As the Walkman returns after 30 years, why we’d all be happier if we’d never heard of the GADGET THAT HELPED BREAK BRITAIN.

Here is an anniversary which makes some of us feel old. It is 30 years  -  yes 30 years!  -  since the appearance of the first Sony Walkman. It is 30 years since we first got on a bus or a train and heard that infuriating tsst, tsst, tsst, tsst noise emanating from a wired-up earhole just behind us, 30 years since one section of the population became literally deaf to the existence of the other half.

For those of us who liked getting on a bus or a train and overhearing, or even taking part in, conversations, there is something a bit bleak about the dozens of private solitudes which nowadays clamber aboard.

Is it possible that by inventing what seemed like a marvellous new gadget which would enhance all our lives, Sony actually created one of the biggest blights of urban life?

The Walkman was a portable, compact cassette player and, strange as it may seem today, the breakthrough it represented was that, for the first time, you could carry your own choice of music around with you and listen to it.

The trouble was that the personal stereo became the archetypal accessory of the me-generation. With one of these infernal things plugged in to your head you are literally deaf to the needs of others, and have no idea quite what a nuisance you are being.

Locked in to your own music choices, you can hear nothing said to you, and you will fast become desensitised to the fact that traces of your noise are intruding into the calm and silence of anyone who has chosen to travel without being wired up.

After Walkman, Apple produced the much more exciting iPod, tiny machines on to which you could download a fantastic range of your own choice, not only of music but of films, too.

Now Sony is fighting back with a new Walkman model, called the X-series, which will have a touch-screen, 60 hours’ worth of music, and a radio tuner thrown in.

Of course it was long overdue, from a marketing point of view, for Sony to improve its act. Nowadays, the only place you are likely to see the old Walkman is at a car-boot sale.

Muggers will rip a decent iPod from your head if you are unwise enough to wear one in the badlands of our big cities.

But no one would steal  -  or even be seen dead with  -  a Walkman. Almost all young people appear to have an iPod, and it will be interesting to see whether Sony manages to claw back some of the customers it has lost to the iPod over the years.

I vividly remember my first sight of a Walkman. I was in New York 30 years ago, and a young man zoomed past me in Central Park on roller skates. His face was abstracted. Out of his ears came the little wires of his phones. As far as the rest of us were concerned, he might have been on another planet.

At the time, I thought, ‘how very American!’ The USA seemed to me a place founded on the concept of private hedonism  -  ’the pursuit of happiness’ is one of the aims of their constitution  -  leading to pleasures which were not social but solitary.

I remember thinking that in England, pop music is a shared social bond. The jukebox in the cafe, the transistor radio blaring from the builder’s scaffolding, the music from Radio 2 provided a sort of social glue which crossed the class divide and even bound together generations. Whereas a Walkman was the opposite of social glue  -  it was isolating.

Needless to say, I was wrong.

It was not an exclusively American phenomenon, and it was only a matter of weeks before I saw the Walkman in London. Within a matter of months I had bought one for myself  -  just as I rushed out to buy an iPod as soon as they were launched.

But I no longer use either. It is partly a matter of road safety  -  locked in to their isolated world, a number of iPod wearers have been killed by traffic they have not noticed.

I am a cyclist, and biking round London with Wagner blaring into your head at full tilt is a very dangerous occupation indeed  -  you can’t tell whether a double decker bus is coming up behind you.

But it was not just the instinct for self-preservation which made me ditch the headphones. I began to dislike the sensation of being cut off from the rest of the world.

We have bred up a generation of children who would regard not having an iPod as a deprivation. From the age of 12, they have downloaded the bad music they consider cool, and even have a number of films that they can ‘watch’ on the three-inch screen. (But who would want to watch a film in such a format? Imagine a three-inch Lawrence Of Arabia or Titanic).

By the time they are 35, this generation will have experienced serious hearing loss. Of that, medical research is in no doubt whatsoever.

