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

La Supercopa de España 2011

Professional sport is, at its very core, an extremely competitive and spontaneous act of theater: it is entertainment. One of the most entertaining spectacles in all of sports comes from my genre of choice, football (soccer). One particularly fine example originates on the Spanish portion of the Iberian peninsula: El Clásico between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

The intensity of the rivalry between these clubs goes beyond competition in the Spanish league, where Madrid have won thirty-one league titles, eighteen Copas del Rey, and nine Supercopas versus Barcelona's twenty-one titles, twenty-five Copas, and ten Supercopas. It also represents far more than a battle between two of the greatest sides in European football, with Madrid having raised the European Cup nine times to Barcelona's four. This confrontation is, at its very heart, a war. A war between the ancient realms of Castile and Aragon, between España and Catalunya, between the Capital and the Province.

So the plot is set, but even the finest drama can be butchered by poor execution (Mel Gibson's Hamlet, por ejemplo). Fortunately for the audience these two sides provide not only the choicest venues in the Santiago Bernabeu and Nou Camp, but the cast...oh my, the cast. Between the two teams, they boast the Starting XI of the World Cup-winning Spanish national side (minus that boy with the highlights who is lurking in West London), former FIFA World Player of the Year and Balon d'Or winners Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Kaká, and a supporting cast who would step into any other team anywhere else on the planet on their worst day. Here we have twenty-two men who are worthy to play out the tale.

The final details: Barcelona meet Madrid in the Supercopa for the first time since 1997. Typically a tepid affair (the Supercopa is usually no more than a pre-season friendly), these heavyweights made it clear from the first that this two-legged tie was going to be a statement of intent: for Madrid, it was to be a signal that Barca's dominance of La Liga (three consecutive titles) was at an end; for Barcelona, it was an opportunity to show that the finest football team ever assembled was not about to wrap up its march into history.

I present to you a drama in two parts: La guerra de la Supercopa de España...

First Leg: Real Madrid 2:2 FC Barcelona


Second Leg: FC Barcelona 3:2 Real Madrid


In the end, Barcelona overcame a spirited Madrid side to take a 5:4 aggregate win and claim the silverware over their bitter rivals, but not before a bench-clearing brawl which saw a certain Portuguese manager give a player on the opposing team what appeared to be... a Wet Willy? Weirdos.

Força Barça! Hala Madrid! Viva El Clásico!


images via marca.com and as.com

Move, Eat, Learn

These three short films by director Rick Mereki were commissioned by STA Travel Australia, the Oz equivalent of the venerable student travel agents of the same name here in Amurrica. The films are titled Move, Eat, and Learn. The music is by Kelsey James. The description by the director:

3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage... all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ....into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films.....

= a trip of a lifetime.

Truly, three amazing pieces. Enjoy!

o hai.

So, my loyal readers, I have returned from across the mighty Pacific to my previous life on the North American continent. It has been an extremely painful adjustment, to be quite honest, and is one that is ongoing. Hopefully I can manage to settle back in over here soon, as my angst isn't exactly a creative tonic most of the time.

As an expert blogger, I can tell you that this type of mental calisthenic requires serious training and commitment, as well as available time in which to capture your muse on the page. I can also tell you that I possess exactly one of those requirements and look unlikely to pursue any more at present (I'll leave you to guess which one I mean).

This is all a very long-winded and whiny way of saying that yes, I'm back, but no, I probably won't be churning out posts like so much stomach bile. Anyway, I promised a Bali write-up, and that you shall have when it's all finished.

Until then, keep an eye out for random posts about random things, and dig this track by M83 titled Midnight City: