Well, as you may remember us talking about a few times in prior posts, the side against the proposed Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington D.C. have finally gotten their way, convincing the United States Commission of Fine Arts to alter the Lei Yixin plans for the statue. Although the request by the commission states that they'd like "that the sculpture of portray Dr. King as a more sympathetic figure," if you've followed the story at all, you'll likely remember that the primary reason everyone has been up in arms about the memorial is because Yixin is from China and, in a previous job, also created busts of Mao Zedong, neither of which are very popular right now.

Hey Copenhagen, get ready to be deluged by rumpled sportswear, elk logos, and scantily-clad youth photographed on beaches by Bruce Weber, because Abercrombie & Fitch is coming to your town! Following last year's opening of a London store, the New Albany, Ohio-based company will open its second European flagship next year in Denmark's capital, Abercrombie & Fitch announced today. After Copenhagen, its on to Asia, where a store in Tokyo's Ginza district is set open late next year. Locations in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden are in the works.

Located at Kobmagergade 11, the 16,000-square-foot Copenhagen flagship location was "designed in the old neoclassical style typically found in Danish architecture when constructed in 1910," the company noted today in a press release. To mastermind the restoration and store design, Abercrombie has hired Selldorf Architects and its principal Annabelle Selldorf. Selldorf designed the company's massive New York City and Los Angeles flagships, although the crowd that lines up every morning outside the Fifth Avenue store and the pumping bass that greets them at 10am sharp always seems to us at odds with Selldorf's sleek modernity.

It's always really interesting to see a story build and build until it reaches its ultimate peak. Such is the case with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. We've been following the controversy over the design of the memorial since the summer of 2006, when it was just appearing in small bits through the local media. Then, later, you might remember, we reported on there being copying and/or theft issues involved. Following that, several times we reported on a man named Alec Rawls who had seemingly made it his life's work in getting the memorial changed completely. Now apparently all the screaming and hollering has worked, as the big time media has picked up the story, like with this piece in the NY Times. We're sure Paul Murdoch, the poor designer behind the whole thing, has been waking up, smacking his forehead again and cursing this project's commission once again. In this writer's opinion, the whole thing has been tragedy following tragedy in varying degrees.

Ron Hogan of our sister blog, Galleycat, recently picked up on what we hope isn't a new trend in international publishing. A Hong Kong publisher has compiled years worth of blogger Darren Di Lieto's interviews with illustrators and hundreds of works by the interview subjects into a book--without the permission of the illustrators and without crediting Di Lieto or the blog (the illustration news portal The Little Chimp Society) as the source of the material. To make matters worse, the book includes a CD of all of the images in the book (with filenames that are identical to those on the LCS site), suggesting that they're without copyright and free to use.

Di Lieto learned of the plagiarized volume from Jonathan Edwards, one of the illustrators whose work is included in the book, and wrote about the horrific incident on his personal blog. "I'm currently in the process of contacting the included illustrators, to let them know they've been ripped-off," writes Di Lieto, who is working to track down the publishers, a company with the ironic moniker of "Great Creativity Organization." "I've been in contact with the [Association of Illustrators] to get legal advice, but I think at the end of the day I or the illustrators who have had their copy stolen will not be able to do much about this situation without major backing or support."

University of Kentucky, you've just been promised a multi-million dollar gift, what are you going to do next? Start our own international design competition! That's right, prosperous architect of retirement housing Clifford Curry and his wife H. Delight Stone (which we kind of wish were our name) have just bestowed upon Curry's alma mater a gift of "more than $5.5 million dollars," which we've taken the liberty of rounding up to $6 million in the headline of this post. The gift, which will be presented to the university over ten years, will establish the Curry Stone Design Prize and the Curry Stone Chair in Design at the University of Kentucky.

The Curry Stone Prize, to be presented annually, will award $100,000 to exceptional emerging designers "with extraordinary design projects or ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity." The prize will be presented for the first time at the 2008 IdeaFestival, which takes place this September in Louisville, Kentucky. "We want to give designers an opportunity to be recognized as leaders in innovation and provide financial resources to help the ideas get developed and implemented," said Curry in a statement issued by the university. According to UK College of Design dean Michael Speaks, the prize will recognize outstanding achievements in urban design, architecture, graphic, and product design.

