so totally sick and rad.com

Language is a wonderful, fluid, organic medium that adheres to a structured logic of assembled units of meaning. Like design or architecture, the underlying structure follows laws of organization, geometry, temporality, and so on, yet the most exceptional writers, like the most impressive designer builders, have the facility and gumption to push, bend and break those rules intentionally in order to create something unexpectedly wonderful, visual, harmonic, or even discordant.

I love how sensual our brains’ connection to and interpretation of language is. Language is a symbology that stimulates visual, oral, aural, olfactory, even somatosensory systemic responses. Physical response through the interpretation of a symbol of meaning. Words trigger memory, associations, imaginations.

I often struggle with my place and meaning in the universe. What do I contribute? What value do I add, and what is my cost to the universal balance? Words are ideas. Ideas don’t consume physical resources, they don’t add physical waste. In today’s hip vernacular, words are carbon neutral, yet they have the power to build and destroy civilizations.

The Elephant in the Room

is a wonderful idiom and it induces that sensory response I relish. Big. Smelly. Feel the texture of its skin, the warmth of it. It’s trying to hide itself in the corner right up against your book shelf, behind your cherished mid-century modern lounge.

I have more than one elephant in my house, and it’s getting pretty damn crowded in here.

I went out foraging the interweb for cool, innovative, exciting art & design. I figured trendhunter.com would surely have some interesting, challenging, progressive, inspiring leads. What I found was a bunch of wank. So disappointing. 3d tattoos? weddings in igloos? a painting that turns into a table?!? hip, modular housing (aka shipping containers) ?!?!! come on….is rip van winkle posting this garbage or what? How 2002 can you get?

There is a universe of inspiring design out there and this is the best the supposed “trendhunters” can come up with. What a let down. I’m crying into my pillow.

SHELLHOUSE.org presents a simple shelter one can fabricate using a large piece of cardboard and a pen. Great design is functional, socially responsible, and aesthetically resonant. The beauty results from the perfect fusion of concept and function to create form, rather than setting out to be beautiful. The simple use of origami folds to create a shelter is a wonderful solution.

if you haven’t seen instructables.com and if you’re into DIY-ing everything, you need to check this site.
within, you will find a diy hack for pretty much anything you will imagine and some stuff you’d never dream of. there’s definitely plenty of useless and redundant, but equally as much very interesting stuff. And like any anarchist’s cookbook, some of the information could easily be put to sinister use (and I find myself wondering about the slant of the intentions of the people who post it), but as GI JOE and the gang always used to say, knowing is half the battle.

I was in a meeting today with a lot of intelligent, high ranking neo-suits, and the question was posed: If you could be doing anything (for a job), what would you do?

Half the people said, “this is pretty much it,” and the other half said things like “I’d have a nice little italian restaurant” or “a sweet breakfast joint” or “I’d be making furniture” or “I’d own a gite in france.”

To the first half of the people who claim to be doing their dream job, I can’t decide if I should be stoked for them that they’ve found it at such a youngish age, or if I should feel sorry for them that this job is their highest aspiration. My immediate response was more one of disbelief and sorrow for them.

To the second half (myself included) I wondered why we are all in this corpo path when our dreams lie easily within reach? Is it because those dreams fall outside the American paradigm of success? Is it because we are so tied to the belief that we won’t be able to “afford” our dreams unless we first stash away a few coins every month for years while being taken advantage of by C-level execs?

Most importantly, I wonder: “Now that I’ve made this observation, what will I do about it?”

hating on itunes

counting beans

I haven’t had toast in about 3 weeks. that’s monumental

This un-fully flared trailer shows nothing of the level of skating happening in Lakai’s Fully Flared video. Where most movie trailers capture the most primo footage and machine-gun edit it into a sizzling 30seconds of juicy goodness that the full-length film will never live up to, the full version of Fully Flared pisses all over it’s own trailer. The level of skating that happens in this film is, for me, so far beyond anything that’s been put out before. It also does an excellent job of making me feel shit about my own skating and while establishing a new paradigm for the next onslaught of skate heroes.

And no words can really service the brilliance of the first 2 minutes of this film. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil the fun, but leave it to the Girl crew to bring mad game.

i have the worst sinus headache in the universe right now