Am going to go visit the TAG expo in the Grand Palais (a prestigious glass roofed expo palace in Paris). Am looking forward to it. Hope there is a good variety of pieces in there.

Will be blogging my visit, it will be a long post.

[:-]

A few weeks ago I blogged about the photos from Serge of Paris and other areas. He recently redid his site and the result is quite nice, all done in WordPress (yes I did have a word to say in that).

His new site looks like this, the landing page is his blog which is great as it keeps the site alive and human.

I suggest you check it out here.

The new site of Serge on www.photoserge.com

One of the shots is an amazing black and white shot of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. The sky is pretty nice and the museum too, but the most amazing in this shot is the sharpness and light effects on the rhinoceros. It is not just the contrast of the photo but the contrast of a rhino overlooking Paris.

www.photoserge.com - another amazing shot of Paris

click on the link on the site or here: http://www.photoserge.com sit back and enjoy.

[;-]

A few weeks ago the Church of Scientology launched a new line of books and recorded lectures on CD. There are 19 new books and 11 modules of CDs.

They are released under an overall banner called the Golden Age of Knowledge and Basics which you can learn more about on the web site.

Now I am writing this post from the viewpoint of design and lettering. The book covers, the color, the design and the interior design of these books is spectacular, I cropped a couple of parts from the covers and included them here.

The rules of color harmony have been adhered to exactly, the lettering is real smart - keep in mind that these books and lectures were released in 15 languages. So instead of doing custom lettering for every title in 15 languages what they did was select fonts and combine them into neat lettering.

The book quality is great, all digitally printed hardback books, even have thumb-indexes.

Then comes the CD modules. They’re sort of aerodynamic plastic modules that hold smaller modules within them and transcripts and glossary of same size.

The image above is a front shot of one of the books and one of the CD modules. It’s not really a descriptive shot – mainly artistic but gives some idea.

And check out the web site. It’s got a better shot of each of these books and modules plus a description of each. And enjoy the Flash graphics.

The images here are (in sequence) from, Advanced Procedures & Axioms book and the Thought, Emotion and Effort lectures. Then it is the cover art from the brochure (which you can see on-line) and the image on the bottom is from the Dianetics 55! book and the Unification Congress Lectures.

Enjoy.

[:-]

note: These books are read in a specific sequence, the presentation here is not per that sequence.

I just saw that Jean Michel Berts has published another one of his amazing photos. It’s Paris again, Place Vendome – the jeweller’s square in Paris.

The dramatic black and white skies and the shining lights are totally capturing.

Well done Jean Michel for another impressive picture.

I can’t wait to see them available as posters!

See my other post on the Amazing Photography he did in New York and other pictures of Paris.

  This is the new cover of their upcoming album. Looks like nothing but actually there’s a whole story to this, but I’ll go into this shortly. I just heard one of the new tracks on radio this morning. Sounds pretty good. A little harder than their last album it seemed to me. But a single track on radio is a little early to judge the album. I am quite excited to get it when it’s out. I wonder if Cigarette Smoke will be on it. It’s a pretty cool demo track they gave out free on the fan site www.arctic-monkeys.com.

The rhythm’s pretty good in the Monkey’s work, similar to Bloc Party they have a great drummer who does a little more than keep the beat. There’s a great article on rhythm how it is an important factor in audience rapport and participation and a bunch more, By L. Ron Hubbard – you can see it here, it is at the bottom of the article.

Now back to the cover of the album. “Liverpool designers Juno, who also did the artwork for the first LP, spent a week gutting three unoccupied houses from the estate, before moving a team of spray artists to paint the interiors.” source www.gigwise.com.

The cover is a little dull – but looking at it from that aspect it’s a lot more interesting. It totally reminds me of that amazing graffitti covered building in New York or the Dolk stencils I’ve posted about.

Ok – well I can’t wait for the album to get released!  Whoever get’s the release date first drop me a comment.

Ok, just bought the new album and listened to it. Here is my review.

Firstly if you liked the first one you will probably like this one.

One thing I love about Bloc Party is the out of the box arrangements. the rythm and drum sequences here just rock. Noticed this on the first album as well the drummer knows his stuff and shows it. This one just the same.

The whole arrangement is extremely cool and takesit out of the hard-rock/rock category and into another level.

Couple of tracks I found boring but since we aren’t listening to cassettes and the “next” button is only a click away that didn’t disturb me too much.

I found several of the trcks a lot better than the earlier album. The first album grew on me over a while, this one I got into almost immediately.

Congrats to Kele Okereke (Vocals/Guitar), Russell Lissack (Guitar), Gordon Moakes (Bass), Matt Tong (Drums) for an album well put together and ready wear my eardrums for a bit.