Thrillist x Cool Hunting Loft Party

by Nathan Suberi

Cool Hunting sponsored an old-school early-'90s jam at the Thrillist Loft earlier this week as part of their week of parties. Absolut Vodka supplied an open bar, calling for many drinks, dances and adventurous picture poses. The classic tunes—from Black Street to SWV—supplied by the illustrious DJ Sharee got the dancefloor going, assisted by a breakdancing troupe. We'd like to shout out our thanks to Absolut, Thrillist, DJ Sharee and our talented photographer James Ryang. (You can see more pics on his site.)

Eric Yahnker: Naughty Teens/Garbanzo Beans

by Karen Day

With his keen eye for pop culture and irreverent humor, Eric Yahnker's current exhibition of highly-detailed pencil drawings and conceptual sculptures at Ambach & Rice Gallery taps into a zeitgeist also seen in the work of contemporaries like Mathew Cerletty and Karl Haendel. Posing as a serious act, it's a wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach that's unabashedly "now," sharing a sensibility with Leslie Nielsen in "Airplane" and, in Yahnker's case, junior high-age boys everywhere.

Titles—like "War & Piece Of Ass," pictured below—are deliberately unsubtle nods that create tension between surface and subtext. His "arty" interpretations of advertising, pornography, etc. make them accessible to the masses and collectors alike.

His "endurance" works, such as "Analogous To The Fall of That One Empire (Moby Dick), " which dissects the pages into individual characters arranged in piles, as well as the ghostly outline of a shirt that Yahnker made by deconstructing it thread by thread, are meditations that use the OCD process to single out the cultural significance of the pop culture artifacts.

By treating his exhibition as a unified piece, in which each of the works encourages conversation with another, they can be read as heroic one-liners or, on closer look, they reveal a multitude of associations, both academic and otherwise.

See more of Eric Yahnker's work after the jump.

Naughty Teens/Garbanzo Beans
Through 9 August 2009
Ambach & Rice Gallery
5107 Ballard Avenue N.W.
Seattle, WA 98107 map
tel. +1 206 789 6242

CRC Jianian: The Chinese Music Connection

by Bailee Wolfson

by Tisha Leung

When 38 year-old Toby Record revealed that as the Executive Director of CRC Jianian Inc., he had access to the Chinese government’s largest body of recorded historical and contemporary music, I was impressed—to say the least. Then he told me that rap producer Oh No laid some beats over a Chinese Peking Opera tune for the video game, Grand Theft Auto. So, how did Record, who grew up in Highland Park, NJ jamming to power pop and punk bands like The Jam, Husker Du, The Replacements, Ramones and Gang of Four, end up with Tibetan music and Chinese ballads? Read on.

What do you do?
I'm Executive Director of CRC Jianian Inc., a joint venture partnership between Los Angeles-based consultancy firm Global Entertainment Media (GEM) and China Record Corporation (CRC), the Chinese government's oldest and largest record company. We have the exclusive worldwide rights (outside of China) to publish and distribute CRC's historical catalog, featuring the largest collection of traditional Chinese instrumentals on Earth. We also have a wide variety of Mongolian, Tibetan, Jazz, Pop, Punk, Metal and the entire Peking Opera collection.

What music groups did you listen to growing up?

Growing up I listened to everything. My parents had thousands of records, so I went from Mozart to KISS to Scott Joplin to Zappa to G.G. Allin.

And from there, China came calling?

I got the job on the strength of my musical upbringing, my music supervision career and my keen understanding of world politics and international publishing. To have an opportunity to combine my passion (music) with my other two interests (politics and diplomacy) is serendipity.

What is it about Chinese music that excites you?
For me, the best way to form cultural bridges is through music and I have found immense similarities between Chinese music and music from around the world. For example, Mongolian music shares an uncanny bond with Celtic music. Shanghai Jazz is reminiscent of a Carl Starling meets Edith Piaf flavor (only in Mandarin instead of French). "Dance of The Yao People" is a hugely famous melody on the Mainland and reminds me of romantic Italian Mandolin music.

Do you see a lot of opportunity in integrating Chinese music on a global scale?
Integrating China on a global scale is inevitable. There are over 100 million Chinese living in countries around the world, with 90% of that population residing in metropolitan areas. From an economic and strategic standpoint, it makes sense to make available the world's largest body of recorded Chinese music. Many major companies have taken notice and I've secured placements of our music in HBO's "Flight of The Conchords," NBC's "30 Rock," and numerous feature films.

Continue reading...

Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable

by Nathan Suberi

Nathan Shedroff's new book, "Design is the Problem", presents a practical and layman-accessible exploration of sustainable design. In it, he breaks the progress towards sustainability into five parts: learning how to reduce, reuse, recycle, restore, and process. And Shedroff isn't afraid to get in reader's faces about the issue, either, bluntly stating that we need to "get over the guilt or shock or outrage... because none of it will be useful... and we have a lot of work to do."

His often counter-intuitive points encourage reconsidering prolific and seemingly solid reasoning. For example, the book considers paper bags may be worse than plastic for the environment or how a Prius may have a larger footprint than a H2 Hummer. (Maybe there's redemption after all for the notorious tank-drivers.) One of the most thoughtful arguments we've come across against green-washing, the gist is that to be sustainable you need to consider more than just the veneer of a product.

Put most poignantly, Shedroff insists, "Don't do things today that make tomorrow worse."

"Design is the Problem" is available through Rosenfeld Media. You get both a digital and a printed copy of the book, and with the discount code WHATMATTERS you get 20 percent off the cost of the book (and all other books) on the site. You can also find it at Amazon.