Hasta La Ideas

Oscar Niemeyer, perhaps the oldest living starchitect at 101 years old, has been laid up in the hospital these past couple of days. He had surgery last week to treat a gall bladder stone and fortunately, everything seemed to have gone well and he was recuperating nicely according to reports. Unfortunately, while he was under observation, some additional tests revealed that Niemeyer had a tumor in his colon, forcing them to set up another date for him with a scalpel. Thus far, after his second surgery, he seems to be doing well. And if there’s one thing we can say about Niemeyer, he’s a fighter, so we’re crossing our fingers that he’ll be fine. Hey, Brasilia, maybe if you canceled your skyline changing plans, it would make the poor guy get to feeling better a little quicker, huh?

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If the kitschy brushstrokes of Miles Thomson don’t transport you to a beachside speakeasy staffed by monkey waiters serving cocktails in tiki heads, well, something must be very wrong.

The Californian effortlessly blends elements of surf art, jazz iconography, cowboys and injuns, vagabonds and drunks, life and death—all that good stuff—in a lowbrow style that looks like a Hallmark card from the ’50s. He’s also currently working on images of crime figures such as Al Capone, John Dillinger and Jesse James for Nickelodeon’s The Mighty B, so keep an eye out for his unmistakably groovy style on the box real soon.

Web icon Derek Powazek, who we last mentioned around this time last year surrounding the closure of his controversial Pixish site, has returned to his magazine roots (see: JPG Magazine), albeit briefly. Following the massive dust storm in Sydney Australia a few days back, Powazek was like many of us who started seeing dozens of photos of the odd city-enveloping storm pop up on every blog and in every tweet. But whereas the lot of us clicked away, he was compelled to do something with the perhaps once-in-a-lifetime happening and dediced to put together a publication using all of these photos he was seeing. After getting permission from nearly every one of the photographers responsible for all those photos the world was seeing, he quickly designed Strange Light: Photos from the Great Australian Dust Storm and ran it through Hewlett-Packard‘s MagCloud self-publishing venture. All of this within 48 hours. Here’s a bit about why:

Why would a Web guy like Powazek slave over an old-fashioned paper product? “Magazines are my happy place,” he says. “I think print and the Internet complement each other more than people realize.” Certainly, there’s something about once-in-a-lifetime occurrences that cry out for print. It’s as if holding something tangible is a more satisfying way to process and mark big events than bookmarking a page.

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The tabletop of this garden table begins at the corners with an organic form, gradually becoming geometric to the center. The tabletop pattern is insp..