Wonderment >> How to See the Secret, Abandoned City Hall Subway Station

This is soo From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basel E. Frankweiler!  

New Yorkers, you know how the 6 train ends at Brooklyn Bridge, and they say "Last stop, Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall"?  Well that stop is really only Brooklyn Bridge, and is not the original City Hall stop, and the original City Hall stop is actually this beautiful, magical place you see above, by far the most beautiful New York subway station ever made.  

But the City Hall station was closed decades ago, for reasons you can read about here, never to be seen by passengers again...  

 UNLESS.

If you stay on the 6 train after they say last stop at Brooklyn Bridge (which you ordinarily would never do, because if for some reason you did want to just head right back up town, you would cross the platform to the uptown side), the 6 has to pass through the City Hall station to turn around and head back uptown!  So if you just stay on for a few extra minutes, you can see the lost station!

How cool is that???  I feel like a little kid.  I'm dying to do it.

Wonderment >> Sound Becomes Sculpture

A wonderful little piece of wonderment for your day... 

Above, an ad for the new Canon Pixma printer, below, the making of the ad. To create what you see above, they put drops of paint on a membrane over a speaker, and then when they played a sound through the speaker, it made the paint bounce up, and they caught the action at 5,000 frames per second.  That's a lot of frames per second.

The result is ultra-clear slow motion video of tiny bits of gelatinous color exploding into the air.


Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

The ad itself is wonderfully captivating, and the making-of film, if it's publicized, will be an interesting combination of the two trends I've been talking about on this blog related to advertising... the short film approach (Chanel, GANT) and the "real people" approach (Tod's by Eliot Erwitt and Cole Haan by the Selby), where the photographer him/herself is known and hyped (not just a tiny credit somewhere), and the subjects are real people who use the product (not actors) and are identified.  In this case, it's not exactly the first or the second, but still carries the themes of a well-crafted story and a behind-the-scenes, "we're not a nameless, faceless corporation" tone.  Interesting here that they even reveal who the advertising agency behind the project was...

[By Dentsu London]