Susology.com

MUTE

2008-05-14T15:01:30Z

We put up those pics of some Blu pieces we snapped in Berlin, but check this. It's called 'Muto' (Mute).

REAL ROAD RACING

2008-05-13T16:55:45Z

You probably know a bit about the Isle of Man TT. At least you might have heard of it. But you might not know anything about the North West 200, a road race held in Northern Ireland in the weeks leading up the TT. It’s the most popular sporting event of the year over there, with some 150,000 people from all over the world in attendance. Traditionally it’s been considered a support race, a warm up if you like; but in reality, where the TT has become a kind of festival of biking, the NW has retained its purity. It’s racing. Nothing more, nothing less...
]]> Picture it. You’re sat atop a machine that can barely stay still a minute such is the ferocity and precision of its engineering. It’s built to move, not to sit still on the grid. And a grid this most definitely is. The TT is effectively a qualifying session, with riders launched down the road at set intervals to improve safety, but here, on the roads known as the ‘Triangle’ (between three local villages), there’s a rider on either side of you. Behind you, the rest of the field waits, clutches held, hearts beating, all eyes on the lights. You won’t find any run-off areas here, no sand traps, no wide open grass sections to smooth a fall. These are roads, complete with curbs, walls, trees and undulating lips threatening to spit you over the top at 200mph if you make even the slightest mistake.

Racing on the roads – literally ‘road racing’ – takes a certain kind of man. Some would call them mad, others, err, determined. Either way, be sure to follow this year’s NW 200 this weekend on the BBC and, as a taster, brace yourself for a tour of the ‘Triangle’.

REAL FANS WEAR BROWN AND TAN

2008-05-08T16:29:09Z

Summer is here, it probably won’t last but we’ve learnt to deal with that. Meteorological mediocrity is part of our lives, in fact it probably defines us a bit. We complain when it’s too cold then moan when it’s too hot. In essence, we thrive on mediocrity. Another country rather fond of mediocrity is New Zealand. As a nation they are self deprecating, sarcastic and pretty relaxed. Their cricket side, traditionally at least, has represented that quite nicely.

]]> Sometimes they are great, sometimes they are awful, often they are average-to-middling. I look forward with baited breath, then, to the arrival of the New Zealand cricket side, but more importantly the mighty Beige Brigade this month. They are the kiwi answer to the barmy army and they are full of passion, pride, booze and wit. Maybe they don’t expect a win, maybe they do, more important than that are the cutting and creative quips and chants that will be directed at our boys. Their local rivals, Australia, are used to it:

"Waugh Waugh - Your Mother's A Door" was the call as the men in beige circumvented the language restrictions at the Basin Reserve in Wellington.

Another highlight is their penchant for lycra. Catch a glimpse of now ex-player and BB icon, Mark Richardson, racing Ashley Giles in the traditional finale to any test series. The get-up is supplied by the Beige Brigade who organise a sprint between the slowest two players on each team. HMS Giles won this head to head in a blaze of averageness. Keep an eye out for the men in beige on TV this summer and follow their journey at www.beigebrigade.co.nz

HIGH CRIME

2008-05-06T15:20:44Z

In 1968, under the lights of his dentist’s chair, Philippe Petit got wind of a pair of giant towers under construction in New York City. An idea was born. “When I see three oranges, I juggle,” he once said. “And when I see two towers, I walk.”
]]> Philippe Petit spent the next six years thinking about how he might walk between the twin towers, and then, in 1974, he decided outright that he’d actually do something about it. Eight months of meticulous and occasionally humorous planning ensued. After all, this was a crime he was planning, so criminal tactics would be required. He faked ID cards and mimicked the construction workers’ dress to gain entry for reconnaissance missions. Once he claimed to be a journalist from an architectural magazine wanting to speak with the workers on the roof; he conducted the interview, and made some useful observations. He also went up in a helicopter to take pictures so he could build an accurate scale model of the towers. Nothing could stop him. “He couldn’t go on living if he didn’t try to conquer those towers,” his girlfriend said. “It was as if they had been built specifically for him.”

The resulting performance has since become known as the “artistic crime of the century”, and James Marsh’s new documentary, Man On Wire, brings it to life through the testimony of the co-conspirators and the spectacle of the act itself. In the meantime, the policeman sent to the roof to bring him down reveals Petit to be less a walker and more a dancer, an artist who he was later obliged to throw into jail:

“I observed the tightrope 'dancer' - because you couldn't call him a 'walker' - approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire... And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle... He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again... Unbelievable really.... Everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.”

