Especially when ou make products as cool as Cold Steel. By now, you’ve all seen the Great Sword videos where a host of strangely methodical professionals cut through shockingly preposterous quantities of meat.

The videos are humorous, a little awkward, and let’s be honest here, over the top. But they’re also totally awesome, and as the Cold Steel test below shows, there’s a serious subculture of knife nerds who take design very seriously.

Please note: This video is a half-hour long and worth every second of the time.

Michael Janich Doesn’t Know from Cold Steel on Vimeo.

Am I cheering for Argentina even though the USA (where I’m from) and Chile (where my Dad’s from) are both in the World Cup? Yes. Why? 1) I studied abroad there when Messi was still coming up as a player so I feel a vague connection. 2) They speak Spanish. 3) They have a chance of winning. So there. But In certain games, Spain, Chile, and Team USA get my support.

In this video, Argentine Maradona and Messi run make the same spectacular run 20 years a part. Seriously, it’s the same play. Who besides chauvinist American ass clowns isn’t loving the World Cup right now?

As usual my snap judgement was wrong, and if you go by Remnick’s eloquent analysis in this video,The Bridge is probably a fantastic book. At 600 pages, though, I probably won’t get to more than a quarter of it.

He’s also also fantastically tall man turned CIA pawn only to be repeatedly abandoned and embraced throughout the painful duration of his life. 3 Story fits the mold of good science because the book takes an implausible but intriguing premise to it’s extreme. What would happen if a person never stopped growing? Well, life would suck. Craig Pressgang hurts his loved ones and turns from a wonder of nature into a society-menacing liability. Like his antithesis the incredible shrinking man, Craig Pressgang’s condition never halts and eventually he disappears as if a giant man had never walked the earth

Sure it’s all a bit melodramatic, but 3 Story off is a great graphic novel because Kindt deftly teases out a sympathetic plot from a sad ending that’s all but foreseen from the drab greens and browns on the books cover. Pressang’s enormous life, or at least a sliver of it, dominates nearly every page of the book, but the reader only hears his voice for a few brief moments from the pages of a posthumously discovered, you guessed it, sad diary.

I had the opportunity to interview Kindt a few months ago. Kindt is also the author of the excellent espionage thriller, Super Spy. Also worth checking out is giant man a mini-story released by Dark Horse via Comics Alliance. Interview after the jump


How’d this story come about?

My initial thought was just to do a book that imagined what it would be like to be a giant for real. Which is kind of how I go into all of my books. For Super Spy, I just thought, “what would it be like to be a spy?” Then I just go from there.” Try to think what I would do in the situations I come up with, what problems and conflicts would arise.

Any particular reason?

I have a cousin who I met a few years ago… he’s a really big guy. Like like seven feet tall with big hands and big head. I found out later that it was a tumor in his pituitary gland that was making him grow. And if they hadn’t found it and cut it out, he would’ve just kept growing till he died. So I thought, “that’s a googd idea for a stroy. Let’s have them not find the tumor and let him grow as tall as he can. Scientifically, obviously, it couldn’t happen, but I used a little artisitc liscence to make him grow.

What did you do graphically different this time around?

I don’t write in the same way everytime. I’m usually trying to write and draw a new story from scratch everytime. It all depends on the project. With this one I really liked the idea of layering perspectives. This guy is a giant.. what are things going to look like from his point of view? From his wife? His Daughter? I had a lot of fun playing with that.

The most important thing to me was to tell giant man’s story but not form his point of view…. you get it from three women’s perspectives but never from his point of view.. There’s one little cheat.. where his wife is listening to the audio tapes. You have to figure out what he his and what he’s about without listening to him.

Is this all a metaphor…?

Well I don’t want to say it’s a metaphor for anything because I kinda hate stories that are like, “He’s not really a giant man, this is what he really is…” The story is a real downer If I had to guess, I think it’s a lot about being a father. This is the first book I’ve done since I had a daughter. As much of a downer as it is, everybody dies.

Like in Super Spy, you returned to spy theme this time.

I had this idea, when I first started working on the project, and I was trying to figure out how to have fun with it. What kinds of interesting things a giant could do. If I was a giant, what kind of things would I do? And, yeah, I was coming off Super Spy too. I like the idea of a giant being both a celebrity and courier of secrets. He’s not the most obvious spy. It’s not like he can go any where in secret.

What about the small book, wide panel format?

I started doing it when I was working on Super Spy, because as I was doing it, I’d put it up online and then you could download it. I actually formated the panels to fit the PSP so you could download it and read it on your portable game thing. It sort of forced me to use this apsect ratio… sort of a wide screen format… I liked it so much that I started writinn thigns in my brain with that in mind. There’s no reason to do it that way anymore because I wasn’t doing it online, but the other thing is that I like books to be book size… I like the feel of that. If it get’s bigger it starts to get heavy and I don’t like as much. Dark Horse did a nice job, It’s hardcover and the binding is solid and if you’re a book nerd like me that’s important.

