nice little tale for a quiet tea party...

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 · Like

 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!).

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.  

Stories of Old Vancouver Neighbourhoods

Amazing interactive website about a diverse little local neighbourhood. Click on a building pictured on the beautifully-designed site, and you’ll get poignant (really!) audio stories and documentary-style photos about its inhabitants.

It feels like a sort of a super-modern, and more human-centred, take on Stan Douglas’ Every Building on 100 West Hastings Street.

Okay, Internet, I stand corrected — a brief Google search tells me that this website by David Look is the super-modern take on the Stan Douglas piece: it’s called “Every Building on 100 block of West Hastings Street (in Google StreetView): after Stan Douglas”.

100% Vancouver was a surprise. It shouldn’t have been — any mix of statistics and personal stories is a potent combination (for me)!

The premise: 100 ordinary citizens are cast according to Vancouver’s demographic mix (sex, age, ethnicity, language, residential neighborhood), each person representing roughly 1% of the population. 

These 100 people come together on stage to ask and answer questions en masse about their individual identities: all sorts of questions, from origins (“We were born in Vancouver” had about 20% clustered under the “Me” sign) to behaviour (“We recycle” saw one brave, if environmentally unsound, man standing on the “Not Me” side of the stage) and beliefs (“We believe in God.”).

Of course the statistics appealed to me, but the surprising part was how much it moved me, too.  After all, census data is powerful and useful — but how well are statistics able to tell the stories of real people? But here they were, not just statistics, but people who had lived those numbers. It’s hard not to be moved by vulnerability. 

A few of the people on stage told small, charming, and often surprising stories of their lives, ones that made a segue into yet another question for the masses.

But I also really loved the stories that were merely implied in the patterns that people formed. You could follow the movements of a specific person through a series of 4 or 5 questions, and get a familiar feeling about the picture of “who” they are.  Or you could start to wonder what the sweet looking middle-aged lady did to land herself in the group of people who have committed violence against another person.

The scenes that brought emotions closest to the surface were ones that asked the really intimate questions, like life-shaping experiences that never get talked about: (“We have experienced war”, “We have been in prison”), and those answers that repeated all those familiar patterns that you wish weren’t true — the ones that represent, I think, structural damage.  Overrepresentation of colour in answers about jail, violence, starting over.   Youth contemplating suicide.  Family structures (okay technically, 100% of married people on stage moved under the “Me” sign when asked who among them were in love. 100%? Shenanigans.).

Of course hard, unsafe questions were the ones which moved me closer to the edge of my seat while we waited intently for bodies to part in answer.  (“We have been lying from the start” netted not a small crowd of “Me“s). 

There was a general lightheartedness to the evening, all told.  Lots of questions and stories told by all “kinds” of people, and lots of good-natured recognition of selves in others.  I suppose this was the lesson here — how intensely human it is to want to identify with the folks on stage. 

BLDG//WLF posted photos of Isabelle Hayeur’s great installation piece on East Hastings last year.

via nevver

These posters by Jonathan Guy have been making the rounds — an ode to the lovely Subway Font!

I like the aesthetic of the black and white ones, but love that the colour poster documents the station signs still using the original typeface.  The history and mess of typography in the Toronto subway are detailed in this excellent paper by Joe Clark, Inscribed in the Living Tile.

Lost the text of my last post in the wake of Tumblr’s growing pains. The Paris map handcut is by studiokmo, an architect with an xacto blade or two.  She’s got her own etsy shop, but I spotted her first while strolling through Supermarket.

I liked the Paris and Baltimore handcuts best.  Lots of her work look nice, but my bias towards street grids clearly prevails.  

Singapore would make for interesting wall decor, all organic and coral-reefy and such, but the contoured quality of these make it hard to really imagine the experience of moving through the city — which is the nicest thing about maps, if you ask me.  

Just got back from Portland, a city with the urban planner’s dream street grid — the blocks are small, the building heights varied.  When I’m not being awed by Gotham-style vistas of unrelentingly straight boulevards lined with supertall buildings, this is exactly the kind of downtown I like to navigate.

So wildly different from the neighbourhoods outside Portland’s downtown — take a look at the grid analysis from the Portland Plan.

The neighbourhoods really form the heart and character of the city, but in many ways it seems to be done in the absence of what we think of as “best practices” in planning.  I’ve picked up on the licensing and zoning before — in conjunction with cheap real estate, Portland’s countless liquor licenses and strip clubs (and the potent combination of both: the State of Washington doesn’t allow stripping and drinking to happen in the same place (!!), which drives some traffic across the state border) are accompanied by an excellent range of incredible happy hours, great food and innovative bar/restaurant/entertainment venues.    

The grid is another thing. Downtown Portland is pretty beautiful, and has done a great job with their public art, infrastructure and several of their parks and public spaces — but it still doesn’t really capture the essence of what makes Portland special.  

It really hit me on this trip that Portland is really still a city made for driving — being in a car at least speeds up travel time through all those curiously uninspired spaces between the awesome walkable neighbourhoods, and allows for odd one-off commercial spaces in the heart of a residential area to flourish.  

Next trip, I think it’ll be time to check out what East Portland is all about.

Grid links I’ve found interesting and/or useful:

• Planetizen article on the failings of Portland’s grid/poster child
• The Portland Plan
• The Portland Grid Project, a collaborative, stream of consciousness-style documentary project spanning nine years and about 20 photographers.
• Bricoleurbanism’s discussion of urban grids from around the world (including a grid-of-grids comparison):

a website of little hand-drawn maps!

Berliner Jan Vormann’s magical  Dispatchwork series, which spans cities across the globe.

Here’s another, across from Penn Station in NYC:

(via randomspecific)

Everything Is Going To Be Alright, Martin Creed.

east van cross, ken lum.

nevver:

Projection