Category Archives: Media & Advertising

Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit

Last week, we stumbled upon this vintage copy of Yoko Ono’s influential 1964 conceptual-art book “Grapefruit.” It was in a display case arranged with various jewelry, accessories and other small objet at General Store in Venice, Los Angeles. The cool-as-fuck book cover has a black-and-white photo of Ono and titles in a lower-case serif typography of a style that has re-surfaced in recent years in the indie magazine and graphic design worlds. The book itself is not so much an artwork as it is a collection of instructions for creating specific performance art pieces and media, a legit artificat from art’s Fluxus movement of the 1960s in downtown New York, where Ono established herself as a leading figure.

Vintage Billboard Ad

Surf Photography Books

On a recent visit to the Arcana bookstore in Culver City, in Los Angeles, we checked out some beautiful coffee-table books on surfing and surf photography. Among these was a book titled “Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume: 1936-1942.” It’s a collection of sepia-toned photos by Don James documenting his surfing experience and his surfer friends and their lifestyle in Southern California during the pre-World War II era and early war years. The photos reveal what the surfing life was like in its first idyllic golden age when the Hawaiian “sport of kings” was still novel and taking root in California.

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これらのクールで美しい本は、サーフィン撮影に関するものです。これらの本は、ロサンゼルスのカルバーシティにある有名なアルカナ書店で見つけました。

“Cold Open”

This beautiful old-school graffiti art is on a corrugated metal fence next to the Venice Beach offices of an advertising agency called Cold Open. Check out this short time-lapse video documenting the painting of this graffiti artwork.

Wes Anderson Directed a Christmas Commercial for H&M

Auteur film director Wes Anderson has produced an amusing short Christmas film (see below) as long-form commercial for the global Swedish clothing retailer H&M. It’s called “Come Together” and stars Adrien Brody as the conductor of a train carrying passengers through a winter holiday storm. The four-minute film is an exercise in branded content for H&M. Aside from a logo “bug,” branding itself and commercial messaging has been kept to a minimum at the end of the video. “Come Together” is quintessential Anderson in terms of style, editing, production design and cinematography, and it is as visually charming as anything we’ve seen from the director. Anderson has directed commercials for other brands in the past and you can see some of them online at AdWeek.

Funny Anti-Trump Guerrilla Ad Campaign in New York

AdWeek is reporting on a series of funny anti-Trump outdoor ads have been popping up on bus-stop billboards around New York City the past week. These cheeky, hilarious ads riff on well-known films and popular fiction such as Dr. Strangelove, Thelma and Louise, The Shining, Humpty Dumpy, and Dumb and Dumber. The campaign amounts to an unpaid exercise in creative guerrilla activist-marketing. The ads were created by three friends, each of whom work for different advertising agency. See more more images on Adweek.

“I Take Care of My Beaches” Sticker … Rincon, California

We stumbled upon this “I Take Care of My Beaches” message on a sticker-bombed pole at the Rincon Beach parking lot near Santa Barbara, California. The sticker’s message is positive and encourage visitors to keep the the coast clean. The message itself can be read as a bit of a cheeky pun, playing off hip-hop culture’s lyrical tropes where usually the word “beaches” would be “bitches.”