09:20 pm - Linda Blair Reviews, Part 3 7/5 Fatal Bond (1992, Vincent Monton, VHS) - 6.0 Linda Blair falls for a sleazy asshole, and decides to give him a bunch of money and go on a road trip with him after knowing him about a day. A girl he cheats on her with turns up dead, and he probably did it, and then LB finds another dead girl, and assumes it was him, but then at the end, it turns out he’s innocent, and I guess it’s a happy ending for them even though he’s still a dick. It was alright. Had it’s moments.
7/8 Double Blast (1994, Tim Spring, VHS) - 8.5 Joe Estevez is trying to find some treasure, so he kidnaps archaelogist Linda Blair to translate some shit for him, but he runs into trouble when a young kickboxing brother-sister duo get involved and repeatedly beat the shit out of his bumbling henchmen. I knew I was in for something special when the opening credits actually explained who one of the stars was, as seen here. It’s kind of a retarded movie, if you can believe it, but also a fucking great one.
7/9 The Heart of the Lie (1992, Jerry London, DVD) - 7.5 True crime drama about a woman who is convicted for killing her husband’s ex-wife, but may not be guilty. Pretty good story, and I thought the lead was really good. They did a kind of ok job of setting up some other possible suspects, and remaining somewhat objective over whether or not she did it. I much prefer the original title, Calendar Girl, Cop, Killer? The Bambi Bembenek Story, but the DVD makes up for the change by listing Fullscreen as a Special Feature, which I always find hilarious.
7/10 Moving Target (1988, Marius Mattei, VHS) - 8.5 Someone on a motorcycle is trying to kill everyone to get a key that I guess unlocks riches, but we never actually find out, and so there’s this blond girl on the run who is topless throughout the entire movie for no reason whatsoever, and she hides out with a tennis star who might be her father, and they have a ton of sex, and there’s also a persistent news reporter, whose cameraman is working for the bad guys, and Ernest Borgnine is a detective trying to figure out what’s going on, and Linda Blair occasionally shows up, but doesn’t seem to actually serve any purpose. By the end of the movie, even the characters themselves don’t seem to have any idea whose side they’re on, and everyone just starts randomly shooting each other. And on top of all that, the soundtrack and score are fucking incredible. This was a tough one to track down, but definitely worth it.
Roller Boogie (Rewatch, 1979, Mark L. Lester, 35mm, Bridge) - 9.5 Linda Blair is a rich girl with inattentive parents who, despite being a musical prodigy, is more interested in rollerskating. She meets Jim Bray, a rollerskater with a shot at the Olympics, and hires him to help train her to win the Roller Boogie Contest. It all goes wrong, though, when some businessmen threaten to burn down the roller rink if the owner doesn’t sell them the property, and so the owner is forced to shut down, unless all the rollerskaters can band together and come up with a plan. This movie features an incredible performance from Jim Bray, and one of the best and most adorable from Linda Blair, as well as some funny turns from almost every secondary character. What’s most amazing about this movie, or well, there’s actually a fucking ton of things that make this movie amazing, but one of the most amazing things is how well it segues 70’s movies into 80’s movies. The tone of it, and certainly the fashion and the music, still make it feel like a 70’s movie, but the personalities, the brand of humor, the way in which the fashion and music are utilized, and even the entire plot would later be recycled in many classic and defining 80’s movies.
10/4 Repossessed (Rewatch, 1990, Bob Logan, DVD) - 2.0 Parody sequel to the Exorcist with Linda Blair all grown up with a family, and she gets possessed again, so Leslie Nielsen shows up to give her an exorcism, and Ned Beatty shows up to televise it. It’s not a bad idea, but the jokes are fucking excruciating. Linda Blair isn't especially gifted with comedy, anyway, but it's usually cute when she tries (like in Double Blast or S Club 7). But here she's fucking brutal (through no fault of her own, obviously, she's clearly a victim of terrible writing and direction), and Leslie Nielsen is equally awful. I had seen this before and didn’t like it, but it’s way worse than I remembered. Fucking terrible.
Hipster chick with "valley girl" accent: Ya, like, ohmigod, ewwwwww... So I was reading Cosmo, and like, there was this story, about like, guys' confessions, you know? And like, this random guy actually said, like, "Sometimes, I rub my dick on my cat's fur, and it feels good."
--Washington Square Park
10-year-old girl to another: I bet his idea of a hot girl is the crazy cat lady across the street.
--34th St, Astoria
Overheard by: Samantha
Woman to another: I have a friend in Belgium now--we both have cats!
--One World Financial Center
Overheard by: macgeekgrl
Brunette on phone: Do you want to play with your cat or do you want to play with me?
--60th St b/w Park & Madison
Overheard by: Adam B.
