Hi, we're OK Great, a tight-knit crew of designers, writers + artists, hell-bent on delivering the best in art, design and culture. The world is a big pile of awesome. We're the spoon. Dig in.
Here at OK Great Worldwide Headquarters (ie. each of our individual living rooms), we’re all getting psyched about the World Cup – donning our favorite country’s facepaint and tuning our vuvuzelas. We’ve put together an ESPN group bracket challenge – kind of like the college basketball tournament challenge, but times a billion.
You can join our bracket here – just make sure you fill it out and submit before Friday’s kickoff. Also, when you’re picking teams, the order that you select each team out of the group round determines where they are seeded for the round of 16.
Winner will enjoy epic glory, immortal fame, and four straight years of bragging rights.
John W Fesken is a painter, illustrator, scrawler, video artist, musician, installation artist, dioramist, poet, and all around Renaissance Madman. He weaves fairy tails on window panes and in boxes using found objects and other ephemera, painting, burning, and scratching his stories from junk. His pieces all tell a story, and his characters have histories and feelings of despair and hope.
I met John at the Artsplosure a few weeks back. If you are a Triangle native, you are probably familiar with Artsplosure – an outdoor art market in Raleigh, mostly filled with run of the mill nature photography, paintings, and jewelry. So naturally, I was drawn to the sore thumb of the event (I mean this in the most admiring / endearing way). His booth was full of dark scenes of creepy characters in dingy settings and a table full of hilarious / gross / dirty magnets (I got one with Han Solo and caption “Self-described asshole”).
But his real passion are his characters – like the doctor, who employs morbid tactics to save his love, or the woman waiting for the pink moon. Not content to let the characters live statically, he pseudo-animates and films their actions and struggles into shorts, giving them life beyond their wooden box settings.
Someone get this man a real website so he can get off Myspace.
Tom Beddard is a former physicist turned amateur fractal guru, who, you know, in his free time, likes to dabble in self-generative fractal programming to build out images like the video above, and the jaw-droppers below. Above is an example of two continuously morphing Mandelbulbs, a sort of 3D analog of the famous Mandelbrot set. These self-generative and self-repeating shapes can be infinitely zoomed in on to reveal shapes that mimic the shape of the whole (I’d recommend you pop over to vimeo and watch it in HD). Totally stunning stuff. If you take a peek around his website, this and other projects are all publicly available to play with. Want to create your own Mandelbulb, generate some free-form fractals or Droste effects, maybe some guillochés – it’s all there to play with, along with all the math to back it up, if you’re into that sorta thing…
This one is for all you local Durhamite OK Greatsters -
Two weekends ago was the third installment of what I hope continues to be a really amazing event in Durham – the Yum Yum Supper. Quote the Yum Yum website:
The Yum Yum Supper Club is a fresh bunch of humans interested in a cooperative exploration of food, timely celebrations, and the tilting of the planet in the North Carolina Piedmont.
Sounds awesome, right? It was. For the not insignificant price of $28 pp, I had high expectations for the night. It started off with some casual conversations and drinks at the Central Park Pavilion(where the farmers market is held) – sangria and wine – along with some bocce ball and croquet on the field. Wandering around I noticed a table with some peculiar objects:
Getting better, I thought. What better way to celebrate the true downtown heritage of Durham than finishing off a hopefully-delicious meal with a post-prandial cigarette and tie-on moustache (apologies for all crappy iphone pics)
So finally the dinner bell was rung and we sat down at a beautifully set table with a bottle of wine between nearly every other seat (big thumbs up). What followed was a truly delicious meal, filled with local ingredients (bacon or pork belly was featured in every course, including the chocolate chip and bacon cookies for dessert – amazing – and yes there was a veggie option), and great company. The chef, Chris Holloway of Southern Season, put out unbelievable food for over 100 YumYummers and then prior to the dessert course, (said cookies and jack and coke floats – I’m salivating now thinking about those) came out and gave one of the most impassioned “I Love Durham” + “I Love Food” speeches I’ve heard anywhere, and everyone got all warm and fuzzy (or maybe just drunk on wine).
Anyway, there’s more photos on the site (including a sort of horrible, sort of hilarious one of me and my lovely in moustaches) and more details about the club. Looks like the next one will be sometime in the fall, so all y’all locals makes sure you check it out.
Needless to say, my $28 expectations were wholeheartedly exceeded on all fronts.
