NEMO Presents: Portland Looking Up -Artwork by Chris Donnelly

Join us Friday, August 7, 2009 for the opening reception of Portland Looking Up – featuring the paintings and carvings of artist Chris Donnelly.

Portland Looking Up will highlight Chris Donnelly’s work of paintings and carvings. The exhibit will focus on Donnelly’s travels through Portland, where he became captivated by the shapes of the industrial water towers, and their contrast to the neighborhoods below.

Discovering Portland by bicycle last summer, Chris noticed the shapes quietly looming overhead. Like floating ships or low-tech space ships at rest just above the neighborhoods, these water towers have a presence. As if monuments from a bygone era, they fade into the landscape despite their size and visibility. These giant vessels venerate our most precious resource. The striking blue sky of Portland summer provides the backdrop for these strong shapes. While strong and industrial looking, their round shapes and patina create a friendly character. Painting these pictures helped Chris get to know Portland.

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Amazon’s Kindle 2 has more of an Apple iPod feel to it. Found on MobileRead.com

Click on the image above and then press play on the page. A fascinating visualization of Twitter in action. Look for what happens at half-time…

Found on Twitter posted by @alisamleo As she says.. “ad-men douchebaggery at its FINEST….”

Story at Gizmodo.

Er, cough, cough…

Seriously, how is this not dreck? Can the folks at Magpie not understand that the minute any of my followers on Twitter spam me with Magpie I will simply unfollow them? Which, on second thoughts, means that I would then have a filtered list of folks to follow who understand that spamming your followers is uncool….

The folks at Magpie may also want to consider the folklore of the winged version, it is not considered a benign bird:

Folklore

In Britain and Ireland, there are a number of superstitions regarding magpies
A single magpie is associated with bad luck
One should make sure to greet magpies when they are encountered in order to either allay bad luck or encourage good luck as related to the number of birds and therefore their place in the Magpie poem. Common greetings include “Hello Mr Magpie” “How is your wife/where is your wife?”, “Good Morning/Evening Sir” and other marks of respect.
Upon seeing a lone magpie one should repeat the words “I defy thee” seven times.
On seeing a lone magpie one should pinch the person they are walking with, if they are alone they are to pinch themselves.
If a lone Magpie is seen, one should salute it to show you respect it. This formality can be forgone if the Magpie looks directly in your eyes, which shows it respects you

Nemo recently completely overhauled the web site for Oregon’s historic Timberline Lodge and Wordpress.org featured the site as a showcase. Go Team Nemo or is that Meat Omen?

Radiohead’s ‘Down Is The New Up’ is no longer an ironic title – take a listen. Radiohead – Down Is The New Up

Found on The Music Slut.

The printed press continues to suffer. Losses at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been mounting year over year since 2000 and last year reached $14 million according to Yahoo Finance. Its owners the Hearst Corporation have put the paper up for sale and, if no buyer is found in 60 days, will close it down.

I feel conflicted over the news of its presumed demise. Newspapers such as the P.I. have long been the backbone of their communities and were the glue that often held those same communities together during the constant ups and downs of civic life. Unfortunately their publishers, journalists and columnists were slow to embrace the realities of the internet and its long reach further down into the zip codes of these newspapers’ former readers. Hyper-local news delivered by web sites such as Yelp and Outside.in, as well as Twitter, may well be the final nail in the coffin for big city newspapers.

The ‘Old Grey Lady,’ the New York Times still trundles along all the while looking over its shoulder. The Times has done a great job of laying out “All the news that’s fit to print” on its website but unfortunately the content is too often weak. As Ana Andjelic points out on her blog i [love] marketing the Times’ regular columnists in Design, Advertising and Fashion seem to be missing the target these days. She uses as an example the Design Observer blog’s response to a recent article by the Times’ Michael Cannell entitled Design Loves a Depression. The design community comes down hard on him – not so much for his article’s premise but for the sin of re-hashing old news – “Design loves a depression? I can assure you that design, along with painting, sculpture, photography, music, dance, fashion, the culinary arts, architecture, and theatre, loves a depression no more than it loves a war, a flood, or a plague. Michael Cannell’s article is regressive and mean-spirited, and it demands a response.”

Bono. Pic Diedre O’Callaghan

And then there’s preaching to the choir. In today’s Times that elder statesman of rock, U2 singer Bono, writes about working with Frank Sinatra. I sincerely hope that this isn’t the Times’ editors’ attempt at appealing to a younger demographic. It’s apparent that Bono has a soft spot for the great man but there’s something inauthentic about how he links the lack of sentimentality in Sinatra’s voice singing ‘My Way’ to the New Year celebrations he witnesses in Dublin – “Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability. A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.” That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.” Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.”

It appears that the multi-millionaire prankster Bono has found the answer to the current climate of economic fear in his own life through the lyrics of ‘My Way.’ Yes its true that Frank sang “I did it My Way” without resorting to nostalgia and fawning sentimentality. He swaggered through the song with a streak of West Coast North American libertarianism, with the can-do spirit of the rugged individual as played in the Westerns of the day by John Wayne. This same ‘can-do’ spirit pervaded the White House during the last 8 years, and that macho spirit didn’t go unnoticed on Wall Street or amongst the banks who were happy to dish out mortgages to people who had no ability to repay them.

“My Way,” that “ode to defiance [that] is four decades old this year,” may thrill Bono but it simply reminds me now of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush et al as they poisoned the well of America’s goodwill abroad and helped to set up the massive losses in our financial industries that have already caused pain to millions of Americans here at home.

U2 release their new album, ‘No Line On The Horizon’, in March and I’m confident it will help to line the pockets of the Irish foursome rather handsomely. Unfortunately the refrain for many thousands of displaced Americans, as the fall out from sub-prime mortgage lending continues to take its toll, will be ‘No Home On The Horizon’.

Bono’s rambling, incoherent op-ed piece will be of no use to them. They chose to do it ‘My Way,’ to reach for the American dream, but were blindsided by greed and corrupt practices. And there will be no government bail out for them.

Ironically Twitter had the last word. User @stevenjayl summed up Bono’s op-ed piece rather neatly in a 130 character tweet today -
“Bono has a way with a tune, a presence on the stage, and an embarrassing inability to write a coherent op-ed. NYT: get him an editor!”

Adpulp appears to be the unlucky recipient of a brand jack.

We gave a group of students from AIGA PSU a tour of the NemoHQ shop yesterday and they were stoked! We sent them on their way with some cool stickers and T-shirts and they got back and posted all their photos to Flickr. Check them out here.

Palm execs went out of their way at CES to point out that the Palm Pre is not an iPhone killer.

Check out the high-quality Palm Pre presentation video at CES here.