I finally got around to going to the LACMA (it’s only been 4 years that I’ve lived here).

John Baldessari has a multi-room exhibition in the contemporary art wing titled, “Pure Beauty.” A lot of it pokes fun at the silliness of the contemporary art world. I can’t help but point out that he sometimes falls into his own trap. Either way, as many bold artists’ works go, some of John Baldessari’s collection is really enjoyable…and some is simply not. See for yourself, at LACMA until September 12.

This wistful quote from Stephen Alesch speaks volumes about the spaces he and Robin Standefer create as architects and designers. Their firm Roman & Williams, is named for their grandparents, paying homage to another era. Together, they draw on the evocative moods, textures, and meaningful objects that linger somewhere between past and present. Their work is infused with memory and allows participants to connect with a more romantic and important time.

Alesch still renders all of their presentations by hand, a skill he has preserved and honed from an early age. Standefer evolved her skills as a painter into creating sets for the likes of Scorsese. As a team they have developed an approach to creating buildings and interiors that reveres craft and tradition, combined with a contemporary viewpoint. This unique vision has lead to a number of important public and private projects including the Ace Hotel, The Standard Hotel, and 211 Elizabeth.

via The Scout

We made a paper boat and sailed into the night.

Faye and I made good use of a rainy day this weekend. She constructed the little boat and I shot the piece at dusk with the 7D.

I think this is predicting a recurring event that shall take place: weekly vignettes by justin+faye?

Music by Sam Cooke.

*Ahhh, Rain*

Haley is a very good friend of mine and she’s made a name for herself up in Portland.

Check out her new show if you’re in the area. She makes creatures in all dimensions, just for you.

Haley Ann Robinson Redux PDX

Location: Redux: 811 East Burnside St. suite

Hungry Eyeball

Check out her BLOG

“We want to let  faces speak.”

Facity is a photo/art project in Berlin by Hannes Caspar and Alexis Vabre.

Learn about Facity

Facity Faces

Facity Flickr

Posted in art, photography Tagged: art, berlin, faces, facity, flickr, people, photography ]]> http://peaceinvisible.com/2009/08/25/facity/feed/ 0 peaceinvisible http://peaceinvisible.com/2009/08/07/endorsement-pulse-concept-by-teague/ http://peaceinvisible.com/2009/08/07/endorsement-pulse-concept-by-teague/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:47:04 +0000 peaceinvisible http://peaceinvisible.com/?p=728 ]]>

Design firm, Teague, has a concept out for their version of how Tron’s Light Cycles could be a way of the future.

Although it doesn’t exist yet, I endorse this technology as a way for urban cyclists to be seen/scene.

The system comes equipped with LED piping, lit handlebars and pedals, and turn signals.

Let’s get it done. Queue rich swedish buyer, now.

More on it via PageGangster

Originally designed by the Eames brothers in the mid-1950′s, the Lounge & Ottoman is still a striking contribution to the modern den.

Like a classic porsche or a rare wine, this item will have to be well earned with age.

So, dust off the old Iliad and take a seat, but you’ll most definitely fall asleep just seconds after sinking into this soft leather cocoon

Find vintage, if you’re lucky.

Find new @ Design Within Reach

My special other is a wizard with interior design. She inspires me in how I’d like to live in the home.

Since Domino Magazine went under, she chooses Dwell for her interior digest.

Not to say it is a bible, but more a supplement for guidance.

Oh, and it tells us poor folk how to get down, too…

Name: Kalie Garrett

Age: 18

Occupation: One of Flickr’s top young photographers

Style: Self Portraits

I’ve been heavily influenced by Kalie’s work lately. She has a lot to say about life (though too emo at times) and her work stands right next to it.

Check out her photostream

Check out her blog

Dear little Six – Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won’t be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time.How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?Oddly – as if six billion of us weren’t enough to be going on with – it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, innefable Being “somewhere up there”, an omnipotent creature whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand.That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.This sky god, it’s said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the singly mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces – junior dieties, avatars, gigantic metamorphic “ancestors” whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust; for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it’s only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.Many of these stories will strike you extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.

It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here’s something genuinly odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, lt has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race’s numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the races spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.
(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against sexually transmitted diseases.)

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. I don’t believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a look at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam’s present day “political arm”. The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan against Iran against Iraq against Saudi Arabia against Syria against Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There’s very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic NATO fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their “sphere of influence.” They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless – American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country’s Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city’s increasingly fearful Muslims.
The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in story books. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcess of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.
The ancient wisdoms are modern non-senses.

Live in your own time, use what we know and, as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things. As the song says, “It’s easy if you try.”

As for mortality, the second great question – how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?- it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves.To my mind, religion – even at its most sophisticated – essentially infantilizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us; the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things – female circumcision, to name just one – can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too can be ignored?(This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph,UK.)

Well, no, it isn’t, but the reasons for saying so aren’t clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended.

Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church and not the state.
This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it’s also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part; once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there’s no heaven, my dear Six-Billionth, and at once the sky’s the limit.

• Extract from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam.

(//This is also context fit for today’s struggles in the socio-political and tyrannical sphere. Take a look around…Iran is crumbling…N. Korea is pushing buttons…Iraq and Afghanistan are wasting away…And so many other nations are beginning to reach closer into the possibility that it allcould be for nothing. Nothing but a system of control and fear that keeps the dying machine from shutting down. Ah, Renaissance…//)

Thank you dredg for resurfacing this article for your art and our eyes//ears.