sundance

If a Claire Denis film falls in a forest …

I had a very bizarre film viewing experience the other day. Reading no review, seeing no ad, having no sense of it other than the title, I plopped myself down in a local theatre for the Claire Denis film, 35 SHOTS OF RUM. “I’m a huge Claire Denis fan,” I thought. (NENETTE AND BONI, I CAN’T SLEEP, TROUBLE EVERY DAY amongst my favorites.) Why research?

It’s an interesting experiment, to see a film absolutely cold. And, to make things even more pure, here in Appalachian Ohio on a Saturday night at 8:45, I was the only one in the theatre. Was this film even happening? If I had not have found my way to the theatre, would they still have shown the movie? Would it still have been … what we understand to be … a film?

National Geographic image collection

I know I am supposed to be the gay voice around here finding all the camp YouTube videos and writing about Lady Gaga, fashion, and decorating. But we gays appreciate beauty of all sorts like the ugly duckling beauty of Babs and train wreck beauty of Liza. But gays are often times fascinated by the beauty of nature and animals and the world. National Geographic has recently published a book called National Geographic: The Image Collection. The images are broken into four sections: exploration, wildlife, people & cultures, and science & climate change. I cannot stress the importance or beauty of the collection.

What’s your secret?

PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God from Frank Warren on Vimeo. Frank Warren created the popular website Post Secret where people could anonymously submit their secrets on a 4 by 6 inch postcard. In this short film Warren asks strangers to reveal a secret on camera.

Timely release: A CHRISTMAS TALE

For better or for worse the holidays mean family – lots and lots of family. We make the trip back home, sleep on the fold-out couch and make strained conversation with the ornery aunt or cousin or brother no one really wanted to invite in the first place. Maybe this is why director Arnaud Desplechin titled his most recent effort about complicated and strained family relationships A CHRISTMAS TALE. Christmas and family, the two are synonymous. Desplechin’s tale follows the Vuillard’s, a family whose relationships are more strained than most, and what happens when they all come together to celebrate Christmas and wish their mother, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), well before her upcoming bone marrow transplant.

Twisted snow globes

Husband and wife duo Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz subvert a traditional holiday decorative toy by arranging “miniature, three-dimensional scenes of alienation, dread and dark humor” inside snow globes. They also evoke a style that is popular lately with tilt-shift camera work.

Retrosexy: Dacron slacks can withstand all sorts of action.

Proof that sex has always been a part of advertising: this retro Dacron slacks ad, which promotes its product’s ability to withstand the most strenuous action of all: the kind that gets doled out by a trio of doe-eyed, busty lovelies. Apparently group sex wasn’t invented during the Summer of Love. Who knew? Busty triplets [...]

SPECTACLE REPORT: ELVIS COSTELLO WITH…
All New Season Kicks Off with Bono and The Edge

Elvis Costello performs with U2′s Bono and The Edge on SPECTACLE.

In 2001, a few weeks after the September 11th attacks had stunned the world, high in the sky somewhere between Montreal and Toronto, guitarist The Edge sat back in his seat on U2’s private “ElevationAir” jet and spoke to me about the band’s personal bonds. “We’re not like so many groups you hear about, where the members don’t ever talk offstage or out of the studio,” he said. “It’s not like that with us—quite the opposite. If we end up at a party, at the end of the night you’ll probably find the four of us off in a corner hanging out.”

Let’s side aside the musical contributions, the classic songs and unforgettable performances that U2 have delivered over the years. If you just consider their personal histories, these four Irishmen have boldly gone where no band has gone before. There has never been another group whose line-up has remained intact for over thirty years. Since forming in Dublin in 1976 at the Mount Temple Comprehensive School (a site the Edge revisited in the recent guitar documentary IT MIGHT GET LOUD), these same four guys have shared a stage all the way from drummer Larry Mullen, Jr.’s kitchen to sold-out stadiums around the globe.

Happy birthday James Thurber, author of “Is Sex Necessary?”

Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor on NPR today, we learned it was James Thurber’s birthday (12/8/1894-11/2/1961). He was a celebrated American writer and wit, best known for his short stories and cartoons in The New Yorker. While on staff there, he shared a small office and became great friends with E.B. White (hey, just like we became great friends when we worked and shared a desk at the online mag Nerve). Together the two wrote “Is Sex Necessary?: Or Why You Feel the Way You Do” (1929), the first prose book either of them had published (hey, just like we wrote our first book together, “The Big Bang”!). Of course, ours was a true-blue sex manual and theirs was a parody of sex manuals — a hilarious send-up of the new “sexologists” on the scene back then, like Freud and his compatriots. And while ours goes into shameless detail (there’s a chapter on fisting, fer chrisakes), their’s never really gets to the sex at all — and that’s its genius.

Simone Racheli’s muscular objects

Artist Simone Racheli gives a new meaning to the term “raw material” with these objects stripped of their “skin.” It wouldn’t be creepy at all to have these around your apartment.

[Via]

Green interior design: Durat

The Finns are renowned for their design aesthetic: while participating in Finnfacts‘ Clean Tech Blogger Tour last week, I spent a lot of time looking at buildings and features, and always noticed the clean, simple, sophisticated sense of design that characterized the built environment. Durat, a 19-year-old Finnish company, attempts to marry that aesthetic with sustainability principles: its polyester-based solid surface materials contain about 30% post-industrial recycled material, and are themselves fully recyclable.

Pill-popping parties

Forget the punch bowl; The medicine cabinet is the new well-stocked bar. Finally, a way to enjoy your favorite cocktails without the hassle having to actually drink them. Russian professor Evgeny Moskalev of Saint Petersburg Technological University has developed a way to turn alcohol into powder and pack it into a pill. Every kind of [...]

Turns out there IS such a thing as too many orgasms

Photos via BeautifulAgony.com

When we first saw the headlines this past week about a woman who has 300 orgasms a day finally meeting the man of her dreams — i.e. a man who could keep up with her libido — we assumed the story would be about Marrena Lindberg, whom we interviewed last year for our U.K. TV show. Lindberg is the author of The Orgasmic Diet: A Revolutionary Plan to Lift Your Libido and Bring You to Orgasm and has persistent sexual arousal syndrome (PSAS), which means that she has hundreds of orgasms a day. Mind you, these aren’t dramatic, Meg Ryan-style orgasms — she demonstrated one for us during the interview (using a photo of Stephen Colbert as her “inspiration,” we shit you not) and after it was over, we had to ask, “Did it happen?” And yes, we were just as awkward as you might expect. Exactly where is the polite place to look when one’s interview subject is in the midst of an orgasm?

Mother(board) of all Mona Lisas

I think Da Vinci, an artist who also had a deep appreciation for science and engineering, would approve if he were to see his famous Mona Lisa painting recreated from pieces of old computer motherboards. This impressive geek art is on display in the lobby of the headquarters of the company ASUS located in Peitou, [...]

Matt Logue’s Empty L.A.

Photographer Matt Logue spent four years documenting Los Angeles’ cityscape devoid of its inhabitants in his series “Empty LA.” The full impact of his project is felt only after viewing more than a few photographs. I think this is an interesting juxtaposition to previously mentioned Benny Chan’s “Traffic” photo project. [Via]

Let them eat divorce cake

We use food to celebrate – or get us through – lots of occasions. There’s candy on Halloween, turkey for Thanksgiving, and cake for birthdays, weddings and now…divorces. That’s right, the newest trend in the cake-making biz is the divorce cake. Yeah, it’s hokey, and I can’t actually imagine anyone signing their divorce papers and heading to the bakery to order a custom cake, but it’s a whole lot more civilized than sitting on the couch with a bag of M&Ms and a gallon of ice cream.

The green economy is dawning

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham recently said at a news conference that “the green economy is coming.” I couldn’t agree with him more. The signs are all around us, from studies that show green jobs are growing 2.5 times faster than conventional jobs to the fact that California’s clean energy industry attracted $6.5 billion in venture capital in the past three years.

These are just the signs from our own shores. From China to Germany, there is no doubt that nations are beginning to see the financial wisdom in preventing the exorbitant costs of global warming by putting clean energy solutions in place now.

