Space Invader sightings aren’t hard to come by, especially in NY, but it still warms my heart when I come across a new one, this time in Silver Lake.
Taking over our coin-op laundries
I have one of his books so I knew he’d done a lot of work in LA, but the city is so spread out you tend not to run into them by accident the way you would in NY or Paris. Still one of the coolest street art campaigns of all time.
I’m not normally a fan of themed hotels. With the notable exception of the former House of Blues Hotel in Chicaco (RIP), most of them are pretty contrived, if not plain cheesy. When I got to the Farmer’s Daughter hotel in LA, at first it lived up (or down) to my expectations.. take a downmarket motel, the kind with outdoor walkways between the rooms, and tart it up with some funky art and wallpaper.. in this case, farm-themed.
Is she a real, or just a myth?
But after a day or so it grew on me.. the art is not quite subtle (rooster-print walpaper, paintings of cartoon cows and sheep), but it all hangs together somehow. It beats mind-numbing Marriott pastels. The location is great, across the street from a big farmer’s market (natch), right near the funky shopping strips on 3rd Street and Melrose Ave, and a short drive to West Hollywood bars and restaurants. For under $200, hard to do much better in LA.
I was reserving a rental car online a few days ago.. underneath the usual compact/intermediate/full-size options there were some that said “COOL CAR” in brackets next to them. Let’s see what Avis considers a cool car.. Cadillac CTS, Ford Mustang, nope.. hmm, Toyota Prius. Hey, if it’s cool enough for Leo, Cameron and a long list of other celebs.. besides, after 7 years on the market, it was about time I finally tried one.
I end up with a Nissan instead - less cool, but still a hybrid.. I get in, push the start button and the dash lights up, but the engine stays off.. put it in gear, still no engine.. start moving, still no engine.. I glide down the parking lot in dead silence, and only when I give it a little more gas do I feel a little rumble as the engine starts up. Then when I roll to a stop, it shuts off. I like it.. I spent the whole trip to my hotel trying to drive as long as I could with little nudges on the gas without getting the engine to kick in.
I finally understood a little of what all the hybrid geeks get out of their crazy mileage contests. It’s not the rush you get from horsepower or cornering, it was more of a finesse vibe.. Maybe my testosterone levels are dropping as I get older, but I actually liked driving the thing.. it felt high-tech, a little cerebral. But I bet in the right parts of eco-obsessed California, you could even cruise for chicks in it.
OK, I’m obsessed with buttons today.. I came across this awesome design for a remote control on art.lebedev’s web site:
Steve Jobs eat your heart out.
I spend relatively little time (for a guy) following sports, but Formula 1 is one of my few guilty pleasures.. the end of this season is a perfect example why - in order to win the championship, Kimi Raikonnen needed to finish first in the last race, and Lewis Hamilton (who was leading the season) needed to finish 6th or worse. So what happens?
“My finger slipped on the steering wheel and I accidentally pressed the button used for the starting sequence,” Hamilton confided several hours after the event, according to Montreal’s French-language daily newspaper La Presse.
That error cut power to his McLaren for an interminable minute, dropping him down to 18th place as the Brazilian Grand Prix entered its eighth lap on the Interlagos circuit.
“The car went into neutral and I had to reinitialize the system, that is, reload the gearbox management program,” he explained. The onboard camera recorded images of Hamilton pressing several buttons on his steering wheel while other drivers sped by.
That’s right - he pushed the wrong button, and had to re-boot the computer. I wonder if he had to press ctrl-alt-delete? Makes you wonder about the UI design of the steering wheel, where pushing one button by accident can shut down the car.. what do you say? Oops? Can’t complain though, it doesn’t get any closer than this.
Plenty has been blogged about the overhyping of Second Life, but this week it reached a new level - there are now market research firms conducting virtual focus groups and other types of research with Second Life residents.. so even if we get over the fact that SL geeks are not exactly typical consumers, to put it politely, what could companies like Coca-Cola possibly want to know about these people? In-game consumption of virtual cola? Or maybe Trojan wants to research the market for virtual condoms for all the 3d genitalia SL residents seem to be buying.
The other issue is more basic - market research relies on the fact that most people tell the truth (more or less) when they’re taking surveys or participating in focus groups.. but in a virtual world, the whole point is you get to be somebody else - I’m guessing a good number of the foxy babes and buff dude avatars in SL have McD’s-scarfing walruses at the keyboards pulling their puppet strings. So if people are taking liberties with their avatars (except for me, of course, I really do have wavy blond hair and huge pecs), can you trust anything they’d say on a survey??
If you’re vegetarian, stop reading now.. the other night I finally got the whole grass-fed beef thing. I’d eaten it before, and read all about the health benefits, environmental impact, the evils of corn.. but this was the first time I got to taste grass-fed and corn-fed beef side by side. We were at Citizen Cake in SF, I ordered the grass-fed steak, my brother had the corn-fed one.
Mmmm… meat…
The corn-fed one was softer, more buttery.. but tasted totally bland in comparison. The grass-fed meat tastes so much more like, well, meat. After eating it, I immediately felt healthier, more well-rounded, an overall better person.
One of the nice things about business travel is when you get a gap in your schedule and have a chance to check out a local art show. I stopped by SFMOMA to check out the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, where one of the main pieces is called Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project.
Very icy
It’s a chassis of a car surrounded by a metal cage, which is encased in ice.. the whole piece sits inside a big meat locker where the temperature is 4F in order to keep the whole thing frozen. They give you a little blanket when you go in, but the cold still cuts right through you.. the piece itself looks very futuristic, yet somehow like it was cut out of some ancient glacier.
Frozen prehistoric steering wheel
There are all kinds of ways to interpret it vs. global warming of course.. but the cool part was the fact that you actually had to feel the cold in order to see the piece. Standing in a big meat locker staring at a frozen car probably doesn’t sound immersive, but trust me, it was.
I don’t know why I was so happy to hear that Apple will be allowing independent developers to make software for the iPhone. Back before their last software update obliterated all the indie hackware that was out there, I had installed a bunch of the little apps on mine. None of them was particularly useful - a voice recorder (which I’ve never used), a flash card program to help me memorize Kanji, and a mini-version of Minesweeper… but it’s like the stuff that ends up cluttering your desk or bookshelves - it’s not practical, but the place looks a bit bare without it.
My pimped-out iPhone
It’s a lesson that consumer electronics companies never seem to learn.. we’re all individuals, we don’t want to dress the same, we don’t want our stuff to look the same. So why make a bazillion devices in exactly the same color with exactly the same stuff on them? At least let us mess with them ourselves!
Part crowd-pleasing party trick, part mass-interactive art installation, last night’s party had a digital photobooth where people could step in front of a camera and push a button to take their picture. On the other side of the room was a huge projector that was constantly cycling through pictures taken in the booth.. when you took your picture, it would get inserted into the rotation immediately, so you’d see it up on the wall only a few seconds after you took it.
Real-time glamour shots
The photos are black and white, and the booth has a flash that lights the photos in a perfect soft light, so the photos ALL look great. The effect was wickedly addictive, people couldn’t stop taking pictures of themselves and seeing them up on the big screen. We were there for several hours and the booth was always busy. I was far from immune, it’s a total rush to see yourself projected up on a wall 5x life size with flattering lighting. I guess we all have a narcissitic streak somewhere inside us.