Araab Muzik is a talented guy from my hometown. He’s produced a lot for Dip Set, especially Cam’ron and last year released an instrumental album called Electronic Dream that ended up on quite a few critic and artist best of lists. His sound is kind of interesting. A few years ago I probably wouldn’t have been into it, but the fact that American music has been taken over for David Guetta-style oonts and sparkle makes the fact that Araab Muzik somehow manages to incorporate and overpower that sound with hard drums and strip club high hats makes it that much more pleasurable to me. He’s also a barbarian on the MPC. See above.

Get him album off iTunes

Araab Muzik - Streetz Tonight

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Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator

Thanks Galahad for reminding me!

Nathan Myhrvold is a jerk. He files for useless patents just so he can use them to sue and shake down other companies that actually are innovating. He doesn’t actually invent or create anything. His company Intellectual Vultures does perform a service or make a product that people use; all it does is manufacture litigation.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the time, but earlier this week I came upon a fascinating and deeply depressing profile of Intellectual Ventures by NPR reporter Laura Sydell and This American Life producer/Planet Money co-host Alex Blumberg. The piece is called When Patents Attack and, in the words of its creators, it asks

Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war waging right now, all across the software and tech industries.

Listen up:

Inspired by this piece, the website FrugalDad posted an informative and pretty infographic on the subject.

This infographic discusses some of the facts behind the patent industry and how it’s changed as software, technology, and the internet have developed at an incredible pace. I find the information to say a lot about the state of development and innovation; both how important it can be to everyday life, and the problems it can face on a larger scale.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

Thanks to Andrew, Frank Lee and everyone for opening my eyes to this and punching holes in my hero worship.

Hot on the heels of holiday season, here is the second installment of Baby Beats, my mix series for 5’s and under. Like the first one, Baby Beats 2 is inspired by my nieces Natasha and Arielle and dedicated to kids and parents near and far.

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“Unnamed Design” the exhibition I obsessed over for most of last year was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 by the New York Times in their Design Honors List!:

As for the other design coups of 2011, my vote for the best historic design exhibition goes to the Carlo Mollino retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich. The outstanding contemporary shows were “Unnamed” at the Gwangju Design Biennial in South Korea, in which the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei [and co-curator Brendan McGetrick - ed.] challenged traditional definitions of design; and “Talk to Me,” a survey of the frenzied field of communication design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The making of this show was an extremely trying and rewarding experience. The show is now closed and largely destroyed but I’m working on making a publication to provide some sort of legacy. In the meantime, here is an essay I wrote about the exhibition and the experience of making it.

Bonus:
Immortal Technique - Industrial Revolution

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from the BET awards, featuring Yelawolf, Joe Budden, Crooked I, Joell Ortiz, Royce da 5′9″, and Eminem.

Where is Ai Weiwei?
The Making of an Un-Named Exhibition

In August 2010, Ai Weiwei asked if I wanted to curate a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale. It was my first time hearing of the project and the place, and my first ever offer to curate. I accepted immediately.

A 30 minute conversation followed wherein Weiwei briefed me on the virtues of the event, including its big budget (”bigger than Venice!”) and open-minded leadership (”they wouldn’t have asked me to be director if they weren’t willing to take risks”). He talked about the host city (”good food”, “Korea’s democracy movement started there”, “many, many love hotels”) and described the biennale site, a complex of four interconnected galleries containing more than 8000 square meters of exhibition space.

As he talked, I started to worry. The scale of the project seemed huge and the expectations were high. The biennale’s theme, a strong, unclear concept derived from the Tao Te Ching and developed by the biennale’s co-director Seung H-Sang, I found difficult to penetrate. “Design Is Design Is Not Design,” Weiwei explained, was an epigram implying limitless creativity. “It is the end and the beginning,” he said. “For the biennale, we need to show design not as just a final product, but as part of a continuous process.” I scribbled the statement down. I wasn’t sure what do with it, but it seemed to me an anchor point, something solid enough to grab on to, extend out from.

