sundance

Skate Fails

Spanish artists Apparatu and Alex Trochut created a series of comically unusable and distorted skateboards made from ceramic.

Sundance Deals: THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED

The Sundance Film Festival is still more than a week away, but the festival-film deal-making has already begun. Roadside Attractions has snapped up the U.S. theatrical rights to Jim Kohlberg’s THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED, which will premiere on Sundance’s opening night, Deadline.com reports. The film, based on a case-study essay by Dr. Oliver Sacks called [...]

Sundance Watch List: FAMILY PORTAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE

If you think your home is chaotic and your family connections complex and emotionally fraught, consider the household of Olga Nenya, the subject of Julia Ivanova’s FAMILY PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE, which will be featured in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition. In a small Ukrainian Village, Nenya is single-handedly raising [...]

Pogo’s SNOW WHITE music remix

Pogo aka Nick Bertke is a favorite at here at SunFiltered (previously) for his ambient electro-pop musical creations built from the sounds of popular classic movies. In case you missed it, here’s his recent one using Disney’s SNOW WHITE.

Coworking spaces thriving in San Diego

Early last month, I got the opportunity to spend some time at Ecohub, a green-focused coworking space developed by old friend Yeves Perez and partners. Opened last Spring, Ecohub is thriving, and has served as home to 27 green businesses and “in-kind” partners since its launch.

It turns out that the concept itself is taking wings in SoCal: SignOn San Diego reported yesterday that many building owners are looking at coworking spaces as a way to make use of (and take rent from) otherwise unoccupied offices and suites. So far, six companies now offer shared space for budding entrepreneurs… and while not all green focused, you could argue that the coworking concept itself is quite green in the sense that it allows these tenants to share resources — from utilities to office machines to the existing buildings themselves — that they might otherwise procure on their own.

Ferocious Battle of the Bands in Downtown NYC

For nine years, M.E.A.N.Y. Fest has lured me to judge their intense rock band competition finals by promising free chicken wings, some Diet Cokes, and a chance to make life-changing decisions about something I know almost nothing about—music!

It’s kind of intoxicating to sit there, all greasy faced, caffeinated, and devoid of any real credentials, and get to pick which of four bands deserves to win recording and performance time, not to mention a free guitar and probably some chicken wings and soda too, for all I know.

Two artists: going in, going out

It’s getting to be that time – Golden Globes coming this weekend; non-stop awards season chatter until February. I happened to be watching LAUREL CANYON the other night, and seeing Christian Bale in that 2002 Lisa Cholodenko flick; I started thinking about these two artists, then and now. They currently exist in the same universe once again for said upcoming awards madness, as Bale makes a hard Method-acting hit with THE FIGHTER and Cholodenko goes the emotional distance with THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT. Both artists have made enviable progress in their careers since they were splashing around the pool in LAUREL CANYON (well, Bale splashed; Cholodenko ostensibly was at the monitor, poolside). While Bale has continued to take his craft outward, going beyond his typical detached cool-guy role (think AMERICAN PSYCHO), Cholodenko has successfully traveled even further in, going deeper into the modern American psyche with regard to family and love. Outward and inward – it’s inspiring.

Sundance Film Festival follow up: RESTREPO

The Korengal Valley is one of the most dangerous areas in Afghanistan, so dangerous, in fact, that it’s known amongst soldiers as “the deadliest place on Earth.” It’s also the setting of RESTREPO, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary on the Second US Platoon that was stationed there for 14-months between May [...]

Sundance Film Festival follow up: WINTER’S BONE

When I say that WINTER’S BONE has swept up since its debut in Park City, I’m not just tooting my own Sundance horn. This low-budget wonder has wowed audiences and critics alike in a big way, nabbing the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, along with a recent Best Film [...]

Zombie figurines

UK artist Jessica Harrison’s ceramic figurine series feature dainty ladies that are…ZOMBIES. As one blog noted, it’s very Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

Naked News: Pantsless in the city, and why eating carrots makes you more attractive

• New Yorkers strip to their undies to celebrate the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride.
  
  
• Spanish Catholic calendar features Easter-themed near-nudes to raise funds for youth group.
  
  

Vimeo of the Week: The Art of Drowning

The Art of Drowning from Diego Maclean on Vimeo. In the above video, THE ART OF DROWNING, filmmaker and animator Diego Maclean brings to life the poem of the same name written by Billy Collins. Collins also reads the verse here on the film, a tale of what one sees when their life flashes before [...]

