09.26.08
Numbers are the new letters
09.22.08
Nuttin’ to do mate?
Welcome to our periodical ‘places to go and things to see’ posting, the ultimate resource to have a look on what places you could go and what things you could go and… well… ’see’. If that doesn’t sound alarming, we don’t know what does.
A recent survey showed that many people that travel to Britain would not consider Bristol as a place where they would go. further research showed that the main reason for that is that they simply did not think of it. 
They would go to London, and perhaps make a stop at Canterbury on the way back to Dover and that’s it. What a shame. If you have any interest in arts or feel any fondness for industrial surroundings, Bristol should be high on your ‘must visit’ list of cities in Europe (and it’s also highly recommended for any MTB enthusiasts out there, we still have dreams about the facilities at the Mud Dock).
Walking through the city or along the docks you can still feel the industrial days that have passed since the rise of Liverpool as the dominant harbour city on England’s West coast. Many of the factories and warehouses are still there, even though they’ve been vacated long ago. But the buildings are not abandoned. a lot of them now house so called ‘creative industry’ companies (Like Aardman, production company of the famous ‘Wallace and Gromit’), museums and galleries or pubs and clubs. A clever thing the Bristol city council has done is build a large shopping area ‘Broadmead‘, which means that in the actual city centre, there is more room for culture and leisure and you don’t see those hideous buy-buy-buy signs everywhere.
A couple of things deserve to be mentioned about Bristol (we won’t recommend either visiting the ‘Brunel ss Great Britain‘, it may have been voted best British museum of 2006… it’s just not our ‘cup of tea’). Arnolfini is a great venue for seeing contemporary art. They regularly change exhibitions (we visited the Far West 
exhibition which was very cool indeed) and since the entrance is free, you will have a few pounds to spend in their bookshop which has one of the greatest collections on art and philosophy we have ever seen. Watershed is just across the canal from Arnolfini. This organisation promotes cultural activity, creativity and innovation but we just went there to catch an arthouse film and have a drink. We absolutely loved the atmosphere there and no doubt, you will as well. From those places it’s just a short stroll over the millennium square (actually, we never saw the name of the square, but it looked exactly like the Millennium Squares you see scattered about in every British city…) that has some really cool architecture to the Harbourside. No match for the Harbourside in Sydney, but a very nice area to walk around in.
You can read about Bristol all you want, but there’s nothing like the actual experience. Go and fill your iPod with Portishead and Massive Attack and book your tickets.
09.14.08
Step AWAY from the toy – Art by Frank Kozik
Common misconsception: “it is small, it is made from ’some sort of plastic’ (vinyl), it looks like a fantasy action figure… so it’s a kids toy.”; Should you encounter a person that reasons like that, just walk away. Otherwise things might start getting ugly. And by no means let a child near your Frank Kozik. This is something you shouldn’t be messing with…
Crime Pays - by Frank Kozik
Spanish born Frank Kozik lives and works in Austin, Texas. His creative career didn’t start out as a genius toy maker. His first claim to fame was as the designer of rock’n roll poster art. Kozik didn’t make his first ‘toy’ until 2001, the Black Smorkin Labbit.
Since then, Kozik’s made a lot of almost iconic toys. With great sense of ‘dark humour’ as he calls it, he develops intriguing, surprising and sometimes unsettling vinyl, mass production sculptures. And even though nothing is quite as uncool as ‘collecting’ anything, there is nothing wrong with having a couple of Kozik’s around the house. A personal favorite is a more recent work, a Ho Chi Min bust with a hat and AK47 that you can take of or put on as you desire (‘You can remove his AK-47 and peasant hat, but you’ll never take his communist values’, as kidrobot puts it) Especially the pink version is more than a little exciting. Only 50 of these are made, so potential buyers needs to be quick.
Ho Chi Minh bust - Kozik
n excellent interview with Frank Kozik can be found on the Vinyl Pulse website, which leaves no additional info to be desired. Should you (rightly) have gotten all excited about owning your own personal Frank Kozik toy to admire day in day out, visit the online Nevermind gallery or the Kidrobot webshop. Both have an extensive catalogue of Kozik stuff (Nevermind has a lot of cover art) and much much more to view and… buy.
