Month: June 2008

Arte y pico award

premio.jpg Thanks to Ms Bluewyvern at Blue Tea for honouring { feuilleton } with the Arte y pico award, the details of which are as follows:

1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter what language.
2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.
3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her/him the award itself.
4. The Award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte Y Pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5. To show these conditions.

There’s a number of excellent blogs I visit more or less daily but the following five are the ones I find are always surprising me with things I haven’t seen before or things I never expected to see. So in alphabetical order we have:

• Mariana at Beautiful Century

• Thombeau at Fabulon

• Mr Door Tree at Golden Age Comic Book Stories

• Jahsonic at Jahsonic

• Pam at Phantasmaphile

All places worthy of your sustained attention.

The New York City Waterfalls

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Olafur Eliasson’s big new art project commences in New York today, with four waterfalls being installed at various places around the city. The photo here shows the Brooklyn Bridge installation during its test run on Tuesday and the project begins just as Eliasson’s NYC art show is drawing to a close. Brooklyn Bridge, meanwhile, was memorably trashed earlier this year by the Enormous WTF in Cloverfield.

• From a Master of Weather, 4 Waterfalls for New York

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson
• Olafur Eliasson’s BMW
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• New Olafur Eliasson

Over the rainbow

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Today is the 30th anniversary of the first appearance of the rainbow flag at a gay pride event. Gilbert Baker designed the flag which was used for the 1978 Gay Freedom Parade in—where else?—San Francisco and he talked to The Independent last week about its legacy.

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Baker’s original design can be seen below, with the stripes signifying (from top to bottom) sexuality, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity and spirit. Subsequent changes dropped sexuality and magic to give us the more familiar arrangement seen in the photo above but it seems Baker would prefer everyone to revert to his original design. I tend to be ambivalent about rainbows, not only are they ubiquitous in other contexts—the spinning “Marble of Doom” on the left is a familiar sight to Mac users—but any spectrum arrangement presents problems for graphic designers. That aside, I wouldn’t mind seeing the original design returned to in order to distinguish it from the many other rainbow flags. But it may well be too late for that now, the six stripe flag is firmly embedded in gay culture. Garish it may be but it has the advantage of being highly visible, which is partly the point, of course. Flickr photos show how effective it is at standing out in a variety of surroundings.

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I was hoping to find a credit for the gay pastiche of Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photo but details about its creator seem elusive. If anyone knows who the photographer was, please leave a comment. I’ve noticed recently that this photo in particular, one of many pastiches of that famous image, annoys a certain type of knuckle-dragging American who sees it as an insult to the soldiers of the Second World War. In which case one has to hope they haven’t seen this Terry Pratchett book jacket. Here in Britain we regard it as bad taste to take flags too seriously, hence the increasingly common appearance at UK gay events of pink Union flags like the one below. Flags are signs, not religious icons, and as such they’re always open to change and reinterpretation; the evolution and appropriation of Gilbert Baker’s flag is the perfect example of that.

Update: The Joe Rosenthal pastiche is by Ed Freeman.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose #2
• Michael Petry’s flag