One of photographer Matteo Ferrari’s personal projects includes finding people who have been driving the same car for decades. He then arranges a photograph with the owner to match a photograph from when the car was purchased.

I came across this work via the blog of Yorgo Tloupas, the creative director and publisher of Intersection magazine, which I have been a fan of since I accidentally found issue #1 at a newsstand in Penn Station (NYC) back in 2001-ish. Back then, issues were imported from the UK and mine cost something like $11. Now, a subscription to this quarterly is $10, which is a great price for such a beautiful publication. [No, I don’t work for this magazine!]

Jean Prouvé has done some fascinating nearly-Bauhaus work, including this c. 1950 armchair. It does have Bauhaus school elements such as the sharp color contrast and choice of colors as well as the textural contrast of metal and Leatherette. I would very much like to admire this piece in person.

In 1996, Dave Soldier conducted a poll of 500 people on the Dia Art Foundation’s web site. He was attempting to determine what people “liked” and “disliked” in music. Based on the results of the poll, he composed two songs, The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.

Here are some notes by Soldier:

This survey confirms the hypothesis that today’s popular music indeed provides an accurate estimate of the wishes of the vox populi. The most favored ensemble, determined from a rating by participants of their favorite instruments in combination, comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style. The favorite lyrics narrate a love story, and the favorite listening circumstance is at home. The only feature in lyric subjects that occurs in both most wanted and unwanted categories is “intellectual stimulation.” Most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives.

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece.

This Solider’s work is an extension of a similar visual arts project by Komar and Melamid.

The Most Wanted Song (mp3)

The Most Unwanted Song (mp3)

(via Dial M for Musicology and Ubu)

Absolutely mesmerizing…

The Thomas W. Lawson is the only seven-masted schooner ever built and holds the honor of being the largest schooner even built. Additionally, it is the largest ever pure-sailing ship (a sailing ship without auxiliary engine for propulsion). That said, it failed to carry the amount of cargo that it was designed for, sailors likened the handling to that of a “beached whale,” and the boat was relegated to coastal shipping of coal instead of the mighty transatlantic voyages it was meant for. When it did finally set sail for London, it was torn to bits, killing 17 of the 19 crew members. Some of the bodies were found at sea in pieces.

Having seven masts appeared to be a point of confusion for the crew, and understandably so. Before construction, the masts were named No. 1 to No. 7 from fore to aft. The No. 7 mast became known as the “spanker mast.” At launch, the mast names were all changed to “fore, main, mizzen, spanker, jigger, driver, and pusher.” After launch, the names were “forecastle, fore, main, mizzen, jigger, and spanker.” Later, new naming systems were attempter, such as “fore, main, mizzen, rusher, driver, jigger, and spanker.” The crew preffered “fore, main, mizzen, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, and no. 7,” which included the likely confusion between the “fore” and “no. 4” masts. At some point, the masts were named by the days of the week with Saturday at the fore and Sunday in the aft.

The remains of this miserable craft can be found 56 feet under water at 49 53’ 38” N (lat.) and 6 22’ 55” W (long.) and can be visited by scuba divers under calm weather conditions. The broken-off stern with the spanker mast lies a few hundred yards southwest.

All in all, a beautiful tale of a ship with hubris.

This clock by Christiaan Postma is fantastic.

At first, it looks like a Sol LeWitt conceptual art piece. Then, you realize that some of the lines are turning to form the word of the hour. You can see the words forming and going back into chaos, which I guess tells you how far along you are in the hour. This part reminds me of the Mondaine “Don’t Rush” wristwatch. Let’s see this Christiaan Postma piece as a wristwatch! (…or an iPhone app.)

(clock found via Pan-Dan)

I have recently come upon the works of Olle Eksell. I think they are very beautiful and resonate with the aesthetic of Paul Rand. I haven’t seen much information about the artist other than the fact that he is Swedish by birth which made it difficult at the time to study graphic design as educational resources were lacking for this field of study. Eksell died in April 2007 and there is an obituary in English by AGI.