Did everybody hear about (my current employer) Conde Nast’s plan to save magazine publishing? A partnership with Adobe to develop an interactive magazine platform for the iTablet. The first pub to get the treatment is Wired, and it’s going to be fantastic. Of course, Apple refuses to officially confirm or deny the iTablet’s development, which may be the reason that some bloggers are throwing negativity at it. I’m obviously biased, but the partnership seems like an ambitious initiative aimed at the worthwhile cause. Finding innovative ways to sustain quality journalism and design in the digital era? I know! Deplorable!

On a somewhat related note, GQ’s put its December issue in the iPhone App Store (above). It’s a small sample of what will ultimately be possible. If you have $4 to spare, check it out.

Read the clips below for the below for more information on the development and the haters.

It’s altogether unsurprising that racial politics have dominated the discussion of  President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Mr. Obama is the nations first Black president, and Sonia Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic to serve on the Court. The language of “inspiring stories” and “empathy”, discussions of the GOP’s political strategy, and the scrutiny of the Ricci case all advance the explicit assumption that Ms. Sotomayor’s ethnic heritage will skew her judgment. The underlying tension in these conversations seems to be whether we live in a “post-racial” America or not. The answer, of course, is that we don’t live in a post-racial society, and moreover, that the very idea that a “post-racial” society can emerge in the way it’s constructed– as colorblind utopia where equal opportunity naturally abounds– is totally impossible.

King Anyi Howellover at Youth Radio in Oakland made this point with surprising efficiency last week:

I say, we will know we have reached a post-racially polarized nation when people stop using the word “race” at all.  Until then, I’ll keep writing about it.

Mr. Howellover discusses his experiences with racial profiling in Oakland and points out that it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House.  Despite the polemics at the highest levels of government, race is still an important qualifier of experience at the street level.

Why would we bury our heads in the sand and, like Stephen Colbert’s satirical persona, pretend that we don’t see race when it’s right in front of us.  It affects the perspective of Ms. Sotomayor no less than it affects the perspective of white men like Justice John Roberts. Mr. Roberts, of course, might be (and is)  less disposed to challenge the status quo, but nevertheless, it doesn’t make Ms. Sotomayor’s perspective any less valid as a point of departure.  Much as Mr. Howellover contends that it’s an imperative to keep writing about racial experience to address the problems of inequality, doesn’t having a diversity of experiences on the court, experience being a necessary contributor to judgment, ultimately help address problems of inequality?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, conservative thinker Shelby Steele is cynical about the nomination and the prospects for racial equality. Mr. Steele argues that Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a “predictable” and “hackneyed” move that panders to the concerns of identity politics and flies in the face of Mr. Obama’s post-racial supposed status. Besides making the obvious claim that post-racial thinking is a pleasant illusion accepted by both whites and minorities, Mr. Steele contends Ms. Sotomayor is an archetypal racial “challenger” in that she believes that identity status justifies preferential treatment:

Sonia Sotomayor is of the generation of minorities that came of age under the hegemony of this perverse incentive. For this generation, challenging and protesting were careerism itself. This is why middle- and upper middle-class minorities are often more militant than poor and working-class minorities. America’s institutions — universities, government agencies, the media and even corporations — reward their grievance. Minority intellectuals, especially, have been rewarded for theories that justify grievance.

In other words, by nominating Ms. Sotomayor, Mr. Obama has committed the cardinal sin of refusing to ingore the inequality in our society and thereby slandered the great country that has given Mr. Obama and Ms. Sotomayor a chance to succeed.

Buried within Mr. Steele’s logic is the assumption that as a minority who recognizes the disadvantaged position of minorities in our society, Ms. Sotomayor cannot be trusted to make judgments that reflect the letter of the law. Furthermore, Mr. Steele does everything besides explicitly state that as a minority Ms. Sotomayor has benefited unjustly from her identity status and is unqualified to be anything other than a “community organizer.” Perhaps most disturbingly, Mr. Steele seems to hold the disingenuous assumption that Mr. Obama could not have authentically selected a minority judge to serve on the Supreme Court unless the person was a relentless denier of minority disadvantages.

Mr. Steele’s implicit claims are all disputed in an editorial which appeared in The Nation. As it turns out, Ms. Sotomayor is not a catagorical racial chauvanist on the bench, and she is thoroughly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. The ediotrial charts right-wing response to Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination, but it might as well be addressing Mr. Steele’s grievences:

Every element of this right-wing assault is false. Judge Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal (as did Justice Samuel Alito). Her seventeen years of experience on federal courts vastly outstrips the combined years of experience John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had when they were nominated–seven in total. As the author of more than 700 opinions, she has proven herself to be a pragmatic centrist cut from the same cloth as Obama. Indeed, unlike Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Justice Thurgood Marshall, she was not a central member of the legal movements to advance women’s and minorities’ rights. For example, she once voted down a constitutional challenge to the global gag rule on abortion. Moreover, she has on occasion disappointed progressives with rulings in favor of corporations.

