Guadalupe Pescinelli

Here is a brilliant column by 11-year old Olympia Nelson on provocative selfie shots on social media. It’s valuable to hear this world described from the vantage point of someone who is actually in it. Nelson uses a wonderful phrase to summarize the selfie culture: the “sexual rat race.” It ...

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Rineke Dijkstra, Julie, Den Haag, Netherlands, February 29 1994

Rineke Dijkstra, Saskia, Harderwijk, Netherlands, March 16 1994

Rineke Dijkstra, Tecla, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 16 1994

Viviane Sassen, Kathleen, 2000

Viviane Sassen, Ayuel From “Moshi” series, 2010

Viviane Sassen, George David Otieno Obiero, 2010

Viviane Sassen, Kine, 2011

Viviane Sassen, dna, 2007

Found this gem in the sales pile today.

limited edition artist collection via kate tucker for gorman.

sadly, they’re sold- but that doesn’t make them any less awesome.

images via gorman

Teaming up again for AW13 the incredibly successful collaboration between adidas and Manhattan based boutique Opening Ceremony now moves on to the precarious world of Rock Climbing. This new collection takes the functional details and design hallmarks of the sport’s life saving equipment and translating it into a series of details, motifs and prints all of which riff on the style and colour palate of the 1970′s. Based on a classic piece of climbing gear, the aptly named Enforcer Rock is constructed from soft nubuck and features a robust construction and lace system, removable neoprene sock liner and rugged sole unit. Available now at End Clothing.

The post Opening Ceremony x adidas Originals “Enforcer Rock” appeared first on The Shoe Buff - Men's Contemporary Shoes and Footwear.

The American–After teasing our eyes with a video that announced a stunning editorial for the latest issue of DSection, leading model Adam Senn returns on our pages with these new images, shot by photographer Jack Waterlot for the Portuguese magazine. Playing the role of the silent cowboy, Adam is captured in a deserted setting and is styled by Lizette Pena in denim numbers, ribbed sweaters and leather boots. Exploring the rocky desert under a burning sun, Adam is definitely the epitome of masculine force, proving a great ability to adapt in every situation, without forgetting for this reason to an intriguing dose of charm. / Hair by Gareth Bromell (Atelier Management). Makeup by Diane DaSilva (Atelier Management).
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The post Adam Senn is a Lonely Cowboy for DSection #7 appeared first on The Fashionisto.

Modern Attitude–Enlisted once more by French label De Fursac, leading model Clément Chabernaud reunites with photographer Karim Sadli to shoot the brand’s fall/winter 2013 look book. With a collection that blends French innate elegance with the functionality of sportswear, the Success model is a vision of refinement in two-piece suits, warm cardigans, impeccably cut coats, pinstriped designs and tweed numbers that compose his daywear looks, while for the evening, the collection offers the always sophisticated allure of a tuxedo jacket in black velvet, paired with a slim fitted suit shirt, silk bow-tie, slim trousers and elegant black shoes, proving that classic elegance never goes out of style.
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The post Clément Chabernaud Appears in De Fursac Fall/Winter 2013 Look Book appeared first on The Fashionisto.

GREG HOLLAND via THE VAMOOSE

Palace Skateboards has teamed up with countrymen Reebok on some limited edition versions of both the Classic Leather and the Workout silhouettes. The capsule introduces premium leather and suede uppers, gum rubber soles, metallic gold branding, and custom insole graphics designed by Will Bankhead and Fergadelic. Done up in timeless combinations of black and white, the range is completed by a red, white, and blue edition of the Classic Leather, no doubt a nod to the UK. All four pairs from the Palace x Reebok collab are set to drop today via End Clothing.

The post Palace Skateboards x Reebok 2013 Summer Footwear Collection appeared first on The Shoe Buff - Men's Contemporary Shoes and Footwear.

“The book is still the most intelligent and interactive data retrieval system which has been devised.”

-

BBC’s The Beauty of Books.

via explore-blog

(via sagansense)

…he reblogged, from a bar, from his iPhone.

