1. Aaron Koblin’s “Flight Patterns” – alternative visualizations of US air traffic.
2. Op-Art artist Bridget Riley
3. The iPod edition of the Yule Log
4. The second wave of retrocars, especially the concepts for the Dodge Challenger (I’ll take one in “Vanishing Point” white please) and Lamborghini Miura.
5. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. This turned up on one of the cable networks a couple days ago and annoyingly it’s not on DVD yet. I started watching it because of Robert Mitchum, who’s terrific in it, but the movie’s real star is the grimy New England industrial autumn – lots of faded overcast grey, brown, flat green, battered strip malls, faded cars from the 70s, – barely a blue sky or primary color to be found. It’s a hell of a cracking good 70s-era existential noir movie too.
Yule Log? Hmm. Recently I found out that making a Yule Log is the proper way to dispose of a Christmas tree. Rather than engaging in that dreadful practice of simply dumping it curbside or in the alley, one should chop up the tree just before the Epiphany, store the timber and use it for a Yule Log the following Christmas. This practice, however, presupposes that one has a) room to store the wood and b) a facility in which to burn it, e.g., a fireplace. Most urban dwellers lack one or both of these accoutrements. I suppose that pulping or recycling could provide a nice postmodern twist on the whole affair.