The Birney Experience

Good Hello

 

Crosley Bendix, Cultural Reviewer and Director of Stylistic Premonitions for the Universal Media Netweb.

Negativland is awesome.

Character

Associate Bob, from Demolition Man, is one of my favorite film characters. His aplomb at his situation on the passing of his employer and the threat to his life was wonderfully played.

Glenn Shadix, the brilliant character actor, has died after a fall at 58. (via @danbenjamin)

For fans of Demolition Man, there is a podcast about it at Natsukashi with Glenn discussing the film from last year. As they say on the podcast, if it is on TV, I settle in and watch the rest of it.

 

Art

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams.

I respond well to certain product design and the look and feel of Braun products have always made me happy.

I ran across that presentation from VernissageTV on my Roku (It's on the blip.tv channel). There are a lot of exhibition walkthroughs on the site.

Digging into the site's archives, I found this piece about a MOMA exhibit called Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s that was fascinating. I was not aware that a lot of the 1970s art that I liked was tied to the 1920s. Some of the artists mentioned in the piece were new to me (El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy) and their work is incredible.

The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934 has a series of illustrations from a children's book by El Lissitzky. I will keep politics out of the discussion, but the imagery works for me.

 
(Select "Transform the World" -> "Suprematism and the non objective world" -> #3)

This is from the 2006 exhibit of Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers at the Tate.

 

I have to go deeper into the 1920s as I am very unfamiliar with what appears to be a lot of good art.