Hasta La Ideas

If art imitates life, then we suppose this falls under the “art imitates art imitating life.” In seeing the new George Clooney-directed/starring film, Ides of March, which concerns the inner-workings of a presidential campaign for an inspiring progressive candidate, the LA Times‘ David Ng noticed the regular appearance of a silkscreened poster featuring Clooney’s congressman character with the word “Believe” underneath. It looks familiar because it’s apparently a near-exact copy of the Obama “Hope” poster that catapulted already popular street artist Shepard Fairey into becoming a household name, as well as landing him in a whole mess of trouble with the Associated Press for basing the poster off of an image taken by one of their photographers. This whole thing gets a little extra familiar when you recall that, before telling the truth about where he’d based his “Hope” image from, Fairey said that it was from a photo of President Obama sitting next to, you guessed it, George Clooney. Whatever strange back and forth there is, Ng looked into the film’s poster and while he didn’t receive too many details, its similarity was clearly not an accident. Here’s a bit:

Fairey didn’t design the poster for the movie, according to the artist’s spokesman. But the artist’s signature aesthetic is unmistakably present throughout the movie, with the “Believe” poster highly visible at the Morris campaign headquarters and various political rallies.The similarity between the two posters is no doubt deliberate and gives the movie a sense of verisimilitude and immediacy. Obama shares some similarities to the Morris character, a left-wing politician whose platform includes pro-environment reform and a reduction in U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

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In case you missed it, and given what we’ve learned from the recent cast contract negotiations there’s a good chance that might be the case, artist and Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, perhaps better known as simply John K., was given the keys to the opening of The Simpsons this past Sunday. On the heels of last year’s Banksy-created opening, the very last section of the ever-changing opening, often referred to as “the couch gag,” was drawn in his familiar, distorted and slightly deranged style. Cartoon Brew landed an interview with John K., launched the morning after its surprise appearance. In it, he goes into great detail about not only how it all came to be, but the whole process behind its illustration and animation. Even if you aren’t a filmmaker and/or a Ren and Stimpy fan, it’s well worth your time. Before you get started, however, here’s the opening (unfortunately, shot on a television screen, as Fox seems to have locked their copy on YouTube):

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Tiny Dancers Kelli Anderson’s die-cut posters for Girl Walk // All Day, an album-length dance music video. (Photos courtesy Kelli Anderson)

Conveying the pleasures of idiosyncratic dancing in a static logo or poster is no warped waltz in the park, but Kelli Anderson was up to the task. The Brooklyn-based artist and designer created this jazzy logo (at right) and die-cut poster (above) for Girl Walk // All Day, Jacob Krupnick‘s Kickstarter-fueled dance music video set to All Day, the new album by mash-up musician Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis. The exuberant trailer for the video (below), featuring freelance dancer Anne Marsen, became a web sensation earlier this year and helped Krupnick to raise nearly $25,000 to fund the project (more than five times his original Kickstarter goal). The 71-minute epic will be screened in public spaces, and at festivals, concerts, parties, and beyond, beginning in mid-October.

“The trailer’s surreal energy floored me,” Anderson tells us. “There is something that is so simultaneously disruptive and joyous about Anne’s movements—and the way she creatively uses stairs, benches, lampposts, the ebb and flow of the crowd, as her dance partners.” Asked by Krupnick to whip up some graphics for Girl Walk // All Day, Anderson seized upon Marsen’s “oversized, bizarre jacket” as a mascot. She was after something similarly offbeat for the video poster. “There was no doubt in my mind that the most compelling visual from the trailer were these odd bodily contortions that Anne made through dance—silhouettes we are not accustomed to seeing in public space,” says Anderson, who got to thinking about the work of Robert Longo. “I wanted to use body shapes, but black silhouettes just looked silly. So I decided to make cut-out shapes instead.”

Using footage of Marsen, she traced screengrabs of “Anne shapes,” created vector silhouettes, and mutilated pristine, Helvetica-lettered posters with her Craft Robo cutting machine. The punchouts are scattered across the surface of each poster and only visible at close range. “Even though the poster will be against a wall, I like the idea that the dancer-shapes are windows,” Anderson adds. “It reminds me of that feeling I got when I first watched the trailer—through dance, I was seeing the city anew.”

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Although it premiered earlier this month at the Toronto Film Festival, Gary Hustwit‘s latest documentary, this time about city planning and entitled Urbanized, is just starting to kick off its worldwide tour, meaning it’s apt to become the subject of nearly every design-based conversation for the next few months, like with Helvetica and Objectified were before it. Starting in New York last week with a screening as part of the Urban Design Week, Hustwit is personally taking the film around to cities around the US (and one stop in London), out until early November. If you happen to live near a major metropolis, and can get tickets quickly enough (thus far every screening has sold out), you should be able to catch it. In the interim, you should start seeing a bevy of reviews from both bloggers and traditional media outlets. The LA Times‘ resident architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, just filed his review, saying that it’s “a sharp, good-looking documentary” and that it “ranks among the smartest recent analyses of mass global urbanization and its discontents,” though he’s a bit miffed that the film doesn’t even include a second about Los Angeles, something the critic finds a glaring omission. Though we wouldn’t be surprised at all if this happens in any number of cities, given that there are only a finite amount Hustwit could cover (“What about Cleveland?!” we’re imagining the Plain Dealer‘s critic is, albeit perhaps wrongly in comparison to LA, already thinking). Here’s the trailer:

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With much of the world’s attention this weekend on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, our friends at Studio 360 have put together a great interview with the memorial’s designer, Michael Arad, set to photos and video of the area. Should you not have tickets to the opening this weekend, which more than likely you won’t for months upon months at the very least, this is a great alternative. Here’s the clip:

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