sundance

What’s the difference between a sugar daddy and a john?

Winston Churchill gets a lot of posthumous credit for witticisms he never uttered, including the exchange below. We’re disappointed to learn it wasn’t Mr. Churchill who said this – apparently he was quite gallant in conversation with women – but we’re going to quote it anyway because the message doesn’t change:

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill. Well, I suppose…we would have to discuss terms, of course.
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

Pop culture art of Brandon Bird

The works of Californian artist Brandon Bird have popped up frequently on my Internet radar of, to borrow the elliptical styling of Carles of Hipster Runoff, “what people are talking about” and “looks cool.” Bird has received sub-mainstream attention in particular for his Law and Order coloring book and a group art exhibition celebrating its release. Bird specializes in adapting icons of pop culture and placing them in absurd situations such as Spider Man and J.Jonah Jameson in a pillow fight, Christopher Walken cheerfully at work in his woodshop or Laura Linney as a Robotech mech aka L.I.N.N.E.Y. (Line-In Neural Network Enhancement Yoke).

They want your business: vote for America’s Best Bathroom

A Swarovski-studded toilet: this shit’s gonna be good.

As any New Yorker knows, a good bathroom is hard to find. In the city, it’s a downright precious commodity. Remember how in the “Seinfeld” reunion in the last season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” George gets rich after creating an NYC bathroom finder app? Having that knowledge at your fingertips really is a million dollar idea. While running errands once near the MoMA, I made a slight detour into the museum where I used my membership only for access to one of their toilets. That’s right, on this visit no art was viewed. I just had to pee.

Usually, hotels are the best bet and everyone knows Starbucks is the go-to city toilet, which is why there’s almost always a long line. And with so much traffic they’re barely a step up from the city ordained public bathrooms. No joke: the porta-potty’s in Prospect Park are officially cleaner, better stocked and better smelling.

People who live in most other cities aren’t confronted with this dilemma on an almost daily basis, but speaking as a New Yorker, I’m kind of really excited about America’s Best Bathroom Award.

Rachel Weisz puts her lips together and blows

Just like she did in her 2005 Oscar grabber The Constant Gardener, Rachel Weisz is bravely battling corruption again. In the just-opened The Whistleblower, Rachel’s an ex Nebraska cop who winds up a U.N. peacekeeper in Bosnia, where it turns out that organization is trying to cover up a gigantic sex trafficking scandal. If you think she shuts up about it, you don’t know Rachel Weisz.

After a special screening in New York the other night, Weisz (the new Mrs. Daniel Craig, by the way) kept blabbing, this time about her diverse career choices.

Here are her most memorable comments.

Green tech finds (8/11/11)

Lots of news on the car front this week, plus electronic paper, and a (partially) green-powered STAR TREK theme park in Jordan (yeah, Jordan).

Lotus’ wine and cheese-powered car: Okay, not exactly, but the British automaker’s Exige 270E Tri-fuel concept can do 0-60 in under four seconds on ethanol made from “undrinkable wine (whew!), whey (a byproduct of making cheese), and surplus chocolate.” Check it out in action above. (via The Discovery Channel)

Ford getting into the solar business? Kind of. They’re partnering with SunPower to offer future buyers of the company’s planned electric vehicles a rooftop solar system that could power the car completely on renewable energy.

My Body Gallery

My Body Gallery is a new online photo collecting project with this goal: “to help women objectively see what we look like, break the pact of silence around ‘weight’ and come to some acceptance that we are all beautiful.” The idea is that all sorts of real women upload full-body images of themselves (their faces obscured if they so desire; no nudity) and input their height, weight, shape (pear, banana, apple, or hourglass) and clothing sizes.

#undatableinlit: Publishers learn how to use the Internet

Would you go for this man of few words?

Now that an increase in book sales has officially been reported (5.6% increase in revenue and 4.1% increase in book sales), we can all stop perpetuating the doomsday message that print is dead. No other phrase is guaranteed to irk me (and my fellow fiction grad students) more. Part of the reason those numbers are on the rise is because the publishing industry has finally become web savvy, or at least savvier, by reaching out to readers through a variety of decidedly un-bookish social media outlets like Twitter. Avid Tweeters are a choosy and demanding bunch, though – there are thousands of 140-character blips to read. Publishers have upped their game accordingly, supplying their followers with more than just book announcements and reading event listings.

Pig knuckles and chicken feathers

The whole hog: a batch of pig ears ready for the fryer. Watch LUDO BITES AMERICA every Tuesday at 9P More savory wit from our featured food blogger Diana Hossfeld, who writes the food blog Diana Takes a Bite. Pig knuckles and chicken feathers. These were my mother’s favorite scary stories when my brothers and I were [...]