I needed more, so I dropped the pretense of collaborating and reverted to my journalist roots, transforming our meeting into a desperate sort of interview. I prodded Weiwei with questions; I offered suggestions and requested clarifications, I repeated and rephrased his responses. He confirmed or corrected me, but he rejected nothing. It was as if his ambition was endless and capable of absorbing everything. By the end of the meeting, I’d written down dozens of commands (”Explore the reasons for similar activities in design”), analogies (”Exhibition like a body - fat, bone, organs, muscle, skin”), conceptual pairings (”Stephen Hawking + Buddhism”), and seemingly unrelated references (”Beat Generation”, “Big Bang”, “Food”, “Kunstkammer”, “French Almanac”, “KKK/Abu Ghraib/Burqa”).

At the center of the page, repeatedly underlined and surrounded by a cartoon cloud was the most important, least defined phrase of them all - Un-Named Design. This was the title of the section that I would curate. It was one of several sections in the show, but the only one that Ai Weiwei would oversee personally. Most of the points he’d made during our discussion were about Un-Named and when it was over he suggested I write a short statement to declare our intentions. That night I pored over my notes and eventually came up with this:

The Un-Named Design component will explore those facets of the human environment that are not conventionally considered design, yet influence everyday life and the perception of it. The works included in this section will derive from areas of creation where originality, signature, and marketability are not the primary source of value, and where the identity of a product is based on its theoretical force and practical use, rather than its material appearance. Examples from this creative territory range from highly purpose-driven virtual designs for social networks to the low-tech, custom manufacturing of low cost artificial limbs. The goal of this theme is to reframe design as a set of strategic solutions to human needs, rather than an ego-driven pursuit of subjective beauty. It will expand the concept of design beyond the material and show that it is not only about providing more or less useful goods, but also about the modification of human perception in a rapidly changing, interconnected world.

Post in full here.

41. A whole bunch of articles on ‘Un-Named Design’ a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale that I spent the past year working on:

A Flurry of Design Events in Asia and Europe Fill the Autumn Calendar
By ALICE RAWSTHORN, New York Times

Despite the anxiety about Mr. Ai, the Gwangju biennale is scheduled to open Friday as planned. His contribution is an exhibition of “Unnamed Design,” on which he has collaborated with the curator Brendan McGetrick to address the timely theme of the changing definition of design. They are planning to explore design’s contribution to fields with which it has not traditionally been associated, including the invention of computer viruses and new financial models, and the organization of political protests … Ambitious, intellectually provocative and generously funded, the Gwangju biennale seems set to be one of the most compelling design events of the autumn.

Korea’s design biennial: an extreme body of work that pushes no products
By Justin McGuirk, The Guardian

This year’s theme – “design is design is not design” – might sound like an existential tongue-twister, but it reflects the kind of dualism that is more common of Taoist thought than European. Chief curators Ai Weiwei and Seung H-Sang derived it from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching….

One exhibit is a pamphlet handed out in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising that advised protesters on the most effective tactics for civil disobedience, including how to improvise a helmet and how to breach police lines. Then there are designs for IEDs (improvised explosive devices) of the kind that kill troops daily in Afghanistan. There’s also a video of the plastic surgery that Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors can undergo in order to bleed less from the nose or above the eyes. (Korea, it should be pointed out, is one of the global hotspots of plastic surgery).

Is all of this design? It would be difficult to argue the case against: collective behaviour, bombs and extreme bodies all require designing. This tests the bland “designing a better world” rhetoric implicit in so much production. The most brazenly provocative exhibit illustrates different forms of public execution, from lethal injection to stoning, as blueprints – methods that someone had to devise in meticulous detail.

“Design that can be spoken of is not the eternal design”
By Edwin Gardner, Volume Magazine

Firstly the exhibition shows that a new design definition should move away from the artifact or object towards defining systems and rules, form is consequence of design, but not design itself. It’s about designing frameworks, instead of infills. It’s about the design of process instead of product.