Earbuds  -  the tiny speakers that fit inside your ears  -  are universally more popular with young listeners than the less stylish headphones, but have been proven by medical research to damage hearing irreparably, and to do so fast.

In the past, it was when you were visiting your elderly relations that you automatically shouted. Now, I do so when addressing children and teenagers who are already  -  even if not actually wired up at the time that you bellow at them – slightly deaf.

Exposing your ear drums to badly mixed rock music at 110 or 120 decibels is the equivalent of standing near a jet aircraft.

Many young people expose themselves to this level of noise for hours each day. No wonder, when they sit next to you on the bus, they create the infernal nuisance of noise from their earphones. If they turned down the decibels to the level that most of us would consider a normal level for radio or music-listening at home, they would be unable to hear.

It is one more indication of the fragmentation of what has been called our broken society. Cut off from being able to hear one another, we all sit around, locked in our private worlds, deaf to what the person next to us might be saying.

I notice that when I travel on trains, and sit in the ‘Quiet Zone’, many fellow-passengers believe that they are being quiet because their deaf ears are tuned into these earbuds. You can hear the bass drums and the annoying tsst-tsst-tsst yards away from them, as they sit, rhythmically nodding in their deaf solitude.

Music used to bind us together, whether we liked classical music at concerts, or whether we enjoyed the sort of light pop played on the radio. It still does so to a much greater extent than anything else in our divided society. But the phenomenon of plugging in earbuds removes the social element from musical enjoyment.

There is something bleak about this. Societies are happy when the greater number have mastered social skills, and this must depend upon people learning to appreciate one another.

How can this be done if we are all plugged in to our separate earbuds, shattering what was left of our hearing, and completely insensitive to the nuisance we are creating for the person sitting at our side?

Source: Daily Mail

“Made in China” will be transformed into “Created in China”. The World Design Congress, praised as the “Olympics of the design world” will be held from October 24 to 30 in Beijing. It will be the first time that China has won the right to host the event. Then, 800 well-known designers from around the world will gather in Beijing, where they will discuss the urgent problems facing the world design industry as well as the development of the industry. The collision of ideas of the “masters” will bring Beijing an October filled with innovation. On the morning of April 27, the World Graphic Design Day, the 2009 World Design Congress was officially launched.

The conference is co-sponsored by China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group, the National Center for the Performing Arts and the Beijing Industrial Design Center. The theme of the conference is “Xin-?,” symbolizing the communication of “messages”, the transmission of “faith”, dialogues seeking transparency and mutual trust, and cross-boundary global cooperation. The conference will last for seven days and will consist of four major themes, “design for more people, harmonious and sustainable development, communication and defining the future and design.” It will conduct activities including the International Design Education Forum, the International Design Forum, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) General Assembly and other related design exhibition activities. Tens of thousands of participants are expected. In addition, the conference will organize about 50 workshops in key cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Wuhan, in which nearly 1,000 students will take part.

Pan Gongkai, President of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, explained that in recent years, China’s design industry has been in a stage of explosive growth. According to statistics, in China, over 1 million students major in designing in China’s 2,000 plus higher education institutions. Therefor, the World Design Congress will exert a huge push on the design industry’s transformation in China.

Icograda was established in 1963 as an international non-governmental, non-political organization composed of professional associations of various countries around the globe that are engaged in areas including graphic design, visual communications, creative design, design management, design education. It is the largest and most influential graphic design organization in the world.  Icograda holds a World Design Congress every other year, each time at a different location around the world.

Source: CCTV

Upon a company name change, the company will undertake its brand name change from the ‘National’ brand, which is used for home appliances and housing equipment in Japan, to the ‘Panasonic’ brand by the end of fiscal 2010, ending March 31, 2010. Subsequently, the ‘National’ brand will be abandoned and the corporate brands in Japan will be unified to the ‘Panasonic’ Brand.

