Showing only Notes + Links tagged americaon creativity, art, & design

by Casey A. Gollan

“Extreme Makeover, Weiner Edition: RKS Redesigns the Deadly Hot Dog”

This is kind of brilliant and absolutely revolting.

I don’t really eat hot dogs, but it freaks me out to think about food as something that is manufactured and designed. Even worse, this redesign was prompted by over-zealous safety experts who are worried that cylindrical shaped, esophagus sized hot dogs are a choking hazard to children. “When it’s wedged in tightly, that child is going to die.” says Dr. Gary Smith, former chairman of the AAP’s Committee on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. This, unfortunately, is not a joke.

Food—mostly excluding food packaging—is definitely one of the areas where lack of design* is the most appealing option**.

(via Fast Company, redesignrelated)

* Hot dogs, being a man made creation (*shudder*), are designed objects, but they are so utilitarian that it’s arguably more natural not to think about them as “designed.”

** Except to children? Think: Rugrats Mac and Cheese and Gogurt

Wondering if America is too stupid to cook, chef and prolific food-blogger Michael Ruhlman serves up America The World’s Most Difficult Roasted Chicken Recipe!

Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.

I just bought his Ratio iPhone app yesterday, next stop is to buy a kitchen scale.

(via jenbee)

Ron Arad’s “Oh, the Farmer & the Cowman Should Be Friends” bookcase, shaped like the U.S. and built out of steel, was made in a very limited edition of just six.

That same-height volume of books that need to stay together? Stow those in Kansas or Colorado. Your super-tall art books can fit in Florida. Paperbacks can go in West Virginia, and put the stuff you never read up in North Dakota.

(via Core77)

Another amazing Maira Kalman piece on the NY Times, this time on food in America.

JFK Airport, New York, 1964

(found by Charles Phoenix and via brocatus none00 simonbeckerman retrozone awoade theswingingsixties)

Incredibly interesting interactive infographic (say that five times fast!) from the New York Times today:

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.

What I love most about it is the feeling that the information was, to most people, a useless spreadsheet before this beautiful execution.

Momentous Thought to the Smallest Detail - The New York Times > N.Y. / Region > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 13

Moving slideshow from the NYT about the typography behind the 9/11 memorial.

Architecture - At Border Station in Massena, N.Y., Security Trumps Openness - NYTimes.com

Pentagram designed signage for the U.S. / Canada border crossing is being dismantled because it is perceived by government officials to be a “target”. NYT architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, “Even the words “United States,” it seems — when spelled out in the wrong size and color — can be an unacceptable security risk.”

On the NYT Moment blog they suggest that instead of taking down the sign, they could simply rearrange it into one of these anagrams:

UNITED TASTES NUDIST ESTATE Or, perhaps the most appropriate, under the circumstances: A STUNTED SITE

Really enjoyed stumbling across this photo by Brian Ulrich, who just happens to have a piece in Summer Reading at JBG.

(via dailymeh)

Man continuing east at 67 mph on Interstate 10 near Palms Boulevard in Los Angeles at 4:14 p.m. in February 1991. From Vector Portraits by Andrew Bush.

I’ve seen some of the Vector Portraits series as it makes its rounds across the internet, and I’m always stopped in my tracks, so I was happy that my friend Anne Pundyk sent me her take, recently published in the Brooklyn Rail:

Owning a car is an American birthright. It is the personalization of American power, prosperity, and autonomy. Regardless of the impact on the environment or national security, we Americans go where we want, when we want, and in the car of our choice. Speed is the hook: put your foot on the accelerator and go. At least, that’s the way it’s always been. Now, with the rapid slow-down of our economy, we are being forced to confront our relationship to our cars.

…

We are what we drive. Our cars reflect our public persona; they are a second skin or our second home. We eat, talk, bank, and, on occasion, procreate in our cars. With the change in our nation’s fortunes, more of us may in fact be living out of our cars. Our individual economic struggles parallel the dire straits in Detroit.

If you haven’t already seen Andrew Bush’s gorgeous Vector Portraits, be sure to check them out online or at Yossi Milo and Julie Saul galleries in Chelsea and check out the rest of the review at The Brooklyn Rail.