Read James Marsh’s own thoughts on both the man and the film here in the director's statement of the press section.

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY

2008-05-01T17:00:35Z

Regardless of success and its common units of measurement, fame and fortune, there is that enduring aspect of music that is born of love, devotion and in a few cases outrageous natural talent. Bobby McFerrin, who won Song of the Year in 1988 for ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ never came close to the top of the charts again but he has had an illustrious musical career since, including a period as guest conductor for the NY Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia and London Orchestras.

Most impressive to me though are his unique vocal improvisations. He has an astonishing vocal range of 4 octaves, he is an expert at vocal percussion and is also capable of throat-singing in which he excites the natural overtones from the fundamental vocal pitch, producing a two-or three-part chord of notes from one voice. Throwing all this talent into an improv session is breathtaking. McFerrin is the guy in the red shirt:

THE HUMBLE CREATIVE

2008-04-30T13:51:38Z

At Stamford Bridge on Saturday, just after halftime, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes were returning to their seats. Both were wearing suits; neither had been selected with Fergie casting a wary eye, at least in Scholes’ case, on Tuesday’s Champions League game against Barcelona. Predictably enough, great swathes of abuse rose up from the stands, from the big naked bellies of West London dads, from the well-spoken mouths of those with fathers’ rich enough to buy season tickets for their sons. But the abuse was aimed only at Neville, and mostly at his new moustache. Not a word could be heard of Scholes, save for the odd hushed whisper: “Great player, that fella,” or “nice if he played for us”…
]]> What isn’t to like about Paul Scholes? Perhaps if we knew the first bit about him, if he’d ever opened up to the cameras, if we’d even heard him speak, then we might have reason not to like him. Nationwide contempt for Gary Neville only increased after he officially elected himself Chief Spokesman for England and Manchester United not long ago; so perhaps Scholes – who would have seen his colleague’s unpopularity grow with every outburst as they rose through the ranks together at United – learned something from his club captain’s use of words: the more you talk, the more unpopular you become. It certainly seems to make sense. The diminutive Scholes, who is said to have never talked at all, is perhaps the most popular English footballer of the last twenty years.

With Scholes, though, you just know that his shyness has nothing to do with his desire to save face. He cares not a smidgen what we think. The only thing that seems to matter for Paul Scholes is his family and what happens on the pitch, either for United or for his beloved Oldham Athletic. But his attitude and loyalty are not the only reasons he escaped the pies hurled from the stands on Saturday. More than that, it’s his ability that he’ll be most fondly remembered for, his little turns, his pure passing, his subtlety of thought and, of course, something we were all beginning to think he had lost: that hammer of a right foot. All of this, bundled up in that lovable ginger frame, and - whatever your team - you surely smiled, just a little, for Paul Scholes last night.

BLU BERLIN

2008-04-29T16:34:01Z

A friend returned from Berlin today bearing pictures of works by esteemed Italian artist Blu. They kind of speak for themselves.

THE LEFT RIGHT PROJECT

2008-04-28T10:09:37Z

This month, Adidas had two 15 foot Superstar trainers built: one for the left foot (of a giant) and another for the right. They then sent one to LA and one to NY and got an artist collective from East and West to represent their respective coastline: the East coast collective, Surface2Air, took care of the right shoe; and Upper Playground, from San Francisco, took care of the left. The whole process was recorded on film before the NY shoe was packed up and driven to Venice Beach where it was reunited with its long lost left-footed brother...

CHECK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE FULL VIDEO.

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JOHNNY LEE AND HIS 3D Wii

2008-04-23T09:32:42Z

This fascinates me. Johnny Lee exposed his discovery on YouTube and the I.T world went crazy for it. He was then invited by the brilliant TED to deliver a talk, which thankfully breaks it down into slightly more basic terms for people like me (although it’s still quite nerdy). I admire Johnny for both his curious and creative mind, and also his attitude to knowledge sharing. He could have hidden away with his idea, or sold it to Nintendo or Apple. Instead, he made it available on his website for free.

WHERE ON EARTH IS WALLY?

2008-04-22T10:37:38Z

In 2002, Canadian artist Melanie Coles won a trip to the U.S. with her high school courtesy of NASA, and, in a stadium filled with students, they watched a live photo of themselves beamed onto a big screen from a satellite camera in space. Now, though, those cameras won’t be looking for Melanie, but for Waldo, known here in the UK as the literary legend Wally of considerable Where’s Wally fame. From vinyl sheet, and with the help of her little team, she’s created a giant Wally that, when the Google cameras update, will show up on Google Earth. And so the whole planet becomes the latest update to the Wally books: Where’s Wally for the 21st Century.

