2007 Gift Guide: Watchismo’s Picks and LIP Watch Giveaway November 30, 2007
To celebrate my redesigned Watchismo.com website and year anniversary contributing to CH, I thought I’d force my Lips on you all!
Actually, I’m giving away a $300 French LIP watch, your pick from six styles, each one evolved from the original 1970s Mach 2000 (below left and right) and other seventies designer series. LIP is a 150-year-old watch company that hired some of the hippest designers of the sixties and seventies to create a futuristic line of wristwatches like nothing seen before (or since). The brand disappeared for almost three decades since the mid-seventies but now they’re back, faithfully reviving many of the original series and even adding some new designs. Watchismo is the exclusive distributor in the U.S.
The most influential by far was Roger Tallon, who has designed everything from mid-century modern furniture to space-age high speed trains. From the fifties through the eighties, Tallon created everything from modern 8mm cameras, portable televisions, modular staircases and furniture, motorcycles, cars, typewriters, industrial equipment and subway maps to the aforementioned bullet shaped French TGV train.
Most iconic horologically was his asymmetric and rectangular aluminum Mach 2000 watches, easily distinguished by the primary color protruding balls for crowns and pushers for the chronographs. Each ball is situated with stylish negativity inside the cutaways of the watch case. Tallon designed a multitude of other styles including a digital LED “Diode” (above left), minimal “Frigo” (below center) and boxy “Tele” (below center).
The designer that started it all in 1969 was by Prince Francois de Baschmakoff. His Jump Hour (pictured above right), though often imitated in the four decades since, hasn’t been reproduced true to the original design—with spinning digital discs and overlapping interchangeable straps—until now.
And taking a step into the past with a leap into the future is up and coming French LIP designer, Prisca Briquet and her “Mythic” (top center) It takes Roger Tallon’s “Tele” case design and adds a new twist, revealing the entire dial with exposed digital discs that line up to tell the time.
One lucky CH reader will have their pick of the litter but the rest of you can have 10% off any LIP purchase at Watchismo just by mentioning Cool Hunting. See a few of my favorites and some other watches that make great gifts in the gift guide.
To enter, send an email to watchismo [at] gmail [dot] com with “CH LIP Watch Giveaway” in the subject line by 14 December 2007. (Please note that your name will be added to the (infrequent and not annoying) Watchismo mailing list by entering.
Indian science fiction — past and present
India’s Tehelka has an excellent article on the history and state of Indian science fiction:
It all began in 19th century Bengal. The first example of modern Indian SF was probably a Bengali story, Shukra Bhraman or ‘Travels to Venus’, by Jagananda Roy in 1879. Or, depending on your perspective, much before that. “Science Fiction has been a part of Indian literature since the Puranas and the Mahabharata,†says MH Srinarahari, General Secretary of the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies (IASFS). “There was the palace of wax made by the Kauravas and Ram faced Mrigmarichika, which was nothing but an illusion. 
INDIAN SF also often comes with a moral message. “It should have a social purpose,†says Srinarahari. “If a writer is speaking of an imaginary world or change in his environ, how can he cope with it? Reading about it will educate a person.†Deshpande agrees. “There has to be a mission,†he says. In his story, the protagonist dreams that a bacteria is speaking to him, saying that increasingly powerful antibiotics are not the way to get rid of pathogenic bacteria. Peaceful coexistence between humans and the bacteria is the need of the hour. The subtext here, says Deshpande, is about nuclear weapons and terrorists.
(Thanks, Partha!)
Uranium ore for sale on Amazon
Amazon sells uranium ore, “in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations.” $23 a throw.
(via Making Light)
Paintings of crime scene photos by Ashley Hope
Ashley Hope paints from crime scene photos. The images in this gallery depict murders of women. Snip from artist’s statement:
There are certain moments in life when one experiences space and time to an excruciating degree. There are seconds — fleeting, momentous seconds — when the world seems relentlessly clear, and the very nature of existence graspable. When the moment passes, you think to yourself, “My God, I just saw it. It. The truth. What was it?” Although you are unable to define, the sensation of knowing stays with you. Most likely, the Real cannot be set in words, it is beyond words. Human tragedy is almost always accompanied by that glimpse of the Real.
Link to her website. Image: Laundry, 4′ x 5′, oil on panel, 2007. A debut solo exhibition is currently on display at New York’s Tilton Gallery. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin, via rileydog)
Rolling Stone — every issue from 1967 to 2007 on DVD
I’m fanatical about Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years. It’s got every issue on three DVDs and works with Windows and Mac.
Once you install the reader application, searches are fast. They’re even faster if you copy the DVDs to your internal hard drive. (You’re not allowed to copy them to an external hard drive, which is a bummer, because I have a 100 GB external hard drive that is just waiting to be filled with something like this.) The first disc contains the print run from 1967 to 1983, which is pretty much all I care about, so I copied that one over to my internal drive.
It’s fun to search on terms to see when they first appeared in Rolling Stone. “Punk Rock” made its debut in 1973 (though it was about garage punk, not the punk rock that began in 1975). An October 1977 article by Charley Walters called “Punk: Pretty Vacant Music” is the first to mention The Clash. (Walters has good things to say about The Clash, but dismisses punk rock music in general as “overly simplistic and rudimentary. It’s also not very good.”)
Hunter S. Thompson’s first article for Rolling Stone (October 1970) is an exuberant, drug-fueled 12,000 word account of his nearly-successful run for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.
The magazine got its first taste of MDMA in Gary Wolf’s article “Don’t Get Wasted, Get Smart!” in 1991.
Boing Boing didn’t show up until February 22, 2007 (”a must click resource for budding futurists since it broke news of the Segway personal transport in 2001″).
It’s also fun to simply browse through the early issues and admire its zine-like design.
I’m still just beginning to understand the awesomeness of having a searchable complete run of Rolling Stone at my fingertips. If I’m not answering my email or phone calls, you’ll know why.
Samuel Sparrow
Samuel Sparrow, a Glasgow-based artist who’s exhibited recently in Sweden, Scotland and England, has some recently completed new pieces. An accomplished illustrator, he’s contributed periodicals like Rant and Bearded Magazineamong others.
If you’re passing through Stockholm before Sunday, he’s also one of the featured creative minds being featured at an exhibition being held inside a former downtown cinema that’s been converted into an Urban Outfitters store.
John Gaeta on VRMAG
John Gaeta, the Oscar-winning special effects guru behind The Matrix trilogy and the forthcoming Speed Racer film, just told me about one of his favorite online hangouts: VRMAG. It’s an online magazine about virtual reality in all its forms including, as John describes it, “interactive photography and explorable documentary art.” Prematurely hyped during the cyberdelic 90s hysteria, virtual reality has actually progressed in amazing ways as an art form. VRMAG isn’t just a technical publication for folks in the biz like Gaeta, but it’s also an online gallery for some stunning VR experiences. The new issue features a look inside the closed zone of Chernobyl, Red Square, Mayan ruins, a pill’s eye-view from a medicine bottle, the scene inside a washing machine, and many more articles and experiences. (Image above from Aldo Hoeben’s “To Be In A Bubble Party At Sziget 2007.”) Here’s what John Gaeta says about VR MAG:
I have been inspired especially in the last couple years by the effort the magazine is making and have referenced many articles while making Speed Racer…which will be a nearly 100% GREEN SCREEN movie (like 300 and Sin City on crack) with many virtual sets created with HD QTVR locations…something that many VRMAG contributors are converging toward. I also think there is a new entertainment medium under way which will be manifested through some of the experiments reported by them.
Link (Thanks John Battelle for the intro!)
Roger Price record in MP3 format - Roger and Over
WFMU has mp3 files of the late humorist Roger Price’s album, Roger and Over. Price was the author of several humor books as well as the classic critique on dumb culture -The Great Roob Revolution.
I was fortunate to become friends with Roger Price in his later years, and fondly remember his encouragement when Carla and I were publishing the print version of bOING bOING.
Roger Price is my favorite forgotten comic, though this album may only give you the slightest idea why. Mr. Price is the self-same Price who co-created Mad Libs with Leonard Stern, and is therefore the Price in Price/Stern/Sloan (or pss!) – but that’s not why, either. He also wrote for Bob Hope, Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad and Steve Allen’s Tonight Show, but that’s also not why.
In the early 1950s, Roger Price invented the Droodle. That’s why.
More specifically, Roger Price is aces with me because of the two collections of Droodles published by pss! – a little red book called “Droodles” and a little green book called “Oodles of Droodles” (formerly “Droodles #2″). I’ve had them since I was very young, and they were a major force in shaping my sense of humor. It’s not the Droodles themselves so much, though they were certainly amusing and clever, as the commentary beneath them, which would often be ambling monologues only tangentially related to the picture above. Check out the “Crookshank” essay on the back of the “Roger and Over” record jacket for a sample of what I’m talking about.
eBoy giftwrap
eBoy, the art collective that designed the Boing Boing logo, has created several styles of beautiful giftwrap, which you can purchase from the eBoy site. Link
Life of universe shortened by observing dark energy?
Article in the Telegraph reports on scientists’ thoughts on the idea that the life of the universe might come to an end sooner because people are studying it.
New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have provided evidence that the universe may ultimately decay by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.
The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have determined that the cosmos is in a state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay,” says Prof Krauss.