Lately, I’ve been doing a lot more traveling than usual. Of the last six weekends, I only spent one in Boston. I meant to blog about all my travels and other events but it was too difficult to keep up. So, here it is all in one post…
In spite of the fact that I had to give a big presentation first thing in the morning and that we got to Brooklyn several hours later than intended, yesterday turned out to be a huge success!
We got to Factory Fresh for ROA’s amazing solo show and took some sweet pictures with the new rig.
Then, with only minutes to spare, we sped over to the Brooklynite Gallery to catch the Dolk and M-City show, Eurotrash right before it closed for the day. Met some cool folks at the gallery and chatted a bit about street art, Banksy, Brainwash and all the work getting overwritten this week.
At this point it was too late to make it to the Blind Spot Lab as we had intended, so we headed over to see Faile & Bast’s Deluxx Fluxx Arcade instead. Grabbed some dinner with good friends, then back to the Arcade for another look.
From there we did a drive-by of the Brainwash show, which looks a bit ridiculous, and headed back to Westchester to crash.
Today, back at it again with Lichtenstein’s Still Lifes, Mr. Brainwash: Icons, Shepard Fairey: May Day and the Great Outdoors are the Woodward Gallery.
I recently decided to purchase all of the street art books in my Amazon wishlist. This turned into quite an endeavor because they all arrived at the same time and I found myself loaded up yesterday afternoon with over 38 lbs of stuff in my messenger bag (including the MacBook Air, iPad and u-lock). Here’s what was included:
To put the book together, Michael spent months on end creating and then pasting up in terrific spots all over New York, street art with each piece representing a single letter in the alphabet.
Broken Windows — Graffiti NYC documents the flowering of the graffiti movement of the post-train era, and this newly revised 2010 edition has been completely redesigned with 70 more pages and many new photographs from the era.
In the 1980’s graffiti was pushed out of the subways as the trains were cleaned once and for all. In the 1990′s, much of the graffiti action in New York migrated to the city’s walls, enabling the ‘writers’ to execute more refined and concept-driven large-scale pieces. By the end of decade, this new medium was being used to great effect.
Photographers James & Karla Murray took great pains to faithfully capture an unprecedented re-birth of the movement, documenting the most significant murals created between 1996 – 2001.
Broken Windows contains insightful interviews, an extensive selection of womens’ graffiti, and features the work of more than 180 artists from The United States, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Italy, and Norway.
Published 35 years ago, The Faith Of Graffiti, is a meditation of tags, marks, concrete and trains. Legendary photographer Jon Naar captured a moment in history with the eye of a outsider combined with the precision of an architecture and design photographer. Norman Mailer wrote a text that is perhaps more relevant today than ever before.
Until now, Faith of Graffiti has been out-of-print and completely impossible to find. But this month Faith of Graffiti as been re-released in an expanded edition with new cropping and additional photos.
In our minds, GRAFFITI WORLD is by far the best book ever to come out on graffiti and street art. The main reason for this is the sheer magnitude and quality of the photographs. They are amazing. The art on each and every page is absolutely stunning. Graffiti World sets the bar so high, that it will be hard for others to “one up” it. The book is so packed with art that it can take you days to absorb it all. We’re still going through it. So without trying to sound like a cheesy book critic, our advice to you is that if there’s one art book to get this winter, this is the one.
This updated edition of Ganz’s 2004 book features over 2,000 photographs of street art by more than 150 artists, including work by Os Gêmeos, a team of twins from São Paulo, Brazil, top; and Stormie, a painter and sculptor from Perth, Australia.
Spraycan Art (1987)
by Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff.
With 224 photos of graffiti from around the world, Spraycan Art chronicles graffiti writing in the United States, England, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. The book also includes an introduction by Zephyr and Revolt.
Also included is a glossary of spraycan and street art terms, including:
bite: to copy another writer’s style
chillin’: being out there and being cool.
king: the best with the most.
toy: inexperienced or incompetent writer.
The book is dedicated:
To the spraycan kings of New York City who, in a hostile environment, created and perfected a new art form and, by their example, excited the imagination of young people throughout the United States and across the seas.
