Dinosaur ♥ Robot

Ah, spring. A time to celebrate love--the love of dinosaurs for robots, robots for dinosaurs, exacto knives for cardboard, and spray paint for bus stops.

Dinosaur ♥ Robot [vimeo via woostercollective]

Tumi Luggage

On sale tomorrow at Rue La La

Junya Watanabe X Levi's

The back of the pants is a standard pair of Levi's 501 but the front is made from a super soft, thin cotton fabric with printed pockets, fly and wear marks. The entire pants is lined with a striped oxford cotton that shows when you roll up.

That's right. The front is printed.

Junya Watanabe X Levi's

Knotts Berry Farm Preserved

1946 Concept Rendering for Walter Knott's Covered Wagon Diorama

One of the most successful American roadside attractions ever invented, Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, CA is about to get some honest-to-goodness appreciation.  The unusual amusement park which grew up around Walter and Cordelia Knott's boysenberry stand is about to be honored with a beautiful new book and a day-long event celebrating its history.

Sad Eye Joe startles all who peek 

in the window of Ghost Town Jail.

Many of the old-fashioned delights collected by Walter Knott still exist today, from a handmade bottle house to replicas of Tombstone's Bird Cage Theater and Philadelphia's Independence Hall - complete with a 2000 pound Liberty Bell.  What in the world could be better than spending a day with your loved ones panning for gold, watching someone spin thread from a box of live silk worms, and dipping your own candlesticks before sharing a dinner of Mrs. Knott's fried chicken, biscuits and pie?  Not a whole heck of a lot!

The ghost of Hangman's Tree concept art

Tickets are on sale - and going fast - for the big "Knott's Preserved" Event on April 18.  It will be a day of historical walking tours, panel discussions, the release of the new book - and of course - chicken dinner.  I can't wait!

Knott's Berry Farm Historical Event Reservations and Tickets

"Knott's Preserved" Blog

Bicycle Handle Bars

Pedalmafia is a bike store in Japan. I am not totally sure as I can't read any of it, but there are often interesting pictures of bicycle happenings, bikes that look like dirt motorcycles, videos of people skidding and lunch. Have no idea if these handlebars are practical or solve a problem that does not exist, but they sure look sick.

New 3T aero bar for World Track Champs "Sphinx" at Pedalmafia

Cardboard Record Player Recycled

Note to cardboard turntablists: you gotta get up pretty early if you want to introduce a throwback audio technology as new without sound artist/archive master Steve Roden calling you out on it. And even then, you'll only have a few hours, and that's mostly because of the time difference. Credit where it's due, people.

When New Things Are Actually Old [airform archives]

La Cage aux Folles Poster Evolution

At first I thought this was a roundup of historical La Cage aux Folles posters but it is all recent work done by SpotCo for a current revival. The far lower right is the final decision and I understand their requirement of flexibility in being able to use the image in many sizes and formats but, my goodness, there were some beautiful rejects. I like the Liquid Sky-style poster in the bottom row, second from the left. The money spent on this many iterations is stunning. Big business!

La Cage aux Folles posters at New York Times

Digital Sticker Photo Frame

I love this!

From Tokyo Mango:

Need a more stylish modern way to flaunt your sticker pictures? There's a new product from toymaker Takara Tomy that'll let you do that — it's called the Love Digi Furi Furi Photo Frame, and it's a small keychain/cell phone strap that doubles as a digital picture frame. It comes out at the end of the month, it's about $50, and it's already sold out on pre-order.

I am not entirely clear on how the sticker photos get onto this little device. Do sticker vending machines have USB or media card slots?

UPDATE: Our esteemed guest blogger Greg translated the Amazon page for us and it appears it is not sticker machine related, but a digital picture frame with photo sticker style borders. Pictures load via Micro SD card.

UPDATE 2: Well, what a crazy bing-bong world. I had tweeted about this cool little photo frame and commented that in a couple years they were going to be $10. @giddygirlie tweeted that the future was now! They are already $10. Minus the cool border making feature, which is key, but that price is still amazing. Cheaper than a USB cable. Thanks giddy!