You live in the past. For every possible combination of sensory input you can have, there is some appreciable time between signal and interpretation. Light hits your eye or a sound hits your ear and...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Romy Schneider et Alain Delon chez eux à Tancrou en 1959

Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston

Caroline Tamagno et Alberto Giacometti

Lisette Model

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY, Anjelica Huston, Woody Allen, 1993

Robert Doisneau 1950

Bruce Davidson Beverly Hills, California. 1960. Yves Montand, his wife Simone Signoret, Marilyn Monroe and her husband Arthur Miller at the Beverly Hills Hotel

Didier Ruef. Graduation. Spanish Harlem. New York 1988

Ralph Crane, Portrait of Natalie Wood, 1950′s

Ed Feingersh, 1955

Christer Strömholm, Carla & Zizou, Brasserie Graff, 1963

Weegee, Lovers at the Movies (detail) c1940

Lewis Morley – Self-portrait in a mirror with Pat, Paris, 1959

Weegee – Couple in Voodoo Trance, ca. 1956

Louis Faurer, “Deaf mute”. New York 1950

Robert Doisneau, Le Muguet du Métro, 1953

Brassaï, Couple at Quatre Saisons, rue de Lappe,1932

William P. Gottlieb, June Christy and Bob Cooper, 1947

James Houston

Ralph Gibson, New York, 1967-70

Elliott Erwitt, Israel, 1962

Elliott Erwitt, Brasilia, Brazil, 1961

David Hurn

Michael Holtz 1967

Richard Avedon Elise Daniels, Turban by Paulette, Pré-Catalan, Paris, August 1948

Lisette Model Nick’s New York, c. 1940-1944

Ed van der Elsken. Pierre et Paulette, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1952

Jindrich Streit

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Mario de Biasi Rio 1977

Herbert Dombrowski Der Kuss, 1956

Bob Gruen Joe Strummer & Gaby, NYC, 1981

Amor, 1950s by Esther Bubley

C-MOULD, the world’s largest collection of microorganisms for use in the arts, with over 50 different kinds of microorganism. We have bacteria and fungi that glow in ethereal shades of green and blue light, bacteria that make gold and electrically conductive nanowires, and bacteria that produce biotextiles. We also possess the largest collection of pigmented bacteria. Here is the palette of living colours that is available through C-MOULD. Behind the obvious colour,  each bacterium has its own unique personality  and  history (see below) and when used in paintings each one adds it own character to the work.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa  (green)This bacterium has a split personality. It is very common in soil and is able to live a blameless life here. However, if it is provided with opportunities (such as failings in the host’s anti-infective defence) it will cause disease in most living things, including humans, and accordingly it has been described Nature’s pre-eminent universal pathogen.

Chromobacterium violaceum (purple) Very common in soils from tropical and subtropical regions, it produces a purple pigment which also has powerful antiviral and anticancer activities.

Bacillus atrophaeus (brown) A common soil bacterium which is often used as a harmless surrogate for the bacterium which causes anthrax. Has the ability to form a tough resting body called an endospore.

Serratia marcescens (red)  This distinctive red pigmented bacterium has been evoked as a natural explanation of the “miraculous” appearance of blood at various times throughout history.

Vogesella indigofera  (blue) A rare blue and gold pigmented bacterium that was isolated from the sediment of a pond that was used for the disposal of highly toxic chemical wastes for 20 years.

Staphylococcus epidermidis (white) One of the most frequent bacteria that is found on human skin. In most cases it is not considered to be harmful but it is also recognised as major cause of nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections particulary in immunocompromised patients. It is highly resistant to many antibiotics including penicillins.

Micrococcus luteus (yellow) A common inhabitant of human skin where in damp regions, such as the armpits, it can give rise to body odour after it breaks down compounds in sweat. It can be found in many other places in the environment, as well, such water and soil. It is readily isolated from air and this probably reflects its prevance in dust which is derived mainly from invisible  human skin cells

Kocuria rosea (pink) Common on human skin. Has been shown to digest feathers due to its possession of an enzyme called keratinase

Bacillus subtilis (orange) Common in soil and has the ability to form a tough resting body called an endospore. In the past its powerful enzymes, that digest proteins, were incorporated into biological washing powders that cleaned “whiter than white”. Inhalation of such products, particularly amongst factory workers involved in their preparation, has been shown to cause asthma. The organism has also become widely adopted as a model organism for laboratory studies.

Arthrobacter agilis (red) Isolated from dry rocks and soil. Also has been found in Antarctic rocks and soils

Rhodococcus rhodochrous (pink on normal agar, black when grown in the presence of tellurite) Common in soil

Dermacoccus nishomiyaensis (orange) Common in soil

Micrococcus varians (white) Found in freshwater environments or in soil

I have been dreaming about these bars all year. Dreaming of ripe summer peaches baked onto a tender shortbread crust, topped with nutty oat crumble and a tangy lemon glaze. Oh, yes, I have. And now, finally, the peaches are here. Along with the strawberries. And the blackberries, and soon now, the plums. We need to make the most of all these summer fruits while they are here — give ourselves something to dream about once their sweet season is over. Are you with me? Here are our top ten most dream-worthy recipes with summer fruit. Make them now. Don't wait.