09.13.08
A small world after all – Art by Willy Rojas
A couple of days ago I visited the Open Art Fair in Utrecht (Netherlands) where I first saw the work of Colombian born artist Willy Rojas. Rojas now works and lives in Barcelona where he specializes in very accessible photography. Colourful, bright and humoristic. Little miniature figures, posing in worlds of fruit ‘n veg. For a moment you’re actually convinced that there’s probably nothing more there. Just an optimistic scenery that provokes a smile. Pleasing to the eye for a moment and then it’s gone.
Willy Rojas - Sunny side Up
Rojas has a good eye for composition and he definitely knows how to take a picture, but that’s hardly enough for a photograph to stick in my mind a couple of days later. What makes his pictures work for me is that they somehow seem to catch the bizarre little things in life, without desperately trying to be funny. It’s the way Willy might see things. Life might just not make sense. What we do might not make sense. On the other hand, is that so important? Don’t take yourself too serious, but do what you the best way you know how.
I admit that this interpretation might just be me, trying to unravel hidden layers and deeper meaning. The only advice that I can give you is take a look at Willy Rojas’ work and see what you think for yourself. A good chance for UK residents might be at the Glasgow Art Fair, 23-26 april 2009, or contact the Villa del Arte galleries that represent him.
09.11.08
Comeback kid
Just about every presidential candidate of this campaign has called him- or herself ‘comeback kid’, which in just as many cases seemed highly inappropriate for a bunch of, well, ‘old’ people (sorry about that). A true come back kid should, of course, have something youthful. Like a professional athlete. Pélé was a come back kid. So were Cruyff, Micheal Jordan and George Foreman. Great athletes, great comebacks. The tile ‘comeback kid of the third milennium’ can only be given to the greatest athlete of the millennium change; Lance Armstrong.
N.B. It’s easy to confuse a post on Lance as a post on ’sports’. This point has been argued here earlier. In contradiction with most other sports, cycling in general and specifically the Tour is pure, emotional, dramatic and heroic art.
Lance was never well-loved among Tour followers. He was too organised, too confident and… well, too good. The only suspense in the Tour was: who will finish second? and many people didn’t like the fact that for Lance only one race per year mattered: the Tour de France. He treated all the great classics as mere training stages, which is a smack in the face of the cycling fans who are a very traditional crowd. This sort of robbed him of the legendary status he deserved. And now Lance has found a way to become that legend after all. Should Lance win the Tour next year, and no one in his right mind would doubt that he at least stands a good change of doing great, he will indisputably become the greatest Tour winner of all time. Greater than Mercx, greater than Coppi, Hinault, LeMond and Indurain. And for the first time I will find myself cheering for Lance.
Chances are good that Lance will ride with his old team manager Johan Bruyneel for the Kazach formation Astana (which is also sponsored by Trek, the cycle company that Lance also has a sponsorship contract with). However, I would prefer to Lance compete with Spanish rider and former Tour winner Alberto Contador than see them riding on the same team.
What would make for even more interesting viewing is if the rumours that another former American ‘Tour-winner’ would make his comeback to the Tour next year. Floyd Landis was stripped of his 2006 title after he tested positive on a testosterone dope test in stage 17, Oscar Perreiro was then named winner. The Health Net- Maxxis team (which will have a new name in the 2009 season) appears to have signed Landis. Whether he will make it the Tour however, remains doubtful.
09.10.08
We are still alive
Good news everybody. You are reading this, so we are still here. CERN with their gigantic Large Hadron Collider has not sucked us all into a big man-made black hole yet. The apocalypse is not yet upon us. Maybe, just maybe, they will succeed at that later on.
Actually, looking at their live webcast, the whole process looks rather dull. just a couple of guys in white overalls walking around, probably thinking about what they’re going to have for lunch. It doesn’t really look like the heroïc quest for finding the meaning of life which it is (really, it is). Until the Higgs boson (aka God particle) is found I think I will mainly feel bad for the Tevatron near Chicago. just imagine how that thing must feel, all those years of being the most impressive man-made machine and now becoming ‘merely’ number two. Poor thing.
