On the rare opportunity I get to New York City, my favorite place to stay is the hipster-decadent Soho Grand Hotel. The hotel's restaurant doubles as a contemporary photography gallery called, appropriately enough, The Gallery. Last year, I made it to The Gallery twice. The first time, I was absolutely blown away by Nat Finklestein's Warhol Factory photos that I'd previously only admired in books. A few months later, 70s rock documentarian Mick Rock's work was on display. It was fun eating breakfast with Ziggy Stardust and Lou Reed (again) looming above. Right now, fashion photographer Jamie Isaia is showing in The Gallery. I didn't know Jamie's work before but her surreal, haunting portraits still flood my brain with eerie afterimages weeks after I saw them. The show runs until January 15. (Image here from an editorial portfolio on Art + Commerce.)

From the GrandLife Art page:

Jamie Isaia evokes mood and atmosphere in a color-saturated, expressive photographic style that suggests dream-like, otherworldly scenarios. Though her images are thoughtfully scripted, they also reveal the unexpected and the spontaneous, resulting in a rich blend of performative elements rendered in a painterly photographic style. In this exhibition, her talent for bringing together landscape, portraiture and fashion is also apparent.

Isaia’s first ventures into fashion and portrait photography have demonstrated how successfully her unique and subtle vision translates to the page. Her work for iD, Italian Vogue, and W Magazine reveals a talent in ascendance within the sphere of fashion photography. She is also a regular contributor to Muse magazine and has ongoing collaborations with fashion designer Zac Posen.

Link to GrandLife Art page, Link to Jamie Isaia's site at Art+Commerce

DB Fletcher's Capstan Tables are amazing, expanding round dinner-tables. When you spin them by the outer edges, they separate into sseveral pie-shaped radial slices, revealing more slives beneath that rise up to make a seamless, much larger surface. Spin the table-edge the other way and the table shrinks back again. The videos have to be seen to be believed. Link (Thanks, Brandon!)

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Carl Hiaasen's new novel Nature Girl, read by Lee Adams. Hiaasen is my favorite crime writer of all time, an hilarious absurdist whose experiences as a columnist for the Miami Herald provide him with a bottomless supply of rounders, cads, fools and patsies for the cast of characters in his books.

Nature Girl is the story of Honey Santana, a mildly deranged single mom who is so infuriated at being insulted by a telemarketer that she lures him from Texas to Florida with the intention of giving him a stern dressing down. But her quest is complicated by her decent but crooked ex-husband, a dope-runner; the telemarketer's girlfriend, a bombshell whose five minutes of fame were in writing a fake tell-all sex memoir called Storm Ghoul; a half-blood Seminole who goes on the lam after a tourist drops dead on his fanboat tour; a lecherous fishmarket owner whose amputated thumb and forefinger have been swapped by an incompetent surgeon; and the telemarketer's wife and the private eye she sends to spy on her wayward husband.

This is vintage Hiaasen -- filled with convulsively funny comic situations, grave ruminations on the state of the Florida Everglades, lovable and detestable characters, and keen suspense. A great holiday read. Link

Reminder: today is the Xmas Felt Club, the semi-regular crafts fair in Los Angeles. I'm hoping to get all my Xmas shopping done in one go! Artisanal schwag for everyone!

Where: Ukrainian Cultural Center LA, 4315 Melrose Ave at Heliotrope
When: Sat, Dec 9, Noon-7PM

Link, Flickr Felt Club photos

An advertisement in the UK's Financial Times contained the signatures of 4,000 musicians who want the term of copyright on recordings in the UK extended from 50 to 95 years. Many of these musicians were long dead -- dug up from the grave and re-animated by the music industry to petition for the right to ensure that 80 percent of all music continues to disappear from the world because its copyright outlasts its commercial potential. Link (Thanks, John Mark!)

Chumby co-founder and Xbox hacker Bunnie Huang has recently returned from a trip to China, where he was arranging for manufacturing of his goods. He's written an incredible narrative of the trip called "Adventures with the Venture Communist" -- a rumination on the social, political and asthetic dimensions of China's runaway, cheap-as-hell manufacturing sector.

The fully-burdened rate of a worker in China is around $1.80 it seems–this is the rate that the employer pays once all the benefits (free food, housing, medical care, day care, etc.) are factored in. At these wages, laborers are cheaper than pick-and-place machines. In the US, you typically pay between $0.05-$0.25 per component placed on a PCB with a pick and place machine in low volume (100’s to 1000’s). I saw several electronics lines where about ten workers are lined up on a bench, bending and stuffing resistors and transistors into a moderately complex circuit board, and hand-dipping them in a solder bath. They crank out about 100 boards per hour; each employee is stuffing about four components, so 400 components per hour at $1.80/hour is $0.0045 per component. Setup and training for the line I saw took about 2-3 hours. So even if you were to run a few hundred boards, this is a very cheap assembly method indeed, as long as you can keep good quality control over the process.

Link

USB keys shaped like Xmas stockings -- themed, formed RAM as a stocking stuffer. Truly, we live in the future, and it is every bit as un-sexy as the past. Link (via OhGizmo)