stolen moments

razorshapes: Bernhard Handick - Fine Feathers Makes Fine Birds...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:29:18 +0100

razorshapes:

Bernhard Handick - Fine Feathers Makes Fine Birds (2012)

I second the motion.

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:52:00 +0000

I second the motion.

Red Umbrella, 1967© Saul Leiter. c/o Howard Greenberg Gallery

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:44:03 +0000

Red Umbrella, 1967
© Saul Leiter. c/o Howard Greenberg Gallery

Photo

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 23:20:40 +0000

chariotsteed: paintings by Meredith Frampton from the 1930s

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:21:50 +0000

Portrait of a Young Woman

Marguerite Kelsey

chariotsteed:

paintings by Meredith Frampton from the 1930s

murketing: (via The Fascinating Business Cards of 20 Famous...

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:16:05 +0000

murketing:

(via The Fascinating Business Cards of 20 Famous People – Flavorwire)

architectureofdoom: From Waiting for the end of the world,...

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:51:54 +0000

architectureofdoom:

From Waiting for the end of the world, Richard Ross

nevver: Art remains a mystery, Milton Glaser

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 09:58:49 +0000

nevver:

Art remains a mystery, Milton Glaser

murketing: Alec Soth encountered Robert Adams’s 1985 monograph...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:53:23 +0000

murketing:

Alec Soth encountered Robert Adams’s 1985 monograph Summer Nights as a young photographer, and the book was, in his words, a “gateway drug” to the “harder stuff” in Adams’s body of work. When asked to participate in Aperture Remix, an exhibition for which artists were commissioned to create new work in response to Aperture publications that were influential in their artistic development, Soth chose Summer Nights.

(via ASX.TV: Alec Soth – “Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree” (2012) « ASX | AMERICAN SUBURB X | Photography & Culture)

kateoplis: “Apple, whose products the world cannot get enough...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:52:37 +0000

kateoplis:

“Apple, whose products the world cannot get enough of, has been justifiably criticized for poor working conditions and low wages at the factories of its chief supplier in China, Foxconn. Now, however, there are signs that all the negative attention, including reports in this newspaper, has caused the companies to make changes, like raising wages, limiting work hours and providing chairs with backs instead of stools at workstations.

As Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg recently reported in The Times, Apple and Foxconn are working to reduce workweeks, first to 60 hours and eventually to 49. Wages have also been increased, in some cases by as much as 50 percent, to make up for fewer hours of overtime.

While tentative and disputed by some independent labor groups, these changes, along with improvements made by Hewlett-Packard and other companies, are a positive first step in what will very likely be a long process of ensuring fair compensation and sound factory conditions for the millions working in this industry. […]

Independent labor activists acknowledge that Apple and Foxconn, which is China’s largest private sector employer with 1.4 million workers, are no worse than other companies in the industry and are probably doing more than their competitors to improve working conditions. As leaders in technology manufacturing, they should chart the course for others to follow. But Apple and Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan, have both been very secretive about factory conditions and even reforms, refusing to release audit and investigative reports that would help raise standards across the industry.

In May, Timothy Cook, the chief executive, said Apple would be “the most transparent company” in the world on issues related to workers’ welfare and supplier responsibility. It is time for the company to start living up to that promise. The production of iPhones and iPads requires skilled and semiskilled workers who increasingly have more bargaining power and cannot be as easily replaced as, say, the Bangladeshi women who stitch clothes for American retailers like Walmart. For companies operating in China and earning billions in profits, corporate responsibility demands that workers be treated and paid fairly.”

Progress Where They Make iPhones | NYT

murketing: This story is almost too bizarre to believe....

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:51:08 +0000

murketing:

This story is almost too bizarre to believe. Journalist David Axe wrote a graphic novel about “the Lord’s Resistance Army” rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which many people may be aware of due to the controversial viral “Kony 2012” story from earlier this year). No matter what you think of the situation with Kony, it seems bizarre that the book itself (which is just about Kony) should be declared a product of a terrorist organization and the money associated with it frozen. But… that’s apparently what happened.

(via Graphic Novel Declared A Terrorist Operation By US Government, Advance Money Seized | Techdirt)

Weird. It’s an actually a really awesome comic, some of it online here.

Thanks for the tip: @steppinlazer

Photo

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 23:06:33 +0000

Just in

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 09:41:44 +0000

Just in

Is Speer so different from us? How many of us would be willing...

