1. The Flaming Lips and Weezer are planning to play two New York City-area shows together — as in side by side, trading off songs back and forth for the entire length of each concert. We don’t know about you you, but we’d love to see this trend catch on. [via Brooklyn Vegan]

2. The popular 2007 documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is going to be remade as a mockumentary. Director Seth Gordon explains: “I’ve done some work on Modern Family and The Office and have worked in this doc style, and so that inspired me to say, instead of doing a traditional narrative feature script, what if we did the remake in the doc style? What doors would that open? What opportunities? What additional story could we tell? And that’s essentially the approach we took.” [via The Playlist]

3. “Mr. Koolhaas has created an eloquent architectural statement about China’s headlong race into the future and, more generally, life in the developed world at the beginning of the 21st century. It captures our era much as the great works of the early Modernists did theirs.” – The New York Times looks at the headquarters of China Central Television designed by Rem Koolhaas

4. Is the first teaser poster for The Dark Knight Rises everything that you’d hope it would be? While we know that we’re looking at the destruction of Gotham City, all we can see is a different Christopher Nolan flick — Inception. [via Slashfilm]

5. What do you think of TNT’s first look teaser for its Dallas reboot? We find it interesting that the primetime soap, which is scheduled to premiere next summer, includes several of the actors from the original series, but given how poorly Melrose Place did on The CW, that’s probably not enough to keep it afloat. [via TVLine]

Bonus link: 15 Cartoon And TV Characters Voiced By The Opposite Sex

Business Week has whet our design whistle with a round-up of the world’s most influential designers, a list of 27 luminaries who regularly impress and inspire in the fields of graphic, industrial, and even auto design, from Philippe Starck to the so-called father of modern video games. Lest you think the premise a bit nebulous, the editors have included a neat little caveat: “Not only is ‘influential’ difficult to measure, but ‘design’ is also nigh on impossible to define neatly.” We’ve rounded up a few personal design heroes and their signature objects from the list, after the jump.

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Despite the clunky moniker, we read with interest as The Independent UK rattled off the seven — count ‘em, seven — relevant starchitects in the world, contrasting them with commercial building firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM is a workhorse firm (established in 1936) that has put up major projects from Dubai to Beijing including five of the ten tallest buildings in the world — in other words, America’s first “super practice.” What SOM hasn’t hammered down is the je ne sais quoi of its flashier architectural contemporaries. A primer on the heavy hitters after the jump.

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Yesterday the architecture world’s Preacherman, Jonathan Glancey, weighed in on the “what is good design” debate. Glancey — architecture critic for the Guardian — is fed up with computers, dammit. “Many of our new buildings and streetscapes feel increasingly digital rather than real,” he wrote on Building Design. It’s an argument people have been making for years — and it’s wrong. Read More »

“Forget the myths the media’s created… The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” So says Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) to Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) in All the President’s Men, a movie widely regarded as the best political picture of the last thirty some-odd years. It is also, however unintentionally, the finest film about architecture ever made. All those half-lit interiors, those labyrinths! those car parks and corridors and elevators! Oh, the Brutalism!

Director Alan Pakula’s 1976 minor-key masterpiece is a veritable primer for the layperson on late modern architecture, but there’s a valuable lesson in it too for today’s post-post-(post-?)modern architects and the critics who adore and abhor them. If we want to know where to find significant buildings of the ‘00s — or if there aren’t any, why not — we could hardly do better than to listen to Deep Throat. (Only to the pseudonym. Mark Felt sounds like the name of a paid spokesman for prostate medication.)

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