(via Happy Mundane)

I like the playful nature of Maarten Baas’ furniture designs. The most immediately striking designs are in his “clay furniture” series (bench shown below). These pieces have a metal skeleton and clay skin, which is applied by hand.

There’s also the “smoke” series which involves torching some wood furniture, then putting out the flames and coating the remnants in a clear epoxy coating. There’s a video of an exhibit for this series (Works->Smoke… sorry, can’t link to it!) It looks like he torched some pretty desirable piece of furniture, including the drawers by Tejo Remy for Droog…

The juxtaposition of the Clay and Smoke series is interesting unto itself. It’s like pitting a child’s mashed potato sculpture against a honed craftsman’s produce.

Photo by Al Ravenna and the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

In 1957, Mike Wallace conducted a two part interview with Frank Lloyd Wright, spanning topics from Christianity to modern art. It’s been made available by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and can be viewed here.

Here are Wright’s thoughts on certain types of criticisms of modern art:

Wallace: What do you think of modern paintings that some people say look like scrambled eggs, some people say that serious modern music sounds like a bad night in a boiler factory.

Wright: I’ve heard all those reactions, and don’t you think we all see as we are? And our reactions will be that reaction which is most characteristic of us ourselves. And every time we express a reaction of this sort, we give ourselves away. Somebody said that the museum out here on Fifth Avenue looked like a washing machine. That’s one of my buildings. But I’ve heard a lot of that type of reaction, and I’ve always discarded it as worthless. And I think it is.

Here are some prickly opinions on “the common man”:

Wallace: What do you think of the average man in the United States who has little use for your ideas in architecture, in politics, in religion?

Wright: Are you speaking of the common man?

Wallace: The average man, the common man, I think that you have sometimes called him part of the mobocracy—part of the mob.

Wright: He’s the basis of it. I think the common man is responsible for the drift toward conformity now. It’s going to ruin our democracy, and is not according to our democratic faith. I believe our democracy was Thomas Jefferson’s idea. I mean I think Thomas Jefferson’s idea was the right idea, but we were headed for a genuine aristocracy. An aristocracy that was innate, on the man, not of him…not this by privilege but his, by virtue of this own virtue, his own conscience, his own quality, and that by that we were going to have a rule of the bravest and the best. But now that the common man is becoming a little jealous of the uncommon man, as H. I. Phillips wrote the other day, “It’s getting to the point where” he said… “Well, what’s the punk got we ain’t got? He’s just got the breaks that’s all.” Now that’s going to ruin the common man, because the uncommon man is his vision. And I believe what you call the common man is what I call the common man, a man who believes in nothing he can’t see, and he can’t see anything he can’t put his hand on. He’s a block to progress.

Wallace: …a pretty fair share of our audience tonight either can’t, or doesn’t want to, understand modern art like the paintings of Picasso or modern music, let’s say by Stavinsky; possibly they don’t even know, don’t even want to or cannot understand you. What do you think of these people who either don’t understand or don’t care?

Wright: I don’t think they matter as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think they’re for me, so why should I be for them?

Watch the entire video here.

(via Signal vs. Noise)

Christian Dell was a German silversmith who is probably best known for his lamp designs through Gebr. Kaiser & Co. They represent the use of bakelite and plastics in products as early as 1929.
According to the Wikipedia page, Walter Gropius invited him to America after Dell was forced from the Frankfurt art school by the Nazis, but Dell stayed in Germany. Now… Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus school at Weimar before it was shut down by the Nazis. Gropius eventually found himself in America and became the director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design while remaining a practitioner with The Architects’ Collaborative - the first teacher/practitioner to direct the GSD. Suffice it to say that if Gropius asked me to move, I’d start packing. (Ok, ok, granted it was probably difficult to leave Germany at the time.)

But I digress. Look at the lamps!

(Photos from Phillips Depury, Objects in the Loft, and TFTM)

…oh, and look at this modified Dell lamp that I found at the glorious blog, Reference Library.