20-something on cell: And when I woke up, I had no idea where I was. Then I realized I was spooning his cat.
In the contemporary world of graphic design, designers must be able to not only convey information, but do so in ways that are engaging and entertaining. Image Making teaches strategies for creating unique visual form to incorporate into graphic design projects. A hybrid of manual, analog, and digital processes including drawing, collage, manipulating found imagery, pattern-making, and typographic assemblage will be utilized to help students with the goal of the class: for each student to create a 100-page book of a range of form-making styles that will greatly benefit their professional portfolios.
The class will work together to explore different formal and conceptual strategies for creating new and exciting visual illustration. This class will appeal to graphic designers interested in both print and web, illustrators, fine artists, and students with an interest in editorial illustration. It will also appeal to designers and illustrators working within a signature style, as the strategies utilized will help loosen up professionals, push boundaries, and create new work.
This class is a studio class but will require a bit of homework for visual research (collecting source material and light reading).
All About Typography (TYP101)
An in-depth look at typography (designing with fonts) for both beginners and experienced practitioners. This class is a working examination of Western typography including lectures on type history, type classification, and contemporary practice.
Practical exercises, as well as in-class critiques will help broaden students’ understanding of typography practically and critically
The class will conduct projects to explore typographic styles, learn correct typesetting practices, and increase design acumen. The class will host guest lectures by some of Japan’s top graphic designers. The class is Mac-based, but will apply equally to PC-based environments.
12:22 am - My noughties 1: Two zeroes and a blank sheet of paper The Noughties Were Shit, proclaims one British blog, looking back with a jaundiced eye on the decade just gone. Personally, I paid zero attention to the celebrity chefs and crappy inventions the blog marshals as evidence of the decade's inherent excrementality. Any decade is going to look like rubbish if you pay attention to celeb chefs, let's face it. And complaining about things you nevertheless fail to switch off -- and even, in fact, switch on specifically to hate and slate -- is a key symptom of The British Disease, much more likely to perpetuate crap than end it.
I want, over a series of Click Opera posts, as we approach the end of the year and the end of the decade, to look back at my noughties, and specifically the five or six albums I released. If I had to conjure a single metaphor for how the decade felt to me, back in 2000, I'd liken it to a blank piece of paper. I felt as if there were no rules, no commercial expectations. Just as I was free to travel (I spent the decade in New York, in Tokyo, then, mostly, in Berlin), I was also free to "experiment", to make things up as I went along, to improvise, to develop a sonic grammar that was mine alone; an electronic folk-lieder aimed as much at the "salons" of Chelsea art galleries as the rock circuit.
Although some of my more conservative fans -- notably Swede John Thelin, once (as "Count V") the mainstay of the alt.fan.momus newsgroup -- characterised the noughties as a time in which "Momus forgot how to write proper songs", others -- notably the Web 2.0 generation, who ranked Nervous Heartbeat and Frilly Military at least as high, in terms of YouTube views, as my old hit Hairstyle of the Devil -- liked my noughties stuff better than what had gone before. With 154,000 views this -- my 2001 collaboration with Montréal group Bran Van 3000, reggaeton vocalist Eek-a-Mouse and actress Liane Balaban -- is the most-viewed Momus-related track on YouTube:
So how did things stand with me, musically and stylistically, at the lead-in of this "fresh reel of blank tape" of a decade, the one we learned to represent with two zeroes? I think a key track -- and one I still like a lot -- is my 2000 collaboration with Dusseldorf band Kreidler, entitled Mnemorex. It's key to what comes later because, for a start, it proposes a new sort of electronic folk song:
As in the Bran Van 3000 song, I'm only responsible for the topline melody and the words and singing here, but this points the way forward -- my 2008 collaboration with Joe Howe is still very much on the same page:
Mnemorex also points forward in the sense that it's German, and references Japan (the Osaka World's Fair, also known as Expo '70), and I'll spend most of the 00s with a predominantly German-Japanese frame of reference. Even living in New York between 2000 and 2002, the records I was listening to were mostly made by Berliners like Tarwater, F.S. Blumm, Pole and Rechenzentrum. In 2000 I returned to Europe to tour Germany with Kreidler, who really deserve their own Click Opera entry; after a long absence they released a new album last month called Mosaik 2014:
I don't want to snow the blank sheet with too much data, so I'll close this scene-setting entry. Next in this series I'll cover the first proper Momus album of the new decade, my, ahem, folktronica album, Folktronic. In that entry, and the ones that follow, I'll be re-listening to my noughties albums, tracing their influences, intentions and themes, and recalling the times and places they were made in. And one reason I'll be doing this is that it's pretty safe to hazard the guess that nobody else will, though there'll no doubt be endless artistic explorations of, for instance, the UK's Top 10 bestselling albums of the decade. Here they are, just to set the scene:
James Blunt Back To Bedlam Dido No Angel Amy Winehouse Back To Black David Gray Wide Ladder Dido Life For Rent The Beatles 1 Leona Lewis Spirit Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head Keane Hopes And Fears Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters
Man on cell: Yeah man, she is so not anyone that I would be willing to invest years in... I mean I don't want to have to spend my time actually working on it. I figured, hell, I kind of want to wake up next to someone a couple of days a week, so I might as well hang on through the summer. No, she has no idea...
