A Deadbeat Summer

Swimming pools, beaches, thunderstorms, sunglasses, falling asleep in the park, and couch surfing across the states and back in a friend’s sister’s 1998 Honda with shoddy air conditioning. That’s what this mix is about. There’s still some good sunshine to be soaked up before the rains begin again. Maybe this one will last until then. Who knows. It’s only 27 minutes long.

Enjoy.

DEADBEAT SUMMER
1. Neon Indian – Deadbeat Summer
2. Fleetwood Mac – Everywhere
3. Kurt Vile – Freeway
4. Memory Cassette – Last One Awake (Friend Version)
5. Animal Collective (remixed by PhaseOne) – Daily Routine
6. Nite Jewel – What Did He Say
7. Coco Rosie – Happy Eyez
8. Empire of the Sun – Walking On a Dream

DOWNLOAD

Also special thanks to Baker for the album art photo

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Meeting Modernity Exhibition Tokyo!

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Unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this portrait photography series documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods.

This post marks the Tokyo opening of the Meeting Modernity Exhibition.
Details:

MEETING MODERNITY
OPENING: A Night of Néojaponisme
A night of presentations, discourse, music, and booze.
DATE: 31st of July 2009
OPEN: 1800 START: 1900
FEE: open charge (Nagesen)
PLACE: hybrid so+ba gallery
5-29-20 KYODO SETAGAYA-KU
TOKYO 156-0052
WWW.SO-BA.CC

Come on down to the infamous Hybrid SO+BA Gallery in Kyodo (Odakyu Line) for a night of revelry with the staff of Néojaponisme. A smattering of presentations by the editors of and contributors to the site will be accompanied by Funkmaster DJ Jean Snow on the wheels of steel.

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Two New Plazm Thread Artists Announced – Al Jaffee + E*Rock



We are happy to announce two new artists for upcoming Plazm Thread shirts.

#1: E*Rock (November 09)
#2: Mad Magazine’s Mr. Al Jaffee (for realz – January 10)

Subscribe now and receive both these shirts and four others including the current gem by Ed Fella. Peruse and purchase here: www.plazmthread.com

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About the artists:
E*Rock has teamed with Plazm on many projects in the past and we are honored to have his contribution to Thread slated for November. E*Rock is a multi-disciplinary artist and electronic musician based in Portland, Oregon who runs the record labels Audio Dregs and Fryk Beat and produces animated music videos with the Wyld File crew. Most often though his work finds itself home on various forms of music driven media such on the covers of numerous CDs, LPs, DVDs, concert posters, magazine covers and also his contributions to music videos and animation have appeared on MTV2 and The Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He has also toured the USA, Japan and Europe with a combination of his video art and electronic music.

His artwork has appeared in exhibits across the world from Hanna in Tokyo, LIttle Cakes in NYC, Impakt in Utrecht/Netherlands, Nu in Athens, CCA in Glasgow, Trudi in Los Angeles, Paris, Oaxaca, Chicago, Seattle, and Portland. His drawings and designs have appeared in books such as Radical Album Cover Art, This is a Magazine compendium and Dot Dot Dash; and featured in magazines like Res, Plazm, The Fader, Afterhours.

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Al Jaffee is a true legend! He is one of Mad Magazine’s cartoonists and has been drawing comics professionally dating back to the 1940s including titles for Timely and Atlas Comics. Jaffee is best known for his work on Mad Magazine’s “Fold-Ins,” which he came up with as a one-off idea. It is an amazing page that has an entirely different meaning once folded across itself. In addition to producing over 400 of those for Mad, Jaffee has worked as writer/artist on many other features including “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” Al still creates all the fold-ins by hand. A great profile appeared in the New York Times a short while back and is totally worth checking out.

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Cooper Black Swash Italic

Cooper Black Swash Italic, now available on MyFonts.

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Sucks.

Pedestal time… .

Sometimes we need to call out the folks practicing around us that do lame shit.

