sundance

Secret Richard Serra sculpture in the Bronx

As a huge fan of Richard Serra’s installations, I found this recent New York Times article interesting: Hidden away in a crane yard in South Bronx are one and a half story high steel pieces of an unfinished Richard Serra sculpture. Whether art or art-to-be, it is striking just the same. Seen from the lot [...]

“Immaterial” at Ballroom Marfa

“Untitled” by Julie Mehretu

If you’ve never been to Marfa, the small Texas town three hours away from the nearest city with enough people to call a population, you’ve probably heard of it by now. Donald Judd ring a bell? At the helm of its art scene is Ballroom Marfa, which helped fund the famous 2005 sculpture “Prada Marfa” and has played host to a number of artists and musicians since it opened in 2003, including Grizzly Bear, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective, to name just a few.

Green tech finds (9/30/10)

Solar ivy, French hybrids, and green cheese… your weekly green tech finds.

• Are smart grids smart for cities?: Stephen Hammer at Harvard Business Review wonders if smart grid technology is the most efficient way to make our cities more sustainable.
  
  
• New portal features green tech ready for funding: Looking for a green technology investment opportunity? The US Department of Energy’s new Technology Commercialization Portal features over 200 marketing summaries of technologies ready for investment or licensing. (via Environmental Leader)
  
  

Kylie Covers Hurts

The other day I wrote about the band Hurts, who are taking Europe by storm. Cementing their status as European it-boys, and new gay icons, the band got a boost this week when the Australian pint-sized-pop-princess (and Europe’s Madonna) Kylie Minogue covered their single “Wonderful Life.” live on the BBC. It’s a lovely reading of [...]

How to study sex without being a sucker

As regular readers of this blog will know, one of our pet peeves is when scientific research about sex and love gets twisted and “re-interpreted” and boiled down and sexed up to make a juicy magazine or newspaper headline. (And yes, we have definitely been guilty of this tendency ourselves, at times. You try resisting when a guy in a lab coat studies sex in socks!) Which is why we love the newish column in the NY Times Style section by Pamela Paul, called “Studied.” Each week Paul takes a new study that is making the rounds — this week it was research showing that economically dependent men are more likely to cheat on their female partners — and attempts to unpack it. And — get this — Paul doesn’t necessarily take the each study’s findings at face value. Isn’t that what they used to call “journalism”?

An artist’s salute to Italian bankers

Self-taught, provocative artist Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture titled “L.O.V.E” recently arrived and was installed in front of the Italian stock exchange in Milan. The artist donated it as a gift to the city, which politely refused it. However, it will be on display for 10 days. View more photos, including its unveiling at DesignBoom.

Runway sizzle: photos from New York and Milan

Have you been checking out all the action and coverage on FullFrontalFashion.com recently?

Loneliest dollar bill

My attempt at finding out the original source of this dollar bill sent me down into an inconclusive Tumblr reblogging rabbit hole. If you know who made this, let us know in comments, but in the meantime I really like this visual representation of the adage “money can’t buy happiness.” [Via]

Green documentary maker asks “What does sustainability mean?”.. after failing to live it

“Young, creative, passionate college student wants to save the world…” Having been in this line of work for years now, I’ve received multiple emails that could’ve used some variation on those words for a subject line. So, when Caroline Savery first got in touch with me in 2008 about her Sust Enable project, a documentary series that would feature her efforts to live in a 100% sustainable manner, the usual two conflicting thoughts arose: “How inspiring!” and “Good luck with that…”

Amy Fisher’s Porn Career

Amy Fisher, best known as the “Long Island Lolita” when her affair with Joey Buttafuoco helped scores of tabloid magazines survive the recession in the early 90′s, announced she has signed a deal with an adult video company to star in eight X rated films. Underage affair with Joey Buttafuoco, 7 years in prison for [...]

Italy steps out of the dark ages of energy

Photo by Dave Yoder for NYT

In THE AMERICAN, George Clooney’s character hides away in an Italian village so remote that the only means of recreation are the church and the whorehouse, and the nearest public phone is a half-day’s drive away. The town, located in the Abruzzo province, could double for Tocco da Casauria, one of Italy’s oldest towns as well as the site of its latest advancements in renewable energy.

Most amazing cowboy boots ever

Fall has definitely arrived in New York City, which means that many women (and a couple guys I know) are dusting off their much maligned Ugg boots. As an alternative piece of footwear, I’m really hoping this cowboy boots-slash-sneaker hybrid catches on this season.

1908 camera lens captures NYC today

With the assistance of a mad Russian lens technician, photographer Timur Civan attached a vintage “Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand cranked cinema camera lens” circa 1908 onto his Canon EOS 5D Mark II. He then roamed Manhattan taking photos and instantly transported New York City back to a pre-digital era.

Stephen Colbert: environmental activist

If you haven’t heard of the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative before, no worries… neither had I (and I watch out for these things). But, while most of us have been watching for news of climate change legislation out of Washington (that’s still hung up), President Obama launched this effort “…to promote and support innovative community-level efforts to conserve outdoor spaces and to reconnect Americans to the outdoors” back in April. There have been listening sessions around the country all Summer long. And now, the deadline for a report from the the Secretaries of the Interior and of Agriculture, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is coming due (on November 15th).

Hurts so good

Hurts is the band that is taking Europe by storm and you’ve probably never heard of them. In traditional music industry fashion, we here in the US are kept out of the loop of emerging bands. Don’t worry, Hurts will eventually get here, since the conquer the rest of the world. The album Happiness is this year’s best.