Sundance Film Fest to debut free, high-speed Wi-Fi

Exciting news for anyone heading to the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and looking forward to the movies and events but dreading the Internet and cell-phone glitchiness the festival has also become known for. Premiering at this year’s festival: Free, reliable high-speed Wi-Fi. The Wall Street Journal reports: To improve the overall festival experience (and encourage [...]

Sundance Watch List: FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT REVISITED

Amid the short films set to debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival is on FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT REVISITED, directed and written by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. Though information about the film is limited – “After the boys leave the party …” is the only description currently available — there are a several reasons [...]

Novel theme: women running from houses

Women Running From Houses is a blog devoted to book covers, many from “60′s and 70′s Gothic romance novels,” which depicts women running from houses. The woman behind the blog, who analyzes in depth each cover she features, explains, ” So that I don’t drive my husband too crazy (or distract him too long from [...]

Star 1973

In 1973 the magazine Star launched. Star covered LA’s groupie scene. After five issues in five months the magazine ceased publication. It was gone forever.

In 2011 Ryan Richardson tracked down the original issues. He paid handsomely for them and then put their entire contents online for viewing. He’s a historian; he’s a collector.

Gabby Giffords: Congress’ voice for solar power

No doubt most of us are still experiencing some shock after Saturday’s mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, which took the lives of six people, and wounded 14, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Dignitaries from President Obama to Arizona governor Jan Brewer have spoken highly of Giffords’ work ethic, passion, and common-sense approach to policy.

Research shows a woman’s tears kill a man’s libido

Scientists have long pondered the mystery of why humans, unlike other species, cry emotional tears. A new study provides a few answers — as well as raising a whole bunch of new questions. Basically, researchers found that men who sniffed drops of women’s emotional tears became less sexually aroused than when they sniffed a saline solution that had been dribbled down women’s cheeks. The sexual arousal was measured in a number of ways, including testosterone levels, skin responses, brain imaging and also self-reporting (i.e. this study wasn’t just a bunch of guys claiming that “teary chicks are a boner killer”).

Rare half of a stamp sold at auction for $347,500

This extremely rare 1872 postage stamp – correction: half of a postage stamp! – was auctioned off in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany for $347,500. Explanation: “Stamps were in short supply in Syke between 1872 and 1874 so it was decided that they should be cut in half as a makeshift solution,” she said. “But because this was [...]

Sundance Watch List: BENAVIDES BORN

How did a couple of New Yorkers, Daniel Meisel and Amy Wendel, end up making a movie about a young, female third-generation Mexican-American high school athlete whose chances of breaking out of her small south Texas town are pinned on winning the state powerlifting championship? As part of its ongoing series of interviews with 2011 [...]

Sundance Watch List: Lou Reed’s RED SHIRLEY

Lou Reed has a reputation as a tough interview – though I honestly found him charming when I sat down with him a few years back – but in his new short film, RED SHIRLEY, which will have a special screening at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, the veteran rock star gets a taste of [...]

Sundance Watch List: LIFE IN A DAY

Something to seriously look forward to from the Sundance Film Festival, whether you’re headed to Park City or not, is the LIFE IN A DAY project, which promises to tell “the story of a single day on Earth.” How, exactly, does it plan to do that? OK, here’s the deal. A while back, the project’s [...]

Jeff Tweedy’s (of Wilco) son writes awesome math-related song

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s 14-year-old son Spencer wrote and recorded “Single Digits (Put a line on it),” a brilliant math-related spoof of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” for his Algebra class project. There’s so much geekiness in this. I love it. Five on your left and Five on your right and Ten on your lit­tle bitty toes [...]

YouTube-inspired art

Anyone that’s dealt with trying to access YouTube while on slow bandwidth is familiar with the spinning loading screen. For most of us that’s a source of frustration. For Dutch artist Helmut Smits it’s a source of artistic inspiration as seen here in his piece “YouTube (Staring at the Wall)” which is formed from different [...]

Love is binary, and other parenting myths

If you’re a faithful reader of SUNfiltered, then you know we love us a good Ted Talk. So we were thrilled to discover that the two of us were in one! Well, just a fleeting picture of us, but we’ll take what we can get. Our old boss, Nerve.com-founder Rufus Griscom, went on to found [...]