The company has been using a company name ‘Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.’ since 1935, following its earlier names ‘Matsushita Electric Manufacturing Works’ since 1929 and ‘Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works’ since 1918 when it was first established. While the company was using ‘National’ and ‘Panasonic’ brand names over the period, it decided in 2003 to unify a global brand into ‘Panasonic’ with a brand slogan ‘Panasonic ideas for life.’

Read the full press release here.

Developed with Interbrand, the new identity is a big departure from previous changes to the brand. The new logo better reflects Xerox today, a company that has transformed itself in recent years far beyond its roots in copier systems. The new design is meant to make people pause, and take a new look at the iconic brand.

You can see the full press release and the new brand identity, including the new wordmark with symbol here. The company’s award-winning advertising will be updated immediately. Xerox will start changing the logo on products, facilities, vehicles and marketing materials over the next 18 months.

Source: adgoodness.com
Resources: Xerox (Xerox Unveils Biggest Change to Its Brand in Company History) | Interbrand (the story of Transforming an Iconic Brand)

Click here to see more.

Source: 2spare.com (via HotNews.ro)

A veeeeeeeeeeery interesting project, almost impossible to be described in few words. Actually, there are several projects gathered together under the “Unpacking The Past…” motto, in a style full of fun and fine humour.

“Hah-hah-hah-HAH-ha!” That signature laughter can mean only one thing: one of the most beloved animated characters of all time is coming to DVD for the first time ever, when The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection lands on store shelves on July 24, 2007 from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

The most popular sailor in animation history is certainly “strong to the finish.” Nearly 75 years after his Silver Screen debut, he’ll bring to DVD for the first time the cartoons that first made him famous when Warner Home Video (WHV), Hearst Entertainment and King Features Syndicate release Popeye The Sailor 1933-1938 Volume 1, on July 31, 2007.

Meanwhile, for more info, just for fun or to learn more about the characters and their “parents”, don’t forget to visit the Woody Woodpecker’s and Popeye’s outstanding official websites. ENJOY!

The Doors is a 1991 film about Jim Morrison and The Doors. It was directed by Oliver Stone, and stars Val Kilmer as Morrison, Meg Ryan as Pamela Courson (Morrison’s companion), Kevin Dillon as John Densmore, Kyle MacLachlan as Ray Manzarek, Frank Whaley as Robby Krieger and Kathleen Quinlan as Patricia Kennealy.

The film is very much focused on Morrison, portraying him as larger-than-life and an icon of 1960s rock and roll, counterculture, and the drug-using free love hippie lifestyle. But the depiction goes beyond the iconic: his alcoholism, interest in the spiritual plane and hallucinogenic drugs as entheogens, and, particularly, his obsession with death are threads which weave in and out of the film.

The film’s soundtrack contains over two dozen of The Doors songs; songs like… “Light my fire“, “Break on through (to the other side)“, “People are strange“, “Touch me“, “L.A. Woman“, “The end“, “Alabama song“, “Riders on the storm“, “Five to one” and more…

In the film, original recordings of the band are seamlessly combined with performances by Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison. Val is great as Jim and is also an uncanny look a like and also did his own singing (the real band said they couldn’t tell Val’s singing apart from Jim’s).

Passionate but overlong and incompetent biographical picture about Jim Morrison, the infamous lead singer of The Doors, the music he made was raw yet poetic, angry yet seductive. Film stumbles and bumbles along the pinpoints of Morrison’s young adult life (he died at the age of 27)… from meeting his girlfriend, to quitting film school, to forming the band called “The Doors” with his friend, to playing in concerts and the infamous Ed Sullivan show incident, and of course, Jim’s various outbursts of uncontrolled frenzy, Jim’s unfaithfulness to his girlfriend, before showing his death in France.

This film will remind us how powerful drugs are… It shows the talent of Jim Morrison and how addicted he was into drugs and a self-destructive psychopathic freak. Still, the real tragedy is that such an obviously gifted and talented man just wasted his life so badly. I hope that this film will serve as a lesson to all musicians out there.

