sundance

GET LOW? Oh no.



I live in a rural area, and as there happens to be more than one ‘small town’ film to choose from these days, I’m thinking about tiny communities in the middle of nowhere and the movies made about them. (Not that I can help thinking about where I live. You really, really cannot hide in a small town. No more walking the dog in my pajamas. No more hiding in the grocery store aisle – because they’ll damn well see you in the parking lot.) Two ‘small town, tragic life’ stories are gone in some areas, still around in others, but I got to see them both – WINTER’S BONE and GET LOW. Oh no.

Oh no. I thought I would love GET LOW. On paper, there’s a lot of good going on – an incredible cast, an indie period piece (rare), the promise of sentiment and wisdom but delivered slowly, cleverly, without the maudlin trappings of Hollywood. What happened? The premise is good enough – Tennessee hermit (Robert Duvall) attempts to stage his own funeral while still living. The performances indeed are very strong, particularly Duvall and Bill Murray as the opportunistic-but-still-lovable funeral director, who says “ass” every other line. But Sissy Spacek is totally underutilized – she simply has nothing to do but wipe away a tear or two. Oh, and she runs across a field at the end.

Green tech finds (9/9/10)

A bee beard for David Cameron, subway energy harvesting, and using search technology to identify endangered species… this week’s green tech finds.

• The Wolverine solar cell: Researchers at MIT actually looked to plants, not the X-Men, when creating a solar cell that “heals” its own UV damage.
  
  
• Tweet for the honey bees: British marketing firm LBi has created a “twittition” (Twitter petition) to support honey bee populations in the UK. Each tweet added to the petition adds a bee to a “bee beard” on a likeness of Prime Minister David Cameron (shown above).
  
  

Archie goes gay

Over at The Daily Beast Barbara Spindel has written a lovely little essay about Archie’s new gay character. While on the surface a gay character in a comic book seems to be really no big deal, it is in fact a big deal. For Archie is an America icon. It is a comic that has [...]

Olafur Eliasson plays architect

Photos by Osbjørn Jacobsen

The Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center in Reykjavik has remained merely a proposal for decades, but now, after Iceland’s recent economic collapse, plans for construction are finally underway and 300,000-square-foot performing arts venue is slated for completion next May. Henning Larsen Architects, who just won a major award for their Zaha Hadid-inspired aquarium in Georgia, took a decidedly more straight-edged approach with their design for Reykjavik’s East Harbor district.

Nobody actually works in LA

No one works, they just create traffic jams. (Photo from RESPRES’ Flickr.)

OOOf. It has been a while. My bad. Truly. I was off in New Orleans hanging with hunky Bayou Boys for a story on BP and the conmen living on Flotels for AOL… Then went to LA to hang with my sisters and tape the voicing for the animation on my MTV show, Grits. LA is so funny. Everyone either thinks I’m going to move there or have already moved there. Which is weird as LA is like my personal purgatory. You try finding someone in that town who isn’t a “producer” (scam artist), “model” (pretty girl with no job), “actress” (hooker), or “realtor” (see model). It’s pretty damn hard. What other city has traffic jams at 3 pm on a Tuesday? No one actually works there! (Says me, typing that shit in and noting the irony).

Military meals from around the world

There are currently 48 different countries with troops in Afghanistan and each country adds their own unique flavor to the combat meals that are served to their troops. Some include branded comfort foods — Australians get a dark-brown spreadable yeast-paste treat called Vegemite, for example — while others get national staples like liverwurst (Germany), or [...]

Scissor Sisters “News” broadcast from US tour

Scissor Sisters are in the middle of the US leg of their tour to support their new album, Night Work, so Scissor Sisters News just released this update: Katy Perry Watches Adam Lambert Make Out with [lead singer] Jake Shears. Check it out to see the silly backstage shenanigans and get some serious kissing tips [...]

Knitted meat

In her free time, Pratt student Stephanie Casper knits these delightful yarn meats that are also PETA friendly. The plastic shrink wraps is a nice final touch. View more on her Flickr site. [Via]

Bob Willoughby and Audrey Hepburn

Shortly before he passed away last year, Hollywood photographer Bob Willoughby signed 1,000 copies of Taschen’s latest release, “Bob Willougby, Audrey Hepburn; Photographs 1953-1966.” Willoughby shot dozens of actors over the course of his career, including Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor, but Hepburn belonged to a small group of “special people,” and he always referred to her as his muse.

The environment as art studio: Nexus’ “Ground Play”

Ground Play: NEXUS at The Schuylkill Center from Jennie Thwing on Vimeo.

Most environmental art exhibits and displays take place in fairly conventional settings: galleries, museums, or coffee shops. Nexus, a Philadelphia-based artist collective, has accepted an invitation from the the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education to use its Brolo Hill Farm site as both studio and exhibition space in order to “consider both the agricultural and cultural conditions that might have existed on the site when the farm was active, and examines the implications of those dynamics in today’s environmental climate.”

James Welling’s Glass House

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is showing James Welling’s Glass House images through March 2011 and it may just be enough to get me to Minnesota before the cold sets in. Welling’s shots of Phillip Johnson’s iconic Connecticut home are a revelation. Using a digital camera and colored filters he recreates the building with new great effect. It’s as if one is peering through stained glass into Johnson’s house. They’re a treat for die-hard modernists like myself.