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The 4th of July, Independence Day, is just around the corner — the high point of the year for sparklers, corn on the cob, and blueberry-strawberry desserts. Whatever would we do without blueberries and strawberries on July 4th? How else would we make our flag cakes and patriotic fruit pinwheels? But as I thought about what dessert to bring you today, I was inspired by the fact that red and blue fruits extend beyond our ubiquitous berry friends. And on the 4th of July I want to enjoy ripe summer fruit as much as possible.

So here is a trifle for your holiday that is really more fruit than cake, with cherries and raspberries and blackberries squeezed between homemade pudding and cream, meant to be eaten outside in the sunshine, before dips in the pool and runs through the sprinkler.

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The Site Corot factory in Limoges, France was once famous for its eclectic, avant-garde porcelain dinnerware, but it hasn't produced anything in over a decade. Now it's back, under new creative direction, and issuing both new and classic designs, like the Florida pattern seen above.

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Acne leather jacket, Joseph black silk maxi dress, Alexander Wang sandals, Ray Ban sunglasses, 3.1 phillip lim clutch.

First Point starring Lindsay Lohan by Richard Phillips

Before science, the flash of lighting that followed a crack of thunder was the will of Greek gods or a violent outcropping of animism. Now we know a bit more about lightning. We know that it can be...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Today I would like to showcase the work of a designer who thoroughly understands contrast: Christian Woo. Christian started his own company in 2006 in Vancouver, BC, and now collaborates with architects and clients across North America. He offers his services as a custom cabinetmaker as well as making furniture for various retailers. Christian was originally inspired to pursue woodworking by his Grandfather’s love of craft, and displays his aptitude for detail in his furniture and interiors. All of Christian’s work is decidedly precise, using FSC-certified hardwood, German hardware, and internal joinery. Naturally, it is all made by hand – all the way to the oil finish.

Each of his creations simultaneously possess striking boldness and a level of restraint, and thus, achieving balance. Japanese and Scandinavian influences in his work are readily apparent, especially in pieces such as the “Platform Bed”, and interiors like the “Howe Sound Residence.” His use of color in the “Covert” series is also interesting. Although there is a current trend circulating of using saturated colors in combination with neutrals, Christian’s work does not seem faddish. There is intentionality how and where these colors are used, resulting in an electric focal line, emphasizing the horizontal aspect of the pieces.

In addition to color, Christian achieves boldness through his opaque forms. Beautiful hardwood is a key element in his work and he lets it become the focus through strong, basic forms. When looking at his stools and cantilevered side table, I cannot help but think of Brutalist wonders such as Decio Tozzi’s monument in Villa-Lobos Park. But again, the weight and thickness of the forms are balanced with their refined finishes and sound construction.

Christian Woo is a craftsman, attuned to detail. A full look through his website is highly recommended.

christianwoo.com

The telegraph was the first technology, of course, that enabled virtually instantaneous messaging over long distances.  Before that, it’s almost impossible for us to, even though it’s less than 200 years, it’s, I think, for us to put our minds back in the place where the world was when you could ...

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How sensory adaptation is compromising our experience of love.

“Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit,” Harvard’s Nancy Etcoff wrote in her indispensable meditation on the psychology of beauty. But beauty’s primal appeal and its polarizing power on our inner world has a dark side. In a chapter unambiguously titled “Why Playboy Is Bad for Your Mental Mechanisms” from his altogether engrossing book Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Nature (public library), Arizona State University psychology professor Douglas T. Kenrick explores how overexposure to beauty makes us recalibrate our own criteria for what is beautiful to a point that harms human relationships and even our experience of love.

He describes a curious experiment inspired by his own everyday experience as a graduate student twenty years earlier, when he caught himself noticing a disproportionate number of attractive female students in the crowd passing by during campus rush hour. Fascinated by this phenomenon of extreme selective attention when it comes to beauty, Kenrick decided examine it empirically two decades later as a formal researcher and replicated his youthful ogling in an experimental setup:

When we strained our subjects’ attentional capacities, we found exactly what I had suspected several decades before: Men overestimated the number of beautiful women (though their estimates of handsome men were unaffected). Female subjects also overestimated the frequency of gorgeous women in the rapidly presented crowds, but they did not overestimate the frequency of handsome men. The whole body of findings points to a simple conclusion about beautiful women: They capture everyone’s attention and monopolize downstream cognitive processes. The conclusion about handsome men is different: They grab women’s eyes but do not hold their minds; good-looking guys quickly get washed out of the stream of mental processing.

