk Trailer



Previously, Dunkirk Teaser.

Each Apartment Has Its Own Pool






























DesignBoom - "bjarke ingels group envisions honeycomb resort in bahamas"
Business Insider - "Every apartment in this honeycomb-style building has a private pool on its balcony"


Sunday, December 11, 2016

'The War on Durgs Is an Epic Fail'




New York Times - "Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’"

Evan by Sandy Hook Promise

Radiohead - "Daydreaming"



Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Kristen Stewart

New York Times - "The Year’s Most Captivating Film Performances" 

A.O. Scott: "No more nuts than my own hunch, which is that Kristen Stewart is the new Robert De Niro. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, De Niro’s reputation as the best actor in American movies rested on his ability to vanish completely into each role, to effect a physical and psychological transformation so total that you could barely recognize him from one movie to the next. Some of what he did was a matter of what you might call technical extremism: learning Sicilian dialect for “The Godfather Part II,” pushing his body from sinewy fighting trim to has-been bloatedness in “Raging Bull.” Stewart hasn’t quite done that yet, but she burrows as deeply as De Niro ever has into the interiors of her characters, arranging her expressions, her carriage, her vocal inflections — even, it can seem, her height and bone structure — accordingly.You could say that, having been made, perhaps reluctantly, into a movie star by the “Twilight” movies, she has lately reinvented herself as the character actor she might have always preferred to be. Apart from her lead performance in Olivier Assayas’s “Personal Shopper,” she has been an ensemble player in 2016, with roles in Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society,” Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” and Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” But the fact that she’s the most interesting person in all of those movies suggests that her movie-star charisma is still intact. She’s just using it in subtle and occasionally subversive ways."

Wesley Morris: "I think Kristen Stewart is just about the best American movie actress we have. Her bad romance with movie stardom has served her well, because early exposure to its toxins might have fortified her resistance to mere fame. Unlike with, say, Ben Affleck, there’s no tension or ambivalence between her being an actor and her being a star. She appears to have rejected the latter to insist upon the value of the former. Lots of people can have it both ways, but it’s a balance that takes a while to achieve. Look at how long it took for Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio, whose allergy to overnight godliness foreshadowed Stewart’s. In the meantime, it’s fascinating to watch her flirt with stardom in the films she takes and the women she plays."

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Greenery






























New York Times - "Color of 2017? Pantone Picks a Spring Shade"

"“There’s a Japanese concept called ‘forest bathing,’ which says that when you are feeling stressed, one of the best things to do is go walk in the forest,” Ms. Eiseman said. “But if you can’t do that, what can you do? Bring green into your environment. Put it on your body, or in your house or near your desk. That symbolic message is very important.”

In any case, you get the idea. And if you don’t, the seeds have been planted. It’ll grow on you."

The Perfect Outlet Pass























SB Nation - "Kevin Love launches an 80-foot pass to LeBron James on a dime"

Monday, December 5, 2016

"... arguably American culture’s most distinctive art form."




New York Times - "The Passion of Martin Scorsese"

"Here an Italian-American Catholic adapts a Japanese Catholic’s novel about Portuguese Catholics for a Hollywood movie — arguably American culture’s most distinctive art form."

The adidas Harden Vol. 1























Nice Kicks - "Interview // Inside The Making Of The adidas Harden Vol. 1"

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Rest in Peace – Michael "Jim" Delligatti, Creator of the Big Mac
























NPR – "Creator Of McDonald's Big Mac Dies At 98"

"Delligatti was one of McDonald's earliest franchise holders, opening his first restaurant in Pittsburgh in 1957. He eventually owned and operated 47 additional McDonald's locations in Western Pennsylvania, making him one of the single largest franchise holders in company history.

The menu was pretty simple back in those early days - hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries and shakes. But Delligatti saw that his customers wanted something bigger, so in 1967 at his restaurant in Uniontown, Pa., he put together two hamburger patties, topped it with cheese, lettuce, onions, and pickles, and he developed a special sauce for the burger. He called it the Big Mac.

In a 1993 interview with the Associated Press, he said McDonald's initially rejected the burger.

"I tried for two years to have McDonald's let me try to make this Big Mac and they said no," Delligatti said, adding, "They figured, why go to something else if (the original menu) was working so well?"

