Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman

On March 29, the Mingei International Museum in San Diego opens “Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism -- Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman,” an exhibition with more than 200 pieces from the vast portfolio of the Culver City artisans. Though little known to most of the public, the couple are revered in design circles for ceramics, tile mosaics, woodcarvings and textiles that had the kind of cheap-chic ethos so popular today. “One of our goals was to be affordable,” Evelyn Ackerman says. “Not having a lot of money was the position we were in most of our young life, so it is what we strove to do for others.”The Ackermans invited the Home section for a peek inside their home and studio. Here, with her “Cat and Bird” tapestry hanging by the living room, Evelyn Ackerman gets a little love from husband Jerome.

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*Editors Note - Notice (in the first picture) Jerome is rockin a pair of 'OG' Jack Purcells and Evelyn has a pair of Deck Shoes (Goodyear?) on with 'black laces'. Respect the Architect!

Poppy van Oorde-Grainger's Pavement Watercolour Paintings

"Al Gore’s Just an Opportunist"

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford -

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Peek a Boo Jesus

Wooster Collective is always amazed (and I as well for that matter) at the effect that street art can have. The other day, the New England based artist Maki105 placed "Peek-A-Boo Jesus" on the side of a video store in New Bedford, Mass. and the end result is below in my second post on this subject.

Wooster Collective

I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso

Yesterday, the following story ran in the Boston papers:

Lund’s Corner Jesus Draws a Crowd

Pitchfork Founder Ryan Schreiber Nominated For Time Magazines 100

Ryan Schreiber, founder of Pitchfork Media, has been nominated as a finalist for The Time 100 Most Influential People in the World. Alongside Vladimir Putin, Pope Benedict XVI, Robert Mugabe, Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh sits "Mr. Finger on the Pulse" Mr. Schreiber. The article reads:

“His music-culture website Pitchfork is the Pravda of indie rock, steering opinion (and sales) with its infamously forthright record reviews; even its detractors can’t help but look at it three times a day. Among Pitchfork’s early finds: Arcade Fire, Interpol and Relevant Elephant.”

Continue reading here via TheTripWire

Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?

When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.That staggering growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower — most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

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Art News: Christie’s Sued over Bacon that Failed to Sell

Francis Bacon, Study for a Self-Portrait, 1964, Via Rawartint

A Florida art collector is suing Christie’s New York, after his Self-Portrait by Francis Bacon failed to sell at auction in November 2008. Christie’s had offered collector George Weiss a minimum guarantee, but allegedly refused to follow through after Weiss consigned the work. The auction house alludes to the collapse of the art market in its defense.

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Levi’s collaborates with Stefan Sagmeister on art series featuring its iconic 501

This is an interesting collaboration that I found floating around the net.

Here are some bullet points from the press release…

• Sagmeister has developed a series of designs that explore the jean that started it all - the Levi’s Original, Button-Fly 501
• The installation will unveil the first two Sagmeister images from the special art series created for the Levi’s
• Levi’s brand and American Rag stores in Los Angeles and San Francisco will distribute a limited run of 501 museum-quality, poster reproductions of the Sagmeister images featured in American Rag’s windows this March.
• Sagmeister took Levi’s Original button-fly 501 and examined its origin and mystique, literally stripping the iconic silhouette down to the raw materials that compose its DNA. “The jeans themselves are iconic, so we decided to go with just a product shot, using nothing more and nothing less than a single pair of 501s,” Stefan explains.

SoWeet!

How Twitter Could Bring Search Up to Speed

When Twitter was introduced in late 2006, asking users to post a 140-character answer to the question “What are you doing?,” many criticized the results as nothing more than a collection of trivial thoughts and inane ramblings. Fast-forward three years, and the number of Twitter users has grown to millions, while the content of the many posts–better known as “tweets”–has shifted from banal to informative.

Twitter users now cover breaking news, posting links to reports, blog posts, and images. Twitter’s search box also reveals what people think of the latest new gadget or movie, letting visitors eavesdrop on often spirited conversations and some insightful opinions. (…)

Nonetheless, as Twitter grows in size and substance, it’s becoming clear that it offers a unique feed of real-time conversation and sentiment. Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land, compares this to the unique real-time feed of new video content offered by YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and says that Twitter could help improve real-time search. Notably, says Sullivan, this is something that Google isn’t particularly good at. Even by scouring news sites, Google simply can’t match the speed and relevancy of social sites like Digg and Twitter, he says.

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Colbert Wins NASA Space Station Name Contest

WASHINGTON – NASA's online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name "Colbert" beat out NASA's four suggested options in the space agency's effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.

NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report," to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday.

NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name. Agency spokesman John Yembrick said NASA will decide in April, but will give top vote-getters "the most consideration."

Yahoo.com

Be a Rebel in HD

My Next Camera

The recent push among camera manufacturers to redefine what entry-level means has been a boon to those of us trying to transition from taking mere snapshots to taking photographs. The genre's latest entry? Canon's Rebel T1i. It has too many features to list, but the vitals are more than solid: It packs the same 15.1 megapixels found on Canon's pro-am 50D model, can handle ISO settings up to a mind-boggling 12,800 (to put things in perspective, shoots full-HD video at 1,080p). The T1i is intended as a Nikon D90 killer, but don't blame Canon, however, if you give up still photography altogether because now you want to direct.
$900 with 18-55mm lens; usa.canon.com

Men.Style.com

Banksy in NYC