Cindy Meehl’s BUCK

Cindy Meehl’s BUCK is a horseman’s story. A character portrait featuring trainer Buck Brannaman – probably one of the best looking modern cowboys you’ll ever see (never mind his beautiful wife and daughter), BUCK is a story of self-realization. This coming-of-self angle may be why the film has been winning awards all over the place and crossing over to audiences who don’t give a lick about horses. That’s me, really (a rider I am not), but I have to say I wasn’t as charmed as I wanted to be. I took my son and had to explain beforehand that much of the movie was going to concern the fact that Buck had been mentally and physically abused by his alcoholic father. (“What’s abuse?” asked my son. When I told him some children are beaten he looked at me earnestly and said, “You and daddy don’t do that.”) Buck’s journey from foster child to world-class horse whisperer who revolutionized the way horses are trained is definitely interesting, but this is a case of slight overhype. “Much of the movie – too much of it – is just Buck in the corral, riding, working with ropes and flags, conditioning a horse to behave,” says Orlando Sentinal critic Roger Moore.

Brooklyn’s Dekalb Market: a flexible business district built from shipping containers

Builders and architects have fallen in love with shipping containers and are using them to design and build everything from office buildings to prison space. It makes sense: they come in standard sizes (a bit like Legos), they’re sturdy, mobile, and readily available. This also makes shipping containers ideal for temporary developments, and a new open-air market in Brooklyn is putting that notion to the test.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s gas station in Minnesota

I have a feeling that many residents in the small city of Cloquet, Minnesota routinely drive by the R.W. Lindholm gas station, which opened in 1958, without having any idea that it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It wasn’t just any old gas station, but a one-of-a-kind structure that the great American architect envisioned would be central to his vision of the hypothetical Broadacre City, “a decentralized urban landscape that many have interpreted as a sort of super-suburbia,” with the gas station expanding beyond its traditional utility and taking on a larger social role in the city. While this vision thankfully never came to pass, certain elements of the design were adopted: “…it helped popularize the now ubiquitous overhang, and other elements (including an angled plan that afforded sight lines, and generous, slanted windows) were appropriated for Phillips 66 stations across the country.” Okay, class is over, but before you go someone needs to update Cloquet’s Wikipedia page to highlight this piece of architectural and design history. It’s worth bragging and boasting about!

BMW Guggenheim Lab says eat local, you wuss

I eat an apple every single day. I order them from Fresh Direct, and unless I click the ‘organic’ option I get four Granny Smith apples delivered right to my door “fresh” from Chile. Like most people, I rationalize this somehow. “My farmers market is only once a week,” I reassure myself, “and I need apples more than just once and besides, they don’t even have the tart and crisp Granny Smiths that I need and love.” As environmentally aware and responsible as I like to think I am, it didn’t even cross my mind that if a farmer in New York isn’t growing Granny Smith apples, maybe I just don’t get to eat them.

Stop-motion trip of a lifetime

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Australian auteur Rick Mereki and Tim White created this wonderful travel video titled MOVE, commissioned by STA Australia, that has rapidly gone viral around the tubes of the Internet. Starring one lucky dude Andrew Lees, these guys traveled a total of 38,000 miles to 11 countries over the course of 44 days. I recommend just clicking on the play button above and watching it for the first time without any spoiler explanation. That said, I love the way their editing rapidly stitched together Andrew’s time in various locales around the world, some familiar and others not, into one coherent movement that underscores our shared connectivity despite our vast differences.

Ludo Bites a buffalo

Watch LUDO BITES AMERICA Tuesdays at 9P

More mouthwatering bon mots from guest blogger Zach Golden, the creator of the incredibly popular website, What the Fuck Should I Make For Dinner?

If you have an aversion to things getting shot, things getting skinned, hearts being eaten or French chefs, you may not want to continue. Or you may want to, we really don’t know each other that well, but consider this your formal warning.

Leafsnap: the electronic field guide that gets smarter with use

Ever been out on a hike, a camping trip or just a walk in the neighborhood and been faced with the question “What kind of tree is that?” More often than not, my own answer is “I don’t know.” Leafsnap, a new “electronic field guide” developed by Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institute (which I covered very briefly a few months ago) is designed, in part, to change that answer. Using your iPhone, you can take a picture of a leaf, flower, or fruit from a tree and identify it through comparison with images in the app’s database. Think of it as facial recognition software for the nature lover.

Naked News: Gender equality means more sex for everyone

• Study shows that more gender equality leads to more sex. (And, we’d hazard a guess, better sex, too.)
  
  
• Cosmo launches an iPad version of the mag for men (there’s no paper version because apparently dudes wouldn’t be seen dead actually reading Cosmo). So now we can all be super insecure about our bodies and our skill in the sack!
  
  

Our weekly Kickstarter Picks

It’s no secret that Kickstarter is pretty much a godsend for enterprising musicians, filmmakers, designers and anyone with a good idea and no money. It’s been around since 2009, but in the last two years it’s rapidly become the go-to place for the capital deficient to pitch their project to those with even just $5 to invest. That may not sound like a lot, and yeah, it’s not on its own, but consider this: of the 1,203 people who backed the +Pool (the plus-sign-shaped floating pool in NYC), 559 of them pledged only $5. That adds up to just under $3,000 – pretty good for a fiver.

