En Tus Brazos is a short animation about the Tango king and his partner. I will not tell you about it as anything I shall say would give away part of the story. The film is brilliantly done and the story is well chosen. The dance of life indeed!
The film is moody and intriguing. It was released in 2006 and created by Fx Goby, Mattheiu Landour and Edouard Jouret.
Oh my god!!! This is the most recent strip from PhD comics. Slackerney is on his way! This is truly the end of an era.
For those of you who are unable to see the significance of this event then either you are hopelessly lost… or you have a wonderful experience ahead of you discovering the work of Jorge Cham. The comic strip is called Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD in case you missed it) and features the troubles of ordinary PhD students struggling with writing, conferences, self doubt, procrastination, insecurity, supervisors, food and sleep deprivation in the futile quest for a title.
The strip began in 1997 and the whole archive is available online. But beware it is not only highly amusing it is addictive and will increase your level of procrastination to new heights. I became hooked in 2002/2003 and since then I have read all the strips, bought the books, bought the t-shirt and included this strip (with permission!) in my own PhD thesis.
The significance of the strip above is that Mike Slackerney is about to pass his PhD. He has been a student since before anyone else can remember – his supervisor is embarrassed to remember the date. So this event must be seen as an evolutionary leap forward.
Personally I think it is great since I took way too long to finish writing my thesis – but remember Newtons First Law of Graduation: A grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it. (PhD comics 3 March 2001)
Adding a haphazard artistic touch to most cities are the street artists. They apply their art in many different ways here it is in the form of a small flag tied up to the railing of a bridge in Göteborg. The flag bears the word “stress” but is it for or against stress?
Time flies. Actually I think it leaks away like water in a rusty bucket. Anyway I was intending to put some of my London pictures online when I got back but I seem to have been rushing around with no time at all. Days where my calender has looked deceptively empty have turned out to be full of stuff that needs to be done. Anyway here is a limited selection of my pictures.
The first is a picture of a Crazy Frog doll. I get the impression that it is more a dropped dolly than a statement but I do like the fact that the person who picked it up has placed it on the rim of a dustbin – somehow profetic of the move from obscurity to fame to obscurity again.
This is followed by a series of street art – the yellow rat was on a lamp post on Oxford Street
The next one was an interesting mix of shapes and colours, making the end result a collaborative work of art.
This stencil of two men was in a quite alley just off Tottenham Court Road.
The last one is significant of the lack of media plurality and was written in chalk on a newsagents box and bears the text “One source isn’t choice”
Not sure if the collection is representative – but it is what cought my eye when I was walking around.
Another excellent cartoon from xkcd
The day was a long one and it is difficult to choose pictures which show something of the city. The first is the fire-fighting readiness at the petrol station on our road. The area is both residential and highly trafficked.
The second is a ordinary block of flats -washing hanging to dry adds color and an exotic flavor in comparison with the Nokia sign below.
The third is the sign at a restaurant notifying that no alcohol is served on this day. Today was the day of independence and to avoid any risks of public drunkenness – no alcohol may be served.
The fourth is a night image of a taxi rushing by. The light and movement is what Mumbai seems to be all about…
Naturally I cannot post them all but here are three of my impressions from the first day in Mumbai. The first is a shrine in a shop selling mobile telephones – the contrast seems to me to be typical India. Only been here one day so I don’t know if I should be using words like typical – yet.
The second is a street scene full of life and color.
The third is the barbershop on the pavement. It is so unusual that I almost feel like having a shave there…
In February last year I wrote a post about a painting by the African artist Pilipil Mulongoy which has been hanging in my home since before I was born. It is, as I wrote, the stuff which makes me and my home. In the post I included a photo
A couple of days ago I recieved an email from a publisher working on a book about African art history. They would like to use a picture of the work in their book. Stuff like this cannot happen in the analogue world, or at least it never happened to me.
Somewhere in the end of last year I became annoyed with Flickr. I used Flickr to upload my photos (original, ey?) but since I used too much bandwidth they started limiting the amount I could put online. One alternative would have been to pay for an account. But instead I just stopped posting my photos. Now I have decided to post them somewhere on my own site and stick a few in my blog. Most of my pictures are of street art from different places. Here are two from Stockholm that I took a while back – they don’t really have anything in common.
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Don’t you hate it when you have an image stuck in your mind? In particular a picture of a picture. Thanks to basic information overload, the internet, and not least, Flickr there are more images than I can imagine. Occasionally one of these images flashes past my screen and I think “nice” before moving along. Later I attempt to look for the picture and fail miserably.
I try retracing my steps, thinking where I had seen it, cursing my senility and realising the picture I need has gone forever (again!). The problem is, and I think of it as a problem, that there is no really good search tool for images. Now there is a partial solution to then problem.
The Flickr Color Selectr searches Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr by color. My problem is that after playing with it for a little while I realised that I will now see hundreds more cool images that, a few weeks later, I will never find…