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 22:23:00 +0000

Is Speer so different from us? How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?

The Architecture of Evil

“For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe’s.” —Albert Speer

Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps. Someone measured the size and weight of a human corpse to determine how many could be stacked and efficiently incinerated within a crematorium. Someone sketched out on a drafting table the decontamination showers, complete with the fake hot-water spigots used to lull and deceive doomed prisoners. Someone, very well educated, designed the rooftop openings and considered their optimum placement for the cyanide pellets to be dropped among the naked, helpless men, women, and children below. This person was an engineer, an architect, or a technician. This person went home at night, perhaps laughed and played with his children, went to church on Sunday, and kissed his wife goodbye each morning.

The technical professions occupy a unique place in modern society. Engineers and architects possess skills most others lack — skills that allow them to transform dreams of design into reality. Engineers can convert a dry, infertile valley into farmland by constructing a dam to provide irrigation; they have made man fly; and architects have constructed buildings that reach thousands of feet into the sky. But these same technical gifts alone, in the absence of a sense of morality and a capacity for critical thought and judgment, can also make reality of nightmares. Ferdinand Porsche, the engineer who designed the Volkswagen — an automobile that revolutionized personal travel for the common man — also designed a terrifying battle tank that helped kill millions of Russians on the Eastern Front. Wernher von Braun, who would later design the Saturn V rocket that brought American astronauts to the Moon, designed the V-2 rockets with which the Nazis terrorized Antwerp and London in the waning months of the Second World War.

Few men better exemplify this danger than Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. From bold, looming edifices, to giant swastika banners, to the intimidating searchlights of the “cathedral of light” piercing the night sky around one of the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg, Speer’s designs became icons of Nazi megalomania. He shared with the dictator a vision of a redesigned Berlin that, when the Third Reich conquered the world, would be a lasting monument to its power for ages to come. “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years,” Hitler told Speer’s wife, reflecting both the scale of their shared ambition and the shared admiration and peculiar friendship that developed between the two men over the course of the war.

Hitler was so enthralled with Speer’s creativity and ability to carry out orders with efficiency and speed that he appointed Speer Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich during the height of World War II. In this powerful office, Speer was for the final three years of the war in charge of supplying the German military. He oversaw the management of a substantial portion of the German economy; he kept the factories running, and the troops supplied with tanks, bombs, planes, and ammunition, continuing to increase production even during the height of Allied bombing. These accomplishments earned him recognition, from both within the Third Reich and outside it.

Among Speer’s major responsibilities was procuring manpower to keep the factories in operation — and he thus played a major role in instituting the Nazi forced-labor programs. On trial at Nuremberg after the war, Speer claimed full moral responsibility for the whole of the actions of the Nazi Party, and yet professed that he had no knowledge of the extermination of the Jews or the atrocities taking place in concentration camps. Whether or not he was telling the truth about his ignorance of these atrocities has been hotly debated ever since. What is indisputable is that the court did not sentence him to death, as it did many of his peers. Instead he spent twenty years in prison, time he spent reflecting on his memories, coming to terms with his actions, and writing about his life and the inner workings of the Nazi Party — writings he later published as Inside the Third Reich (1970) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976).

Albert Speer did not, as far as any historians know, personally design any death chambers, nor did he personally kill another human being. But Speer did use his brilliant technical expertise and talents to enable the war efforts of the most evil regime in history, allowing it to murder millions of human beings. But even as we condemn him, we must ask — especially we engineers and technicians — is Speer so different from us? How many of us would be willing to compartmentalize our emotions, suppress our consciences, almost to sell our souls, for the opportunity to work on the grand projects that Speer was involved in? How many of us are so focused on solving a technical problem that we fail to contemplate where that solution might lead?

Photo

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:46:21 +0000

thenewinquiry: “[Damien Hirst] invented a kind of art that...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:41:06 +0000

thenewinquiry:

“[Damien Hirst] invented a kind of art that hadn’t existed before: art that becomes pointless as soon as you remove the price tag.”

- Being Damien Hirst, The New Inquiry

nevver: Fuck art

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:01:36 +0000

nevver:

Fuck art

999

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 23:51:42 +0000

Emergency Services:- Are you bleeding?

Caller:- Yes.

Emergency Services:- Where are you bleeding from?

Caller:- Poland.

nevver: Fantastic

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:23:41 +0000

nevver:

Fantastic

Video

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:55:45 +0000