Tiny Digital Picture Frame at Tokyo Mango

Dash Snow, artist

Life and Death of Dash Snow

Duchamp's Got More Urinals Than A Baseball Stadium

By shifting the definition of art from the thing the artist makes to the thing the artist sees or thinks, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, 1917, changed art for the rest of the 20th century.

Unfortunately for all his first generation of Readymades, the "originals" were promptly thrown out with the trash.

So when demand for Fountain picked up, Duchamp started authorizing replica/replacements. Two in the 1950s, one in 1963, and then an edition of 8 [plus 4 proofs] in 1964, which were actually not off-the-shelf urinals at all, but casts from an original clay sculpture ["the prototype"] copied from a photo of the 1917 original. So that's 17, which is how many Cabinet Magazine thought there were in 2007 when they tracked them all down. [I think the one above, (1964, 4/8), is the one I saw a few years ago in a collection in New York.]

Only it turns out Arturo Schwarz, the dealer who made the 1964 edition with Duchamp, had some extras--at least four--outside the official edition. And he's been shopping one around for $2.5 million. And the Duchamp Estate is pissed, no pun intended. OK, maybe a little bit intended.

Rogue Urinals [economist.com via @joygarnett]

Thomas Watson's Computer Collection Photo Archive

Wow, longtime Eames collaborators John and Marilyn Neuhart are selling some incredible things at Wright 20's upcoming Eames Auction, including this:

LOT 730: Computer Image Collection

USA, 1980s
43 binders; contents comprised of 35mm color and black & white slides, color transparencies, prints, Polaroid prints and photocopies

This image collection was compiled during the 1980s documenting and displaying the rare computing instruments (from the 14th century to the late 1950s) collected by IBM Corporation founder, Thomas Watson, Jr. The Computer Image Collection is the only color archive of the company’s collection which has, since Watson, Jr.’s death been dispersed among various museums and collectors.

Estimate: $10,000–15,000

Frank Lloyd Wright's Son's House's Carpet

David & Gladys Wright's house in Arcadia, AZ has long been one of the major sites for the pilgrims of his father, Frank Lloyd Wright. FLW built it for them in 1951 out of concrete block, with Philippine mahogany built-ins and all the furniture, from the beds to the kitchen garbage can, to the massive, custom-fitted, abstract rug [above].

David died in 2006 at 102, and Gladys died at 104 in 2008, and the granddaughters sold the house for $3.5 million. The new owner has put the rug up for auction at LA Modern.

It's pretty spectacular, as far as rugs go. The design is apparently based on some early bubbly murals from the 1920s. The wall-to-curved-wall shape is so odd, you'd be tempted to leave it as is, floating in your even larger space. But actually, what you'd really be tempted to do is to cut it down to something more "manageable" that "works" in your [obviously architecturally inferior] space.

At which point you'd better hope the Cult of Wright doesn't have fatwahs or voodoo dolls or anything, because they would be even more pissed than they already are.

Frank Lloyd Wright Rug Revealed! [lamodern]
Meanwhile, check out Mario de Lopez on that crazy jerry-rigged cherrypicker photographing that rug! [lamodern]

Recycled Reversible Venetian Red and Lake Blue Leather Cuff - Rib Cage Design

As long as I'm D+R'ing about wearable accessories, I'd like to point out these fantastically designed, handcrafted (beautifully presented and lengthy-of-name) cuffs by TrilbyMade. The colors, the stitching, the dual purposefulness, the rib-cage-y-ness of it...Perfection, I do declare.

Link

Houses on Rings

I want mine to come with a fancy monocle for peering inside too, please.

Phillipe Tournaire's Dream Houses on Rings

Oh Yes: Herzog & de Meuron Edition/Model On eBay

The collapse of New York City's luxury starchitect condo market has a Lucite lining:

"This box contains a numbered, limited edition interactive model of Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street, designed to be taken apart and reassembled as a means of exploring the tower’s radically innovative design. The building will contain 145 residences, each with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space, in a veritable cascade of houses stacked in the sky, blending indoors and outdoors seamlessly together."

