When my family and I rent a car and drive through Montréal, we play a game of looking out for works by a graffiti artist named Kong. His pieces are cute, but that’s not really the point. The appeal of his work is that he does his pieces in the craziest of places. Sometimes they’re on bridges, sometimes on the side of buildings. We always wondered how he did his pieces, that is until we found this video.
From the dearly departed XOXO festival, which I sadly was never able to attend. Erin Kissane talks about the degradation of the social internet and her own role in the remarkable Covid Tracking Project.
Here is a classic short film from one of my heroes, Scottish/Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. It’s haunting, beautiful, and was groundbreaking for 1968.
Four years earlier, in 1964, McLaren (with Grant Munro) used essentially the same technique of overlaying film to create something with the complete opposite vibe, which is one of my favourite short sequences of film, the second half of his hodgepodgey film Canon. The relevant bit starts at exactly the 4:30 mark:
The difference in these two clips shows one of my favourite aspects of McLaren’s work: his flexibility. They both use essentially the same technique in different ways to create a very different effect.
I’m a bit late, but Jay Smooth has returned to Youtube after a near 6 year absence to cover the beef between Kendrick and Drake of all things.
My own take on the feud is that Drake was never in the same league as Kendrick, so the “win” doesn’t carry too much weight with me.
I love this tiny house designed by Japanese artist Zajirogh and his wife. The house is centred around a courtyard which can open to the sky. Extra points for showing the house without being staged like in an architecture magazine.
Built in the 1950s to test a rather ambitious plan to build a series of dams across large parts of San Francisco Bay, the Bay Model is an impressive, multi-acre scale model of most of the lower part of watershed. The model found that the plan was extremely flawed, and would likely cause extensive flash floods, but it lived on as laboratory to study the movement of water in the region until the early 2000s, when computer modelling became feasible.
The model was built with three different scales, with the vertical depth being exaggerated in order to improve the accuracy of depth measurements, and the scale of time on the model condensing the tide cycle down to under 15 minutes.
We unfortunately visited it when the water was not flowing, but there is a great little summary by Tom Scott:
I am terrible at chess, but I also love it. I also love these kind of intense deep-dives into esoteric subjects.
Until the age of about 14 I was certain I wanted to do movie special effects when I got old enough. Plans changed, but I still enjoy watching how special effects are done. In this case, a small studio resurrected a decades-old technique for making a “green screen” effect using sodium vapour lighting and prisms. Neat!