So Delligatti made and sold Big Macs in his Pittsburgh-area restaurants, experimenting with the special sauce along the way, until eventually, McDonald's executives came around and began selling the Big Mac nationally. Now, almost 50 years later, the Big Mac is sold in more than 100 countries and has become the most popular sandwich on the planet, according to the fast food chain."

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Vegas Golden Knights























ESPN - "NHL welcomes Vegas Golden Knights as league's 31st team"

""We now have an identity," Foley told ESPN.com just before the announcement. "My whole idea was to create a logo and a name that was powerful that would epitomize the warrior class. The Knights are the epitome of the warrior class, the top of the line in terms of defending the realm, defending the unprotected. This is all part of the culture we want to create with the hockey team."

The NHL announced that Las Vegas would be home to the league's 31st team after a board of governors meeting in the city on June 22. Not only will the Golden Knights be the NHL's first expansion team since the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild during the 2000-01 season, but they also will become the first of the four major North American professional sports leagues to have a team in Las Vegas.

Foley said he went with "Vegas" instead of "Las Vegas" for the NHL team name because that is how most locals refer to the city."

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Dave Chappelle Hosts SNL

Flip ∞

A photo posted by Zach LaVine (@zachlavine8) on

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Mapping the Future of U.S. Transportation


























The Verge - "The Future of America is Driverless"

Q: Some say Americans will never give up their cars. How do you create a mass transit system that appeals to Americans?

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx: Two of the largest groups in our society today are the boomers and the millennials. In some ways, they’re both looking for the same thing: to live closer to the central core of cities, where they don’t have to get in a car all the time. What our system hasn’t done is respond to those demographic changes. Out of our Highway Trust Fund, 80 cents on every dollar spent goes into our road system and only 20 cents goes into transit. For a country that is urbanizing, the way we pay for infrastructure doesn’t correlate. We need a more flexible funding approach at the federal, state, and local level that is demand-driven, not supply-side driven, and that responds to what people want. High-speed rail is going to be something people embrace as we see it happen in places like California and possibly Texas and Florida. The more it succeeds, the more people are going to want it where they live. That, coupled with fixed rail transit, bus transit, roads and highways, bike paths, and places for people to walk are going to give the people the choices they want.

New Album from A Tribe Called Quest

























New York Times - "Loss Haunts A Tribe CalledQuest’s First Album in 18 Years"

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill























Vulture - "Damn, Gary Oldman Looks Really Good As Winston Churchill"

Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon
Gary Oldman as Drexl Spivey

Old Advertising: John Madden for Miller Lite (1981)




BroBible - "How John Madden’s 1981 Miller Lite Commercial Marked A Turning Point In His Career (Plus, What Does He Think Of Roger Goodell?)"

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

LeBron – Come out of Nowhere

Moonlight



Limited release now
Written & Directed by Barry Jenkins
Based on a Story by Tarell Alvin McCraney

Arrival




November 11, 2016
Based on "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang
Screenplay by Eric Heisserer
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker

Sweatpants the Future of Office Casual?























Quartz - "Is the world ready for sweatpants at the office?"

The Funfetti Explosion


























New York Times - "The Funfetti Explosion"
By Julia Moskin

Saturday, October 22, 2016

"Is the Self-Driving Car Un-American?"























New York Magazine - "What Happens to American Myth When You Take the Driver Out of It?"
By Robert Moor

"Why Do Americans Move So Much ...?"

























The Atlantic - "Why Do Americans Move So Much More Than Europeans?"

"From Manifest Destiny and the Gold Rush to Okies going west and the growers of the Green Rush, the seeking of distant opportunity, particularly for an immigrant nation, is part of a national mythology as well as a broader American fixation with work. A new working paper dissected by Ben Steverman at Bloomberg suggests that workers in the U.S. now “put in almost 25 percent more hours than Europeans” in a given year. This figure has steadily risen since the 1970s, when the hours logged by workers in Western Europe and the United States were roughly the same. (Meanwhile, every country in the European Union has at leastfour work weeks of paid vacation every single year, and 41 percent of Americans who have paid vacation days squander them.)"