--Columbus & 62nd St
Grad student: They have this symbiotic relationship in which he does all the eating and she does all the drinking.
--Columbia University
Woman to herself: God, I asked you for a good man; not a fucking joke!
--Spring & Hudson
Overheard by: Oscar Gamble
Firefighter to others: It's not that I have anything against commitment; I just like diversity.
--125th St Fairway
Overheard by: Just Shoppint
Man in shorts to another: I wouldn't date a girl with double vision, period.
--Williamsburg
Overheard by: Dr No-Eyes
Businesswoman to hobo: If you get back in the dating scene, I'll kill you.
Guy wearing a promotional cardboard to another: I think I'm going to treat myself to health insurance next month.
--Broadway & 43rd St
Overheard by: Maria
Woman on phone: My urologist wanted to stick a microscope up my urethra! (pause) No! (pause) Because it's going to hurt!
--Vandam St & 6th Ave
20-something woman on cell: Yeah, the doctor told me not to exfoliate my labia.
--R Train
Overheard by: Note to self....
Bartender: I gotta get sexy for my doctor tomorrow. I'm gonna be like, "doctor, I need you to examine me. I need you to remove my garments." Nah... I'm just playin'. My doctor's cute, though. For real. I'm just gonna show some cleavage or somethin'.
--Jamaica, Queens
Woman on phone: She wants to be a doctor. She likes it when the guts fall out. (pause) No, she wouldn't do that. She's too lazy to be a serial killer.
As I announced earlier this month, the November edition of PauseTalk (Vol. 35) is set to happen this coming Monday, on the 16th, at Cafe Pause. This is a big return of sorts, since it’ll be the first edition in over two months (Vol. 34 was held in early September), and I’m definitely ready for some great PT-style discussions.
The official start will still be at 20:00, but from 19:00 we’ll be playing the new Tokyo Realtime Akihabara audio tour — great chance to find out exactly what these tours sound like.
Yamaha has introduced a new model of its TENORI-ON digital musical instrument, originally developed with media artist Toshio Iwai. The new version is stripped down to bring the price down (now around $1,000), and features orange lights. Via Designboom.
Update: $1,000 is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, but the street price for the device should be under $800.
Here’s a video of Yuki Yamamoto’s Spica, a speaker that uses water and light to give you quite the show as you listen to your favorite tracks. It was on show at this year’s DesignTide, and I can confirm that it looked just as good in person as it does in the video. Via Designboom.
Takashi Shinozaki of *studio has an upcoming exhibition at the Living Design Gallery in Shinjuku entitled “A New Domestic Animal Landscape.”
For a long time, human beings coexisted with animals. Today, however, our cities make it difficult to do that. Instead, we find ourselves surrounded by animal characters and toys. This exhibition attempts to take a proactive stance in reappraising these characters and toys as new “domestic animals,” showcasing a new “domestic landscape” featuring hybrid animal toys original furniture prototypes, etc.
The show will run from November 19 until December 1 (closed on Wednesdays).
11:25 am - Websites as slideshows I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that allows you to turn any webpage into a slideshow.
Now, turning a website into a slideshow is a bit like turning a bicycle into a record player; it's perverse, against the grain. People put images onto their websites in a certain context. When you pull them up and turn them into a full-screen sequence of three-second images, you de- and re-contextualize them. The intended narrative gets stripped away, replaced by a new narrative which can be surreal, dreamlike, or psychologically revealing. That's the theory, anyway.
It doesn't always work. News sites like the BBC, The Guardian and Google News have done something to their html to make slideshowing impossible. Stil in Berlin works, Face Hunter doesn't. But those street fashion blogs are predominantly visual already, packaged as sequences of images. So is stripes-crazy Stanley Lieber's LiveJournal.
Some blogs frustrate the desire to escape text by bringing it into their images. Hipster Runoff sprinkles its jpegs with bitmapped lettering: "ELECTROMA = POOP", the images say, or "I deserve a better life / career / job". What emerges here is the extent to which American hipsterism simply recycles American strip malls and office cubicles with a tiny justifying sparkle of irony.
