March 22, 2011
Kustom Kulture is an an aesthetic and lifestyle born out of the hot rod culture of Southern California of the 1960s, associated with artists such as Kenny Howard (also known as Von Dutch), custom car builders such as ‘Big Daddy’ Ed Roth and Dean Jeffries, hot rod and lowrider customizers such as the Barris Brothers, along with numerous tattoo artists, automobile painters, and movies and television shows such as ‘American Graffiti,’ ‘Happy Days,’ ‘The Munsters’ and ‘The Monkees.’
Kustom Kulture is usually identified with the greasers of the 1950s, the drag racers of the 1960s, and the lowriders of the 1970s. Other subcultures that have had an influence on Kustom Kulture are the Skinheads, mods and rockers of the 1960s, the punks of the 1970s, metal and rockabilly music, the scooterboys of the 1980s, and psychobilly of the 1990s. Each has its own style, but common themes include wild pinstriped paintjobs, choptop Mercurys, custom Harley-Davidson and Triumph Motorcycles, metalflake and black primer paint jobs, and monster movies.
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March 22, 2011
The Orbitron is a custom car built by Ed Roth and feared lost until its rediscovery in Mexico in 2007. Built in 1964, the vehicle was powered by a 1955 or 1956 Chevrolet V8 and was backed by a Powerglide automatic transmission. The body was hand-laid fiberglass which actually hid Roth’s extensive chrome work to the chassis.
The cockpit, set at the extreme rear of the vehicle in the manner of a dragster, was lined with fake fur and featured a General Electric portable television inserted in the console. Topping the cockpit was a custom-made, hydraulically operated plexiglass bubble top. One of a series of ordinary doorbell switches atop the hood activated the top from the outside.
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March 22, 2011
‘Big Daddy‘ Ed Roth (1932 – 2001) was an artist and cartoonist who created the hot-rod icon ‘Rat Fink.’ As a custom car builder, Roth was a key figure in Southern California’s Kustom Kulture and hot-rod movement of the 1960s. He grew up in Bell, California, attending Bell High School, where his classes included auto shop and art. Roth is best known for his grotesque caricatures — typified by Rat Fink — depicting imaginative, out-sized monstrosities driving representations of the hot rods that he and his contemporaries built.
Although Detroit native Stanley Mouse is credited with creating the so-called ‘Monster Hot Rod’ art form, Roth is the individual who popularized it. Roth is also well known for his innovative work in turning hot rodding from crude backyard engineering, where performance was the bottom line, into a refined art form where aesthetics were equally important, breaking new ground with fiberglass bodywork.
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March 22, 2011
The Biker Cross is a derivative of the Iron Cross (a Prussian, and later German, military decoration). Bikers started to display the Iron Cross in the mid 1960’s with the advent of outlaw biker gangs. Originally bikers displayed the Iron Cross as a symbol of rebellion to society in general.
Today it is also worn to signify honor, valor, strength and ‘standing up for what you believe.’ Hot rodders (American car customizers) and others also use it as a provocative gesture to offend the public, or as a symbol of rebellion or non-conformity.
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March 21, 2011
Multivac is the name of a fictional supercomputer in many stories by Isaac Asimov. Like most of the technologies Asimov describes in his fiction, Multivac’s exact specifications vary among appearances. In all cases, it is a government-run computer that answers questions, usually buried deep underground for security purposes. However, Asimov never settles on a particular size for the computer except for mentioning it is very large.
Unlike the artificial intelligences portrayed in his ‘Robot’ Series, Multivac’s interface is mechanized and impersonal, consisting of complex command consoles few humans can operate. Though the technology depended on bulky vacuum tubes, the concept – that all information could be contained on computer(s) and accessed from a domestic terminal – constitutes an early reference to the possibility of the Internet.
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March 21, 2011
‘The Last Question‘ is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. It was Asimov’s favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterised computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer.
The story deals with the development of computers called Multivacs and their relationships with humanity through the courses of seven historic settings, beginning in 2061. In each of the first six scenes a different character presents the computer with the same question; namely, how the threat to human existence posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted.
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March 21, 2011
Vernor Vinge (b. 1944) is a computer scientist and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), as well as his 1993 essay ‘The Coming Technological Singularity,’ in which he argues that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the point at which ‘the human era will be ended,’ such that no current models of reality are sufficient to predict beyond it.
Vinge came to prominence in 1981 with his novella ‘True Names,’ perhaps the first story to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others.
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March 21, 2011
Colin Stetson, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a bass saxophone player and touring member of Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre. In addition to saxophone, he plays clarinet, bass clarinet, french horn, flute, and cornet.
Stetson has worked with dozens of artists, including David Byrne, Tom Waits, TV on the Radio, Sinéad O’Connor, and LCD Soundsystem. His solo album New History Warfare, Vol 1. was released in 2008. The follow up, New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges was released in 2011.
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March 21, 2011
Hefty Records is an independent record label based in Chicago, founded in 1995 by John Hughes III (aka Slicker). The label has established itself as a home for innovative electronica, releasing post-rock, IDM, downtempo, nu jazz, experimental music, and hip-hop. The label was formed by Hughes (as well as Bill Ding and Dan Snazelle) as a way of releasing his own music from his Ohio University dorm room in 1995. Soon afterwards a demo was given to Hughes from Scott Herren who was added to the roster under the name Savath and Savalas.
Hefty released the ‘Immediate Action’ series in 2000, a limited collection of six vinyl records from various electronic artists. All the records were hand pressed by Hughes, with sleeves created by the Brooklyn graphics company Graphic Havoc (now known as GHAVA), which used a stencil and spray painting technique to create each album; with different stickers to tell them apart.
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March 21, 2011
Telefon Tel Aviv is an American electronic music act formed in 1999. Formerly comprising Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis, Telefon Tel Aviv continues with Eustis as the sole official member since Cooper’s death in 2009 from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. The two were high school friends whose four-song demo was picked up by John Hughes III’s music label, Hefty.
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March 21, 2011
Kyle Cooper is an acclaimed modern designer of motion picture title sequences. He studied graphic design under Paul Rand at Yale University. In 1995 he designed the title sequence for the film Se7en, a seminal work which received critical acclaim and inspired a number of younger designers.
In 1996, he co-founded Imaginary Forces, a design firm, and in 2003 another firm, Prologue, based in Los Angeles. Cooper has also directed a feature film, New Port South (2001), a teen drama produced by John Hughes, based on a script written by Hughes’ son James. The project was filmed in Chicago and scored by Telefon Tel Aviv.
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March 19, 2011
The stereographic projection, in geometry, is a particular mapping that projects a sphere onto a plane. The projection is defined on the entire sphere, except at one point — the projection point. Intuitively, then, the stereographic projection is a way of picturing the sphere as the plane, with some inevitable compromises. Because the sphere and the plane appear in many areas of mathematics and its applications, so does the stereographic projection; it finds use in diverse fields including complex analysis, cartography, geology, and photography.
The projection has been used to map spherical panoramas. This results in interesting effects: the area close to the point opposite to the center of projection becomes significantly enlarged, resulting in an effect known as little planet (when the center of projection is the nadir) and tube (when the center of projection is the zenith).
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