Many a box of Cap'n Crunch's Crunchberries has been ruined by some careless soul (usually one's brother) forgetting to scrunch down the inner plastic bag before closing the outer cardboard box. What good are artifically-flavored sweetened corn and oat biscuits when they've been robbed of their crunch? Fear not, cereal lovers, Target is on the case. Now headed to Target stores everywhere are new cereal canisters (pictured at right) containing the store's private label "Archer Farms" cereal. Flouting the bag-in-box paradigm, the new packaging features:

...a reclosable easy-flow spout and snap-shut lid that allow for simple pouring and snacking....ensur[ing] that cereal stays fresher longer, while eliminating stale or unused cereal. Oblong shaped and partially constructed from recycled paperboard, the cereal canister offers a slim design--10 inches tall by two and one and a half inches deep--that requires minimal kitchen cabinet space.

As stalwart Archie fans, we rather liked that the biggest problems encountered by the youth of Riverdale involved things like rampant gossip, stray kittens, and the vexing vanity of Reggie Mantle. Today's comics are increasingly going the Law & Order route, with ripped-from-the-headlines plots and themes. Case in point: Marvel Comics' Secret Invasion, premiering tomorrow at the New York Comic Con, in which "an alien race called the Skrulls comes to claim Earth as its holy land after their home planet is rendered uninhabitable in a fashion foretold by their religious scriptures," according to Brian Niemietz writing in today's New York Post. We're guessing that the Skrulls don't have much time to unwind at the soda shoppe.

According to Marvel President Dan Buckley, anyone who wants to draw parallels between his new series and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the U.S. invasion of Iraq does so on his own, though not without some justification. "You can play with the concept of who's the invading force and who's the occupying force," says Buckley.

Later in the article, which gives a shout-out to the Cold War/nuclear-era metaphor of the Fantastic Four, Buckley notes the hazards of directly pegging a superhero to living beings, a move that often translates to a reduced shelf life for a comic series. "We've been publishing Spider-Man since 1962, and he's aged about four to five years."

Quarterly design review Eye has changed hands, according to FOLIO and a release by Haymarket Media Group. The global media company has passed ownership of the magazine to its editor, John L. Walters. "Following discussions, both parties agreed that Eye's niche-market readers would be better served by a smaller, design-oriented company," Haymarket said in its press release -- although we're not sure how to take that "niche market" bit coming from a company that publishes such magazines as .32 (the magazine of the America's Cup) and Practical Motorhome. Meanwhile, Eye is now managed by Eye Magazine Ltd, a new company established by Walters with Simon Esterson, Eye's art director, and Hannah Tyson, business director at Esterson Associates. Both Esterson and Tyson were involved in Eye's 1990 launch.

Congratulations citizens of Vilnius, not only are you getting your own Guggenheim/Hermitage Museum, but it's going to be designed by none other than Zaha Hadid! Hadid's office has just informed us that it was chosen today to design a new center for international art in the Lithuanian capital that will house pieces from the collections of both the New York-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the St. Petersburg-based State Hermitage Museum. The design of Zaha Hadid Architects (pictured above) triumphed over those of Studio Daniel Libeskind and Studio Fuksas in an international competition judged by a six-member jury that included Lithuanian Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas, Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, and former Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens. As for the design, it's a Hadidian mix of fluidity, velocity, and lightness that Hadid's office likens to "a mystical floating object that seemingly defies gravity."

Today Columbia University announced the winners of the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes. The chosen ones will pick up their Daniel Chester French-designed medals at a luncheon at Columbia on May 29. In the always intriguing criticism category, it was back to the arts after the 2007 medal went to restaurant critic Jonathan Gold. This year Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe got the nod for his "penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting." We were also pleased to see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Inga Saffron nominated as a finalist "for her forceful critiques that illuminate the vital interplay between architecture and the life of her city." Taking home the prize in the editorial cartooning category was Michael Ramirez of Investor's Business Daily "for his provocative cartoons that rely on originality, humor and detailed artistry."

As for photography, Adrees Latif of Reuters won in the breaking news photograpy category "for his dramatic photograph of a Japanese videographer, sprawled on the pavement, fatally wounded during a street demonstration in Myanmar," while Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor won the feature photography prize "for her intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness."

And this year's special citation goes to the cultural phenomenon that is Bob Dylan "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." We wonder: has the Pulitzer Board seen his paintings?