Rolex presents THE YOUNG LAUREATES: Jacob Colker

Jacob Colker In 2008 Jacob Colker co-founded The Extraordinaries with a simple mission: making volunteerism less daunting to working people.  Colker understood that many people wanted to give their free time but were intimidated by the complexity of finding causes. And through his own experience, he knew that most nonprofits needed all the unpaid help [...]

Month at the Museum

Your new home: The Museum of Science and Industry

Remember reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler as a kid and how badly it made you want to sneak into a museum and stay overnight? The only question was whether it would be the art museum, the science museum, the natural history museum or the aquarium. If the science museum was your pick and the dream is still alive, you’ll be very envious of the winner of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s “Month at the Museum.”

Tilt-shift Van Gogh

Artcyclopedia applies one of our favorite little gimmicky photo tricks, tilt-shift photography, to Vincent van Gogh’s rich paintings, which lends itself quite well to this technique. The results are quite stunning. [Via]

Books: Our Bodies, Our Junk

You wait your whole life for a book making fun of hippie seventies sex manuals and then, boom, two come along in a month — what are the odds? But only one of them includes the top five pastry-related euphemisms for female genitalia, and only one of them includes a suggested list of effective safe words, including “rhubarb” and “I went to Camp Sea Gull in North Carolina.” And it’s even got line drawings, too. We’re talking about Our Bodies Our Junk, a new book by five hilarious guys (alums of The Daily Show and The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, amongst others) who write under the guise of the Association for the Betterment of Sex. Our friend Todd Levin agreed to represent the ABS for a few of our only-slightly-insecure questions. (His co-writers are Scott Jacobson, Jason Roeder, Mike Sacks, and Ted Travelstead.)

EM & LO: You guys aren’t making fun of us, right? You’re just making fun of stuffy old seventies sex manuals…

THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE BETTERMENT OF SEX: Why does it always have to be about you? We were definitely inspired by all those 1970s sex manuals our (liberal) parents had lying around — the ones featuring tasteful pen and ink drawings of hippies going down on each other.

Shipwrecked “Sea Nymph”

Hey, LA friends, go check out the Machine Project’s shipwrecked “Sea Nymph” by Josh Beckman. Beckman’s installation is up until October 8. [Via]

Organic coffee shop funds fair trade… and missionary work

When you hear the phrase “mission-driven business,” you likely think of a company dedicated exclusively to using commerce to address social and environmental problems. That’s definitely the case with A Cup of Organic, a coffee company and cafe based outside of Tampa, Florida. But the owners of this company take the word “mission” much more literally, too: all devout Christians, they devote a portion of their profits to funding missionary work.

What in the hell do I pack for Kenya?

Hanging out with a giraffe in Nairobi — last year.

The question of this week, as I leave for Kenya on Thursday: What in the hell to pack?

Fun fact: The dreaded tsetse fly’s favorite color (the color of luuuurve, apparently) is blue. So there go jeans. OR do I wear jeans and spray the hell out of them with Deet and risk having three-headed babies — even though I am not dating and nowhere near having a baby, much less a three-headed one… You see? The problems we unemployed have!

I also wonder: What to wear to a restaurant called Carnivore? It’s like the TGI Fridays/Edible Epcot Center of Nairobi, but instead of serving cheese sticks and chicken wings, they serve shit like: Zebra, Gnu, Wildebeest, Wart hog and Hippo. Basically, if you want to see it, they will serve it to you so you can also eat it… the full African experience, if you will. No pun intended. Apparently, Wart hog, being of the pig family, is very good. Hippo is supposed to be insanely fatty and semi-disgusting. All I know is I’m going the second night I’m there so it better not make me sick for the rest of the trip. Speaking of which, I better go to Duane Reade and stock up on some Pepto Bismol. So, do I go safari chic and pretend I killed my meal myself? Do I slurp down ostrich soup under a pith helmet?

Update: Renzo Piano’s LACMA

When Eli Broad first invited starchitect Renzo Piano to enter the competition to make sense of LACMA’s chaotic cluster of buildings in 2001, Piano declined, adding that “it’s very frustrating to play a good piece by a string quartet in the middle of three badly played rock concerts.” Ouch, take that, weird clump of old LACMA buildings. Soon after, Rem Koolhaas’ design was chosen, a ballsy plan that involved demolishing most of LACMA’s existing structures and building new galleries. Luckily, Broad and Co. came to their senses, threw out Koolhaas’ ridiculous idea and begged Piano to reconsider.

Creator of “I Heart NY” presents two new variations

The New York Times recently asked readers to submit their own version of the iconic “I Heart NY” icon, but with the twist of remixing it with other brands and logos. You can view the submissions here online. YMMV (your mileage may vary) as some of them are terrific and others…terrible. The 81-year-old design guru [...]

Was Facebook created just to help a geek get a girl?

According to the movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK (in theaters October 1st; we got a sneak preview last week), Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg –portrayed brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg — was just trying to prove himself cool when he created the site while he was still a student at Harvard. He was a geek who couldn’t get the girl and couldn’t get into Harvard’s most exclusive social clubs and parties, and so he sought out to accumulate friends — or “friends” — the new-fangled way. Oh, and also, he might have kinda sorta “appropriated” the idea from some rich jock guys at Harvard. Though the best line in the movie, in Zuckerberg’s defense, spoken by Eisenberg (and possibly invented by script writer Aaron Sorkin), is this: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”