I very much liked Gerhard Richter's Cage paintings on display at the Tate Modern.
Part Pollack, part Rothko, part glitch art. From the Financial Times:
The six paintings are composed in his characteristic swiping, blurred style of over-painted and obliterated layers, fine-tuned nuances of grey and white worked through with coruscating colours — carmine, emerald, turquoise, cadmium yellow, fiery orange — dragged across the canvas, smeared, wiped, leaving fragments of beauty on cool but sensuous surfaces. They suggest rain and mist, instability and displacement, absence and endings, classical rigour and postmodern ruin. They echo the northern European palette of earnest darkness and piercing brightness that goes back to Grunewald and Caspar David Friedrich, but Richter is also a minimalist, a denier of meaning, ideals, personal signatures. He has named the works in honour of composer John Cage, in reference to his Lecture on Nothing — "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it."
Three other things I found interesting there:
1) Miroslaw Balka's 480x10x10, a sculpture consisting of used bars of soap held together by a stainless steel rope hanging from the ceiling. It's not often that contemporary art smells Zestfully Clean.
2) Jean Dubuffet's The Exemplary Life of the Soil (Texturology LXIII). The online image doesn't do it justice...the painting looked just like a slab of rock hanging on the wall.
3) The Turbine Room is an amazing, amazing space...I could have spent hours in there. I took this photo of Ollie attempting to take his first steps in the Turbine Room. Oh, and they've patched the cracks from Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth. The patching is shoddy...I wonder if that's on purpose as a permanent aftertaste of the artwork.
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Stamen teamed up with MySociety to produce some lovely travel-time maps of London. My favorite is the interactive travel + housing prices map:
Next, it is clearly no good to be told that a location is very convenient for your work if you can't afford to live there. So we have produced some interactive maps that allow users to set both the maximum time they're willing to commute, and the median house price they're willing or able to pay.
The commute time slider makes a lovely Mandelbrot-esque pattern as you pinch the times together. (via o'reilly radar)
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Another kind of Tube map: which seating/standing positions in the carriage are the best and which are the worst? "Everyone knows the prime seats and standing spots, and people jostle for supremacy when the doors open, especially at the depot, when the train is empty."
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Typographic map of London. That is, a map made of type (like Paula Scher's paintings) not a map of typography in London. (via moon river)
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The Fat Duck, one of molecular gastronomy's main outposts, recently offered a course complete with its own soundtrack served up on iPods shuffle. "Heston Blumenthal, the chef, said he wanted to experiment with using sound to enhance a dining experience. Hence the iPod, playing the soothing sound of the sea breeze and waves gently caressing the seashore."
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The top 11 underground transit systems in the world. The London Tube is #1, NYC is #7, Hong Kong is #10. (via rob)
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Little People is a series of photographs of tiny handpainted people depicted in different situations around London. Reminds me of the tiny people with food photos of Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle. It would be neat to monkey with the depth of field in these photos so that somehow both the little people and the background were in focus, making it seem more like the people weren't little.
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A comparison: London's Tate Modern versus the MoMA. The MoMA is a stuffy, inaccesible place, while the "Tate Modern is an enormously user-friendly place, physically comfortable and hospitable, with inexpensive places to eat and frequent opportunities to sit."
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Are large cities, both culturally and economically, turning into their own countries? "The most important place to London is New York and to New York is London and Tokyo. London belongs to a country composed of itself and New York." Like many residents, it often seems like NYC isn't a part of the rest of the US.
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The Type Museum, located in London and housing "one of the world's best typographic collections", is being shut down due to lack of funding. The folks in the TypeMuseumSociety GoogleGroup are trying to find a way to save it. (thx, mark)
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Representation of the London Tube map if the stations were sponsored by products or companies. I love the Pizza Hutney, Upministry of Sound, and iPoddington stops. Rather DFWesque. (via bb)
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"Inspector Sands is a codeword used by public transport authorities in London...to alert authorities of a potential emergency without causing panic amongst travellers by explicitly mentioning the nature of the emergency." Cool! (via alice)
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The origins and common usage of British swear words. "Both Oxford and London boasted districts called 'Gropecunte Lane', in reference to the prostitutes that worked there. The Oxford lane was later renamed the slightly less-contentious Magpie Lane, while London's version retained a sense of euphemism when it was changed to 'Threadneedle Street'. Records do not show whether it was a decision of intentional irony that eventually placed the Bank of England there."
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More explosions in London on the tube and buses. Only detonators were used; minor injuries and damages.
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The large number of surveillance cameras in London may help identify the bombing suspects. "In all, there are at least 500,000 cameras in the city, and one study showed that in a single day a person could expect to be filmed 300 times."
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Daniel Gross on why the financial markets reacted to the London bombings as they did. Stocks dropped (but not too much), oil fell sharply, and transportation and insurance stocks took a bigger hit than most.
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Despite the flurry of remaindered links yesterday morning about the London transport bombings, yesterday was a pretty slow day on kottke.org. Because of the time difference between New York and London, news about the bombings became more scarce around noon ET when the London workday was ending and I decided not to post about anything else for the remainder of the day. Today, I'm resuming the usual flow of frivolous links and commentary around here, but I'll be keeping an eye out for news from London as well.
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A Letter to the Terrorists, From London. "We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub."
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