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I love documentaries that focus on other people’s interesting daily lives. I was curious as to what those sleeper trucks looked like on the inside, and since I’ve done many road trips, I did a bit of internet investigation and found these two documentaries to be interesting and worth sharing. To my European friends, these videos will answer a lot of your questions on highway culture.
From the band: “We had felt for years that most instances of combining techno and classical music lack an authentic approach. Instead of using only the typical epic orchestra or piano sounds, we love to explore the dirty and percussive sides of those instruments, adapting techniques from composers like John Cage or Helmut Lachenmann: preparing our piano with screws and rubbers, knocking against every single part of an instrument, until we find that one great…
Wow. How did they event make it out of the hospital door? Oh wait–being hot. Got it.
Right… I’ve never properly rooted around in the New British Artists concept from the 90s, but they did represent a turning point in the postmodern art world, specifically in the quotidian aspect of people like Tracy Emin. I’ll put it bluntly: she is the opposite of the sorority girl who goes to college to land a job at a corporation that will give her a salary to merely exist and create value for the company.…
Confident people can rock basically anything. Case in point: put hipster clothes on classical sculpture. You’re welcome. Clickity click click to see some more examples.
The BBC’s documentaries are generally top notch–the polar opposite of current US “edutainment” shows that have distilled down formulas to get the highest eyeballs. It’s little wonder that The Family (above–full) from 1974 would be the precursor to reality TV shows–but that theirs would be more “fly on the wall” and genuinely curious about and relatively impartial towards their subject. An American Family from 1971 is its precursor, but I haven’t checked it out yet.…
Right–well, you may have noticed as of late I’ve been on an architecture kick for my consumable media consumption activities. I stumbled upon this 1997 BBC series that tracks how certain buildings adapt to future uses, and how others totally fail at future flexibility–most often the victims of egocentric architects and rigid expectations of future behavior of their users. Above is the first episode, “Flow” which gives an introduction to presenter Stewart Brand’s thesis, which…
Doing it right. Susan Gregg Koger turned her fascination with vintage clothing collecting (as in, buying gorgeous, unique pieces from thrift stores in Florida, even if the clothes didn’t fit her personally) into an business known for its “vintage-inspired” designs made accessible to the masses, through an initial survey that showed them it was a need. Along the way, they crafted their own “democratic” social shopping experience that allows the customer to have a voice…
Here is a low-key documentary on John Baldessari.
Here is a playlist of National Geographic’s “Megacities” series. I was poking around to find some architecture documentaries and ran across these. I grouped them first by cities and then by themes that they made episodes around. It starts out in North America with New York, checks in on Las Vegas (yeah, it’s basically a city in a desert… totally a lot of work to create a modern city there), pops down to South America,…
Here are some selected Industrial Design lectures by Matthew Bird from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has a self-deprecating sense of humor, which you can really see in “Bauhaus to Broadway” (below). The first one, above, is “Josiah Wedgwood for Industrial Designers”: Josiah Wedgwood was a tireless innovator who introduced and employed many important components of what designers still do. Or SHOULD do. This is an overview of Josiah Wedgwood’s work, with a…
This 80s-retro documentary is hosted by a socially awkward engineer who fumbles his cuecard-reading way through uncomfortable, scripted segues with props that illustrate the point being made. It’s a decent documentary on engineering, nonetheless.