Picasso Draws Three Things

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This is a Photograph.

(click to source.)

(Amy Cannon found this first.)

Mother’s Day Math Problem

This guy is so awesome.

Los Angeles, by Michael Light & David L. Ulin

From Design Observer:

“…This utilitarian connection to the city is one, I think, that gets to the essence of L.A. It exists at the heart of the dichotomy between private and public architecture, the pre-eminence of infrastructure, the balance between neighborhood and sprawl. Where else would we find freeway overpasses named for fallen heroes, such as the Clarence Wayne Dean Memorial Interchange, where the Antelope Valley Freeway sweeps into Interstate 5, named for the motorcycle policeman who died in that spot when his bike plunged off a piece of collapsed roadway during the Northridge earthquake? On the one hand, such a memorial seems ridiculous, reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s caustic lines: “Here were decent godless people: / Their only monument the asphalt road. / And a thousand lost golf balls.” As with most things in Los Angeles, however, the surface masks another kind of depth. A site such as the Clarence Wayne Dean Interchange tells us something — not about our superficiality, but about the nature of how we live here, how we interact with our environment, which makes freeways among the most important monuments we have. It also highlights our complex relationship with the natural landscape, which can rise up at any moment to shake our most substantial structures loose. This is perhaps the least understood aspect of Los Angeles, the way it exists in the shadow of elemental forces, forces we cannot control. We build on terrain that is, in the most fundamental sense, unstable, that shakes and burns and floods with the regularity of the tides. Here again, we see the intercession of technology, and the limits of that technology at once. What does it mean that it all can fall to pieces in an instant, that what we have constructed here, no matter how apparently substantial, is as ephemeral and fleeting as a dream?

Still, it is a dream of substance, a dream that we can see and feel. It is a built dream, as concrete as it is abstract, an imposition of collective will. It is a three-dimensional set of hieroglyphs, a runic architecture unveiled in cloverleafs and rail yards, skyscrapers and industrial plants, dotted with small houses etched into the flats and hillsides, a narrative interposed upon the land. And if, in looking at it or living within it, we occasionally forget its essential nature … well, then, that’s part of the story also, a story in which illusion and reality are always both at hand.”

Read more.

Now That’s Advertising.

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Michael Wolf Views the Street

Just when you thought Google had become omniutilizable, it gets used for something else.  Michael Wolf has capitalized on the everywhere-pervasive (invasive?) photography used to power Google Maps’ Street View to power a whole new strand of found photography.  His screenshots vary from the sublime or ridiculous to the inspiring or tragic: all completely candid moments caught by a computer, but found by an artist.  A small sampling is below, but you should scroll through the collection on his website.

The Examined Life: One of my Latest, Greatest Projects

Just out today.  You should visit it and see whether you can figure out which design flaws are bugging me most.

I’ve got an article in it on Peter Paul Ruben’s The Entombment.  Read it here.

Chad and Rachel: Engagement Photos

Spend a day with a Glazener and a proto-Glazener?  At the Tea House at Los Rios?  Yes, please.

Rachel’s Recital Photos, Poster, & Postcard

Rachel’s senior recital is next month, and she graciously asked me to design her recital poster and postcard.  Things learned from this project: 1) Rachel is awesome. 2) Rachel is amazing. 3) Chad is a lucky bum.  Click past the break below to see some of the photos and the final designs.