A side-by-side portrait of Ms. Sotomayor and Justice Clarence Thomas in the New York Times (registration required) makes a nice argument on how two minorities with similar experiences might end up on opposite ends of the racial political divide.

The two may sit together on a court that is struggling over whether race and ethnicity should be a factor in legal thinking, each pitting his or her hard-won lessons against the other’s. Both judges are passionate about minority success, dedicating countless hours to mentorship. But Judge Sotomayor sees herself as the successful product of diversity initiatives, whereas Justice Thomas, who thinks of himself as a scarred survivor of those efforts, believes they often backfire.

The ultimate question, of course, is not whether Ms. Sotomayor believes that racial initiatives have the power to advance the position of minorities in our society. The question is whether she has the judicial qualifications to evaluate legal arguments based on their merit with regard to the legal precedent. If we assume that deniars like Clarence Thomas can do so despite his experience as a minority, we must believe that Sonia Sotomayor can do so as well. We should value their personal differences of opinion on race, and similiarly, we should be happy they have opinions at all. After all, justices are people who have diverse experinces in life and with the law that lead them to their judicial opinions. Their experiences with race should vary because there’s nothing post-racial or equal about a homogenous Supreme Court.

I’m currently enjoying “The Eternal,” Sonic Youth’s first independent label record since the 1980′s. It’s great to hear a new record. It’s great to see the influential group supporting (and supported by) the great Matador. So far, so awesome. I’m loving it, well done.

The official release date for “The Eternal”  is July June 9th, but Matador Records is making it available NOW through the label’s Buy Early Get Now (BEGN) promo program. I went to Amoeba and forked over almost forty bucks for the PRIVILEGE of streaming the record off the Matador site now and getting first crack at presale tickets for the band’s August show at the newly renovated Fox Theater in Oakland… and a bunch of other shit I don’t really want or especially care about.

I respect Matador’s commitment to fans who are willing to buy early as opposed to downloading the inevitable album leak, but I’m not wild about the hefty price tag. I realize that 1) Matador’s beautiful, virgin vinyl is expensive to produce. 2) Matador is trying to reward people who actually pay for music. 3) That a “blue chip indie” like Matador should be a profitable venture and they don’t owe me shit.

In fact, I owe Matador. I love the label. I love Sonic Youth. But I still feel a bit cheapened.

Here’s why:

I’m not saying they do, but Matador shouldn’t feel like it’s doing me or other fans any favors. Stick to the music business and don’t go into ticket scalping. I’m a big fan, and I honestly don’t care about all of this extra crap. I just want to make sure I can get good tickets for the show and hear the record NOW. A few points: 1) Big fans get good tickets to the show without paying out the ass . 2) If I recall properly from ticket prices at other Sonic Youth shows, I pay out the ass for them anyway. 3) If you want to reward people who buy music, throw them a bone… not a fine. Spend a little money, reward the customer and keep the customers for life. Or at least be forthright and package BEGN as paying extra for frills that help the label. I could buy into that.

I do see the argument that by signing Sonic Youth Matador holds a valuable commodity. And, yes,  an amazing band that I and thousands of others will pay a lot of extra money to get the most of . These days independent labels need to make money off their big acts so they can provide some crucial services like investing in higher risk artists , providing an alternative to corporate media, and maintaining a culture of integrity in the music business.

Still, I kind of feel like I’m paying the price for the unscrupulous distribution of  promotional copies, and the unethical downloading practices of people who don’t support the label to begin with. I can preorder “The Eternal” online without any of the extra frills, though it’s unclear whether full album stream is part of “the bonus materials.” What good does that do my record store, though? In either case, I shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege of hearing music early, or for supporting my local record store. I would willfully pay to help the label, but whether it’s good for Matador or not: those options are availible without BEGN.

Fox News calling Obama a Socialist one day at a time.

Doug Pray reveals the personal and professional stories behind some of the most influential advertising campaigns of our time. (Festival Page)

The Good Life

In taking on the ensemble narrative form, respected Chilean filmmaker Andrés Wood has created a complex and affectionate patchwork of stories about ordinary people struggling to follow their dreams in a dispiriting world. (Festival page)

Laila’s Birthday

Gaza-born director Rashid Masharawi captures the absurdity of the Palestinian situation in this comically deadpan, stop-and-start “road trip” through the land of checkpoints and barriers. (Festival page)

35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis has created a sensual and contemplative body of films over the years, but nothing in her work prepares us for this deeply emotional yet light-of-touch story set among a small circle of Parisians and their friends. (Festival page)