Category: Homepage

. . . the best compliment

Stuart Noble in The Agonist, one of my favorite blogs, did a post last week that I only became aware of this morning (I usually visit daily but . . .). It’s on the LeBron James Vogue magazine cover that I first blogged about a couple of weeks ago. It is very well done. He drew on more sources and wrote a very good post.

Feministe and Jezebel have posted thought-provoking pieces. And Bag News Notes, another one of my absolute favorite blogs, unbeknownst to me, had also already weighed in.

I am not sure if this changes anything, but it is available at Vogue. Here is the Vogue story. Other images in the package:

Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and model Caroline Trentini.

Rollerboarder Shaun White and model Daria Werbowy.

Model Raquel Zimmermann and Olympic discuss thrower Jared Rome.

Model Doutzen Kroes and Olympic speed skater Apollo Anton Ohno

The image below came from the comments section on the post.

Here’s how the commenter, Zuma, described how the image came about:

monster illo purposely uncolored

when lisa and i first got together, she told me about a book by john tigges that she liked, ‘monster’, so i drew an illo of it for her. the monster’s love for the female protagonist was about providing, hence i named the drawing provide. it was one of extremely few such files i did not color. god knows why. i just knew there was an unusual amount of factors at play in the piece.

Noble had this to say about that image:

Thanks for the observation

It’s an interesting sketch but I don’t think the emotion of your image resembles at all the negative cultural heritage which I argue the LeBron image represents.
stuart noble April 2, 2008 – 2:27am

Paranoland

Patrick Boivin is a French Canadian autodidact director. He started by drawing comic books 15 years ago, and quickly discovered that it was faster to tell a story with video. He gradually became a moviemaker . . . the palimpsest copped this movie from his YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PatrickBoivin).

I will post more in the future, if I have his permission.

For most of what you can see on his channel, he did the light, the camera, the directing, the editing and the special effects . . . For some of them, he also made the sound and the music.

Charlton Heston obits

As Moses
From the Los Angeles Times
The Oscar winner played Moses and Michelangelo, then later became a darling of conservatism by Robert W. Welkos and Susan King, Special to The Times, April 6, 2008
Charlton Heston, the Oscar-winning actor who achieved stardom playing larger-than-life figures including Moses, Michelangelo and Andrew Jackson and went on to become an unapologetic gun advocate and darling of conservative causes, has died. He was 84.

Heston died Saturday at his Beverly Hills home, said family spokesman Bill Powers. In 2002, he had been diagnosed with symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer’s disease.

From the Washington Post

A strapping figure of commanding presence, Heston seemed particularly suited to such roles as Moses, the biblical patriarch, Ben-Hur, the fictional hero of Roman times, and the ringmaster who presided over operations in the “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952).

As the title character in “Ben-Hur,” whose strength and pluck enabled him to escape slavery in a Roman galley and win a fiercely contested chariot race, Heston won the 1959 Oscar for best actor.


From The New York Times

When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.

Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.

The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off-screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a Constitutional guarantee — the right to bear arms.

His cold, now dead, hands

(Photo by the Associated Press) Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963. Left, he joined civil rights protesters picketing a whites-only restaurant in Oklahoma City in 1961.

Charlton Heston wasn’t always destined to be kook. He had one of those legendary Hollywood careers. He was a moderate who supported Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. And, more importantly, he used some of his Hollywood cred to back civil rights. He fought for good causes and was, even when he became more conservative, a truly compassionate one.

Heston even supported gun control, especially after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Which was why it was so jarring when he later emerged as the face of the National Rifle Association.

Heston has died at 84 and all most people will remember him for was holding that rifle aloft and screaming.

But, even at his most strident, true gun nuts questioned how truly committed he was, citing his earlier desire to rip guns out from their cold, dead hands after his buddies MLK and JFK were killed. I mean just because a couple of patriots (what else would you call people who know how to shoot guns?) killed your buddies isn’t reason to go soft in the knees.

We’ve got a militia to organize here. If and when we need on. It’s a right and Heston, once upon a time, was going to take that away from us.

His spoof of the NRA in the early 1990’s, when Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill into law, was easily the most effective anti-gun propaganda anyone could create. And it was funny.