The 20-inch model is numbered, 37/300. It includes a scale model of the Anish Kapoor sculpture that would have graced the building's entrance. The whole thing, including a pair of white gloves, mint-in-mint-box, is on eBay right now. $605 with a day and a half to go. Assuming the base is around 4" square, that comes out to around $5400/sf, just above the pre-construction price of never-gonna-be-built original.

56 Leonard St. Building Model (Herzog & de Meuron), auction ends Mar. 17 [ebay via curbed.com]

Some Guy Bought This Thing On The Moon

In 1970 and 1973, nearly thirty years before the US's Mars rovers, the Soviet Union landed two robotic explorers, Lunokhod 1 and 2, on the moon. They were equipped with panoramic television cameras and some other instruments. The hinged top was full of solar cells and opened up like a clamshell. They ran for months; Lunokhod 2 still holds the distance record [37+km] for extraterrestrial surface travel.

Contact with Lunokhod 1 [pictured above, but they look basically the same] was lost in the 1970s, but using laser ranging, they've sited Lunokhod 2 and its landing vehicle, Luna 21 with sub-meter accuracy. It's around the Le Monnier crater.

Which may be why the contractor, Luvochkin, felt comfortable putting title to Lunokhod 2 and Luna 21 up for auction at Sotheby's in 1993. Together they sold for $68,500, delivery not included.

The buyer was Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, the guy who started Ultima. His dad was an astronaut on Skylab and the Space Shuttle. He also owns a Sputnik. This is the craziest thing I've heard all weekend, and it has even been one of those weekends.

Lunokhod Programme [wikipedia]

Art Desserts at the SFMOMA

This afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I came across a series of clever artist-themed desserts offered at the SFMOMA's Rooftop Coffee Bar. There were many on offer, but these three were my favorites: Mondrian Cake, Richard Serra Cookies, and Jeff Koons White Hot Chocolate. Delicious and brilliant!

Hell Yeah, Brittania!

Sure, in Canada a Chesterfield IS a sofa, but in England, a Chesterfield is a sofa with a gigantic Union Jack on it.

Lot 389: MAHOGANY 'CHESTERFIELD' TYPE SOFA, Est. £600 - £1,000, Mar. 24, 2010, Christie's South Kensington, London [christies.com]

Venini Drop Light, c. 1930

Oh, hello, beautiful flying saucer/Olafur Eliasson/Frisbee-like Venini drop light! Why don't you drop your reserve price and come hang out at my place for a while?

Lot 218: VENINI DROP LIGHT, CIRCA 1930, est. £2,500 - £3,500, March 24, 2010, Christie's South Kensington, London [christies.com]

Hardware Sorting Box

Ingenuous drop box to take care of the rudimentary sorting of miscellaneous hardware. Very clever and a handsome solution.




Self-sorting Hardware Box on Craftster (Thanks, Rigel!)

Resurrection City: Shackitects Against Poverty

In 1968, Washington, DC architect John Wiebenson was asked to design an instant, temporary city for thousands of protestors organizing as part of Martin Luther King, Jr's Poor Peoples' Campaign.

Originally conceived as the City of Hope, Resurrection City was built on the National Mall in May, just weeks after King's assassination. Around 3,000 impoverished protestors built and lived in modular, triangular plywood shacks for six weeks.

Wiebenson and his students at the University of Maryland designed two types of shacks: a family unit and a dormitory unit. In 2009, while on a research grant to the Library of Congress, British conceptual artist Matthew Thompson tracked down and exhibited the original drawings, plus the Wiebenson family's photos of the construction of Resurrection City, at DC's Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library [which was designed by Mies van der Rohe]. Thompson also built a full-scale Resurrection City dorm shack, which he furnished with a Mies chair and the library's bust of King.



