Thursday, October 28, 2010

Frank Frazetta - Painting With Fire

Frank Frazetta stands in the front rank with Titian, Caravaggio, Parrish & Rockwell. His work holds you emotionally and changes you.

This 2002 documentary is an excellent view of the greatest Modern Day illustrator there has been. Who of us have not been affected by at least one of his covers?





Thursday, October 21, 2010

Urban Homesteaders - 'The Crazies on the Block'

Another piece on the Dervaes Family's Pasadena Home. If you've never heard of them before, they have a successful Farm - on 1/10th of an acre - in the midst of Pasadena!



I really really recommend looking over their website Path to Freedom and seeing whether some of their ideas don't spark off a bit of inspiration in your universe!

The Incredible Graphite art of Dalton Ghetti

Artist Dalton Ghetti transforms the common pencil stub into the sublime.





















Spending weeks or months on each piece he works with 3 basic tools. Using an X-acto knife, sewing needle and a sculpting knife he doesn't use a magnifier. He also doesn't sell his work. He uses it to relax when he's not working! FULL STORY














photo:Carl David LaBianca

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Monday, October 18, 2010

The Brooklyn Space Program

Ever hear of "Urban Space Exploration" ? Me neither. Until now.

(Thanks to one of my favorite bloggers Guy Kawasaki for the heads up on this one. Guy's blog: "Holy Kaw!"
"All the topics that interest us" is always a treat and this time he's found some people doing - yes - Space
Exploration from their 'back yard'.)

Luke Geissbühler is a cinematographer (Borat, Independent Lens) and founder of The Brooklyn Space Project.

Together with his son Max they built a 'capsule' from take out containers, foam, hand warmers etc. and launched
an HD camera into space with an iPhone for GPS tracking and recovery (brilliant). Their resulting video below just speaks for itself.



And if you think that that's a pretty cool thing to do you can go to the official Brooklyn Space Project site where you can support "Urban Space Exploration" -- and get a tee shirt.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

No, It ain't a new game or a Frog Mosaic

qrcode
I've got a friend named Hans. ( He doesn't know it but he sort of acts as my de facto tech guru. ) I pick up new stuff pretty quickly but I think he's got his sensors out there a few miles ahead on the trail.

I'm taking my fast token scan through Facebook for the day to look over the adventures of all my compadres and run across this fairly ugly little square image he's just posted. There's about 11 comments on it and I've got to stare at it a bit to get just what significance this thing has.

I seem to have missed this so far because I don't carry a cell phone. I use my desktop for most all my communication and very rarely have need for a phone -- so I learn this stuff vicariously as the tech develops.

The image, quite simply, is an Asian bar code technology invented for the car industry several years ago which evolved and grew into advertising and pop culture.

It's called a QR Code. The QR stands for Quick Response. The really brilliant thing about it is that it's a two-dimensional symbology, meaning the code can carry information in 2 directions and carry significantly more information than the linear bar code we're familiar with.

Created in 1994 the Denso Wave technology would appear to be the new standard as the two-dimensionality allows 100 times more information to be carried. The code can be scanned with a smart phone, putting its use into an absolute stratospere of new applications, from pop art to advertising and even - somewhat bizarrely - the cemetary .

You'll begin to notice these popping up in magazine ads, billboards -- basically anywhere you could point a cell phone and anywhere someone is wanting to transfer a large chunk of information.

... Like we don't all have enough information already.