Entries Tagged 'Design' ↓

Gorgeous 6″ Iron Man bobblehead on the way, priced at $12.99, for sale at the best movie-toy fan-site, Entertainment Earth.

Who’s this flick aimed at: Tourists? Come on, Clive “Pinhead” Barker: You’re gonna have to do more than that to scare Brooklyn.

Your copy is $16 at MoviePoster.com.

Opens May 16, 2008.

Now, that’s how The Midnight Meat Train should have done it the first time. Count on the best movie poster site on the web, bar none—the Internet Movie Poster Awards (IMPA)—to bring the noise.

This post that you’re reading started its life as a mere addendum to the one above it, but it’s going to live out the rest of its days giving blogroll-worthy props to IMPA, the best place on the net to see today’s motion picture print advertising.

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Seoul-born JooYoun Paek, a resident with the art/technology center Eyebeam, here in New York,

observes people doing everyday things like dressing and undressing, drinking and eating, calling and texting on cell phones, writing emails and letters, folding origami, etc. Then, she uses her observations on human habits and behavior to design interactive objects for public spaces.

Right now, you’re probably thinking of all the places and situations that chapeau, called Pillowig, would come in handy. (My favorite detail: The little bow.) Check out her web site for suggested uses, and more of her goofy, Dada-chomping work.

One very happy smiley face: del Rio shows her considerable talents

Count on the impossibly design-consistent Taschen to come up with something like this: Not only does their foot-square, 396-page, 1,500 numbered copies, $700 Vanessa del Rio—a retrospective book on the life and career of the ’70s porn star—arrive signed by her, in a slipcase, with an original 140-minute DVD documentary. As well, one buyer, and only one, is going to find something even more amazing, below: A Willy Wonka-like “Golden Ticket good for an all-expenses paid evening with Vanessa, to be documented by a world famous-photographer”:

I’m presuming “an all-expenses paid evening with Vanessa” merely means dinner. However, clicking on her ticket here will get you the next best thing to that meal: a short, but aurally NSFW Taschen video clip of del Rio riffing on her life and history as, not only the first Latina porn star but, “the first woman to do a DP.” Don’t ask. My favorite part: Toward the end, del Rio displaying two fellatic black & white 8x10s…after having put on her granny glasses.

As a child born in the early 1960s, I can remember when every print ad in National Geographic seemed to be done in this style: Painting of athletic and slim white man and woman in some otherwise impossible, wildly desirable setting, madly enjoying some consumer item that, it seems, would not be that all interesting, actually, if you, say, lived in a bleeding-edge, part-glass, woodland home cantilevered over a stream, or a couple dozen stories above a headlamp-lit New York City street.

Both are by illustrator Charles Schridde. As the awesome Paleo-Future notes, the top pic is from a Motorola television print campaign:

This series ran in Life Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post from 1961 until 1963 and was immensely popular for its elegant, futuristic look.

Though the Western-themed stuff Schridde seems to most paint these days does zero for me, thankfully, his work is preserved on the web, in books like Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising and The Golden Age of Advertising – the 70s. Click on the pics to see close-ups. Thanks to FFFFOUND, StrangeHarvest, Paleo-Future, and The World of Kane for the links.

Peter Eisenman does not cheer at football games.

Peter Eisenman is a hardcore football fan. (The Wall Street Journal called him “an unrepentant sports nut.”) He has been buying season tickets to NY Giants games for a half-century.

He doesn’t cheer at them.

A month ago, he had what most sports fans could have only described as an out-of-body experience: He went and saw his favorite pro football team—50 years running—win one of the most amazing championship victories in sports history—Super Bowl XLII, his first.

He didn’t cheer.

But even more, of the 60,000 people who saw the event live, Peter Eisenman was the only person sitting in University of Phoenix Stadium, pictured above, who, while watching those men do battle, could look out at the retractable roof; its roll-in natural grass field; the completely unobstructed seating; and the massive supercolumns supporting the whole structure, say two little words, and be telling the truth.

“My baby.”

