sundance

Baltimore Candies

The new issue of the zine Put A Egg On It, the one with Justin Bond on the cover, is out now. I was asked to contribute an essay about an independent food brand from my hometown. I chose Goetze’s Caramel Creams, a true Maryland classic. Enjoy the essay and grab up a copy of the zine. It’s an eclectic mix of people, food, and stories.

Japan relief poster

While the world watches the devastation occurring in Japan right now the design community is responding. All over Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr graphic artists are creating visual designs intended to encourage giving and help. The best I’ve found so far is W+K’s poster. Combining the flag of Japan with the cross symbol, the poster is [...]

All-purpose gift wrap paper

This “universal wrapping paper” designed by Fabio Milito and Francesca Guidotti is brilliant, especially for those of us who think the extra step of buying a card is too much to bother. With a crossword set up, this gift wrap paper “covers” all major holidays, occasions and recipients.

“Sex in America with Lisa Ling”

At least, that’s what Ling’s new show on OWN (Oprah’s new tv network) should be called, instead of “Our America with Lisa Ling.” After all, four of the first five episodes focus on matters of sexuality: There’s “Pray the Gay Away,” which looks at the conflicts between Christianity and homosexuality; “Transgendered Lives,” which profiles several different people who were born in the wrong body; “The State of Sex Offenders” which takes a look at criminals once they’re out of jail; and tonight at 10pm “Online Brides,” which we’re guessing (from the promos) follows men to foreign lands who are in search of love (read: paid-for sex slaves). The first three (which we’ve seen) all take a very personal and intimate look at how these issues are affecting real people — it’s fascinating stuff, all shot very cinematically.

Cleaning up after Mardi Gras

(Patrick Semansky) MSNBC’s Photoblog has some morning after Mardi Gras pictures from this year’s event. Captain Obvious made the observation: Dang, that’s a lot of beads! I like how the guy in the photo above apparently didn’t get the last call memo. If you haven’t been to this wonderful city then do so in the [...]

Sculptor Ron van der Ende’s big Armory splash

As the excitement of this year’s Armory Show fades, a few stand-out artists have managed to keep a buzz going. Ron van der Ende is one such artist, easily making a name for himself with his eye-catching wall-mounted sculptures. The Netherlands-based artist is represented in the US by the Seattle gallery Ambach & Rice, which showed a series of his signature bas-relief sculptures made form salvaged wood. What is perhaps most remarkable about these pieces that van der Ende doesn’t paint over or alter the color of the wood in any way; He uses it in its original state, chopping of hunks and rearranging them into photo-realistic mosaics.

Beyond Earth Hour: three days of digital silence?

Could you go for three days without your phone? Internet access? Game console? Television? For most of our work and lifestyles, this seems like an impossibility: digital connection is often essential to our productivity, and, to some degree, our sense of connection.

Yet that’s what one small campaign is suggesting. Digital Silence started in January, and has now set March 26-28th as suggested dates for disconnecting, going offline, and “reconnecting with reality.” While complete disconnection may be completely impossible for many of us — do you really want to have your cell phone off if the kids are out? — the founders of this effort suggest picking some element of you digital life to forgo, and using that time for genuine person-to-person and community connection…

Photographer to watch: Annie Collinge

It’s difficult to pin London-born, Brooklyn-based photographer Annie Collinge into one specific category of photography. Her range is wide and includes portraiture, landscape, still life and fashion editorial – and she does each well. She’s photographed Malcom Gladwell, Nico Muhly and Stephen Jones and creates the most imaginative and playful still lifes for accessories pages in fashion mags I’ve ever seen. She also has a great blog where she posts photos of fleeting and humorous street shots form her travels as well as around her neighborhood in New York.

