Cars, branding and product placement. Miramax is apparently touting a $35m licensing deal (one of the largest ever) for whichever car manufacturer wants to get their brand into the upcoming remake of cult radio/TV series the Green Hornet. The original series featured a heavily customised 1966 Chrysler Imperial as Black Beauty, the car-come-sidekick with a mind of its own - see 'The Incomparable Imperial for 1966,' a scan of the original brochure.

You just know that whatever company digs deep to get its new car on screen, something won't be the same. The recent Matrix Reloaded (linked, discussed, disected, practically everywhere) used Cadillacs almost exclusively. James Bond got the Ford group in a vice-like grip (or was that the other way round?), ensuring that their key brands (the Ford Thunderbird, Jaguar XKR and Aston Martin Vanquish) were prominently featured (to the exclusion of practically everything else). Thunderbird's pink-tinted marionette Lady Penelope had a famous Rolls Royce, the FAB 1, which was allegedly approved by Rolls Royce itself. In the upcoming, groaningly inevitable, live action movie, the RR branding has been dropped in favour of something else, a retro-futuristic concoction that some have likened to the automotive Thunderbird, a nice bit of not-so-subliminal product placement. Vaguely related: how do they reckon on getting a Humvee-based Mars Rover to Mars…?

Drowing in Brown is a Vincent Gallo fansite, an almost oxymoronic state of affairs given the critical pasting doled out to his latest one-man created opus, the now notorious The Affair of the Brown Bunny. With searing reviews all round ('so autistic, so painfully sincere that it goes off the so-bad-it's-good scale into something else entirely'), it seems likely to get some kind of cinematic release. Just what is it about rabbits that encourages such flights of fantasy (I, II, III)? How did the rabbit become a totem of supressed desires? Time to re-link to Danielle Olsen's rabbit-proof fence piece. And where has our favourite rabbit photo gone?

Elsewhere. Dublog is a quite excellent culture-related blog. One of many useful links was this one to AARON, a painting robot I remember vaguely from back issues of National Geographics (the NG has always been a constant: an ageless, familiar publication that lurked in school libraries, grandparents' houses and attics)

Lightcycle links to computer-art and cultural impact, including projects like Processing, with its pop-up gallery of little software toys (we like the beautiful Whip) / Social Design Notes has escaped our attention until now, a thoughtful meditation on design and media responsibility, and how the two camps surge backwards and forwards on matters ethically dubious, e.g. Toppling.

Thanks to Blogmatcher for this sudden spurt of discovery. Without trying to sound like one of those glowing testimonials you get in dating agency literature, the Blogmatcher service has thrown up all sorts of new things to see (and, according to which, Where threads come loose is our perfect partner. Try this link to a very un-Disney and off-brand moment).

Evocative posters from a more innocent era of rock and roll / covers from Ren and Stimpy comics (and video captures) / Dublog also links to the awesome-sounding Listening Post installation, the sinister fusion of instant messaging with sound and visuals /
Sniggle.net has a fun page of news hoaxes, trolls and downright forgeries amongst its encyclopaedic collection of culture-jamming.

You'll usually learn something at the Guardian's Notes and Queries site (although Private Eye's parody is usually far more inspired) / the Joy of Shards points out that they have a whole page on Barcelona, and questions the Gaudi Industry's sidelining of his mosaic collaborator, Josep Maria Jujol / Isokonplus is an all-new modernist design site for all-retro (almost) modernist furniture.

Slick CD-R covers / a found photo album / Bryan Boyer's IndyJunior transforms your mindless airmiles into an international adventure / Annoy someone: take photos in Starbucks / Caterina on Gursky / a gallery of lenticular postcards (via travelers diagram). Some of these things must have been tricky to scan.

We have two new galleries: the south-west and Barcelona architecture (the latter unforgivably drab, given the subject matter). posted by things at 08:40 / 0 comments