The Publics

I recently wrote an article for the current issue of Elemente Magazine entitled “Aerosol Interiors“, which details the exploits of Graham Oatman - graf writer turned interior/graphic designer extraordinaire. Since finishing the article, I’ve grown quite fond of the wily yank and we’ve collaborated on a few projects here and there. The most recent and tactile of these collabos is the ongoing redesign of my century-old kitchen, which is being transformed through the science of design and the magic of “art” from a mess of vomity salmon pink nonsense into a cool n’ breezy Iberian-style la cucina.

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Peter Kennard, a London-based artist best known for his photomontage work, has been engineering iconic anti-war imagery since the late ’60s. Along with contemporaries like Steve Bell and Banksy, Kennard’s work has come to define the aesthetic of Britain’s Blair/Bush-era neo-resistance art movement. His most recent efforts include an ongoing collaboration between Cat Picton-Phillipps, which is available for purchase on the To Die For DVD.

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Experimental cartography meets anti-corporate resource under the umbrella of slick web design with They Rule, a site that allows its users to seamlessly explore the business connections between America’s ruling elite.

From the site:

A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy. They are proud to rule. And yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.

Ex-Goonie Josh Brolin will play Dubya in Oliver Stone’s upcoming biopic of the most unpopular president in American history. The film will be released into theatres this October, coinciding with the general election.

From the Entertainment Weekly First Look:

”You’d be amazed how many male stars of a certain age in Hollywood are Republicans,” says Bill Block, CEO of QED, one of the film’s producers. ”I’m not going to name names, but a lot of them just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.” According to Stone, even some of the town’s young Democrats couldn’t be persuaded. ”They hate Bush so much, they can’t understand why I’d want to make a movie about him,” he says. ”They hate him so much, they can’t even imagine themselves playing him or playing anybody around him.”

Democratic front-runner Barack Obama has personally thanked Shepard Fairey for his artistic efforts in a written letter and has commissioned the former wheatpaster to design this new “Change” campaign poster. This comes at a good time for Fairey, who is currently embroiled in a dispute with Baxter Orr, a freelance designer out of Austin, TX who has built a modest career off of “re-engineering” some of Fairey’s most recognizable works. Fairey has sent a cease and desist order to Orr and threatened to sue if the posters up for sale aren’t removed from Orr’s website.

The whole situation is a little too ironic for my tastes, but I guess we’ll have to chalk it up as yet another example of art-parodying-communism-imitating-capitalism turned art-imitating-communism-and-inadvertently-parodying-capitalism.

Click more to see further examples of Baxter Orr’s cutting-edge design genius.

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Not only does the old adage “crime pays” ring truer by the day, but it now seems that massive feats of white-collar criminality have become a great way to attract the attention of upper echelon headhunters.

Jérôme Kerviel, France’s infamous rogue trader who is accused of taking Société Générale for €4.9bn ($7.7bn) has landed a gig at LCA, a computer services firm that specializes in crisis management for illustrious brands like luxury goods group LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy).

from The Guardian:

A spokesman for Kerviel said he had been working for the firm based outside Paris for about a week. He has been allowed to take up the job because of a judge’s change in the terms for his provisional release from prison. After five weeks in custody, Kerviel, 31, was released on bail on March 18 while investigators examine his role in the biggest bank trading scandal in history.

I wonder where Takafumi Horie will end up? Horie took the Japanese business world by storm with a cutthroat “get rich quick” genius that enabled him to take a single website and turn it into Japan’s largest media empire within a decade. His company, Livedoor, was worth over $6bn at its peak but was brought crashing down when it was revealed that Horie and other Livedoor executives had cooked the books by setting up a network of dummy investment partners and manipulating Livedoor’s share prices.

Horie, known endearingly as “Horiemon”, is now serving out the remainder of a four-year prison term, but upon release I think quite a few companies will be interested in accruing his services - legal, illegal and anything in between.

The Life and Times of Takafumi Horie

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The RZA has let loose a couple joints off the upcoming Bobby Digital “Digi-Snax” album. While the production and lyricism on the new tracks are undeniably hype, I’m unconvinced that the RZA’s alter-ego is still relevant in 2008. Bobby Digital made his debut a decade ago, when people were listening to the likes of Puff Daddy and Will Smith - the dark ages of modern hip-hop - when any attempt to freshen the aesthetics of the genre was more than welcome.

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The car bomb, a popular form of improvised explosive device (IED), also known as “the poor man’s airforce” has a complex history of development that stretches back for almost 100 years.

The first recorded execution of a car bomb attack was actually a “cart” bomb. In 1920, Italian anarchist Mario Buda parked a horse-drawn wagon filled with explosives across from the JP Morgan building in New York’s business district, killing 40 and wounding 200.

After its inception, the first crucial phase of the car bomb’s development occurred in late 1940’s Palestine, where fascists filled trucks with explosives to kill their British and Palestinian opponents.

From thereon the car bomb became a sporadic trend in a variety of conflict hotspots. Vehicle-induced massacres occurred in Saigon, Palermo, Algiers and Northern Ireland. It was the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who took the technology to the next level, using next-generation bombs that were made from easy-to-acquire industrial ingredients. Consequently, the modern car bomb was born and urban terrorists were able to level the playing field against their government rivals.

In the 1980s, Hezbollah perfected the use of car bombs within the context of state conflict and used IED-propelled ground terror strategies to challenge the advanced military technologies of Israel, France and the US. Recognizing the potential of VBIEDs (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) The CIA decided to experiment with the technology, training Afghani Mujahedin to use car bombs against the Russian forces in Kabul.

All of these stages of development laid the groundwork for the popularization of VBIED terrorism in major urban centres throughout the 90s. Key targets were hit in London, Manhattan, Oklahoma City, Nairobi, Colombo, Buenos Aires, Bombay, etc, inflicting thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the car bomb has gone from a worldwide phenomenon, used by extremists to target specific financial and governmental nodes, to a daily feature of modern urban warfare. In May 2007, IED incidents in Iraq peaked at 60 per day, but have since declined sharply, while the number of suicide car bombings and use of roadside bombs is beginning to gain momentum throughout Afghanistan.