Opening Ceremony

I'm not ultra into sports, but I like the Olympics. Something to do with watching creme de la creme athletes doing incredible things and seeing visual representatives of every country. It's all very cool and international.

Another thing I love about the Olympics is all the proprietary design and branding that comes along with it; basically it's a designer's dream project. My favorite are the pictograms because it's really hard to come up with a system of icons that not only look stylish, but are highly functional. They have to communicate in one glance with absolutely no math involved.

The best thing about Olympics identity design is that it capture the time of the era and a bit of the country hosting it, which leads to my two favorites. Lance Wyman's identity for Mexico 1968 for being so op-art and mod. And despite the sadness surrounding the following one; Otl Aichner's Munich 1972 identity for being so modernist.


It's not surprising that these are stellar because graphic design was at an all time high during that era. It was also the time before gradients, arbitary moves and over-stylization came in to F everything up. If you don't believe me, google all the travesties that followed; Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Beijing... I'm still undecided about London 2012. I'll keep you posted.

Happy Friday

I stare at these with glassy eyed and feel a mix of mild outrage and incredible jealousy. Because I don't know how to make these and I can't deny how perfect they are. w-t-f. Is food allowed to even be this beautiful, and still be edible?

ACNE

Hello ACNE, I love all of you.

Town of Cats

I finished reading Murakami's latest brick of a novel, 1Q84 not so long ago. It's a story about love, isolation and most importantly--portals into alternate realities, a topic that I've always been equally intriqued and creeped out by.

My favorite Twilight Zone episode is the one where a little girl accidently falls through an invisible portal in her bedroom wall and is lost in infinite space with only her cries echoing sporadically throughout the house like a ghost, driving the parents mad.

The main characters in 1Q84 realize they've somehow transitioned out of their own worlds into another when they notice that the sky now depicts two moons. The parallel universe (1Q84) isn't all that different from the real world--at first. I think the parallel world being 'off' in barely perceptible ways, make it more sinister because it's disorienting, like when you don't know whether you're in a dream or not.

One of my favorite elements in the book is actually a short story embedded within the novel. It's understatedly creepy, I couldn't shake the eeriness for weeks, I keep thinking about the town of cats.

The Anatomy of Heartbreak

Jesse Bering writes one of the most profound few paragraphs I've read in a long time. I love pithy one-liners. The second paragraph is particularly sad.

 “During the ‘protest’ stage that occurs in the immediate aftermath of rejection, ‘abandoned lovers are generally dedicated to winning their sweetheart back. They obsessively dissect the relationship, trying to establish what went wrong; and they doggedly strategize about how to rekindle the romance. Disappointed lovers often make dramatic, humiliating, or even dangerous entrances into a beloved’s home or place of work, then storm out, only to return and plead anew.

At the neurobiological level, the protest stage is characterized by unusually heightened, even frantic activity of dopamine and norepinephrine receptors in the brain, which has the effect of pronounced alertness similar to what is found in young animals abandoned by their mothers.

This impassioned protest stage — if it proves unsuccessful in reestablishing the romantic relationship — slowly disintegrates into the second stage of heartbreak, what Fisher refers to as ‘resignation/despair,’ in which the rejected party gives up all hope of ever getting back together. ‘Drugged by sorrow,’ writes Fisher, ‘most cry, lie in bed, stare into space, drink too much, or hole up and watch TV.’ At the level of the brain, overtaxed dopamine-making cells begin sputtering out, causing lethargy and depression. And in the saddest cases, this depression is linked to heart attacks or strokes, so people can, quite literally, die of a broken heart.”


‘Drugged by sorrow,’ writes Fisher, ‘most cry, lie in bed, stare into space, drink too much, or hole up and watch TV.’


l-o-l? it's true. dopamine is no joke.

Happy Friday

Joanne. I'm talking to you.

Richie

My favorite Tenenbaum.