Super slow motion slap

If you’re having a bad day, I highly recommend you watch this Japanese video of someone (willingly) getting slapped in super slow motion. It’s strangely gratifying. If anyone is interested in recreating this, I’m more than willing to be the cameraman. (Editor’s note: as is often the case with anything in modern pop culture, the [...]

Naked News: A celibate Craigslist; plus, saying the wrong name in bed may be bad for your health

• A recent study claims that there may be a psychological danger to prolonged celibacy.
• Craigslist renames their controversial “Adult Services” section “Censored” and shuts it down — temporarily, we’re assuming, to make a point about free speech. Don’t they know there’s a psychological danger to prolonged celibacy?!

Watch this: Interview with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

From the archives, watch this 10 minute talk by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explaining how he came up with Sherlock Holmes (who was based in part on an old medical professor who was excellent at deductions using his power of observations). The esteemed author however seemed more interested in sharing “the more serious matter” of [...]

Eli Broad gives LA the silent treatment

There are curmudgeonly old men and then there’s Eli Broad, whose secrecy around the design of his LA museum seems to be putting everyone off. First, he wouldn’t reveal the site, then he wouldn’t reveal the architecture firms he was considering and now that he’s chosen one he won’t reveal the design until he breaks ground in the fall. Of course, as a private owner, Broad is under no obligation to reveal any part of his operation, but many in LA claim he’s “making a mockery of the public process,” and that his refusal to share his plans is “a disaster for LA, which will effectively have no say over one of the most important cultural institutions in history.”

National school lunch program comes to the big screen

LUNCH: THE FILM may sound like a spoof of some kind, but filmmaker Avis Gold Richards, and her team at Birds Nest Productions couldn’t be more serious about their exploration of the National School Lunch Program, and its potential connections to childhood obesity, and the illnesses related to it.

The HOWL! Festival brings back the Beatniks

Annually arriving between the Fringe festival of bizarre off-Broadway theater and the New York Film Festival for well-heeled cineastes, the HOWL! Festival is a three-day arts extravaganza in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to the memory of beat poet Allen Ginsberg and presented for nouveaux bohemians who get in free.

But it’s more than just a palate cleanser between fests. HOWL! is a simultaneous throwback and flash-forward that tosses cultural elements together into a giant, jivey be-in for high-def artsy-crafty appreciation. And it starts, aptly enough, with some longtime New York poets (like John Giorno and Anne Waldman) reading Ginsberg’s hallucinatory and historic “Howl” this Friday, September 10, when a whole new audience can decide for themselves if the poem is good-obscene, bad-obscene, or not obscene at all.

Bullet time photography

Dutch photographer Alexander Augusteijn stops time and captures these incredible high-speed photographs of bullets shooting through water drops. He explains: I use a normal flash to achieve very short illuminations. The most critical parameter in this kind of photography is timing, which is achieved by computer control of shutter, flash, valve, gun or whatever other [...]

One-night stands can so lead to beautiful relationships

Before we started writing about sex, we had no idea that so many scientists and researchers spent time so much time studying our sexual proclivities. These days we have trouble thinking of anything sexual that hasn’t been qualified and quantified and written up in a science journal.

Take Ivy finally available!

Until quite recently, very few people knew about “Take Ivy,” a discontinued fashion book of photos published in 1965 with a cult following. I had actually blogged about it a couple years ago when a friend mentioned it. I explained then, “In the late 1960s Japanese photographer Hayashida visited our Ivy League universities and documented [...]

Kids protest farmed frog legs in Virginia

You probably associate frog legs with French cuisine and its offshoots (they’re pretty popular in Southern Louisiana where I grew up)… but the United States is challenging France as the world’s leader in frog eating. That’s happening, in large part, because some restaurant chains now carry frog legs… which they generally import from farms in China.

Sukkah City

During Sukkot, the annual Jewish festival, families build a sukkah, a booth-like temporary housing structure where they live out the week as a reminder of the nomadic homes the ancient Israelites lived in during their 40 year Exodus. Per the Bible story, the sukkahs are traditionally wilderness structures, and are often decorated with branches and leaves in an autumnal theme.

New Banksy: Oil covered dolphin is for the children

Banksy stepped away from the stencil street art with this children’s dolphin ride that’s was given the BP treatment and placed at Brighton Pier. Watch a video of it in action here.

Watch this: Hunter S Thompson and Hell’s Angel biker on TV talk show

Unearthed from the time capsule, the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcasting channel uploaded to YouTube this televised segment from a 1967 talk show of an angry Hell’s Angel gang member confronting a smoking Hunter S. Thompson following the publication of his book “Hell’s Angels.” It sure was a different time back then: the studio audience’s [...]

Signing out with Josef Schulz

I’m guessing Waffle House

Josef Schulz has exhibited only once in the US, but that doesn’t mean the Dusseldorf-based photographer hasn’t made his mark in the international art scene. In fact he’s made his mark by removing the marks of big, brand-name companies and showing the form that remains once the logos are gone. “Sachliches,” one of his earliest series, shows what hulking box-like structures big name retail stores really are once their signs are digitally removed. Earlier this year, Schulz debuted his latest series, “Sign Out,” a clever look at fast-food and gas station signage. See if you can guess them all.