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The ultra-awesome international design collective eboy have finally redesigned and updated their site. For those not familiar with eboy they are creators of very fine pixel art and vector illustrations. I love the new design and it's so nice to finally see some of their newer work collected and presented together.
Yesterday my mother and I went to visit my brother in Baton Rouge. We had a nice lunch, went shopping for books (I bought Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions), and caught two movies in a row. This is something I hadn’t done since my most frenzied days of film watching, back when I worked at the cinema and watched 5-10 movies per week.
The first film of our double feature was Jonathan Demme’s crafty remake of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. Demme has remodeled Frankenheimer’s masterful original, a paranoid work that slyly illustrates the collision of Communist ideologues and their most ardent critics and what sort of disastrous impact that could have on the American political process, into a skillful examination of the political and social realities of our time. In doing so he rifts on the original but never covers it note for note.
After a brief prologue set in the original Gulf War, we move to the darkly proclaimed world of “Today”. Due to the announcements of Military casualties in Guinea, various references to multi-national corporations like MegaMart and also to the music of the opening scenes (if you’re an avid music listener you’ll know what I mean, no G.I.s were listening to French hip-hop in the first Gulf War) we know that Demme has set his film in an alternate world that mockingly mimics our own. The differences and similarities between our world and that of the film was one of the most enjoyable parts of the movie for me.
The master of funk, Rick James, has died. I think every time a white boy uttered the phrase "I'm Rick James bitch!" a little piece of his soul died.
Bjork’s new album, Medulla, consists only of vocally generated sounds. Every time I’ve read about the project I couldn’t help thinking, “She’s finally gone off the deep end, into the recesses of her eccentric Icelandic mind.” I kept expecting to hear some hokey cross between Zap Mama and Bobby McFerren. That is until I listened to the tracks Pleasure Is All Mine and Mouths Cradle today. Now I’m thinking that this could possibly be her most accomplished and amazing work to date. This just proves that, unlike Madonna, Bjork is a visionary artist that can fully reinvent herself in innovative ways that go beyond conventional modes of musical production. This is wonderful stuff and I will never doubt her again. The album comes out August 31st.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the greatest photographers of all time, has died. Some of his travel shots, war pictures and portraits are among my all time favorites. Here are a few links to his work:
http://www.photology.com/bresson/
http://www.afterimagegallery.com/bresson.htm
http://www.artnet.com/ag/fineartthumbnails.asp?aid=3702