- Are they wrong? You never come back here, in the middle of the night, thinking things over?

- ... 

[ waves crashing ]

- Before "The System", a man like you might have had a chance. Work hard, keep striving... You'll never be more than a construction worker or a petty criminal because that's all they'll let you be. 

[ data scrolling ]

- They won't invest in someone who's gonna kill himself. But by not investing they ensure the outcome.

[ waves crashing ]

Labels: design, DNA, sunflower, titles

Dear Charlie,

I am so glad you have found it, that thing that exists even when it is imperceptible to everyone. Yet, somehow, you found it. 

There is no way to tell our bones to bend. That’s not something bones do. That’s not why bones grow so strong with conviction. Perhaps that’s just the way they were programmed. Poor things have no clue how to grow any other way.

Above my dinning table, a painting lies. The boy should be looking up, my friend told me. The boy in the frame. She painted it, so she should know. But the boy trapped inside it looks like he’s resting this way; laying on his bed with his head gently resting in the emptiness of the edge. Like I’ve done so many times. Otherwise, he’s sitting on a chair, looking up in an awkward way.

What a nightmare! To spend eternity sitting on a chair! In a frame, or on a train, always sitting. Watching and waiting for something to happen, to change the landscape. A chair can be very helpful. A chair for waiting out the blizzard. A chair to be taller. A chair to listen to other chairs in a circle. A chaise longue to express your fears in a safe space. I prefer a bed.

(An October bed is a trap. Coming home is terribly dangerous when it is dark with October hours. A terribly glauque homecoming, to keep the company of someone who never remembers you. Yet, somehow, finds you, over and over again. Perhaps by mistake. Perhaps not. A running gag, as they say. An opportunity to match two cards? The grasshopper and the ant. Am I the rich one? Who’s rich enough to know the difference? Who’s the poor ol’ boy who can’t mute everyone’s thoughts? And how kind is he in the face of all that information? Is it a crime to think these thoughts? Is it a crime to want to ignore them? Snooze. Snap!)

These temporary things that stretch over us like constellations of roots keep us up at night. Sitting up right and waiting for that moment... a bored volcano, indeed. Be a mountain! It’s all downhill from here, eh Charlie?

Hold on.

Labels: conversations, Dear Charlie, design, DNA, experiment, humans, musical, please feel secure, social

In a few days the streets of our fair city will be filled with rotten apples and bullets with butterfly wings.

This time of year, when trees are pretty naked, we little humans wrap ourselves up in horrid scenes. It is quite fabulous. Our imagination, running amok, protects us from the cold. Unless you are a sexy nurse zombie.

How common. Ladies, don't be so pink. Grease your costume with some classic cinema styles. Here are ten girls that might do the trick. Heads up! Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo!

Labels: costume, design, halloween, pictures, suspicious activity here

After months of being surrounded by movie hype, I took the time to watch a jewel last night: A Single Man.




Now ready, after all the information I had heard about this film faded away, to take it in, mind wide open.

It greets you with a soft touch of contemplation of blurs and slowly takes you through a series of modern symbols, struggling to survive, face-to-face.

What pops up from the mundane modern magazine lifestyle as unique is filled into lungs, rendering them heavy and obsolete. We see a man choose his moments carefully. When to stop and listen in wonder to what takes place in a few seconds, within a few steps. The film succeeded in presenting how everything could look so ridiculously perfect and wrong at the same time.

What we get to see, forming before our eyes, is the stain of defining moments left on the face of someone who knows the importance of what lies between his world and how we see it. What is invisible. What is met between passion and interest. What counts between desire and disenchantment. Throughout the film, we are directed down a hall of mirrors, which are actually passages to other mirrors. All of this emphasizing the moment when a definition is smashed into quiet, sober and rational revolutions, when one door must close for another to open.

This passage, between hyper saturation and fade to black, is worth revisiting.

Labels: design, film, Tom Ford

This evolving organism, the Internet, is constantly renewing itself. Progress is produced through failures and variations of applications, cells adapt and renew themselves in response to everyday interactions, boredom and drama. The only thing that connects the birthed (newbies), the dying (users) and the plug (portal) is communication. Links. Transmissions sent through venous, intricate designs that may have occurred by accident, or not.

