love-la

OK, I give up. I saw this guy earlier this evening at a very healthy/ very vegan West Hollywood restaurant. I know him from the ‘Chelsea Lately’ show. That’s the very inane 11 pm talk show that airs on E! on weeknights. He’s one of the many comedians I enjoy watching her bully almost every night. So much so, that I almost walked up to him and said, ‘Don’t let Chelsea bully you!’ But, hey, I don’t even know any of their names. I just watch the show. So, many, many googles later, including google images, that normally yields something, I gave up. I still don’t know what his name is. But I’ve seen him on the show, often. So, Asian guy, who looks like you have some other race in your parentage ‘Don’t let Chelsea bully you!’ 

Link to E!

Apart from that, I have to admit, that I remember, that at 11 pm every night Jon Stewart also spews on the important politics of the day. But I have not bothered to figure out which channel Comedy Central he is on since I moved to LA. I left my brain behind in New York! I’m very flattered when they say Chelsea Handler has 90,000 viewers. I like supporting the lady who hasn’t even reached a million! Even if I fall asleep by the time her soporific guests come on! Jon Stewart, I promise, I’ll watch your show one of these days/ nights! Someone give Chelsea better guests! I want to see her insult Demi Moore, instead of old David Letterman suck up to her! Did you see last night’s episode?!

I’ve not quite got the design sensibility that Stefan Sagmeister espouses…cutting oneself for a poster! Is that really graphic design?! But hey, who said, type had to be typeset on a machine? 

And today, I chanced upon this video he did for TED, posted by my documentarian friend Miao who worked for him many years ago. I’ve never actually met him or attended a talk. May be we passed each other on the anonymous streets of Manhattan; but this talk truly connected with me in a way that no other work of his, has. He talks about shutting down your enterprise/ design studio every seven years and going off on a sabbatical. I did that, after I had been working for nine years, took time off, went to grad school, to let my brain breathe, as I put it. Along the way, there were a huge amount of challenges. And yet, I totally support this! When you start repeating your own boring formulae, look for a challenge, take a long break…very, very hard to do, and I don’t think I can do it again, but hey SS, thanks for challenging us, designers!

Stefan Sagmeister/ TED on youtube

Stefan Sagmeister’s professional website

My old dept. at my alma-mater Parsons in New York, keeps changing its face. Every year either the website changes, or the name of the thesis show or the very courses and concentrations offered. Which is kind off cool, because its a program so immersed in changing technologies, that it’s forever evolving and responding… Looks like I might miss the graduate thesis show this year. I really like the clever title- Ones and Zeros being all about the digital world; very geeky!

Link to Parsons Design and Technology thesis show

But I am now located closer to my other favorite design school, here in the lovely Pasadena- Art Center. I hope to make it to their Graduate show in a couple of weeks. 

Link to Art Center graduate show schedule

These days the marketing term ‘stick’ has been really sticking. Will something ‘catch on’? Become popular? ‘Eat. Pray. Love.’ a book that came out a few years back about a New York writer who traverses the globe was absolutely the book to be avoided! At least by me. Every woman on the New York subway was reading it! But it was ‘sticking’. Hmmm…why did I want to avoid it? I don’t usually read a book, or watch a movie, till someone whose opinion I really, really respect, recommends it. So I ended up picking up the book a few years after it became big on Oprah, because my globetrotting, documentary film maker, strongly feminist friend recommended it. I know, I know….I’m crazy.

And then, I actually read the book and liked it. ( I was on vacation, I am embaressed to say! Life looks different when your toes are deep in sand and the dog-eared book in your hands is all you packed!) I even bought it as a gift for a few women I cared about, all the time suspecting that Elizabeth Gilbert was a far better writer than she was being genuinely honest about what she was actually going through.

All said and done, I was actually curious to see what James Franco, and Javier Bardem would contribute to its Hollywood version. And if you’ve read the book, and kept track of Elizabeth Gilbert’s life, her real life men did not really resemble these Hollywood hunks at all!

Here’s a peak at the trailer. And I predict, the movie will do fantastic business, Julia Roberts’ and her very extraordinarily wide mouth notwithstanding!

Trailer

I have to say I have had quite a love-hate relationship with the New York taxi through my New York years. On mornings when I could barely get out of bed and the subway ride would have been 45 minutes, the cab ride was 10! (Try living on the upper east side, and commuting to mid town all the way very very west!) God bless the speeding ‘desi’ cabbie- Bangladeshi, Punjabi and Pakistani! And then the times when I should NOT have been driving on a friday, very late night or a saturday, equally very late night, my implicit trust in the New York cabbie always got me home. 

Coming to the hate part…I did loose a tooth and ended up with stitches on my forehead in a cab accident; being a passenger, but that’s another story.

On yet another note, NYtimes.com created this interactive graphic today that shows the ebb and flow of traffic through the week. (Jan - mar 2009). I didn’t really spend too much time studying it, I have no patience for that, but it made me very nostalgic. On a typical afternoon as I looked out my 6th Av window the last few years, the color on the street was always chrome yellow….or rather pantone ? yellow, the sea of taxis sweeping through Manhattan. It’s very New York!

Play with the graphic