Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Love the game

“And if Washington isn’t going to send their Generals then we’ll send our Globetrotters.”















Vice Magazine and HBO have sent Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea "in a filmed trip billed as "basketball diplomacy."

Los Angeles Times - "Dennis Rodman tests out 'basketball diplomacy' in North Korea"

Previously,
Vice TV

UPDATE:
According to Gawker, "...the choice of Rodman actually seems inspired if you consider this photo of a young Kim Jong Un, glowering at the camera in Rodman's number 91 Bulls jersey from his days at a Swiss boarding school. Kim is a noted basketball fanatic, and he and his late father both shared a fondness for the Rodman-era Bulls, reportedly.

Rodman's agent claims he'll have an audience with Kim Jong Un himself."


Sunday, February 24, 2013

Game of Thrones Season 3 Trailer




March 31, 2013.

Apple's Watch Patent




















PSFK - "Apple Releases Patent For Flexible iWatch"

"The accessory is like a digital version of the classic slap bracelet from the ’80s, as it has a flat state and a curled state in which the flexible device wraps around the user’s wrist."

Spring Breakers – 2-minute trailer




March 22, 2013.

GQ's Tom Carson on the film:

“To put it mildly, James Franco’s idea of an acting challenge is more gonzo than Daniel Day-Lewis’s. In Spring Breakers, he gleefully stars as a silver-toothed rapper-cum-drug-lord who ends up playing dark-side Svengali to four college gals out to get the most out of their vacation in St. Pete, and the beach babes baring their boobies in scene after scene look as if they were rented by the acre. But Franco is also no dummy, and this thing isn’t the straight-to-DVD cheesefest the action often expertly mimics. It’s the latest from certified indie-flick oddball Harmony Karoine, and believe it or not, it’s one of the smartest American movies you’re likely to see this year…

 …the reason this is his best movie yet is that all the loopy stuff he tosses at us turns out to be under pefect control. Spring Breakers isn’t just a terrific parody mash-up of teen exploitation flicks and cautionary tales about troubled youth, always two sides of the same wooden nickel anyway. This overdue send-up of riot-grrrl empowerment sagas is also wickedly funny – but cryptically heartfelt – sucker-punch riff on white-kid fantasies of thug life as the ultimate in hedonism, American-style.”

Saturday, February 23, 2013

High Fashion Taps Street Graffiti

The trend continues...
Louis Vuitton has hired RETNA, Aiko and Os Gemos (photos below respectively) for its Spring/Summer 2013 scarf collection, The Foulards D’Artiste.






















































And Coach has enlisted KRINK for a Spring/Summer collection of bags and other stuff.





































Previously,
Artist - Retna

Kevin Durant is Not Nice

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Google Glass

















You can be one of the first people in the world to buy Google Glass for $1,500 by tweeting what you would do #IfIHadGlass.

NYTimes - "Google Searches For Style"


Red Stripe Ad Response to Volkswagen's Ad



Monday, February 18, 2013

North Dakota Oil



















New York Times - "North Dakota Went Boom"

"At the time, North Dakota was ranked ninth among U.S. oil-producing states. By 2010 it had climbed to fourth. In July 2012, monthly oil output reached 20.97 million barrels, and North Daktoa was the largest oil producer in the country after Texas.

Viewed in the global market, the state's oil output isn't huge - Saudi Arabia produces about 10 million barrels a day - but North Dakota's oil boom now accounts for 11 percent of U.S. oil production, and it is the main reason the state government currently has a $3.8 billion surplus"

---------------------

""This whole area was a field two years ago," [Ward Koeser, presdient of the Williston City Commission]. "By this fall every one of these lots will have a house. I love construction and new buildings. It's new life, new families moving in. But it's just happening too fast. Every master plan the city has prepared is obsolete by the time it's printed. You'd like to have more time to think things through, but everybody is in such a rush.""

---------------------

"One reason for the lack of dissent may be that there just aren't that many people in North Dakota - the state has a population density of less than 10 people per square mile; Pennsylvania has 284, New York 411 - and the people who are there appear to have weighed the benefits agains the costs."

#LongRead - "Michael Jordan Has Not Left The Building"



















ESPN OTL - "Michael Jordan Has Not Left The Building"
by Wright Thompson

"This started at an early age. Jordan genuinely believed his father liked his older brother, Larry, more than he liked him, and he used that insecurity as motivation. He burned, and thought if he succeeded, he would demand an equal share of affection. His whole life has been about proving things, to the people around him, to strangers, to himself. This has been successful and spectacularly unhealthy. If the boy in those letters from Chapel Hill is gone, it is this appetite to prove -- to attack and to dominate and to win -- that killed him. In the many biographies written about Jordan, most notably in David Halberstam's "Playing for Keeps," a common word used to describe Jordan is "rage." Jordan might have stopped playing basketball, but the rage is still there. The fire remains, which is why he searches for release, on the golf course or at a blackjack table, why he spends so much time and energy on his basketball team and why he dreams of returning to play."













"In Charlotte, he starts thinking about 218.