Incentive to do your Kegels

Here”s a cool new toy: vibrating dual balls that you can control the incremental speeds of via your PC muscles! It’s basically a “squeeze me” toy you control from the inside (you can manipulate it manually too, if you’re a lazy twat). The Vanity Vr1 by Jopen, part of their whole cool Vanity series, is an external bullet toy and internal kegelcisor in-one that has all the key features of quality toys we like to recommend:

Paris Fashion Week

Sonia Rykiel Fall 2011 by FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/GettyImages Designers brought out the big guns for Paris Fashion Week Fall 2011. See all the bold colors, patterns, fur and more from the Parisian catwalks. FaceHunter brings you nightlife and style from the city of lights. Spring is in the air, which means it’s time to pick out [...]

NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell

Discos29 – NY77 – The Coolest Year In Hell from Veintinueve on Vimeo.

Watch this film if you love New York or music. It’s eye-opening.

Many music genres emerged from NYC in the late 1970s: dance, hip-hop, punk. This wonderful film dissects the politics of 1977 and the emergence of those music genres, which, to this day, shape and inspire most popular music. Also thrown in is a history of being a minority, race and sexuality, in Manhattan during the time.

“Til death do us part” ring

What do you get when you cross a brass knuckle with a wedding ring? Answer: Kate Bauman’s “Til Death Do Us Part by.”

For NatGeo, things are looking UP

Let’s start the weekend on an UP note with the National Geographic Channel’s brightly colored balloon launch. Inspired by the premise of the 2009 Pixar film UP, the makers of the NatGeo series “How Hard Can It Be?” decided to see whether it was possible and what it would take to launch a house into the air with the aid of only a bundle of balloons. Usually things exist in animation because they’re impossible to achieve in real life, but as you can see in the pictures the balloon launch was successful.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Now that Oscar season has come and gone, we can all relax a bit and not drown in the complete saturation. On movies, I’m simply able to reflect more clearly. One opportunity came recently, after pondering TRUE GRIT and watching Jeff Bridges do his friendly guy thing on the red carpet– I popped in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and gave it a whirl (Criterion released it on blu-ray in December). I reflected – what a career Jeff Bridges has had. And what an ensemble cast – particularly the wonderful Timothy Bottoms. It’s worth going back to.

When sex hurts…and we don’t mean heartbreak

We’ve been writing about sex for more than ten years, and when we started out, the topic that our female readers wanted to hear about most was orgasms — how to have them (either solo or with a partner), how to have them more often, how to have different kinds, how to have them simultaneously with a partner, how to stop faking them, and so on. Well, the Big O is still a favorite topic, but these days it practically ties with another topic: painful sex. (And we’re not talking about the attending heartbreak, though consistent physical pain during intercourse can itself be heartbreaking, of course.) We don’t necessarily think that sex is suddenly more painful for women, but rather that it’s becoming more acceptable to talk about the fact that, for women especially, sometimes sex can hurt like a motherfucker…not to put too fine a point on it. But too many women still fail to speak up. So we were thrilled to hear about a new book that focuses on this topic: When Sex Hurts: A Woman’s Guide to Banishing Sexual Pain, by Andrew Goldstein, MD, Caroline Pukall, PhD, and Irwin Goldstein, MD. We definitely don’t have nearly enough letters after our names to adequately address the issues involved here! The authors were kind enough to allow us to publish an excerpt from the first chapter of their book, which you can read below. Check back in next week for their summary of the various causes of painful sex, and the week after that for a Q&A with the authors, in which they address some of the most common question they hear about painful sex.

Movie Barcode

Movie Barcode is a blog that compresses frames of a film into a single image. It’s interesting to see these films single barcode-esque image juxtaposed next to one another because you can view the dominant visual color themes in each film. Above is THE KING’S SPEECH. [Via]

Steve Carrell’s farewell cake

Rainn Wilson blogged (sidebar: kind of tech-y awesome that he uses Posterous…) a photo of this sweet and fitting farewell cake NBC gave Steve Carrell at his going away party (as we all sadly know this is his last season on The Office). As Rainn tweeted to mark the moment: “…And the angels of comedy [...]

Weird science: living, breathing toys

Mark Landwehr and Sven Waschk share an odd job title. While they call themselves artists, it’s more accurate to add toy maker and alternate reality designer to their resume as well. Together, Landwehr and Waschk started Coarse, a company that creates resin and vinyl figurines, both and small and life-size. These aren’t the kind of toys you’d encourage a kid to play with, though. Sold only in museum gift shops and art toy stores, Coarse’s creations are dark, some are even downright evil-looking (think the rabbit in DONNIE DARKO).

