Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Designer as Author Program, writes the “Visuals” column for the New York Times Book Review, and is the author of 120 books on design, illustration, and satiric art – including TASCHEN’s Design For Obama which features my own original English-French-Hebrew design on page 95. The book will be available worldwide in two weeks, so in the meantime you can check out Heller’s discussion with the Philadelphia chapter of AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) on the outpouring of posters for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Heller also compares today’s political graphics to the campaign posters of a previous generation, and the relationship between democracy and design.
Last week Israel’s Channel 2 News had a segment about brides and grooms that want their wedding to be different. Apparently, after watching a couple of viral wedding videos they thought to themselves: “Yeah, how about we do something original for a change: Let’s do exactly what those other people did…”. Forget about holy matrimony, these people are here to entertain you on their quote-unquote “most important day” of their lives.
The segment is in Hebrew, but you don’t really need to understand the language in order to understand this copycat phenomenon should be studied by both psychologists and sociologists. You can skip over the first 55 seconds:
W3dd1ng Danc3 C0pycats in Israel – September 26, 2009
After watching the brilliant Israeli rock opera ‘War’ on stage, and blogging about it, I have been corresponding by email with musician Kobi Vitman who created it based on his experiences in 2002 as a reserve infantry soldier during Operation Defensive Shield, and the PTSD that followed. A couple of months ago, when the original cast recording was issued, I tried to convey to Vitman my own experiences as a listener and a fan of the genre, emphasizing the difficulty in trying to track down these musical gems once the curtain closes on the original show. In accordance with my beliefs about file sharing, copyright laws and my own experiences searching for recordings of Israeli musicals, I tried to push for making the entire album available online.
Well, I am so very happy to announce that as of this week, the album is indeed available online and for free. You can still purchase the physical CD, booklet and all, for 40NIS, but if you just want the MP3 files, they are now legally available on WarRockOpera.com. You can still watch the show live in its acoustic version. Check the website for details.
