New York, New York

We’re back — with gifts from the Jersey mob, 33 reasons why birthdays are overrated, and music legends who can bend power-coated steel.

That’s right, we’re back — with a spankin’ new site domain. (Cue in glance at browser’s URL field.) And because right now we’re in the most un-New-York-like place in the world — Sofia, Bulgaria — we’re focusing on the random, smart, bizarre stuff that makes New York New York. Welcome to the New York, New York issue.

JERSEY MOB SAYS “THANKS”

Let’s face it, this is the age of extreme consumerism. We define ourselves by what we buy, eat, watch, and otherwise consume. And now, we can define ourselves by the stuff leftover from our consumption.

New York-based artist Justin Gignac is selling fresh-picked NYC garbage. That’s right, junk. He scours the streets of the world’s most conspicuous-consumption-driven city for leftovers — metro cards, plastic cups, cigarette buds, newspaper, receipts, gum wrappers, you name it — then carefully arranges them in small (non-leaky, non-smelly) plastic cubes, each unlike any other.

For homesick New Yorkers and randomness-seeking hipsters alike, the cubes are anything from a sentimental piece of home to an artsy-fartsy piece of self-expression. (For us, they’re just garbage-filled plastic boxes, but we dig the idea nonetheless.)

The cubes even come in special limited-edition varieties: you can reminisce with junk from the last opening day at Yankee Stadium, New Years’ Eve ’08 at Times Square, and the final day at Shea.

Here’s to trashy taste.

BETTER THAN A CHAMPAGNE TOAST

And if you just realized you take garbage for granted, just wait until we consider tap water. Sure, NYC’s may not be the finest, but it’s drinkable — which is more than what a huge chunk of the world can claim. That’s why New Yorker Scott Harrison founded Charity Water, a — you guessed it — charity aiming to bring clean drinking water to people in the developing world.

The nonprofit was Scott’s version of a midlife crisis — after trading in his glitzy life as an NYC nightclub and fashion promoter for a humanitarian gig in West Africa, he came to appreciate the far-reaching (and often underestimated by the priviliged) power of driniking water, from basic convenience to serious disease prevention.

This week, Scott turns 33, so he’s out on a month-long birthday campaign: he launched Boring September, an effort to build 333 drinking wells in 33 villages across Ethiopia.

The idea: Scott is asking everyone born in September to do away with birthday presents and ask their friends and family for $33 donations instead. The goal is to raise $1.5 million for the 333 wells, which will greatly improve 150,000 people’s health and quality of life.

The best part: a few do-good companies are supporting the campaign and matching donations, making our regular contributions twice as powerful. Which is good news, since 1,100 regular Virgos and Libras have joined the movement so far — each contirbutor gets an individual birthday page, where friends can donate in their name.

So if you’re a water-spoiled September baby, suck it up and ask your mom not to give you that inevitable sweater you’ll never wear anyway — poor people score drinking water, you score one less dent in your street cred courtesy of mom.

BYRNE THE COMPETITION

Ok, ok, so we can’t get enough of David Byrne these days. So sue us. But the Renaissance man just keeps churning out the good stuff.

His latest: design work for New York’s CityRacks Design Competition. Besides submitting 9 designs of his own — among them “The Coffee Cup” in Brooklyn, “The Hipster” in Williamsburg, shaped like an electric guitar, and “The MoMA” right outside the eponymous museum — he was also recruited to be on the jury. (Come on now, fairness is overrated.)

Byrne, a die-hard cyclist himself, got down with the powder-coated steel like a pro, but didn’t make it as a finalist in the competition. Granted, some of those top designs are mad cool — we love Andrew Lang and Harry Dobbs’ “I heart NY” and the Kubrick-like geometric sculptures by Stephan Jaklitsch Architects.

Sure beats the way we do it in Philly.

via PSFK

Artist Spotlight: Alice Wang

What Isaac Asimov has to do with your body image and why your friends would rather you got 8 hours of sleep.

