Ok. This is quite cool. A documentary on industrial design with appearances by Chris Bangle, The Bouroullec Brothers, IDEO, Naoto Fukasawa, Jonathan Ive, Hella Jongerius, Marc Newson, Dieter Rams (omg!), Karim Rashid and plenty more. Including yourself in the credits roll if you fork over $500 to help support the thing. Made by the guy who did THAT Helvetica documentary, if you recall from ‘07 by Gary Hustwit. Objectified is all about design and the people behind it and the processes behind it. If the earlier film is anything to go by, I’m sure the music will be awesome.
The trailer for this already looks super dope. I hope it goes a long way to demystifying the false idea that design is just some flashy packaging crap or fancy colors. Ok, maybe some product designers are still all about pure form and style but the stuff they design still contain certain emotive aspects that transcend simply aesthetics. Still, I don’t really expect the general public to ever catch the film but I’m sure bits of it will feed around. So gonna geek out staring at form blocks and foam and pencils and markers and shit.
Ps. If you peep the Objectified logo, its by Build and its composed of some iconic objects, like the Panton Chair or the iPod scroll wheel. You can kop dat on a $20 AA t-shirt. Tres chic~!
Franz Kafka’s The Trial is the story of a man, Josef K., who wakes up one morning to find two dudes in his room who put him under arrest. Only, he is never told what his crime is and he maintains his innocence whilst he fights against a court that is nigh unreachable. He starts losing grip on his former life as a successful banker and everything descends into a downward spiral from thereon.
Its bleak and depressing, much like the multiple vignettes of the smoke shrouded city Kafka writes about in the book. There seems to be no respite, no pause, only endless questioning and never really getting anywhere. Corridors and airless passageways. Choked stairwells and dark gravel streets. Tasteless, black and white. At one point, I did wonder, what was the point. Why this perpetual, relentless race against an unknown. Then, I found myself fighting against the same such at work and it all seemed to click.
I not really whinging as such and I don’t think the book itself means to say that life’s a bitch necessarily. Still, the intensity of the atmosphere, the caricature of the bureaucracy, the many side characters that seem so removed from K., it almost sickening at times. Its intriguing. Like watching something fall off the edge of a cliff, it moves and accelerates and at one point seems almost endless but you just know its going to hit the bottom hard. Yet, we still persist, we watch, we act, we live. Why? Why not? Some of us actually feel just like K. and wonder. Some of us don’t. Does it matter? Probably not but we still do anyway. For some, it is enough to simply exist and never need to know. For others, it is a fly chasing you in the heat of an Australian summer. That last bit is a little whinge in case you were wondering.
I read from wikipedia, that the book is actually unfinished and that Kafka asked his mate to burn the manuscript. Thankfully, his clever mate acted against that interest and edited into what he thinks is a novel. Some bright sparks consider that The Trial might perhaps be based on Crime & Punishment. Hmm… I wonder what I’m going to read next?
The other day, my peasant ass was walking into work, which means a 30 minute hike up a fluffing mountain that meanders like a hippie on mojo and there’s this bit where I cling onto a precipice with a harness homemade outta leftover plastic bags and dental floss. I’m kidding of course. About the 30 minutes that is. It’s probably more like 29.47 minutes if I wanted to be exact.
Anyway, the main thing was, I saw the non peasant ass of the general manager flash by but it wasn’t his ass I was staring at but his car’s ass. It was fucking smoking and I seriously wanted to tap it but I couldn’t because I was preoccupied with the crossover maneuveur I had to perform at the final part of the climb into work which involved hypnotising the llama security taskforce as well as the plate spinning and unicycles on one foot. Also, I would like to categorically state that my staring at my boss’s car’s ass is totally no-homo.
It was a Volvo C30. What I loved about it was the height of the rear window. It goes down past the brake lights, kinda like when chicks wear dem low slung hipster jeans like 5 years ago and you can always see the ass crack but wayyyyy classier. The clarity was refreshing and somehow just made it seem cooler.
Back in the 80s of course, Volvo were basically mobile bomb shelters that bust shit up on the roads. Pure rectangular bricks where functionality was paramount. Then in the late 90s, they started sexing it up with that bum line, you know, the woovy line on the V70. In fact, its still visible on most of the current range and on the C30 as well. And now, they’re doing it again, bumping that ass.
Maggie Beer is to Australia what Julia Child is/was to the US. She’s got her own line of products that you can find at many delis here in Sydney but even Coles, the local supermarket chain, stocks some stuff too. I’m not a huge fan of her signature Pheasant Farm Pate (bit sweet methinks) but you can kop to kart and check it out yourself. What I do like is her new range of ice creams. Strangely enough, I had some peculiar notion that Australia would have a good selection of ice creams in the common market but I haven’t found anything close to say… Haagen Dazs for instance. Until now that is.