Article by Tix from Rakista.
Other resources: The New York Times Review (click here for the online version, or here to read it in pdf format).

Mungiu’s film will be presented for the first time in Romania at the Transylvania International Film Festival-TIFF.

“I bet on this move from the very beginning. I told all my friends it has huge chances of success. My only regret is that Ana Maria Marinca, without whom the film would not have been what it is, was not among the winners of the night, but I hope this will be fixed at TIFF“, Romanian film critic and TIFF director Mihai Chirilov told HotNews.ro.

He said the Cannes success was “a step forward for Romanian film making, a validation of a tendency, a confirmation at the highest level. But of course there’s always room for better”.

The story of the film takes place in Romania before 1989, in a totalitarian regime. The title tells the period that the main character, Gabita (actress Laura Vasiliu) let things happen before searching for somebody willing to perform an illegal abortion.

Otilia, her friend, helps Gabita find the necessary money for the procedure.

Mungiu’s film also won the FIPRESCI award granted by the International Film Critics Federation in Cannes.

This year’s festival also brought another important prize for Romanian film making: director Cristian Nemescu, killed in a car accident last year, received a post-mortem “Un certain regard” award for his unfinished film “California dreaming (endless)“. The same distinction went to another Romanian director in 2005: Cristian Puiu for “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu“.

Source: HotNews.ro.
More on this film: “4 months, 3 weeks & 2 days” official website.

12 films from 12 countries are about to compete this year within the sixth edition of Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF) for the Transylvania Trophy.

Either a black and white silent movie (The Antena / La antena from Argentina), or a story about the end of the adolescence (the swidish Falkenberg Farewell), a picture about the moral dilemmas (the serbian The Trap / Klopka), or an italian film with the famous choreographer Eduard Gabia, playing the main character (Cover Boy), a story about confused and acid parent-children relationship  (Children / Börn from Iceland), or the american A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, either the already awarded  (the spanish Azul oscuro casi negro and La sagrada familia from Chile), each film in the competition is the first or at least the second feature of it’s director.

This year, in the TIFF Official Competition, Romania is represented by the same film that represents it in the Cannes Official Competion – 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. The director Cristian Mungiu returns to the TIFF Competition, after his first feature, Occident, won the Transylvania Trophy  of the first TIFF Competition in 2002.

More on the festival: TIFF’s official website.

“We’re a nation of inventors in garages and corporate labs, creating new gadgets and services that delight us and occasionally drive us crazy. USA TODAY chose inventions that changed our lives since 1982″.

1. Cellphones
Car phones were around in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1983 that Motorola introduced the first widely available handheld cellphone. The DynaTAC 8000x weighed almost 2 pounds, but it still cost $3,995.

2. Laptop computers
It was about as portable as a sewing machine. But the 28-pound Compaq Portable – Compaq Computer’s very first product – was the first portable IBM-compatible PC on the market. More than 53,000 sold in the year after its 1983 launch, despite a price usually topping $3,000.

3. BlackBerries
An obscure Canadian pager company, Research In Motion, shortened attention spans around the world with the launch of the BlackBerry mobile e-mail device in 1999.

Click here to read and enjoy the full article.

401 Projects is a non-commercial photography gallery in New York City, created as an exhibition space to showcase the work of both emerging and well-established artists.

Every exhibition is complimented by a special program; be it a lecture, portfolio review, or roundtable discussion.

Face of Fashion focuses on the portraits of five outstanding fashion photographers from Europe and America: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, Corinne Day, Steven Klein, Paolo Roversi and Mario Sorrenti. It is the first exhibition of its kind, celebrating the innovation and diversity of current fashion portraiture.

In the contemporary fashion world, models, actors, musicians and designers frequently swap places. The exhibition highlights the relationship between fashion and celebrity and illustrates the extraordinary intimacy that often develops between photographer and subject. The exhibition is curated by Susan Bright and the installation is designed by David Adjaye.