this blog is a visual notebook of inspirations for a group of bandit bloggers. we post things we see and like. our lives don’t revolve around singular topics and neither does our blog. sorry! nothing is in-or-out of context here. enjoy xx
“the best, for the most, for the least”– as charles eames would say… now lets see if this fits the bill? born in brooklyn, made in italy (we are told). they do give common projects and the others a good run for their money at under $200 a pair. leather interior, simple lines, clever double stitching, and yet this royale (and royale court high) model(s), being the simplest of the footwear line, still have a bit of fat to trim… the rest of the line is not to our taste, maybe the hirsh could work, we love the heel detail, if it was not for that complicated sole. judge yourself, wed love to test drive one and write about the feel… worth a look for all you post-normcores. by ac
an army of eclectic-looking models stomped out to showcase the MM6 maison margiela ready-to-wear collection, which highlighted clothes that looked as if they’d been culled from a futuristic thrift store.
one model wore a camisole dress seemingly crafted from plastic bags, while another wore an oversize sweater with an airbrushed mystical horse motif. according to the label’s show notes, the collection took its cues from “london and the creative community surrounding MM6,” and it certainly had a messy, all-over-the-place, over-sized, mismatch feel. shoot me now if this is where fashion is headed. margiela, i am disappointed. by lb
what happened to edward snowden? terminal F documentary
i was looking up london fashion week and the latest on lady gaga, and came up with this awesome video of byonce that then, of course, took me to this rare behind-the-scenes clip of an old reality show with baby kendall jenner, when i randomly stumbled upon this downer, which basically ruined my day! but you know what, us millennials know how knowledge is like the awesomest asset, so i thought why not… ill give like 5 seconds of my precious time… and here’s the blah blah about the film:
“the documentary, made by german investigative journalist john goetz and danish documentary filmmaker poul-erik heilbuth, tells edward snowden’s story from the moment he left the US for hong kong to his arrival to terminal F at moscow’s sheremetyevo sirport in 2013. snowden was granted temporary asylum in russia in 2013 after spending a month in the Terminal F of the sheremetyevo international airport. having received a three-year residence permit in 2014, he continues to live in russia.”by xy
friendly snap of brian ferry of roxy music during breakfast one summer morning
damn this looks just like hashtag dave! brian ferry extended play LP, it’s only love, heart on my sleeve and the price of love
did you know that our beloved brian ferry was once a pottery teacher at holland park school in london before forming his seductive carrier in pop music? well that is true! in any case, happy birthday mister ferry… 26 september 1945… damn that’s old now. by dd
bauhaus master herbert bayer 1968 very little was known about his earthworks by the general public
architect maya lin’s installation for phillip lim’s fashion week show – NYFW 2015
we actually love the gestural installation for philip lim’s show and well gladly take that over any old runway/catwalk… but before we all run out and comment “that’s awesome” on instagram, it would be good to understand a bit of the history and where it came from. thanks to the internet, we create very little new content, its the curse of our generation, and we, ourselves, are guilty of that many folds. its simply too easy to just regurgitate what has been there. and the info is so readily available in cliff notes version. but the least we can do is to study the things that attract us just a bit, and understand what came before us. if nothing, when we want to copy some one, and we always evidently do, we can go to the source and the origin of it, and maybe learn a bit about its history first… now that’s not an ‘outdated way of doing things’ doll… that’s just “super awesome!!” by xy
the dolly black white silk shoes…. maybe a bit too late for this summer, but non-the-less, love these simple summer espadrille lace-ons by tabitha simmons. bit steep at $395 especially when you consider you’ll be getting them sandy and dirty in no time, but maybe ‘yall can pick em up on sale in a few weeks… just not yet. by kv
this is an alternative slower version of the original song and possibly the best version in my opinion.
musically, “crazy” was inspired by film scores of italian spaghetti westerns, in particular by the works of enino morricone who is best known as the composer of sergio lenone’s dollars trilogy but more specifically the song “last man standing” by gian piero reverberi and gianfranco reverberi from the 1968 spaghetti western viva! django (italian preparati la bara), a sequel to the better-known django. “crazy” not only samples the song, but utilizes the parts of the main melody and chord structure. the original songwriters for “last man standing” are credited by gnarls barkley for this song alongside their own credits.
the lyrics for the song developed out of a conversation between danger mouse and ceelo… ceelo took that conversation and made it into ‘crazy,’ which we recorded in one take… regardless its a massively incredible heart renching song. its on our repeat playlist all day long. and the lyrics:
i remember when, i remember, i remember when i lost my mind there was something so pleasant about that place. even your emotions had an echo in so much space
and when you’re out there without care, yeah, i was out of touch but it wasn’t because i didn’t know enough i just knew too much
does that make me crazy? does that make me crazy? does that make me crazy? possibly
and i hope that you are having the time of your life but think twice, that’s my only advice
come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are, ha ha ha bless your soul you really think you’re in control
well, i think you’re crazy i think you’re crazy i think you’re crazy just like me
my heroes had the heart, to lose their lives out on a limb
and all i remember is thinking, i want to be like them
ever since i was little, ever since i was little it looked like fun
and it’s no coincidence i’ve come
and i die when i’m done
unique reinterpretation of the adidas superstar featuring hanging “tassel” stripes and a smooth shell-toe hit the market again in early 2015 with the monochromatic all-black and all-white colorways. the red threat release followed soon after. both colorways are constructed in premium leather which in adidas worth means just you average leather. but cool non the less. by dd
not sure why jony ives gets on my tits so much, maybe it’s his poor rendition of that david attenborough like voice, or his calculated “poor little me… i’ve been working all day and night to solve human kinds problems” stubble and hair cut, or maybe it’s the way he makes the most basic things sound so complex and self important? but he does annoy me much. jony doesn’t just think about things like you and i, instead he “incubates notions”… what ever he does it’s a pivotal shift in the cosmos. the truth is apple has come up with less usable innovations and more jargon. i can’t recall how many times philip schiller used the word innovation before they got to the most amazing feature on the iPhone 6S… the most astonishing selfie button!