If we had to choose only one art book to buy this year, our pick would be Tristan Manco’s latest work for Thames and Hudson, Street Logos. We’re absolutely blown away by how good it is. There are a lot of really good books out there on street art, but Tristan’s book is the first really great one. With Street Logos, Tristan has evolved his thoughts on street art first developed in Stencil Graffiti. He presents a series of artists in five separate sections – Signs, Iconographics, Logos, Urban Characters, and Free-Forms.
Manco’s colorful survey of this D.I.Y. subculture spotlights some seventy artists working in the service of an impulse that is variously subversive, ironic, pop, celebratory, and dogmatic. In this medium, recognition is everything, and Manco’s subjects are heavily influenced by the use of logos in advertising; the London artist Banksy terms his work “Brandalism.” Exuberantly inventive, they enjoy responding to, and even altering, each other’s work, to form what the New York-based artist Swoon calls a “community of actions.”
Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition
by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant.
Originally published in 1988, this update to the bible of the urban street-art movements comes in a large format (almost 12″x17″) hardcover edition with huge, vibrant centerfolds of full-car pieces.
With 70 additional photographs, and a fresh introduction and afterword, this collector’s edition illustrates the passion, creativity and resourcefulness of unlikely kids inventing an art form destined to spread worldwide and spawn the present-day street art movement.
Artist Caledonia Curry is known as Swoon to admirers who follow her work on streets and in galleries all over the world. She is perhaps best known for the life-size prints and figural paper cutouts she has pasted on walls for the past ten years, each portrait taking on a new life as it is slowly destroyed by the elements. Much of Swoon’s work is like this—beautiful and powerful, but ephemeral.
Swoon’s projects are often grand in scope, requiring weeks of preparation and huge numbers of collaborators to make them a reality. And then they disappear. Her art collective, Toyshop, was known for organizing massive street parties and demonstrations in New York City that were elaborate and dynamic, but fleeting. Her most recent focus has been on armadas of boats fashioned from scavenged junk and then launched by crews of craftsmen into the Mississippi and Hudson rivers and the Adriatic Sea.
This book captures Swoon’s work—her portraits, boats, installations, and parties—and presents them with reflections from collaborators and colleagues. Deitch Projects owner Jeffrey Deitch provides an introduction to the artist and her work, and other contributors include: culture critic and curator Carlo McCormick, Nonsense NYC founder Jeff Stark, journalist and Toyshop-member Rollo Romig, gallery owner Thomas Beale, and playwright Lisa D’Amour. Swoon herself writes the captions and the essay for her Miss Rockaway project.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Still Lifes brings together more than fifty paintings and sculptures from notable private collections and museumes worldwide. In addition, it includes a number of rarely views Still Life drawings, maybe of which are precise sketches for the paintings and sculptures.
The last exhibition at Deitch Projects (before Jeffrey Deitch heads to CA to take over as director of the LA MOCA) features new work by Shepard Fairey.
5/11/10 – 6/1/10 @ Barneys New York windows on Madison Avenue and 61st Street
Aakash Nihalani, Darkcloud Eames Inspirations
Curated by Billi Kid and Luna Park and in support of Operation Design, some great street artists design one-of-a-kind versions of the Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair.
Immediately following his first solo show in London at Pure Evil Gallery, Belgian artist ROA presents his first solo show in NYC at Factory Fresh Gallery.
Ever since I got the iPhone sometime last year (okay, I admit, it was June 29th, at 6:25pm), more and more of the tools I use every day have moved to the web.
I have migrated virtually all of my email to five separate Gmail accounts (3 of which are Google Apps domains): private/personal (family and friends only), public/personal (mailing lists subscriptions, website registrations, etc.), Alienwebshop business, Broad business and an account just for old domains and addresses that are now 99.9% spam. The move to Gmail was made possible when Google finally released the IMAP feature last year, which made it easy to import messages from all of my old accounts.
The benefits of moving to Gmail (from IMAP servers that I managed myself) have been huge!
First, of course, has been the spam filtering, which is amazingly accurate. Then there’s the search capabilities, which are an enormous improvement over my previous mail client, Apple’s Mail.app, particularly when you consider that I have literally hundreds of thousands of messages going back over 14 years! That, coupled with the custom filters and colored labels makes it really easy to find whatever message(s) you might be looking for with Gmail.
