Oh god how I’ve missed my headphones. I took a music-less flight to LA this morning– I was feeling pretty tragic about this at first, but I still had a pencil and a window seat. I *guess* this beats watching a 5-hour ANTM marathon.
To the huge, hot, glorious mess that is THE city to end all cities.
If I were to attempt to sum up this beautiful video and all the feelings that it encapsulates in my own words, it is very likely that I would embarrass you and myself with an unacceptably high dosage of cheesy, irrelevant rambling… Soo as put by Brain Pickings, cos they said it so well:
New York is a slow love. Beyond its typical emotional roller coaster — a target of all the world’s tourist lust, from the intense infatuation of the infrequent visitor to the quick disillusionment of the recent transplant — lies a rich and beautiful middle, a neverland between the black and white not grey but vibrant and colorful and magnificently enchanted, that over time swells into a powerful attachment.
That slow New York love blossoms when you cease trying to live the city as it should be and surrender to it as it is. When you embrace its uncontrollability and take comfort in its chaos, its whisper in your ear, its breath on your skin, its heartbeat in your heart. When you let the city grow on you and, in the process, you let yourself grow with it.
Here’s to New York, its vibrant neverland between infatuation and disillusionment, its allure of surrender, its promise of growth and, above all, its slow love.
Like the feeling described above, the video builds up slowly. It’s well worth the 30 minutes out of your life to just kick back and let yourself drown in a maze of color, sound, and movement. Oh and the music on these videos is the $hit. Also, that’s gonna be me casually strolling the Brooklyn Bridge in one week.
This makes me happy. Stop-motion urban-pastoral landscapes by DaBrainkilla to such clean, clear music. If you listen, you will understand that clean and clear is the most accurate way to describe what’s going on here. Please ignore the association with less exciting things like acne-fighting medicine.
This vid, composed of 4500 photos, is like grabbing the window seat on a magic school bus. Or a really awesome commuter rail. I would prefer all of my morning commutes to look and feel like this.
Vendor Power is a project by artist/designer Candy Chang, made in collaboration with The Street Vendor Project and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). This guide to street vending in NYC decodes the city’s cryptic volume of regulations through a series of illustrations. Rosten Woo from CUP notes, “we tried to create something that uses as little language as possible to spell out the most critical pieces of the code.”
Many vendors are being fined $1000 for little things like parking their cart too far away from the curb, not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license, and other rules buried in the City’s regulation book full of intimidating jargon that would make even the most patient person cry. This guide helps clarify the rules through diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, so NYC’s diverse vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.
Vendor Power is part of a series called Making Policy Public, which uses graphic design to explore and explain public policy. This is the beauty of design: a marriage of art and community needs. Thousands of copies were distributed to vendors this spring. Check out the research-and-design process via Urban Omnibus and click on the image above to download the poster.
