Friend or Faux

Headless and Threadless

2008-07-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

I work across the street from a company that sells store displays. One creative soul decided to spray paint one of their mannequins and put it on the roof. After a few weeks I decided it deserved a photo.

The Great Dictator / M83 remix

2008-07-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Same famous speech from Chaplin's film, but I've added the M83 track "By the Kiss" from Digital Shades Vol. 1.

It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun

2008-07-07T11:32:00.001-07:00

I am in no way affiliated with the New Globe Theatre in London, nor have I ever been paid to create a poster for them. BUT, if they DID put on Romeo and Juliet and asked me to design something, this is what it would look like.
It started as a sketch I made during a meeting. I then made it into a vector in AI and imported back into PS for texturing. I guess it reminded me of a Folger mass market I would have read in high school. I'm happy with it.

It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun, originally uploaded by russmmeyer.

Anti-war poster

2008-06-29T22:47:00.000-07:00

I don't support these wars. They are an embarrassment to our country, and they are unforgivable offenses committed by an oligarchy of privileged liars. That reality aside, I believe most the young men and women in Irag and Afghanistan are doing their best with the clusterfuck they've been handed. Without any clear exit strategy, many of them are simply trying to stay alive long enough to see their families again.

I created this piece because this is how I see war. The powerful few have always, will always, feel free to throw the lower classes into the meat grinder to build their own wealth and jurisdiction. It angers me to no end when that selfishness is shrouded in an illusion of patriotism. Unfortunately, many young people buy in completely, offering their lives and limbs for nothing. Senseless.

Canyon House

2008-05-27T17:48:00.001-07:00

This is an idea I’ve been playing with for a few months. It’s a massive dwelling suspended between two canyon walls. Why? I’m not sure (other than it’s safe from zombies). The more I played with the design (this is the third concept) the more I wondered how the inhabitants would actually support themselves. So, I’ve integrated a number of sustainable technologies into the design:

1) Sloped roof covered with photovoltaic cells for solar energy (also sloped for collecting rain water)

2) Rooftop vegetation (farming and recreation - irrigated with a combination of rain water and recycled grey water) complete with a roll-back greenhouse canopy

3) Landing pad (of course)

4) Eight 30ft. turbines on the house’s belly for collecting wind energy (that can be retracted into the hull for maintenance)

Still haven’t solved the potential problem of swaying in high winds, but I’m working on it. I used Google Sketch Up Pro 6 to render the 3D model.

Ground Zero

2008-04-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

I captured this photo near the WTC site on my first trip to New York on Oct. 11, 2001. For days, while the city was paralyzed in a state of shock and disbelief, I walked empty streets into the early morning.

One night, past the closed boutiques and galleries of TriBeca, I stopped at a line of barricades to get this shot. I would have expected throngs of people, but there were only a handful loitering out of equal parts fascination and grief. The furthest point visible in this picture is still about a block away from the site, but I could still taste the ash in the air. The silence was broken every 20 mins. or so as another dump truck with pass by on its way to the Fresh Kills Landfill—its load to be sifted for personal effects.

Over the years I had forgotten exactly where I was standing that night. So, yesterday I began searching Google Maps for clues. What I thought would take days, took about 30 mins. I shot this photo standing at 90 W. Broadway near Chambers St. The photo below shows it as it is today, without the police vehicles and barricades. Back to being just any ordinary street.

OMNI's predictions for the year 2000 (from 1989)

2008-04-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my mom dropped off another “I-don’t-want-this-stuff-in-my-garage-anymore” box of childhood artifacts. At the bottom of the box, under a pile of space shuttle mission patches and data sheets from JPL (I spent a lot of time by myself), were a dozen old issues of OMNI.

From the late 70’s into the 90’s, OMNI magazine ruled. It was a WIRED-meets-Fortean Times mash-up of hardcore science, speculative metaphysics, and everything in the middle. Before our wildest dreams became our realities, OMNI captured the excitement and wonder of science for leagues of devoted nerds like myself.

The best of my collection was from October, 1989:
Trends and Predictions for the Year 2000 and Beyond.
(I’ve arranged the highlights into two categories.)

HAPPENED (more or less):
• By 2001, nearly all college textbooks and many high-school and junior-high books will come with computer disks (with a “k,” as in “floppy”) to aid in learning.
• Computers will provide access to all the card catalogs of all the libraries in the world by the late 90’s. (And all the free porn in the world.)
• Modular plastic housing will allow people to move more easily (Plastic? Not exactly a bull’s eye on this one, but a trend indeed.)
• Mass media will be more personalized as consumers use pay-per-view television to select movies. Viewers will download their choices from a “teledelivery” service, paying for the program when they see it.
• Job mobility will increase. People will get more used to the idea of changing jobs several times in their lifetimes. (Thank God for plastic houses).
• Portable computers will give us wireless access to data wherever we go inside our computer network.
• Supercomputers the size of three-pound coffee cans. (PS3? Mac Mini? What constituted a “supercomputer” in 1989?)
• By 2000 there will be three major corporations making up the computer hardware industry: IBM, Digital (Who?), and Apple.
• About half of all service workers (43 percent of the labor force by 2000) will be involved in collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, structuring, storing, or retrieving information as the basis of knowledge. (That’s us! And we do it for free. This practically defines Web 2.0.)

NEVER HAPPENED:
• Videodiscs (!) will enhance books by providing visual and audio information and even recordings of smells and tastes. (An LP-sized book that you could taste? Sweet!)
• Fewer very poor and very wealthy will exist in our society. (Sorry, more poor, more wealthy.)
• The Social Security system will be reformed. (From a system into a memory.)
• Personal robots in the home. (Does a Roomba qualify?) Mundane commercial and service jobs, and repairs of space station components will be done by robots.
• Artifical blood could replace the world’s blood banks.
• Lackluster performance of U.S. students on standardized tests will prompt inevitable reforms. (Well, this one is half right).
• Companies will be judged on how they treat the environment.