The Internet was born in efforts to develop superior communication devices and has been blossoming through the good, the bad and the ugly ever since. Driven by user content, the web is a non-geographical public forum that, to some, holds a promise of a limitless well of information. We reach out, regroup and find each other because the last thing we want is to live in a world that has nothing to do with us. In a nutshell: we spark connections with a click of a key.

A quick peak into your body’s bloodstream transit system and you might view such signs as  “Exhaustion” or “Exciting” or even “Too much beer” whereas across the screens of online communities you might read “Check out this hot new band.” or “Have you seen this child?” or even “All your bran are belong to us.” and so on. When such matters are brought to light, interest grows like weeds and they can aid as much as they can harm. 

Was the Internet an important tool in bringing aid to Haiti? We have seen the end of a world and we have organized in order to send support to a society that is left without electricity, without running water and without the certainty that their calls will be answered by a familiar voice. As we coordinated concerts, telethons and food drives we created opportunities to encourage generosity and involve our networks in expanding awareness to this cause. There is no doubt that this web is good for the group.

The plug supplies power to the mass. The web cannot be blamed for hours wasted on Bacon Degrees. Don't we all just want to make contact with other intelligent life forms? Pick your tool: Flickr, HypeMachine, YouTube, Wordpress... the Internet is your canvas to share (almost) any information with a world that is reaching out for reciprocity.

An important connection we make online on a daily basis is the one between the ghost of users past, present and future. Through the web we align ourselves with strings of information on any given subject, connecting bases of knowledge of the past, present and views of the future. (This type of association is usually one that is scoured by firms but unfortunately often goes completely unnoticed by those who would actually make great progress with these sources as fuel.) It is now easier, with a tool like Twitter, to share information between those who are passive and active in order to signal those that are reactive. In other words, this is how you can avoid calamities, be one step ahead and skip to plan b. This is how trends work, by unifying the dispersed crowd with a string of common interests. The big P will put fire in that trend engine.


Progress. It’s a natural process for all of us. Progress can manifest itself in the offline world as designed in the bosom of online communities. A good example is via Twitter and the #STM trend which is the umbrella code to everything STM related under one simple RSS feed. At the moment, there is no way to know if your bus is going to arrive at your stop in five, ten or twenty minutes. There are bus schedules at every other street corner but these are more like guidelines. With Twitter, a user can post an update such as “Bus 45 is 20 minutes late #STM”, warning all other users (the invisible crowd) waiting above and beyond and consequently prompting plan b.

Progress is a matter of perception. Progress will always rest between the hands of the people who bend it. People power rises in a flash mob, under a crowd surfer, in a cheer, in a rescue effort and at most intersections.

What progress fuels you? Is it Wikipedia? Is it a vaccine? Is it a President? Is it televised? If you want to change part of this world you are building, write about it, scream about it and involve all the different crowds that can help. Your actions are like money and money, as you might have already heard, is like a vote. It is an investment in an idea and a way of living. So live out loud.

Labels: design, folk, interactive, montreal

Some things in life are beautiful, and others are barely perceptible. To each his own scale of illusion and clarity, of sweet and sour, of hilarity and graveness... as long as children remain safe and sincere.

I love a sandy shore. It fills the emptiness between my toes. A bed that was woven with earth, water, wind and sunbeams: this is beautiful to me. I’m made of nothing like that. I sometimes feel disabled but I’m told I can create my form and nature. I can be an architect and design my identity? I can’t fly. I can’t stay underwater for more than a minute. I can’t walk naked in a snowstorm or through a firestorm, can you? So what exactly am I doing to myself through this new framework?

Jacob Bronowski wrote "Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created." When I die, I want to disappear into thin air. Leave the precious green to farmers and golfers. Leave the fire to foundries and the Olympics. To the rest of you I will leave different shades of skin colour in liquid and powder form, silicone mouths and posteriors, latex pockets, different shades of normal in over the counter and prescription form, a googol of virtual memories, first class rockets, third and fourth world countries and 1,722 lipstick names because I’m $$$ it. What a place of empowerment.

The human wheel, turning on itself because all it wants to do is kiss the sun on a sandy beach.

You’re so money. (Now that’s poetry!)





Usually, I would leave the entry at that and keep the rest unspoken, knowing that anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a week understands what I was aiming at, what I am always aiming at. Instead, I’d like you to take a look at this video.

Labels: design, octopus, video