Interview on Deep Glamour!

Levi's and Loubouton's!

Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style and The Future and it's Enemies interviewed me for her wonderful website Deep Glamour. The interview is here. Hope you enjoy!

The Stray Shopping Cart Project

Specimen 198, photograph by Julian Montague


Specimen 168, photograph by Julian Montague

From the Daily Heller:

Julian Montague, a designer in Buffalo, New York, is obsessed with shopping carts.

He writes on his website: "Over the last several decades, the stray shopping cart has quietly become an integral part of the urban and suburban landscapes of the industrialized world. To the average person, the stray shopping cart is most often thought of as a signifier of urban blight or as an indicator of a consumer society gone too far. Unfortunately, the acceptance of these oversimplified designations has discouraged any serious examination of the stray shopping cart phenomenon."

He has made it his mission to categorize "stray shopping carts" according to an intricate identification system (here). Enter at your own risk, his notions are addictive.

Starting on November 21 through December 18, two pieces from "The Stray Shopping Cart Project" will be in a group show, "Sign / Age: Lost in the Supermarket" at Armand Bartos Fine Art in New York, including William Eggleston, Martha Friedman, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and more. "It seems crazy that my work is in a show with all these huge artists," says Montague, "I'm hoping the gallery people won't change their minds about me before the opening."

His project is also featured in The Design Entrepreneur by Lita Talarico and Steven Heller.

Designing Ants: The Superorganism

Via Kottke

And another, to "see" how they do it:



Humbling.

Eno to Einstein, Blackboard Drawings

Blackboard drawing by Albert Einstein


Blackboard drawing by Cornelia Parker

It’s hard to compete with Albert Einstein’s calculations. But if you want to see how Brian Eno and other 21st-century luminaries responded to the challenge, visit the Oxford Museum of the History of Science.

Setting out to create an exhibit around the museum’s most prized possession — a blackboard full of (relatively) simple equations that Einstein chalked up in 1931 — the curators asked scientists, artists, sports stars, actors, journalists, musicians, and politicians to sketch whatever they wished on an actual blackboard. The results are wonderfully varied: Eno drew a global map of the “Arabic singing diaspora.” The British soccer star Bobby Robson charted a complicated play. And pianist Joanna MacGregor sketched a bass line from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” that illustrates the connection “between Bach’s supersensitivity to the contemporary styles around him . . . and today’s musicians.” This collection serves a similar purpose, connecting past epiphanies to the sudden impulses of the present.

This exhibition marks the centenary of the Special Theory of Relativity and the blackboards were prepared in the early months of 2005. The result is a gorgeous exhibit about science, art, celebrity and nostalgia. So many of my favorite things.

Via the always amazing Very Short List

Why

Via Eric Baker.

Why Proposition 8 is Hateful and Wrong

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment of the day, today. Bravo, Keith, bravo.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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