Saturday, August 21, 2004

Airport Express with AirTunes and wireless USB printing. Aaaaaah!! Another phenomenal, beautifully designed masterpiece from Cupertino. Lost the shrinkwrap, plugged it in, and it worked - right out of the box. The geek in me was slightly disappointed, being entirely denied the pleasure of tweaking the gadget through the Airport Admin Utility. What sublime bliss - being untethered and able to read the latest headlines via NetNewsWire, in the loo!

Came to London last week and am now in Scotland. Had to suffer horrible dialup in London but have a rocking broadband connection in Glasgow. Went to the Design Museum in London - in a word: WOW! There was a Saul Bass (more on him below - as usual, I can't be bothered with effective hyperlinking) exhibition on and it was mind-boggling. All the Apple products were also on display, along with a commentary by Apple's wunderkid industrial designer, Jonathan Ive.

The Scots are wonderful - funny, warm, and really easy to get along with. Yes, yes, I have met exactly 15 Scots!! Am here for my uncle's wedding - it's a Scottish/Asian fusion wedding and fun beyond belief, so far. All the coolness of a desi shaadi sans the pretentious bullshit.

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SAUL BASS



One of the great graphic designers of the 20th century, Saul Bass is the undisputed master of film title design. The haunting elegance of the titles he created for Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick in the 1950s and 1960s and, later, for Martin Scorsese transformed a banal medium into an art form. Before Bass, titles were simple lists of the cast and crew projected on to cinema curtains which were only drawn when the film began. As this landmark exhibition will show, Saul Bass turned the film title into a visual spectacle. From his stark cut-out's for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, and the spiralling circles of Hitchcock's Vertigo, to the frenzied neons of Scorsese's Casino, Saul Bass created some of the most enduring images in design and cinema history.

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