Pocket Noodle - Eventually, everything connects

• The BFI are running a two part Kubrick retrospective this February which includes an extended run of ‘Barry Lyndon‘ as well as a study day of the Kubrick Archives. Accompanying this is the Aryan Papers installation by artists Jane and Louise Wilson.
• The Vignelli Canon – Essential reading for any designer, Massimo Vignelli on typography and graphic design. Available as a free download.
• General Robots – Supplier of fine robots since 2006.

The BFI are showing ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Aryan Papers‘, an art installation by the Turner-prize nominated artists Jane and Louise Wilson which focuses on one of Kubrick’s unfinished projects, the Aryan Papers.

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• 1968: A Roadshow Odyssey – Found on in70mm.com. this article on the original reserved seat release of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Star Wars: A new heap – great essay on Star Wars and minimalism that takes in the influence of Kubrick’s 2001, machine aesthetics and modernist sculpture and architecture.
• Simon Mullen’s ‘Magnificent Revolutionary Cycling Cinema‘. Nice documentary shot on Super8 about a cinema powered by bikes. Worth checking out are the group behind it, ‘Magnificent Revolution‘.

• Come Play With Us – Recreating the ball from The Shining at the Timberline Lodge. I know where I want to be this halloween!
• Geode – Experimental add-on for Firefox from Mozilla Labs that uses an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification prior to a full implementation. Guess we’re going to be seeing a lot more location based services along the lines of Brightkite and Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle.

The Telegraph interviews set designer extraordinaire Ken Adam who designed the ‘War Room’ for Kubrick’s ‘Dr Strangelove’ as well as some of the most iconic sets for the James Bond films including ‘Dr No’ and ‘You Only Live Twice’. The article includes video of Adam talking to Christopher Frayling about his work and includes some great Kubrick stories. He was offered ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ but turned it down because Kubrick had already been working on it for a year with experts from NASA, this however left him free to concentrate on the Bond films. Other highlights include his work on designing the car for ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ and an Oscar for Best Art Direction on ‘Barry Lyndon’.

There’s a book out ‘Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond’ and Adam will also be giving a talk at the V&A on Friday 7th October as part of the Cold War Modern Show.

Knowledge of all fonts – BBC News ‘In Pictures’ article on typefaces used in movie posters. It includes a comment on the use of Futura for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Futura was the official font of the Apollo moon landing program,” he explains.

“Because it’s based on geometric features – the square, the circle and the triangle – it’s got an inherent simplicity and timelessness.”

Sebastian Lester

Possibly correct but it also happened to be Kubrick’s favourite typeface as mentioned by Tony Frewin in Jon Ronson’s Citizen Kubrick interview. Anyway nice to see an article on type linked to from the news front page.

• Armen Antranikian, director of the short film Kubrick has uploaded the full version of Tony Kaye’s Kubrick interview to YouTube. Definitely worth watching again.
• London from above, at night – Another fantastic collection of photos showcased on Boston.com’s ‘The Big Picture‘. Taken by aerial photographer Jason Hawke.

As part of their 25th Anniversary, Taschen are reprinting what has got got be one of the best books on Stanley Kubrick – ‘The Stanley Kubrick Archives‘. Featuring 800 film stills, many taken from the original prints, essays and interviews and a CD of a 1966 interview of Stanley Kubrick by Jeremy Bernstein, original copies of the book are hard to find and expensive with the first print including a 12 frame film strip from a 70mm print of 2001 owned by Kubrick. The preface to the book by Alison Castle can be found here.

Coudal Partners interviews Armen Antranikian the film maker behind the short film Kubrick shown as part of the recent C4 Kubrick season. Mentioned in the interview is the full version of Tony Kaye talking about Kubrick’s influence. Fantastic stuff!

• Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes – Jon Ronson’s documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s archive that aired last night as part of Channel 4′s Kubrick season. Items of interest were the amount of location photography that Kubrick had shot by various assistants including his nephew Manuel Harlan – roughly 30,000 in one year for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, the sinister hat test footage from ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and the creep letter archive. So many boxes, too little time.
• Evan Hecox – Arkitip have a rapidly diminishing collection of Evan’s prints for sale. Grab them while you can. Also check out their ‘curated‘ section for some custom ‘Apple’ product designs.
• Kill Spiders, Buy Art. Support Matthew Woodson aka Ghostco by purchasing some of his excellent artwork.