Every morning since returning from the islands, he's been in the gym. At mealtime he texts his nutritionist to find out what he can and can't eat. Ostensibly, the reason is that he stepped on a scale after leaving the excess palace of Mister Terrible and saw this number staring back: 261. Nine days later, sitting in his office and surrounded by basketball, he's down to 248. He'll claim it's about health, or looking good for his 50th birthday party. But in his mind, there's a target: 218, a familiar and dangerous number in Jordan's world.

That's his playing weight.

When he mentions that Yvette never saw him play basketball, he says, "She never saw me at 218." On the wall of his office there's a framed photograph of him as a young man, rising toward the rim, legs pulled up near his chest, seeming to fly. He smiles at it wistfully.

"I was 218," he says."

C-Store Heist

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Photographer Olivia Bee

















Olivia Bee rose to fame on Internet photo site Flickr where she was first noticed and hired by Converse sneakers 2 years ago when she was only 16.

She's since done work for the New York Times, Fiat, Subuaru, Nike, Levi's, Adidas, Nickelodeon, Vice and Hermes.

NYMag.com - "The Very Rapid Rise of the Very Precocious Photographer Olivia Bee"

OliviaBee.com
Olivia Bee's Flickr
Olivia Bee's blog























































































































































































































Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Tracey Emin in Times Square for Valentine's Day


















TWBE - "Romance in Times Square"

"Every night in February at the stroke of 11:57pm, 40 video screens normally reserved for advertising go dark, then slowly come back to life with the neon scrawls of Tracey Emin. Lasting only 3 minutes."


















































































Invader - Pink Panther

















Hypebeast - "Invader in Paris"

Previously,
Street Art in Brooklyn

Drake - "Started From The Bottom"



Big Ten Homecourt Advantage Contest













Home Court Challenge.

A charitable contest that "awards student sections for opponents' missed free throws."

Saturday, February 9, 2013

1865 Baseball Card Bought For $100, Sold For $92K














Associated Press - "1865 Baseball Card Fetches $92K in Maine Auction"

The Color Atlas


















Empirical Zeal - "The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains" 

"...if you think about it, there’s a real puzzle here. Why should different cultures draw the same boundaries? If we speak different languages with largely independent histories, shouldn’t our ancestors have carved up the visual atlas rather differently?"

Glass Made For An I.P.A.




















New York Times - "Precision Engineering For Beer"

"The German glassmaker Spiegelau, in partnership with Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head, and Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada brewery, has introduced an I.P.A.-specific beer glass, perhaps the world’s first, surely the most obsessively considered."

How An App First Broke Through














New York Times - "A Growing App Lets You See It, Then You Don’t"

"Snapchat has its origins at Stanford, where Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy first met as fraternity brothers. Mr. Spiegel presented a prototype of Snapchat in spring 2011 to one of his classes, but it was greeted as impractical and silly by his classmates.

Undeterred, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy shared an updated version for the iPhone with about 20 friends in September 2011. A few weeks in, they started seeing an influx of new users, paired with unusual spikes in activity, peaking between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.

It turned out the activity was centered around a high school in Orange County. Mr. Spiegel’s mother had told his cousin, who was a student at the school, about the app, which then spread throughout the school.

Other high school students in Southern California picked it up, with the number of daily active users climbing from 3,000 to 30,000 in a month in early 2012. Mr. Spiegel took a leave from Stanford last June and Mr. Murphy quit his job and the pair raised a small round of financing and moved to Los Angeles to work on the application full time."

Friday, February 8, 2013

The Creation of Channel Orange

















New York Times - "Frank Ocean Can Fly"

"While Malay created the musical beds, Ocean would type on his laptop, humming melodies and trying out combinations. For mood they sometimes had an old movie playing in the background with no sound, and in later stages Ocean put up posters of Pink Floyd and Bruce Lee for inspiration. Ocean’s tastes are eclectic, drawing on everything from Wes Anderson movies to Radiohead and Celine Dion. “The next thing you know, Frank’s like, ‘Let me go in the booth,’ ” Malay told me, “and then he just lays it down. He’s kind of like an M.C.,” he went on, “like a rapper. Rappers come in, and they just write lyrics and drop it down, and he’s that same way, but obviously his lyrical concepts and melody concepts are ridiculous.”

After a couple of months of on-and-off work with Malay, Ocean had skeleton versions of every song that would appear on “Channel Orange,” including the nonsong interludes that create so much of the record’s ambient appeal. On a dry-erase board in his apartment, he wrote the names of the songs and the interludes with a red Sharpie and began playing around with their placement. “Even though they were all sketches,” Ocean says, “there was so much comfort, because I heard in my head how it was going to sound. Now all I’ve got to do is finish it.” Once he arrived at the final album order, with nine months of recording still ahead of him, the sequence never changed."

"After the recording was complete, Ocean played “Channel Orange” for Rick Rubin, the legendary producer and founder of Def Jam. Rubin was impressed by the rawness and power of Ocean’s vocals, and he urged him not to mess around with the recordings too much. He was also struck by Ocean’s process for a song like "Pilot Jones," for which Ocean wrote the melody to one backing track and then, with Malay’s help, created a completely different backing track once the melody was complete. “It’s really interesting that he uses seed ideas or tools to write that really don’t have anything to do with the song,” Rubin told me. “It’s just a way for him to access himself, and then the song comes out, and then the track is built around what he writes.”