this pivotal shift in the evolution of human kind is right up there with apples previous engineering intervention in iPhoto. the iPhoto has not been anything like the old iPhoto… because they brilliantly changed it to simply “photos”… i mean that really changed my life. what seems simple to common folks is actually a very complicated process at apple… well thanx! that was brilliant search optimization guys, now try and search “i have problems with photos” to fix your latest kinks and you now end up with prescription eye glass stores near you. but joking aside, and there are some nice things about the 6S like the 3D touch etc. but apple has messed up really bad in the most basic areas ever since jobs passed. issues that mac users never experienced and where the exclusive domain of PC users have since found their way into apples. perhaps apple should focus on fixing some of these before fiddling with the letter “i”… all of these OSX problems listed below, i have personally experienced first hand, so these must be just a few of the mac OSX problems of the late…
1- the spinning ball of death when you try to shut down OSX yosemite, only to come in the next morning and have to force shut down.
2- iTunes playlist playing in reverse order when you’re using apples own remote app?
3- updating apple software… getting an unknown error on apples own “app store”
4- slow motion videos shot on apples iPhone, and transferred to apples iPhoto (sorry p h o t o s), and back onto your iPhone no longer plays in slow motion?
5- unable to delete some “photos” in “p h o t o s”… now that sounds just wrong!!! let’s see how was it before…. unable to delete some photos in iPhoto. better. thanks for that ingenious idea guys.
6- syncing problems with iTunes and photos… where things do not actually sync. you have to shut down apps, sometime restarting your computer, detach iphone attach again etc. until it finally syncs (never had these issues and i’ve had apple for ever, every mac and iPhone in the past).
7- transferring photos from your iPhone to apples photos and clicking on “delete after export” leaves a bunch of photos on your iPhone.
and this is just what i can remember at the top of my head, fuming after watching the apple september 9th keynote. by dd
what a cool pet project by by jesse reed and hamish smyth… to reprint the original 1975 NASA graphics standards manual through kickstarter. for just $79 you can be one the very few to own and sport a soft-touch, hard-cover, copy of the reissued NASA graphics bible. a must have for any self respecting graphic designer. go ahead. pull out your credit card and reserve yours, there is only 26 more days left, and only so many copies. these are sure to be collector book items. you can most definitely sell your extra copy on ebay for much more than the price offered here given the limited edition issues. so do it as an investment, do it for design, do it for NASA, do it so we can get our copy. here’s the link to the kick started page, may your design go where no man has gone before. by ars
the mersault investigation is the reverse mirror novel by kamel daoud countering camus’ the stranger
l’etranger by albert camus
albert camus in paris… smoking of course!
for all you illiterates, here’s the one connection you may have had to camus… “killing an arab” the song by the cure was based on camus’ the stranger. robert smith read the book… you should too!
ok now for some real talk… the mersault investigation is the debut novel by kamel daoud, an algerian writer who has made his living by journalism, for various french journals. the novel’s first sentence is “mama’s still alive today.” this alerts us to the fact that daoud is re-imagining camu’s 1942 classic “the stranger” for the new century that begins: “mama died today”. camus himself borrowed from ernest hemingway’s spare prosaic style (seen to full effect in a clean well-lighted place) but pushed it to the point of absurdity by creating a first person narrator in the throes of a virtual existential, comatose experience – until he kills an unknown arab on a beach for no apparent reason. he then has to defend himself, to his friends, to the state, and finally to a priest that he lashes out at in one grand soliloquy, where he finally articulates his philosophy to the priest, and even more surprisingly, to himself.
in daoud’s brilliant contemporary “sequel” the “unknown arab” finally has a name – musa –moses in arabic. harun, musas’s brother realizes that he must go back to that catastrophic event and examine the root cause of it – in effect to instigate an investigation – before he can move any further with his life, which is nearing its end. it is of course not only harun, but algerians themselves that must examine, not only camus’ tortured history with algeria, but their colonial past, to move on, and find their way in the new century.
while other novels have taken camus’ masterpiece as a jumping off point – most recently michel houellebecq’s brutal, sardonic “platform”, daoud is more ambitious, being both an homage and a criticism of camus’ work, that does not attempt to resolve that contradiction. daoud’s novel is also a profound meditation on identity, and the secret pull that the dead exercise on the living, and in this it shares some qualities with w.g. sebald. the connections between present day algeria, and the current situation there, are contrasted with the past of camus’ colonial pre-war algeria, and an alienated meursault who could only find his own identity when he realized that he was about to loose it to the guillotine as retribution for a senseless act of violence. in the mersault investigation that senselessness comes full circle into the present tense, bringing camus’ novel back from the mausoleum of the academy, where it has lingered far too long, making it resonate with current history. daoud dares to look back and the result is an imaginative, brilliant, moving book that stays with you – as much as camus’ the stranger. by gp
a visual collective outlet of inspiration