Read more about it here or follow the link below for an interview with Wally himself.

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BLEEDING FOR DESIGN

2008-04-17T16:54:27Z

In 1999, a leading designer with an international reputation was invited to a give a lecture near Detroit on behalf of AIGA, the professional association of design in America. He was also asked to design the poster for the event. How could he visualise for people the pain and suffering he put into every single design project, the kind of effort he believes to be part and parcel of the creative process? Simple: he got his assistant to carve the lecture details into his skin with a knife.

Such is the life of Stefan Sagmeister...

]]> Stefan Sagmeister is now one of the world’s leading graphic designers, with a small studio - kept deliberately so since its inception in 1993 - operating out of New York. He hails from Vienna, though, and it was there that he trained as a designer. Similarly, it was on Austrian streets that he began to experiment with the possibilities and objectives of design in the public sphere. A friend once came over from New York to visit him, he recalls, complaining that no girls in America paid him any attention whatsoever; he may as well have been invisible for all they cared. Sympathising with his friend’s plight, Sagmeister pasted the walls of his neighbourhood with posters containing a photo of his friend with copy beneath saying: “DEAR GIRLS! PLEASE BE NICE TO REINI!” Oh, to have friends like that!

Even today his work retains that kind of “do it yourself” handcrafted quality. He admits this is perhaps the one thing resembling a common thread in his work, even if he did spend years trying not to be defined by any particular style: “For a long time we prided ourselves on not having a style, but to uphold that became impossible. That’s because if you really switch your stylistic approach from project to project then it becomes impossible to come up with a new one on a weekly or monthly basis without ripping off either historical styles or a particular designers' style.” So, yes, many of his great works can be characterised by that handmade quality, and it often makes them all the more engaging.

He took a year off in 2000 and put together the excellent Things I Have Learned book-come-collection-of-pullouts charting the good and the bad from a life spent in design. If you’re a fan of good design and powerful ideas, then you could do a lot worse than buy it and take a look. He seems to have a knack of applying interesting and personal ideas into work that he can actually get paid for, like the ‘COMPLAINING IS SILLY. EITHER ACT OR FORGET’ idea. Fed up of overhearing people moaning about life in cafes and bars - an epidemic he believed to be particularly prevalent in Vienna - he felt obliged to do something about. How could he encourage people to look around them and see the positive side of things rather than the negative; how could he tire people’s incessant moans? Well, taking advantage of the fact that newsprint yellows significantly in the sun, he and his small team built giant billboard stencils in the sun and left them in the sunlight on the roof of their New York studio. When they removed the stencils, the areas beneath remained completely white. And then, commissioned by a Portuguese beer brand presumably hellbent on promoting a more optimistic approach to life, the newsprint was rolled up and mounted in Lisbon. In the blazing sun the message was simple yet effective: stop complaining. A week later, though, completely faded, the message was clearer still: stop complaining and do something about it, or else you’ll fade away, forgotten, erased. Nice.

SOUNDTRACK TO LIFE

2008-04-16T17:54:12Z

“I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling to realise that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation." - Andreas Pavel

How far we have come. If your iPod is of the Nano persuasion, kudos to you. If you’re packing 6G’s, you rock. iTouch? Awesome. iPhone? Spectacular. Anything electronic that has pinching, flicking and caressing as standard operating procedures deserves all accolades.

What holds all that together though is an enduring idea. One that was laughed off by the likes of Grundig, Phillips and Yamaha. One that plays an integral part in many of our lives - rest, work, play, exercise - you name it. Quite simply, the idea that it is nice to add a soundtrack to real life.

Andreas Pavel created the original portable personal stereo player. He fought court battles for 25 years with Sony who called their dubiously similar version the ‘Walkman’. He was at one point indebted to the tune of $3m in legal expenses. Eventually Pavel was awarded $10m plus royalties on a variety of future Walkman sales. The imagination of a man who wanted to hear his music on the go, no matter how many weird looks he got, is to be honoured. The determination to never let his creation be swallowed up by the power of Sony is inspiring. Pavel’s Stereobelt of 1972, while devoid of MP3, JPEG, WiFi, YouTube and the rest of the gang, represents the official birth of an era defining icon. Surprisingly enough, we couldn't find a digital photo of one...

A NEW TAKE ON SKATE

2008-04-15T17:09:30Z

A few minutes of film can capture the imaginations of people from all walks of life. If you skate, you’ll know about this already. If you don’t, then fall in love with the intro to Lakai’s new film, Fully Flared. The risks they took to shoot it were pretty substantial - using napalm to blow things up will always incur some kind of risk - but the results speak for themselves. It's beautiful.