I can still access everything with Mail.app just like I always have, but I hardly ever do except to move messages between accounts. I prefer the rent a car bulgariakeyboard shortcuts that the Gmail interface offers, as well as the search, threading and support for multiple (colored!) labels. Even though I mostly use Mail.app from the phone, I’m getting more and more comfortable with the new Gmail iPhone app, which has several features the built in mail client lacks.
Calendars:
I also started using Google Calendar for all my calendaring needs sometime last year and have totally fallen in love with it!
The best part about it is the sharing. Bailey and I have several shared calendars together. I have calendars for the work softball team and for a music mix club that are shared with everyone involved in each group. I can let some people just see the events (or just when I’m busy) and let other’s actually add or modify events.
With the custom colors you can set for each calendar and the bars in month view for events that last several days, Google Calendar is great to look at. On the iPhone, Google Calendar is much prettier than the built in calendar, though both will let you create new events and neither allows you to modify them.
In order to get all the events into the iPhone calendar I simply subscribe to each of the calendars through Apple’s iCal. Then, all of my Google Calendars are available in iTunes for syncing to the phone. This is a one-way sync from Google to iCal and doesn’t let you create events on the computer or the phone. All events must be created from Google Calendar. To get around this, I created a shared calendar in iCal and subscribed to it from Google Calendar, but I’ve never had to use it.
Todos:
Another important tool that I use every day is a todo list. Unfortunately, neither Apple nor Google offers an application for managing a todo list. Thank goodness for Remember the Milk! RTM is a web-based task list application that employs tags and tag clouds, as well as several great search features and keyboard shortcuts for most of its functions. It also provides offline access with Google Gears.
Integration with Google Calendar adds a little RTM drop-down menu on each day showing which events are due. A mach zehnder modulatorFirefox plugin for integration with Gmail provides an RTM menu to the right of your inbox, making it feel like it’s all one application. Integration with Twitter adds the ability to create new events and receive notifications from any Twitter device. Of course, RTM also provides a fabulous iPhone application, which provides most of the functionality of the standard web app as well as a great look and feel.
More:
The list goes on. I’ve been an avid user of Google Reader as a newsreader for a couple of years, now available in a new iPhone version. I’ve recently begun the process of migrating all of my Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to Google Docs, also available on the iPhone. I’ve also began managing my finances (checking/credit card accounts) with Wesabe, which again, has a custom app for the iPhone.
I’ve also recently started using a MacBook Air, so it’s nice to be able to access everything from that without having to worry about where that file I was working on is stored or which computer has my most up-to-date Quicken file. The more I take advantage of these online applications, the less work it is for me to manage and the less it matters where I am when I’m trying to be productive.
Before I got the iPhone I hardly did anything with my phone other than make and receive phone calls. Also before the iPhone, most of the applications I used every day ran locally on my computer and that required me to always have it with me to be productive. Now it doesn’t matter where I am. I can be productive from anywhere. I’ve finally gone mobile!
I’ve decided to get a second BMX. After a year and a half with my flatland bike, riding it nearly every day, I’ve realize that what I really want for daily use is a street bike.
For the uninitiated, a flatland bike is smaller (shorter top tube), has two sets of big grippy alloy pegs, front and back brakes with a rotor, and is generally several pounds heavier than its streetly counterpart. It’s made for flatland riding, which you do in a nice, well, flat parking lot and which involves lots of rolling, spinning and bouncing type tricks. The bike is never much more than an inch or two off the ground at any time. It a also has a smaller gear ratio, which makes getting going very easy but makes going fast very hard.
Since I only got the bike to do flatland tricks, it was the perfect choice at the time.
A street bike is made for street riding, which involves manuals (think “wheelies”), jumping things (curbs, stairs, ledges, benches, railings, ramps and what have you) and grinding stuff (again, what have you). This involves being in the air at times and sometimes landing on hard things from high places. As such, a street bike is big and strong but tends to be very light. It might only have a pair of pegs on one side (or only one peg or none depending on your riding style), only rear brakes (or none depending on style) with no rotor and a slightly larger gear ratio (though still a small chainwheel for good clearance) which makes higher speeds easier to maintain.
