mister lister

unquestionably the greatest production company logo known to mankind. thanks to D. Wein for putting this masterpiece up on the utube. i could watch it on loop.



be sure to check out breaking upwards in spring '09

rainbow apocalypse album artwork

ELP (sister of ASP and of neon gold fame) has a new visual blog, byzantium, featuring her own patterned artwork.










About: Database of Color

Newest Series: Database of Color

This series was directly inspired from Victoria Vesna’s book “Database Aesthetics; Art in the Age of Information Overflow”.

“Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art…the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.” (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/V/vesna_database.html)

People use data as a way of trying to ultimately understand and control an environment of information. Vesna provokes artists to explore projects that represent different modes of databasing the self . How does one compile small and seemingly unrelated pieces of information to present a new form of a whole and a new way of relating all the parts? This new series of artwork “Database of Color” explores these questions by creating a database of the self and mind through my personal interpretation and relationship to color. The various geometric patterns represent visual databases of color (a network of relationships) within a pre-constructed host site (the pre-registered lines/boundaries) which ultimately serve as a synthesis of my personal history, experiences and influences of color that have shaped my relationship to art.

These designs thus represent my own relationship and categorization of information. They become an individualized web of identity, history and creation. Within the boundaries of the interface I organize a new way of clarifying the information. Vesna claims that the primary components of a database are navigation, organization and retrieval. My designs, though seemingly random, are in fact composed of several webs of patterns that are echoed somewhere else in the overall makeup. As a result, to navigate through the image one must find the ways in which design and color are repeated through mathematical equation or to try and follow my own personal logic. In this way organization and navigation seem inextricably tied and retrieval becomes personalized. Vesna asks, “how do you represent information without dehumanizing it?” I believe this can be answered by how the information is constructed and through the process by which it is organized. In this case using color as information and using information as a way to communicate a relationship to the self, a database of the self through color.

yo la tengo murders the classics

this (brilliant) album name back story almost tops the band name backstory:

re: i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass
"The title of the album is rumored to be a (paraphrased) quote by NBA player, Tim Thomas. Sitting on the bench together during a game, Thomas was caught on tape by the MSG Network in a profane exchange with fellow Knick, point guard Stephon Marbury. Thomas yelled at Marbury, "Everyone in this organization is afraid of you, but I’m not, and I will beat your ass."

also alternate track titles for yo la tengo's electr-o-pura:

"A Rehearsal"
"Sound Is Music And Quick Lights And The People Who Make Our Sound Their Own. That's When We're Really Turned On."
"It's The Start Of A Musical Dialogue"
"A Group Is Like A Jig-Saw Puzzle-Everything Must Fit Into The Groove"
"A Few More Beats-And Maybe, A New Sound"
"The Music Can Really Drag It Out Of You-If It Says Something"
"Waiting For A Break"
"Sometimes, Not Often, You Start A Number And Something Miraculous Happens, And Then The Scene Is Beautiful."
"The Sound Of A Guitar Is With Me All The Time-Or Am I With It?"
"A Break Like This Is Worth Its Weight In Publicity"
"By Now The Music Becomes A Little Like A Perpetual Diary"
"Play It Soft And Easy, Play It Hard-The Beat Still Comes Thourgh"
"One Of My Favorite Instruments-The Electronic Flute"
"Patterns Of Sound Are My Bag Right Now"

my alphabet is illusive

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well my kind's your kind

check out this link for some info on the map art below. some innovative cartographic stuff going on out there. thanks to ELP for sharing.

thats just the way it is

more sabia

raise high the roof beam carpenters

a while back, ND posted a few pics from the inaugural issue of uk-based imaginary zine. we knew they had good taste, and they proved it again today by naming longtime ND pal adrien debontin a featured photographer on the site. a few of our personal faves from adi's flickr:

i'm looking for the goddess. are you the goddess?

Dating Montage
Uploaded by smithy00101. - Independent web videos.

while you wait for the others (bradley)

if robin hadn't de-activated his twitter account due to overuse, we might have caught wind of this earlier....grizzly bear / sean pecknold collab:

hell of a lot of truth in it in my opinion...yeah, a hell of a lot of truth

and now i must own this

just come up with an idea and make it

cover article this coming sunday

supply and demand

this is on ebay right now. starting bid is $1,000. which seems about right.

athletics not aesthetics.

about a third of the way through herzog on herzog and there's a solid post coming somewhere down the line just listing the various gems of wisdom the man drops within. concurrent with reading i'm watching all his films that can be streamed on netflix. i'd never heard of the great ectasy of woodcarver steiner but it became an immediate favorite. a quintessential herzog film about an unsung hero/rebel. now trying to find a copy of the fantastic score by popol vuh. might have to make a homemade mp3 using garageband, a reminder of younger days spent recording tapes off the radio...check out some ski-flying.

the strangest little bird I'd ever seen

a day late to this party. a pleasingly perfunctory post.

the last thing hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers

this video, just posted yesterday, was put together for John Hughes when he received the showest producer of the year award in 1991. a fitting tribute for a man who was rarely seen since. (gems at 3:24 and 5:48)



some knowledge

sunshine or noir

william t. vollmann's epic new book IMPERIAL beats out infinite jest by a solid 200 pages or so. given that it took me an entire summer in college to tackle the latter, i have no idea when i'll find time to read the former. but sam anderson's review in nymag intrigues:

"I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)"

the nytimes offers a more informative, if less flavorful, synopsis: "The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost."

powerhouse books (a small publishing co. with an awesome storefront/gallery space in their DUMBO office) will release a companion set of vollmann photographs taken during his 12 years of research





(vollman's tome coincides with a new pynchon release (INHERENT VICE) partially set in recent ND haunt, topanga canyon. check out wired magazine's "unofficial thomas pynchon guide to LA")

have wild imaginings, transformative dreams, and perfect calm

aaron rose's in-croy-able roadtrip photographs take the lomo aesthetic to a whole new level. i am dying to know what camera and film he is using to create these.










the artist himself. the only thing that could make this series cooler would be if that were actually barry o.