Now it seems like everyone is pitching their idea to Kickstarter. We think that’s great, but with great power comes great responsibility, and while the 23-person Kickstarter team does their best to filter out the winning projects from the thousands and thousands of proposals they receive, there are still literally tens of thousands of new projects that launch each week. That’s a lot of ways to spend your hard-earned five bucks. Too many ways, actually. How can one person sort through it all? Relax, we’ll do it all for you, starting right now (and every Monday) with this week’s Kickstarter Picks. And while there are a ton of investment-worthy ideas out there we don’t want to bombard you, so this week we’ve chosen two editor-approved projects we can really get behind.

“The New York Times Magazine Photographs” goes beyond celebrity

Cropped from the original

Celebrity portraiture can seem like an easy way for a photographer to make a buck, and maybe that’s what makes it so challenging – to do something new and exciting in such well-trodden territory. Kathy Ryan, the director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, is such an avid proponent of the “good” celebrity portrait that she wrote a book on the subject, “The New York Times Magazine Photographs,” a “wonderfully heavy” tome out next month, the result of six years of research poring through 1,700 issues of the magazine.

New cycling campaign says “thank you” to bicyclists

While bicycling hasn’t hit the kind of critical mass we see in other countries, it’s certainly taking off in the United States. As with any new trend, “cool factors” come into play. Whether it’s the hardcore athletic cyclist decked out in brightly-colored Lycra or the hipster on his/her single-speed cruiser, biking has become a means of sharing one’s sense of identity, as well as a healthy, low-carbon means of transportation.

Portable pocket smut for the blind

Well, maybe it’s not just for the blind. It could be for anyone who likes a little something left to the imagination. Or for anyone who doesn’t want people watching their porn over their shoulder on the train home. For all these types, SonicErotica offers free (for now) downloadable stories and confessions “to make your ears blush.”

Yogi Proctor’s gold painted Canon copy machine

I freaking love this piece: a gold painted and fully operational office copy machine and printer by Yogi Proctor, titled “Canon 2011.” I love the visual impact of a common or utilitarian object covered with the completely unnecessary self-indulgent luxury of, in this instance, gold.

#BikeNYC photo series

Flickr’s official blog highlighted Dmitry Gudkov’s photo project titled “#BikeNYC” that was inspired by his own personal transformative experience with how he engaged with New York City after he purchased a bicycle. He became curious about his fellow bicyclists and reached out to them, first through Twitter (hence the hashtag origin of the photo series’ name) and began snapping portraits of New Yorkers with their bikes along with an accompanying profile. He explains:

Terrence Malick and … parenting

I saw THE TREE OF LIFE last night at the Sunshine Theatre in New York, and no surprise here – I loved it. As an urbanite at heart and decades-long Malick fan, I went in expecting to like it, and this epic look at life through lenses both broad and narrow did not disappoint. Here’s one revelation: if a twenty-something newbie director had paired dinosaurs with the intimate story of one Texas family, I very well may have balked. But I’ve been in a relationship with Malick for years now, and I trust him. I’d go anywhere with the guy, so cuts between sunshine-drenched babies draped in gauzy white to (next shot) an exploding star deep within space seem amazing, not pretentious. The scope of the project and its ability to move between things small and large feels truly groundbreaking. The one thing I was not expecting from the film was its specific meditation on parenting. In detailing small moments in the daily lives of the adoring-playful Mother and the adoring-stern Father (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt), Malick paints a stark contrast between child-rearing approaches but is never overtly critical. As a friend said, it was the most patient and thorough examination of the small trials of parenting that she’s seen on the screen (and the day after with her own kids was more or less a misty-eyed affair), as the film ultimately asks us to cherish the living through all the small struggles and heart aches – especially if they happen to be our progeny.

THE ORGASM DIARIES and more love and sex in film

We noticed something called THE ORGASM DIARIES is playing on The Sundance Channel this Saturday at midnight. Sounds like a documentary, right? Turns out it’s a British indie film from last year about a couple who’s private naughty photographs become pornographic art-world hits, which turns their relationship upside down. Knowing that, the title becomes a bit more dubious. But Indiewire said it “captures the essence of young love.” It gets a 50-50 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which sounds a lot less damning when you realize that’s only out of 8 reviews. Could be a fine late-night alternative to Skinemax…?

Passport photos and reality

“Passport and Reality” is a photography project by Suren Manvelyan and Biayna Mahari “about how different a person can look in real life and his own passport photo.” The contrast is made all the more striking when you consider that passports often don’t expire for years. Case in point: I don’t think the guy pictured above grew into his features too early (pun totally intended). It’s probably because most of the subjects are smiling in their non-passport photo, but reality seems so much more pleasant. I finally had to renew my passport last year and gladly forked over the money to the US government because it meant I could finally update the photo of me with the buzzed look I thought was a really swell idea back in college.