Letters of Note shows images of... letters, naturally. That doesn't preclude visual interest, of course; some of them, like the Lucasfilms recruitment ad up the page, are visually pretty arresting.
The slideshow thing works better with Awful Library Books, although, like the blog itself, the interestingness of the books depicted (rooted in their otherness) contradicts the blog's whole premise, which is to encourage librarians to weed out, name and shame inappropriate, absurd or boring books from their libraries. Leave them there, I say! We need those glimpses of otherness more than we need appropriateness.
The slideshow software works well with Japanese sites like Sajiblo (which documents the refurbishment of an old building as an organic cafe) because they tend to publish quite high resolution photos at absurdly small sizes. For non-Japanese-readers the slideshow doesn't change the essential experience of these websites (they're already image sequences), it merely strips out the clutter of text.
It's worth saying that full-screening images, while it does take away the clutter of nested windows most of us have on our screen, doesn't remove the windows metaphor entirely: what, after all, is a computer screen but a proposed "window on the world"? What it does do, though, is replace an ugly, complex collision of frames with a single, apparently-authoritative one. It replaces a messy space-sequence (lots of complicated relationships between frames and text and images) with a single, simple, tidy time-sequence. The fact that that big authoritative time sequence is actually fairly random and decontextualised is what makes it so fascinating: the big images become a sort of oracle, telling us unexpected things.
Click Opera, slideshow-ified, for instance, looks like a trailer for a sexy, didactic, utopian horror film.
Female college student on cell: Sorry, there was an incident. She was eating string cheese, and I told her she looked like a walrus. So she tried to smack me in the face but she couldn't, and I ran into the bathroom. So she tried to hit me with the string cheese, but I was like your string cheese will get all fuzzy. So she smacked me in the face with the cheese.
--Penn Station
Girl on phone: And then I stuck a string cheese in the microwave. Yeah, in the wrapper.
--57th & 7th
Sexy guy, looking at orchestra program description of movement "con brio": Does that mean "with cheese"?
--Camerata Notturna Concert, W. 57th St
Overheard by: Ladle
Older European woman to another: She's fine with the reference to cheese. I mean, she can eat cheese, just not the real kind.
--Union Square
Hipster: So she writes everything down in her cheese diary...
Just a reminder that the opening party for the “PROTOTYPE 03” exhibition happens tomorrow night (November 12, 19:00-22:00) at Tokyo Midtown Design Hub — for more details see my previous post. You’ll definitely want to catch this.
Girl wearing leggings as pants: I love your watch... does it flip open? (frail elderly woman looks confused) Girl: That, your watch. Frail elderly woman: This is my life alert. If I fall, I can call for help. Girl: Oh! Uh... well, it goes really well with your outfit. Frail elderly woman: It doesn't come it any other colors. Just beige.
First Brad Pitt, now it’s Quentin Tarantino’s turn to appear in ads for Softbank. Unlike Pitt’s CMs, Tarantino will be joining the “cast” of the regular series of “White Family” ads (named after one of the mobile provider’s plans) as a wacky uncle. The video above, courtesy of The Japan Times, shows a preview. Via Japan Probe.
Young black girl #1: Why ain't you under the umbrella? You black. Young black girl #2: I don't give a fuck if my hair gets messed up. Young black girl #1: You black! You so black!
Didn’t get to attend last week’s DesignTide? Dezeen posts a few photos of this year’s space design, which was again by Hiroshima-based architect Makoto Tanijiri (Suppose Design Office). I don’t think the photos quite capture how well it worked though — most of the time, when in a booth, you couldn’t really see what was in the nearby booths, which encouraged exploration (versus quick scanning).
Great newsbit of the day: SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima has been announced as the director of next year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. She is the first woman to occupy the post.
Over the past few months I’ve covered a few examples of innovative QR barcode design by SET Japan, but here’s a look at some fun “regular” barcode designs by Japanese firm D-Barcode. Via PSFK.
9h is a stunning new capsule hotel set to open next month in Kyoto, and designed by Fumie Shibata (a name readers of my “On Design” column will probably recognize, since I tend to cover a lot of her work). The name, 9h, refers to a suggested 9-hour stay (1 hour for shower, 7 hours to sleep, 1 hour for rest), although you can stay for up to 17 hours, at a price of 4,900 yen. Designboom posts a nice gallery of photos, including some great graphics on the accessories (toothbrushes, slippers) by Masaaki Hiromura.
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I recently experienced a catastrophic Safari meltdown; every time I launched the browser it quit, and even deleting lots of library files and re-installing Safari didn't help. So I switched to Firefox. There are some things I don't like as much (poor History implementation, lack of Search Snapback), but there are compensations too. For instance, the add-on that 
