I like the way book trailers attempt to light up your expectation for a printed page by teasing you with an entirely different sort of temptation. A good book trailer is like good food photography. I don’t think of the primary seduction of a meal as being visual, but a well-done food photo evokes everything non-visual about a meal — taste, scent, texture. Similarly, I don’t typically think of the primary seduction of a book as being its atmosphere or aesthetic, but this is what a good book trailer (or animated book cover) evokes — the environment the book will create around you as you read it.

Obligatory Miranda July link. Obligatory Miranda July book trailer:

Why do we find ourselves so close to the aftermath of this very strange event, this Big Bang, that has such low entropy? The answer is, we just don’t know.

Then there’s an analogy with chickens and eggs.

(Thanks Dan!)

I love Luke Butler’s Enterprise series. Drawn puts it nicely: “His paintings seem to capture both the campiness and the pure spirit of adventure of the original series.”

Don’t miss this one.

Are those photos unreal or what? Worth watching in HD for sure. (And good format, yeah? Simple but effective.)

(Thanks Len!)

Shanzhai, which literally means “mountain fortress” and implies banditry and lack of state control, refers to China’s vast array of name-brand knockoffs. Shanzhai versions of Apple Inc.‘s iPhone, for example, include the HiPhone, the SciPhone and the deliberately misspelled citrus-themed iOrgane.

There’s more.

Recently, the definition of shanzhai has expanded. On China’s Internet, blogs, bulletin boards and news sites carry photos of automobiles jerry-rigged to run on railroad tracks (“shanzhai trains”), fluffy dogs trimmed and dyed to look like the national mascot (“shanzhai pandas”) and models of the Beijing Olympic Games’ National Stadium made out of sticks (“shanzhai Bird’s Nest”).

And finally, a sort of storefront Las Vegas. Instead of faux Paris…

A property developer in Nanjing, hoping to lure business and buzz, set up storefront facades with logos such as “Haagon-Bozs,” “Pizza Huh,” “Bucksstar Coffee,” “KFG” and “McDnoald’s.” Images of what became known as “Shanzhai Street” spread rapidly online.

This reminds me of the semester I spent in Bangladesh with my classmate Dan. For weeks we’d heard legends of a Domino’s Pizza somewhere in Dhaka. Domino’s! So finally, we made the trek and discovered not Domino’s, but… Dominous. Same red-and-blue livery; crucial extra vowel. It clearly had nothing to do with the U.S. Domino’s—except for the suggestion that the owner of Dominous (who came to greet us at our table) may once have worked at one.

I love the shanzai vibe. There’s a certain Robin Hood spirit to it: the noble, resourceful, slightly wacky rogue.

And here, the map’s creator slots the regions one-by-one into a list of the world’s most populous countries. Man that is a lot of people.

Here’s the North American analogue for all of Snarkmarket’s Chinese readers! “Ecotopia”—talk about shorthand—but I love it.

Superman in a windbreaker, via the Guardian.

I spotted the photo at BLDGBLOG, so while I’m here, I’ll also point you to his new post called Messianic Urbanism:

The idea that the Second Coming of a messianic figure—from any religion—will bring with it enormous traffic-engineering concerns is something that had not, in fact, occurred to me.

In World of Warcraft, sending commercial spam (e.g. offers to buy virtual gold) via the game’s messaging system will get you banned. The workaround? Spell your message out in corpses.

Here’s a screen-shot.

So weird. So awesome.

Via Noah Brier.

As one of those people who often likes title sequences better than the movies they introduce, I like this trend a lot. It’s also very Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word—except (of course) the word isn’t falling out of the picture, it’s falling in to the video frame. Words spinning and dancing, bumping up into pictures, emphasizing (or contradicting!) the voice-over track… mmm, good stuff. More animanifestos, please.

To answer one question Chris poses in his post: This kind of animation is still mostly done in Adobe After Effects, but I think the field is wide-open for something more mass-market. Some new iMovie to After Effects’ Final Cut Pro. Prezi could grow to meet this need, if they made the tool a lot more flexible—so it was built for making media, not just giving presentations.

Some recent posts to help you triangulate its coordinates in your personal media galaxy:

• There’s one about Snarkmarket favorite Max Barry and his serialized novel Machine Man.
• There’s one about Lady Gaga. (I will take this as an opportunity to repeat my LG judgment: Admirably-realized aesthetic. However, not truly zeitgeisty or forward-looking.)
• There’s one about Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who seems to be making all the right moves. Have you seen his site hitRECord? It’s weird and wonderful—a small-scale video-remixing community. Who knew? A+
• There’s one about Ayn Rand’s Hollywood years.

See what I mean? All over the map. I guess it’s all culture, broadly defined. Worth putting in your RSS reader of choice.

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