sundance

She’s a dude of a filmmaker…sigh

Two recent articles in the New York Times caught my eye. Michelle Orange’s piece about Lynn Shelton’s film HUMPDAY, “She’s a Director Who’s Just another Dude” and “Action!” Manohla Dargis’s profile of Kathryn Bigelow and her film THE HURT LOCKER. Both articles made much of the fact that these female directors are working with male stories and male actors. Dargis describes how Bigelow “steered clear of the industry ghetto to which female directors are usually consigned, bypassing the dreaded chick flick for stories and archetypes traditionally if reductively seen as the province of men.” Orange quoted one of HUMPDAY’s actors Mark Duplass who described “…her greater affinity for men”: “You know those girls who are closer with dudes, in general? She’s got a little bit of that going on, so that obviously plays into it.”

Is it just me… or does this is all feel a bit grating that at this point in time when a female filmmaker makes a good film, the angle of the story still ends up being about how she’s not a guy?

Things to say during sex: a handy diagram.

Though we’ve been led to believe that pillow talk is something that just comes naturally–that we’ll all just magically know just the right thing to say in the heat of the moment–the truth is often anything but. Sure, sometimes we managed to pull it off, but more often than not, words fail us (or, worse [...]

Eternal Moonwalk

An interesting tribute to the King of Pop, a publicly funded radio station in Belgium also known at StuBru, has created Eternal Moonwalk, a video slideshow of people, animals and inanimate objects doing Michael Jackson’s signature move. Each video clip is about six seconds long and a counter keeps track of the number of meters [...]

Gay Icons: portraits selected by Elton John, Billie Jean King, Alan Hollinghurst and more

Last week in London the National Portrait Gallery launched the exhibit “Gay Icons,” a collection of portraits selected by a diverse group of gay who’s who: Elton John, Billie Jean King, and Alan Hollinghurst among them. Their selections are broad, including “include artists Francis Bacon and David Hockney; writers Daphne du Maurier and Quentin Crisp; [...]

Edith Zimmerman plays with her food

Brooklynite Edith Zimmerman shows off her wonderful and fun creations made from food on her blog. Playing with food never gets old or as she commented: …when I see a piece of food art there’s some super straightforward part of my brain that just goes, “that’s a fish made out of lettuce, haha!” or “that’s [...]

Non-stop Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh is a busy, busy man. You would think CHE: PART ONE and TWO and THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE would be enough films for one director to release in a year, but come September Soderbergh will add one more to the list: THE INFORMANT! starring a pudgy Matt Damon as a CEO with a conscience [...]

Internet abuzz about Japanese music video

This deceptively lo-fi video is too spectacular to bury in my weekly Friday music video round up and the blogosphere is currently freaking out about its brilliance. It’s a crowd sourced music video for Hibi no Neiro (“Tone of Everyday”) by Japanese band Sour that uses webcam footage from fans which is then stitched together [...]

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, electronica-style

The YouTube user Fagottron is a hugely talented musician and video editor who’s been putting out amazing rhythmic edits of classic-film footage and putting a dance beat underneath them. His latest is the one below, based on the original CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. It’s not quite as good as the incredible MARY POPPINS edit [...]

The coolest colleges are going green

Think this whole “green” thing is just a fad? Maybe some elements of it, but if trends in higher education are any indicator of larger patterns, sustainability will continue to play a role in how we live, work, and play. In late June, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) released its annual Digest, a collection and analysis of stories from the previous year’s weekly newsletter. Just the size of the publication should give us hope: according to Acting Executive Director Judy Walton’s “Introduction,” the 2008 Digest is 50% larger than the previous edition.

Phat girls

Across the world high school gay boys and fat girls are finding solace in each other’s company. Forged in the solitude of being misfits, it’s a bond that’s unbreakable: fat girls and the homos they love.

So of course we queers clamor for Beth Ditto, the big-voiced and bigger-bellied lead singer of The Gossip. About to launch a new album, Ditto also recently turned in a convincing role as fashion designer.

THE LAZY ENVIRONMENTALIST : Lazy Mayor

THE LAZY ENVIRONMENTALIST, hosted by Josh Dorfman, screens Tuesdays at 9PM on Sundance Channel.

Working with John Tran, the mayor of Rosemead, CA, was particularly fascinating. To be sure, The Lazy Environmentalist typically focuses on helping individuals conveniently make environmentally conscious choices that fit their lifestyles. However, this same philosophy can also be applied to a town or city. In fact, sometimes the best way to help people easily and enjoyably reduce their environmental impact is to focus on making changes at the municipal level. For example, Rosemead’s recycling rates are very low; only about 25% of recyclable trash is diverted from the landfill and actually recycled. So in “Lazy Mayor” I present Mayor Tran with a municipal recycling solution that can lower the town’s costs while also making it easy, convenient, and financially rewarding for Rosemead residents to sort the recycling in their homes. It’s the kind of win-win-win solution that saves taxpayer money, financially incentives people to participate in environmental action, and benefits the planet in two major ways: 1) it reduces greenhouse gas emissions and 2) it reduces our demand for virgin natural resources from which to make new products.

