Valerie by Topshop
Design
How can I not love a collection named after me? The separates look great for mixing and matching. I love that red shoe. It’s crazy, it’s unique and it’s HIGH! And that cute little gingham dress… I know where my pay’s headed…
Apple iPhone goes 3G
General
Hello, this is my new phone.
Apple has announced the launched of Apple iPhone 3G! It comes in 2 colours, black and white. And get this, comes with a glossy plastic back. It’s smaller, faster and hell a lot cheaper. It will be retailing for US$199 everywhere in the world (That’s only $271 in Singapore! Move OVER Nokia!) by July 11th. Yay!
There’s a whole slew of other cool stuff along with the iPhone like the launch of MobileMe. MobileMe allows you update ALL your devices at a go.
Róisín Murphy
Music
Irish electronica star Róisín Murphy’s Overpowered is one of the most polished, tightly choreographed electronica albums in recent times. Róisín Murphy (pronounced as ro-SHEEN), once one half of Moloko, returns with Overpowered. In this album, she is cheerful as she’s depressing, positive as she’s heartbreaking too. Róisín tells you how is it like to be overpowered by love, nature and dreams in her way. The catchy beats and smooth sounds injects fun. I find my head bobbing along with the beat and my tuneless voice singing along.
Every track on this album is great but my favourites are Overpowered, You Know Me Better and Dear Miami.
Róisín Murphy has a sense of style that gets me feeling excited about getting up in the morning and dressing for the day, but that’s another post for another time.
Levi’s Mix It Up
Advertising, Design
I’m so happy to see the website that my team and I worked so goddamn bloody hard to create is so well received by the design community. We have won accolades on this weeks’ DesignCharts, last week’s E-Creative.net and won Site of the Day (15 May 2008) on Designlicks.com!
Levi’s Mix It Up is a microsite promoting Asia Pacific Levi’s latest Spring/Summer collection. The feature of this collection is idiotproof mixing and matching of clothes within the collection. We mirrored this concept in our site. Users can have fun by jumbling the cubes to form their favourite outfit in different settings.
Painting on wood
Design
Indonesian born Tessar Lo displays a flair for painting pictures that speak a thousand painful words. Yet his strokes are incongruent with such dark sentiments. His paintings on mediums like wood and stonehenge are like poetry in dark, stormy night. Pensively beautiful yet perfectly comprehensible. I also like how his work has an Asian influence to it.
The Never-ending Colour Book
Design, Interactive
ColorFlip by Rafaël Rozendaal, interactive experimenter extraordinaire, creates an entertaining, addictive site of coloured paper. All there are to the site are sheet after sheet of intensely coloured paper for you to tear and tear and tear.
Sometimes, things don’t have to be complicated to be beautiful and engaging. It is very easy for us Flash designers to get carried away by the speed of technological advancements. By the way, did you all know that Flash 10 is out? Head over to A-SFUG for more details.
Taxidermia
Movies
2006 alternative film by György Pálfi takes the viewer on a journey of surrealism in a realistic world. Set in Hungary, the film is a chronicle of three dysfunctional generations. From a martial father who’s first born is a boy with a pig’s tail, to a disgraced speed eating champion to a young taxidermist who goes extreme lengths to preserve beauty at it’s best, Taxidermia will leave you feeling confused, disgusted, fearful yet strangely liberated when the credits begin to roll at the end.
Rebel with a cause?
Books, Musings, Writings
Have you ever been in a position where you are told to not do something by someone of authority and, no matter how you wrack your brains for a reason to not do so, you just cannot find a reason? Say for example, you were walking down the road and you saw something that caught your attention, you veer off and race to take a closer look only to be yanked back by your mother.
I have been. I still am being censured thus.
I am reading Totto-chan: Little Girl at the Window for the seventh time and each time it never fails to make me feel a tinge of regret. I regret that I just let myself be moulded to the contemporary education system without standing up and trying to revolutionise. I wonder to myself it was because it was too hard or was it because I was conditioned to fear being different from the crowd?
Nevertheless, my favourite paragraph in the book is this:
Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving the truth; having hearts that are never moved therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster
For every point in that paragraph, I can pinpoint an incident to underscore it. For having eyes, but not seeing beauty are about these bunch of frightful worms that have made their home in trees that line a path that I take to get to the train station. These worms are HUGE (from the tip of your longest finger to the base of the palm), yet few have noticed them. For having ears, but not hearing music, my boyfriend once told me he never had his heart moved by music before. I was just stunned, I was unable to understand how could anyone not have experienced that shining, warm feeling that washes over your heart when beautiful music plays? Having minds, but not perceiving the truth relates to how people just never wonder how something happens or why something works. They just accept that’s how it happens and never question. Their innate curiosity has been baked to death by too much routine. Having hearts that are never moved therefore never set on fire is the most poignant point for me. When I take the train and look around me, I always will come across a face so devoid of expression it scares me. I tell myself I must never end up like that. I embrace my emotions fiercely. I am proud that I let myself feel sadness, anger, disappointment, hope, passion without feeling ashamed or the need to restraint my emotions inwardly, that my heart is still alive in these abrasive times.
Interestingly, all of these I never learnt in school. My most precious lessons in life were taught to me in a multitude of settings. While I can’t change the past, I promise myself that I will never back down and change who I am to fit into this world.
And you?
Queen
Music, Musings, Weird shit
I had a dream that Freddie Mercury stitched me up with needle and thread. And I was grateful.
Portishead is God
Music