While I’m on the topic of cool commercials, this new BMW commercial recently caught my eye. Now, normally I absolutely cannot stand car commercials – standard boilerplate of lame voiceover of such and such award or 5 star safety whatever with stock footage of twisty turns or salt-flat pedal to the metal or, even worse, a soccer mom. But while this commercial also has some of that, it also has some of the really beautiful stills above. It definitely takes a rare combination of an art directors vision, a company’s trust, and a lot of beautifully vintage design and cinematography/photography to get a commercial to look like a series of beautiful posters put in motion. Nice work BMW. I’d get one if I had a pile of cash.
Ok, so I think the new (well not that new) Old Spice commercials are absurdly hilarious. I had a buddy over recently and we discovered that there are several more that are presumably too ridiculous to air on TV on the Old Spice website.
The first one to catch everyone’s attention was the “I’m on a horse” commercial, produced by Wieden & Kennedy out of Portland. Hilarious, quick, and the single take shot makes you want to watch it over and over again. In an interview with the copywriter and art director for the spot, Craig Allen and Eric Kallman explain that there is basically no trickery or CG involved in the shot as well, only a Rube Goldberg-ian set of perfectly timed actor and set movements that all came together after three days of shooting and over 50 takes. Huge props to Isiah Mustafa, the actor in the spot who never breaks his stare or his condescension through the entire shot.
But honestly, that commercial was just a gateway drug to the hard shit – the Eric Wereheim and Tim Heidecker (a la Tim and Eric Awesome Show) directed series of commercials featuring Terry Crews, aka former linebaker for the Redskins, aka President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho from Idiocracy. I guess most of the commercials are too ridiculous for television, but if you want to watch them all, they are over at the Old Spice website.
So not too long ago I reminded all of my fellow Durhamites that the third annual DOUGHMAN is coming (and yes, it must always be capitalized – style guide y’all). A lot of you were probably thinking, well, that’s pretty damn cool, and all the eating stuff sounds awesome, but I could do without all the running and biking and water activity-ing and the what-not. Well fear not couch crusaders, because the DOUGHMAN is for lazy people too.
On the evening of May 29th, after all the competitive eating has completed, and those participating have had enough time to digest, the DOUGHMAN hEArTS Durham Banquet will take place at the Durham Athletic Park. Tons of great local restaurants (Piedmont, Toast, Fosters, Tosca, Locopops, etc) will be offering various dishes and local beer (Foothills, CBC, etc) will be flowing as well. Music, good people, good food, and a great cause – the Durham Inner City Garden and SeeSaw Studios will be the benefactors of the event.
Pick up a ticket soon, cus they will most definitely sell out. See you all there, fat & happy.
Castelao deconstructs normal things into super vector robot cyborgs that look like they came out of a retro-inspired technical drawing. He’s kinda like an Iron Chef – taking those meals that we are so used to and turning them into haute cuisine deconstructions. Instead of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Iron Chefs give us Brioche Pan Perdu with a Pinot Noir reduction sauce and Peanut foam. For Castelao, its taking animals, birds, and objects and pulling apart all the pieces and reconstructing them from simple shapes and lines into something even more awesome and delicious than the original inspiration. Maybe that has nothing to do with Iron Chef, but I think they are pretty damn cool (and I watch too much Food TV).
Now I’m hungry too.
Castelao’s got some new prints up at Poster Cabaret. Being as though it’s tax day and Uncle Sam has been kind to me, I may actually spring for that Owl print – pretty flippin’ rad. Wish it was bigger though.
I’ve been digging some really good motion graphics work lately. So I’d like to give you a taste of what I’ve been enjoying lately.
First, most of you have probably seen Logorama, the 2010 Oscar-winning (!) Short Animated film, featuring every logo you can possibly think of, by French animation collective H5. If you haven’t seen it, a) where have you been, and b) hit play. If you have seen it, and you are spending your time reading blogs like this one, you probably have a few minutes to sit back and enjoy it again.
Next is another really creative film by Patrick Jean called Pixels in which again we are forced to reencounter our surroundings this time through the old 8bit world of Nintendos-past instead of our ultra-highly saturated branded lifelens. Jean is a director for the Parisian ad group One More Production.
Apparently the French love destroying everything at the end of their films.
Yuken Teruya is cut from the same mold as Peter Callesen, however he brings his paper-slicing skills to found objects and waste, creating something new out of something useless or discarded. It’s almost as if he’s freeing the inner life from the dead objects he collects.
