sundance

Rainn Wilson tweets for LACMA

In an effort to broaden their reach, LACMA has enlisted the twittering service of Rainn Wilson, whose own Twitter feed is one of the most popular on the site. His campaign is called “I HATE LACMA” and includes tweets like “LACMA isn’t nearly as cool as the African American museum down the street, BLACMA,” and “My new sculpture is displayed in the 2nd floor mens room. It’s made of feces and shaped like a big poo.”

Orange County’s Project Playhouse features green building for kids

Playhouses have apparently come a long ways since I was a kid: the wooden posts and chicken wire structure my uncle built at my grandmother’s house has given way to small cottages featuring “flat screen TVs, entertainment systems and video game players.”

Yep, sounds more like mini-mancaves as opposed to spaces for kids to exercise their imagination, but at least one group of architects and builders sees the luxury playhouse concept as an environmental education tool. The Ocean Adventure Lab, designed, built, and supported by LPA, Inc., Turner Construction, ProRepro, and Tangram Interiors, features “…a working wave tank, microscopes, oceanography books, a working projector featuring underwater sea creatures, and a Playstation 2.”

Andrew Bird plays the Guggenheim

Before musician Andrew Bird stepped onto the small stage at the bottom of the Guggenheim rotunda for the second installation of their Dark Sounds summer concert series, the packed crowd had a chance to peruse a field of Victrola-style speakers arranged into groupings of 3-foot tall ‘hornlings’ and a few impressive 8-footers, playing the sounds of crickets. The brightly-colored mouths of the speakers – red, orange, gold – took on the feel of a garden at sunset and transformed what was essentially a bunch of amplifiers into an audiovisual landscape of organic forms.

Marriage = an institution free from state-mandated gender roles

Everyone’s saying you’ve just got to read the full text of Judge Vaughn Walker’s overturning of Prop 8 in California last Wednesday — apparently it’s a page turner! You can view it here in full. We admit, we haven’t yet read the whole thing ourselves, but thanks to Rachel Maddow, we were apprised of one [...]

Peek into Mad Men’s closet

My roommates finally got me hooked on Mad Men and like everyone else I’ve become quickly obsessed with the clothing, especially those suits (God, those lapels: Drool!). This video of Mad Men’s costume designer Janie Bryant giving a tour of the closets of Don and Co. is a treat for any fan of the show. [...]

Photos of contraband items seized at JFK

What you see above is just a small sample set of illegal items detained or seized at JFK airport from passengers and express mail entering the United States. Over a span of five days Taryn Simon snapped 1,075 photos of contraband stuff. The New York Times has a nice interactive page with some of these [...]

Strippers, hookers, mud wrestling… My kind of shit

Photo from the Louisiana shores (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Karl is once again furious — I went back to New Orleans… without him. I was going down to check out the BP command center outside of Houma, LA, and do some digging around — I had heard stories of strippers, hookers, mud wrestling… you [...]

Interview With Filmmakers Annie and Lisa of SPARKS

Image from SPARKS

Sundance Channel presents SPARKS, an ALL NEW digital series premiering Monday, August 9th.

Equal parts absurdist comedy, mystery, and documentary, SPARKS is a web-based serial about humans and technology. The story follows 30 year-old Sarah Sparks in her quest to serve the tech-dependent citizenry of New York as a freelance technologist.
Her special “connection” with technology, however, takes her far beyond simple repair jobs, and into both the lives of her clients as well as some of the city’s darkest, most chaotic corners.

Filmmakers Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson provided us with this digital exchange.

FULL FRONTAL FASHION highlights

Looks from the new Thomsen collection No matter how busy you were this week, we are sure you took a moment to check out Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. Find out what Lynn Yaeger had to say about the glamours event. Check out Thomsen; A chic little collection – easy, breezy, calm, and cool. Almost Parisian, nearly [...]

Before TWILIGHT: the history of the vampire at BAM

While the vampires of today are cute enough for gaggles of teenage girls (and many full-grown women too, I’ve heard) to hang posters of on their bedroom walls, the original vampires were actually meant to instill fear. Hence the long, sharp nails, the carnivorous teeth, the goblin-like ears and the dead white face of Nosferatu, the guy who started it all in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece of German expressionism, NOSFERATU, A SYMPHONY OF HORROR.

Cazwell’s Ice Cream Truck

If you’re like me, with a hankering for ice cream, primary colors, and Latino go-go boys, then you’re going to love, love, love the above video. It is almost safe for work. I said almost. Cazwell is a gay white rapper and a NYC-nightlife fixture. Typically he’s seen running around town with Amanda Lepore. But [...]

Chalkboard street art

Brooklyn real estate-centric blog Brownstoner posted this chalkboard cleverly placed at a construction site on Bond and Degraw. I predict that a genius construction worker will anonymously write the solution to a previously never solved math problem on this chalkboard. How do you like them apples?

A conspiracy theory about “Rubicon”

If you’re a fan of the first two episodes of AMC’s new conspiracy thriller series, Rubicon, what you probably like is what makes it different from your typical television drama: its slow pace, its subtlety, its intelligence, its lack of glitzy pizazz, even its muted colors. Well, that’s why we like it. And it’s why there was one element of the second episode that was so out of sync with this vibe we just couldn’t get past it: the assistant’s cleavage.

