Background information

One of my favourite blogs is Bobby Solomon's Kitsune Noir. Once a week, Bobby posts a new desktop wallpaper that has been sent in by an independent designer, illustrator, or artist. This Desktop Wallpaper Project has kept my desktop looking ace for like the past 6-8 months.

There are different resolutions for different desktop sizes, and the style of the design changes dramatically each week, and with work from guys like Tavis Coburn, Josh Cochran, and Rey Ortega, the work is top-notch. Check out a few examples below, and definitely have a look at the site for the full range of wallpapers:

In praise of Mitch Ansara

Just saw these awesome illustrations over on Veer. Illustrator Mitch Ansara has taken a bunch of movies, some old, some new, and created images that show what they would look like as 60's era paperbacks. They're slightly similar to my earlier post about Olly Moss' work I guess, in that they're both using retro designs to simply illustrate the general plot of a film. Either way, Mitch's work is simply great, and I really encourage you to head over here, to check out some more (like 16 or 17 more) work like this:





The illustration series is called "I Can Read Movies", by the way..

The Fall

I was lucky enough to see Tarsem Singh's The Fall the other night. I say 'lucky' because this movie was nearly lost to the world, due to the lack of any film distributor willing to take a risk and show it to the public. Thankfully, directors Spike Jonze and David Fincher saw the film, and managed to convince a distributor to take on the film. The director paid for most of the production himself, and the film was shot on 26 locations across 18 countries. It is without doubt the most visually attractive film I've seen in at least a year, and the performances of the two leads are absorbing.
I won't try to explain the plot of the film myself, just check out the trailer below, and see for yourself:

Heating up?

It's getting hotter here in Dubai right? I think that was the shortest winter ever. Maybe this had something to do with it:


See more of these guys here.

Polo position

On Friday I went down to the Dubai Polo club to watch a friend play. I've been to the polo once or twice in the past, and it's always a good day out. Everyone parks their cars on the opposite side from the clubhouse, and brings picnics etc. The polo season is wrapping up in the next few weeks I think, so if you get the chance to head down, take it.



There are a couple more photos from the polo on my Flickr photostream, so check them out if you're interested.

Also, don't forget to follow my Twitter feed, it's super awesome, and makes me feel popular..

Image dump 2

More stuff from all over the place, to get your week started right:

Art attack

I had some old friends from London in town the other week, so I took them out to lunch at the XVA Gallery in the beautiful Bastakiya precinct:




The courtyard area in the gallery is really nice, and the food is great too. I think it may have won best restaurant back in 2006 according to Time Out Dubai, but I can't be sure.

One thing that caught my eye in the gallery was a piece by an artist called Jennifer Maestre. I had seen her work a few months earlier on Boing Boing, and on a few other blogs, so I was quite surprised to see one of her creations here in Dubai. The piece at XVA was similar to this:


Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the piece itself, but I'd encourage you all to head down (or up) to XVA and check out some of the work.
In the entrance to the gallery area, they had this amazing chair created by young artist Noel Duigan:


Click here to read a short interview with Noel, and see some more of his designs. It looks like he's leaving Dubai to head home to Sydney, which is a shame, but it seems as though he'll maintain a retail presence in Dubai.

Social butterfly

Just a quick note to let you guys know that I'm now on Twitter, so if you are too, follow my feed here.
http://twitter.com/Sandman84

Plus if you liked the photos I put up of the Graniph launch the other day, there are some more on my Flickr photostream, which can be found here.
http://flickr.com/photos/sandman-files

So follow me on Twitter, and we can be best of friends, like these guys:


Wow, two robot-related posts in one day. Strange..

Robot invasion

A friend of mine has been asked to submit something to the My Name Is Robot art show that is running from the 19th until the 22nd of February at Jam Jar Gallery here in Dubai.

The idea behind the show is to get a range of different artists to decorate one of these guys in any way they want:


The robot was designed by UK artist Martin Simpson. It looks like it's going to be a pretty cool exhibition, and MTV Arabia is going to be filming part of their Weyakoum programme there as well, so if you come down to check it out you might end up on TV! This is exactly the type of stuff Dubai needs more of, so make sure you drop by at some stage..

Icarus and Ulysses

I was listening to Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks of 2008 earlier, and there was a track called "Upon Viewing Brueghel's 'Landscape With the Fall of Icarus'" by a band called Titus Andronicus. Apart from striking me as probably the most ridiculous name for a song that I've heard in a long time, it made me want to see this painting for myself. So here it is:


The great thing about this work of art is the fact that Icarus is so small, you can barely see his legs poking out of the water near the stern of the ship. The total indifference of the farmer just makes Icarus' death so pointless. It reminded me of this short story by Borges, called The House of Asterion, which totally flipped the perspective in the old myth of Jason slaying the Minotaur. Borges' short stories are so face-punchingly awesome; if you have the chance to buy one of his collections, you really should.

While we're on the subject of Greek mythology, I just heard a track from the new Franz Ferdinand album, called "Ulysses". I was literally listening to the track over on The Hype Machine, when I was looking at BOOOOOOOM.com, and they had just posted the video of the same track. In their words, the "video makes this song 10,000 times better." I think the track is pretty great on its own, especially the crunchy synths that kick in at about the 40 second mark. Pitchfork have given the new album a decent review, so hopefully we'll all be hearing a fair bit of this album this year:

Eyebrows and images

It seemed like everyone on the internet today was talking about this new ad that was made by Cadbury:

If you liked that one ad they did with the gorilla playing drums, chances are you'll like this one too.

On the weekend, I came across this great site called Hey Okay. It's basically an image log like FFFFound or You Look Marvelous (both possibly NSFW), except the site allows comments, and seems to have a nice little community following it. The site's curator collects awesome images like this:


So make sure you check out Hey Okay; it's just recovering from a server loss at the moment, but it's bound to get better by the day..

Slumdog soundtrack

I've been a bit lazy about posting about Slumdog Millionaire. I saw this film when I was on holiday, and it totally blew me away. Danny Boyle has done an amazing job putting the whole thing together, and he gets amazing performances from his entire cast. One of the best elements of the whole thing is A.R. Rahman's amazing score. Now, I'm sure you've all heard M.I.A.'s track Paper Planes by now. It was probably my favourite track from 2008 (although it's technically from 2007), and it features prominently in the film. There's actually two versions of the track in the film though, and I thought I'd share the second version, which is a DFA remix:

I'm quite confident that Slumdog Millionaire will win the Best Picture prize at this year's Oscars, and it's already #34 on IMDB's top 250 films of all time (whatever that's worth), so yeah, everyone should really check it out..

Image dump

Every so often I'll just post up a bunch of weird and wonderful pictures that I've found from the internet. Most of these images come from sites like FFFFound, It's Nice That and yay!everyday, so there's a chance you might have seen them before if you like these sites. Either way, enjoy, and remember to click on the images to see them in higher resolution:

Garfield is gone

Someone sent me the link to this great web-comic the other day called Garfield Minus Garfield. The comic describes itself as "a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb." Here are just a few of the hundred great examples:






This is just a genius idea for a comic, and if it wasn't so funny, would probably be quite depressing. Jon seems to be totally manic in these strips; I guess that's why he started talking to his cat in the first place. This one seems to make the most sense: