Naoya Hatakeyama

His work is up at ICP in New York until September, I'm definitely gonna try to see it.

I just read a new interview with him, I like how unassumingly he speaks about his work. It deals with human interaction with the earth, both the quiet and loud, among other things. He talks about the fragility of the city in the 21st century and the Japanese familiarity with destruction. I pulled the images above from the interview page - but there's a pretty wide range of subjects and moods in his body of work, I'm going to keep looking for more images.

John McCain's Longshot

Time Magazine just put up an article that pretty neatly summarizes McCain's chances in November, and it's not very optimistic. 

Foreign policy issues are looking to be less and less of an advantage for his campaign, and he's looking weaker and weaker on the economy. The past week or so has been particularly bad:

• The argument that talking to rogue states as 'appeasement' seems more baseless than ever since the Bush administration moved towards more normal relations with Iran

• Prime Minister Maliki more or less endorsing Obama's plan for withdrawal from Iraq, forcing McCain to make some pretty awkward decisions about where that leaves his 'time horizon' plan

• Obama's tour of Europe and the Middle East, a mix of high-level policy meetings with more rockstar-like events, will dwarf most news from the McCain campaign for a while and do a lot to erode perceptions of foreign-policy naivete. 

I'm still keeping my fingers crossed, McCain came back from almost nothing in the primaries, but this election is definitely Obama's to lose.

Happy Birthday

Miguel's 22nd, July 18

Harvest Is When I Need You The Most

Just got this comics collection in the mail yesterday - I'll admit I bought it based on the title alone. It's a tiny little book, but it has a really nice mix of artists and some great moments. I guess Star Wars must be an inexhaustible source, because all this stuff feels really fresh.

Preview here.

"Varmints" by studio aka

New half hour film coming out in September that looks really good... though the themes and sensibilities of the thing look pretty similar to those of Wall•E. Judging from the trailer though this looks like it'll be a beautiful movie.