Living in Harlem, I’ve been seeing Asian tourists coming uptown for years, and that would little suprise most people. What might get their attention, though, is that many of these sojourners don’t come here just to eat at Sylvia’s, or merely to sit in the back of Abyssinian Baptist Church and hear its choir’s masterful singing.
Over the last two years, hundreds of Japanese, primarily women, have trekked to Memorial Baptist for the Saturday workshop where veteran black gospel music instructors like Mr. [Terrance] Kennedy lead them in a crash course of clapping, stomping, singing and swaying. Tommy Tomita, who is Japanese and a longtime Harlem resident, started the workshop in 1998 to give friends a look at one of the oldest forms of black music. When the friends demanded more, he persuaded the church to teach them how to sing. Now the workshop is advertised in Japanese stores and community centers in New York, as well as throughout Japan.
As we post, investigators are still looking for answers to why Air France Flight 447, on its way from Rio de Janiero to Paris, disintegrated, apparently at cruising altitude, off the coast of Brazil Sunday night, certainly killing all 228 people aboard.
In light of the disaster, Mario Freese’s ghostly “Air Lines,” above, serves as either a comfort that these tragedies don’t happen more often, or an alarm as to how likely it is that other calamities may soon follow. Just under 4 feet wide and 3 feet high, the rendering comes either in white on black, as shown, or in extremely limited-edition black on white, printed on heavyweight fine-art paper, and shipped in a mailing tube.
As Freese explains,
Air Lines is an art project showing worldwide airliner routes. Every single scheduled flight on any given day is represented by a fine line from its point of origin to its port of destination. Thereby forming a net of thousands of lines. Hubs like JFK, FRA or DXB turn into dark knots where lines meet, lesser served local services are only are a subtle hint.
This enlargement, right, of the flight network over Western Europe, gives a sense not only of the larger image’s level of detail, but of the gargantuan energies required to maintain and organize the world’s air traffic. Horrifying as this week’s catastrophe remains, and whether one believes that flying is the safest way to travel or not, one thing all can agree upon is that it could happen a lot more often.
In Detroit-based filmmaker Matthew J. Tait‘s animated short, Zygote, above, Bob has talked his teenage girlfriend into coming over so he can claim her virginity. Unsure she’s ready to take their relationship “to the next level,” the girl wavers. So Bob deftly parries, observing that his previous girl, a mature woman, wouldn’t have had all these issues.
It’s a despicable, caddish move, played thousands of times a day. So why does this 2:05 piece have me howling with tearful cackles at the plight of these losers?
Blame it on Tait and Xtranormal Text-to-Movie web-based software. With it, users create their own shorts, complete with avatars lip-synching dialogue you keyboard in. (“If you can type, you can make movies,” says the company’s motto.)
By coupling the application’s wonkiness—a gentle arm around shoulders leaves Bob’s limb hanging in mid-air—with tightly warped dialogue (“My hymen…I’m embarrassed..it’s thick…like a disc of thick-cut Canadian bacon”), Tait fashions 125 seconds of rogue puppetry, where you know the actors are controlled by entities that truly mean them ill.
How is it that even small children have a built-in notion of justice and balance? Why is my old employer—I briefly worked as a cashier for GMAC, now Ally Bank, in my 20s—playing on that sense of fairness in a series of new spots?
Scott Urban of Urban Spectacles, the Chicago-based custom eyeglasses maker whose “Beergoggles” delighted readers of MEDIA ASSASSIN weeks back, is at it again. This time, its his “Singing None” frames, fashioned from vinyl records, that will make your eyes happy. Look closely: You can still see record grooves in them. Scott Urban’s frames, made to fit your very own nose and noggin, start at $500 a pair. For that money, what’d be really cool is, when you put them on, if they made the music industry disappear.
Michigan-based graphic designer Logan Walters recently uploaded 21 albums by Wu-Tang Clan and their extended family into his iTunes app. As a working visual artist, however (with “mild OCD” that he blames on his mom), Walters says
I need to have decent-quality album art for every album on my computer, which currently equals over 90 gigs. The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB’s two albums being the only real exceptions) — no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they’re looking pretty dated these days. So, armed with inspiration from what Olly Moss and others are doing (as written about by me here, and later by Kottke here) and a book of Blue Note Records covers, I set out to remake all 21.
Thus far, he’s done 12 of these so-called “Wu Note” artwork mashups. His latest, above, reworks the cover of RZA’s 1998 album, Bobby Digital in Stereo, right, replacing its “blaxploitation” palette with the cool hues and playful typography designer Reid Miles fashioned for jazz greats of the 1950s and ’60s. While, to this writer, not all of Walters’ “remixes” are Wu-bangers, these pieces for Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers and GZA’s Liquid Swords are a sweet delight. Now, all we need are liner notes. That, and better graphic design in hip-hop.
With a single, masterfully-composed image, above, designer Dina Prasetyawan‘s obliquely-titled T-shirt, “The Red”, undoes centuries of fairy tales, recasting storytelling’s most vulnerable victim, Little Red Riding Hood, as a Doc Martened-out, Japanese horror-style psychopath. Given the heft of that chainsaw, and the surrounding drench of blood, I’m guessing the Big Bad Wolf, Grandma, and the Woodsman all got done. Only $18 from Threadless.com.
The stunning frozen terrain, above, made of ice several feet thick, but clear as glass, was photographed by explorers on the surface of a planet millions of miles from our Sun.
This enlargement, right, of the flight network over Western Europe, gives a sense not only of the larger image’s level of detail, but of the gargantuan energies required to maintain and organize the world’s air traffic. Horrifying as this week’s catastrophe remains, and whether one believes that flying is the safest way to travel or not, one thing all can agree upon is that it could happen a lot more often.
Thus far, 