Problem #1:

Punctuation and grammar. Why doesn’t “the establishment” take graphic design seriously? Because graphic designers have no sense of the mechanics of language. One cannot poke fun at another if one cannot use punctuation properly. 

*Note: there is an extra apostrophe in the graphic above.

Problem 2:

Homophobia sucks.

It isn’t edgy. It isn’t ironic. It isn’t anything except fucking lame, Bunch Design.

Take potshots elsewhere. 

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Plazm Thread Presents Mr. Ed Fella’s Latest


Each month Plazm presents a new limited edition T-shirt design, once it’s gone, it’s gone. We call it “Plazm Thread.” This month’s shirt features a six color Ed Fella design that seemingly brings clarity to the economic collapse. The print will feature three colors pulled in split fountain, so each shirt will be a little different. Subscribe to get Ed’s T-shirt plus 6 more original, exclusive designs for 99 little bucks (that’s about 16/ shirt shipped to your door).

view / info / purchase: www.plazmthread.com

All subscriptions through November automatically enter you for a raffle with Plazm’s collector’s box set as a prize.

Concocted by Plazm with BuyOlympia.com

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Envisioning Information: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly


Lust put this together for De Volkskrant newspaper. It’s quite an amazing semiotic analysis and re-categorization of the sea of information we swim in.

The Oogle search engine queries Google search and determines the semantic orientation of each word in the returned results. To determine semantic orientation the program searches every word in the title and description of each result. By comparing the number of returned Google search results for each word to the ratio of returned results for a set of positive and negative words to the number of returned results for the positive/negative words paired with each word, the program can determine the degree of positivity or negativity. Essentially word score is determined by how often it is found paired with other words known to be positive or negative. Each word in the returned results is then colored by score, and the scores visualized per result title, result description, and then for the whole page, showing the overall semantic orientation as determined by Google. Oogle is a tool for digital anthropology in that it gives insight into the relationship between language and (primarily western) culture and shows how, at a certain moment in time, words are being read and valued.

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Blur – Rick Valicenti Mash-up of Farrah and Michael


Following up from my post a week ago in tribute to Rick Valicenti’s 1996 cover for Plazm #14, now you can download Rick’s mash-up book “Blur.” Made a week or so ago in response to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett’s passing and impact on our collective consciousness.

Download the pdf here.
Blur-RV.pdf

Posted in culture, Design, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson Memorial, Rick Valicenti | Leave a comment

The Potential of Web Typography


Firefox 3.5 is out now- go get that sucker!

The Mozilla Japan team asked that Craig Mod and I jointly write and design this demo page of what is now possible using Firefox’s new @font-face, a CSS rule implemented in Firefox’s latest 3.5 release which allows web designers to reference fonts not installed on end user machines.

(In other words: it allows web designers to store fonts on their server and reference them in CSS , regardless of what fonts the user browsing the page has installed.)

Look at it in Firefox- it is designed for that. It looks OK enough in Safari, but we’d rather have you see it in all its glory. Click around a bit and see what the future of typography for the web looks like….

We lucked out in getting Underware to agree to being our foundry partners in making this demo happen. The demo coincides with the release of their new typeface, Liza.

Original referring page on Mozilla’s site is here.

Thanks to Craig for dropping crazy hours with me on getting this project together. Shoutouts to Mozilla for their support, encouragement, and sheer radicalness!

Posted in graphic design, type design, Typography, web design | Leave a comment

Help Fight Corporate $ponsorship


Here in NYC, the parks department is threatening to sell the naming rights to McCarren Pool. The pool was named 200 years ago, in 1809,  is currently being renovated and is the centerpiece of a favorite artistic Brooklyn community. The community response to this shameless cash grab? PoolAid. Consider taking a minute to sign the petition and just as importantly, spread the word, the arts community is not for sale.

Posted in corporate greed, mccarren pool, pool aid | Leave a comment