Thursday, October 30, 2014
Sofia Coppola and David Lynch for Gap
Fast Company - "The New Normal: Sofia Coppola Makes Gap Cool For The Holidays"
The Verge - "Watch David Fincher's normcore ads for The Gap"
Space Adventure
New Yorker - "The Antares Explosion: Confronting the Inevitable Risks of Space Travel"
"In order to get Americans excited about the manned spaceflight program and the race to the moon, NASA turned its first seven astronauts into media stars. This was in sharp contrast to the way that test pilots, a few of those seven astronauts among them, had been treated in the past. The men who flew jet fighters while they were being developed were mostly anonymous, so that when one of them died in a crash or a fire it wasn’t an occasion for national mourning."
"The probability of catastrophe only increases, for example, if astronauts fly beyond the moon, to visit a captured asteroid, or if they try to match orbits with a near-Earth asteroid—or, of course, if they eventually set out for Mars. It’s not clear which, if any, of these adventures will actually happen, but given Americans’ continued enthusiasm for space exploration, in principle at least, payloads will continue to be destroyed. And yes, people will occasionally die. This is nothing more than the nature of space travel."
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Secondary Shoe Market
FiveThirtyEight - "You See Sneakers, These Guys See Hundreds Of Millions In Resale Profit"
"Luber — a fanatical sneaker collector himself, with 178 pairs on display in his home — says eBay’s sneaker business totaled $338 million in the last year, up 31 percent from the year before. Sneakers, he says, have become “boxes of cash” for many people. As soon as Foot Lockers across the country open each Saturday, thousands of pairs are on eBay."
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Creative Process
EW - "Inside 'Interstellar,' Christopher Nolan's emotional space odyssey"
"Before (re)writing a word of Interstellar, Nolan did something he had never done before, something that speaks to his desire for more emotionally potent work. He asked composer Hans Zimmer to write some music for the film, but without telling him about the genre, title, characters, or plot: “I said, ‘I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It’s going to tell you the fable at the center of the story. You work for one day, then play me what you have written.’ He was up for it. And it was perfect. He gave me the heart of the movie.” Zimmer says he remembers this idea from Nolan’s letter: “Once we become parents, we can’t help but look at ourselves through the eyes of our children.”"
Previously,
Dream Job
Interstellar Trailer 3
Quote of the Day
"Style fills the gap between how you see yourself and how you want other people to see you. It is not a mysterious quality reserved for Cary Grant or Liberace. You have a sense of it in there somewhere. It's just a matter of finding a way to express it without seeming like you're trying."
- Scott Sternberg, Founder of Band Of Outsiders
Details - "Rules Of Style From Scott Sternberg"
Businessweek - "Band of Outsiders and the Business of Casual"
New York Times - "Shopping at Band of Outsiders"
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
David Chang's Love Letter to Cheap Beer
GQ - "My Name Is David Chang, and I Hate Fancy Beer"
"For years I've watched craft-beer aficionados go on about their triple-hopped IPAs and cocoa-flavored English milk stouts while inside I've harbored a dark secret: I love cheap, watery swill. Singha, Tecate, Miller High Life—they're all the champagnes of beer, and for more reasons than you think"
Sunday, October 12, 2014
The Cosmic Forces Around Which Human Days Are Ordered
New York Times - "For Luxury Watch Buyers, One Just Isn’t Enough"
"One reason for this is that a mechanical wristwatch is only partly a timekeeping device, said Michael L. Friedman, official historian for the 140-year-old Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet. It is also a complex and nuanced object.
“Guys look at their watches as many as 30 times a day,” Mr. Friedman said. “They are not looking at them to tell time.”
They are, he suggested, regarding the timepiece as an article of jewelry (for most men, a watch is the sole piece of jewelry considered socially acceptable to wear) and equally a status symbol; or as an example of fine industrial design and advanced engineering; or as a link to horological traditions centuries in the making; or as a talismanic man-made symbol of the cosmic forces around which human days are ordered."
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Steven Soderbergh on Raiders of the Lost Ark
Watch the entirety of the original Indiana Jones in black-and-white with no audio, but for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' scores for The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
"So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect." - Soderbergh
Indiewire - "Watch: Steven Soderbergh Re-Scores And Changes Steven Spielberg's 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' To Black-And-White"
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Saturday, October 4, 2014
The Moved Evolution of College Football
New York Times - "As Big Ten Declines, Homegrown Talent Flees"
"Big Ten teams won only one title during the 16-year Bowl Championship Series era (Ohio State 2002) and have captured only one other national title since 1971 (Michigan 1997). Penn State won two titles and Nebraska won three titles in the past four decades, before joining the conference."
. . .
"It is not just that the South has risen, though. For decades, the Big Ten’s meal ticket was players from the states of conference members. Ohio was the mother lode, producing talent like Archie Griffin (Columbus), Desmond Howard (Cleveland) and Charles Woodson (Fremont). But increasingly, the Midwest’s young are restless. The region is producing fewer Jerome Bakers, and its Jerome Bakers are less inclined to play there."
Related,
New York Times - "College Football Fan Map"
Friday, October 3, 2014
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Hey, Batter, Batter, Batter
New York Times - "Many Strikeouts, Fewer Runs as Pitchers Take Control"
"Teams this season averaged 0.86 home runs per game, the lowest rate since 1992. They averaged 4.07 runs per game this season, the lowest since the strike-shortened season of 1981. The overall batting average (.251) and on-base percentage (.314) were the lowest since 1972, the year before the designated hitter was introduced. And teams struck out an average of 7.7 times per game, the highest rate in the game’s history.
...
In Major League Baseball, pitchers are dominating hitters in ways not seen in at least 20 years — and, by some standards, ever."
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