I bet that if the god particle is found, it will look something like the Rubik’s cube. Math scientists have been looking for god’s number (the number of moves with which you can solve any Rubik’s cube) for decades now. At this point, the lowest figure that has been ‘proven’ is 26. It took Sony’s supercomputers which were used for this project on downtime when they were not rendering 3D animation films no less than 63 hours to calculate it. To be able to bring this number down to the suspected actual god’s number of 20 would take many, many more years of hard computer processing hours. Maybe the LHC could solve that one as well?
In the meantime… watch the world record solving of a Rubik’s cube here.
09.09.08
Slow down – Art by Oksana Badrak
In our modern day society, everything has to be simple, easy and fast (what Benjamin R. Barber called, the ‘infantalisation’ of our society). Which doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. The problem is that this ethos is also translated to segments of our society where speed and simpleness stand in the way of real appreciation. Some things have to harder in order to fully appreciate them. E.g. compare reading this fast and utterly simple blog, with reading a great novel and you know what I mean.
Art is not compatible with simple, easy and fast either. That goes for both the creation of art as for the appreciation of it. You have to invest to get the full reward.
These thoughts drifted through my head what I felt when confronted with works by Russian artist Oksana Badrak. Her works are very skillfully and carefully made with great eye for detail and composition. The creation process itself takes time as well; starting out with digital elements, then going to a giclée print, then a layer of varnish and at last a layer of oil paint. That’s a big time investment in an era where you can buy a car online within 30 seconds.
Looking at the fantastical works she creates you can almost feel time slowing down 
around you. You get sucked into a world of calm, without it being a world for mere wimps. Her works are not ‘girly’ or ’sweet’, there are rough edges there. But all of a sudden, since you have the time to appreciate the complete work, you can handle it. Just throw your Blackberry and machiatto in the bin and go see a friend for a cup of real coffee and an actual conversation about the world’s Badrak’s created.
That’s what really matters in life anyway.
Works by Oksana Badrak. Please visit her website for more information and images.
09.04.08
An inconvenient conspiracy theory
Hey kids. Are you fed up with all that negative talk about the environment by those nasty, pessimistic (smelly?) tree-hugging conservationist hippies out there? Are you very sceptical about this ‘global warming’ thing being caused by human action? If you are, the blog axischange is definitely something you should visit. I don’t think I have ever seen such a collection of seemingly concinving pseudo-scientific evidence about a major government cover up since that loose change ‘documentary’ (they also have in commons that neither are in any way backed up by serious science).
So, what’s their claim? Global warming is not caused by human doing, it is caused by a two stage shift in the earth’s axis of 26 degrees (one in late 2004 and one in early 2005). Why didn’t we, the people, notice? Well, as axischange puts it: the Global Positioning System (GPS) broke down at these times and ‘the government’ covered these shifts up. And, apparantly, we wouldn’t notice the change in the position of the stars in the nightsky either. Sound spooky huh? Yes, spooky and… hilarious.
Before the more gullible among you go visit the site and get convinced, please keep in mind that a 26 percent shift in the earth’s axis would mean that large parts of the world would have daylight untill well after midnight and that everyone who owns a satelite dish would have had to seriously adjust it several times. Please take axischange for what it is: serious comedy. Don’t go and prepare yourself for the end of the world just yet.
This does not mean that there is nothing truly interesting to say about the earth however. The Institute of Geophysics in Paris have recently suggested that the reason the earth’s core transmits seismic waves faster in the eastern side than in the western side is, that there may subteranean cylones in the liquid iron outer core of our planet. The researcher Julien Aubert came to this conclusion on the basis of numerical simulations he developed. I do not remember reading anything about him finding a shift in the earths’s axis though. But I am sure the true conspiracy theorist can find a way to implement these finding into the axischange delusion.
Picturecredits where picture credits are due:
Top photo is of a ’suspicious looking clowd’that hung over [the photographer] for hours’ and was copied of the axischange blog.
The second image was copied of Julien Aubert’s page on the Institue of Geophics and depicts what according to his simulations happens beneath our feet. Please visit his site for a real explanation and more interesting information.
