Went out into the neighborhood today with my friend Tyler Askew (art director, quality blogger, hotlanta native, and coca-cola fan) to meet someone whose work I’ve liked since back in the Straight No Chaser glory days… Illustrator and artist Ian Wright. Tyler is friends with him and he’s just moved to NYC. If the name doesn’t ring any bells, you might recognize the work. I’ve always liked his use of color and shape-repetition, and the Rorschach-style symmetry in his work… But his style switches up so that last description may not always apply. Some of my favorite pieces were for the Ian Brown ‘Golden Greats‘ album, particularly the ‘Dolphins Were Monkeys‘ cover shown below… And he did the cover for one of the best UK pop-punk singles ever: The Undertones’ 1978 “Teenage Kicks,” played at John Peel’s funeral a few years back, as requested; it was Peel’s favorite song, and he was the first radio DJ to play it 26 years earlier.

While we were all sitting at the weird little coffee shop ‘Aroma’ on Houston St., my friend Willo Perron walked by with his lady and we chatted things up a little. Willo does a lot of retail space design, and just finished up the redesign for Rihanna’s stage on the Glow-In-The-Dark tour, happening in NYC tomorrow. I saw the show in L.A. and she’s excellent but her stage was mildly cornball, with some pretty cool speaker things, but dragged down by some nervous aluminum scaffolding on rollers. Sorta suspect. I’m just gonna say Rihanna’s show will likely really benefit from Willo’s expertese.

We finished up with Willo and his girl heading to the Margiela store… I joked about picking up this ‘line 11′ wallet for me:

If you get the chance, check it out in person, it’s FRESSSSSSSSSSHHH… The irony here would be that it would likely be empty half the time if I rocked it.

Later we met up with Willo and a bunch of his NYC friends at Smith and Mills for dinner, and although I’m not trying to be the ‘food photo blog’ guy, I was really happy with this rib/polenta dish I had:

I was out to dinner at Lucky Strike several months ago, and when it came time to pay for my mashed potatos, I pulled out the Comme de Garçons wallet my girlfriend had let me adopt from her a few weeks earlier. A friend mentioned ‘those wallets have really tipped,’ referring, of course to the Gladwell book. I shudder to think what he would have said tonight: Out of 10 people, 6 had the wallets. Everyone that could throw down, threw down… And it was silly. We all added the iPhone as a garnish.

It’s likely going to get a lot more ‘tipped’ in the next few…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 12:56 and is filed under Common stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.