Global Graphica

The latest in our ongoing photo project What’s Outside the Window? is this picture of the view from a Virgin America airlines Airbus looking out at another Virgin plane parked at Los Angeles International Airport, or LAX.

A utility box painted with colorful artwork on Sunset Blvd. in Silver Lake, in Los Angeles.

While the Global Graphica team is in Los Angeles, we’re getting a Japanese-Hario-style slow-pour coffee fix at the Intelligentsia Coffee outpost on Abbott-Kinney in Venice.

While waiting for our roller-bag at the baggage claim at LAX, we spotted one of those “Love Me” stickers on the metal-conveyor carousel.

We’ve decamped from New York City to spend a few days in Los Angeles during the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday period. Below is the view from B’s car of the Century City skyline in West LA.

This massive wheat-paste street-art piece by Shepard Fairey (of Obey / “Giant Has a Posse” fame) features a gang of kids posing with weapons-like sticks on the side of an old building in SoHo, at the corner of Wooster and Grand streets in New York City.

This massive styrofoam tunnel by artist Carsten Holler is called “Swinging Curve” and is on view at the New Museum in New York as part of a retrospective exhibition called the Carsten Holler Experience.

The new Aether shop in New York City is a tent pitched and ported to a tricked-out classic Airstream camping trailer. Awesome.

Two of the four covers designed for Fast Company magazine’s “Great Tech War” feature last month. Here we see Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Sergei Brin of Google face off. The other contenders are the late Steve Jobs / Apple and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Graffiti-art bust that double as a mobile art gallery and studio parked in front of the New Museum in New York City at the opening weekend of the Carsten Holler exhibition.

Wheat-paste street-art post-up of a small boy wearing and an old-school beanie cap and scratching his butt. We found this on Crosby Street in SoHo, in New York City. Funny.

The bald mannequin in the display window at designer Vivienne Tam’s Mercer Street store in SoHo,  in New York City.

Our colleague Chris, with whom we worked on a project this past summer, shows off his upside-down Roma piano graphic t-shirt. Full of awesome.

We are in love with these white lights in the elevator landing at the advertising agency and production agency offices shared by Firstborn, 360i, and their parent company, the Japanese ad network Dentsu America, in TriBeCa, in downtown New York City. The lights run up the wall and across the ceiling and create the effect of a architectural, physical shift of the space,

A photo spread in New York Magazine of a famous image by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The artwork is a visual, visceral and grimly literal play on the phrase “I Love You,” or “I ‘heart’ you.” The heart is an actual heart. Cattelan’s work is part of a major and ground-breaking exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this month, in which, at the artist’s request, all of his major sculptural/installation works are being hung from the ceiling of the museum’s massive, iconic rotunda. The legendary architect of the Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, could never have imagined it.

Happy ice cream wheat-paste street art by artist Buff Monster on the wall next to the parking lot at the corner of Wooster and Grand streets in SoHo.

We were rummaging around the closet at Global Graphica HQ in New York a couple of weeks ago when we found an old box with a bunch of old electronics gear crammed into it: A tangle of USB and Firewire cords, old cellphones and their chargers, adaptors, earbuds, various keyboard mice (mouses), etc.

We also found a long, translucent plastic case by Japanese brand Muji. The case was designed specifically for containing MD’s, or Mini Discs. The case was full of these square storage devices. The Mini Disc player and its disc format were a huge hit in Japan in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s. But Mini Discs never took off in America, and eventually (and thankfully) the much better Apple iPod effectively killed off the all the competition in personal-audio technology product category, including the Mini Disc.

Before throwing all the old electronic junk out, we took a picture of some of the various discs. See below.

The view looking north out at an office window in TriBeCa with a view of the Empire State Building in New York City.

“A Native American was Here” Graffiti in SoHo, in New York City.