AND I QUOTE...

2008-04-14T13:25:21Z

“You can’t handle the truth!”... “I’ll never let go, Jack.”... “I love you honey bunny.”... “Say hello to my little friend!”... “I’m... kind of a big deal”... “Do the chickens have large talons?”

You could never quote from, say, an Italian Neorealist film of the 1940’s (unless in the right crowd) because it would transport you to Ubergeek status. Quoting films is about shared experience. ‘We both saw that film, we both liked that bit, and now we are connected by something.’

Sometimes though, a little soundbite won’t cut it, and not even the most talented impressionist can do justice to the quote, especially when it is intrinsically linked with the film’s music, cinematography and narrative. Lengthy monologues must be a really exciting and probably quite daunting thing for an actor to see when first reading the script; a chance to really impress himself on the character. A chance, even, to define the film.

A quote becomes a speech when it can only fully exist in its lengthy entirety. The one I’m thinking of has been borrowed by a second-rate football team (Plymouth Argyle, I think) when they were managerless for a short period, and they won every game using it as motivation. Undoubtedly thousands of over-excited American high school kids have embraced it as part of their sporting ritual, and there are those of us who just love it for what it is: The perfect speech at the perfect moment in a very good (as far as sports stories go) film.

Without further ado and with a healthy disregard for whether you like the film or not, this is a speech that those involved should be very proud of. Take a bow, Oliver Stone and of course, Al Pacino.

THE FALLEN ANGEL OF BRAZIL

2008-04-11T10:00:45Z

Asked a few years ago what he thought of Liverpool FC, Pele, a global ambassador for football no less, said that, yes, Liverpool were a fine team indeed. They have great players, he continued, like Ryan Giggs.

In Brazil, “the greatest player that’s ever been” isn’t revered quite so much as he is in, say, FIFA HQ. He may be ‘The King’, but there’s a feeling of disassociation these days between the young man from the streets who left his mark on the game and the deity he has now become. He recently joked that he was more famous than God because people in Asia knew him, too. So no, in Brazil, they hold another player dearer to their hearts, a man born with a bent spine, one leg shorter than the other and each pointing in opposite directions. That man was Garrincha...

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Where Pele, dressed to the nines, is Mr. Squeaky Clean, the Goodie Two Shoes of footballing heroes, Garrincha, when he was alive, was famed as much for his off-field antics as he was for his other worldly on-field abilities. He’s been called the Brazilian George Best, but, according to Garrincha’s biographer Ruy Castro, the Irishman's efforts away from the football field simply don’t match up. The Brazilian lost his virginity to a goat, fathered 14 children with five different women (and those are only those we know about), and drank himself into an early grave at the age of 49. He tried to commit suicide twice, and killed his mother-in-law in a car crash. He was not, it’s safe to say, blessed with the luck of a God. But the people of Brazil feel a deep connection with Garrincha precisely because of these imperfections in his character. He never wanted to be anything other than a footballer, he hated wearing a suit, and he never bought a home with palatial gates behind which he could hide. He also never lost touch with his childhood friends.

Garrincha played football because he loved playing football, an amateur in the truest sense of the word. And despite being born a cripple, it was a love that brought him two World Cup winners’ medals. Many believe the win in 1962 was down to him alone, such was his impact on the tournament. Four years earlier, in Sweden, he came up against Wales (I know, these things just don’t happen anymore) in the semi-finals. The Welsh left-back Mel Hopkins, charged with stopping him, said of Garrincha, “When he stood and faced you, his legs went one way and his body the other. There’s no doubt about it, he could have been declared a cripple. But my God could he play.” Indeed, forget Ronaldo, Garrincha is surely the greatest dribbler that’s ever been (check the video below).

He died in a Rio hospital in 1983 but was buried in his home village of Pau Grande. The main roads leading in were jammed on the day of the funeral. Thousands of people fought for only 300 seats in the church, leaving hoards of desperate mourners outside. Such was the tension that the priest had to curtail the service and merely blessed the body. He was carried by the people to the cemetery where 8,000 Botafogo fans (his club) had been waiting for hours. Garrincha’s own family couldn’t get near to the grave to see him buried.

These are not the kind of scenes reserved for ordinary footballers. And Garrincha, the unlikeliest of all players, the cripple who became a wizard with a ball at his feet, was in no way ordinary. He was special, a flawed sporting genius to whom even “The King” has occasionally bowed:

“Without Garrincha, I would never have been a three-time world champion.” For once, the man speaks some sense.