Heston would later show he was at least crazy in other ways. In a December 1997, Heston trivialized the Holocaust and made disparaging remarks about women, gays and lesbians, and African Americans in a speech, drawing praise from David Duke.

I, for one, prefer to give more weight to the good work he did in his political activism before he went off the deep end. I’ve posted obituaries in arts & media.

Nikon

From Digital Photography Review @ dpreview.com

Review based on a production Nikon D60

The D60 is the third incarnation of Nikon’s compact, user-friendly entry-level SLR line that started back in 2006 with the D40 (which replaced the first Nikon ‘starter’ model, the D50). The original D40 was a hugely important camera for Nikon and can be given a lot of the credit for the resurgence in Nikon’s fortunes at the volume end of the SLR market (which had been totally dominated by Canon since the launch of the EOS 300D / Digital Rebel). The D40’s success (which continued long after the D40X made its swift appearance only 6 months later) isn’t hard to explain; it was keenly priced, nicely designed and built and capable of excellent results. It was also a camera that proved cameras do not sell on megapixels alone (even at launch its 6MP resolution was far from ‘class leading’).

The D40X, which was positioned as a premium alternative to the D40 rather than its replacement, didn’t mess around with the formula much at all; a new sensor with more (ten) megapixels and a lower base ISO, plus a slightly higher continuous shooting rate. The D60 is a direct replacement for the D40X (the D40 will stay around for a while as Nikon’s budget option), and once again it’s not a major upgrade; the sensor remains the same (though now has a dust reduction system) and the external design is almost identical. There’s a few new features, including the same Expeed processing ‘concept’ seen in the D3 / D300, Active D-Lighting, an eye sensor (to control the screen display), and some tweaks to the interface, but perhaps the most significant change isn’t to the camera at all; the move to an optically stabilized version of the kit lens.

Auto Focus only for AF-S or AF-I lenses

As with the D40 and D40X, the new D60 doesn’t have an built-in focus drive motor which means it can auto focus only with lenses which have their own drive motor (AF-S and AF-I lenses). The lack of a drive motor can be seen by the missing mechanical focus drive pin on the lens mount (see images below). One of the D60’s new features is an electronic rangefinder to help manual focus on non AF-S / AF-I lenses.

Stylish old days

Photo by Winston Goodfellow. The three 1950s cars were based on Alfa Romeo mechanics. Center, the 1954 B.A.T. 7.

After 53 Years of Beauty Sleep, the B.A.T. Is Back By PHIL PATTON, March 23, 2008

THERE was disappointing news ahead of the Geneva motor show this month: for the first time in decades, Bertone, one of Italy’s great coachbuilders, would not have its own display inside the exhibit halls.

Bertone is being managed by bankruptcy commissioners after the founding family was pushed aside. Like Italy’s other surviving carrozzeria — the design houses that produce concept cars and sometimes build small runs of vehicles under contract — Bertone is facing hard times.

But Bertone showed it still had life with a surprise unveiling at a nightclub, away from the Palexpo Geneva exhibition center, of a design study called the B.A.T. 11. The swoopy green-gray concept car was presented as a spiritual successor to the visionary B.A.T. cars, Nos. 5, 7, and 9, that the company created on Alfa Romeo mechanicals in the 1950s and displayed at auto shows in Turin.

The B.A.T. 11, whose creation was led by David Wilkie, design director at Bertone, has a helmet-like body comprising loosely joined planes, a central spine, taillights inset in its fins and black wheels shaped like a jet’s turbine.

B.A.T. stands for Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica; berlinetta is an industry term for a sporty coupe, and the cars were exercises in the technology of aerodynamics. The cars combine aerodynamic principles — the chief designer of the original trio, Franco Scaglione, had studied the science — with sheer fantasy. The 1950s B.A.T.’s are viewed as milestones by design historians.

“The B.A.T. cars combined fantasy with extraordinary aerodynamic performance, extraordinary sculptural qualities, extraordinary beauty and timeless forms and organization,” said Geoff Wardle, director of advanced mobility research at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. “They had a subliminal influence on future vehicle designs.”

The B.A.T. 11 evokes Bertone’s glorious past. It was commissioned by Gary Kaberle, an American collector. As a teenager he had fallen in love with the B.A.T. 9, which had fallen on hard times and was parked in front of a Dodge dealership in his Michigan hometown to draw customers. The young man, who is now a dentist, saved up his money and bought the car, according to an article in Classic & Sports Car Magazine in 1994, but sold it years later to pay medical bills.