The top photo is from the nice little photoset of the exhibition the library posted on flickr. [flickr]
Here's a video podcast the library did with Thompson, chock full of vintage photos. [libsyn.com]

Mandala I (1972), by John McCracken

California-based artist John McCracken is best known for his glossy, hard, monolith-like sculptures leaned against the wall. But in the early 1970s, he also made a series of hard-edge, concentric mandala paintings, including this rainbow one, Mandala I, which first belonged to his New York dealer Robert Elkon.

It's for sale next week at Sotheby's, with an estimate of $30-40,000. Which sounds great, except that the seller bought it for $78,000 in 2006, nearly 10x Christie's original estimate. Last September, another Mandala sold at a North Carolina auction for just $17,000. I'm sure this reveals something deeply meaningful about the contemporary art market, but I can't imagine what.

Lot 248: Mandala I (to Anne), 1972, John McCracken [sothebys.com]

Photos from Bankrupt Polaroid Collection at Auction

Andy Warhol "Farrah Fawcett"

From New York Times:

In the 1960s about half of all American households owned a Polaroid camera, according to the company’s own estimates. And while the instant thrill of having a tangible record of first birthdays, prom nights, vacations and Christmas dinners was the driving force behind the company’s success, its revolutionary product also changed forever the way many artists worked. Ansel Adams captured some fabled images of Yosemite National Park using a Polaroid; Andy Warhol and Chuck Close took Polaroid portraits — of themselves, friends and celebrities — and William Wegman used a Polaroid to shoot his beloved Weimaraners.

Now some of those works, as well as conventional prints that Polaroid’s founder, Edwin H. Land, brought together in one of the most storied collections in photography — a visual diary of 20th-century culture — are going on the auction block.

Polaroid Corporate Collection at Auction

Robert Rauschenberg "North Carolina from the Bleacher Series"

Ultraman Art

Diamond Series: Ultraman
奥特曼
by Tibetan artist Gade
2008
Mixed media on canvas

Mimeograph Machine

In grade school, I was in charge of the school site council newsletter. The site council was a group of grade school stakeholders - teachers, parents and two students - that made limited decisions on how to spend a small, arbitrary school improvement budget. The newsletter was the mechanism of communicating our decisions to the rest of the students, teachers and parents. As a student representative, I communicated that my constituents requested basketball nets for the bare hoops but it was never done. In fact, I don't think we ever spent a dime, we just discussed endless possibilities. Politically, it was frustrating, but I sure loved that mimeograph machine. I can still smell it.

$9 Mimeograph Machine in eBay
Mimeograph on Wiki

Old School BMX Photo Set

A wonderful set of old BMX photos captures what will make you nostalgic for BMX bikes, Polaroids or both.

BMX Photoset (via Coudal)

MoMA's Franklin Gothic

An exhibition announcement for Corot-Daumier, The Museum of Modern Art, 1930

From MoMA:

The Franklin Gothic typeface is the primary influence for nearly all MoMA materials; it’s the basis of our logo (see the top of your screen) and our official font “MoMA Gothic,” which were both created by Matthew Carter. We were happy to see that MoMA used a version of Franklin Gothic as long ago as the 1930s. We found these printed materials in our archives while doing some research on our current identity.

We understand not all people are totally crazy typographic aficionados like us, but more often these days, casual observers are able to recognize subtle differences in typefaces that were once thought to be the domain of only the obsessed. Can you spot Franklin Gothic on the walls of MoMA, in our subway advertisements, or anywhere else? Look for the “two story” lowercase “g” with a unique “ear” to be certain!

MoMA From the Archives 3: A Brief Homage to Franklin Gothic (via c-monster)

Merry Christmas 1967, From The Robert Kennedy Family

Good googly-moogly, am I to believe that if not for Sirhan Sirhan, America would have elected as president the man who'd just sent out this awesome, psychedelic Christmas card??

It was an even more tragic loss than I'd ever known. Also, the card just sold for only $115.

see the rest: Robert F. Kennedy's Last Family Christmas Card [anonymousworks]