But pointing to other research he has conducted with his colleague Sara Gutierres, Kenrick argues that “an overdose of beauty might have ill effects for both sexes, albeit different ones for women than for men.” Citing Harry Helson’s famous 1947 theory of sensory adaptation, which holds that we make psychological adjustments as we match new forms of stimulation — hot or cold, salty or sweet, heavy or light, etc. — against our adaptation level, he began suspecting that sensory adaptation might be at work when it comes to our judgments of beauty. So Kenrick and Gutierres set out to test the idea:

In our first study, [we] asked people to judge an average-looking woman after being exposed to one of two series of other women. Half the participants judged the target woman after seeing a series of unusually beautiful women; the other half judged her after seeing a series of average-looking women. As in the case of expose to extremes of water temperature, exposure to extremes of physical appearance affected people’s judgments of what was average. As we had predicted, an average-looking woman was judged significantly uglier than normal if the subjects had just been gazing at a series of beauties.

Another study sought to assess whether these same processes played out in our judgments of people we know and love. Under the pretext of conducting research on “community standards of aesthetic judgment,” the scientists told participants they were collecting opinions from a random sample of students to settle an ongoing controversy about what is considered good and bad taste in visual art:

Subjects in the control group first judged the artistic merit of abstract paintings such as Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square. The men in the experimental group saw centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse; the women saw handsome naked men from Playgirl. After they had looked at either paintings or centerfolds, we asked our participants to rate their feelings about their current relationship partners. Again, there was a cover story — that psychologists were divided on whether being in a relationship opened people up to new aesthetic experiences or made them less open to novelty. To test which side was right, we told them, we needed to know about the extent to which their reported level of commitment depended on whether they had seen centerfolds.

Once again, the results displayed a curious gender difference:

Men who had viewed the centerfolds rated themselves as less in love with their partners; women’s judgments of their partners were not so easily swayed.

What the study suggests is at once obvious and ominous: Exposure to beautiful women changes people’s reference points for what is beautiful. Kenrick considers the implications for men:

The harmful side effect for guys … is this: Real women … do not look as attractive once the mind has been calibrated to assume the centerfolds are normal. And for guys in relationships, exposure to beautiful photos undermines their feelings about the real flesh-and-blood women with whom their lives are actually intertwined.

(It turns out, then, that Esquire’s 1949 dating tips were not only amusingly appalling in their sexism, but also scientifically off in advising women to only bring their most glamorous friend to a double date.)

But lest we’re too quick to assume men are the only ones who conform to the worst of their gender’s stereotypes, women didn’t fare much better when the experiment was repeated with power rather than beauty as the variable:

Seeing a series of socially dominant men undermined women’s commitment, just as seeing attractive women had done to men’s.

But what could be driving this toxic allure of beauty? Kenrick suggests a biological basis for our sensory receptors, which evolved to make our ancestors aware of opportunities and threats while looking for mates in a world very different from our own — but amidst today’s media overstimulation, he argues, our natural mechanisms are overwhelmed and begin to malfunction. He likens our relationship with beauty to our relationship with food:

In a sense, the images from Hollywood and Madison Avenue are analogous to the flavors of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The tasty flavors and images tap into mechanisms that were designed to promote survival and reproduction in a much different world. Consume too much, though, and it may be harmful to your health.

Like Clay Johnson did in his information diet guide, Kenrick suggests a cure that is at once obvious and onerous, simple but certainly not easy, and altogether necessary for the sake of sanity:

So what’s a mortal to do? Are we helpless in the face of our evolved mechanisms, which may lead us astray without our conscious awareness? Not completely. People who understand the dangers of overabundant fats and sugars can control their diets. People who understand the dangers of an overabundant diet of mass-media images can stop gorging on Playboy, People, Sex and the City, or Dancing with the Stars.

It may sound simplistic, perhaps, but at the heart of this empirically grounded suggestion is the idea that our beauty diet is just one of the harmful habit loops we can rewire if we remember that, as William James famously put it, “we are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.”

Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life is absolutely captivating in its entirety, exploring such fascinating subjects as the relationship between sex and religion, the psychology of homicidal fantasies, and the missing bricks in Maslow’s classic pyramid of needs.

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