Every once in a while, we come across an artist so innovative and conceptually brilliant that we have the compulsion to stalk them. This, however, gets kinda hard if they’re halfway across the world, which in most cases they are. So we just spotlight them instead.

Today, we take a stalker’s stare at Alice Wang, a Taipei-born, London-educated, is-gonna-be-big-take-our-word-for-it product designer. We’re obsessed with Alice because her work isn’t just an aesthetic: it’s informed and inspired by genuine insight into human behavior, cultural taboos and sociological patterns. In other words, the Brain Pickings mission materialized.

Her Audio Sticks project explores how digitization will change our complex relationship with music. In Pet Plus, Alice projects the way we treat our pets as human surrogates onto products like the pet wineglass set that live in the extremities of the human-pet relationship.

She looks at the complex issue of body image through the prism of Asimov’s First Law — the idea that artificial intelligence can never harm a human — and the weight we place on that number on the bathroom scale.

Three different scales challenge the absolutism with which we think about body image.

White lies allows you to manipulate the weight reading depending on where you stand on the scale’s surface. Half-truth shows the weight reading to your friend or partner, who can choose the level of truthiness in relaying the number to you. Open secrets texts your weight reading to a friend’s mobile phone, binding said friend to share the results next time the two of you hang out. (“Hey, Anna, you brought suntan lotion, right? Oh and by the way, you’ve gained 5 pounds.”)

And then there’s the tyrant alarm clock. It hijacks your phone and starts randomly dialing one of your contacts every three minutes until you get out of bed and make it stop before your social circle has shrunk to the size of a sleeping pill.

Wang’s work is sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheeck, and always thoughtful. Just the way we like it.

The Reel Stuff: Top 3 Sites for Harcore Film Buffs

Hitchcock vs. Jason Reitman, the laserdisc’s most valuable heritage, and why David Caruso is now more quotable than ever.

You were that kid in film class. Or you never even took film class and still wish you had. Just so you could be that kid. You can quote any Sundance film on cue and name-drop obscure directors like a top-40 rapper does bling brands. Your knowledge of German Expressionism and Soviet Montage is directly proportionate to your contempt for IMDB, so it’s only fitting that we bring you the top 3 gems by film geeks, for film geeks.

ART OF THE TITLE

In our line of work, we know every touchpoint with a brand is important, every detail of the package matters and needs to work with the contents. And because every film is its own mini-brand, the best of them pay special attention to one very special element of the package: the opening credits.

Which is why we’re head over reels with Art of the Title — a project dedicated entirely to the coolest, the smartest, the most visually engaging of movie title sequences.

You’ll find anything from the colossally classic like Vertigo, to the excruciating bio-realism of Fight Club, to the uncomplicated playfulness of Napoleon Dynamite.

We’d love to see them add some more of our favorites: like the opening credits of Mad Men and Weeds, and the end credits of Superbad. Now here’s a final project for your next film class.

MOVIE TITLE SCREENS

Wanna get even more specific and anal about opening sequences? Zoom in solely on the movie’s title. For 11 years now, mega film buff Steven Hill has been doing just that. His Movie Title Screens Page is as far from a mere page as it gets: it’s a fascinating library of 5,301 movie title slides encompassing more than 7 decades of film.

You can see the evolution of title design over the years, compare title screens of alternate releases of the same film, or just gawk at the amount of work that went into this. And to think it all started almost by fluke, thanks to a crappy laserdisc.

WAXY

A true film buff is nothing if not obsessive. And when they’re compulsive about being obsessive, well, it could either result in institutionalization, or yield a brilliant project. Luckily, Andy Baio over at WAXY has decided to skew brilliant with his Fanboy Supercuts collection of “obsessive video montages” stringing together every utterance of a specific word or phrase in a specific film, TV show or video game.

The collection ranges from the expected yet delightful (like every uttrance of “dude” in Big Lebowski), to the inside-jokish (like every “lupus” reference in House), to the unhelpably smile-inducing (like every sound of a door, button or explosion in The Incredibles), to the indulgently absurd (like David Caruso’s each-more-laughable-than-the-next one-liners on CSI: Miami.)

