the definitive daily cultural column curated by stefan boublil.



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    Jun 28, 2010

    oped-new7because my children were conscientiously kidnapped last saturday by their benevolent grandparents, gina and i found ourselves alone, spread over the 500-counts of our sleeping platform, confused and disoriented for lack of orders to give lifeforms smaller than us, and ended up flipping through the channels of the idiot box, large and looming above us, finally settling on the windy world's episode of natgeo's how the earth changed history series. sure, you might think, what a missed opportunity to give way to our loudest sexual fetishes given that the house lays empty and far from the nearest sugar-borrowing neighbor. and you'd be right albeit for the complete and utter lack of desire my beautiful wife feels for the slowly yet inevitably melting stack of butter my body resembles. regardless, there we were, watching handsome-ish professor iain stewart take us from the far reaches of the sahara desert to the great wall of china by way columbus' discoveries, explaining to us lowlives the impact of mere wind on the evolution of human civilizations. and it got me thinking, don't you know...

    neither of any grand realization about the importance of pushed air nor about macrocosmic appreciation of nature over our over-inflated egos mind you, but about the fact that i've been nowhere! sure, i've been a tourist aplenty but, really, i've been nowhere... i've come to a point in my life where nature documentaries are starting to get on my nerves because they keep showing off places on earth that i have not seen for myself and all i can think about is how the sought-out comfort of my past 40 years seems to have replaced the taste for adventure that got me here in the first place. so i turned to gina, my equally sated life-companion, and asked, naively: would we ever be the kind of family that takes a year off with the kids to travel the world, say, pick a country a month as ...
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    Jun 21, 2010

    clockfor those of you who have ever wondered what it is we do for a living and never quite bothered to click on the creative agency link to the left there, i would like to extend a helping hand. fact is, even colleagues in our own industry sometimes ask "no but really, what do you guys do?..." and so, i figured that after exactly 10 years of practice (we opened our doors in the summer of 2000,) perhaps i should, for once, utilize this forum for something useful and answer that most pertinent of questions. to start this conversation right, please find below, for your perusal, a smattering of our favorite things... (it may take a little bit of time to load, but once it does, you will smooth sail your way to knowledge and understanding, so-called, theaptWORKS.)

    theaptARCHITECTURE shows how just another brick in the wall does not have to mean conformity.

    theaptBRANDING displays ideas for which a visual solution, graphic or otherwise, was needed to accomplish the stated goal.

    theaptEXPERIENTIAL details the projects for which we were asked, by a variety of clients, to invent and build experiences utilizing the tools of architecture, branding, marketing and event planning, all at once and never boring.

    theaptPRESS is a few pages of our favorite published compliments by some of the most cajoled names in the business.

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    Jun 14, 2010

    oped-new7i don’t believe. nay, i refuse to believe. in anything. not that i am unmoved by powder’s school-mates when they ask the adults to indulge in such a procedure but i find utterly unnecessary the action of accepting as true what one cannot empirically verify. i do not stand, however, against the romantic appeal of faith, i too want to feel the force, i too want to believe in magic. but i think there is so ...
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    Jun 6, 2010

    oped-new7this won't be long, i promise. i just have a bit of a bone to pick with superlatives... i know it might sound weird coming from verbose lil' ole me but there are few things in life that bother me more than the apparently innocuous answer of "great" to the largely un-meant question of "how you doing?" are we talking about the same thing? great? |grāt| adjective - of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average? is this really how you're doing? i didn't think so, nobody is great! apart from brian austin green, naturally. but this is yet another example of the oral viruses quickly gaining ground across all manners of members of the human race. un-aided ...
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    Jun 4, 2010

    yoshioka0529102

    drawn back into the long asian arms of the chosun peninsula, divad q. nead solos a saturday into submission, visiting tokujin yoshioka's spectrum show at the museum beyond museum in the heart of chungdam, seoul's haute interior design district.

    straight from the likes of krypton come korea, i arrived at the theban entrance of the museum, itself a faux-esque limestone maw, nestled on a short corner in high/tight southeast seoul just an hour shy of spring rainfall. having already primed myself for the showing on a stroll through the interior design halles of gangnam and apgujeong, i steadied myself on the porch of an adjacent eatery, sipping cold local beer, mulling david lehman's examination of the new york avant-garde, followed by udong noodles, pickled sorts. the femme behind the ticket booth glass, as many girls do when confined to tight spaces in this heralded land of tech, passed me my ticket through a slot whilst she nodded politely and returned to her tv on a mobile phone, 2.5 inch diameter screens are the metaphorical johnson, replacing the schvantz as the demi-attenton-getter for girls under 30.

    entrance0601101

    the exterior of seoul's museum beyond museum stood out of place amongst modest-modish urban structures seemingly updated in a fierce whipping of style to ...
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