Peter Eisenman, of Eisenman Architects, designed University of Phoenix Stadium. Peter Eisenman watched his first live Super Bowl as it was won with feats of superhuman cunning and strength by a team he’s loved all of his adult life in a massive stadium people are raving about but that he remembers when it weighed less than a paper clip, when it was nothing but a pattern of neurons firing in his formidable brain.

And he still didn’t cheer.

He’s either the coolest or the most tightly-wound person ever made. Me? If I’d held all that passion, history, talent, and juice inside me, after Plaxico Burress’s game-ending catch, I’d have let out a Cuba-Gooding-Jr.-winning-best-supporting-actor-at-the-Academy-Awards style war cry squared, run out onto the field naked, and set myself on fire. But I guess that’s why I’m not Peter Eisenman.

That I’m not Peter Eisenman is also why I didn’t spend Super Bowl Sunday seated next to the smart, slender, friendly, and blonde Cynthia Davidson. The person who knows that Eisenman doesn’t scream over great plays (“We high-five! He yells when he’s angry, not when he’s happy”) knows an awful lot more about him, enough to fill a book. So she did one.

I’m talking with Cynthia about that book tomorrow, Friday, March 7, at 2 pm ET, on NONFICTION, my weekly WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, broadcasting terrestrially in the NYC tri-state, and streaming live here. The book’s called Tracing Eisenman: Peter Eisenman Complete Works (Thames & Hudson). It details Eisenman’s history and ouevre as only someone who knows him well, understands his intent, but who was an architectural critic and theorist before she met him, might do. Cynthia is cofounder of the nonprofit Anyone Corporation, and editor on a dozen books for MIT Press’s Writing Architecture series. As well, she publishes Log, an architectural journal.

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Did a young and promising clean-energy consortium just give a big prize to the wrong guy?

This cool “gravity-based kinetic energy lamp,” Gravia, above, by designer Clay Moulton, placed second at the Greener Gadgets Conference (GGC)’s design competition, held here in New York City, on February 1.

Said the contest summary,

The driving idea of Gravia is that light is generated when the user raises weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. As the mass slowly falls it spins a rotor. The energy created by the movement is harnessed by an internal mechanism to make electricity. Ten high-output LEDs light the four foot high acrylic column with a diffuse glow (600-800 lumens) for about 4 hours of ambient light.

You can see a schematic here.

Obviously, using gravity for power means environmental cleanliness exceeding the surgical. Gravity is a fundamental, universal force, everywhere, free, abundant.

But there’s a problem with the prize-winning Gravia, a big one:

Gravia isn’t actually manufacturable: “The criticism is that a great deal of weight –- tons — would be required [for it to work] and [, as well,] current LEDs are not sufficiently efficient.” Designer Clay Moulton has acknowledged this fact and says that [“]the current design is probably not possible given current LED technology, but could be soon.”

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Why didn’t the recent DirecTV commercial, featuring Sigourney Weaver as “Ellen Ripley” in James Cameron’s 1986 movie, Aliens, get more amore?

You’ve seen the original: At the film’s geekalicious climax, Ripley takes on the villainous Alien Queen with an “anthropomorphic exoskeletal” Caterpillar P-5000 Powered Work Loader. (Weaver got a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her performance.)

DirecTV, as they’d done with well-known flicks from the ‘80s and ‘90s (Star Trek: Generations, Major League, Back to the Future), remixed the scene into an ad pitching the virtues of satellite over cable. Their digital fx hoo-haa even lip-synced Ripley’s 22-year-old footage to new script. (Hey: If we all yell and stamp our feet loud enough, maybe they’ll sign Pacino to remake the climactic “Sigh ay-low to mah lee’l frah!” bloodbath from Scarface.)

Yet, if you’re even a tiny bit like me, even a quarter-century in, there’s still no such thing as too much Aliens. If so, wrap your head around this: Hot Toys‘ 1/6-scale, 21″ high, fully articulated Power Loader model kit.

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There’s just something gloriously arch about a radiant Neal Patrick Harris on a unicorn, wouldn’t you agree?

Get it at my favorite poster shop, MoviePoster.com.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is out April 28, 2008.