I ride to work every day, even longer distances on occasion, and I absolutely love to jump things, having something light and fast is what I need for daily use.
Rather than build my own dream bike, which could apparently cost me nearly $1500 (yeah , I already priced it out on Dan’s Comp), I’ve decided to buy one of the many fabulous complete bikes that are being released to the market over the next couple of months by so many BMX companies. Of course there are a million choices, including brakes (rear or none?), color/styling, weight, price, etc. But what I’ve been struggling with the most is the rear hub.
The hub is the part of the wheel in the center which connects to all of the spokes. In the front, it’s job is to be strong, light, small and to hold some fast bearings and an axle. In the back, however, it also carries the driver, which is pulled by the chain and ultimately makes the bike go. Over the years, I’ve encountered several distinct kinds of rear hubs.
The simplest kind of rear hub and driver setup possible is the fixed-gear (“fixie”), traditional on track bikes and popular with bike messengers the hipsters of today. This is what the very first chained bicycles used. With a fixed gear, the pedals are always moving in the same direction as the rear wheel is moving, so you can never stop pedaling as long as you’re moving. You don’t need brakes because you can use the force of your legs against the rotation of the pedals to slow it down (think “Big Wheel”) and you can pedal backwards. Of course, a fixed-gear hub has no place in BMX because it would render nearly all tricks impossible (prove me wrong, please).
On my very first bike, a blue and yellow BMX, I had a rear hub with a coaster-brake, which allows stop pedaling while the bike is moving (freewheel), but has a brake which engages as soon as you backpedal (after a very short rotation). When bike rolls backwards, the pedals can stay in place until you apply the brake. However, this type of brake is now mostly only seen on low end kids bikes, beach cruisers and the like. I never see coaster-brakes in BMX anymore, probably because they hard to maintain and they can lock at very inopportune times.
On my second BMX bike, a white 1987 GT Pro Freestyle Tour, I had by far the most popular BMX hub, the freewheel. This is the one that lets you coast without moving the pedals and lets you backpedal without applying the brakes. When the bike rolls backwards, the pedals go backwards along with it. This means you can do tricks rolling backwards but you have to make sure to pedal backwards a little faster than the bike until you’re ready to go forwards again. Most bikes I find have this type of hub and it’s the most affordable.
On my third BMX bike, a custom built 1987 Haro Master, I had ACS RL (Osborn) Edge wheels that had a new-fangled (and rarely seen since) “freecoaster” hub that allowed you to switch it (in less than 2 minutes by turning a couple of screws) from freewheel to coaster-brake. In addition, you could roll backwards as long as you wanted without having to backpedal. This made for a long of really interesting tricks, but was way before its time. As far as I made, this hub was not made past the late ’80s.
My current bike, a dark grey 2005 Haro Master M7, has a freecoaster hub, but today this has an entirely different meaning. There is no brake in a current freecoaster. You have the traditional freewheel but you can also roll backwards without having to backpedal. After a portion of a forward rotation (1/4 or so), the hub engages and you are “back in gear.” This allows for what is now an entirely new and thriving area of BMX street involving backwards rolling tricks (manuals, jumps, grinds, etc.) where the pedals are kept level the entire time. However, it also introduces what turns out to be an annoying lag when first pedaling forward, but I guess you can get used to it. I pretty much have.
So with all that the real choice is between the freewheel hub or the freecoaster hub (though on a totally separate note I’ll be honest that I’ve been regularly drooling over some of the fixed-gear bikes I’ve seen lately and crave one of those as well). I could get a complete bike with a freewheel and replace the back wheel or replace the hub, but that’s a pretty expensive and/or complicated upgrade so I want to make the right choice from the start. I could always decide that I have a freecoaster already on one bike so I’ll get a freewheel on the other, but I really think that the street bike is where I’m most likely to use the backwards rolling the most. I probably won’t regret getting the freecoaster on the new bike, but it drastically reduces the options for complete bikes.
I am now awaiting all the new 2008 BMX completes to be announced at Interbike, which takes place this week in Las Vegas. From that I will make my selection.
