C215 Stencils in Barcelona

Stencil artwork by C215 of Paris.  I'll tell you a secret: C215 probably stands for Cris.  L337speak veteran up in this.

via juxtapoz

M.I.A. Bad Girls

I was fairly dismayed when I saw the peerless Maya Arulpragasam selling out on Super Bowl Sunday with that old lady who has sold lots of records, but then I saw this video and it made me feel much better. After her unanimously panned 2010 album MAYA, this British Tamil sounds like she's back to her best.

 The video is by Romain Gavras and is exceptional in that it combines the desert, dirty rap, and German automobiles on two wheels. Four minutes well spent.

Y-3 Honja Low

Here's a look at the new Honja Low sneaker from the collaboration brand by Adidas and Yohji Yamamoto, Y-3. I'm of the school of thought that denim is really only fit to be worn on the legs (unless there's a dire emergency, like having four legs and no appropriate attire for the two that are located where your arms should be), but these beauties have been done up tastefully (and well they should for $250, because you could buy two pairs of designer jeans or a denim tent for that price).

Like: the stylish bronze finish on the leather. Bosh, as they say in certain parts of the white world.
Dislike: giant Y-3 logo on the heel and tongue (click on the P & B link below to see better pics, it's all Flash and I'm lazy so the one up top is all you get).

Available at Park & Bond for the aforementioned exorbitant price of $250.

via hypebeast

Hokusai Manga

For the art lover, Japanophile or shameless hipster in your life, consider this ponderous 970 page tome containing the 15 separate sketchbooks, or manga, of Edo-period illustrator Katsushika Hokusai.

Best known for his masterpiece The Great Wave of Kanagawa, which is my favorite work of art bar none, Hokusai painted and made woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e style. His great inspiration was Fuji-san, or Mt. Fuji. His collection of prints titled Thirty-Six Views of Fuji-san--of which The Great Wave is a part--is the most famous series of prints in the genre.

The book itself is a collection of his sketches and drawings, which start with a demonstration of his style of geometrical construction, which is basically exactly what it sounds like: building a drawing based on geometric shapes.

The rest of the pages are filled with his playful and seemingly effortless sketches and prints.

This is a real bargain over at Amazon for $43.

via CoolHunting

People People Speaker

So I was going to write a big HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE 2011 in all capital letters and make it like six pages long with a bunch of cool stuff in it. I didn't end up doing that. Instead, I'm going to make a bunch of separate posts, because my SEO consultant told me that keeping one's blog updated is important for the current Google search metrics, which in turn are important to boost traffic. To be honest I don't really know why I care about that given that I don't make a red cent off this space, but everybody likes to be noticed I guess.

Anyway, the People People Speaker will be my next audio purchase if it is reasonably priced. Actually, it has to be reasonably priced AND the box has to be able to open up so I can clean it, which I totally could because the speaker is assembled at home "IKEA style."

Also, my friend Glenn said that he could see a cat ending up in there at some point, which is probably true. I've included a picture of my cat at the bottom of this post for your review.

The speaker operates via a wifi connector and is designed to "blend in to any living room out there." Oh, and they practice sustainable shipping, so, hey hey!

Anyway, as you could infer from the above, price is TBA. The website for the project is located beyond this hyperlink.



via uncrate

AVICII

Minneapolis! You must see this man on the decks. January 6 at Epic. Tickets here. I'm just a fan, not a schlepp. This is good music. I wouldn't even tell you about it but it just so happens I have my tickets already, so we're good. You're welcome.

Art Deco Superheroes by Grégoire Guillemin

I'm a pretty big nerd. When I was a kid, it was all about Star Wars, video games, and comics. I'm also a bit of a designophile, particularly illustration and architecture. If you've looked at even the first page of this blog you probably picked up on that, rendering the above a statement of the most redundant variety, but words are necessary to take some of the pressure off of the images and video, and to prove that I'm not an entirely lazy creature.

Anyway, illustrator Grégoire Guillemin re-imagines some recent stars of the big screen in some beautiful illustrations. I'll just plop my favorites down here and you can have a gander. Available for purchase at the artist's website.



via io9

Landscapes by Dustin Farrell

Wow. Two out of the three parts of Dustin Farrell's photo/video/whatever project titled Landscapes. Made with a Canon 5D2 DSLR, "every clip is a RAW image sequence (5616 x 3744) that I rendered out as a 1080P 23.976fps Quick Time movie. The motion control is achieved using servo motors," according to the artist.

The shots were mostly taken in Goblin Valley State Park in Arizona. You'll probably notice some other prominent natural monuments in the two sequences as well though.

Wow.

via highsnobiety

Star Wars Remix

I'm a greedy, limelight hogging bastard and I dislike giving anyone else's blog credit for being sweet, especially in its own post, but I really have to give it up to Star Wars Remix, which features DIY creations based on themes or characters from the movies. A few samples from the site follow.

The Chewburger, by Charlton Yu of Everything Burger

Jabba the Meat Puppet by Scott Williams

Noah Scalin's Aspirin Troopers

This kind of free expression and adaptation of the Star Wars universe is a key element of keeping the franchise a part of the social fabric of my generation. It becomes more and more necessary with each passing year largely because George Lucas, who is jealously milking his greatest achievement for every last penny it can produce by churning out an ever more astonishing array of absolute crap, is slowly pushing away the core fans of the franchise, which is really quite sad.

There are, of course, things that have been extremely well done in the past, and even more to come in the near future, but the disappointment of the three prequel films ans subsequent glut of unimaginative and poorly conceived content still festers like a credit-sized canker in the palette of most long-time fans.

Anyway, my nerdraging aside, I look forward to seeing if SWR can keep up the content output in the years to come. Mostly because I've kind of failed to do so and seeing them spiral slowly into nothingness would bring me secret joy. Cheers!

Universiade Sports Center

Universiade Sports Center is a massive multi-venue sports complex in Shenzhen, China. Designed by GMP architects, based out of Germany, the stadia feature massive polygons which are illumanted beautifully at night. The site includes a park, ponds, and some other stuff I can't really descry from the map over at contemporist. Enjoy.


via contemporist