Can Anybody Be a Designer?
By ALICE RAWSTHORN, New York Times

Curated in absentia by the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, who was imprisoned during the final phase of research and banned from leaving China to participate in the installation, “Unnamed” explores the role of design in projects with which it would not traditionally have been associated. The show argues that design is not solely the preserve of professional designers but can also be the work of scientists, activists, computer programmers, hackers and anyone else who applies ingenuity, originality, strategic thinking and other qualities that are indispensable to good design.

42. This depressing report on how the privatization of government services (in the name of greater efficiency and cost effectiveness) ends up costing tax payers billions more:

Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors
By Project on Government Oversight

Choice Quote:

POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.

43. Another vid from my favorite new artist of 2011:
Frank Ocean - Swim Good

44. This quote:
Progress isn’t the future. It’s keeping up with the present. - Patti Smith

45. This quote:
If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. - John Waters

46. This clip of the world’s greatest thinker describing the world’s greatest superhero:
Karl Pilkington - Bullshit Man
Click here to view the embedded video.

The End.

31. This quote:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” — Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

32. This feature on art produced by inmates at Guantanamo Bay detention camp:
In pictures: The art of Guantanamo’s inmates

The paintings are on display in the jail’s library. Prisoners don’t have direct access to the facility, which houses 16,000 books in 18 languages. Instead, inmates can choose books from a list and guards deliver them. According to officials there, the most popular titles are Harry Potter books and the novels of Agatha Christie.

33. This jam that my friend Josh showed me:
Clams Casino - All I need

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34. This inventory of things Americans say that British people don’t like:
Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples

24. People that say “my bad” after a mistake. I don’t know how anything could be as annoying or lazy as that. - Simon Williamson, Lymington, Hampshire

35. Amy Winehouse prior to:
The DL - Amy Winehouse ‘Valerie’ Live
Click here to view the embedded video.

36. A very good piece on how neo-con cynicism has done more damage to western society than multiculturalism, terrorism, or any other right wing boogieman could:
The biggest threat to Western values
By Tarak Barkawi

Choice Quote:

Note for example the ways in which the great professional vocations of the West - lawyers, journalists, academics, doctors - have been co-opted and corrupted by bottom line thinking. Money and “efficiency” are the values by which we stand, not law, truth or health. Students are imagined as “customers”, citizens as “stakeholders”. Professional associations worry about the risk to their bottom line rather than furthering the values they exist to represent. Graduates of elite Western universities, imbued with the learning of our great thinkers, are sent off to corporations like News International. There they learn to shut up, obey, and collaborate in the dark work of exploitation for profit, for which they will be well rewarded, at least financially speaking.

37. This nostalgic clip:
I mentioned Prodigy and Nas in earlier installments. Here they are at the peak of their powers on Yo! MTV Raps…
Click here to view the embedded video.

38. An eye-opening visual essay on life in North Korea:
Inside North Korea

Earlier this year, David Guttenfelder, chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, along with Jean H. Lee, AP bureau chief in Seoul, were granted unprecedented access to parts of North Korea as part of the AP’s efforts to expand coverage of the isolated communist nation. The pair made visits to familiar sites accompanied by government minders, and were also allowed to travel into the countryside accompanied by North Korean journalists instead of government officials. Though much of what the AP journalists saw was certainly orchestrated, their access was still remarkable. Collected here are some of Guttenfelder’s images from the trip that provide a glimpse of North Korea.

Students swim and play on a water slide at a pool facility at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea, on April 13, 2011. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

39. This pamphlet, distributed among Egyptian revolutionaries this spring:
“How to Rebel Smartly” - Egyptian Non-Violent Protest Manual

It was the centerpiece of an exhibit on non-violent revolution design we made for the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale. Translation by Abla Menouer.

40. This monster jam by the reigning princesses of K-Pop:
Girls’ Generation(소녀시대) - Genie(소원을말해봐)
Click here to view the embedded video.

To be continued…