One day too late for advance voting, which means that I now have another day to reconsider all my “maybe” picks.
Biked from Gastown shop and hop, stopped by the Astoria for beer, biked home in the first snow(?)fall of the season. Technically, it’s raining slush outside. That’s Vancouver for you. 10 years here now, so I’m not as picky as I was…even the wettest snow still looks pretty in the streetlights as it falls.
Art intervention by Juliana Santacruz Herrera in the cracks of Paris sidewalks. A beautifully deconstructed ‘yarn bomb”.
(via Trendland)
Great alley! Nice urban intervention in South Hill, East Van by Instant Coffee (amongst other things, the Vancouver chapter brought us the odd glossy sandwich boards and faux-yarn-bombed buses for the Main Street transit redesign a few years back).
(via OtherSights)
Referenced at Walk21. Interesting to see that so many of my top 1st world cities to visit are in the top 10 bike-friendly cities. If I wasn’t already planning to bike when I visit, I will now.
Yeah, I love the Talking Heads. I took a letterpress course at Emily Carr a couple of years ago and made small posters of the lyrics from This Must Be The Place (the first verse alone, incidentally, took me all morning to set).
I find the quirkiness of Talking Heads to be more compelling and charming than Ian Curtis’ (also compelling) intensity.
Also, I like this question way more than Beatles vs Stones.
Whoa. Cindy Sherman x MAC Cosmetics.
I don’t even know what to think about this!
Okay, well I forced the discussion by reposting to facebook:
RC: I’m no Indy purist, and not a total corporate ho, but I like that the chameleon artist did this. Tongue in cheek, unabashed, why the hell NOT style (probably loads o cash too.) I say yes!
AC: Is she supposed to look like a drag queen?
whyvonne: RC, I love her style/work/attitude! I actually think it’s a brilliant collaboration, and a surprisingly innovative one, even for MAC. I guess what I’ve liked about her work is that she inhabits these unreal female figures — fairy tale characters, plastic surgery patients, dolled-up 1960s society girls. It’s not so much critique as commentary, even, which is a balance I like very much. Not that she shouldn’t benefit from her own work, but I feel like the work moves solidly away from critique or commentary when it’s in service of the industries that (re)produce these beauty standards — the very things in question with so much of her work.
whyvonne AC: I’m going with yes! Did you see the other shots in this campaign?
AC: not yet…
RC: Good points - I do think she was well aware of the situation by accepting the collaboration, and I have a hunch that the people at MAC, at least the creative team involved in this project, were equally against the archetypal beauty standards, and more interested in paying the rent while working with an amazing artist, and doing something different and out there. The beauty industry is like any - sincere good people, horrible greedy insensitive bastards, and everything in between. I hope she surrounded herself with the former.September 28 at 5:53pm ·
whyvonne: Oh, I agree - kudos to the creative team, for sure. Just that the larger the org, the more difficult it is to be a radical or dissenting voice (this coming from a bureaucrat!).
Love SpacingToronto’s Before/After photo series. (I had a similar idea involving vintage postcards of various cities…but when you snooze, you lose.)
Reminds me of other delightful old/new transitioning-spaces projects, like the charming Dear Photograph website, or Stewart Brand’s still-relevant book (and subsequent 6-part BBC television series!! Who knew?), How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built.
(dear photograph)
(infographic inspired by How Buildings Learn)
Less urban-y, but also cool:
Michael Wolf’s 2006 series, 100 x 100, depict 100 rooms and residents in one of Hong Kong’s oldest public housing buildings.
Two hot, dusty, lovely weeks in the Kootenays.
(click photos to embiggenify!)
This stunning little map-site of Reykjavik city centre is THE prettiest thing. Hand-drawn and interactive, it does the mundane work of any number of BIA/tourism/retail/neighbourhood/destination websites, with 10,0000x the style. Love the closeup drawings/photos of each point of interest.
Produced by design group Borgamynd; funding in part through grants by the City of Reykjavik.
I love this! A set of maps categorized by the origin of street names.
Reminds me of a set of streets north of Princess in Kingston, ON with names like Cherry Street, Plum Street, etc. — it was a little neighbourhood with lots of cute little old houses for reasonable wrong-side-of-main-street rental rates, where a group of activisty gay women had formed a little community-within-a-community. Affectionately known as (of course) “the Fruit Belt”.
More beauty from Bostonography: an exploration of Cambridge street names. Click through for the full set of maps.
(via ilovecharts)
Source: bostonography.com
An adjustable stencil for taking your statistics-based infographic to the streets (with temporary spray chalk, of course).
Neat idea, though the adjustability means it’s not a very clean-looking image.
(via GOOD)
Came across these pretty graphs while reading a series on stay-at-home parents on the Vancouver Sun website.
The stats are interesting, but so is the format: clean, very simple, well-designed, interactive. I haven’t yet come across Tableau Public before, but I’m interested. You can share and download data from these pretty graphics, and make your own data pretty and interactive too. Provided you have a PC, that is — currently not Mac compatible, though you can view the results in pretty much any browser.