The B.A.T. 9 joined its siblings when the cars were restored and brought together in 1989. In 2005, they were shown at the Concours d’Élégance at Pebble Beach, Calif., by their new owner, Cars International Kensington Ltd., a British dealer of expensive road and racing cars. They were valued by the company at $8 million before being sold to a private collector.

Dr. Haberle went to Bertone a couple of years ago with the idea of a new B.A.T. The B.A.T. 11 is built on the chassis of the new Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione.

Bertone began literally as a builder of coaches, the horse-drawn sort, having been founded by Giovanni Bertone in 1912. After World War I, the company shifted to car bodies. Giovanni’s son Giuseppe, known as Nuccio, was born in 1914 and took over direction of the company in 1934.

Claudia Neumann, a design historian, calls Bertone “one of the greats of Italian design.” Among the great creations of Bertone are the Lamborghini Miura and Countach; the Ferrari Dino 308 GT4; and the Lancia Stratos. For BMW, Bertone did the 3200 CS in 1961; in 1975 it shaped the Polo for VW. It also did work for Citroën and Volvo. The 1956 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint was planned as a limited edition of 500 cars, but instead sold 40,000 over 14 years.

The company is also distinguished for giving starts to design stars like Marcello Gandini and Giorgetto Giugiaro, who each followed Franco Scaglione, designer of the B.A.T.’s, as the top designers at Bertone.

Concepts from Italy’s carrozzeria are often the highlights of the Geneva auto show. Last year, Bertone showed a design study for Fiat called the Barchetta. This year, Zagato showed a concept called the Bentley GTZ, and Pininfarina offered one called the Sintesi.

But revered coachbuilders like Ghia and Touring are now gone, and survivors like Zagato, Pininfarina and Italdesign-Giugiaro are feeling extreme pressure. The carrozzeria declined as the number of aristocrats, plutocrats and movie stars willing to pay for bespoke or limited-production bodies declined. Most moved from operating as the automotive versions of skilled tailors to becoming consultants on engineering and production, and serving as small-volume manufacturerers. Bertone, for instance, produced 2,000 copies of the limited edition Mini GT through 2006.

Against a backdrop of court actions among Lilli Bertone, the widow of Nuccio Bertone, and their daughters, the new B.A.T. can be viewed as either a last gasp of the coachbuilders or a defiant assertion of their intent to survive.

Mr. Wardle of Art Center College points out that the coachbuilders have been lagging for years, as automakers turn inward for design. Over the years, coachbuilders have produced some of the most esteemed designs in the history of the automobile, but today they are being run by second- or third-generation members of their founder’s families or outsiders, “who do not have the same vision, talent or focus as their progenitors,” he said.

Inauspicious

I cannot say how refreshed I was when I woke up this morning. Probably not much. I dragged my raggedy butt out to the gym. I was pathetic there so I left. I went for a run. After about half a mile, a glorious sun rose but did not improve my performance and, at about a mile, as several severely old people (age-ism?) passed me, I gave up that ghost and went home.
I showered and went back to bed.
My soccer season starts tomorrow. I’ve been trying to cram six weeks of preparation into two weeks and I’m only succeeding in getting myself injured before the season even starts. We’ll be the defending champion. Again.
Last season, although ultimately successful, was bruising and grueling. I hung my cleats when it ended in November and did not play or workout until February. Gym work, which is valuable but could never take the place of getting on the field and playing.
Oh, the invoice to renew my home subscription of The New York Times arrived in the mail today. $265.20. I wish I knew how to quit the Times. That’s $530 a year. I’m not saying it’s not worth it but the invoice almost always arrives when I’m either too broke, or broker than that.
On the other hand, I could buy the paper on the newsstand, which is actually the best paper to have because it should, technically have the latest news and final sports scores from the night before. But it costs $1.25 for the daily paper and I don’t know how much on Sundays, probably $5. Whatever the pressures, the Times should have resisted the urge to go over $1.
Maybe when Murdoch starts a Sunday section for the Wall Street Journal and prices it like he prices that abominable rag, the New York Post. I may give up the Times then.