Mad World - A Michel Gondry video for a Gary Jules song

The French director Michel Gondry started his career making musical videos. As an in-demand professional, he worked with everyone from Björk to Massive Attack, including Beck and The Rolling Stones. In 2001, he directed his first film, Human Nature, scripted by Charlie Kaufman. They collaborated again on 2004's Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar . He also made commercials for Gap, Smirnoff, Air France, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Polaroid and Levi - the latter making him the most highly-awarded director for a one-off commercial.

Gary Jules is an American singer-songwriter, best known for his cover of Tears for Fears single Mad World, which he recorded together Michael Andrews for the film Donnie Darko.

In 2004, the two artists got together to produce the promotional video of Mad World. The clip was done in a single-shot. Sitting at the rooftop of a school building in Brooklyn, Jules watches children choreographing simple, child-like pictures on the pavement: a car, a house, a boat:

Taylor's drawer I

In Spanish language, a cajón de sastre is the drawer where the taylor keep his instruments. In figurative sense, it is the drawer where everything that does not have specific place ends up. It is what we would call in English language an hotchpotch or an hodgepodge - meaning, a confused mixture or a motley assortment of things.

I have several taylor's drawers scattered around my life. Probably the most used is the kitchen one, where film rolls, garlic crushers, egg whiskers and blade sharpeners live happily together. It is also known as the drawer (have you seen the scissors? Oh yes, last time I have seen them, they were in the drawer!).

The most useful taylor's drawer I have is probably the one in the office, which is euphemistically called personal belongings. Last time I emptied it, I found almost everything you need to have in a work environment, but were always afraid to ask: make up, used boarding passes, tooth paste and tooth brushes, a comb, perfumes, stockings, hand cream, business cards, universal plug adaptors, spare pens, pain killers and so many coins of different currency that I could have bought lunch.

Inevitably, my blog also has also a taylor's drawer. It lists a few unclassifiable websites or blogs that for unspeakable reasons I am following. They could be marked as my favorites, but, helas!, that wouldn't honor them as they deserve.

Where I else but in a taylor's drawer could I have saved My milk toof? This blog is authored by Inhae, a California-based artist, who welcomed home a couple of milk tooth. Of, Anna the Red's Bento Factory, a blog about Bento boxes, that includes recipes? Anna's lunch boxes are so pretty that are almost uneatable. Or, Atlas Obscura, a compendium of curious places? Right now, the featured museum on this web site is the Icelandic Phallological Museum, known to have the worlds largest (and only) encyclopedic collection of mammal penises. And, last but no means least, were else could the Lunchbreath photostream be? This a flickster gallery where a Chicago based artist with a caustic sense of humor publishes his cartoons.

Source - some of these sites were found at the Huffington Post, others at Shooting the Cheese

A story of mixed emoticons

:-)

Thomas Dolby - from I Scare Myself to La Vie en Rose

Thomas Dolby recorded I scare myself in 1983, as a track of the album Flat Earth (1984). This recording was made on the tube around those days:

In 2001, Dolby was appointed Musical Director of the TED - Ideas Worth Spreading. He performed live La Vie en Rose, together with Rochelle Garnier in 2004:

I look forward to seeing what he will be doing in 2024...

How to be happy in business

found on Swiss Miss; source and full story on What Consumes me

IKEA - Bringing design to the masses

The aesthetic form is there for all. And not just for the museum

IKEA Catalog, 1979  

In a couple of weeks I might be off to IKEA in Munich. Not to IKEA, the store, but to IKEA, the exibihion at the Pinakothek des Moderne 

Democratic design - IKEA  is the first ever show about the Swedish company that has shaped the concept of bringing design to the masses like no other. As understood by IKEA officers and designers, democratic design means that having a limited budget should not prevent people from creating a beautiful home, with practical and sensible elements. This groundbreaking concept make them one of the most impressive success stories of the 20th century, and the world's biggest producer of furniture and decorative objects. It is was estimated that one in 10 Europeans are conceived in an IKEA bed.

 

A perfectly good example of bringing the design to the masses and democracy of design is the PS Jonsberg series of vases, created by Hella Jongerius.    

Hella Jongerius is a Dutch designer whose innovative creations are sold by high end design companies, shuch as Droog, Vitra or Donna Karan  She heads her own company, JongeriusLab, which designs and produces unique ceramics, textiles, tableware and furniture.

 

Jongerius is known for her attention to detail, and also the individuality she puts on each piece. Almost all of her objects involve handwork during the production process. “Normally my work is made in small editions, which gets expensive”, she admits  (the limited edition of the repeat big pot can cost something like EUR7000; a unlimited production, like the NON temporary vase can be EUR400).

For the Jonsberg vases, Jongerius wanted to integrate her love of handwork with the high volume production requirement IKEA imposes. “I was searching for a way to create something mass-produced while preserving attention to the richness of details,” she says. “I wanted to make a product that is uniform in shape, but that reveals that it must have been made in a traditional workshop because there is no industrial production technique for this particular ceramic process. This was possible because Ikea has manufacturing companies in China, which produce very high-quality handwork, but can also deal with large volumes”.

 “The 4 vases all have an identical shape, a familiar archetypal vase form, which for me is a blank sheet of paper on which I can design. Every vase has a pattern that represents a particular part of the world, and each pattern is also assigned its own ceramic technique. It reveals the great diversity of the ceramics world. Moreover, it shows four different characters and traditions that produce completely different vases, despite the fact that the basic form is one and the same”.

 

I am the proud owner of several of those vases, that were something like CHF50 each (about EUR40):

I love them!

Europride 2009 - There is a little gay in everyone

Imagine a rainbow flag flying facing the world’s most expensive commercial square meter. Imagine it flying next to a Swiss and a Kanton Zurich flag, overseeing the Old Town and Lake Zurich. I didn’t have to image it – I was there and I have seen it with this two eyes earth will swallow one day.

 

Since May 2^nd, the City of Zurich is the official GLBT* capital of Europe, hosting the 2009 EuroPride. The event will offer a whole month of pride activities, that will end on June 6 and 7^th, with  massive street festival and parade. Over 100 000 visitors are expected.

 

The theme for this year edition is Celebrating 40 Years with Pride. It commemorates the GLBT* rights movement that formed in 1969 after police raids on New York’s Stonewall bar. I certainly prefer the advertisement slogan - There's A Little Gay In Everyone: 

Although Zurich has the reputation of being very open and GLBT* friendly, an homophobic ultra right wing lobby tried to stop it. But, at the end even the Police welcomed the visitors.

A spokesman has commented on the ad saying that it is etwas klischiert, aber es ist ja Werbung: a bit of a cliché, but such is advertising. 

*lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people