The only question that remains is: Will America be a leader in the green economy?

Twilight leaving you hanging? Try vampire erotica.

Depending on whom you ask, the lack of sex in the Twilight saga is either the essence of its appeal or its greatest flaw. If you’re squarely in the latter category, then you might want to turn to the new book The Sweetest Kiss: Ravishing Vampire Erotica, edited by D.K. King, to satisfy your blood lust. It contains all the naughty stuff that the Twilight vampires would probably be getting up to if Stephanie Meyer wasn’t so, you know, Mormon. Here’s a taster (sorry…) from one of the stories in the collection, “Red by Any Other Name” by Kathleen Bradean, which combines S&M and power play with vampire lovin’:

Suntrica’s solar charger: not just cool and wearable

If you follow green gadgets at all, you may have already heard of Finland-based Suntrica‘s solar-powered charger for personal electronics. Numerous blogs wrote about the company and its products last May after the company won second place in the CTIA’s E-Tech Awards‘ “Green – Consumer Hardware” category, and nearly all framed Suntrica’s solar chargers as cool, cutting-edge, green consumer technology.

After listening to a presentation today from company VP of Sales Kenneth J. Jönsson as part of the Finnfacts cleantech blogger tour, I realized the company was meeting one of its marketing goals — receiving recognition from consumers with green values. That’s great… and I’ll definitely enjoy using the charger Suntrica gave to me. But I was even more intrigued by some of the other markets for which the company wanted to create value.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland

Elvis Perkins in Dearland may fit easily into the folk category, but one of the most striking qualities of Perkins’ music is his ability to pull the best from past decades in music history (decades dominated, ironically, by his namesake) and write them, maybe not into a single song, but a singe album, the self-titled “Elvis Perkins in Dearland,” which came out earlier this year. Referencing everything from blues to R&B to good ol’ barnstomping rock ‘n’ roll, Perkins’ performance is as confident as his songwriting. Listening to one of his albums is a bit like taking a step back in time (even his bandmates’ names are old timey: Brigham and Wyndham!); His yips and warbling echo Buddy Holly and some of his lyrics are straight out of the Old Testament, but the effect that all these styles have when played in harmony is a sound all his own.

A story of HIV via Twitter

December 1st was World AIDS Day and it came and went with little attention from the media. You know Tiger Woods is much more important. Anyway. The Huffington Post spotlighted the Twitter feed of Chris MacDonald-Dennis. MacDonald-Dennis is a college dean in Philadelphia. On World AIDS day he fired off 100 tweets, 2,100 words, documenting his life and his HIV infection. It’s pretty moving and keeping in mind Twitter posts are limited to 140 words, the end result, when read chronologically, is like an epic poem. It is full of frank and honest dialogue and also hope. Click below to read the entire day’s posts in order.

World flag

This watermark-looking flag is in fact “an average of all the world’s countries’ flags weighted by population.” We can perhaps welcome our future alien overlords by waving it as a kind of a representative world flag. I’d actually love to see flags blended based on other factors like GDP. Anyway, in contrast this flag is [...]

The Case of the Stolen Climate Emails

On Tuesday, November 17, the webmail server at the University of East Anglia was hacked and a file including over 1,000 emails sent from or sent to members of the Climatic Research Unit at the university was stolen. The emails were posted on several public websites, although the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and posting private correspondence without permission is unethical.

India Pledges to Reduce Carbon Intensity

India will never accept legally binding emission cuts at Copenhagen, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Parliament Thursday, but he did say the government plans to reduce India’s level of “emission intensity” by 20 to 25 percent compared with 2005 levels.

Purdue University Will Test Alternative Fuels for Aircraft

Purdue University will operate a new federally funded facility to test aircraft engines and develop alternative fuels for aircraft in an effort to reduce U.S. reliance on imported oil.

Tilt-shift Hulkmania

Hulkamania from Keith Loutit on Vimeo. Keith Loutit (previously) is back with another terrific tilt-shift video from a Hulkmania wrestling tour featuring Hulk Hogan and Rick Flair fighting to the music of The Wolverines, “Hip Square Dance.”