There are a total of four flavors out and I’ve tried 2. The 2 I haven’t tried are Passionfruit and Vanilla with Elderflower. They just seem way too normal and I really expect the elderflower element in the latter to be kinda so mild that it’d be pretty much plain vanilla really. Ok, maybe I will try that out. The other 2 I tried I found to be good and great. Quince and Bitter Almond was good although I think the bitter bit in the name seemed more marketing than anything. Maggie is huge on quinces. What I loved was the Burnt Fig Jam with Honeycomb and Caramel. This was really rich, almost to the point of cloying but lingering just below. Good deep flavor and sweet as. Again, the burnt bit in the name makes it sound so magic dunnit. You do get the taste of the fig which goes well with the caramel ice cream and some honeycomb bits to bite into.
She should now make a range of meat pies, which are my other supermarket vice.
*First X-post from CookBlog!
To Singapore that is. By April 9th. Why you ask? Well simply because the global credit crunch has fucked the Australian dollar to shit and its now worth what it used to be worth/what its really worth. We have been found out and I can proxy no more. To my rescue comes Fast Retailing, who have decided they will grace me by opening a Uniqlo outlet or 2 back home in da SG yo.
And like any self respecting, cheapo as shit S’porean, I will be first in da queue! Tampines 1, here I come!
The iht is right. Research In Motion has a lot to be happy about, what with their unofficial spokesperson going into office today. One wonders if anything will change for the better. Then again, if you’re starting at the bottom and you presume you can’t go any lower…
The U.S has just gone from a guy who choked on pretzels and fell off segways (probably the worst advertising ever for either product) to a guy that said this about a phone, “I’m still clinging to my Blackberry, they’re going to pry it out of my hands.”
Cha-ching!
Filed under: Fashion
A.P.C New Cures
or Dior 19cm MIJs?
The predecessor or the progeny?
Some decisions in life are just soooo hard. Like.
I was at work the other day when, hounded by a certain Hitler, I harried to move this fridge around the place for maintenance. All I really needed to do was lift the damn thing up marginally, like a couple of cm or 5 cos the damn wheels were too small. Unfortunately, it came down a little too quick for whatever reason and before I knew it, pain and bright crimson starting lining the edge of my right thumb. A split second later, my left hand clutches and squeezes to try to stop the bleeding.
Whether it was my awkward positioning or simply the sheer bulk and size of the massive fridge being difficult to handle, I can’t say for sure. All I know is, I’d gotten hurt and it was pretty bad. It was a pretty deep cut and how it happened exactly, I have scant idea. After a barrage of expletives, I could see that the top part of my thumb with the nail had split apart from the bottom half, but only at the top end. So it was probably like 1.5 to 2 cm deep. I would later learn from a doctor (who “just can’t resist hand injuries”) that I avulsed my thumb.
So I get help bandaging the thumb up, and ride down to the hospital, which was nearby. I register at the desk and wait, having to fill in a form with a slight bit of disdain peppered with politeness and humor. I just seemed to want to laugh it off and get on with things. The hospital made me wait for something like half an hour before an intern came over to check out the bleeding. I needed an x-ray before they could proceed. At this point, more waiting for an hour or so. In between, the hand fetish doctor came over and checked me out, before dishing out some calm advice to the very luscious intern who was in charge of me. I get the x-ray done and bam, the very tip of my thumb had fractured. Which meant I needed antibiotics but because it was so small, I didn’t really require surgery.
Instead, I got stuffed with a numbing agent (after another hour or so) and stared at my thumb as said hot intern/doctor threaded some blue sutures into my flesh which I barely felt. Blood oozed everywhere, staining this absorbent sheet below and then I got bandaged up with a thumb guard and given 2 weeks off work. I swear I bled more because I had some boobage dangling at me. That and the not wanting to hurt me but wincing as she pulled a needle through my flesh kind of innocence.
Hurting my thumb made ordinary life fucking painful. I mean, the thumb didn’t hurt much if at all, even right after the injury but the number of things that now became so troublesome was immense. I never realized how much I used my thumbs until now. Opening doors, twisting caps off drink bottles, pressing the side buttons on my mighty mouse, holding utensils and cutlery… The list seemed endless. Try wiping your nose with your non dominant hand. Or using one hand to shampoo your hair. Or soaping the left armpit with the right forearm. And keys, motherfucking keys. Opening doors is like horrible.
Without thumbs, we wouldn’t have been able to use and invent tools. Without thumbs, we’d be resigned to pawing and biting at food, probably raw and I don’t mean Charlie Trotter or Japanese. Without thumbs, we wouldn’t be able to show our approval, or hitchhike, or suck. This shit is precious man. Treasure your thumbs ladies and gents. I swear you’ll feel like you devolved without them. I certainly did.