If you’ve got some of your own, go ahead and post them in the comments to be added to the collection. We’re waiting for someone with more free time than us to finally splice together every “mothafucka” in every Samuel L. Jackson movie.

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Customization Gone Wild

70% fabulous, respecting your inseam, how to add a 29th bone to your foot, and why a bear is missing an “e” but has plenty of nuts.

MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY

In this I-me-mine age, customization is already the expected norm. But what happens when it all runs rampant with made-to-order stuff offering OCD-worthy precision? Freud would sure have a field day with the anal-retentive nature of today’s consumerism, and who are we to stand in Freud’s way? Welcome to the Customization Gone Wild issue.

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Since we last featured Freddy&Ma, the design-your-own-handbag getup (named after founder siblings Anthony and Amy Pigliacampo’s childhood partners-in-crime nicknames) has branched out into more cool design-your-own stuff: plates and pillows, to be exact.

The concept is still all about rebelling against the mass-marketed fashions of today and takes a simple approach: to design your own handbag, you get to pick the bag style (tote, pouch, bowler, hobo, clutch and more), the leather trimmings (black, white, tan, brown, maroon) and one of the thousands of patterns (retro, geometric abstract, minimalist, flashy, you name it).

Then they make it for you.

Prices are based on the “canvas” you pick and range from $65 for the wallet-like metro clutch to $295 for the bowler. Or, if you’re feeling lazy and generous at the same time, just pick one of their Carry for a Cause Bags — 30% of your bag money goes towards Art Start or Crate Now, and 70% goes towards making you feel like a good person who just happens to be fabulous.

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Back in the day, you went to the tailor to get your custom-fitted suit, made from a fabric of your liking and with those buttons you inherited from your grandmother. Today, you are the tailor.

At least at MakeYourOwnJeans.com, where you get to do just that: make your own jeans. You simply submit your precise measurements and pick a denim wash. Then, these guys (who we’re pretty sure are Santa’s little helpers moonlighting those other 51 weeks of the year) stitch your unique pair together and enzyme-wash it so it’s all pre-shrunken and even-colored. The rest is between you and FedEx guy.

We dig the concept not only because the big O gave it a nod-off, and not merely because non-cookie-cutter style makes us feel special, but also because we believe everyone’s inseam is a very, very special place and should only be clad in something very, very special.

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Fact: there are 28 bones in each of your feet. Another fact: feet are ugly, especially the really bony ones. But guess what: now, you can have 29 bones and killer foot style.

We’re taking about Skins Footwear, the tech- meets-design hybrid that features a two-part shoe structure consisting of an orthopedic “bone” core and an outer collapsible “skin.” The idea is you get yourself a perfectly fitting, super comfortable bone and then pick a number of skins so you can mix up the look and keep the comfort.

These guys launched less than a year ago, and they’ve already been featured in The New York Times. (Which is almost as good a nod-off by Oprah.) Not bad for a skin-and-bones concept.

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We’re not quite sure if this next über-customizer is the result of dyslexia or pure genius, but YouBar is one “e” short of the Build-a-Bear concept: it’s a fresh-baked, handmade nutrition bar that you build yourself by picking the exact ingredients and even naming your concoction.

And you do it all online.

Here’s how it works: you choose one or two nut butter “bases,” up to 3 different protein sources, some nuts and seeds to add, throw in your choice of dried fruits and berries, add the sweetener you prefer (they even have Stevia!), stir in your favorite seasonings or a bit of chocolate, and add some grains and cereals if you’re so inclined. You can even infuse it all with a shot of vitamins, greens and/or fiber.

Many of the ingredients come in organic version and you can manipulate the proportions of all your choosings within a category (say, 1/3 soy protein + 2/3 whey protein) as well as the levels (not too sweet, extra nuts, etc.) It even calculates the bar’s nutritional value for you — talk about full control.

Then you give your Frankenfood a name and get 12 of your very own lovable, edible monsters for $40 plus shipping.

We, needless to say, absolutely love the concept — it indulges both our health-nutness and our control-freakness. And to think people settle for PowerBars.

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