You Gotta Have Another: Every smoking scene in Mad Men

Whirled, a nifty looking creative ad agency in San Fran compiled every smoking scene in Mad Men, seasons 1 through 3 (total of 39 episodes), into a single YouTube video that will leave us non-smokers feeling nauseous. This video will have one of two results. This repetitious, perfunctory and seemingly pointless act of inhaling smoke [...]

Green tech finds (8/5/10)

NASCAR, bicycles, and recycled guns… your green tech finds for the week.

• It all started with the bicycle: Trade pub Mechanical Engineering sings praises to the bicycle… not only as an engineering breakthrough for its time, but also as a “platform” for other transportation developments.
  
  
• NASCAR goes solar: Well, sort of… the Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania now operates the tenth-largest solar farm in the US (and the biggest of any sports arena in the world).
  
  

The Windowfarms Project

The Gourmet Kit – for serious window farmers only

Farmers markets may be in full bloom now, but in only a few months we’ll be back to buying our fruits and vegetables from the regular market, and if you’ve eaten a tomato from a regular market recently you know how hard this switch can be. In addition to the carbon footprint a tomato from Australia carries, think about how much flavor and nutritional value it loses during shipment. But what if you could grow your own vegetables in your window all winter long? I’m not talking about a couple of pots of basil, but up to 25 different varieties of vegetables. All you need is a window.

Put A Egg On It

Put A Egg On It #2 from Put A Egg On It on Vimeo.

The makers of Put A Egg On It, the quirky zine about food, are not your typical foodies. Sarah Keough and Ralph McGinnis are artists, not food writers. But the coupling of their unique design sensibilities with the subject matter of food has created a rather unique zine. It’s like The Joy of Cooking for poor Brooklynites. It’s smart, easy to look at, and funny. And it has bean recipes!

Life through the lens of a Polaroid

In 1979 Jamie Livingston, a “a New York-based photographer, film-maker and circus performer,” received a Polaroid camera. Soon after, he began a project where he snapped one Polaroid photo a day. This continued every day for 18 years until October 25, 1997 when he passed away from cancer. The photos were eventually organized by friends [...]

Sex ed video game is ALMOST a really good idea

Okay, we admit it: When we first read about an abstinence video game in development down in Florida, we were ready to jump all over what a ridiculous idea it was. As if abstinence-only education needed to be removed even further from reality! As if abstinence-only education really deserved another $434,000 federal dollars! Etc.

The fight for armrest supremacy begins!

Christoph Niemann’s latest illustrated piece “Red Eye” in the New York Times pokes fun at the familiar hassles of flight travel (fighting for armrest real estate and bad food), but with an injection of Niemann’s unique sense of humor that is punctuated by his sketches. Speaking of airplanes, have you seen this Salvador Dali inspired [...]

Certified green cleaning: Design for the Environment

If you’re shopping for energy efficient appliances, you know to look for the ENERGY STAR label. If you’re looking for bath fixtures, toilets, or shower heads, Water Sense gives you insight into the most water-efficient products. And the new EPEAT label provides a standard for multiple environmental attributes of home electronics.

These government-created or supported certifications help with bigger-ticket purchases… but what about day-to-day items that can impact you home environment (as well as the natural environment), and possibly your family’s health? Turns out there’s a certification program for those kinds of products, too. The Environmental Protection Agencies Design for the Environment program has largely flown under the radar since its founding in 1992, and the launch of its certification label in 1997; in those eighteen years, though, DfE has certified more than 2000 industrial and consumer products for high health, safety, and environmental standards, including cleaning products, inks, car care, and odor removal products.

The Original MAD Men: Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragones in “Strokes of Genius” on Sundancechannel.com

World renowned cartoonists Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragones have been part of “The Usual Gang of Idiots” at MAD Magazine for over 40 years and their amazing work continues to this day with Jaffee’s “Fold-Ins” and Aragones’ Marginals.  These video interviews offer an insight into their work, artistic influences and careers at MAD Magazine.  Watch [...]

New York’s first passive house

For the last two years architect Dennis Wedlick has been redesigning the cave. A cave, Wedlick explains, is the perfect metaphor for building a passive house: “One continuous material provides super insulation with only one energy-leaking opening.”

Just over a month ago, Wedlick raised the frame of his cave-inspired design, a 3-bedroom house on the Hudson, which, when completed, will be New York’s very first passive house. That’s kind of a startling figure, but “there are only about 10 certified passive projects in the entire country,” Wedlick says, “but something like 10,000 in Germany. That really tells you how far behind we are on sustainability.”

The past and present

Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov overlays pictures, with the assistance of Photoshop, from World War II with their locations in Europe today, and the effect as you can see above is pretty neat. His photos reminds me of this Flickr pool that I blogged about here last year. [Via]

Pag: The Lady Is Dead

The above video directed by Roy Raz features imagery fit for a Lady Gaga video. However, where Gaga’s creations are filled with product placements, this one seems more real. Well, as real as a video full of unreal images can feel. What is shown here is nothing new. Homo-eroticism coupled with costumes and characters of freaks. It’s [...]