Up until now their toys, like most toys on the market, have remained inanimate (and I don’t just mean battery-operated). Their latest release, however, breathes new life into the world of toys, literally. The project is called Oops, and it arrives on your doorstep as a seven-inch embryo. There’s a whole line-up of embryos to choose from, iconic Coarse characters in their most infantile state so fans can experience the birth, growth and eventual death of their favorites. The embryo starts out as a spore and then becomes a shoot, then a fruit and, finally, flesh. Once it has reached this stage it emerges from its protective pod and life begins.

Green tech finds (3/10/11)

Lots of apps this week… for Freecycling, sharing your juice with electric vehicles drivers, and teaching the kids about rainforest ecosystems.

• Organize your Freecycling: Like to search for used treasures on service like Freecycle and Freegle? The Trash Nothing online app allows you to organize your activities at various recycling groups.
  
  
• i-Tree 4.0 is out: OK, this won’t garner the attention of the iPad 2, but the latest update of the US Forest Service’s i-Tree online tool for urban and community forest analysis features new applications for tree placement planning for individual land parcels, and “modeling the watershed-scale effects that vegetation has on local hydrology and water quality.”
  
  

OMD Live at Terminal 5

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the iconic electronic band that sadly most in the US only know from “If You Leave,” played their first US shows this week in over 20 years. At NYC’s Terminal 5 the energy was palpable and nostalgia flooded the room.

OMD’s latest album, History of Modern, is a welcome return to form. Unlike many other past-their-prime pop stars’ recent efforts, this album is quite good. It’s so good in fact it trumps much of OMD’s back catalog, which has always been a bit uneven.

Great Gatsby mansion to be razed

This dilapidated 25-room mansion located in Sands Point, New York that helped inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is scheduled to be razed and replaced with five $10 million mansions.

A baby video on YouTube that’s actually art

This doesn’t have much to do with love and sex, except that we love this trailer which features an adorable product of sex. The teaser is from the short film LAS PALMAS by Johannes Nyholm, which just won the Short Film Award and the Audience Award at the Gothenburg Int’l Film Festival, Startsladden. (The jury [...]

2011 Armory Show epic roundup

Like last year, I’ve compiled an epic photo roundup of the art that caught my eye at this year’s Armory Show, a leading contemporary art show. This year I was also lucky enough to be included (Thanks Paul!) in the Armory Show’s opening benefit party held at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday night. The party included a fashionable and festive crowd that enjoyed the live performance of Kate Nash and her big bow headpiece, the DJing of Justin Miller and Will Robbins, and of course the ever-popular open bar.

Bandwidth warning: Lost of photos and more after the jump, including one awesome surprise guest appearance (at least for this fanboy)…

Putting Emphas.is on documentary photography

Photograph by Karim Ben Khelifa, taken in Rafah

(Click to the end for more of his work)

Documentary photography has, in recent years, found an uncomfortable home amongst the ‘noble arts’ – noble because photojournalists, like artists, musicians and writers, are finding contract (aka paid) assignments few and far between. Karim Ben Khelifa is one such photojournalist. For the last twelve years he’s traveled the world, mainly the Middle East, documenting the war in Kosovo and Iraq as well as struggles in Yemen, Egypt and Palestine, to name just a few. But even with a portfolio that would easily impress any news outlet, Ben Khelifa was still having a difficult time securing backing for his work. As he watched one project after the next remain unfinished due to a lack of funding, he grew frustrated and decided to take matters into his own hands.

Young filmmakers challenge viewers to “Find Your Footprint”

The last time I mentioned young filmmakers, I was discussing college students. Turns out they’re not the youngest people making environmentally-themed documentaries: the National Geographic and P&G Future Friendly “Find Your Footprint” contest solicited short films from elementary school classes in which the kids shared their ideas for conserving natural resources.