Secret Still

Tank Magazine has unveiled a new collection of novels by great authors called Tank Books. The idea is that since public smoking is going to be banned why not take up another addiction in its stead. Now whenever you reach for that pack of smokes you can pull out Heart of Darkness instead. Your lungs will be healthier, your mind sharper, and you’ll get to spend just as much time out on the patio. I appreciate their spreading great literature and a killer design all in one package. The books themselves come in specially design cigarette packs that are authentic right down to the foil. I can’t wait for some desperate bastard to use a page from one of these books to roll his own. Silly addicts.

Tank Books

Gonna hit you with some sweet videos to make up for the impending lack of content. So if you’re still with us during the transition the rewards, as you will clearly see, are so so sweet. Here are a few quick video links that you will love so much you’ll try to electronically bond your eyes with your monitor screen. Don’t do that. It hurts.

The coolest skittles commercial yet

It gets old but initially it is radical

I thought this guy was a cartoon the first time

Some of you might be asking yourself that very question, tossing and turning at night, unable to sleep for lack of an answer. Let put your fears to rest. Days of Danger is undergoing a mild case of hiatus. I recently started posting for Juxtapoz.com so that’s eating a lot of the good art posts I would normally throw at you. There’s still a good bit of design/illustration stuff out there that they don’t cover; so I have material just not a lot of it all the time. What does this mean for you? It means that new posts will occur less frequently. I’m not stopping, just slowing down a little. The truth is this week is kind of a slow news week for art, especially since I am not anywhere near the new shows that just opened. Not yet anyway. But prepare yourself for new and amazing things once I move out west and make a name for myself as “that prick that stood around trying to be cool and make friends.” Oh the places we will go.

I’ve posted before about Pixar’s most awesome film to date: Ratatouille. Now that I’ve seen it and can say that it is undeniably the best film they’ve ever made animation-wise, they’ve sweetened the pot even more. Pixar has made available a series of virtual tours of the various settings from the movie in all their lushly rendered glory. The level of detail is astonishing and the soft beauty with which the animation is crafted really captures the soft lights and warm glow associated with Paris. Well done, geeks, well done.]

Ratatouille Virtual Tour

Isreali illustrator and motion graphics designer Gal Shkedi has a ridiculous awesome music video for Tom Waits’ Starving in the Belly of a Whale. The video was a Gal’s graduation project at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. Go. Watch. Drool.

Starving in the Belly of a Whale

Look to your left for some exciting new action from the sidebar. Daily darlings Inhabitat and Varshava have been added for your perusal. I haven’t mentioned Varshava before, mostly because I just found it today, but having spent 5 minutes there I know we’re going to get along great. Like two peas in a can of peas.

Inhabitat
Varshava

Green resource and all around interesting site Inhabitat has a really nice article up today about William Kamkwamba. Name doesn’t ring a bell? I’m not surprised. Positive press usually gets filtered out in favor of the horrific. I heard about him a little bit ago thanks to my close watch on the TED conference. William, without any training, taught himself all he could out of books borrowed from a school library. One of the things he learned was how to make a windmill, which he did, out of found materials. He used the windmill to support his family’s moderate power needs and continues to do so, improving the windmill whenever possible. His little project garnered him enough acclaim that he was invited to be one of 100 speakers at the international TED conference. Not bad for a poor kid from Malawi. Plus I think he’s wearing skate shoes in that photo, so we could definitely be bros.

William Kamkwamba on Inhabitat
William’s Windmill Blog

German musician Apparat has been a favorite of mine for a while now. I first listened to his album Duplex when it was released. I randomly found it lying in my yard one day and popped it in. I’m just that open-minded. And it was amazing. I listened to it 4 or 5 times back to back without pausing to breathe. It was mellow and misty and ethereal but still had some nice glitch beats for me to nod along to. It was the perfect album for riding my bike at sunrise in the Fall. Now his second full-length, Walls is out and it’s surprisingly even better. You can see the influence that he’s gotten from his side project with Ellen Allien. There is a harder beat in some songs, and even some nice vocals, but still that synthy mist floating over all of it. Walls is a great album and you should probably get it immediately so you don’t forget and spend that money on hotdogs or something.

Apparat

The Times has a great slideshow up pairing people in real life with their online avatars. There are also stats about what game the avatar is from and how much time the person spends playing that game per week. You can tell a lot about a person by their avatar. Like a glimpse into their very nerdy desires.

NY Times: Avatars

Danish photographer Nikolai Howalt has a great series of portraits featuring boys before and after a boxing match. Each photo is shot on a neutral background to leave only the subject as the object of focus. It’s interesting to see not just how much of a beating each kid took (though that’s fun, too), but to notice how they hold themselves differently afterward. The work seems reminiscent of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ book 30 Porn-star Portraits. I likes it, though. Mostly just because I like the words “scrappy” and “moxy”, and these kids look like they’re full of that.

Nikolai Howalt