PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Bookshelf porn

    Bookshelves are sexy, like the librarian with trendy glasses:

    Bookshelf Porn

  • Detroit Art City

    Economic collapse means you can build a lot for your buck amongst the rubble, especially if you’re an artist in Detroit.

    But its particular brand of civic and economic decay has also drawn something unexpected: a small but well-publicized movement of artists and other creative types trying to wring something out of the rubble.

    TED, Banksy and Make Magazine are some of the big names, and the mayor has hired a special position to help coordinate art events.

  • Play nourishes creativity

    In publishing her latest book, Jillian Tamaki says this about the importance of play to the creative spirit:

    But I do sincerely believe that without personal work and comics, I might go nuts. For the most part, there is little Sense of Play in commercial illustration (there are a few glorious exceptions to this rule). And the Sense of Play is really what nourishes creativity and, ultimately, good work (paid or otherwise). Sometimes, I think, it’s actually more important than rigorous practice.

    I have a day job that pays the bills, but my creative projects save my soul.

  • Coordinated camera flashes at a concert

    At concerts, the pop of a camera flash is constant. You see it on TV at the Super Bowl or some other event. At a Robbie Williams concert, for a Nikon ad, he called upon the crowd to raise their cameras and take a picture. The result:

  • The Black Keys – Brothers

    Brothers by The Black Keys is a dirty blues rock album. You can hear The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix coming from two guys. With bass and drums leading the way on what seems like every song, it gets a bit repetitive. There’s enough diversity in the arrangements that you can tell the difference between songs but only after a few listens. The Only One, Ten Cent Pistol and I’m Not the One are stand out tracks.

  • Dennis Hopper – Bucharest Nights

    Eccentric and edgy Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper avidly collected art, and photography was a lifelong active hobby. In 2005, he published Bucharest Nights, a collection of “digital paintings” at night with a digital camera. The majority of the images are ghostly and ethereal. Stark figures in golden tones against a black backdrop, light trails down a street, neon glows from a casino. A few are stunning but for the most part the book contains good pictures that work better on a whole as a body of work. The random photos of naked women taken with film, jarringly contrasts the preceding 30 or so pictures as if you were listening to soft trance music and someone turned on a buzz saw.

  • Peter Gabriel – Scratch My Back

    Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back continues the trend of cover albums. However, Gabriel covers both his peers and those who may have been inspired by him.

    The album begins softly with David Bowie’s Heroes that builds into an aching crescendo. All the songs have a lush, symphonic, orchestral arrangements–strings, pianos, horns–and often to a repetitive degree. Sometimes this works, in covering the Magnetic Fields’ Book of Love, it becomes a tender ballad despite the odd lyrics. Paul Simon’s The Boy in The Bubble and Arcade Fire’s My Body is a Cage become soulless. He closes with Radiohead’s Street Spirit which goes out in a baritone drone.

    Covering songs is always risky, and there are risks on Scratch My Back. They’re interesting choices, but none will reach the level of Johnny Cash remaking Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt.

  • Finite and Infinite Games

    James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility philosophically explores the premise of life as a series of games and infinite games.  Finite games have an end and rules may not change, whereas infinite games are never ending and the rules must change. Directly, think of Super Mario versus World of Warcraft.  With the Mario games, there’s a set of rules (stomp the mushrooms, fireball the goombas, save the princess, don’t die), but with Warcraft, there’s an entire world with a constantly changing set of rules and dynamics of play.

    Understanding that, there are several other tenets:

    • Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries
    • Finite players are serious, infinite players are playful
    • A finite player seeks to be powerful, an infinite player plays with strength
    • A finite player consumes time, an infinite player generates time
    • A finite player aims for eternal life, an infinite player aims for eternal birth

    Zen koans aside, it’s interesting to distinguish that from a finite standpoint, resources are scarce and must be consumed, but with an endless, infinite perspective, resources are plentiful and can be created. Carse discusses resource issues briefly, however, he mainly applies logic to his thesis to different areas of life–learning (training vs. education), sex (body vs. spirit), family (choosing vs. having), stories (plot vs. themes).

    Finite and Infinite Games is a good book for anyone looking for perspective, but it’s not an easy read in the sense that it’s tediously and brutally logical.  Perhaps that’s what’s needed to fully explain infinite concepts in a finite span of pages.

  • Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now

    Charlie Styr published Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now using pictures from the Flickr Teenage Photography group. It’s aimed at the beginner or wanna-be-a-little-bit-cooler-by-by-taking-cool-pictures photographers. It’s balanced covering all the essential photography topics-exposure, aperture, shutter speed, light, composition, etc. It goes a little further with the example photos and includes camera settings. This comes in handy when wanting to figure out techniques specific to certain situations, such as macro, low-light, creating light trails or portraits.

  • Flipboard

    Flipboard is a damn, clever iPad app.  It takes streams of content such as Twitter, Facebook, various RSS news feeds and transforms the assortment of text, hypertext and pictures into an enjoyable experience.  Flipboard uses a newspaper-like metaphor for pulling content together and users swipe to flip pages.  Tweets are artfully rendered, and those that link to articles elsewhere, the articles are expanded.  Logging into Facebook makes browsing the Newsfeed like you’re catching up on your friends with a digital late edition newspaper–minus the spam of quizzes and Farmville clones.  Further, if logged in to Twitter or Facebook, you can comment and interact with the content.  What’s interesting is that the web page fades away and content becomes forefront to the experience–which is how it should be.