Chic hotel packaging

Barcelona’s Chic and Basic Born Hotel provides guests with amenities that jumps on the typeface design bandwagon with some bold and straightforward messaging.

Casual sex confessions in 5 seconds flat

In their hook up issue (Jul 2-8, 2009), Time Out New York launched a new sex and dating section. One fun feature you can access online is called “One-Night-Stand Confessions” where New Yorkers reveal one thing they’ve always wanted to tell a past fling. This being the age of Twitter, these revelations aren’t eloquent personal [...]

Hayao Miyazaki’s PONYO

I’m a big fan of Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, a “modern day Walt Disney.” SPIRITED AWAY and HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE blew me away with their fantastical stories and brilliant animation. So I was excited, along with many others on the Interwebs, at viewing the trailer for his latest effort, PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE [...]

Introducing Reyna Perez

Meet Reyna, the Brooklyn-based chanteuse whose self-titled four-track EP debuted last Friday along with the music video for “Love Love Love,” shot entirely on the new iPhone 3GS by filmmakers Ari Kuschnir and Michael Tyburski. The video’s black and white imagery and Reyna’s gothic-meets-high-fashion ensemble (all Yohji Yamamoto, one of her favorite designers) sets the perfect tone for her haunting yet lush, pop-infused vocals and acoustic backing.

Click the link below to watch.

Premiering Bruno

Sacha Baron Cohen, the mastermind behind Borat, this week unleashes the limp-wristed Bruno on theatregoers everywhere. While some gays are upset at the portrayal of the super-effeminate character, I feel just the opposite. Cohen’s act is obviously done with love, much like a drag queen’s lampooning of a woman. It’s an homage, not a mockery. Bruno has [...]

Green tech finds (7/6/09)

If fireworks and gas grills didn’t feed your techie jones last weekend, here are some of the latest stories in the green tech world.

• Drive time: Danielle Brigada, social media guru at the National Wildlife Federation, just loves the ’10 Ford Fusion hybrid.
  
  
• Wearable lighting?: That’s one potential use envisioned by art students for GE’s planned “flexible, paper-thin lighting panels” featuring organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). (via OLED-info.com)

Giant photography

I talked about giant stuffed animals and ginormous trophies. Now how about these manipulated oversized high heels, eggs, and hot dogs brought to you from the imaginative lens of photographer Petros Chrisostomou who “takes objects with which we are all too familiar with – a high-heeled shoe or two, some eggs, a head of blonde [...]

Books: The Other Side of Desire

We’ve read — or at least skimmed — hundreds of books about sex in our ten years in the biz, and our shelves are stacked with tomes on everything from gays in the military to the science of seduction. Some educate us, some make us laugh, some make us blush, some make good door-stops — and then every now and then, a book just completely blows us away. Like Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire. It’s an engrossing, sensitive, intelligent exploration of various forms of lust and longing, and it is by turns shocking and moving — and occasionally even romantic. Bergner hangs his story on four main characters: a foot fetishist, a female sadist, a child sex offender, and an amputee “devotee.” We chatted with him about furries, the Craigslist killer, and the age-old nature vs. nurture debate.

Stop-motion lego arcade games

This short by Michael Hickox would be right in the middle of a Venn diagram overlapping LEGO, classic arcade games, and stop motion video, which are three popular trends lately in the blogosphere.

Tibetan Leader Calls for Wildlife Protection

One of the most honored Tibetan Buddhist leaders is appealing to his fellow Tibetans not to harm wildlife.

UNESCO Expands List of World Heritage in Danger

The largest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere has been placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and an Italian Alpine mountain range and a coastal wetland in Germany and The Netherlands have been newly inscribed for protection on the World Heritage List.

Winners of EPA’s First Water Quality Video Contest Announced

“One quart of oil can pollute 250,000 gallons of water. When it rains, leaked oil gets transported right into our waterways, and that’s everybody’s problem,” says the narrator of a winning video in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s first Water Quality Video Contest.

Mad about Arad

MoMA will be showing the first ever  major retrospective of designer Ron Arad in the United States starting August 2, 2009. The show will run through October 9, 2009 and will feature the Israeli industrial designer’s furniture, sculpture, and chandeliers for Swarovski, which display text messages from strangers that are sent to the lamps by incorporating light-emitting diodes. Regardless [...]

Beijing’s burnt Mandarin Oriental still stands

Back in early February 2009, fireworks during the finale to the annual Spring Festival/Chinese New Year celebration sparked a fire that quickly “engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings.” The nearly completed 32-story, 241-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel was designed by famous architect Rem Koolhaas. James Fallows points out over at The [...]